The Familiar Spirit in Tales of Violent Labor Relationships : From Early Modern France to Agro-Industrial Argentina

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the metaphorical and historical changes of two central signifiers of the narrative: the metaphor of the contract with its legal components and the body imagery with its socio-economic associations. It takes a literary historical-comparative perspective and considers early modern French and English as well as Spanish colonial reports, collected by the political and demonological theorist Jean Bodin and Inquisitional authorities between the 15th and 19th centuries, and compares them to archival unpublished and published documentation of interviews with workers in the sugar plantations and their surroundings, which represent areas of the communicative memory since the 1880s. For centuries, the Familiar Spirit had been an intimate partner in secret mutual service relationships, allowing individual life experiences and fantasies of social betterment. The last wave of tales with Familiar Spirits arrived on American shores in the company of European immigrants who fled hunger and poverty in their recently industrialized countries during the last third of the 19th century.