FETISHISM

FETISHISM . The Oxford English Dictionary (1893–1897) defines fetishism as the "superstition of which … the characteristic feature" is "an inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed inherent magical powers, or as being animated by a spirit." This fetish is distinguished from an idol "in that it is worshipped in its own character, not as the image, symbol, or occasional residence of the deity." The only problem with this definition is that neither fetishism nor the fetish exists as such. There are indeed material objects believed to be imbued with force or power, the nature of which varies with object and culture, and that are used with the intention of achieving particular ends. Consider the list offered by Mesquitela Lima:

diviners' implements (i.e., the figurines contained in the diviner's basket, most of which are carved from any one of a variety of materials); figurines sculpted in clay or in termite secretion; small dried trees or even parts of a tree, such as roots, twigs, leaves, branches, and fruit; coarsely sculpted tree trunks; small dolls clothed in net; miniature musical instruments or miniature agricultural or hunting implements; a large number of figurines carved in wood, bone, or ivory in the shape of human beings, animals or even abstract forms; horns, nails, or claws, or bits of human or animal skin; small tortoise shells; sacred rocks or minerals; crucifixes, medals, or images used in Christian cults; philters or magic substances and medicines. (Lima, 1987, p. 315)

However, these objects and their use by no means constitute a system or the entirety of any culture's religious practices and beliefs. Moreover Wyatt MacGaffey, in his analysis of Kongo religious practices surrounding what have been considered the exemplary fetish objects known as minkisi, has demonstrated the inadequacy of any notion of fetish that entails the personification of material cultic objects. Supplementing Marcel Mauss's dismissal of the ethnographic significance of "fetishism" as "nothing but an immense misunderstanding between two civilizations, the African and the European" (Mauss, 1905–1906, p. 309), MacGaffey placed the ethnographic data against the characteristic components of the fetish as determined by William Pietz, whose analysis of discourses about fetishism is the standard against which contemporary discussions of this topic take their measure (MacGaffey, 1994a). Pietz delineated the four primary attributes of the fetish as:

1. irreducibly material and not representing an immaterial, elsewhere located spirit,
2. fixing previously heterogeneous elements (e.g., an object and a place) into a novel identity,
3. embodying the problem of the nonuniversality of value, and though separate from the body,
4. functioning at times as though it were in control of it. (MacGaffey 1994a; cf. Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1993)

In his studies MacGaffey finds fundamental disjunctions between Kongo minkisi and the fetish so defined.

Consequently this article will focus on how the signifier fetishism has come to delineate a discursive space in which the often misrecognized attempt is made to mediate difference(s) by means of material objects (or persons). Simultaneous epistemic and value crises are often provoked by persistent contact with otherness. An inadequacy of extant categories and a disproportion of ascribed values distinguish this ongoing encounter and are met by both avowal and disavowal of that difference. The threatened party finds the ever-deferred resolution of these dilemmas by displacing the recognition of difference upon an object that in its material opacity embodies even as it screens the ambiguity. Correspondingly, ambivalent affect is directed at, even as significance is affixed to, the object. Thus localized and materialized, otherness can be marked and mastered while the marking individual or group's identity is rendered the norm. The seemingly incommensurable differences between European and non-European, colonizer and colonized, capitalist and worker, male and female are articulated during contact in terms of oppositions, including religion and nonreligion, science and superstition (the absence of science), rationality and irrationality, spirit and matter, necessity and accident, subject and object, order and chaos, culture and nature, human and animal, public and private.

Since its emergence in the contact zone of European-African encounter, no other signifier in the history of the study of religions has been appropriated by so many secular discourses. This article will follow how fetishism has traversed from mercantile encounter to rationalist anthropology to philosophy to positivist sociology to political economy to sexology to psychoanalysis to aesthetics to postcolonial analysis. During its journey "fetishism" functioned as a camera obscura, projecting an inverted picture of Euro-America upon the screen of a number of persistent others, including the non-Euro-American, the woman, the Jew, and the insane.

