The Spirit of Matter: Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects [1 ed.] 9781805390152

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introductions
Chapter 1. The Auto-Icon
Chapter 2. Toward a Methodology of the Concrete
Part II. Fetish and the Fear of Matter
Introduction
Chapter 3. The Spirit of Matter
Chapter 4. The Modern Fear of Matter
Part III. Do Catholics See Things Differently?
Introduction
Chapter 5. Trophy and Wonder
Chapter 6. Africa Christo!
Chapter 7. “I Am Black, but Comely”
Chapter 8. Seeing Things as Different
Part IV. The Time of Things
Introduction. Fetishizing the Commodity, in Real Time
Chapter 9. Things in Time: Commodity Fetishism before Advertising
Chapter 10. False Consciousness?: The Rise of Advertising
In Lieu of a Conclusion. The Future of Things
References
Index

Citation preview

THE SPIRIT OF MATTER

Methodology and History in Anthropology

Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford Recent volumes: Volume 45

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The Spirit of Matter: Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects Peter Pels

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THE SPIRIT OF MATTER Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects

Peter Pels

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Peter Pels

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pels, Peter, author. Title: The spirit of matter : religion, modernity, and the power of objects / Peter Pels. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Methodology and history in anthropology ; Volume 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023004601 (print) | LCCN 2023004602 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390145 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390152 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Material culture--Religious aspects--Christianity. Classification: LCC BR115.C8 P36 2023 (print) | LCC BR115.C8 (ebook) | DDC 261--dc23/eng/20230509 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004601 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004602

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-014-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-015-2 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390145

CONTENTS

List of Figures

vii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Part I. Introductions Chapter 1. The Auto-Icon: or, What a Secularist Relic Says about Modern Dematerializations Chapter 2. Toward a Methodology of the Concrete: or, Rematerializing Material Culture Studies

3 34

Part II. Fetish and the Fear of Matter Introduction

71

Chapter 3. The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy

76

Chapter 4. The Modern Fear of Matter: Reflections on the Protestantism of Victorian Science

102

Part III. Do Catholics See Things Differently? Introduction

123

Chapter 5. Trophy and Wonder: or, Bodies at the Exhibition

131

Chapter 6. Africa Christo!: The Materiality of Photographs in Dutch Catholic Mission Propaganda, 1946–1960

161

Chapter 7. “I Am Black, but Comely”: Mission, Modernity, and the Power of Objects in the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal

182

vi

Chapter 8. Seeing Things as Different: The Powers of Miming “Africa”

Contents

222

Part IV. The Time of Things Introduction. Fetishizing the Commodity, in Real Time

237

Chapter 9. Things in Time: Commodity Fetishism before Advertising

244

Chapter 10. False Consciousness?: The Rise of Advertising

261

In Lieu of a Conclusion. The Future of Things

298

References

321

Index

355

FIGURES

1.1. A 1980s photograph of the Auto-Icon in its cabinet, with the desiccated head set between the feet. © UCL Educational Media, used with permission.

7

1.2. The Auto-Icon in the South Cloisters of University College London in 2011. © Peter Pels.

9

P3.1. Article advertising the Afrika Museum in a local journal, St. Jansklokken, 10 July 1959.

124

6.1. A Holy Ghost Fathers’ stand at a Dutch mission exhibition in the 1940s. Photo by Fotografie Fictoor.

163

6.2. A so-called féticheur. Bode van de Heilige Geest 47/12 (1951): 166. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

164

6.3. A South African fortune teller. Africa Christo! 52/6 (1956): 20. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

165

6.4. A smartly dressed gentleman. Bode van de Heilige Geest 38–42/4 (1946): 48. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

166

6.5. Handa-woman made up for puberty feast. Bode van de Heilige Geest 46/1 (1950): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

168

6.6. A Maasai woman. Africa Christo! 48/3 (1952): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

169

6.7. An African salute. Africa Christo! 49/2 (1953): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

170

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Figures

6.8. An early example of a photograph of African Christianity. Africa Christo! 56/1 (1960): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission. 172 6.9. African Christian sculpture, Africa Christo! 58/4 (1962): cover. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

173

6.10. Photograph of a part of the African section of the AMATE mission exhibition, 1960. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission.

