Colonialism built its own vocabulary to name those who threatened it. A vocabulary of radical alterity forged by a hegemonic project of the human, of matter, and of thought. Animisms, fetishisms, shamanisms, idolatries, sodomies, sorceries and witchcrafts, concepts fruit of a narcissistic episteme, are participants in the construction of Europe as an idea, and of the social sciences as a discipline. If the very concept of Europe depended on its exteriority, this grammar of the other played a central role in its construction. Although its origins are inscribed in violence, repression, racism, and epistemicide, these concepts migrated and took new paths, building their own trajectories. Sometimes insisting on or repressing their colonial past, sometimes finding another way forward. Each in its own way, they have occupied a central place in contemporary critical thought.

The concept of “Fetishism”, in particular, carries an archive of its own: the archive of its uses, the territories it has passed through, the practices it has named, its participation in accusations and in the processes of translation it has undergone or resulted from. Derived from the word “fetish”, and used to designate in a negative and racist way the religious practices in the colonies, it came to signify, beyond the most primitive stage within a spiritual teleology, the heterogeneous materiality of the other. Through an epistemological conspiracy against Western knowledge, it entered the theoretical circuits as the place of absence, the inappropriate and the equivocal. Fetish thus became that which is opaque, suspect and contingent. Still, it has its own past, a past inscribed in colonial violence, agglutinating uses, people, practices, ways of thinking, doing and being in the world. “Fetishism” is a concept-archive. To excavate this archive, to activate the forgotten and buried memories of “fetishism”, the substrates of coagulated times and semantic silences is the proposal of this seminar.

It is no accident that it has occupied the place of a subverted, heretical and religiously perverted theology. “Fetish” and “Fetishism” are two key concepts in the architecture of this grammar of the other, surviving in critical thought as a critique of the modern economy of desire and the instability of sexual, economic and aesthetic values. In their text En defensa del fetiche (2010), Mariana Botey and Cuauhtémoc Medina speak of the fetish as a space of imperfect cognition that appears at every moment when it is necessary to refer to the impossibility and obligation of stabilizing necessity and production, utility and demand, rationality and value, meaning and matter. William Pietz (1989) speaks of the “irreducible materiality” of the fetish. Karl Marx links it to the religion of the appetite of the senses. Sigmund Freud, to the inappropriate object of sexual desire. All these projects give rise to a heterogeneous, perverted, and marginal materiality that refuses any stabilisation.

By promoting a debate on the political, poetic, and epistemological possibilities embedded in the concept of “Fetishism”, we intend to question the actuality of this concept within a post-colonial debate and its turns as a critical and disturbing instrument of a colonial knowledge. Disobedient, at the same time that “Fetishism” conspires and confabulates other ways of thinking about power, the material, and intercultural translations, it destabilises knowledge through its incapacity to be contained or domesticated.
Activity within the POLICREDOS working group

Bio notes

Iracema Dulley (ICI Berlin) - Iracema Dulley is an anthropologist whose work stems form over fifteen years of envolvement with colonial and post-colonial Angola, socila theory and continental philosophy. The projects conducted by her have as common ground an interest in the relationship between sociocultural, political, historical and linguistic elementsin the constitution of the subject. This has been explored through research on translation in Christian missions, state and vernacular ways of naming oneself and others, emonic designation in ethnographic writing, the formation of Ovimbundu ethnicity, and accusations of witchcraft and treason.

André Menard (Universidad de Chile) - André Menard holds a PhD in Sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and is professor and researcher at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chile. His work has focused on the Mapuche political history,  centering on the political uses if the notion of race in the Chilean and Mapuche context. In this framework he edited, alongside  Jorge Pavez,  the photo album Mapuche and Anglicans, photographic traces of the Misión Araucana de Kepe (1896-1908) (Santiago do Chile): Ocho Libros, 2008), and more recently the manuscprits in the mystical Mapuche leader Manuel Aburto Panguilef Libro Diario del Presidentee de la Federación Araucana, Manuel Aburto Panguilef (1940-1951) (Santiago do Chile: CoLibris, 2013). His current research focuses on fetish theories and its appilications to the analysis of the legal and political status of indegenous peoples.  

Lior Zisman Zalis (Centre for Social Studies - University of Coimbra) - Ph.D. student in Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and fellow of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) with the project "Insurgent Spiritualities and Enchanted Politics: Bordering the Theological-Political Problem in Brazil". Master in Comparative Studies of Literature, Art and Thought by the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona with the thesis "Toda piedra puede ser océano: una historia migrante del fetichismo", graduated from the Programa de Estudios Independientes (PEI) of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in Critical Theory and Museological Studies (Barcelona, 2017-2018) and holds a Bachelor's degree in Law with a specialization in "State and Society" from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where he was a researcher at the Núcleo de Direitos Humanos (NDH) and participated in research in the field of memory and the military dictatorship. He is mainly dedicated to themes related to cultural studies, postcolonial theories, and the memory of colonization in Brazil, namely in its articulations with conceptions of religion and politics.

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