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The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make
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.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
12 people are currently reading
161 people want to read
About the author
J. Lorand Matory
5 books5 followersDr. J. Lorand Matory, Ph.D. (Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1991) is Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project and Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of African and African American Studies of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University. Previously, he was a tenured Full Professor at Harvard University until moving to Duke in 2009. He also served from 2009 to 2013 as the James P. Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont.
He has produced 37 years of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic, West-African Yoruba religion, West-Central African Kongo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santeria/Ocha and Haitian Vodou.
In 2003, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award and year-long residential fellowship, and U.S. President G.W. Bush appointed Professor Matory to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property at the US Department of State, where he served until 2011. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association.
He has produced 37 years of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic, West-African Yoruba religion, West-Central African Kongo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santeria/Ocha and Haitian Vodou.
In 2003, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award and year-long residential fellowship, and U.S. President G.W. Bush appointed Professor Matory to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property at the US Department of State, where he served until 2011. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 19, 2021
I didn't get along too well with Matory's writing. But there is a lot of important and really intresting stuff in here. The first part, about marx was by far the most annoying and was kind of mean-spirited. it maybe does make more sense in the context of the whole book though.
I'd recommend reading the conclusions to the first two parts on marx and freud and making more space for the last part on afro-atlantic religions, which is just full of interesting gods and anecdotes and not as repetitive.
random quotes:
""Hegel and Marx endeavored to expel this darkness from Europe, while Freud vacillated be- tween efforts to show, on the one hand, that assimilated Jews like him have repressed and risen above this darkness and, on the other, that this darkness inhabited civilized gentiles as much as civilized Jews.""
""Thus, particularly in Freudian analyses of fetishism, Africans can play opposite rhetorical roles— sometimes as the antitype of civilized humanity and sometimes as the proto- types of a shared humanity.""
""Yet both formulations are studiously ignorant of African self-understandings and aspirations, reducing Africans to rhetorical tropes rather than human beings.""
"Had they given it any thought, Freud and his acolytes would likely have at- tributed the heartless behavior of “civilized,” white colonialists and lynch mobs to the aggression inherent and equally resistant to repression in the psyches of all human beings. To me, it is an equally worthy sociological hypothesis that the working-class Belgians who administered “justice” in the Congo Free State were passing on forms of aggression generated by mistreatment and feelings of inferiority in their home society, and then resolving their psychic distress by identifying with and miming the authoritarian behavior of their own oppressors. Violence is more intrinsic to the role of the conqueror than to that of the conquered. Hence, Freud’s use of the “savage” as the prime ex- emplar of violence and vice is nothing short of colonialist fetishism."
"Assimilated cen- tral European Jews like Marx and Freud responded to this precarity with a mix of ethnological Schadenfreude—that is, through the denigration of Afri- cans, unassimilated Jews, and women in order to highlight their own belong- ing in the master race and sex—and an identi cation with and revalorization of the downtrodden. Their fetishes often looked both ways and spoke with two voices—the castrator and the castrated. These men were ambivalent, though lopsidedly so. And I submit that this lopsidedness is both compensa- tory and strategic. It entails an aspiration to whiteness and a hedging of the theorist’s bets."
150
"Like Africans, Jews were regularly fetishized as embodiments of what a central European should not be. I have argued that Marx’s and Freud’s ambiguous racial position and Marx’s ambiguous class position help to explain not only their displacement of stigma onto the African but also their exceptional insightfulness about the workings of fetishism itself."
192
While Marx and most European social theorists focus on production as the main source of value, what turns merchandise and gifts from distant Afri- can kingdoms, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere into gods is not the production of those objects but their assembly and their repeated consecration through the ritual exchange of labor, cash, and other material things. In the Afro-Atlantic religions, the paradigmatic site of value production is not the European fac- tory but African royal marriage.
Each divinity or person is a set of relationships materialized through commerce, rit- ual gifting, and souvenirs of long-term debt. Like communities, gods are assem- blages animated and kept alive through such repeated exchanges.
I'd recommend reading the conclusions to the first two parts on marx and freud and making more space for the last part on afro-atlantic religions, which is just full of interesting gods and anecdotes and not as repetitive.
random quotes:
""Hegel and Marx endeavored to expel this darkness from Europe, while Freud vacillated be- tween efforts to show, on the one hand, that assimilated Jews like him have repressed and risen above this darkness and, on the other, that this darkness inhabited civilized gentiles as much as civilized Jews.""
