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Title: Fetishism as social creativity
Author: David Graeber
Date: 2005
Language: en
Topics: creativity, anthropology, Religion
Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/papers/fetishism-as-social-creativity/
Notes: Published in Anthropological Theory Vol 5(4): 407–438. doi: 10.1177/1463499605059230.

David Graeber

Fetishism as social creativity

ABSTRACT

Originally, the term ‘fetishes’ was used by European merchants to refer

to objects employed in West Africa to make and enforce agreements, often

between people with almost nothing in common. They thus provide an

interesting window on the problem of social creativity – especially

since in classic Marxist terms they were surprisingly little fetishized.

Starting with an appreciation and critique of William Pietz’s classic

work on the subject, and reconsidering classic cases of Tiv spheres of

exchange and BaKongo sculpture, this article aims to reimagine African

fetishes, and fetishes in general, as ways of creating new social

relations.

KEY WORDS

BaKongo • fetishes • fetishism • social contract theory • social

creativity • Tiv

---

In this article, I would like to make a contribution to theories of

social creativity. By social creativity, I mean the creation of new

social forms and institutional arrangements. Creativity of this sort has

been the topic of some discussion in social theory of late, although up

to now anthropology has not played much of a role in it. Here I would

like to bring anthropology into an area that has traditionally been seen

as its home turf: by looking at the literature on ‘fetishism’ in Africa.

Now one could argue that creativity of this sort has always been one of

the great issues of social theory, but it seems to me that the current

interest can be traced to two impulses. Or perhaps more precisely, the

desire to work one’s way out of two ongoing dilemmas that have haunted

social theory for some time. One, mapped out most clearly, perhaps, by

Alain Caillé (2000), French sociologist and animateur of the MAUSS

group, is the tendency for theory to endlessly bounce back and forth

between what he calls ‘holistic’ and ‘individualistic’ models. If one

does not wish to look at human beings simply as elements in some larger

structure (a ‘society’, a ‘culture’, call it what you will), doomed to

endlessly act out or reproduce it, and if one does not want to fall back

on the economistic ‘rational-choice’ option, which starts from a

collection of individuals seeking personal satisfaction of some sort and

treats larger institutions as mere sideeffects of their choices, then

this seems precisely the point at which to begin formulating an

alternative. Human beings do create new social and cultural forms all

the time, but they rarely do so just in order to further their own

personal aims; in fact, often their personal aims come to be formed

through the very institutions they create. Caillé proposes that the best

way to develop an alternative to the currently dominant utilitarian,

‘rational-choice’ models is by setting out, not from market relations,

but instead from Marcel Mauss’ famous exposition of the gift, which is

all about the creation of new social relations. He is not the only one

working in this direction. Hans Joas (1993, 1996, 2000) has been trying

to do something quite similar, setting out not from Mauss but from the

tradition of American pragmatism. I have myself been trying to do

something along these lines in my book Towards an Anthropological Theory

of Value, where, inspired in part by ideas developed by my old

professors Terry Turner (e.g. 1979, 1984) and Nancy Munn (e.g. 1977,

1986), I attempted to broaden the Marxian notion of production to

include the fashioning of persons and social relations.

The other impulse is more explicitly political, and has to do with the

concept of revolution. Here the problematic stems broadly from within

Marxism. Marx, perhaps more than any other classic social theorist, saw

creativity and imagination as the essence of what it means to be human;

but as Hans Joas among others have remarked, when he got down to cases

he tended to write as if all forms of creative action really boiled down

to two: the production of material objects, and social revolution. For

Joas, this makes Marx’s approach so limited he prefers to discard it

entirely; I prefer to keep what I take to be his most profound insights

and apply them to other forms of creativity as well; but what’s at issue

here is the relation between the two. Because there is a curious

disparity. Marx assumes that both the human capacity for creativity and

human critical faculties are ultimately rooted in the same source, which

one might call our capacity for reflexive imagination. Hence his famous

example of the architect who, unlike the bee, raises her building in her

own imagination before it is raised in reality. If we can imagine (as

yet non-existent) alternatives, we can see the existing world as

inadequate; we can also cause those things to exist. This is the

ambiguity, though: while our ability to revolutionize emerges from this

very critical faculty, the revolutionary, according to Marx, must never

proceed in the same manner as the architect. It was not the task of the

revolutionary to come up with blueprints for a future society and then

try to bring them into being, or, indeed, to try to imagine details of

the future society at all. That would be utopianism, which for Marx is a

foolish bourgeois mistake. So the two forms of creativity – the creation

of houses, or other material objects, and the creation of new social

institutions (which is, after all, what revolution actually consists of)

– should not work in at all the same way.

I have written a little about this paradox before.[1] What I want to

emphasize here is how it has contributed to a fundamental problem in

revolutionary theory: what precisely is the role of creativity,

collective or individual, of the imagination, in radical social change?

Unless one wishes to adopt completely absurd formulations (the

revolution will come about because of the inexorable logic of history;

human agency will have nothing to do with it; afterwards, however,

history will end and we will enter a world of freedom in which human

agency will be utterly untrammeled ...) this has to be the key question,

but it’s not at all clear what the answer is supposed to be. The

revolutionary theorist who grappled with the problem most explicitly was

Cornelius Castoriadis, whose Socialisme ou Barbarie group was probably

the single most important theoretical influence on the student

insurrectionaries of May 1968. Castoriadis was the effective founder of

the Autonomist tradition, which has come to be probably the dominant

strain of Continental Marxism,[2] and eventually took Marx’s starting

point – his faith in the critical role of the creative imagination and,

hence, our capacity to revolutionize – so seriously that he ended up

abandoning most other tenets of Marxism entirely. For Castoriadis, the

great question became the emergence of the new.[3] After all, most of

the really brilliant moments of human history involve the creation of

something unprecedented, something that had never existed before,

whether Athenian democracy or Renaissance painting, and this is

precisely what we are used to thinking of as ‘revolutionary’ about them.

History, then, was a matter of the constant pressure of the imaginary

against its social containment and institutionalization. It is in the

latter process, he argued, that alienation enters. Where Marx saw our

dilemma in the fact that we create our physical worlds, but are unaware

of, and hence not in control of, the process by which we do so (this is

why our own deeds seem to come back at us as alien powers), for

Castoriadis, the problem was that ‘all societies are instituted by

themselves’ but are blind to their own creativity. Whereas a truly

‘democratic society is a society which is instituted by itself, but in

an explicit way’ (in Ciaramelli, 1998: 134). By the end, Castoriadis

abandoned even the term ‘socialism’, substituting ‘autonomy’, defining

autonomous institutions as those whose members have themselves,

consciously, created the rules by which they operate, and are willing to

continually re-examine them (Castoriadis, 1991).[4]

This does seem a unique point of tension within radical thought. It is

probably no coincidence that Roy Bhaskar, founder of the Critical

Realism school (1979, 1993, 1994, 2001), found this exactly the point

where he had to break with the western philosophical tradition entirely.

After arguing for the necessity of a dialectical approach to social

problems, he found himself asking: when contradictory elements are

subsumed in a higher level of integration which is more than the sum of

their parts, when apparently intractable problems are resolved by some

brilliant new synthesis which takes things to a whole new level, where

does that newness actually come from? If the whole is more than the sum

of its parts, what is the source of that ‘more’, that transcendent

element? In his case he ended up turning to Indian and Chinese

philosophical traditions and arguing that the main reason why existing

Marxism has produced such disappointing results has been its refusal to

take on such issues, owing to its hostility to anything resembling

‘spiritual’ questions.

What is important for present purposes is merely to underline that all

these authors are, in one way or another, dealing with the same problem.

If one does not wish to see human beings simply as side-effects of some

larger structure or system, or as atoms pursuing some inscrutable bliss,

but as beings capable of creating their own meaningful worlds, then

their ability to create new institutions or social relations does seem

just the place to look. Radical thinkers are just dealing with the same

issues from a more pragmatic perspective, since as revolutionaries, what

they are interested in is precisely the creation of new social

institutions and new forms of social relation. As I say, it is obvious

that people do, in fact, create new institutions and new relations all

the time. Yet how they do so remains notoriously difficult to theorize.

Can anthropology be of any assistance here? It is not obvious that it

could. Anthropologists have not exactly been grappling with this kind of

grand theoretical issue of late, and have never had much to say about

revolution. One could of course argue that maybe this is all for the

best, that human creativity cannot be, and should not be, subjected to

anyone’s theoretical model. But a case could equally well be made that

if these are questions worth asking, then anthropology is the only

discipline really positioned to answer them – since, after all, the

overwhelming majority of actual, historical, social creativity has, for

better or worse, been relegated to our academic domain. Most of the

classic issues even of early anthropology – potlatches, Ghost Dances,

magic, totemic ritual and the like – are precisely about the creation of

new social relations and new social forms.

Alain Caillé would certainly agree with this assessment: that is why he

chose Marcel Mauss’ essays on the gift as his starting point. Mauss

himself saw his work on gifts as part of a much larger project, an

investigation into the origins of the notion of the contract and of

contractual obligation. (That is why the question that really fascinated

him was why it was that someone who receives a gift feels the obligation

to return one.) This has proved a highly fruitful approach but in this

article I would like to suggest another one, that I hope will be equally

productive, which opens up a slightly different set of questions. This

is to begin with the problem of fetishism.

WHY FETISHISM?

‘Fetishism’ is of course a much-debated term. It was originally coined

to describe what were considered weird, primitive, and rather scandalous

customs, and as a result most of the founders of modern anthropology –

Marcel Mauss prominent among them – felt the term was so loaded it were

better abandoned entirely. It no doubt would have been, had it not been

for the fact that it had been so prominently employed – as a somewhat

ironic technical term to describe certain western habits – by both Karl

Marx and Sigmund Freud. In recent years, the word has undergone

something of a revival, mainly because of the work of a scholar named

William Pietz, who wrote a series of essays called ‘The Problem of the

Fetish’ (1985, 1987, 1988), tracing the history of the term, its

emergence in intercultural enclaves along the West African coast from

the 16^(th) through 18^(th) centuries CE. Pietz is that most unusual of

things, an independent scholar who has had an enormous influence on the

academy. His essays ended up inspiring a small literature of their own

during the 1990s, including one large and well-received

interdisciplinary volume in the US (Apter and Pietz, 1993), two

different collections in the Netherlands (Etnofoor, 1990, Spyer, 1998),

and any number of essays. The overriding theme in all this literature is

materiality: how material objects are transformed by becoming objects of

desire or value, a value that often seems somehow displaced, inordinate,

or inappropriate. My own interest here is slightly different. What is

especially interesting to me is Pietz’s argument that the idea of the

‘fetish’ was the product neither of African nor of European traditions,

but of a confrontation between the two: the product of men and women

with very different understandings of the world and what one had a right

to wish from it trying to come to terms with one another. The fetish

was, according to Pietz, born in a field of endless improvisation, that

is, of near pure social creativity.

