ABSTRACT
This essay interrogates the relationship between translation and fetishism, fixation and instability through an examination of how the chain of substitution related to terms in European languages such as “fetish,” fetiche, and feitiço is juxtaposed in colonial Central Angola with Umbundu terms such as umbanda and owanga. It argues that these “concepts from the Global South” cannot be described in themselves, based on a conceptual particularity grounded in the emic gesture and in opposition to “Western” concepts. Rather, because conceptuality, like translation, depends on displacement, with its continuities and ruptures, feitiço, umbanda, owanga, “fetishism,” and the “fetish” only make sense in the chain of their dissemination. Translation thus appears as the “fetish” of suture.
