Tackling the history of the book

What is a fetish? That was the question that independent scholar and political activist William Pietz tackled Monday night.

Tackled, but could not explain.

"This is one question I never could answer," Pietz said during his lecture "The Problem of the Fetish." He spoke to an audience of about 60 people, comprised mainly of graduate students but also some faculty members from a wide variety of departments.

The seminar, held at 3619 Locust Walk, was part of the "History of the Book" series, which deals with a large array of topics concerning how ideas are disseminated in literature.

Pietz, who is also the Green Party of California's co-coordinator for electoral reform and an alternate member of the national coordinating committee of the national Green Party, conducted extensive research on the fetish phenomenon during the late 1980s and published articles in the journal Res. He also co-authored the book Fetishism As Cultural Discourse.

The concept of the fetish, Pietz argued, emerged in the 17th century on the African coast as a result of a series of encounters between Africans, Portuguese traders and their middlemen.

It encapsulates some of the cultural and economic confusion that characterized the interaction between the Portuguese and the Africans and the transactions that took place between them. The fetish, the Portuguese thought, demonstrated the way in which Africans misunderstood the value of material objects.

He added that the concept of the fetish was used by various people throughout history to explain totally different concepts. Karl Marx used the concept of commodity fetish in his writings, while Sigmund Freud was fixated with sexual fetishism.

"It is amazing how important the idea of a fetish is in some of the founding texts of social sciences," he said.

Pietz went on to say that his research has shown some common traits concerning the use of the word fetish, such as a basic concern with the body that does not involve the soul.

"William Pietz's work is a brilliant critique of the modern western opposition between 'person' and 'thing'," English Professor Peter Stallybrass said.

"Even the very words for 'person' and 'thing' have been transformed by our desire to set them in antithesis." he continued. "The word 'person' itself begins as meaning, a mask, whereas 'thing' originally meant a meeting or assembly."

Pietz argued that humans need to learn again how we store up memories and, therefore, value in certain items.

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