This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz). In doing so, Marx echoes some of the earliest critical representations of the indio by Europeans including Bartolome de las Casas, who evoked Indigenous figures in his polemics against the conquistadors’ idolatrous fixation on gold and its genocidal consequences. Michael Taussig extends the customary Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism by attending to the constitutive erasure that occurs in the creation of the fetish that effaces its scene of production. Among his elaborations of this theory is an analysis of what he calls ‘state fetishism.’ If fetishes involve a degree of deception, he argues, they are also magical objects closely aligned with the exercise of political power, which often have profound material effects. For example, Taussig describes how the image of the devil emerges in South American folklore as a fetishization of evil that mediates the transition between precapitalist and capitalist modes of production. In addition to such vernacular uses, contemporary artists and writers often deploy the fetish as a device uniquely suited to examine the entwinement of capitalism and colonialism. 

This panel will work through the many aspects of the fetish – as commodity, as ethnographic object, as state power – as it is mobilized in comparative literature and art. In conversation with scholarship on Indigenous modernism, this panel foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies whose exploration of fetishism and totemism has been profoundly misrecognized within the academy as expressions of a primitive political order and aesthetic. We, instead, seek to explore the intersections between Indigenous expressions of sovereignty and anti-capitalist critiques of the fetish as a rich counter discourse on the complex interrelations of people and things.

We welcome papers on: 

• Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism:
• The equation of people and things under capitalism
• Money
• Representations of indigeneity (Indigenismo, etc)
• Indigenous representations of the (commodity) fetish
• Anthropological/comparative theology origins of fetish:
  • The fetish hiding/erasing traces of its production
• Agency falsely attributed to things
• Critiques of idolatry
• Totemism