In what follows, I will first consider Pietz’s story of the origin of

the fetish, then try to supplement his account (drawn almost exclusively

from western sources) with some that might give insight into what the

African characters in the story might have thought was going on, and

then, return to our initial problem – and to see how all this relates to

‘fetishism’ in the more familiar Marxian sense. To summarize a long and

complex argument, basically what I will argue is this: we are used to

seeing fetishism as an illusion. We create things, and then, because we

don’t understand how we did it, we end up treating our own creations as

if they had power over us. We fall down and worship that which we

ourselves have made. By this logic, however, the objects European

visitors to Africa first labeled ‘fetishes’ were, at least from the

African perspective, remarkably little fetishized. They were in fact

seen quite explicitly as having been created by human beings; people

would ‘make’ a fetish as the means of creating new social

responsibilities, of making contracts and agreements, or forming new

associations. It was only the Europeans’ obsession with issues of value

and materiality and their almost complete lack of interest in social

relations as things valuable in themselves that made it possible for

them to miss this. This is not to say they were completely unfetishized.

But this is precisely what is most interesting about them.

PIETZ ON FETISHISM

If the reader will allow me a highly simplified version of Pietz’s

complex and layered argument: the notion of the fetish was not a

traditional European concept. Medieval Europeans tended to interpret

alien religions through very different rubrics: idolatry, apostasy,

atheism. Instead the idea seems to have arisen, in the minds of early

Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants, sailors, and maritime

adventurers doing business in West Africa starting in the 15^(th)

century, primarily from a confrontation with the threat of relativism.

These foreign merchants were operating in an environment which could

hardly fail to cast doubt about their existing assumptions about the

nature of the world and of society: first and foremost, with the

relativity of economic value, but also of the logic of government, the

dynamics of sexual attraction, and any number of other things. By

describing Africans as ‘fetishists’, they were trying to avoid some of

the most disturbing implications of their own experience.

The first Portuguese merchants who set up ‘castles’ on inlets and river

islands along the West African coast were brought there by one thing:

the belief that this part of the world was where most – if not all – of

the world’s gold originally came from. In the 16^(th) and 17^(th)

centuries gold was the main product being extracted from the region (it

was only somewhat later that attention shifted primarily to slaves).

These were extremely practically minded individuals, entering into a

very complex world full of an apparently endless variety of unfamiliar

languages, religions, and forms of social organization, none of which,

however, they had any particular interest in understanding as phenomena

in their own right. They were simply after the gold. The very experience

of moving between so many cultures, Pietz suggests, encouraged a kind of

bare-bones materialism; in their writings, he notes, early merchant

explorers tended to describe a world in which they perceived only three

categories of significant object: tools, potential dangers, and

potential commodities (1985: 8). And for obvious reasons they also

tended to assess the value of just about everything by the price they

thought it could fetch in European markets.

The problem was that in order to conduct their trade, they had to

constantly confront the fact that the Africans they met had very

different standards of value. Not entirely different. ‘Gold is much

prized by them’, wrote an early Venetian merchant named Cadamosto, ‘in

my opinion, more than by us, for they regard it as very precious:

nevertheless they traded it cheaply, taking in exchange articles of very

little value in our eyes’. To some extent this led to the familiar

rhetoric of beads and trinkets. Merchants were always going on about how

Africans were willing to accept all manner of junk – ‘trifles’, ‘trash’,

‘toys’ – for gold and other valuable commodities. But at the same time,

Africans were clearly not willing to accept just anything, and one could

never tell in advance what sort of junk a given group would fancy.

Anyone who has pored over ‘travelers’ accounts’ from this period will

likely have noticed how much time and energy merchants had to put into

figuring out which particular variety of worthless beads, what color or

type of worthless trinkets would be accepted at any given port of call.

Situations like this can very easily lead one to think. To reflect on

the arbitrariness of value. After all, it is important to bear in mind

that these early merchant adventurers were not only seeking gold, they

were doing it at very considerable risk to their own lives. Coastal

‘castles’ were malarial pest-holes: a European who spent a year in one

had about a 50:50 chance of coming back alive. It would be very easy, in

such circumstances, to begin to ask oneself: why are so many of us

willing to risk death for the sake of a soft yellow metal, one which

isn’t even useful for anything except to look pretty? In what way is

this really different than a desire for beads and trinkets?[5] It was

not as if people of the time were incapable of such reflections: the

absurdity of such overweening desire for gold became a stock theme for

popular satirists, particularly in the age of the conquistadors. The

merchants in West Africa, however, instead seem to have come to the

brink of such a conclusion and then recoiled. Instead of acknowledging

the arbitrariness underlying all systems of value, their conclusion was

that it was the Africans who were arbitrary. African societies were

utterly without order, their philosophies utterly unsystematic, their

tastes utterly whimsical and capricious:

the most numerous Sect [in Guinea] are the Pagans, who trouble

themselves about no Religion at all; yet every one of them have some

Trifle or other, to which they pay a particular Respect, or Kind of

Adoration, believing it can defend them from all Dangers: Some have a

Lion’s Tail, some a Bird’s Feather, some a Pebble, a Bit of Rag, a Dog’s

Leg; or, in short, any thing they fancy: And this they call their

Fetish, which Word not only signifies the Thing worshipped, but

sometimes a Spell, Charm, or Inchantment. (William Smith, 1744, in

Pietz, 1987: 41)

So Africans were evidently like small children, always picking up little

objects because they look odd or gross or brightly colored, and then

becoming attached to them, treating them as if they had personalities,

adoring them, giving them names. The same thing that inspired them to

value random objects in the marketplaces caused them to make random

objects into gods.

The commonest explanation of the origin of fetishes begins something

like this. An African intends to set out on some project, to go off

trading for example. He heads out in the morning and the first thing he

sees that strikes him as in any way unusual or extraordinary, or just

that randomly strikes his fancy, he adopts as a charm that will enable

him to carry out his plan. Pietz calls it the ‘chance conjuncture of a

momentary desire or purpose and some random object brought to the

desirer’s attention’; Le Maire put it more simply: they ‘worship the

first thing they meet in the Morning’. Bosman writes of one of his

informants:

He obliged me with the following Answer, that the Number of their Gods

was endless and innumerable: For (said he) any of us being resolved to

undertake any thing of Importance, we first of all search out a God to

prosper our designed Undertaking; and going out of Doors with this

design, take the first Creature that presents itself to our Eyes,

whether Dog, Cat, or the most contemptible Animal in the World, for our

God; or perhaps instead of that any Inanimate that falls in our way,

whether a Stone, a piece of Wood, or any Thing else of the same Nature.

(in Pietz, 1987: 43)

It was not the ‘Otherness’ of the West Africans that ultimately drove

Europeans to such extreme caricatures, then, but rather, the threat of

similarity – which required the most radical rejection. So too with

aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of sexual attraction. European

sources wrote of the odd practices of the women they encountered in

coastal towns, who ‘fetishized themselves’ by making up their faces with

different kinds of colored clays, or wore ‘fetish gold’ in their hair,

intricately worked ornaments, frogs and birds along with glass beads and

similar adornment. The descriptions here are not normally morally

condemnatory, but they usually adopt a kind of sneering tone, one of

contempt for what seems to pass as beauty in these parts, what Africans

found alluring or attractive. But again they obviously protest too much.

If European sojourners were entirely immune to the charms of women with

earth on their faces and frogs in their hair, they would not have

fathered hundreds of children with them; indeed, there is no particular

reason to assume that the numbers of such children would have been

substantially higher had the women in question behaved like proper

European ladies and put grease on their lips and gold rings in their

ears instead.

The same dynamic recurs when Europeans talked about African modes of

government. First, observers would insist that the basis of African

social life was essentially chaotic, that it was utterly lacking in

systematic public order; they would usually end up by admitting that

laws were, in fact, quite systematically obeyed. According to some,

almost miraculously so. The attitude is summed up by a later British

administrator, Brodie Cruickshank, Governor General of the Gold Coast in

the 19^(th) century:

The local govt of the Gold Coast must have the candor to acknowledge its

obligations to Fetish, as a police agent. Without this powerful ally, it

would have been found impossible to maintain that order, which

characterized the country during the last twenty years, with the

physical force of the govt. The extraordinary security afforded to

property in the most remote districts, the great safety with which

packages of gold of great value are transmitted by single messengers for

hundreds of miles, and the facility with which lost or stolen property

is generally recovered, have excited the astonishment of Europeans newly

arrived in the country. (Cruickshank, 1853, in Pietz, 1985: 25)

The reason, they concluded, boiled down to the most primitive of

instincts: fear of death, or the terrible punishments fetishes were

thought to bring down on those who violated their (somewhat arbitrary)

principles.

Again, the problem was not that the picture was so alien, but that it

was so familiar. That government was an institution primarily concerned

with threatening potential miscreants with violence was a longstanding

assumption in western political theory; that it existed primarily to

protect property was a theme in the process of emerging at this very

time. True, the fetish was said to operate by invisible, supernatural

means, and hence to fall under the sphere of religion and not

government. But these observers were also, overwhelmingly, Christians,

and Christians of that time insisted that their religion was morally

superior to all others, and particularly to African religions, on the

very grounds that their God threatened wrong-doers with the systematic

application of torture for all eternity, and other gods did not. The

parallels were in fact striking, although this was an area in which

Europeans found it particularly difficult to be relativistic. It was

their assumption of the absolute truth of the Christian faith which

probably made any broader move to a relativistic attitude impossible.

On the other hand, this was an area where common understandings made a

great deal of practical difference, because especially before Europeans

came as conquerors, oaths sworn on fetishes and contracts made by

‘making’ or ‘drinking’ fetishes were the very medium of trust between

Europeans and Africans engaged in trade. If it were not for their common

participation in such rituals – often newfangled ones improvised for the

occasion combining Bibles and beads and bits of wood all at the same

time – the trade itself would have been impossible. And of course this

is what especially interests us here.

FETISHES AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS: TWO CASE STUDIES

Now, as the reader might have noticed, Pietz is almost exclusively

concerned with how things seemed to the Europeans who came to Africa.

