The Madeness of Gods and Other People

Daily parlance in most of the Afro-Atlantic religions suggests that it is people who make gods. However, priests debate the implications of that formulation. Like the Afro-Atlantic gods themselves, the question of whether they are human-made arises in the context of an intergenerational and intercultural frisson. At this generational and cultural crossroads, the Afro-Atlantic priests are anything but the exemplars of unawareness, projection, and befuddlement that the theorists of the fetish have made them into. To Marx, fetishism was the false transfer of agency from people to commodities and the denial of European workers' preeminent role in creating the value of those things. Compared to the Afro-Atlantic priests, Marx is shockingly nondialectical in his perception of the reciprocal making of people and things. This chapter explores the role of human effort and of ambivalence in the reciprocal making of humans and gods.