174

7.1. Article announcing the documentary “I am black, but comely” about the new Afrika Museum. Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958): 60.

183

7.2. Announcing the “Vademecum” broadcast on the new Afrika Museum. Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958), cover.

185

7.3. Cover of a printed guide detailing the permanent exhibition of the Afrika Museum around 1958. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission.

186

7.4. Two boys in blackface on the Feast of the Holy Childhood, 1954. © Missio, used with permission.

203

10.1. The “Bubbles” poster for the 1886 Pears’ Soap campaign by John Everett Millais. Wikimedia Commons.

267

10.2. The Pears’ Soap advertisement featuring US Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila (1898) during the US colonization of the Philippines. Wikimedia Commons.

268

10.3. The Guinness toucan painted by John Gilroy after Dorothy Sayers coined the “Guinness is good for you” slogan in 1935. Photo by Jibi44; Wikimedia Commons.

271

PREFACE

The title of this book was first conceived for an essay written in 1995 (Pels 1998; now Chapter 3). At the time of writing, I was not completely sure what it meant, and this book tries to spell out what in 1995 may have been an educated hunch. Pressed to sum it up, I would now say that the spirit of matter haunts a modern set of cultural patterns that have tried to assert the sovereignty of mind over matter, in a kind of “manifest destiny”—the North American political reference is intended— that subjected nature, human bodies and relationships, and all other raw materials of planet Earth to what it regarded as rational designs for a better future “for all.” The subtitle of this book, equally oxymoronic, brings dominant items of this haunting together: “modernity” and modernist self-representation manifested themselves in discourses and practices that claimed to achieve universality because of the secular and “natural” foundations of knowledge by which mind could conquer matter. Yet it ubiquitously and ceaselessly employed metaphors of religion in an attempt to exorcize the powers of objects as survivals of so-called traditional and past beliefs. Modern people thereby performed “tradition,” but such wishful uses of religious metaphors indicated deeply rooted modern anxieties instead—a kind of double consciousness: the near-conscious suspicion that these performances and designs were insufficient and unsuccessful in keeping at bay (human) nature and the vagaries of how the planet materially responded to these designs. My main target in this book, therefore, is modernity: how its self-conceptualizations try to subordinate, yet are haunted by, material manifestations of its own making (cf. Pels 2003a). My career has been largely devoted to the anthropology of modernity, contributing to the effort to decolonize a discipline that has too often focused on others, and failed to cross boundaries with other social sciences that focused more exclusively on modern selves. Neighboring disciplines like sociology have neglected those others, not least by preferring to ignore that colonialism was integral to modernity’s constitution. Such a focus rarely addressed the cultural patterns by which modern people

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(re)invented the traditions that their self-images required, traditions usually evoked by something modern people call religion or magic. As the chapters in this book testify, there is no secular modernity without “religion” or “magic,” just as there is no social life without (excessively) religious things. But religion and magic have been, at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, “provincial” and Indigenous North Atlantic concepts (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). Not only was “religion” since that time transformed to support modern claims to universality (Masuzawa 2005), but the concept may also not (yet?) be sufficiently valid to apply to other parts of the world (Engelke 2015; Meyer 2020). The simultaneous denial and reinvention of magic in modernity shows how it expresses modern desires and contradictions more than it describes what other people, presumed to be racially or ethnically different, do (Pels 2003a, 2014b). While this book does claim to say sensible things about what modernity is, it is not meant to define or explain “religion” or “magic”—although its arguments cannot be made without magico-religious things taking central stage. This is because its core topic is the power of objects—and yet, “the spirit of matter” indicates that this is a topic that can be approached only indirectly, by a kind of circumlocution, as a presence that cannot be fully represented by words. (Indeed, the seeds for this project were sown in a book on material culture that focused on objects in “unstable spaces” [Spyer 1998].) Put differently, people can usually feel they are affected by certain objects’ “thing-power” coming at them from an “outside”—to use Jane Bennett’s (2010: 2) felicitous phrases—but they find it far more difficult to give a transparent explanation of why these objects do so. Such powers are literally occult: difficult to see, because, as the chapters that follow will document, their power arises from a contingent dialectic of objectification and embodiment in which the performance of the object calls up multiple times and places in the affective subject: pasts, futures, and hyperreal elsewheres that these objects make materially present by their performance, yet that depend on how the objects move their subject’s (sub)consciousness. However, I will argue in Chapter 2 that I am not happy with the dichotomy of subject and object: instead, I use an analytic stressing the dialectic of objectification and embodiment that confronts material bodies with equally material things. Even more, this involves things that are also produced by nonhuman beings (that grow by themselves, for example). Material culture studies has far too long taken artifacts as its point of departure, feeding an implicit hubris about manufacture that may call forth the wrath of present-day equivalents of the Greek Gods.

