The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make

by J.Lorand Matory

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Author: J.Lorand Matory

Paperback:
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN 10: 1478001054
ISBN 13: 978-1478001058

Hardcover:
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN 10: 1478000759
ISBN 13: 978-1478000754

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

Review

"J. L. Matory provides a critical and provocative account of how the concept of the fetish has been appropriated and used as a key concept in the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The work is especially strong in demonstrating the fantastical appropriations of the idea of the fetish, plucked from the complex and rich contexts of meaning and agency in transatlantic black religion. . . . . A fascinating, readable, and wandering book. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."

-- G. E. Marcus, Choice Published On: 2019-04-01

"Matory’s The Fetish Revisited is a masterful work, stunning in its erudition, ambitious argument, and prodigious ethnographic detail."

-- Laura S. Grillo, Journal of the American Academy of Religion Published On: 2019-09-01

"The Fetish Revisited is an important book and a pleasure to read."

-- Steven Engler, Studies in Religion Published On: 2019-07-01

Review

“J. Lorand Matory's The Fetish Revisited is a brilliant tour de force that links nineteenth-century fantasies about blackness and the power of the fetish with many of the underlying currents of the twentieth century, from Marxism to psychoanalysis. Matory's work consistently contrasts such views with the ‘fetish objects’ themselves, the products of African religions and cultures, their inherent meanings and functions, and their appropriation within the intellectual world of expanding European colonialism. An important addition to the analysis of racial thought in Europe showing how the underlying objects that seemed to inspire Marx and Freud had an autonomous and powerful function quite separate from their role in the two men's thought.”

-- Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity

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The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make