The Invention of Fetishism

While the term fetishism (fétichisme) was coined in 1760 by Charles de Brosses in his Du culte des dieux fétiches (The cult of the fetish gods), the purported practices and beliefs to which the term referred as well as the family of Portuguese words related to feiticaria or witchcraft from which it emerged had long been in circulation. Indeed the philological genealogy of fetishism in many ways anticipated the series of oppositions the term would eventually mediate. Feiticaria finds its roots in the Latin facticius (manufactured), which also had the occasional pejorative connotation of artifice or something factitious (without an original). In medieval Christian discourse such objects were associated with the manufactured amulets, images, and potions employed for witchcraft (as opposed to the talismans, remedies, relics, and other sacramental objects given legitimacy by the church) and, in medieval Portuguese, came to be known as feitiços. Feitiços were distinguished from idolos as witchcraft was from idolatry or more generally as magic was distinguished from those religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and paganism or idolatry—that could found an orderly society. An additional distinction was that feitiços were concerned with material bodies rather than souls. In contradistinction to such magical objects, the object of idol worship was the immaterial demon or false god that the idol represented and who acted upon the soul of the worshiper.

As the Portuguese developed a trade zone along the west coast of Africa from what is now Senegal to Angola, feitiço rather than idolo came to be the dominant Portuguese ascription of the "religious" practices of the cultures encountered in this series of spaces. As trade grew the related pidgin term fetisso became affixed by all involved parties to sacramental objects, traded commodities, political emblems, medical preparations, and women's ornaments that circulated among the various populations who peopled these areas of cross-cultural exchange. The travel accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European traders, Protestant Dutch and English as well as Catholic Portuguese and French, frequently referred to material objects held to be endowed by the African populations with magical powers or animated by spirits. Attribution of religious value by Africans to a wide range of material objects was correlated with their apparent inability to recognize the proper value of the commodities involved in trade with the Europeans as well as their inability to maintain proper distinctions between public and private, male and female, animal and human. Ironically the same anecdotes that illustrated the moral depravity of fetishists depicted anarchic polities ruled exclusively by the principle of interest—projecting upon the other the forces and values that shaped European society. Moreover that the Africans were said to arbitrarily associate these fetissos with the accomplishment of some desired end appeared to confirm the European assumption of the Africans' allegedly deficient mental abilities.

By the eighteenth century, as the fetisso began its migration from the exclusive reserve of travel literature to the emergent rationalist critique of clericalism and superstition, it was rechristened as the fétiche (fetish). The scene shifted from the zone of contact where Europe fashioned itself against its non-European other to the emerging zone where the secular fashioned itself against its religious other. Anecdotes from those travelogues, especially Willem Bosman's A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1704) and its analogy of fetish worship with Roman Catholicism, became illustrations of the irrationality and immoral consequences of ascribing supernatural or teleological qualities to material objects rather than recognizing physical and mechanical causality.

Just after mid-century a new term to describe and generalize fetish worship, fetishism, emerged with the publication of Charles de Brosses's Cult of the Fetish Gods. Fetishism would become the zero degree of the Enlightenment taxonomy of its other, religion. Rather than sui generis, African fetish worship became only the foremost surviving variant of a variety of worldwide practices relating to cult objects: from the biblical Urim and Thummim to Egyptian obelisks to Native American manitous. Fetishism was distinguished from polytheistic idolatry and provided a deeper wedge for cracking open the theological monopoly on the definition of religious origins. From the privilege ascribed to theistic belief and the human-divine relation, a discourse emerged in Bernard Fontanelle and David Hume that located the source of religion in faulty epistemology, childlike intellects, imagination, fear, and desire. Where natural causality would be, there were the gods. With de Brosses, a stage of human and religious development that preceded polytheism was recognized. Neither beliefs in invisible beings nor amorphous nature initiated that development, rather the forces behind the gratification of human desires or the realization of human fears lay in supernaturally endowed "material, terrestrial entities": fetishes (Brosses, 1988, p. 11).

Although in the wake of Brosses's work the primitivity and primordiality of fetishism became a truism, its material and magical dimensions, in contrast to the spiritual and social dimensions of polytheism and the three monotheisms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, led to the question whether fetishism indeed represented the original religion or was instead the stage preceding religion. Complicating the theological and philosophical questions over the relationship between the material and the spiritual were the demands of colonialism (and later imperialism). Indigenous religion was a fundamental tool for maintaining control of the colonized. Consequently, as David Chidester argues, "fetish worship" would be characterized as a religion, not as a consequence of "prolonged exposure, increased familiarity, acquired linguistic competence, intercultural dialogue, or participant observation," but as a result of Europeans achieving political and economic control of the particular region (Chidester, 1996, pp. 16–17). The Europeans did not perceive themselves as supplanting some other legitimate sovereign entity, rather European control was imposed upon an anarchic situation ruled by arbitrariness, irrationality, and desire. On a more fundamental level the distinction between order and disorder represented the distinction between the human, defined as the zoon politikon (political animal), and the nonhuman, pictured as the demonic or savage that found its confirmation in the distinction between religion and fetishism since, as Ludwig Feuerbach, drawing upon René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (and before them John Calvin), asserted in the opening of his Essence of Christianity, "Religion has its basis in the essential difference between man and the brute" (Feuerbach, 1989, p. 1).