Preface

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This last reference to a European “future past” (cf. Koselleck 2004) indicates the specific role that my interest in the anthropology of modern time came to play in this project. If this book is not intended to discuss (or, if you want, define) the “real” of “religion,” “magic,” or “fetish”—I may still attempt to do so, but not in the following pages— the presence in modernity of the kind of pasts that these concepts evoke is necessary for my arguments. Moreover, these pasts call up their own futures—as Parts I and III show, often negatively, and as especially Part IV shows, in a kind of “future positive” mode in the case of techno- and commodity fetishism. My focus on time and temporality is crucial to my arguments because of several reasons: firstly, modern claims to universality are based on a classical Enlightenment model of knowledge that stresses its timelessness, rooted in “objective” nature and its unchanging “laws”—a conceit of having arrived at and consecrating history’s telos that betrays that modernity’s attempts at secularization of humans and history are still partial at best. Secondly, this book tries to rehabilitate the methodological necessity for the humanities as well as social sciences and field sciences of contingency: the ways in which time constitutes rather than inhibits social knowledge (see especially the end of Chapter 2). Thirdly, I would not be faithful to the preceding point if I would conceal that these chapters were written at different times, for different purposes, and that more than half of them were (largely) written before the idea of writing a book about materiality and modernity crossed my mind. The decision to republish certain chapters (especially in Part II) is meant to give readers access to such historical contingencies. More importantly, as especially Part IV brings out, an awareness of the contingencies of human-thing entanglements—of putting back time in things—may help to solve some of the conundrums that social theory faced due to essentialization, both “folk” and academic. Time is also important because this book has been long in gestation, and much has happened in the field of material culture studies in the meantime. An important publication like Rosalind Morris’s masterly “After de Brosses” (2017) appeared well after most of these chapters were written, and while it proves useful in the following pages it addresses discourses of fetishism rather than fetishes or excessive objects as such—as the contrast between her focus on Karl Marx’s texts and my focus on Karl Marx as suffering fetishization himself (in Chapter 8) brings out. I already enlisted the support of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in this preface, also published after many of my chapters were finished, but her philosophical and political-ecological interest is far more general, and less concerned with the specific in-

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sights we can gain from studying excessive objects. I did not learn about Jean-Pierre Warnier’s older discussions of praxeology (2001) until recently, but his emphasis on the shifting material boundaries between bodies and objects supports my use of Bourdieu’s dialectic of objectification and embodiment, and how it should lead to a critique of the distinction between subjects and objects, or meanings and things. I have more difficulties with the “ethnographic theorizing” of “artifacts” by certain self-confessed proponents of an “ontological turn”: it seems to me that to “treat meaning and thing as an identity” so as to arrive at a more “radical” essentialism (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 3) in fact imports modern cultural presuppositions (such as the early nineteenth-century notion of essentialized identity employed by Jeremy Bentham—see Chapter 1) through a methodological back door.1 The turn to ontology may be more complex than that, but this particular gesture strongly resembles the kind of double consciousness that also characterizes Arjun Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism,” criticized in Chapter 3 (Paolo Heywood similarly criticizes the ontologists’ claim to develop “just a method” [2017]). In any case, I employ an older and more social conception of ethnography throughout this book, which—rather than putting the difference of indigenous meanings center stage—draws on exploring the gap between native points of view and how they are realized in social practice (a seminal statement being Bronislaw Malinowski’s discussion of “the Ideal in its actualization” [(1926) 1972: 119]). I also apply it to modern selves rather than reinforcing anthropology’s classic obsession with others. However, this book does try to make a contribution to the theory of materiality, especially in Chapters 2 and 4. Chapter 4 was originally a contribution to a symposium that led to Daniel Miller’s edited volume (2005), but he wanted me to revise the essay in a way that disagreed with my conception of it (see the Introduction to Part II). In the meantime, much has happened in Material Culture Studies at University College London, as a recent edited collection shows. While its researchers mostly continue to focus on artifacts, many have “come to trouble the subject-object dyad” that was still prominent in Miller’s 2005 volume (Carroll, Walford and Walton 2021: 8). Issues of time and scale (see Chapters 9, 10, and the Conclusion) have become more central to material culture research, and a suspicion of linguistic models of representation that was at the basis of my 1998 essay has also become more common (Carroll et al. 2021: 14). I am not aware, however, that the Material Culture Studies unit at UCL has ever studied the Auto-Icon in the UCL South Cloisters, by which I introduce the main topic of this book.

Preface

xiii

Finally, time was crucial because delays in finding a publisher for this book crucially affected my perspective on it by the occurrence, in the meantime, of three major social upheavals outside of academia: climate activism such as Extinction Rebellion, the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. Climate activism, in particular, made me realize that my students no longer faced the kind of open future that seemed available when I started my academic career, and the pain of witnessing their anxieties made me lose some of the motivation for working on a pursuit that seemed esoteric at times (but it does so no longer). The pandemic, on the one hand, affected my motivation to work on the book in a similar manner, but, on the other, modified our dialectics of objectification and embodiment so drastically in 2020 that it confirmed the analytic focus of this book, and reinforced my suspicions about the antisocial effects of digitization (see the Conclusion)—as the collective sense of relief among a majority of teachers and students on being allowed back into a “real” classroom in 2021 demonstrated. In contrast, the response of Black Lives Matter to the public resurgence of white racism (especially in the guise of a president of the United States), not least when reinforced by the decolonial agitation of Rhodes Must Fall spreading from Cape Town, gave me a different sense of engagement, with immediate effects on my academic activities (see Pels 2022). In revising the book, I repeatedly confronted, but also resisted, the temptation to update my thoughts about human bodies and possessive individualism in response to people’s growing awareness of the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in the present. Such an awareness is crucial to the effort of desacralizing and decolonizing the forms of humanism that this book so often targets. Moreover, Igor Kopytoff (1986) demonstrated early on that the relationship between humans and things is brought into sharp relief by rethinking chattel slavery, and I do touch on the topic obliquely by discussing how human bodies have been treated as things (see Chapter 2). However, it would be more honest to say that my thoughts about materiality and the spirit of matter allowed me better purchase on the complex problem of understanding racism and race, than that it happened the other way around. (That may be white privilege speaking.) Moreover, addressing such burning topics by adding parentheses and footnotes to texts that I had already written would be disrespectful toward a topic that should receive undivided attention. I therefore decided to explicitly address racism and race only where the ramifications of my approach for understanding them might raise misunderstanding (as in my use of W. E. B. du Bois’s “double consciousness”), or where its

xiv

Preface

relevance to such issues should be made apparent (as in my discussion of ethnic labels like “Africa” in Part III). I have become increasingly interested in researching transatlantic “African” heritage recently and hope to give the topic of racism the attention it deserves in forthcoming publications that derive from it. This book does not give an exhaustive overview of excessive objects. In fact, such a project of surveillance seems somewhat foreign to the book’s topic, since it would replace the contingent surprises of excessive objects with the pretense to neutralize them in a universally rational and encompassing scheme. Excess leads to understanding, but, almost by definition, inhibits the realization of the desire to make that understanding all-encompassing. It might be better to say that the book claims to illuminate and understand certain crucial modern paradoxes: that modern people aspire to be free from materialism yet constructed a consumerist and materialistic society; or that consumers usually strive for possession, but equally often concede that possession does not lead to fulfillment (the first global pop song was, after all, “Can’t Buy Me Love”). Excess and paradox are joined by a further imbalance resulting from the fact that the chapters in this book reflect the contingent development of my own research interests—a development that, like collecting objects, may pretend to be coherent, but in fact shifts register in the course of its own unfolding, adding counterpoints to earlier statements. In fact, that is where the book started in the first place, deriving, in particular, from William Pietz’s pioneering work on the fetish (1985, 1987, 1988; see also Apter and Pietz 1993 and Spyer 1998), in a kind of counterpoint to the simultaneously developing interest in more mundane material culture (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Thomas 1991). I hope it shows that such thinking by counterpoint is an endeavor worth our while.

