Vida material

In My Life With Things, anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, reckoning with her own “consumerist diaries,” returns to the etymology of fetish. When Karl Marx completed Capital in 1867, fetish did not suggest kinky sexual proclivities. Rather, the word came from the Portuguese and described Africans’ “mistaken” belief that spirits inhabited objects. Already, Marx’s use is divergent: Animists believe that spirits inhabit objects, but they worship the spirit, not the object itself. “Veneration of the object,” Chin writes, “is most certainly not the point of animism,” though when Marx accused European consumers of fetishism, he was “leveling an insult of mammoth proportions, stating directly that those who bought commodities were as primitive and backward as Africans.” In other words, “fetishism,” in Marx’s use, was a racial slur. As much as vital materialists, or object-oriented ontologists, or any other crop of thing-happy philosophers would like to declare their daring leap across the ontological divide as a necessary advancement of Western thought, the fact is that recognizing matter’s agency is a recapitulation of very old knowledge, knowledge that was systematically dismissed and persecuted. Now, much past the eve of environmental collapse, we need to remember this old knowledge, not reinvent it.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Trash life.