Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 357

In fact there is an apocalyptic tradition which hands down to these ecstatics visions and experiences to a certain extent already framed, however odd it may seem, psychologically, that a raving man should rave in the same pattern as another who came before him: that one is ecstatic not independently, so to speak, but by rote.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 180

In a work there is much seeming and sham, one could go further and say that as "a work" it is seeming in and for itself. Its ambition is to make one believe that it is not made, but born, like Pallas Athene in full fig and embossed armour from Jupiter's head. But that is a delusion. Never did a work come like that. It is work: art-work for appearance's sake--and now the question is whether at the present stage of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stands in any legitimate relation to the complete insecurity, problematic conditions, and lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not become a lie.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 54-55

In the course of their history, women observed the changes in their own bodies and acquired through observation and experiment a vast body of experiential knowledge about the function of their bodies, about the rhythms of menstruation, about pregnancy and childbirth. This appropriation of their own bodily nature was closely related to the acquisition of knowledge about the generative forces of external nature, about plants, animals, the earth, water and air.

Thus, they did not simply breed children like cows, but they appropriated their own generative and productive forces, they analysed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters. This means they were not helpless victims of the generative forces of their bodies, but learned to influence them, including the number of children they wanted to have.

We are in possession of enough evidence today to conclude that women in pre-patriarchal societies knew better how to regulate the number of their children and the frequency of births than do modern women, who have lost this knowledge through their subjection to the patriarchal capitalist civilizing process.

Among gatherers and hunters and other primitive groups, various methods existed--and partly still exist today--to limit the number of births and children. Apart from infanticide, most probably the earliest method, women in many societies used various plants and herbs as contraceptives or to induce abortions. The Ute Indians used lithio-spermium, the Bororo women in Brazil used a plant which made them temporarily sterile. The missionaries persuaded the women not to use the plant any more. Elisabeth Fisher tells us about methods used by women among the Australian aborigines, certain tribes in Oceania, and even in ancient Egypt, which were predecessors to modern contraceptives. Women in Egypt used a vaginal sponge, dipped in honey, to reduce the mobility of sperm. There was also the use of acacia tips which contained a spermicidal acid.

Another method of birth control used widely among contemporary gatherers and hunters is a prolonged period of breastfeeding. Robert M. May reports on studies which prove that 'in almost all primitive gatherers' and hunters' societies fertility is lower than in modern civilized societies. Through prolonged lactation ovulation is reduced, which leads to longer intervals between births'. He also observed that these women reached puberty at a much later age than civilized women. He attributes the much more balanced population growth, which can be observed today among many tribes as long as they are not integrated into civilized society, to 'cultural practices which unconsciously contribute to a reduction of fertility'. Though he criticizes correctly those who think that the low rate of population growth in such societies is the result of a brutal struggle for survival, he still does not conceive of this situation as a result of women's conscious appropriation of their generative forces. Recent feminist research has revealed that before the witch hunt women in Europe had a much better knowledge of their bodies and of contraceptives than we have today.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 201

With the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation, its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure: the rise of professional medicine, which erected in front of the "lower classes" a wall of unchallengeable scientific knowledge, unaffordable and alien, despite its curative pretenses.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 170

Witch hunting was also instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources. This means that the witch hunters were less interested in the punishment of any specific transgressions than in the elimination of generalized forms of female behavior which they no longer tolerated and had to be made abominable in the eyes of the population. That the charges in the trials often referred to events that had occurred decades earlier, that witchcraft was made a crimen exceptum, that is, a crime to be investigated by special means, torture included, and it was punishable even in the absence of any proven damage to persons and things--all these factors indicate that the target of the witch-hunt--(as is often true with political repression in times of intense social change and conflict)--were not socially recognized crimes, but previously accepted practices and groups of individuals that had to be eradicated from the community, through terror and criminalization. In this sense, the charge of witchcraft performed a function similar to that performed by "high treason" (which, significantly, was introduced into the English legal code in the same years), and the charge of "terrorism" in our times. The very vagueness of the charge--the fact that it was impossible to prove it, while at the same time it evoked the maximum of horror--meant that it could be used to punish any form of protest and to generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State page 332

It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an oral culture has no textual reference point for marking deviations, traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker, the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such a culture can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as remaining faithful to tradition.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State page 259 and endnote

A great many nations, some of them former colonies, have built entirely new capitals rather than compromise with an urban past that their leaders were determined to transcend; one thinks of Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, Belize, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, and Tanzania.¹²⁰

120. One political advantage of a new capital is precisely that it does not belong to any existing community. Founding a new capital avoids certain delicate, if not explosive, choices that would otherwise have to be made. By the same logic, English became the national language of India because it was the only widely spoken language that did not belong exclusively to any particular traditional community. It did belong, however, to India's English-speaking intelligentsia, which was enormously privileged when its "dialect" became the national language. The United States and Australia, with no urban past to transcend, created planned capitals that represented a vision of progress and order and that were, not incidentally, in stark contrast to indigenous settlement practices.