The culture of terror
Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror--Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497. In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population). “...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointl