ABSTRACT
The concept of “fetish” emerged in the colonial encounter of Europe and Africa. For the Europeans that first used this term, the fetish would not be just the representation or image of worship. It was a material object or natural event worshiped in itself that was identified with African religion. The very idea of the fetish was scandalous and absurd for the Western Enlightenment. It represented a conceptual problem that is at the origin, and end, of many of the discussions on religion and materiality. This chapter reviews the long history of the concept from its origins in the colonial period, the initial formation of a theory of “fetishism” in the Enlightenment, through its uses in critical theory in the last two centuries, to more recent re-valuations of authors that have proposed to recover the concept from its negative connotations. Rather than taking sides on any of these theories of the fetish, the objective of this chapter is to reflect on how the different iterations of the concept reveal its recursive character: how it always draws upon itself.
