The Problem of the Fetish, I

Abstract

Fetish has always been a word of sinister pedigree. Discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive, it has always been a word with a past, forever becoming embarrassment1 to disciplines in the human sciences that seek to contain and control its sense. Yet anthropologists of primitive religion, sociologists of political economy, psychiatrists of sexual deviance, and philosophers of modernist aesthetics have never ceased using the term, even as they testify to its conceptual doubtfulness and referential uncertainty. It seems this word's usage is always somewhat indiscriminate, always threatening to slide, as in Merleau-Ponty's tentative proposition, into an impossibly general theory. Yet it is precisely in the surprising history of this word as a comprehensive theoretical term indispensable to such crucial thinkers as Comte, Marx, and Freud that the real interdisciplinary interest of lies. This essay is intended to provide the introductory discussion to an extensive exploration of this history, an exploration that must begin with a study of the origin of the fetish as a word and as a historically significant object. My thesis is that the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, origins are never absolute. While I argue that the fetish originated within a novel social formation during this period through the development of the pidgin word Fetisso, this word in turn has a linguistic and accompanying conceptual lineage that may be traced. Fetisso derives from the Portuguese word feiti?o, which in the late Middle Ages meant magical practice or witchcraft performed, often innocently, by the simple, ignorant classes.2 Feiti?o in turn derives from the Latin adjective facticius, which originally meant manufactured. The historical study of the fetish must begin by considering these words in some detail, only then going on to examine the initial application of feiti?o on the African coast, its subsequent development into Fetisso, and finally that word's textual dissemination into the languages of northern Europe, where national versions of the word developed during the seventeenth century. The study of the origin of the fetish concludes at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the text of Willem Bosman, for his Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea provided the image and conception of fetishes on which Enlightenment intellectuals based their elaboration of the notion into a general theory of primitive religion.3 The elaboration of this general Enlightenment theory, as developed from Bayle to de Brosses and then adopted by philosophers of the late eighteenth century, constitutes a second period of the history of the Its dissemination into a host of popular and social scientific discourses in the nineteenth century marks a third large period, and one could view twentieth-century theoretical discourses that seek to make a unity out of the diversity of earlier fetish discourses as the last historical development of this idea. The essentially theoretical nature of the interest in the history of the term, as well as the need for an initial schematism to establish criteria of relevance for the subsequent historical discussion, call for a preliminary consideration of the nature of the problem named by the word fetish.