""Thus, particularly in Freudian analyses of fetishism, Africans can play opposite rhetorical roles— sometimes as the antitype of civilized humanity and sometimes as the proto- types of a shared humanity.""
""Yet both formulations are studiously ignorant of African self-understandings and aspirations, reducing Africans to rhetorical tropes rather than human beings.""
"Had they given it any thought, Freud and his acolytes would likely have at- tributed the heartless behavior of “civilized,” white colonialists and lynch mobs to the aggression inherent and equally resistant to repression in the psyches of all human beings. To me, it is an equally worthy sociological hypothesis that the working-class Belgians who administered “justice” in the Congo Free State were passing on forms of aggression generated by mistreatment and feelings of inferiority in their home society, and then resolving their psychic distress by identifying with and miming the authoritarian behavior of their own oppressors. Violence is more intrinsic to the role of the conqueror than to that of the conquered. Hence, Freud’s use of the “savage” as the prime ex- emplar of violence and vice is nothing short of colonialist fetishism."
"Assimilated cen- tral European Jews like Marx and Freud responded to this precarity with a mix of ethnological Schadenfreude—that is, through the denigration of Afri- cans, unassimilated Jews, and women in order to highlight their own belong- ing in the master race and sex—and an identi cation with and revalorization of the downtrodden. Their fetishes often looked both ways and spoke with two voices—the castrator and the castrated. These men were ambivalent, though lopsidedly so. And I submit that this lopsidedness is both compensa- tory and strategic. It entails an aspiration to whiteness and a hedging of the theorist’s bets."
150
"Like Africans, Jews were regularly fetishized as embodiments of what a central European should not be. I have argued that Marx’s and Freud’s ambiguous racial position and Marx’s ambiguous class position help to explain not only their displacement of stigma onto the African but also their exceptional insightfulness about the workings of fetishism itself."
192
While Marx and most European social theorists focus on production as the main source of value, what turns merchandise and gifts from distant Afri- can kingdoms, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere into gods is not the production of those objects but their assembly and their repeated consecration through the ritual exchange of labor, cash, and other material things. In the Afro-Atlantic religions, the paradigmatic site of value production is not the European fac- tory but African royal marriage.
Each divinity or person is a set of relationships materialized through commerce, rit- ual gifting, and souvenirs of long-term debt. Like communities, gods are assem- blages animated and kept alive through such repeated exchanges.
September 27, 2020
Ooooh boy, this book has won all the academic prizes and so it feels a little disrespectful to only give it three stars because who am I, you know?
And truth be told, the first two parts of Fetish Revisited are phenomenal. In them, Matory shows how Marx and Freud – whom he describes as "off-white whites" because they were Jewish in a culture that viewed Jews with suspicion – engaged in "ethnographic Schadenfreude" by displacing their cultural insecurities onto Black and brown people in the form of American slaves (in Marx's case) and African natives (Freud's case). They both did so either by denigrating African religious practices as "fetishism" – either directly, as Freud appropriated the word for sexual desires transferred to inappropriate objects, or indirectly, as Marx used the term to criticize capitalism's applying value to commodities for no rational reason. In both cases, Matorey persuasively argues, a European Jew aspiring to assimilation with white European culture used anti-Black stereotypes to differentiate themselves from other people with ambiguous pedigrees and criticize the tendencies of those dominant groups.
Matorey also shows how "fetishism" – the idea of placing value on something perhaps undeserving or inappropriate for the value it receives – is an allegation just as easily applied to both Marx and Freud, and pretty much to all of us, given that we all imbue objects with value beyond their objective worth, including theories and concepts such as historical materialism or psychoanalysis.
So, yes, the first two parts of Matory's book are incredible. A lot to think about, especially for those of us who like Marx but haven't given as much thought to the way he treated slavery in his writings (other than to blithely note he opposed it).
But the last part feels more like an infodump on Afro-Atlantic religions; it claims to be doing more than it really is; and it's incredibly long and tedious to work through. The overall feel is of one amazing book and one poorly edited book crammed together into one book that feels too long and disjointed. If Marx, Freud, the 19th century concept of the fetish, or religious studies in general interests you, check out this book. But it's OK if you stop after the part on Freud.
