Fetish: An Object or a Category for the Enlightenment?
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The Department of Art History is pleased to present the next installment of our French Visiting Lecture Series, featuring Prof. Anne Lafont (EHESS, Paris).
PLEASE NOTE: Registration Required
Fetish: An Object or a Category for the Enlightenment?
When: Tuesday, January 14, 2025 - 5:00pm
Where: Paul Cadario Conference Centre, UC
Since the avant-garde, fetishes have been roughly identified with African art objects, and even more so with African sculpture. But this has not always been the case. The fetish has a long history, originating in the transcultural space of the West African coast in the 15th century, when the Portuguese, in their Atlantic navigation, found a word (fetissos) to describe things, natural or artificial, invested with supernatural power by local religious thought. The semantic fluidity of this noun led it to cover a wide range of elements and phenomena, from trees to amulets, from the material elements of worship to the tools of the human and social sciences.
This talk will focus on a specific moment in this history, in the 18th century, when African objects were integrated into the classification project carried out by Natural History, and the first public museums were set up. The aim is to follow these African objects in collections, in art and in the engravings used to illustrate travel literature, while linking their paths to the fortunes of fetishes and fetishism within the intellectual production of the Enlightenment. For the fetish is a concept that has never lost its dual nature, both material and ideal.
