The Problem of the Fetish

The Problem of the Fetish PDF

Author: William Pietz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-11-18

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0226821811

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"The Problem of the Fetish gathers William Pietz's innovative writing on the fetish object and the history of the "fetish" as a concept. Engaging extensively with historical documents, Pietz traces the genealogy of fetishism from encounters between European colonizers and African communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the emerging social sciences. Discussing the role of fetishism in anthropology, political economy, psychiatry, and law, he analyzes the relationship between the fetish and value, violence, sacrifice, and debt. To accompany Pietz's seven essays, this long-awaited volume includes a foreword by Francesco Pellizzi, editor of RES, the journal in which several of the essays originally appeared, and it also includes an introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Ben Kafka, who provide an invaluable guide to Pietz's thought. This book will speak to Pietz's multidisciplinary readership, continuing his legacy of engaging with questions of material culture, object agency, merchant capitalism, and spiritual power, and introducing the work of a powerful theorist to new generations of scholars and thinkers"--

The Returns of Fetishism

The Returns of Fetishism PDF

Author: Charles de Brosses

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-07-26

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 022646475X

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"Fetishism (supposing that it existed)": a preface to the translation of Charles de Brosses's Transgression / Rosalind C. Morris -- Introduction: fetishism, figurism, and myths of enlightenment / Daniel H. Leonard -- A note on the translation / Daniel H. Leonard -- On the worship of fetish gods; or, a parallel of the ancient religion of Egypt with the present religion of Nigritia / Charles de Brosses ; translated by Daniel H. Leonard -- After De Brosses: fetishism, translation, comparativism, critique / Rosalind C. Morris -- A fetiche is a fetiche: no knowledge without difference of the word: rereading De Brosses -- Excursus: recontextualizing De Brosses, with Pietz in and out of Africa -- Re Kant and the good fetishists among us -- Hegel: back to the heart of darkness -- Fetishism against itself; or, Marx's two fetishisms -- The great fetish; or, the fetishism of the one -- Freud and the return to the dark continent: the other fetish -- Conjuncture: Freud and Marx, via Lacan -- Anthropology's fetishism: the custodianship of reality -- Fetishism reanimated: surrealism, ethnography, and the war against decay -- Deconstruction's fetish: undecidable, or the mark of Hegel -- Rehistoricizing generalized fetishism: the era of objects -- Anthropological redux: the reality of fetishism -- The fetish is dead, long live fetishism

The Fetish Revisited

The Fetish Revisited PDF

Author: J. Lorand Matory

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1478002433

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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.

Worldly Stage

Worldly Stage PDF

Author: Sophie Volpp

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 168417435X

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"In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites, and notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. In this study of late-imperial Chinese theater, Sophie Volpp offers fresh readings of major texts such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) and Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan), and unveils lesser-known materials such as Wang Jide’s play The Male Queen (Nan wanghou). In doing so, Volpp sheds new light on the capacity of seventeenth-century drama to comment on the cultural politics of the age.Worldly Stage arrives at a conception of theatricality particular to the classical Chinese theater and informed by historical stage practices. The transience of worldly phenomena and the vanity of reputation had long informed the Chinese conception of theatricality. But in the seventeenth century, these notions acquired a new verbalization, as theatrical models of spectatorship were now applied to the contemporary urban social spectacle in which the theater itself was deeply implicated."

Growth Fetish

Growth Fetish PDF

Author: Clive Hamilton

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1741150949

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Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

Democracy as Fetish

Democracy as Fetish PDF

Author: Ralph Cintron

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0271085657

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Democracy has long been fetishized. Consequently, how we speak about democracy and what we expect from democratic governance are at odds with practice. With unflinching resolve, this book probes the theory of democracy and how the left and right are fascinated by it. In this innovative multidisciplinary study, Ralph Cintron provides sustained analysis of our political discourse. He shows not only how the rhetoric of democracy produces strong desires for social order, global wealth, and justice but also how these desires cannot be satisfied. Throughout his discussion, Cintron includes ethnographic research from fieldwork conducted over the course of twenty years in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, where he observes both citizens and the undocumented looking to democracy to fulfill their highest aspirations. Politicians hand out favors to the elite, developers strong-arm aldermen, and the disenfranchised have little redress. The problem, Cintron argues, is that the conditions required to put democracy into practice—territory, a bordered nation-state, citizens, property—are constituted by inequality and violence, because there is no inclusivity that does not also exclude. Drawing on ethnography, economics, political theory, and rhetorical analysis, Cintron makes his case with tremendous analytic rigor. This challenge to reassess the discourses on democracy and to consider democratic politics as always compromised by oligarchy will be of particular interest to political and rhetorical theorists.