And truth be told, the first two parts of Fetish Revisited are phenomenal. In them, Matory shows how Marx and Freud – whom he describes as "off-white whites" because they were Jewish in a culture that viewed Jews with suspicion – engaged in "ethnographic Schadenfreude" by displacing their cultural insecurities onto Black and brown people in the form of American slaves (in Marx's case) and African natives (Freud's case). They both did so either by denigrating African religious practices as "fetishism" – either directly, as Freud appropriated the word for sexual desires transferred to inappropriate objects, or indirectly, as Marx used the term to criticize capitalism's applying value to commodities for no rational reason. In both cases, Matorey persuasively argues, a European Jew aspiring to assimilation with white European culture used anti-Black stereotypes to differentiate themselves from other people with ambiguous pedigrees and criticize the tendencies of those dominant groups.
Matorey also shows how "fetishism" – the idea of placing value on something perhaps undeserving or inappropriate for the value it receives – is an allegation just as easily applied to both Marx and Freud, and pretty much to all of us, given that we all imbue objects with value beyond their objective worth, including theories and concepts such as historical materialism or psychoanalysis.
So, yes, the first two parts of Matory's book are incredible. A lot to think about, especially for those of us who like Marx but haven't given as much thought to the way he treated slavery in his writings (other than to blithely note he opposed it).
But the last part feels more like an infodump on Afro-Atlantic religions; it claims to be doing more than it really is; and it's incredibly long and tedious to work through. The overall feel is of one amazing book and one poorly edited book crammed together into one book that feels too long and disjointed. If Marx, Freud, the 19th century concept of the fetish, or religious studies in general interests you, check out this book. But it's OK if you stop after the part on Freud.
March 26, 2021
This is an excellent, though-provoking and invaluable book which illuminates both the way religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora theorize the world and also how European theory (notably Hegel, Marx and Freud) emerge from the colonial encounter. For those interested in the spiritual and cultural power of objects, it is an extremely important contribution. It argues for a complex view of how the European misinterpretation of worldly African spiritual practices created a "word-weapon" wielded to normalize and justify a colonial racial order. Yet it also awakens our curiosity as to how the complex socio-material relations between people and objects (that the word-weapon "fetish" seeks to identify) are pivotal to not only Afro-Atlantic societies but also European ones. For students of Marx and Freud, this is a vital read: it argues these theorists defamed but also relied on notion of the African fetish to advance not only to advance their theories but also their standing as racially ambiguous subjects of Europe. The book also provides a one-of-a-kind insight into the theoretical and practical insights of Afro-Atlantic spiritual practitioners in West Africa, Germany, Brazil, the United States and Haiti. A tour de force, to be sure.
June 6, 2025
J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press, 2018).
• Introduction
o Indeed, a derogatory word for African hair is an alternative term for fetish play—¬ “kink.
o sadistic scenes that too closely recapitulate the ¬ actual racial structure of sexual oppression and degradation at the foundation of the Atlantic po¬liti¬cal economy are the greatest taboo xv
o That the term “fetish” is used to describe ¬ these pleas¬ ur¬ able but stigmatized activities is no accident. Nor is the fact that race appears to be such a cardinal, albeit subliminal, meta¬phor in the social roles and paraphernalia that Marx, Freud, and bdsm participants mobilize as they resist the rival role expectations of other parties. ¬
o Today’s concept of the fetish originated on the West African coast, where African and Eu¬ro¬pean traders disagreed about the value and agency of ¬ people and ¬ things. Heirs to this legacy of disagreement, Hegel, Marx, and Freud invoked materially embodied ¬ African gods—¬ so-¬ called “fetishes”—as the universal counterexample of proper reasoning, commerce, governance, and sexuality.
Freud embraces this term in reimaging and refashioning intimate relationships xvi
o Thesis: The pres¬ ent volume argues that the priests of Yorùbá and Kongo “traditional” religions, Cuban Santería/Regla de Ocha (henceforth Santería/Ocha), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou are not the ¬ bearers of some primordial, history-¬ less tradition but heirs to the same sixteenth-¬ and seventeenth-¬ century legacy of semantic and moral conflict on the “Guinea Coast” that inspired the Enlightenment and post-¬ Enlightenment discourse of the fetish in Eu¬ rope
o THESIS: the so-¬ called fetishes of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions have counterparts in historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and white American bdsm, that each of ¬ these systems invests assertions about proper social order in certain physical props, and that ¬ these intellectual and material assertions about social order cannot be understood outside the context of their common roots in a half millennium of Atlantic slavery and colonialism.
