The problem of the fetish, Illa Bosman’s Guinea and the enlightenment theory of fetishism WILLIAM PIETZ In my second essay in Res (Pietz 1987), | traced the ‘origin of the term “Fetisso.”" | argued that it came to express a novel idea whose fundamental problematic: lay outside the theoretical horizon of Chistian theology despite its linguistic derivation from Christian juristic discourse as the Spanish and Portuguese word for “witchcraft.” In that essay, the formation of the fetish idea in sixteenth-century Afro-European discourse was explored in terms of a shift in core concepts: the key Christian ideas about witchcraft were “manufactured ‘esemblance” and “voluntary verbal pact,” whereas the Central concepts of the Fetisso were “personification of ‘material objects” and “fixed belief in an object's supernatural power arising in the chance or arbitrary conjunctions.” Indeed, | argued that what was most ‘marginal and conceptually obscure for the Christian theory of witchcraft—“‘vain observances” and “veneficia”— became central in the notion of the In the present essay | look more closely atthe «complex idea of the fetish found in the travelogues written by northern European merchants and clerics visting black Africa, texts that were read and boroprated by radical intellectuals of what might be called the anti-Leibnitzian moiety among champions of the Enlightenment (a category broad enough to include figures as theoretically diverse as Hume, Voltaire, de Brosses, and Kan. In the first two sections, | reconsider the original idea ofthe Fetisso, not in order to contrast it with feudal Cheistian thought as in my previous essay, but in order to grasp its practical and ideological '. Due ois length, this esay appears in two parts: the fist halt separ: her; the rest willbe published in Res 17, spring 969, | ail he expres my deep grate o Rane Pela the ator of es, both for his extensive suggestions regarding revisons of {hs essay ad for his understanding when | pefaned my ongiat formulations. Any ifeicitous diction or unnecessary bucorey in this tenis my responsibilty eniely. Ion (One of the ways of extending the range of anthropology is traveling, or at least reading travelogues. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View significance for the commerce-minded Europeans who authored the travel accounts, In particular | focus on the 1703 text of the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman and on accounts of the serpent worship at the slave Port of Ouidah, for these were, respectively, the great authority on black Africa and the paradigmatic example of a fetish cult for eighteenth-century Europe.? For ‘merchants like Bosman, as for the clerics who accompanied them, such as the French priest Loyer who first asserted the nontheistic status of African fetishes, the worship of fetishes represented the central institution of African culture and society and the one ‘most responsible for its perceived perversity. It was Bosman’s explicit thesis that African fetish worship was founded on the twin pillars of “supersttion’” and “interest.” African society, conceived according to the ‘mercantile ideology of traders such as Bosman, was a world turned morally upside down by officially enforced superstitious delusion that suppressed men’s reasoning faculties. The “fetish worship” examined in the first half of this essay thus pertains not to the real West Africa of the eighteenth century but rather to Enlightenment Europe's image of “Guinea.” 2, Variusly spelled "Why," "Whidah,” “Whidaw," "Ouidah, “uid, “hada,” and; by Bosman, “Fda.” Tha was the Principal port fr slaves fom Dahomey. In Bosman’s day was an Independent Ewe-ruled sate; not many years ater his departure was conquered by Dahomey (se note 36 below). 23. We might take the word “Guinea” as tell an emblem ofa novel problem constitutive of the new discourse and theory characteristic ofthe Enlightenmont. “Guinea” was the wend ued to designate black Afica—a non-European, nonmonetheist and net covered by the histories and cultural codes of ol Europe or clascal antiquity. But “guinea” was also the word for the god coin, which, being the frst machine manufactured coin and therefore the fst cin immune to debasement by clipping and shaving around the edges helped bring about Europe's unprecedented monetary sabi afer 1726, (This the date given by Pree Vilar in his chapter on “The {8th Century Conjuncture” in A History of Gold and Money, 1450 1920, tr Judith White, Aanic Highlands: Humanities Pres, 1976),106 RES 16 AUTUMN 68 Bosman’s Guinea was a world of public corruption and popular delusion created by the libertine and priest-ridden religion of fetish worship. For Enlightenment intellectuals, fetish-worshiping Guinea became the definitively extreme example of a society made immoral, a government made unjust, and a people kept irrational by the economically self- interested promulgation of religious delusion. The ‘African fetish worshiper became the very image of the truth of “unenlightenment,” as a reading of Voltaire’s Candide in the third section of this essay (Res 17, spring 1989) will argue. in this and a final section of the essay | trace the appropriation of the “travelers’” discourse about fetish worship by French intellectuals of the age of the Encyclopedie. It was in this period, the late 1750s and early 1760s, that the Burgundian hilosophe Charles de Brosses first proposed a general theory of fetishism and coined the term “fétichisme.” ‘My particular concer in what follows is to trace both the continuity in descriptive and explanatory concepts of African fetish worship and the discontinuity in regard to ideological purpose found between two sets of texts: the firsthand accounts of Guinea and the philosophical writings of Enlightenment intellectuals. Continuous is the conception of fetish religion as the worship of haphazardly chosen material objects believed to be endowed with purpose, intention, and a direct power over the material life of both human beings and the natural world. This conception implied 2 type of materialistic cult incommensurable with traditional Christian categories: the alternative of ‘monotheism (with its three varieties of Christianity, ‘pp. 253-262. For the story ofthe guinea, see John Porteus, Coins in istry (New York: Pam, 1969], pp. 212-214, 219, 233) The ‘connection between the two meanings ofthe word of course, not abitrary; the coin was ft suck in 1668 by the English Royal’ ‘African Company fom god imported from West Arica. I's almost 4s if between these two psychopeopraphical poles ofthe distant Strange land andthe new mysteriously monetarzed Europe, all ‘natural objects with commodity value appeared in 2 new, exotic light almost a new field of consciousness Fr "Guinea was also an ‘acjectve added to familar nouns to name new things and species {hat now appeared in Europe as commodities imputed fram traf lands: not just “Guinea gold” but “Guinea fow,” "Guinea hens,” "Guinea com,” “Guines pepper,” "Guinea wood,” and 90 on Indeed, the adjective “Guinea” came to stare Yor any fa-o and, ‘not ust black Afica. For instance, “guinea pgs are fom South ‘America. And of course a "New Guinea” was discovered inthe South Seas already in 1545. Finally the word "Guines” connoted the _ratest and most profitable of contemporary abormination. the ‘ican slave trade. A "Guinea ship” was a slave ship, and 3 “Guinea trader" a slavedealer, Judaism, and Islam) or polytheism (an amorphous range (of cult activity all classifiable as idolatry: the worship of false gods). Making this implication explicit in his Original treatment of fétichisme, de Brosses’ new theoretical terminology redefined the problem of historical religion from one of identifying the varieties of theistic belief to that of deriving types of belief from people's “manner of thinking” about causal powers in material nature. This shift displaced the problem from theological discourse to a psychological-aesthetic discourse consistent with the emerging project of the human sciences, Also continuous between travel accounts of Guinea and theoretical Enlightenment writings was the idea that African fetish worship was an institutionalized religious delusion that functioned effectively in maintaining the {allegedly perverse) social fabric of black nations. The efficacy of fetish beliefs to sanction all forms of social obligation (from marriage and sexual fidelity to political loyalty and commercial contractual agreements) was. understood to derive from its core religious delusion: that the fetish would supemnaturally cause the physical death of those who broke faith. Fetishism thus represented a principle of social order based on an irrational fear of supernaturally caused death rather than 2 rational understanding of the impersonally just rule of law. It therefore revealed the true political principle (always supplemented by arbitrary despotic violence) that governed all unenlightened societies, since ignorance about the workings of physical causality — the very definition of a mentality lacking ‘enlightenment’ — provided the ground of religious delusion necessary for this system of social obligation to work. As a fundamental principle of both individual mentality and social organization, fetish worship was the paradigmatic illustration of what was not enlightenment. What is discontinuous in the text of fetish worship between the travelogues and Enlightenment philosophy is the implicit judgment regarding the moral value of “interest” as a motive. Bosman and other authors ‘employed by the various national Indies companies presented a picture of African fetish worship as the perversion of that very rational self-interest which, in their view, should be the natural organizing principle 6f good social order. Intellectuals of the French Enlightenment reversed this interpretation, viewing ‘exploitive fetish priests and greedy merchants as equal ‘embodiments of the essentially antisocial motive of “interest.” In this ideological reversal, the key aries