There is almost no speculation about what any of the Africans with whom

they traded might have thought was going on.[6] Of course, in the

absence of documentary evidence, certain knowledge is impossible; but

there is a pretty voluminous literature on more recent examples of the

sorts of object these Europeans labeled ‘fetishes’, as well as on

African cosmological systems more generally, so one can make some pretty

good guesses as to what the Africans who owned and used such objects

thought they were about. Doing so does not, in fact, invalidate any of

Pietz’s larger points. Actually, it suggests that the ‘threat of

recognition’, if I may call it that, runs far deeper than one might

otherwise suspect.

Allow me to begin here with some probably unwarranted generalizations

about the relation between European and African cosmologies. My interest

in Pietz, and in fetishism more generally, originally arose as part of a

comparative study of beads and other ‘currencies of trade’ (Graeber,

1995, 2001), which included cases ranging from Trobriand kula shells or

Iroquois wampum to Kwakiutl coppers. For someone brought up in a

religious environment largely shaped by Christianity, moving from the

cosmological systems of Oceania or North America to Africa is moving

from very alien to far more familiar territory. It is not just that

throughout Africa one can find mythological topoi(the Garden of Eden,

the Tower of Babel) familiar from the Old Testament, that just do not

seem to be present in other traditions. There is a sense that African

theologians seem to be asking mostly the same existential questions.[7]

Max Weber made a famous argument that every religion has to come up with

some answer to the question of ‘theodicy’, or the justice of God. How is

it that if God is both good and all-powerful, that human beings must

suffer? Now, it’s pretty obvious that, as a generalization, this is

simply untrue. The question probably would not have even made sense to a

Maori theologian, let alone, say, an Aztec poet or Trobriand chief.

While every tradition does seem to see the human condition as inherently

problematic in some way, in most, the reasons for human suffering is

just not the issue. The problem lies elsewhere. Mythic speculation in

Africa, on the other hand, focuses on the question endlessly (e.g.

Abrahamsson, 1952) – even if many African theologians came up with what

were from the Christian perspective very disturbing answers (i.e. who

says God is good?)[8]

I said ‘unwarranted generalizations’ because, as any number of authors

have reminded us, terms like ‘Africa’, ‘Europe’, ‘the West’, are fuzzy

at best and probably meaningless. I cannot claim to know why European

and African theologians seem to have been asking the same existential

questions – perhaps it is because Europe and Africa were, for so much of

their history, peripheral zones under the influence of the great urban

civilizations of the Middle East. What I want to stress, though, is that

here, 17^(th) or 18^(th) century European seafarers found themselves in

much more familiar territory than they did when they ventured to places

like China or Brazil. It was the underlying affinity, I suspect, which

accounted for the common European reaction of shocked revulsion and

dismay on being exposed to so many aspects of African ritual: a

desperate denial of recognition. Because in many ways, African

cosmological ideas seemed to take the same questions and come up with

precisely the conclusions Europeans were most anxious to avoid: such as,

perhaps we suffer because God is not good, or is beyond good and evil

and does not care; perhaps the state is a violent and exploitative

institution and there is nothing that can be done about it; and so on.

I shall return to this theme in a moment.

Throughout much of Africa, ceremonial life is dominated by what

anthropologists have labeled ‘rituals of affliction’. Those powers

considered worthy of recognition are almost invariably those capable of

causing human misery, and one comes into contact with them when they

attack one in some way. A typical chain of events (I’ll use a Malagasy

example out of familiarity) might run like this: one offends a power

without knowing it, say by bringing pork into a spot inhabited by a

Vazimba spirit; the offended spirit causes one to become ill, or to

experience nightmares; one goes to a local curer who identifies the

spirit and tells one how to propitiate it; doing so, however, causes one

to become part of a congregation of former victims all of which now have

a special relationship with the spirit, which can help one or even

direct its powers against one’s enemies. Suffering leads to knowledge,

knowledge leads to power. This is an extremely common pattern. Victor

Turner for instance estimates that among the Ndembu of Zambia, there are

essentially only two types of ritual: rituals of affliction, and

‘life-crisis rituals’ such as initiations and funerary rites. And he

adds that even the latter always ‘stressed the theme of suffering as a

means of entry into a superior ritual and social status’ (1967: 15–16);

normally, because initiation rituals passed through physical ordeals

(suffering) to the attainment of some kind of ritual knowledge. Most of

the African objects labeled ‘fetishes’ were enmeshed in precisely this

ritual logic.

Let me take two representative examples. The first is the Tiv of central

Nigeria, c.1900–1950. They are a good case to start with because they

are well documented and lived not too far from the region dealt with in

Pietz’s texts. The second is the BaKongo of the central African coast,

who have a much longer history of entanglement with European trade. The

Tiv are a classic example of a ‘segmentary’ society; before they were

conquered by the British, they recognized no centralized authority of

any sort, beyond the confines of a typical extended family compound (L.

Bohannan, 1952; P. Bohannan, 1959; Bohannan and Bohannan, 1953). Larger

society was instead organized on a genealogical basis, through an

elaborate system of patrilineal lineages, which, however, had no

permanent officials or ritual officers. Where the ritual life of most

segmentary societies in the region centered on an elaborate cult of

ancestors or of earth shrines, the Tiv lacked these too. Instead, their

ritual life revolves largely around warding off witchcraft, and the

control of objects called akombo, or ‘fetishes’.

The names of most akombowere also those of disease. In a certain sense,

the akombo quite simply were those diseases,[9] though they were also

embodied in material ‘emblems’. These emblems might be almost anything:

a pot of ashes, a whisk broom, a piece of elephant bone. These existed

in certain places, and were owned by ‘keepers’, and they were always

surrounded by a host of rules and regulations indicating what could and

could not be done in the vicinity. One came into relation with an

akombowhen one broke one of those rules – this is called ‘piercing’ it –

and became sick as a result. The only way to set things straight was to

approach its keeper in order to ‘repair’ the akombo or ‘set it right’.

After victims have so freed themselves from the effects of the fetish,

they might also decide to take possession of it, which involves a

further ritual of ‘agreement’ and sacrifice in order to give the new

owner the power to operate (‘repair’) it, so as to help others so

afflicted, and also to gain access to whatever other powers the akombo

might have (Bohannan and Bohannan, 1969). All this is very much on the

model of a typical ‘cult of affliction’.

What I have said so far applies to minor, or ordinary, akombo. There

were also major akombo, which had broader powers. Probably the most

important of these were those that protected markets. According to Tiv

informants of the colonial period, what really distinguished these great

akombofrom the ordinary variety was, first of all, that they could

protect a whole territory from harm; second, that they could be passed

on from father to son; third, that they ‘either contain a part of a

human body as a portion of their emblems, or they must be repaired by a

human sacrifice ... or both’ (Bohannan and Bohannan, 1969 IV: 437).

To understand this, one has to understand something, I think, about

traditional Tiv conceptions of social power – at least as they existed

in the early 20^(th) century. The Tiv combined very hierarchical

domestic arrangements – with household compounds constructed around some

important older man, almost invariably with numerous wives, surrounded

by a host of frustrated unmarried adult sons – and a fiercely

egalitarian ethos which allowed next to nothing in the way of political

office outside the compound. Certain older men manage to gain a larger

influence in communal affairs, but such accomplishments are viewed with

extreme ambivalence. Social power, the ability to impose one’s will on

others, is referred to as tsav; it is seen in quite material terms as a

fatty yellow substance that grows on human hearts. Some people have tsav

naturally. They are what we would refer to as ‘natural leadership

types’. It can also be created, or increased, by eating human flesh.

This is ‘witchcraft’, the definition of evil:

Tiv believe that persons with tsav form an organization called the

mbatsav. This group is said to have a division of labor and a loose

organization. The mbatsav are said to meet at night, usually for

nefarious purposes; they rob graves in order to eat corpses;

they bewitch people in order to put corpses into graves which they can

rob. There is thought to be a network of ‘flesh debts’ which become

established when someone tricks you into eating human flesh and then

claims a return in kind; the only thing you can do is to kill your

children and your close kinsmen – people over whom you have some sort of

power – and finally, because no one can ever win against the

organization, you must give yourself to them as a victim because you

have no kinsmen left to give. (P. Bohannan, 1958: 4–5)

As Paul Bohannan succinctly puts it: ‘men attain power by consuming the

substance of others’. While one can never be certain that any particular

elder is also an evil cannibalistic witch, the classes overlap, and it

would seem that in recorded times at least, every generation or so, a

witch-finding movement would sweep through the country unmasking the

most prominent figures of local authority (Akiga, 1939; P. Bohannan,

1958).[10] This is not quite a system in which political power is seen

as intrinsically evil, but it

is very close. It only stands to reason, then, that akombothat have

power over communities should have a similar predilection to absorb

human flesh. The information we have about most of these ‘great akombo’

is somewhat limited, because most were destroyed during a witch-finding

movement in the 1920s, but the one sort that did tend to survive were

the akomboof markets. Fortunately, these are the most relevant to the

issues under consideration here.

Tiv markets are dominated by women, who are also the main producers.

Over the last few centuries markets have also been the principal context

in which most Tiv come into contact with those with whom they can trace

no close genealogical ties, and therefore, towards whom they have no

necessary moral obligations. In markets, then, the destructive powers of

akombocould be used to keep the peace. Every significant market had its

own fetish (Bohannan and Bohannan, 1968: 149, 158–62), which Tiv of the

colonial period, interestingly, often compared to an authorization

certificate from the colonial regime. Essentially, they embodied peace

agreements between a series of lineages who shared the same market, by

which their members undertook to deal fairly with one another, and to

abstain from theft, brawling, and profiteering. The agreement was sealed

with a sacrifice – nowadays said to be a human sacrifice, though the

Bohannans suspect most often it was really just a dog – whose blood was

poured over the akombo’s emblem. This is the sacrifice by day; in

addition, the (male) elders, in their capacity as mbatsav, kill others

of their own lineages ‘by night’ – that is, by witchcraft (Bohannan and

Bohannan, 1968: 159–60). Henceforth all those who violated the agreement

would be struck down by the akombo’s power. And in fact, the existence

of such agreements made it possible for marketplaces to become meeting

places for the regulation of local affairs, judgments, and the taking of

oaths.