o Thus, the pres¬ ent volume argues against the assumption embedded in conventional notions of “fetishism” that, in contrast to African gods, Eu¬ ropean social theory is a disembodied and socially neutral articulation of truths about all times and all places. Rather, it is as historical and as socially positioned and materially embedded as any of the social phenomena to which it is applied.xvii
o THESIS: By heuristically describing both Eu¬ro¬pean social theories and African altars as “fetishes,” The Fetish Revisited highlights the fact that each is the articulation and materialization of a contested proposal about how such social relationships should work.
o Each of ¬ these “fetishes” nominates into socially recognized being a typology of actors, their powers and goals, and a set of norms governing ¬ those actors’ interaction, norms prioritizing the interests of some of ¬ those actors over ¬ others’.xviii
o Therefore, Eu¬ropean social theories and African altars are to be judged not for their truth or falsehood but for their relative efficacy at rearranging ¬ people’s social priorities in a context where ¬ there is more than one choice regarding how people should organize themselves and how the rewards of their cooperation should be distributed
o Reads fetish IN Freud
Freud knew as well as Marx and the Afro-¬ Atlantic priests that ¬ things and the value attributed to them powerfully mediate ¬ human relationships. So The Fetish Revisited also analyzes the ambivalent social relationships that Freud reor¬ ga¬ nized through the medium of couches, armchairs, cigars, alcohol, intaglio rings, pilgrimages to the Acropolis and Rome, his antiquities collection, his ¬ father’s fur hat, and his texts about the “savage.” I argue that this reor¬ga¬ni¬za¬tion was concerned as much with the enfranchisement of assimilated Jewish men as with curing neurosis. xix
o Afro-¬ Atlantic priests typically know that it is ¬ people who make gods. These religions reconfigure interfamilial, interclass, interethnic, interracial, and intergender relationships through the liturgical assembly, re-¬ valuation, and care of material ¬ things
o FETISH DEF: book rests on a heuristic definition of the fetish as a material ¬ thing animated by the contrary models of society and the contrary personal expectations of the ¬ people who—as Eu¬ro¬pe¬ans and Africans, buyers and sellers, priests and worshippers, oath-¬ givers and takers, husbands and wives, masters and slaves, bosses and employers, teachers and students, and so forth—¬ have rival relationships with that material ¬ thing. xix
A thing is most likely to be called a fetish when it mediates the relationship between parties with very different or even opposite perspectives on their social relationship, perspectives that are also expressed in opposite perspectives on the thing itself
Like the fetishes of Freud’s patients and the paraphernalia of the gods in most religions, the most powerful spirited things of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions are deeply ambivalent—¬ embodying si¬multa¬neously and sometimes in equal measure both faith and the anticipation of doubt, dissent, and disapproval
• Introduction
o Yoruba model of the person as vessel 11
o [Pietz’s first fetish encounter] the Guinea-¬ Coast encounter of Eu¬ro¬pean merchants with African monarchs, merchants, and priests catalyzed two social revolutions—¬ one Euro-Atlantic and the other Afro-¬ Atlantic. On the one hand, the Euro-¬ Atlantic social revolution advocated the inherent equality of all white men and their individual, rights-¬ bearing autonomy from one another. This new social ideal was based on the model of a band of ¬ brothers, and the prime actor imagined in this vision of society and history is a white man. On the other, the simultaneous Yorùbá-Atlantic social revolution idealized the hand-¬ in-glove, hierarchical connection between actors from dif¬ferent families, ethni groups, and places—¬ a hierarchical connection modeled on royal marriage and ¬ horse¬ manship. The prime historical actor ¬ imagined in this model of society and history is a black royal wife (Matory [1994] 2005).
o In many ways, Babá Murah precedes me in my proj¬ect, which is to put the heirs of ¬ these two social revolutions back into explicit dialogue with each other. He does so in the ser¬ vice of community and healing, while I do so in order to enhance our understanding of what each party separately takes for granted about the value and agency of ¬ people and ¬ things
o Through vivid color images and ethnographic analyses of ¬ these gods, I show that Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-¬ made gods. I ask of historical materialism and psychoanalysis the same socially contextualizing questions that anthropologists, deeply influenced by Marx and Freud, have applied to the study of African and African-¬ inspired religions.
o Freud summary
Freud’s theory of fetishism (1927) seems a thinly veiled meta¬phor for his own situation as an assimilated Jew in an increasingly antisemitic Eu¬ rope. And, for him, ambivalence is central to the structure of the fetish. According to Freud, the fetish embodies both the fearful hostility of the boy to his ¬ father and the boy’s desire, in the end, to assume the ¬ father’s role as an aggressor.
