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Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term "fetishism" chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx's and Freud's conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa's human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx's and Freud's theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.
List of contents
A Note on Orthography ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
Part I. The Factory, the Coat, the Piano, and the "Negro Slave": On the Afro-Atlantic Sources of Marx's Fetish 41
1. The Afro-Atlantic Context of Historical Materialism 45
2. The "Negro-Slave" in Marx's Labor Theory of Value 60
3. Marx's Fetishization of People and Things 78
Conclusion to Part I 91
Part II. The Acropolis, the Couch, the Fur Hat, and the "Savage": On Freud's Ambivalent Fetish 97
4. The Fetishes That Assimilated Jewish Men Make 103
5. The Fetish as an Architecture of Solidarity and Conflict 117
6. The Castrator and the Castrated in the Fetishes of Psychoanalysis 145
Conclusion to Part II 165
Part III. Pots, Packets, Beads, and Foreigners: The Making and the Meaning of the Real-Life "Fetish" 171
7. The Contrary Ontologies of Two Revolutions 175
8. Commodities and Gods 191
9. The Madeness of Gods and Other People 249
Conclusion to Part III 285
Conclusion. Eshu's Hat, or An Afro-Atlantic Theory of Theory 289
Acknowledgments 325
Notes 331
References 339
Index 349
About the author
J. Lorand Matory
Summary
J. Lorand Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European social theory to show how Marx's and Freud's conceptions of the fetish illuminate and misrepresent the nature of Africa’s gods while demonstrating that Afro-Atlantic gods have their own social logic that is no less rational than European social theories.
