In 1956, several apparitions of the devil during a whole week in a large modern factory in the outskirts of São Paulo showed that the phenomena of demonization can also take place outside the traditional and rural world of the peasantry. Modern industrial workers are also liable to invoke archaic imagery in an effort to understand changes in production technology. When industrial modernization introduces a radical divide between thinking and doing in the work process, archaic imagery can fill the vacuun to give it meaning: the meaning that its irrationality can bring.
imagery; demonization; alienation; modernization; work relations