Likewise, I ¬ will argue, Freud’s rhetorical use of Africans and our gods embodies both his fearful hostility ¬ toward the white gentile ¬ father and his desire to impress and, in the end, to become that ¬ father. 20
o FOR OP The term “fetish” indexes the speaker’s condemnation of one human-¬ posited and human-¬ enforced socio-¬ cosmological order in the ser¬ vice of affirming another.
o ON BOHME
The Berlin-¬ based cultural and literary historian Hartmut Böhme ([2006] 2014) argues that fetishes are not new in Eu¬ ro¬ pean cultural history: they are both ancient and omnipresent. Ironically, his own critique of other Eu¬rope-ans embodies the very fetishism that he criticizes. Böhme defines a fetish as an emotionally charged symbol that replaces the real phenomenon it represents, hides it, represses it, or makes it unidentifiable to the believer. For him, the fetish is a ¬ thing that appears to bear a power beyond ¬ human authorship, a power that both threatens the author and believer with harm and embodies his or her hope of salvation from that harm.
o In both Marx’s historical materialism and Freud’s psychoanalysis, physical things are the classical referents of the term “fetish,” with the implication that the ¬ thing is merely a mistaken vehicle for a social relationship that a reasonable or mentally healthy person understands is ¬ really immaterial.
o What are the implications of the thingliness, or materiality, of the fetish?
o St st rhetorical sign that talks back—that’s the nature of the fetish 27
o “AIM IS TO “refine our social hermeneutics” and return “full voice to the African side of this dialogue” 28
o a fetish is neither an idyll nor an inherent evil. 31
o OKAY FINAL TIME THE THESIS: I explore the hypothesis that, like the material ¬ things that psychoanalysts call fetishes, both African gods and Eu¬ ro¬ pean social theories embody the revolutionary’s, the patient’s, or the worshipper’s ambivalence—¬ his or her simultaneous pursuit of relief from victimhood and identification with the victimizer.
o NOT A REFUSAL OF FREUD: “I internalize their hermeneutics even as I remove …Freud from the pedestal” 33
o SUMMARIES
Part I argues that Marx’s ¬ labor theory of value is no more empirically demonstrable than the theories that it critiques and that it is just as socially positioned in the perspective it articulates. By comparison with the ostensible incompetence of the “negro slave” and the supposedly minimal worth of his or her product, Marx affirms the collective agency of all Eu¬ro¬pean wage workers, the value of their product, and, by proxy, Marx’s own worthiness of enfranchisement despite his ethnicity and downward class mobility.
Part II describes how Freud’s insecurities about his race and his sexual orientation ¬ shaped psychoanalysis and inspired divinations about the ¬ human personality that uncannily resemble underdeveloped versions of the Afro-Atlantic religions. This argument employs the shared insights of psychoanalysis and the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions to highlight the ambivalent nature of the empowered ¬ things at the core of the social organ¬izations constituted by both psychoanalysis and the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions 38
Part III discusses the conceptions of value and agency embodied in the human-¬ made gods of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions and the class interests they encode—¬ interests very dif¬fer¬ent from but no less contextually reasonable than ¬ those advocated by Hegel, Marx, and Freud.
o Argument summarized in four main terms
First, theory is not a disembodied, universal truth but a creature dialectically related to the social environment, material surroundings, and material interests of the theorists.
Second, the term “fetishism” is a useful way to show the competitive an strategic nature of meaning making in the construction of Eu¬ro¬pean social theories, Afro-¬ Atlantic gods, and numerous other socially effective stipulations about where value lies and who owes what to whom.
Third, like the most power¬ful and spectacular of African “fetishes,” the most power¬ful and spectacular Eu¬ro¬pean social theories embody not only the social ambiguity but also the po¬liti¬cal and emotional ambivalence of their creators.
