It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms.

a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars RoomĪ cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Caliban represents the body, in Federici’s analysis the way in which the body was presented as animalistic and in need of taming and controlling in order to make acquisition of wealth (albeit for other people) our central aim in life over fulfilling our own personal and natural needs. Federici has become a crucial figure for.

Caliban and the witch federici