This gives some idea, I think, of the logic by which ‘fetishes’ also

came to mediate trade agreements with European merchants in the 16^(th)

and 17^(th) centuries. The similarity with European theories of the

social contract, which were developing at precisely this time, need

hardly be remarked. I will return to these parallels in a moment. The

Tiv themselves had little to do with Europeans before the British

conquest; they came into relation with the trade largely as victims,

being raided for slaves by more powerful neighbors. As a result their

recorded history is very shallow. The BaKongo, famous for their

minkisior ‘fetishes’, many considered brilliant works of art, on the

other hand have one of the longest recorded histories in Africa. In 1483

the Kongo kingdom entered into an alliance with Portugal; the royal

family converted to Catholicism. At the time its capital, São Salvador,

was the largest city south of the Sahara. Within a century the kingdom

was torn apart by the pressures of the slave trade, and in 1678 the

capital was destroyed; the kingdom broke down into a series of smaller

successor states, most of whom officially recognized the authority of a

nominal Kongo monarch stripped of almost all real power: a classic

hollow center (Thornton, 1987). Later centuries witnessed even greater

fragmentation, the centers of most of the successor states hollowed out

in similar fashion, leaving a highly decentralized social field in which

former chiefly titles increasingly became prizes that could be bought

and sold by successful merchants and slave-traders. Certainly this was

the case by the 19^(th) century, during which power gradually shifted to

commercial towns along the coast. This is also the period from which we

have most of our information on minkisi, as recalled in documents

recorded by Christian converts, in the KiKongo language, at the very

beginning of the colonial age. In a lot of ways the BaKongo might seem

as different from Tiv as can be: matrilineal where the Tiv were

patrilineal, hierarchical where the Tiv were egalitarian, with a

cosmology centering on the ancestral dead which was totally alien to Tiv

conceptions. But the basic assumptions about the nature of power in both

cases are remarkably similar. First of all, we find the same logic of

affliction: here too, one comes into contact with powers largely by

offending them; once that power has caused one to suffer, then one has

the opportunity to master it and, to an extent, to acquire it for

oneself.[11] This was the normal way in which one came into relation

with a nkisi: one first appealed to its keeper to cure one of an

ailment; as such, one became a member of what might be broadly called

its congregation; later, perhaps, if one was willing to undergo the

expensive initiationprocess, one could eventually become a keeper

oneself.

BaKongo and Tiv theories of the relation of political power and

witchcraft were also remarkably similar. The power of chiefs was assumed

to be rooted in a physical substance in the body – in this case, called

kindoki. This was also the power of witches. The main difference was

that Kongo witches operated on a level that was somewhat more abstract

than Tiv witches; while they too became entangled in ‘flesh debts’, they

were mainly represented as consuming the spiritual substance of their

victims, through invisible means, sucking up their souls rather than

literally dining on them. Also, while at first witches feed on their own

relatives, those who have sucked up, and thus gained the power of, a

large number of souls can eventually become powerful enough to attack

almost anyone. It is the responsibility of chiefs to thwart their evil

plans, using their own ndoki. However, as Wyatt MacGaffey emphasizes

(1977, 1986, 1988), the difference between a chief and a witch is merely

one of motive: witches are simply those who use their nocturnal powers

for their own selfish purposes, greed or envy rather than the good of

the community. And since the latter is a notoriously slippery concept,

while no one without kindokiis of any real public account, no one with

it is entirely above suspicion.

There are two key differences, though, with Tiv akombo, and these appear

to be linked. One is that Kongo minkisitend to become personified. They

have not only names and histories, but minds and intentions of their

own. This is because their powers are really those of ancestral ghosts:

most nkisistatuettes, in fact, contained in their chests both a series

of medicinal ingredients which gave them their specific capacities for

action (cf. Graeber, 1995) and grave dirt, which effected their

connection with the dead. The second difference is that they tend to act

largely when someone intentionally provokes them. While the Tiv might

say that one who unintentionally offends an akombo‘pierces’ it, with

minkisithis was no mere metaphor. Those operating nkisiwould often quite

literally drive nails into the object to provoke it into action. This

was not, I should stress, at all like driving pins into a voodoo doll,

since the idea was to provoke the nkisito anger – though Wyatt MacGaffey

(1986) stresses that, in a larger sense, the figures represented both

the aggressor and the victim simultaneously, the assumption that the

infliction of suffering creates a kind of unity between the two.

Even chiefly office could be drawn into the same logic. In much of

Central Africa, leopards were symbols of royal power. So too here. One

19^(th)-century notebook (no. 45, MacGaffey, 1986: 159) describes how,

should someone kill a leopard, a man wishing to be invested in an

important chiefly title might rush to the scene to ‘desecrate its tail’

by stepping on it. This was a period in which such titles could be

acquired fairly easily by men who had gained fortunes in trade; after

desecrating the object, the man could proceed to acquire the title

through what is a kind of ‘purchase’ which might typically involve, for

example, the payment of 10 lives ‘by day’ (slaves delivered to the

current holder), and 10 ‘by night’ (members of the chief ’s own kin

group killed by witchcraft; cf. Vansina, 1973).

The following gives something of the flavor of their power (note that a

ngangais curer and keeper of minkisi; bangangais the plural):

Lunkanka is a nkisi in a statue and it is extremely fierce and strong.

It came from Mongo, where many of our forebears used to go to compose

it, but now its banganga [keepers] have all died out. When it had a

nganga it was very strong, and so it destroyed whole villages. Its

strength lay in seizing [its victims], crushing their chests, making

them bleed from the nose and excrete pus; driving knives into their

chests, twisting necks, breaking arms and legs, knotting their

intestines, giving them nightmares, discovering witches in the village,

stifling a man’s breathing and so on. When it was known that Lunkanka

was exceedingly powerful, a great many people trusted it for healing,

placing oaths and cursing witches and magicians, and so on. (in

MacGaffey, 1991: 127)

The text goes on to explain that if two men make an agreement – say, one

agreed to be the other’s client, or pawn, and thus be bound to his

village – they might both drive nails into Lunkanka to seal the

agreement; the nkisiwould then act as its power of enforcement.

According to Wyatt MacGaffey (1987), in the 19^(th) century every aspect

of BaKongo economic life, from the policing of marketplaces to the

protection of property rights to the enforcement of contracts, was

carried out through the medium of nkisi, and the nkisiso employed were,

in every case, forms of crystallized violence and affliction.

The underlying logic seems to have a remarkable similarity to social

contract theories being created in Europe around the same time:

MacGaffey has even found KiKongo texts which celebrate the existence of

nkisias a way of preventing a war of all against all.[12] Once again,

there is a striking parallelism in underlying assumptions: in this case,

the same background of competitive market exchange, the same assumption

that (at least outside of kin relations) social peace is therefore a

matter of agreements, particular agreements to respect one another’s

property, that must be enforced by an overarching power of violence. The

main difference seems to lie in the assumed reasons why such violence is

necessary. The Judaeo-Christian tradition goes back at least to

Augustine (himself an African), having been based, as authors like

Sahlins have much emphasized (2000), on an assumption that human desires

are in their essence insatiable. Since we can never have enough

pleasure, power, or especially material wealth, and since resources are

inherently limited, we are all necessarily in a state of competition

with one another. The state, according to Augustine, embodies reason,

which is divine. It is also a providential institution which by

threatening punishment turns our own base egoism – especially our fear

of pain – against us to maintain order. Hobbes (1651) merely secularized

the picture, eliminating the part about the endless desires being a

punishment for original sin, but keeping the basic structure; then Adam

Smith, Enlightenment optimist that he was, brought divine providence

back in to argue that God had actually arranged things so that even our

competitive desires will ultimately work for the benefit of all. In

every case, though, the western tradition seems to combine two features:

the assumption that humans are corrupted by limitless desires, and an

insistent effort to imagine some form of power or authority (Reason,

God, the State ...) which is not corrupted by desire, and hence

inherently benevolent. God must be just (despite all appearances to the

contrary); a rational man can rise above bodily passions; it should at

least be possible to have rulers who are not interested in their own

aggrandizement but only about the public welfare. The result was that

the effects of power tend to be endlessly euphemized or explained away.

African cosmological systems seemed to lack both features: probably,

because they were less inclined to see human motivation as, say, a

desire for wealth, or pleasures that could be abstracted from, or

imagined independently from, the social relations in which they were

realized. They tended to assume that what people desired was power

itself.[13] It was impossible thus to imagine a form of political power

which was not – at least partly – constituted by the very form of evil

which the western tradition saw as the means to transcend.[14] Perhaps

for this reason, what Europeans nervously euphemized was exactly what

Africans seemed to selfconsciously exaggerate. One might consider here

the difference between the famous ‘divine’ kingships of much of Africa,

whose subjects insisted that any ruler who became weak or frail would be

promptly killed, but in which, in actual fact, this seems to have

happened only rarely, with an institution like Augustine’s Roman Empire,

which claimed to be the embodiment of rational law and guardian of

public order but whose actual rulers murdered one another with such

savage consistency that it is almost impossible to come up with an

example of an emperor who died a natural death. Similarly, in 17^(th)and

18^(th)-century Europe, African states developed a reputation for being

extraordinarily bloodthirsty, since their representatives and subjects

never saw any point in disguising the essentially murderous nature of

state power. This despite the fact that the actual scale of killing even

by the Ganda or Zulu states was negligible in comparison with the

devastation wreaked in wars within Europe at the same time – not even to

mention with what Europeans were prepared to do to anybody else.

THE MATERIALITY OF POWER

Another way to understand the difference is to look at the contrasting

ways in which power was seen to take on material substance or tangible

form. For Pietz’s merchants, of course, the emphasis was on material

valuables, beautiful or fascinating objects – or sometimes artificially

beautified people – and their powers to enchant or attract. The value of

an object was its power. In the African cases we have looked at, at

least, power is imagined above all as a material substance inside the

body: tsav, ndoki. This is entirely in keeping with the distinctions

sketched out earlier, but it also has an interesting corollary, which

is, in a sense, to systematically subvert that principle of

representation which is the very logical basis of any system of

legitimate authority. Here I can only refer to an argument I have made

at greater length (Graeber, 1997): that any system in which one member

of a group can claim to represent the group as a whole necessarily

entails setting that member off in a way resembling the Durkheimian

notion of the sacred, as set apart from the stuffs and substances of the

material world, even, to a certain degree, abstracted from it. Much of

the etiquette surrounding figures of authority always tends to center on

denial of ways in which the body is continuous with the world; the tacit

image is always that of an autonomous being who needs nothing. The ideal

of the rational, disinterested state seems to be just one particular

local variation of this very common theme, inherent, I have argued, to

any real notion of hierarchy.

