The signs and symptoms of disease do something more than signify the functioning of our bodies: they also signify critically sensitive and contradictory components of our culture and social relations. Yet, in our standard medical practices this social "language" emanating from our bodies is manipulated by concealing it within the realm of biological signs. I try to show this by means of a patient's interpretation of the meaning of her illness. This case study illustrates that in denying the human relations embodied in signs, symptoms, and therapy. we mystiiy those relations and also reproduce a political ideologv in the guise of a science of physical things. This I call reificarion, following Karl Marx's'analysis of the&mmodzy and Georg Luk&s' gpplication of this analysis-to the interpretaiion of capitalist culture and its mode of objectifying social relations. I argue that in sustaining reification, our medical practice invigorates cultural axioms as well as modulating the contradictions intrinsic to our culture and views of objectivity. In this way disease is recruited into serving the ideological needs of the social order, to the detriment of healing and our understanding of the social causes of misfortune.

This essay is about torture and the culture of terror, which for most of us, including myself, are known only through the words of others. Thus my concern is with the mediation of the culture of terror through narration-and with the problems of writing effectively against terror.Jacobo Timerman ends his recent book, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, with the imprint of the gaze of hope in the space of death.

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What does wage labor and capital mean to a peasantry that is subjected to rapid rural proletarianization and what is the basis of that meaning?I wish to discuss an aspect of this question in the light of certain ideological reactions manifested by a South American lowland peasantry as expanding sugar plantations absorb their lands and peasants are converted into landless wage laborers. In the southern extremities of the Cauca Valley, Colombia, it is commonly thought that male plantation workers can increase their output, and hence their wage, through entering into a secret contract with the devil. However, the local peasants, no matter how needy they may be, never make such a contract when working their own plots or those of their peasant neighbors for wages. It is also thought that by illicitly baptizing money instead of a child in the Catholic church, that money can become interest bearing capital, while the child will be deprived of its rightful chance of entering heaven.