Fourth, in the making of theories and of gods, the assignment of value and agency to one party regularly entails the devaluation and the zombification of (that is, the denial of agency to) other parties
• Introduction
o Indeed, a derogatory word for African hair is an alternative term for fetish play—¬ “kink.
o sadistic scenes that too closely recapitulate the ¬ actual racial structure of sexual oppression and degradation at the foundation of the Atlantic po¬liti¬cal economy are the greatest taboo xv
o That the term “fetish” is used to describe ¬ these pleas¬ ur¬ able but stigmatized activities is no accident. Nor is the fact that race appears to be such a cardinal, albeit subliminal, meta¬phor in the social roles and paraphernalia that Marx, Freud, and bdsm participants mobilize as they resist the rival role expectations of other parties. ¬
o Today’s concept of the fetish originated on the West African coast, where African and Eu¬ro¬pean traders disagreed about the value and agency of ¬ people and ¬ things. Heirs to this legacy of disagreement, Hegel, Marx, and Freud invoked materially embodied ¬ African gods—¬ so-¬ called “fetishes”—as the universal counterexample of proper reasoning, commerce, governance, and sexuality.
Freud embraces this term in reimaging and refashioning intimate relationships xvi
o Thesis: The pres¬ ent volume argues that the priests of Yorùbá and Kongo “traditional” religions, Cuban Santería/Regla de Ocha (henceforth Santería/Ocha), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou are not the ¬ bearers of some primordial, history-¬ less tradition but heirs to the same sixteenth-¬ and seventeenth-¬ century legacy of semantic and moral conflict on the “Guinea Coast” that inspired the Enlightenment and post-¬ Enlightenment discourse of the fetish in Eu¬ rope
o THESIS: the so-¬ called fetishes of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions have counterparts in historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and white American bdsm, that each of ¬ these systems invests assertions about proper social order in certain physical props, and that ¬ these intellectual and material assertions about social order cannot be understood outside the context of their common roots in a half millennium of Atlantic slavery and colonialism.
o Thus, the pres¬ ent volume argues against the assumption embedded in conventional notions of “fetishism” that, in contrast to African gods, Eu¬ ropean social theory is a disembodied and socially neutral articulation of truths about all times and all places. Rather, it is as historical and as socially positioned and materially embedded as any of the social phenomena to which it is applied.xvii
o THESIS: By heuristically describing both Eu¬ro¬pean social theories and African altars as “fetishes,” The Fetish Revisited highlights the fact that each is the articulation and materialization of a contested proposal about how such social relationships should work.
o Each of ¬ these “fetishes” nominates into socially recognized being a typology of actors, their powers and goals, and a set of norms governing ¬ those actors’ interaction, norms prioritizing the interests of some of ¬ those actors over ¬ others’.xviii
o Therefore, Eu¬ropean social theories and African altars are to be judged not for their truth or falsehood but for their relative efficacy at rearranging ¬ people’s social priorities in a context where ¬ there is more than one choice regarding how people should organize themselves and how the rewards of their cooperation should be distributed
o Reads fetish IN Freud
Freud knew as well as Marx and the Afro-¬ Atlantic priests that ¬ things and the value attributed to them powerfully mediate ¬ human relationships. So The Fetish Revisited also analyzes the ambivalent social relationships that Freud reor¬ ga¬ nized through the medium of couches, armchairs, cigars, alcohol, intaglio rings, pilgrimages to the Acropolis and Rome, his antiquities collection, his ¬ father’s fur hat, and his texts about the “savage.” I argue that this reor¬ga¬ni¬za¬tion was concerned as much with the enfranchisement of assimilated Jewish men as with curing neurosis. xix
o Afro-¬ Atlantic priests typically know that it is ¬ people who make gods. These religions reconfigure interfamilial, interclass, interethnic, interracial, and intergender relationships through the liturgical assembly, re-¬ valuation, and care of material ¬ things
o FETISH DEF: book rests on a heuristic definition of the fetish as a material ¬ thing animated by the contrary models of society and the contrary personal expectations of the ¬ people who—as Eu¬ro¬pe¬ans and Africans, buyers and sellers, priests and worshippers, oath-¬ givers and takers, husbands and wives, masters and slaves, bosses and employers, teachers and students, and so forth—¬ have rival relationships with that material ¬ thing. xix
A thing is most likely to be called a fetish when it mediates the relationship between parties with very different or even opposite perspectives on their social relationship, perspectives that are also expressed in opposite perspectives on the thing itself
Like the fetishes of Freud’s patients and the paraphernalia of the gods in most religions, the most powerful spirited things of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions are deeply ambivalent—¬ embodying si¬multa¬neously and sometimes in equal measure both faith and the anticipation of doubt, dissent, and disapproval
• Introduction
o Yoruba model of the person as vessel 11
o [Pietz’s first fetish encounter] the Guinea-¬ Coast encounter of Eu¬ro¬pean merchants with African monarchs, merchants, and priests catalyzed two social revolutions—¬ one Euro-Atlantic and the other Afro-¬ Atlantic. On the one hand, the Euro-¬ Atlantic social revolution advocated the inherent equality of all white men and their individual, rights-¬ bearing autonomy from one another. This new social ideal was based on the model of a band of ¬ brothers, and the prime actor imagined in this vision of society and history is a white man. On the other, the simultaneous Yorùbá-Atlantic social revolution idealized the hand-¬ in-glove, hierarchical connection between actors from dif¬ferent families, ethni groups, and places—¬ a hierarchical connection modeled on royal marriage and ¬ horse¬ manship. The prime historical actor ¬ imagined in this model of society and history is a black royal wife (Matory [1994] 2005).
