Before the Fetish

Alexandra Cook

This dissertation builds and theorizes a corpus of the many feitiços, fetissos, fetiches, and fetishes that, with the advent of Iberian traders along the Atlantic coastlines, materialized and circulated in early modern West Africa before the institution of what we now refer to, in the singular, as “the fetish.” It contends that the techniques and forms that elicited the accusation of fetishes were devised in response to new and varied pressures of the highly dynamic trading contexts of early modern coastal Guinea: to make meaning out of confusion, to anchor unstable notions of value and truth, to shape outcomes by bending fortune to human will, and to assert control and possession in the face of disorder and dispossession. These forms and techniques are the subject of this dissertation, which departs from the thesis that, coded into each use of the term “fetish,” there is an...