Cultures of Fetishism

Cultures of Fetishism PDF

Author: L. Kaplan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0230601200

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In her latest book, Dr. Louise Kaplan, author of the groundbreaking Female Perversions , explores the fetishism strategy, a psychological defense that aims to tame, subdue, and if necessary, murder human vitalities. Through an exploration of such cultural phenomena as footbinding, reality television, and the construction of robots, Kaplan demonstrates how, in a technology-driven world, an understanding of the fetishism strategy can help to preserve the human dialogue that is the basis of all human relationships. Kaplan writes from the heart as well as from the intellect.

The Book of Fetishes

The Book of Fetishes PDF

Author: J. C. Fetish

Publisher:

Published: 2012-04-03

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 9781475125283

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The Book of Fetishes is a collection of erotic fetish short stories. If you'd like to sample a few different fun and playful fetishes, this is the book for you. Blow Me: Ever since Daniel was young, he has always had a strange obsession with balloons. Now that he's older, it's become something much more. When he shares his secret with his girlfriend, Amanda, he finds that she's much more accepting than he could have ever hoped for.Take Me: Rachel goes home for a night of relaxation in solitude, but little does she know she has an unexpected visitor - a man who has been watching her for weeks. When she finds him in his apartment, she knows right away that she's in for one crazy night.Kiss Me: Cindy and Rick share a special bond that neither one has been able to speak about with family or friends. They both have a shoe fetish. There is nothing better than when Cindy brings home a new pair of shoes for the two to enjoy, but after a long period of nothing new, the passion begins to die down. When Cindy finds the perfect pair that combines everything she and her husband love in shoes, she decides to surprise him.RAM Me: Abby is tired of being recognized for all of the wrong things. She's beautiful and intelligent, but no man seems to see it. She builds a robot as a last ditch effort to get the worst of the men to stop harassing her, but finds herself drawn to her creation in very unexpected ways.Trust Me: Adam knew that his girlfriend, Stephanie, had a unique side job, but hadn't never been interested in becoming one of her clients. After taking a new job though, he finds himself stretched to the point where he's going crazy. Seeing Adam distressed and feeling his resistance to trusting her, she decides to pull out the whip.Write Me: Jenny decides to do something a little wild for the first time in her life: Start exchanging letters with an inmate. While she doesn't intend on taking it further than a few raunchy letters, she'll find her defenses beginning to weaken.

Bond Girls

Bond Girls PDF

Author: Monica Germanà

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350124702

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Since Ursula Andress's white-bikini debut in Dr No, 'Bond Girls' have been simultaneously celebrated as fashion icons and dismissed as 'eye-candy'. But the visual glamour of the women of James Bond reveals more than the sexual objectification of female beauty. Through the original joint perspectives of body and fashion, this exciting study throws a new, subversive light on Bond Girls. Like Coco Chanel, fashion's 'eternal' mademoiselle, these 'Girls' are synonymous with an unconventional and dynamic femininity that does not play by the rules and refuses to sit still; far from being the passive objects of the male gaze, Bond Girls' active bodies instead disrupt the stable frame of Bond's voyeurism. Starting off with an original re-assessment of the cultural roots of Bond's postwar masculinity, the book argues that Bond Girls emerge from masculine anxieties about the rise of female emancipation after the Second World War and persistent in the present day. Displaying parallels with the politics of race and colonialism, such tensions appear through sartorial practices as diverse as exoticism, power dressing and fetish wear, which reveal complex and often contradictory ideas about the patriarchal and imperial ideologies associated with Bond. Attention to costume, film and gender theory makes Bond Girls: Body, Gender and Fashion essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, media and cultural studies, and for anyone with an interest in Bond.