o In many ways, Babá Murah precedes me in my proj¬ect, which is to put the heirs of ¬ these two social revolutions back into explicit dialogue with each other. He does so in the ser¬ vice of community and healing, while I do so in order to enhance our understanding of what each party separately takes for granted about the value and agency of ¬ people and ¬ things
o Through vivid color images and ethnographic analyses of ¬ these gods, I show that Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-¬ made gods. I ask of historical materialism and psychoanalysis the same socially contextualizing questions that anthropologists, deeply influenced by Marx and Freud, have applied to the study of African and African-¬ inspired religions.
o Freud summary
Freud’s theory of fetishism (1927) seems a thinly veiled meta¬phor for his own situation as an assimilated Jew in an increasingly antisemitic Eu¬ rope. And, for him, ambivalence is central to the structure of the fetish. According to Freud, the fetish embodies both the fearful hostility of the boy to his ¬ father and the boy’s desire, in the end, to assume the ¬ father’s role as an aggressor.
Likewise, I ¬ will argue, Freud’s rhetorical use of Africans and our gods embodies both his fearful hostility ¬ toward the white gentile ¬ father and his desire to impress and, in the end, to become that ¬ father. 20
o FOR OP The term “fetish” indexes the speaker’s condemnation of one human-¬ posited and human-¬ enforced socio-¬ cosmological order in the ser¬ vice of affirming another.
o ON BOHME
The Berlin-¬ based cultural and literary historian Hartmut Böhme ([2006] 2014) argues that fetishes are not new in Eu¬ ro¬ pean cultural history: they are both ancient and omnipresent. Ironically, his own critique of other Eu¬rope-ans embodies the very fetishism that he criticizes. Böhme defines a fetish as an emotionally charged symbol that replaces the real phenomenon it represents, hides it, represses it, or makes it unidentifiable to the believer. For him, the fetish is a ¬ thing that appears to bear a power beyond ¬ human authorship, a power that both threatens the author and believer with harm and embodies his or her hope of salvation from that harm.
o In both Marx’s historical materialism and Freud’s psychoanalysis, physical things are the classical referents of the term “fetish,” with the implication that the ¬ thing is merely a mistaken vehicle for a social relationship that a reasonable or mentally healthy person understands is ¬ really immaterial.
o What are the implications of the thingliness, or materiality, of the fetish?
o St st rhetorical sign that talks back—that’s the nature of the fetish 27
o “AIM IS TO “refine our social hermeneutics” and return “full voice to the African side of this dialogue” 28
o a fetish is neither an idyll nor an inherent evil. 31
o OKAY FINAL TIME THE THESIS: I explore the hypothesis that, like the material ¬ things that psychoanalysts call fetishes, both African gods and Eu¬ ro¬ pean social theories embody the revolutionary’s, the patient’s, or the worshipper’s ambivalence—¬ his or her simultaneous pursuit of relief from victimhood and identification with the victimizer.
o NOT A REFUSAL OF FREUD: “I internalize their hermeneutics even as I remove …Freud from the pedestal” 33
o SUMMARIES
Part I argues that Marx’s ¬ labor theory of value is no more empirically demonstrable than the theories that it critiques and that it is just as socially positioned in the perspective it articulates. By comparison with the ostensible incompetence of the “negro slave” and the supposedly minimal worth of his or her product, Marx affirms the collective agency of all Eu¬ro¬pean wage workers, the value of their product, and, by proxy, Marx’s own worthiness of enfranchisement despite his ethnicity and downward class mobility.