It is not that the logic of hierarchy is not present – one might well

argue it always is, in some form or another – but rather that things

seem to work in such a way as to constantly subvert it. It seems to me

one can’t really understand even the famous Tiv system of spheres of

exchange without taking this into account. The system, as mapped out by

Paul Bohannan in an essay in 1955 (see also Bohannan, 1959), is really

quite simple. Everything considered worth exchanging, all things of

value, fell into one of three categories; things of each category could,

ordinarily, be exchanged only for each other. The resulting spheres of

exchange formed a hierarchy. At the bottom were everyday goods like food

or tools or cooking oil, which could be contributed to kin or friends or

sold in local markets. Next up were prestige goods such as brass rods,

slaves, a certain white cloth, and magical services such as those

provided by owners of akombo. The highest consisted in nothing but

rights in women, since all marriages, before the colonial period, were

considered exchanges of one woman for another – or more exactly, of

their reproductive powers – and there was a complicated system of

‘wards’ whereby male heads of household could acquire rights in women

seen as owed them in one way or another and marry them off in exchange

for new wives, even if they did not have an unmarried sister or daughter

of their own. On the other hand, division between spheres was never

absolute. It waspossible to convert food into valuables, if one found

someone sufficiently desperate for food, or, under other circumstances,

valuables into additional wives. To do so took a ‘strong heart’, which

according to Bohannan was inherently admirable (‘morally positive’),

though one has to imagine somewhat ambivalently so, since having a

strong heart meant, precisely, that one had that yellow substance on

one’s heart which also made one a witch.[15]

Obviously, the system is all about male control of women. The sort of

goods that are largely produced and marketed by women are relegated to

the most humble category; those controlled by men rank higher; the

highest sphere consists solely of men’s rights in the women themselves.

At the same time, one could say as one moves up the spheres, men are

increasingly gaining control of the capacity to create social form

(households, descent, genealogy ...); converting upwards from food and

tools that can merely keep people alive, to objects with the capacity to

assemble clientages, and then finally, to the power to create descent

itself. Since, after all, when one assembles wives and wards one is not,

technically speaking, trafficking in women so much as in their

reproductive capacities. All of this one does by manipulating debt, in

its various manifestations, placing others in a position of obligation.

This in turn makes it easier to understand what’s really going on with

stories about witchcraft and the flesh debt, what I would propose should

really be considered the fourth sphere, since it marks the ultimate fate

of those with ‘strong hearts’. This is where the whole system collapses

on itself, the direction is utterly reversed: since those who are most

successful in manipulating networks of debt to gain such powers over

creation are discovered, here, to be in a position of limitless debt

themselves, and hence forced to consume the very human substance the

system is ostensibly concerned to produce. In striking contrast with the

western version, the insatiable desire for consumption, when it does

appear, is not a desire for wealth but for the direct consumption of

human beings, indistinguishable from the political power which, in the

European version, is usually imagined as the only thing capable of

controlling it.

Now, all this might seem appropriate to an egalitarian society like the

Tiv, which one would expect to be somewhat ambivalent about the nature

of social power and authority. The surprising thing, then, is how much

of this is reproduced, almost exactly unchanged, in the BaKongo

material, where the political situation was so different. Granted it was

not entirely different – this was an area where centralized authority

had been being effectively broken down for generations (Ekholm Friedman,

1991); but the parallels are striking, even down to the small details

like the payments ‘by day’ and ‘by night’. The few salient differences

do seem to reflect a greater acceptance of social hierarchy among the

BaKongo (at least in principle). There is more of an overt willingness

to see kindoki as capable of serving the common good, and,

significantly, I think, also a tendency to treat the whole matter of

witchcraft more abstractly. While there is some occasional talk of

feasting on disinterred bodies, the usual imagery is of a kind of

disembodied vampiric power feeding off the soul-stuff of its victims –

which, if nothing else, shows a reluctance to challenge the fundamental

logic of representation through abstraction on which any system of

legitimate rule must, it would seem, eventually rest. Ultimately,

though, these are minor differences.

DIFFERENT SORTS OF SOCIAL CONTRACT

The first Portuguese and Dutch sources, as I mentioned, seem entirely

oblivious to all this. Caught up as they are with their own newfound

materialism, questions of economic value – and in particular, value in

exchange – were the only ones that really concerned them. The result is

that, oddly enough, at the moment when Hobbes was writing his famous

theory of the social contract (1651), he seems to have been entirely

unaware that, in Africa, social contracts not so different from the sort

he imagined were still being made on a regular basis.

This brings one back to the questions with which we began: about the

nature of social creativity. The main way of talking about such matters

in the western intellectual tradition, for the last several centuries,

has been precisely through the idiom of contracts, social or otherwise.

As I mentioned at the start of the article, Marcel Mauss claimed that

his essay on the gift (1925), in fact, was really part of a much larger

project on the origins of the notion of the contract and of the notion

of contractual obligation. His conclusion – a rather striking one – was

that the most elementary form of social contract was, in fact,

communism: an open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two

individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one

another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to

their abilities, to each according to their needs’. Originally, he

argued, there were two possibilities: total war, or ‘total reciprocity’.

The latter informed everything from moiety structures (where those on

one side of a village can only marry the daughters of those on the

other, or only eat food grown on the other, or only the others can bury

their dead) to relations of individualistic communism such as applied

between close friends, or in-laws or, in our own society, husband and

wife. This later gets refracted into various more specific forms of gift

relation, and then of course eventually you get the market, but ‘total

reciprocity’ remains the kind of baseline of sociality, even to the

present day. This is why, Mauss suggests, wage labor contracts seem so

unsatisfying to those on the receiving end; there is still that

underlying assumption that voluntary agreements (such as, say, marriage)

should involve an open-ended commitment to respond to one another’s

needs.

Alain Caillé (2000) sums up the difference between the first sort of

contract, and gift relations in general, and the more familiar contract

as between ‘conditional unconditionality’ and ‘unconditional

conditionality’. The first is an unlimited commitment, but either party

is free to break it off at any time; the second specifies precisely what

is owed by each party, no more and no less – but within that, each party

is absolutely bound. My own work on trade currencies, and in particular

what happened to beads or shell currency once they left the circuits of

the trade (Graeber, 2001), revealed some striking patterns. Everything

seemed to turn on the presence or absence of an internal market. In

North America, belts of wampum, originally acquired in the fur trade,

were never used as money by indigenous people when dealing with each

other (in fact there were no market relations between indigenous people

of any kind at all); instead they became a key element in the

construction of social peace. The Iroquois Confederation, for example,

saw themselves as emerging from a kind of Hobbesian period of war of all

against all, but it was caused not by competition over wealth and power

but by the power of grief and mourning, which twisted humans into

monstrous creatures craving vengeance and destruction. Wampum, in

comparison, was never seen as causing anyone to hurt anybody else.

Wampum was crystallized peace, a substance of light and beauty with the

power to heal and open those wounded and cramped by rage; gifts of

wampum cleared the way to open-ended relations of mutual responsibility

of just the sort Mauss seemed to have in mind (1947). In Madagascar, in

contrast, where buying and selling was everywhere, trade beads and,

later, ornaments made of melted silver coins, became elements in charms

(ody, sampy, and so on) that operated very much like West African

fetishes: they might not have embodied diseases, quite, but they were

capable of being highly punitive in their effects. If anything, in

Madagascar the Hobbesian logic becomes much more explicit, because this

was also the way one created sovereign power and the state.

Here again I can only summarize a much more elaborate argument (Graeber,

1995, 2001), but the gist goes something like this. Silver coins, which

came into Madagascar largely through the slave trade, and which were

melted down to create ornaments and broken up to create smaller

denominations of currency which people actually used in daily life, were

also used, in Imerina, to create the power of kings. Every major event

at which the ruler appeared was marked by ‘giving hasina’, the

presentation of unbroken silver coins by representatives of the people

to the king – unbroken to represent the unity of the kingdom created by

this act of recognition. The ultimate message was that by doing so, the

people created royal power, in exactly the way that one created a charm

or fetish. Even more critically, in the Merina kingdom, every time two

people came to any sort of business agreement, or for that matter every

time members of a community came to agreement on the disposal of

property or the maintenance of irrigation works, they invariably sealed

the contract by ‘giving hasina’ to the king (Graeber, 1995: 96–109),

recreating that power of violence which bound them to their contractual

obligations.[16] It is not that contracts of the more open-ended,

Maussian variety, did not exist in Madagascar or for that matter in West

Africa. Most often, they are referred to in the literature under the

rubric of ‘rituals of blood brotherhood’. In Malagasy these are called

fatidra. In 19^(th)-century texts gathered by missionaries – the Tantara

ny Andriana (Callet, 1908: 851) or Fomba Gasy (Cousins, 1968: 93–4; see

also Ellis, 1838, vol. 1: 187–90; Sibree, 1875, 1897) – they are indeed

treated as the most basic, even primordial, form of contract (most

business partners, for instance, seem to have been bound together in

this way). The two parties would each put a little of their blood

together in a piece of liver, eat the liver, and then would swear always

to be responsive to one another’s needs, never refuse help in a crisis,

never refuse food when the other is hungry, and so on. However, the

actual body of the oath takes the form of imprecations, invoking an

invisible spirit created by the ritual and calling on it to wreak every

sort of disaster and havoc upon them should they ever fail to live up to

these obligations. The same is true of the creation of communal ties:

people insisted (in fact, they still insist) that even before there were

kings, those creating new communities would begin by ‘giving hasina’ to

some stone or tree or other object which would then have the power to

enforce their communal obligations, to punish or at least expel those

who did not respect the social contract.

When Mauss described ‘total reciprocity’ he was thinking of the sort of

agreements that would be made in the complete absence of market

institutions: here, we are dealing with societies deeply entangled in

market relations; in fact, often, relations between people had little

else in common. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the generic

power of money – as the one thing already binding the parties together –

itself became the model for that invisible power which was, as it were,

turned back against itself to maintain commitments even when it might

have been in one party’s short-term financial interest not to. Hence,

even the ‘individualistic communism’ of blood brotherhood ends up

subsumed under that same logic.