Note 1. Vigh and Sausdal (2014) in fact make the ontological turn into a far more Eurocentric endeavor than I do here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is no author without counterpoints, and I want to thank those people without whom this book would not have come about. Without Lynn Meskell’s invitation to consider turning my writing on materiality into a book, this would never have gelled into a project, and I would never have had to pose the question whether there was any coherence to my interests. Lynn was also, together with Ian Hodder, responsible for broadening my views in the direction of archaeology, although too little of what they taught me has found its way into this book. Patricia Spyer stood, without both of us realizing it, at the beginning of this project when she invited me to contribute what is now Chapter 3 of Border Fetishisms (1998); her friendship and collegiality over the years have been a constant source of intellectual comfort and excitement. Webb Keane, too, was a regular interlocutor in the context of different projects over the years, and I am grateful for his inspiration and fundamental insights. Bill Pietz has been a constant object of admiration and source of insight since we first met in 1995. Johannes Fabian triggered my interests in material culture in the first place and taught me more about my profession than I can ever acknowledge. Anke Kamerman has probably made me understand material culture more than anyone else, and will, I hope, continue to do so in the years to come. Several colleagues have contributed to different chapters in this volume. I thank those who helped with individual chapters in the footnotes to those chapters themselves, but some of them also influenced this book as a whole. Nicholas Dirks and the late Fernando Coronil commented on an early draft of Chapter 3 and thereby helped set the stage. Daniel Miller was responsible for the invitation that led to the writing of Chapter 4, and I have been in (sometimes unilateral) conversation with him since. Birgit Meyer invited me to the EASA panel that led to Chapter 7, stimulated the publication of Chapter 4, and continues to be an important interlocutor ever since we started our PhD research at more or less the same time on a very similar topic (and with the same supervisor). Pieter ter Keurs, Michael Rowlands, Oscar Salemink, Wayne Modest, Rogier Bedaux, and Harrie Leyten

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Acknowledgments

helped me to develop the arguments in Part III in general. Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry made me write an essay on magical things that has left traces, especially in the Conclusion to this book, as have my discussions with Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman, and Dorien Zandbergen in the context of the “Cyberspace Salvations” project. Without Sabine Luning, intellectual sparring partner for well over a decade now, the book would not have developed its reflections on economic anthropology, commodification, and scale in Chapters 8 and 9, just as the reflections on methodology in Chapter 2 could not have been written without discussions with other Leiden colleagues, and Igor Boog in particular. The “temporal spirit” of the book owes a debt to colleagues and friends in the “Futurities” project: Erik Baehre, Bart Barendregt, Andrea Cerda, Zane Kripe, and Marianne Maeckelbergh; and Zane and Andrea helped organize meetings with colleagues on (African) futures, among whom Elizabeth Ferry, Jane Guyer, Juan Obarrio, Achille Mbembe, and Charles Piot were particularly influential for my thinking. My more recent collaboration with Jasmijn Rana on diversity and democratizing heritage institutions has led to a perhaps even steeper learning curve on my part. I am very grateful to Dan Hicks for a meticulous, generous but also profoundly critical review of the book for an earlier press—this has become a much better book due to him—and two anonymous reviewers for Berghahn Books for their constructive comments. I thank David Gellner and David Parkin and the staff at Berghahn—especially Tom Bonnington—for finally turning this into a real book. Finally, I owe a word of thanks to Phineas Taylor Barnum: while he anticipated Donald Trump’s career as a professional liar by more than a century, he still taught me more about modernity than many a social scientist. I am undoubtedly forgetting important interlocutors here and apologize to them for it. None of those involved in the book’s making is, of course, responsible for the views expressed in these pages, although I sincerely hope they will like what they see. Acknowledgments of permission to use earlier publications appear in those chapters themselves.