Part II describes how Freud’s insecurities about his race and his sexual orientation ¬ shaped psychoanalysis and inspired divinations about the ¬ human personality that uncannily resemble underdeveloped versions of the Afro-Atlantic religions. This argument employs the shared insights of psychoanalysis and the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions to highlight the ambivalent nature of the empowered ¬ things at the core of the social organ¬izations constituted by both psychoanalysis and the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions 38
Part III discusses the conceptions of value and agency embodied in the human-¬ made gods of the Afro-¬ Atlantic religions and the class interests they encode—¬ interests very dif¬fer¬ent from but no less contextually reasonable than ¬ those advocated by Hegel, Marx, and Freud.
o Argument summarized in four main terms
First, theory is not a disembodied, universal truth but a creature dialectically related to the social environment, material surroundings, and material interests of the theorists.
Second, the term “fetishism” is a useful way to show the competitive an strategic nature of meaning making in the construction of Eu¬ro¬pean social theories, Afro-¬ Atlantic gods, and numerous other socially effective stipulations about where value lies and who owes what to whom.
Third, like the most power¬ful and spectacular of African “fetishes,” the most power¬ful and spectacular Eu¬ro¬pean social theories embody not only the social ambiguity but also the po¬liti¬cal and emotional ambivalence of their creators.
Fourth, in the making of theories and of gods, the assignment of value and agency to one party regularly entails the devaluation and the zombification of (that is, the denial of agency to) other parties
November 1, 2025
Matory wants to set up a cross-cultural encounter between European theory and Afro-Atlantic religion. He does this in few ways:
- first, by showing the kinds of fetishes (spirited or significant material objects) and ritualistic social behaviors in which Marx and Freud invested;
- second, by showing how their notions of fetish (as commodity fetish concealing surplus value extraction or as paraphilia symptomatic of neurosis, as index of a universal 'savage within' disguised by civilization) are anti-black cudgels to leverage against their middling or off-white or swarthy or Semitic status in white Europe;
- third, by showing that Africa responded and adapted to modernity just as Europe did. This final section, what other reviews have called an "info-dump" justifiably, attempts to cover a huge ground, dealing with phenomena as diverse as the cross-cultural nexus of Hausa, Amazigh, and Yoruba people in the development of horse trade; the nexus of West Africa and Islam and the use of veils in Yoruba royal aesthetics; and the diagnostic and thaumaturgic capacity of African and Afro-Atlantic religion squared against the talking cure and dialectical materialism. There are lots of compelling aesthetic arguments happening here but it's just a bit messy and all over the place. Could've been its own book.
There's apparently a second half to this, Zombies and Black Leather, which gets into the anti-blackness of junk and presumably links his ethno logical schadenfreude concept to the Haitian zombi and the punishment of the First Black Republic. Anyway, I really like this book, aside from Matory's prolix tendencies. He's a deep thinker and sincere lover of African tradition.
- first, by showing the kinds of fetishes (spirited or significant material objects) and ritualistic social behaviors in which Marx and Freud invested;
- second, by showing how their notions of fetish (as commodity fetish concealing surplus value extraction or as paraphilia symptomatic of neurosis, as index of a universal 'savage within' disguised by civilization) are anti-black cudgels to leverage against their middling or off-white or swarthy or Semitic status in white Europe;
- third, by showing that Africa responded and adapted to modernity just as Europe did. This final section, what other reviews have called an "info-dump" justifiably, attempts to cover a huge ground, dealing with phenomena as diverse as the cross-cultural nexus of Hausa, Amazigh, and Yoruba people in the development of horse trade; the nexus of West Africa and Islam and the use of veils in Yoruba royal aesthetics; and the diagnostic and thaumaturgic capacity of African and Afro-Atlantic religion squared against the talking cure and dialectical materialism. There are lots of compelling aesthetic arguments happening here but it's just a bit messy and all over the place. Could've been its own book.
There's apparently a second half to this, Zombies and Black Leather, which gets into the anti-blackness of junk and presumably links his ethno logical schadenfreude concept to the Haitian zombi and the punishment of the First Black Republic. Anyway, I really like this book, aside from Matory's prolix tendencies. He's a deep thinker and sincere lover of African tradition.
January 1, 2023
I really like Matory's book - compelling insights, and a great decolonial read of Marx and Freud.
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