fetishism as social creativity
Fetishism as social creativity
or, Fetishes are gods in the process of construction by david graeber
reading for m of care – feb 1 24 [https://museum.care/events/fetish-and-value/] – from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-fetishism-as-social-creativity] .. [also here: https://davidgraeber.org/papers/fetishism-as-social-creativity/]
and for m of care – mar 7 24 – part 2
notes/quotes:
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.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
KEY WORDS
BaKongo • fetishes • fetishism • social contract theory • social creativity • Tiv
bauwens contracts law.. et al
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.
need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
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.
*gift\ness..not new/free.. so will end (has ended) up with same song
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. 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… For Castoriadis, the great question became the emergence of the new. 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.
*last ch theory of value
**makes no diff.. as long as still in sea world
****to me.. nothing legit new to date..
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?
*roy bhaskar.. critical realism
**perhaps from legit free people.. so nothing legit new to date..
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.
*yeah not that.. ie: maté trump law; brown belonging law; undisturbed ecosystem; et al
**but why not this? (impossible to understand or interpret)..? ie: graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. graeber can’t know law.. et al
***to me.. difficult because 1\ nothing new to date 2\ graeber can’t know law
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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.
*yeah.. need to let go of any form of people telling (or describing or explaining or whatever) other people what to do (or what they have done)
**again.. to me.. perhaps this would all be irrelevant to legit free people..
***makes no diff.. still cancerous distractions.. because ****nothing legit new to date.. all same song
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.
*so maybe larger.. but not new/diff.. if still focusing on contract and obligation ness..
**exactly.. any form of m\a\p as red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
***but not yet fruitful to legit free people.. to creating conditions for 8b to be legit free
****still (to me) cancerous distraction.. until we get out of sea world.. let’s do this first ness. for (blank)’s sake
‘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 16th through 18th 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.
WHY FETISHISM?
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 15th 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.
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? 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:
theory of value.. graeber values law et al
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:
in a way.. this resonates with the need to listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us.. before we get side swiped by maté trump law et al
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)
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 19th 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.
structural violence et al
If it were not for their common participation in such rituals .. 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. 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.
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. ..Suffering leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to power. This is an extremely common pattern. ..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.
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’.
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;
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.
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 16th and 17th centuries. The similarity with European theories of the social contract, which were developing at precisely this time, need hardly be remarked…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. 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 initiation process, one could eventually become a keeper oneself.
.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.
.. According to Wyatt MacGaffey (1987), in the 19th 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. 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…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.
bauwens contracts law et al
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 was possible 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.
graeber values law
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.
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.
*reciprocity and war ness.. same song
*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.
*ha.. pearson unconditional law et al..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
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.
to me..makes no diff.. same song if reciprocity ness.. if any form of m\a\p
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.
A fetish is something one makes, or does:
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’.
NECESSARY ILLUSIONS?
So what is a fetish, then?
A fetish is a god under process of construction.
Fetishes exist precisely at the point where conventional distinctions between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ become meaningless, where charms become deities.
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.
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,
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.
*not legit new/diff
**so same song
..Marx ultimately wanted to liberate human beings from everything that held back or denied them control of their creative capacities, by which he meant first 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?
perhaps because always have been in sea world.. so not legit free art ists.. let’s do this first.. for (blank)’s sake
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.
*i don’t buy that.. i think we just have no idea..
**because still in sea world
hari rat park law et al
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.
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.
massimo de angelis.. silvia federici.. david on marshall..
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be you. 