Colonial mass terror ran on cultural mythology, not mere economic rationality

Evidence

Taussig is insistent that ‘behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning – structures of feeling – whose bases lie in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.’ We have to move through the electrodes and the mutilated human body, and the experience of torture, in order to confront ‘the hallucination of the military’ (referring to Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner without a Name)90– in other words, to confront what the savagery is all about. … Uncovering tremendous violence, what Casement’s report conveyed most of all through all the facts and witness accounts was the ordinariness of the violence. People passed the time by hunting Indians. The torture was too excessive to be explained as simply economically rationalized. Taussig suggests that such terror entailed a trade in mythologies. The narratives of terror that abounded tell us something about the terror itself – they were stories of the savagery of the jungle and the savagery of its inhabitants. The ‘wild Indians’ could reflect back to the colonizers their reality as civilized and business-like only if they were controlled through acts of savagery. Savages, mythically endowed with great strength, had to be put down. Torture took on a life of its own in this environment, passing from individual acts to an organized culture and mode of life. … ‘Fascist poetics succeed where liberal rationalism self-destructs,’ he warns, unless we confront the emotions generated by terror. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189

Categorization

• XREF: The Putomayo rubber-genocide case as paradigm for neo-colonial torture connects to the earlier Abu Ghraib analysis as cultural ritual. This is Taussig’s argument (Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man), worth tagging as grounding the whole chapters-through-8 framework.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that terror in colonies ran on a ‘trade in mythologies’ rather than rational economic calculus — ‘fascist poetics succeed where liberal rationalism self-destructs’ — is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea dense enough to sit with.