ABSTRACT
This essay is an attempt to use the concept of fetish for an inquiry—begun elsewhere (Pels n.d.; Van Dijk and Pels 1996)—into the place of materiality in present-day cultural and social theory. The fetish is a good guide in such explorations, because, ever since it emerged from the cultural tangle of West African trade, it has signposted an untranscended materiality and beckoned its students to sojourn in the border zones that divide mind and matter, the animate and inanimate. The fetish foregrounds materiality because it is the most aggressive expression of the social life of things: not merely alive, it is an “animated entit[y] that can dominate persons” (Taussig 1980: 25). Fetishism is animism with a vengeance. Its matter strikes back.
