ABSTRACT
A fetishist conception of representation is a sense of undifferentiated identity that tends to be unqualified, unlimited and independent of context. For the devotee and believer the fetish is the god at all times, no matter when and where or under what conditions or stipulations it appears. However, there is also another more qualified and limited sense of identity where the representamen is the represented only in certain specified contexts and under expressly spelled-out conditions. The chapter shows that the first major transition in symbolic representation was coextensive with the move out of primitivism into civilization and how it involved a dual movement, a break with fetishism and its substitution by iconism. The transition from iconism to mimeticism, like that from fetishism to iconism, can be closely correlated with a momentous historical development: the rise of the so-called Axial Cultures.
