ABSTRACT
To early modern sensibilities, fetishism and idolatry were alike in their being products of putatively false religions ignorant to the truth of Christianity; moreover, both idolatry and fetishism relied on attributing human or even supernatural powers to merely material objects. The clash between European and African cultures provided an early occasion for observation of fetish, and the cultural disjunctions and interstices exposed in such confrontations of discontinuous value continue to provide the best vantage points from which to observe the fetish phenomenon. The fetish phenomenon which does not depend on any one discourse but synthesizes multiple discourses into a discontinuous narrative that in turn provides the illusion of fixity, unity, and fullnessis adept at accommodating for change, and its flexibility contributes to its uncanny resilience. Fetish thus attempts to obscure the history of the cultural production of value by inventing an illusory history of value for the object instead.
