Pots, Packets, Beads, and Foreigners:The Making and the Meaning of the Real-Life “Fetish”

This chapter 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 different from but no less contextually reasonable than those propagated by Hegel, Marx, and Freud. The implications of “fetishism” for semiotic theory are also explored.

The materials used to create the altars and the insignia of the Afro-Atlantic religions reflect their roots in West African polities intensely embedded in interregional commerce, including a half millennium of commercial exchange with Europe and the Americas. The ritual assembly of these materials reflects and engineers a conception of transcorporeal personhood well suited to the political interests of merchant monarchs, diasporic communities that rely on clientelism, and, more generally, to the cosmopolitan context of these religions' genesis.