In 1970, the Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig settled in “a small and predominantly black town of about 11,000 people,” in the Cauca Valley of western Colombia, “a town without sewage or drinking water . . . pressed between two chains of the Andes.” His intention was to study the formal abolition of slavery, which had taken place more than a hundred years earlier. But what he discovered was a capitalist mode of agrarian production, alarmingly similar to the old slave relations, rapidly asserting itself over the region.

Three white families had recently assumed control over thousands of hectares, “consuming many of the plots of the surrounding peasant farmers, descendants of African slaves,” Taussig wrote at the time. “All this was new. Very new. The area was rapidly . . . becoming proletarianized.”

It was obvious to Taussig that workers on the periphery of global capitalism critiqued the system from within their own worldviews. As capitalism spread, dislocating people from their ancestral lands and annihilating traditional economic practices, new stories and rituals emerged to help people make sense of their alienation.