ABSTRACT
Originally a Eurocentric means of dismissing the theories of causation of racialized others, the discourse of the fetish was developed by Karl Marx and then Sigmund Freud into a reƒexive critique of European culture. In his theory of commodity fetishism, Marx turned anthropology around to assert that it was modern capitalist behavior that was fetishistic, because it aributed to commodities powers that mystied actual class relations. Freud in turn inverted the modernist superiority complex over the so-called savage mind, making the sexual fetishes of neurotics emblematic of a society divorced from a direct
contact with the reality of its senses. e eld which grew up aer the 1960s, in the wake of decolonization and counter-cultural ferment, and which valorized intercultural performance as a response to Eurocentric theatre history, drew on these Freudian and Marxist critical archives of fetishistic exchange in launching its own versions of performed cultural critique.
