The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America is both a polemic about anthropology and an analysis of a set of seemingly magical beliefs held by rural and urban workers in Colombia and Bolivia.
The first is the belief held by semi-proletarianized peasants in Colombia (with an analogous case among Bolivian tin miners) who proletarianized sugar-cane cutters can make a contract with the devil that will cause them to make a good deal of money, but that this money can be spent only on frivolous consumer goods, and that the cutter will die an early and miserable death.
Taussig suggests that earlier anthropologists might have argued that this belief is a hold-over from pre-capitalist culture, or serves as a leveling mechanism (ensuring that no individual become significantly wealthier than any of his or her fellows).
The author begins by studying the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century.
The barons' reactions to indigenous resistance was to carry out violence against the local population, which Taussig documents through providing firsthand accounts from the time.
The Cuna have adopted a set of wooden figurines for magical ritual that look remarkably like white colonists, to the point of sometimes being recognizable as figures from history that traveled through those parts.
Another noteworthy peculiarity of Cuna culture that Taussig mentions is the way in which the Cuna have adopted, in their traditional molas, images from western pop culture, including a distorted reflection of the Jack Daniel's bottle, and also a popular iconic image from the early twentieth century, The Talking Dog, used in advertising gramophones.