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Thinking Outside the Body: New Materialism and the Challenge of the Fetish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Louise Green
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Abstract

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

Keywords

Animismfetishismvital materialism, Africa
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 304 - 317
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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3 Ibid., 18. The only other place in the book in which animism is mentioned is in the preface where she remarks: “Vital Materialism as a doctrine has affinities with several nonmodern (and often discredited) modes of thought, including animism, the Romantic quest for Nature, and vitalism. Some of these affinities I embrace and some I do not” (xviii).

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8 This becomes evident when looking at comparative graphs of carbon emissions. See the CAIT climate data graphs, which record greenhouse gas emissions according to a number of rubrics, including country and continent (cait.wri.org). See also the discussion of these graphs in my article “Modernity’s Dirt: Carbon Emissions and the Technique of Life,” Social Dynamics 44.2 (2018).

9 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, xv.

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35 Tangwa, “Bioethics: An African Perspective,” 192.

36 Ibid., 199.

37 Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics, 225–27.

38 Garuba, “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism and the African Order of Knowledge,” 7.

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