Articulating the distance between liberty and alienation, between commodities and deities, and between sociality, fecundity, and resource access, the fetish continues to haunt contemporary social science. The rich soil from which fetish discourses grow articulates the relations between, but also the control over subjects, objects, materialities, and ideas about materialities. As an analytic category, the fetish is also a symptom masking the conditions of its source. Often coded as 'religion', invocations of fetishistic practices point in fear to 'primitive beliefs' or 'magical thinking', revealing the insecurity of secular modern rationalism more than any primitive irrationality. This is particularly evident as 'nature worship' reveals itself to be the commonsense ground of viable economic strategies. The unquestioned secularization of commodity fetishes is revealing in this light. The commodity as fetish obscures the irrational alienation of objects as players in human sociality, the fruits of labor and the raw materials of those fashioned objects connect earth to human skill, which in turn connects humans to each other and back to earth. The commodity fetish emerges from the disruption of this cycle when objects, both fashioned and raw, create new socialities and relational systems of value through monetized extraction and trade -- bridging cross-cultural spaces of contact with the hubris and horrors of mutuality's denial. This panel asks, what, is the relation between the statue of a god, the prayers of a believer, the statue's price at auction, and subsequent claims to statue ownership? Or those between a stone ancestor, a freshwater pond, a marble mining operation, and a stone countertop in a middle-class home? Embedded in these questions we find stone, sculpting technology, ritual technology, mining technology, and energy defined as 'divine' and life-giving. We also find the violence of war and extraction, theft and its cleansing, wealth for some and poverty for others through the circulating power of money within legal frames. The fetish reveals modern history, heritage, and the intimate attachments of people in the world. This panel argues that uncanny and fecund others lie buried beneath commodities and gods alike, and we invite speculation on the revealing symmetry of 'the fetish' in all its forms.
Please send inquiries and abstracts by JULY 25 to:
Courtney Work
cwork@nccu.edu.tw
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Courtney Work
Associate Professor
National Chengchi University
courtney.k.work@gmail.com------------------------------