Contact, Conquest, and Crisis: Fetishism and the Human Sciences

As a consequence of its delineation and appropriation by French philosophes, fetishism disseminated throughout European philosophic discourse. In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) Immanuel Kant analogized clericalism to fetishism in order to distinguish between true moral religion and false religion, between autonomy and heteronomy. Such labeling allowed Kant to discredit his opponents, render them "irrational," without ascribing either evil intent or demonism to them.

Now the man who does make use of actions, as means, which in themselves contain nothing pleasing to God (i.e., nothing moral), in order to earn thereby immediate divine approval of himself and there with the attainment of his desires, labors under the illusion that he possesses an art of bringing about a supernatural effect through wholly natural means. Such attempts we are wont to entitle sorcery. But (since this term carries with it the attendant concept of commerce with the evil principle, whereas the above mentioned attempt can be conceived to be undertaken, through misunderstanding, with good moral intent) we desire to use in place of it the word fetishism, familiar in other connections. (Kant, 1960, p. 165)

By extending materiality from particular objects to all means, fetishism, or "fetish-faith," came to extend beyond the borders of Africa to encompass everything in the realm of religion—including, in a clear allusion to Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783), the Jews—except for "purely moral" religion (Kant, 1960, p. 181–182).

G. W. F. Hegel, by contrast, limited the extent of fetishism to sub-Saharan Africa, where it came to exemplify the historical development or lack thereof of a continent and its peoples. Fetishism was emblematic of the African character, which

is difficult to comprehend, because it is so totally different from our own culture, and so remote and alien in relation to our own mode of consciousness. We must forget all the categories which are fundamental to our own spiritual life, i.e. the forms under which we normally subsume the data which confront us; the difficulty here is that our customary preconceptions will still inevitably intrude in all out deliberations. (Hegel, 1975, p. 176)

The people characterized by fetishism were outside history and substantial objectivity, outside God and morality; they were ruled by caprice, by the arbitrary rule of the individual projected outward onto a misrecognized natural form. This religion of "sensuous arbitrariness" was the lowest form of religion, immediate religion. If religion it was: "A fetish of this kind has no independent existence as an object of religion, and even less as a work of art. It is merely an artifact which expresses the arbitrary will of its creator, and which always remains in his hands" (Hegel, 1975, pp. 190, 181). This debasement of consciousness mirrored the debasement of social life: fetishism was one with cannibalism and slavery. Fetishism embodied the origin that future development would disavow; it was the threshold moment when humanity separated itself from bare life, from animal nature.

Though Samuel Taylor Coleridge analogized fetishism with vulgar empiricism, the proponent of scientific positivism Auguste Comte would determine it to be the first developmental stage of human intelligence and world history. In his Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) Comte posited three universal stages of human development—theology, metaphysics, and science (scientific positivism)—with the first, the age of theology, itself assuming a triadic structure: fetishism, polytheism, monotheism. For Comte, in the stage of fetishism "primitive man" endows all external objects with agency and therefore rises above sheer animal inertia. While Comte later reevaluated "fetishism," or rather "pure fetishism," as a necessary component of his new positivist religion of humanity, his implicitly (r)evolutionary scheme was most influential. While the primacy he ascribed to fetishism as the first religion (evolving from a primal atheism) was asserted by John Lubbock in his Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870) and by representatives of the German school of ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie ) among others, its primordial status was contested by animism, animatism, totemism, Urmonotheismus (primal monotheism), and other claimants.

In the 1840s Brosses's work not only influenced Comte's positivist musings, it was also picked up and excerpted by the young Karl Marx, who was in the midst of an extensive ethnographic reading program that also included other discussions of fetishism by Karl Böttiger and Benjamin Constant. These early studies of what Marx called "the religion of sensuous desire" were soon relocated from the colonial periphery to a metropole itself divided into secular and religious spheres as well as into exploiting capitalist and exploited proletariat classes. Marx began his analysis of value in contemporary capitalism in the first volume of Capital with a discussion of the fetishism of commodities: that which was viewed as most primitive came to characterize the seat of civilization, and that which was viewed as the most secular of activities—political economy—was unveiled as the religion of everyday life. In a dialectically materialist appropriation of Feuerbach's theory of religion, the value borne by the fetishized commodity was the culmination of the alienation and objectification of human labor. In contrast to Marx's earlier construction, fetishism, as the fetishism of commodities, is directed at "a thing which transcends sensuousness." With the circulation of commodities, "the definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (Marx, 1977, pp. 163, 165). As in the fetishism described in his early readings, Marx analogizes, "The products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race" (Marx, 1977, p. 165). Even as it expropriates use value from the fetishist other, capital reproduces the misrecognitions that it ascribes to that other.

