Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici (review)

"BUT WE ARE REGAINING OUR KNOWLEDGE."

Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

In a succinct collection of essays, Silvia Federici returns to once again forcefully intervene in the defamation of women who continue to be cast as the scheming old witch—that she-devil who curses her neighbor's livestock and flies in the night.

In Federici's analysis, this false image fueled a misogynist misinformation campaign that justified the systematic dispossession, torture, and extermination of countless women who resisted the rise of capitalism. By reframing the practices deemed "witchcraft" as the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and practices pertaining to land, body, and the most intimate powers of nature—including the birthing and nurturing of life—Federici restores the place of these women and their magical works as central to the very reproduction of their communities.

Professor emerita of political philosophy and international studies at Hofstra University, Federici is known for her dedication to the labors of activists as well as academics. A cofounder of both the International Feminist Collective and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, Federici is a militant who pushes feminist Marxist analysis to its edges, instantiated clearly in her efforts for the revaluation of women engaged in unwaged domestic and reproductive labor.

Federici not only reviews her evidence for the capitalist roots of particular socioeconomic conditions that fomented witch hunts throughout Europe, but also exposes the basis of these misogynist and femicidal responses as indivisible from men's fear of women's knowledge, labor, and power. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women functions as both a reintroduction and follow up to Caliban and the Witch (2004), in that it considers the contemporary significance of witch-hunting in the context of new, global outbreaks of violence against women in the postcolonial nations of Africa and Asia.

Federici opens Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by stating her motivations for bringing the arguments made in Caliban and the Witch into contemporary focus. She contiinues with an example of a Norwegian memorial for the 135 women and men who were victims of witch hunts in seventeenth-century Finnmark. Federici follows the introduction with a contrasting example of a Danish song valorizing witch-hunters, still sung around fires on St. John's Eve, in order to highlight the need for public denouncements of pro-witch hunt practices.

Part 1 addresses the history of capital accumulation and witch-hunting in Europe, focusing on the enclosure of common lands through agricultural commercialization, fencing, and the creation of a beggar class, as well as the accompanying enclosure ofwoman's bodies through the state control of their sexuality, reproduction, and political power. Beginning with an adaptation of an early version of Federici's introduction to Caliban and the Witch, Chapter 2 reestablishes some of the foundational feminist approaches to the study of witch hunts and their effects on women.

Chapter 3 focuses on England as a site of enclosure and land dispossession that peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chapter 4, a revised version of a piece originally published in the 2012 Documenta (13): The Book of Books, scrutinizes the male fear driving the disproportionate targeting of women as witches. Chapter 5, an etymological and literary case study of gossip's evolution up to the mid-sixteenth century, when it transforms from female friendship to disparaging talk, is a fresh addition to Federici's examination of how the misogynistic domination of women laid the groundwork for witchcraft accusations.

Part Two explores the contemporary context for capital accumulation and the new witch hunts in the Global South, fueled by patriarchal, evangelical, and neoliberal forces capable of reproducing the socioeconomic conditions of the European witch hunts. However, Federici skillfully juxtaposes evidence of brutal, ongoing violence toward women with powerful stories about those same women organizing resistance to this violence. Based on a presentation at the Forum on Femicide in 2016...