The comparison of North America and Madagascar is telling, I think,

because in both cases stuff which is an embodiment of pure value, and

which is seen as coming from very far away, becomes the basic medium for

the creation of new social ties – for social creativity. The Iroquois of

the Six Nations used wampum to create peace, but in fact what we call

society was, for them, peace: the ‘League of the Iroquois’ was called

‘The Great Peace’, and the presentation of wampum became the medium for

creating all sorts of contracts, mutual agreements and new institutional

forms (see Graeber, 2001: 125–6, 132–4). In the Malagasy – and also

African – cases we are looking at the media for the creation of

agreements, communities, even kingdoms.

That this should so often involve manipulation of objects of alien, and

apparently universal, value should perhaps come as no surprise. No doubt

we are just dealing with the familiar structural principle that a social

field, or logical domain, cannot be constituted except in relation to

something which is not part of it, something transcendent or anyway

alien. A constitution cannot be created by constitutional means; beings

capable of establishing a system of justice cannot themselves be bound

by that system of justice; always one needs something else. This much is

straightforward enough. But it’s also important to stress that these

objects were, ultimately, only the medium. Hence what they are is

ultimately somewhat arbitrary: one can use valuable objects from faraway

lands, or one can, in fact, use pretty much any random object one lays

one’s hands on, ‘a Lion’s Tail ... a Bird’s Feather ... a Pebble, a Bit

of Rag’. In this, Pietz’s sources had a point, because this is exactly

the moment where the arbitrariness of value comes fully into focus.

Because really, creativity is not an aspect of the objects at all, it’s

a dimension of action. In this sense the new does in fact emerge from

the old, and the numinous, alien nature of the object is really the

degree to which it reflects on that aspect of our own actions that is,

in a sense, alien to ourselves.

OUR OWN ACTIONS COMING BACK AT US

Here of course is where we start, finally, moving in the direction of

the Marxian notion of the fetish: objects which seem to take on human

qualities which are, ultimately, really derived from the actors

themselves.

Not that we are speaking of pure mystification here. As I have tried to

demonstrate in my analysis of the Merina Royal Bath ceremony (2001:

232–9), and hasina ritual in general, people were not entirely unaware

that it was the ritual that made the king, that what constructed royal

power was not the coin, but the action of giving it. This was tacit in

the ritual itself, and stated explicitly just off-stage. Similarly,

Malagasy charms involved the giving of an oath or pledge by those

protected by them, or over whom they had power; without that, it was

simply a powerless object. On the other hand, once given, the object was

treated as having a power of its own. Something similar seems to have

been widely recognized by West African ‘fetishists’. In fact, if one

looks over the literature surveyed by Pietz, one sees the exact same

emphasis on action: here, taking a collective oath could be called

‘making’ or ‘drinking’ or ‘eating’ fetish, phrases which appear to be

direct translations from African languages. A fetish is something one

makes, or does:

Obligatory Swearing they also call, making of Fetiche’s; If any

Obligation is to be confirmed, their Phrase is, let us as a farther

Confirmation make Fetiche’s. When they drink the Oath-Draught, ‘tis

usually accompanied with an Imprecation, that the Fetiche may kill them

if they do not perform the Contents of their Obligation. (Bosman, 1967

[1705]: 149)

The basic sequence here – people create (‘make’) something; then they

act as if that thing has power over them – is of course just the sort of

thing Marx was thinking of when he spoke of ‘fetishism’. There are two

curious things here. One is that those involved seemed not entirely

unaware that this was happening: both that these objects were

constructed and, at the same time, that they came to have some kind of

power over those who constructed them. This is very important I think

and I will try to consider the full implications in a moment. The other

curious thing is that Pietz does not even consider any of this. In fact,

even when he turns to look at Marx’s own work (Pietz, 1993), Pietz

considers every definition of fetishism, every aspect, other than the

simplest and most common one: that ‘fetishism’ occurs when human beings

end up bowing down before and worshipping that which they have

themselves created.[17]

Now, this is a peculiar oversight.

The reason seems to lie in the structure of Pietz’s argument: that ‘the

fetish’ is a concept that emerged within a peculiar intercultural space

in which neither existing European, nor existing African categories

really applied. He calls it a ‘space of cultural revolution’,[18] in

which the ‘conceptualities, habits and life forms, and value systems’ of

a number of radically different social systems (feudal Christianity,

proto-capitalist mercantilism, African lineage systems and so on) were

suddenly juxtaposed and forced to come to terms with one another. It was

therefore a space of continual innovation and cultural creativity, as

each side found their existing practices and categories inadequate in

dealing with the others, that a kind of pidgin culture emerged,

particularly among figures like the tangomaos, ‘Portuguese speaking

adventurers and traders who made their home on the Guinea mainland, in

defiance of the orders of the crown, and who married there and

established mulatto families’ (Donelha in Pietz, 1987: 39).

In this situation, Pietz argues, the standard Christian rubrics for

dealing with alien religious practices just didn’t seem to work. The

most common of these had been ‘idolatry’. Pagans worshipped idols. Idols

were material images, made by human beings, that represented invisible

powers – conceived as a god, a spirit, though the Christian knew them to

be really demons – with whom the worshipper came into relation by some

kind of verbal compact. Here was the key difference with fetishism.

Fetishes – at least in the descriptions of the first Portuguese and

Dutch traders – did not represent anything; they were material objects

seen as having power in and of themselves; imaginary products, in

effect, of the merchants’ own materialistic cosmology. As Wyatt

MacGaffey noted early on (1994), this materialistic emphasis was

precisely what was missing from the way Africans talked about these

things (making one wonder how much one is really talking about a ‘pidgin

culture’ at all). Some of the items labeled ‘fetishes’ took the form of

images, many did not; but verbal compacts and invisible spirits were

almost invariably involved. The foreign missionaries who were the first

to establish themselves in Imerina, for instance, did not hesitate to

label their Merina equivalents ‘idols’ instead of ‘fetishes’, even

though sampyonly rarely took representational form. The difference

between Malagasy ‘idols’ and West African ‘fetishes’ seems to be quite

simply that the former were first named by missionaries and the latter

mainly by merchants, men really only concerned with exchange and

questions of material value. Questions of production, creation, let

alone the production or creation of social relations, were simply of

little interest to Pietz’s sources. As a result, what is to me, at

least, the most fascinating aspect of the whole complex of ideas drops

away: that is, the notion of ‘making fetish’

that by a form of collective investment one can, in effect, create a new

god on the spot

even though this seems to be what really startled European newcomers to

Africa, and ultimately caused them to launch into peculiar fantasies

about people who worship the first thing they see in the morning. It was

the improvisational quality of the ritual surrounding fetishes which

made it appear to them that in many African societies, at least, it was

particularly in the domain of religion – what should have been the

domain of eternal verities – that everything was up for grabs, precisely

because this was also the main locus for social creativity. In this

sense, as we will see, the issue is not so much that these were objects

that existed in a ‘space of revolution’, but rather that they were

themselves revolutionary objects.

NECESSARY ILLUSIONS?

So what is a fetish, then?

A fetish is a god under process of construction.

At least, if ‘fetish’ can still be used as a technical term in this

context – and of course there is no consensus on this point – this is

what I would suggest.

Fetishes exist precisely at the point where conventional distinctions

between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ become meaningless, where charms become

deities. Frazer of course argued that magic is a technique, a way of

humans trying to shape the world to their will – if only by mistaken

techniques – while religion was instead a matter of submitting to an

external authority.[19] For Durkheim, magic was ritual pursued for

purely individual ends; it becomes religion when it acquires a church, a

congregation, because religion is about society. Fetishism then is the

point where each slips into the other: where objects we have created or

appropriated for our own purposes suddenly come to be seen as powers

imposed on us, precisely at the moment where they come to embody some

newly created social bond.

This may sound rather abstract but if one looks carefully at the

ethnographic evidence, this is exactly what happens. Ordinary life in

rural Madagascar is still full of different sorts of ‘medicine’

(fanafody), a term which covers everything from herbal infusions to

charms with the power to bring bolts of lightning down on an enemy’s

head. Most people know how to make or work one or two sorts, or at the

very least, are willing to allow others to speculate that they might.

The simplest charms are improvised for a specific occasion, others are

more permanent: very important, older charms which affect whole

communities – charms which guard the crops against hail, or protect

villages from thieves – which have names and histories and keepers, or

even have to be renewed (like kings) by periodic sacrifice. In earlier

centuries, certain of these went on to take on a more general role as

protectors of communities, and these came to be known as ‘sampy’. They

were ultimately collections of bits of rare wood, beads and silver

ornaments, kept hidden under cloth or in boxes, usually with little

houses of their own; sometimes they spoke through their keepers; they

had names and stories, wills and desires, they received homage, gave

blessings, imposed taboos. They were, in other words, very much like

gods. Especially so when they came to be adopted into the royal

pantheon: at any given time, the king would adopt 12 or so to be the

guardians of the kingdom, and these would be borne before the royal army

during campaigns; they were present at important rituals; their ritual

days were national holidays; their keepers a de facto priesthood. These

were also the ‘idols’ – with names like Kelimalaza, Manjakatsiroa,

Ravololona – that so offended the English missionaries in the 19^(th)

century. Yet this was also a very unstable pantheon. If these were gods

– and in fact they were called ‘gods’ (Andriamanitra, the same word used

for the Creator, or later the Christian God) – their hold on godhood

seemed remarkably tenuous. New ones would appear; older ones might slip

into obscurity, or else be exposed as frauds or witchcraft and purged

from the pantheon. There literally was no clear line between ordinary

‘magic’ and deities, but for that reason, the deities were a constant

process of construction. They were not seen as representing timeless

essences,[20] but powers that had proved, at least for the moment,

effective and benevolent.

West African ‘fetishes’ were not exactly the same as Merina sampy – they

tended to be more destructive in their powers, more caught up in the

logic of affliction; there were other subtle differences – but there too

we find the same continuum between casual charms and quasi-deities, the

same sense of objects created through human actions, property that could

be possessed, inherited, even bought and sold; tools, but at the same

time objects of obeisance and adoration, capable of acting with

potentially devastating autonomy.

So what does all this strange theology have to do with social creativity

per se? Here I think we can finally return to Marx.

For Marx, the ‘fetishism of commodities’ was one particular instance of

a much more general phenomenon of ‘alienation’. Collectively, human

beings create their worlds, but owing to the extraordinary complexity of

how all this creative activity is coordinated socially, no one can

really keep track of the process, let alone take control of it. As a

result, we are constantly confronting our own actions and creations as

if they were alien powers. Fetishism is simply when this happens to

material objects. Like African fetishists, the argument goes, we end up

making things and then treating them like gods.

