Borrowing its title from the seminal 1985–87 series of articles by William Pietz on “The Origin of the Fetish,” this seminar examines the social, religious, and economic conditions under which the word fetish was coined in the seventeenth–eighteenth century on the West African coast. The course then considers the evolution of the word from an idiom descriptive of a type of objects created in the interactions between European travelers and Africans in the early modern period, to an analytical term that played a central role in the perception and study of non-Western art in general and African art in particular. Class discussions and readings focus on historical texts as well as recent scholarship, and make use of Yale’s collections.
Taught by Cécile Fromont, Spring 2019