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Paper short abstract

Exploring Andoque devil figures (Colombia), this paper brings together psychoanalytic and political-economic perspectives, as well as moral and inter-species ones, to examine the ontology of the devil that emerges within Indigenous negotiations of needs and desires amid forest and market forces.

Paper long abstract

Like other Indigenous peoples in Latin America, the Andoque in the Colombian Amazon have inherited and adopted an array of devil figures from Christianity—primarily, the devil as a blanket term for dangerous forest forces, and as an immoral entity with which one can enter a pact to become rich. While recognizing the heterogeneous origin and nature of these devils, this paper seeks a unifying framework for understanding their coexistence in the Andoque’s current situation of fraught engagements with both forest and market forces. Drawing on points of convergence between Andoque devil figures—to wit, how devil pacts may lead to predation by forest devils—I connect Jacques Lacan’s theory of the symbolization of the Real to Michael Taussig’s analysis of devil imagery as a pre-capitalist attempt to mediate the opposition between exchange value and use value. However, the Andoque’s position as economic entrepreneurs, rather than wage laborers, requires an understanding of the devil as reflecting the commoditization of social relations not only among human transactors but also of those between humans and nonhumans, on whose domains extractivism-oriented individuals infringe. Bringing moral and ontological perspectives together, I consider destructive nonhuman agency as mirroring human lack of self-restraint and self-assurance, and discuss the convergence of devil pacts with forest devils as indexing a given individual’s profit-driven orientation, rather than a needs-driven one. Defining needs as opposed to (yet inseparable from) desire requires further understanding of symbolization processes, this time those of the Andoque self—with the devil reflecting the failures of that self.