The actual argument in Capital(1967 [1867]: chp. 2) is of course much

more complicated. In it, Marx is mainly making a point about value.[21]

For Marx, value always comes from labor, or, to be more precise, value

is the symbolic form through which our labors become meaningful to us by

becoming part of some larger social system. Yet in capitalism, consumers

tend to see the value of commodities as somehow inhering in the objects

themselves, rather than in the human efforts required to put those

qualities in them. We are surrounded by objects designed and produced

for our pleasure or convenience. They embody the intentions of people

who anticipated our needs and desires and sank their energies into

creating objects that would satisfy them; but owing to the workings of

the market system, we normally do not have the slightest idea who any of

those people are or how they went about it. Therefore, all those

intentions seem as if they are properties of the object itself; objects

therefore seem to be things we can enter into personal relations with;

we become indignant, hit them or kick them when they don’t work, and so

on. Actually, capitalism seems rife with such subject/object reversals:

capital grows, money is always fleeing one market and seeking out

another, pork bellies doing this, the bond market doing that ... In

every case, what is happening is that we are operating in a system so

complicated we could not possibly see all of it, so we mistake our own

particular perspective on the whole, that little window we have on it,

with the nature of the totality itself. Because from the point of view

of the consumer, products might as well have simply jumped out into the

market with a personal commitment to play their DVDs or vacuum their

apartments; from the perspective of the businessman, money might as well

be fleeing some markets, and so on.[22]

Now, all this jumbling of agency might seem innocent enough;

particularly since if really challenged on the matter, few would defend

the premise that commodities really have minds of their own, or that

money really flees markets all of its own accord. For Marx this becomes

dangerous for two reasons. First, because it obscures the process of how

value is produced, which is of course very convenient to those who might

wish to extract value. Money represents the value of labor, but wage

laborers work to get money; it thus becomes a representation that brings

into being what it represents; it is therefore easy to see it as the

source of that value, or asvalue (since again, from the laborer’s

perspective, it might as well be). In the same way tokens of honor

(rather than honorable actions) can come to seem the source of prestige;

tokens of grace (rather than acts of devotion) the source of divine

favor; tokens of conviviality become the source of fun; and so on.

Second, all of this makes it much easier to treat the ‘laws of the

market’, or tendencies of whatever system it may be, as natural,

immutable, and therefore completely outside any possibility of human

intervention. This is of course exactly what happens in the case of

capitalism, even – perhaps especially – when one steps out of one’s

immediate situated perspective and tries to talk about the system as a

whole. Not only are the laws of the market taken to be immutable, the

creation of material objects is assumed to be the whole point, the

commodities themselves the only human value, so that in contemporary

Africa, for example, one can witness the bizarre spectacle of government

officials and their World Bank advisors declaring that the fact that in

some areas half of the population is dying of AIDS is a real problem

because it is going to have devastating effects on ‘the economy’ –

apparently oblivious to the fact that until fairly recently ‘the

economy’ was universally assumed to be the way we distribute material

goods so as to keep people alive.

The emphasis on value theory makes it easier to understand the strange

disparity – with which I began – between Marx’s view of material

production and the way he talks about what I have been calling social

creativity, or revolution. In producing a house or a chair, one first

imagines something and then tries to bring it into being. In fomenting

revolution, one must never do this.[23] The main reason for the

disparity seems to be that, as Hans Joas points out, Marx does seem to

reduce human creativity to two modalities: production (which happens all

the time), or revolution (which happens only occasionally). Not in

principle: in The German Ideology(1970 [1846]), for example, Marx states

very clearly that the production of material goods was always, at the

same time, the production of people and social relations, and all this

was a creative process and therefore in constant transformation. But

Joas is right to say that in Marx’s concrete analyses of events of his

own day, all of this does rather tend to fade away. Social creativity

tends to get reduced to political action, even, to dramatic,

revolutionary change.

One reason is that in carrying out this kind of value analysis, one has

to assume that the social system surrounding production is pretty much

stable. Let me illustrate. To say that in fetishizing commodities, or

money, one is confusing one’s partial perspective on a system with the

nature of the system as a whole, does at the very least imply that a

whole system exists and that it is possible to know something about it.

In the case of a market system this is a perfectly reasonable claim: all

economic study is premised on the assumption that there are things

called ‘markets’ and that it is possible to understand something about

how they work. Presumably the knowledge required is not comprehensive:

one need not know exactly who designed and produced the pack of

cigarettes or palm pilot in one’s pocket in order to avoid fetishizing

it.[24] One simply needs to know how these things generally tend to

work, the logic of the system, how human energies are mobilized,

organized, and end up embodied in objects. But this, in turn, implies

the system tends to work roughly the same way over time. What if it

doesn’t? What if it is in a process of transformation? What if, to take

an extreme example, the system in question does not yet exist, because

you are, in fact, trying to bring it into being through that very act of

fetishism?

In the case of many of these African fetishes, this was exactly what was

happening. Merchants who ‘drank’ or ‘made fetish’ together might not

have been creating a vast market system, but the point was usually to

create a small one: stipulating terms and rates of exchange, rules of

credit and regimes of property that could then be the basis of ongoing

transactions. Even when fetishes were not explicitly about establishing

contracts of one sort or another, they were almost invariably the basis

for creating something new: congregations, new social relations, new

communities. Hence any ‘totality’ involved was, at least at first,

virtual, imaginary, and prospective. What is more – and this is the

really crucial point – it was an imaginary totality that could only come

into real existence if everyone acted as if the fetish object actually

did have subjective qualities. In the case of contracts, this means: act

as if it really will punish them for breaking the rules.

These were, in other words, revolutionary moments. They involved the

creation of something new. They might not have been moments of total

transformation, but realistically, it is not as if any transformation is

ever really total. Every act of social creativity is to some degree

revolutionary, unprecedented: from establishing a friendship to

nationalizing a banking system. None are completely so. These things are

always a matter of degree.[25]

Yet this is precisely where wefind the logic of fetishism cropping up –

even the origin of the word ‘fetish’ – and it doesn’t seem to be

misrepresenting anything. Of course it would also be going too far to

say that the fetishistic view is simply true: Lunkanka cannot really tie

anyone’s intestines into knots; Ravololona cannot really prevent hail

from falling on anyone’s crops. As I have remarked elsewhere (Graeber,

2001), ultimately we are probably just dealing here with the paradox of

power, power being something which exists only if other people think it

does; a paradox that I have also argued lies also at the core of magic,

which always seems to be surrounded by an aura of fraud, showmanship,

and chicanery. But one could argue it is not just the paradox of power.

It is also the paradox of creativity. This has always been one of the

ironies of Marxism. Marx ultimately wanted to liberate human beings from

everything that held back or denied them control of their creative

capacities, by which he meantfirst and foremost, all forms of

alienation. But what exactly would a free, non-alienated producer look

like? It is never clear in Marx’s own work. Not exactly like an

independent craftsperson, presumably, since the latter are usually

caught in the shackles of tradition. Probably more like an artist, or a

musician, or a poet, or even an author (like Marx himself). But when

artists, musicians, poets, or authors describe their own experience of

creativity, they almost invariably begin evoking just the sort of

subject/object reversals which Marx saw as typical of fetishism: almost

never do they see themselves as anything like an architect rationally

calculating dimensions and imposing their will on the world. Instead one

almost invariably hears how they feel they are vehicles for some kind of

inspiration coming from outside, how they lose themselves, fragment

themselves, leave portions of themselves in their products. All the more

so with social creativity: it seems no coincidence that Mauss’ work on

the ‘origins of the idea of the contract’ in The Gift(1965) led him to

meditate endlessly on exactly these kind of subject/object reversals,

with gifts and givers becoming hopelessly entangled. Put this way, it

might seem to lead to a genuine dilemma. Is non-fetishized consciousness

possible? If so, would we even want it?

In fact, the dilemma is illusory. If fetishism is, at root, our tendency

to see our own actions and creations as having power over us, how can we

treat it as an intellectual mistake? Our actions and creations do have

power over us. This is simply true. Even for a painter, every stroke one

makes is a commitment of a sort. It affects what she can do afterwards.

In fact this becomes all the more true the less one becomes caught in

the shackles of tradition. Even in the freest of societies we would

presumably feel bound by our commitments to others. Even under

Castoriadis’ ideal of autonomy, where no one would have to operate

within institutions whose rules they had not themselves, collectively,

created, we are still creating rules and then allowing them to have

power over us. If discussion of such matters tends towards metaphoric

inversions, it is because it involves a juxtaposition of something that

(on some level) everyone understands – that we tend to become the slaves

of our own creations – and something no one really understands, how

exactly it is we are able to create new things to begin with.

If so, the real question is how one gets from this perfectly innocuous

level to the kind of complete insanity where the best reason one can

come up with to regret the death of millions is because of its effects

on the economy. The key factor would appear to be, not whether one sees

things as a bit topsy-turvy from one’s immediate perspective – something

like this seems inevitable, both in the realization of value, which

always seems to operate through concrete symbolic forms, and especially

in moments of transformation or creativity – but rather, whether one has

the capacity to at least occasionally step into some overarching

perspective from which the machinery is visible, and one can see that

all these apparently fixed objects are really part of an ongoing process

of construction. Or at the very least, whether one is not trapped in an

overarching perspective which insists they are not. The danger comes

when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute assurance that the

gods are real.

Consider again the confrontation between Pietz’s European merchant

adventurers in the 16^(th) and 17^(th) centuries, and their West African

counterparts – many being merchants themselves. I have already argued

that while both arrived with a number of broadly shared cosmological

assumptions – for instance, that we live in a fallen world, that the

human condition is fundamentally one of suffering – there were also a

number of profound differences which the Europeans found deeply

disturbing. (Whether their African partners were equally disturbed by

the encounter we are not in a position to know.) To reduce the matter to

something of a caricature: the European merchants were, as Pietz

stressed, budding materialists. They were Christians, but for the most

part their interest in theological questions seems to have been

negligible; the main effect of their Christian faith was to guarantee

the absolute assurance that, whatever spiritual ideas Africans had,

insofar as they were not Christian, they had to be profoundly mistaken.

This in turn had an effect when they confronted what they really cared

about: matters of trade, material wealth, and economic value. Confronted

with abundant evidence of the arbitrariness of value, they instead fell

back on the position that Africans themselves were arbitrary: they were

fetishists, willing to ascribe divine status to a completely random

collection of material objects.