Just as the fetish had come to figure and facilitate the debasement of social life—whether in the form of slavery according to Hegel or proletarianization for Marx—and of society-sustaining morality, so it became associated with the fears of degeneration that haunted the Europeans of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a France that was experiencing a decline in both its colonial reach and its European position, the perceived source of the threatening physical and moral debilitation and consequent devirilization and depopulation, of cultural crises of national, sexual, and gender difference, was sexual perversion. The psychiatrist Alfred Binet (1887) gave the cause of individual and national decay a name: fetishism. Like the people under French colonial domination, French men were seeking the satisfaction of their sensuous desires not by the real (here: "natural" acts of genital sexuality) but by fixing their attention upon objects (or body parts) whose value accrued from some past accidental encounter. Fetishism was characteristic of a perverse predisposition, just as Hegel had suggested that the fetishistic behavior of Africans was inherent to their character. Yet even as the fetish was displaced from the religious to the sexual, Binet felt compelled to analogize different levels of fetishism with those other religious stages with which fetishism had previously been contrasted, polytheism and monotheism. He compared normal love, which is composed of a myriad of fetishistic excitations, with polytheism and fetishism, previously associated with the base of the pyramid of religious forms, in its most singular and perverted form with monotheism, the pinnacle. In a world gone upside down, the civilized were going native. Within four years after the publication of Binet's 1887 "Le fétichisme dans l'amour" (Fetishism in Love), the authoritative compendia of sexual pathology, Richard Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathis Sexuali s declared fetishism the general form of sexual pathology.

Unlike totemism, fetishism came under Sigmund Freud's scrutiny in his analyses of sexuality and not of the genesis of religion. Instead of the perception of fetishism as the sign of a crisis of difference, the degeneration feared by the French medical community, such a crisis was its source: the little boy's encounter with sexual difference disrupting his narcissistic enjoyment of an undifferentiated, self-contained world. According to Freud, the discovery that women do not have penises leads the little boy to fear for his own. Fetishistic object choice—a symbolic substitute for the mother's (nonexistent) penis—is one way by which the boy mediates his desire to elide difference (and its feared causes and consequences) with the actuality of that difference; the mother's castration is both disavowed and affirmed. With the crisis surmounted, the boy not only assumes a gendered and sexualized identity, he is inserted into the social order.

As psychoanalytic and materialist analyses interpenetrated, most influentially with Walter Benjamin's criticism of the work of art and the political symbol in which "traces of the fetishist" are at play in the object's "aura" and "authenticity," the discourse of fetishism became a prime weapon in the critical armory of cultural studies (Benjamin, 1969, p. 244). With the later admixture of postcolonial analysis to the phantasmagoric study of fetishism, what went around came around. The discourses about the colonized and dominated other, including those about the (non)religion of fetishism, were recognized as themselves fetishistic attempts to mediate the possibly incompatible differences between social and cultural forms. The cultural analyst Homi Bhabha read the racial stereotype in its multiple and contradictory shapes of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism. As extended by Jay Geller and others, such as Anne McClintock, the colonial stereotype often entailed the Euro-Americans' discursive fixation upon a part of the other's body. The fixated-upon body part was often one that had been subjected to some discipline, practice, or technique: the circumcised penis, the bound foot, tattooed skin. This overvalued mark or member uncannily conjoined the natural and the cultural. This ambiguous conjunction of two (culturally) differentiated orders of being contributed to both the fascination and the horror evoked by such body techniques. Further, through such corporeal metonymies, discourses in which historical difference was naturalized as race and in which natural difference was figured by sex combined to construct the ethnic, gender, and sexual identity of the other. These fetishistic constructs provided symbolic substitutes for and objectified representations of the otherness—both the indigenous heterogeneous populations of modern Euro-American society and the different peoples contacted in colonial expansion—which undermined the narcissistic phantasy of Euro-American wholeness, of autonomy and dominance.

In sum, fetishism has come to signify the apotropaically monumentalized negotiations at the internal and external borders of culture. That is, it signifies the stuff that helps one think (or more likely misrecognize) the alienations, ambiguities, and contradictions that make up everyday life.

See Also

Transculturation and Religion.

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