Up Off Their Knees: Servanthood in Southwest Colombia

Abstract

Live-in female servants form an important part of many Third World societies. It is therefore astonishing that so little is written about them and that they are hardly ever featured in discussions concerning the reproduction of the power that disfigures these neocolonial societies as a whole. Unconsciously accepted by radicals as much as by upholders of the status quo, female service is secured by the unthinking way people take it for granted, just as slavery was for centuries. Yet domestic service forms one of the main occupations for lower-class women. The middle and upper classes are dependent on their female servants for the intimacies of their daily care, leisure, and stylish existence. Above all, this institution is important in actively reproducing some of the basic patterns of oppression that make these societies what they are today. It would be an exaggeration to say that Third World societies are servant-based societies, founded on a servant mode of production, but nevertheless it is a helpful way of framing the issue and of gaining an initial perspective on an important and all too neglected topic of political economy. Our aim in this article is to draw attention to both what we call the inner as well as the external consequences or social functions of female servanthood in a region of marked capitalist development in Colombia, namely the Cauca Valley. Unlike the few published accounts we have encountered on servanthood, we wish to focus as much on the supply-end as on the lives of servants as servants; in other words we wish to draw as complete a picture as possible of the career of a servant, including a description of the lives they led in their homes (and in this case, their villages) of provenience, the pressures forcing them into service, their reasons for seeking such work, and their feelings about this transformation. It is because servanthood reproduces the quasi-familial, authoritarian, and sexist character so common to all hierarchical relations in the society that we