In the European accounts, social relations tend to disappear. They were

simply of no interest. For them there was therefore virtually nothing in

between God and the world of material objects. But the Europeans could

at least compliment themselves that, unlike Africans, they managed to

keep the two apart. Of course they were wrong; the whole thing was

largely a projection; they were in fact already well on the way to the

kind of fetishism described by Marx where social relations, for the very

reason that they are made to disappear, end up getting projected onto

objects. All this was in dramatic contradistinction with the Africans,

for whom social relations were everything. As Jane Guyer (1993, Guyer

and Belinga, 1995) has pointed out, conventional economic categories are

hard to apply in such contexts, because people (rights in women’s

fertility, authority over children, the loyalty of followers, disciples,

recognition of titles, or status, or accomplishment) were the ultimate

form of wealth. Material objects were interesting mainly insofar as they

became entangled in social relations, or enabled one to create new ones.

Since wealth and power could not, ultimately, be distinguished, there

was no way to idealize government (which disturbed Europeans); it also

made for an enchanted world – one in which, for that very reason, the

mechanics of enchantment were never very far from the surface (which

disturbed them even more). It was as if everything existed in that

middle zone which the Europeans were trying to evacuate; everything was

social, nothing was fixed, therefore everything was both material and

spiritual simultaneously.

This was the zone in which we encounter the ‘fetish’. Now, it is

probably true that most gods have always been in the process of

construction. They exist at some point along the passage from an

imaginary level of pure magic – where all powers are human powers, where

all the tricks and mirrors are visible – to pure theology, with an

absolute commitment to the principle that the constructive apparatus

does not exist. But objects like akombo, minkisi, sampy– or, for that

matter, the improvised ‘fetishes’ made of Bibles and bits of wood

through which half-Portuguese tangomaos negotiated business deals – seem

to have existed at a midpoint almost exactly in between. They were both

human creations and alien powers, at the same time. In Marxist terms,

they were fetishes from one perspective and, from another, not

fetishized at all. Both perspectives were simultaneously available. But

they were also mutually dependent. The remarkable thing is how much,

even when the actors seem perfectly aware that they were constructing an

illusion, they also seemed aware that the illusion was still required.

It rather reminds one of the practice of shadow puppetry in Southeast

Asia: the whole point is to create an illusion, the puppets themselves

are supposed to be invisible, mere shadows on the screen, but if you

observe actual performances, you usually find the audience is ranged

around in a big circle so that many of them can only see the puppets and

cannot actually see the illusion at all. There doesn’t seem to be a

feeling that they are missing out on much. Nonetheless, it would not be

a performance if the illusion did not take place.

This is what one might expect in a world of almost constant social

creativity; in which few arrangements were fixed and permanent, and,

even more, where there was little feeling that they really should be

fixed and permanent; in which, in short, people were indeed in a

constant process of imagining new social arrangements and then trying to

bring them into being. Gods could be created, and discarded or fade

away, because social arrangements themselves were never assumed to be

immutable.

What does this teach us about the grand theoretical issues raised at the

beginning? If nothing else, that if one takes seriously the idea of

social creativity, one will probably have to abandon some of the dreams

of certainty that have so enchanted the partisans both of holistic and

individualistic models. No doubt processes of social creativity are, to

some degree, unchartable. This is probably all for the best. Making it

the centerpiece of a social theory regardless seems like it would be an

increasingly important gesture, at a time when the heirs of Pietz’s

merchants have managed to impose their strange, materialist theology on

not just Africans but almost everyone, to the extent that human life

itself can be seen as having no value except as a means to produce

fetishized commodities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

David Graeber would like to thank the following people: Alain Caillé,

Lauren Leve, Stuart Rockefeller, Jennifer Jackson, Michael Duncan,

Massimo de Angelis, Hylton White, Ilana Gershon, Sylvia Federici, George

Caffentzis, Marshall Sahlins, Rupert Stasch, Nhu Le, Anne Rawls, Yvonne

Liu, Stephen Shukhaitis, Andrej Grubacic, Terence Turner, Michael

Taussig, Mike Menser, Heather Gautney.

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[1] In the last chapter of Towards an Anthropological Theory of

Value(Graeber, 2001), subtitled ‘The Problem of the Fetish, IIIb’. What

follows in this article was, in large part, originally written for that

chapter but ended up having to be cut for reasons of space. I was

tempted to call it ‘The Problem of the Fetish, IIIc’ but it seemed

unlikely many readers would get the joke.

[2] Especially in Italy. The most familiar representative for most

readers in the Anglophone world is Toni Negri, but most of the ideas

presented in Empire(Negri and Hardt, 2000) are the products of a long

tradition involving many other writers and activists.

[3] For Castoriadis, history is no longer a matter of the development or

play of productive or class forces but the work of ‘the imaginary, which

is creation ex nihilo’, such that change is ‘the positing of a new type

of behavior ... the institution of a new social rule ... the invention

of a new object or a new form’ that is ‘an emergence or a production

which cannot be deduced on the basis of a previous situation’

(Castoriadis, 1987: 3, 44).

[4] The tie to the Autonomist school can be seen by looking at the early

work of Toni Negri, on constituent power (1999). Essentially he is

trying to work out exactly the same problems: what is that popular power

of creativity that emerges during moments of revolution and how would it

be possible to institutionalize it?

[5] Actually there is no particular reason why gold should be a better

medium of exchange than beads. Economists of course might make the

argument that the supply of gold in the world is inherently limited,

while glass beads can be manufactured in endless number; however, there

is no way that European merchants of that day could have had the

slightest idea how much of the earth’s crust was composed of gold; they

saw it as precious because they got it with difficulty from very far

away, just as Africans did beads.

[6] At least, there is none in his first three, best-known articles

(Pietz, 1985, 1987, 1988). He does address West African ideas in two

later articles concerned with debt and human sacrifice (1995a, 1995b);

these essays, however, are concerned with a later historical period, and

somewhat different sorts of questions.

[7] This would be one reason why Africans have been, from such an early

period, comparatively receptive to religions like Christianity and

Islam.

[8] Most African cosmologies posit the creator as in one way or another

beyond good and evil, as, for instance, an otiose creator who has

abandoned the world, or a force of violence beyond all moral accounting

whose very arbitrariness demonstrates his local priority to, and hence

ability to constitute, any system of human justice.

[9] More precisely, symptoms.

[10] Bohannan interprets these movements as regular features of Tiv

social structure. More recently Nigerian sociologists (Tseayo, 1975) and

historians (Makar, 1994 [1936]) have placed them in the colonial

context, as a result of British efforts to force a highly egalitarian

group into the framework of a state based on indirect rule. In fact,

there is no real way to know whether such movements did occur earlier,

but it seems reasonable to assume some such mechanism existed, at least,

for as long as Tiv egalitarianism itself did.

[11] MacGaffey (1986) suggests the archetypal BaKongo ritual cycle leads

from affliction to sacrifice to retreat to receiving gifts to new

status.

[12] Personal communication, March 2000. Just as in Hobbes, by creating

some overarching power of violence, which can ensure people fulfill

their contractual obligations and respect one another’s property rights.

Which if we look again at Pietz’s material, becomes especially ironic.

Here we have European merchant adventurers swearing oaths and making

agreements with Africans over objects they called ‘fetishes’, at exactly

the same time as authors such as Hobbes were inventing social contract

theory back home, but it was apparently the Africans who were seeing the

act as creating a sort of social contract; the Europeans seem to have

had other fish to fry. All this obviously raises the question of whether

there is any reason to believe that Hobbes, among others, was aware of

what was going on in Africa at the time; in Hobbes’ case at least,

though, I have managed to find no concrete evidence. While Hobbes grew

up in a merchant household, in his entire corpus his only mentions of

Africa, as far as I am aware, are via Classical references.

[13] Clearly, what I am suggesting here could be considered a variant of

the famous ‘wealth in people’ argument (see for instance Guyer, 1993,

Guyer and Belinga, 1995).

[14] Obviously, this is a bit of a simplification.

[15] Bohannan and Bohannan (1968: 233): having a ‘strong heart’ means

you have ‘both courage and attractiveness’.

[16] This is by no means unique to Madagascar. In the BaKongo case, too,

royal power was seen as created through the same means as fetishes.

[17] In fact, the word ‘fetish’ derives from a Portuguese term meaning

‘something made’, or even ‘artificial’; this is why the term was also

used for cosmetics – ‘make-up’ – (Baudrillard, 1972: 91).

[18] The phrase is adopted from Fredric Jameson. Jameson’s notion of

‘cultural revolution’ (1981: 95–7), in turn, goes back to a certain

strain of Althusserian Marxism: the idea is that as one ruling class is

in the gradual process of replacing another, the conflict between them

can become a crisis of meaning, as radically different ‘conceptualities,

habits and life forms, and value systems’ exist alongside one another.

The Enlightenment, for example, could be seen as one dramatic moment in

a long cultural revolution in which those of the old feudal aristocracy

were ‘systematically dismantled’ and replaced with those of an emerging

bourgeoisie. In the case of the West African coast one is of course

speaking not of one class replacing another but a confrontation of

different cultural worlds.

[19] This is why, as I have suggested (2001: 239–47), Marxists have such

a difficulty figuring out what to think about magic.

[20] That is to say there was nothing like the fixed, mythological

pantheon one finds among the Greeks, or Babylonians, or Yoruba, where

objects of cult could be identified with some enduring figure like Zeus,

Athena, Shango, or Marduk.

[21] Value being, as I have previously defined it, the way our creative

actions take on meaning for us, by being placed in some larger, social,

framework, by being embodied in some social ‘form’ like money or

commodities (Graeber, 2001).

[22] As Terry Turner and others have argued at some length (see Graeber,

2001: 64–6), all this is pretty much exactly what Piaget was talking

about when he described childish ‘egocentrism’: the inability to

understand that one’s own perspective on a situation is not identical to

reality itself, but just one of an endless variety of possible

perspectives, which in childhood too leads to treating objects as if

they had subjective qualities.

[23] Even this is somewhat deceptive language because it implies the

production of people and social relations is not itself ‘material’. In

fact I have argued elsewhere (forthcoming) that the very distinction

between ‘material infrastructure’ and ‘ideological superstructure’ is

itself a form of idealism.

[24] In point of fact, if one does, this can lead to fetishism of a

different sort, as in the sort one sees in heirloom valuables in many

gift systems which are seen as embodying or including the personalities

of certain former owners.

[25] From a Marxian perspective it might be rather disturbing to see

business deals as a prototype for revolutionary activity; but one must

bear in mind it comes with the argument that the prototypical form of

contract, even between business partners, is communism.