PART I

Introductions

Chapter 1

THE AUTO-ICON OR, WHAT A SECULARIST RELIC SAYS ABOUT MODERN DEMATERIALIZATIONS

In 1832, in a will drawn up shortly before his death, Jeremy Bentham, the self-proclaimed founder of Utilitarianism, left his body to medical science on the condition that some of its parts be used to produce an “Auto-Icon” that would be preserved in a cabinet, seated on his own chair and wearing his own clothes, and occasionally made present to friends and disciples should the desire to do so arise. His friend and surgeon, Thomas Southwood Smith, made sure Bentham’s wishes were carried out: after delivering a lecture over his friend’s remains, he prepared and stored the Auto-Icon and sometimes wheeled it out to Utilitarian gatherings. When Southwood Smith ceased to practice medicine in 1850, the cabinet, body, and desiccated head were donated to University College London. While the institution that Bentham inspired with his example initially received this gift with embarrassment, it was put on display at the end of the century, and until today gives the shivers to many of those who take a “Free Family Day Out in Central London.”1 As we shall see in this introduction, Bentham’s “Auto-Icon” oscillates between reverence and revulsion, monument and mockery, education and embarrassment. It is an object that violates and confuses the boundaries by which modern people try to keep objects and images in their proper places. Both less than a person and more than dead matter, the Auto-Icon addresses us in extraordinary and excessive ways, whether by demanding obeisance from disciples or generating horrific fascination in tourists, and thus exceeds any ordinary representation of the founder of Utilitarianism. No longer animated by its

4

The Spirit of Matter

original subject, the Auto-Icon has nevertheless acquired a capacity to address and possess us by the spirit of its dead matter. Since it is an icon of the secularist Jeremy Bentham, the modernity of this object seems hard to deny. Yet, since its inception, many observers classified the Auto-Icon as an idol, a relic, or a cult-item—as essentially religious and premodern. I think such paradoxes have to be understood by a complex modern need to reject, marginalize, and dematerialize such excessive objects, born of a fear that they might indeed possess us (rather than the other way around). As such, the Auto-Icon epitomizes the problems that modern people have with matter and materiality. It is an excessive object that interrupts our everyday flow and invites us to reassure our modern humanist and/or secularist selves by relegating it to another time, place, or personality type. However, in the attempt to banish such objects to a religious past or a pathological subjectivity, we often tend to forget our equally modern tendencies—epitomized by Bentham as well—to produce monuments, idols, fetishes, and a host of other excessive objects ourselves. I believe we pay a price for such amnesia: it prevents us from fully understanding how we engage with matter and materiality in our past and present. In the chapters that follow I argue that when modern people are confronted with excessive objects, they more often than not treat them as a pathology of the human subject—a pathology that, as words like fetish, relic, and idol indicate, they would like to understand in terms of a premodern, religious or magical mindset, but that understanding obscures that modern people habitually generate such excessive objects themselves, whether as art, commodities, or technologies. A better understanding of the power of objects requires us to rethink materiality as a historical process. This is not a simple linear process of increasing secularization and transparency of objects as they confront the humanist subject. Instead, excessive objects acquire their power through a history of religious ruptures and continuities and shifting layers and hierarchies of object forms. They make people experience a multiplicity of times and spaces at the moments that these objects arrest the flow of everyday life. However, modern humanists, by insisting that objects are not supposed to behave like subjects, and by exaggerating the separations that Protestant Christianity, capitalism, and science have introduced between them, have obscured our understanding of such moments. If humanism is often haunted by the spirit of matter, countering humanism may show that this ghost is surprisingly real. The second chapter of this part of the book will discuss the implications of this for material culture studies and set out how the differ-

The Auto-Icon

5

ent parts of this book counter humanist fears of matter. In this first chapter, however, I would like to employ the uncanny agency of the Auto-Icon to show the impossibility of the humanist attempt to banish excessive objects to an earlier, more religious epoch. Situated, in 1832, at a major watershed in the history of modern materiality—at the time of the emergence of our current understanding of objectivity (Daston and Galison 2007)—Jeremy Bentham’s desire to posthumously materialize his identity in an Auto-Icon produced a historical process of dismemberment, dislocation, and remembering of material items and qualities that reminded observers, through Bentham’s effigy, of multiple moments, stages, and places of their past, present, and future. The particularity and historicity of the Auto-Icon’s material constitution can help us understand why the excessive objects studied in this book require a methodology of material culture studies that resists modern tendencies to dematerialize objects, embraces their contingency, and teaches us that—contrary to the basic tenet of mechanical objectivity—things can never be (only) what they are. I start with a thin description of the Auto-Icon, in order to show an approach to excessive objects that, I feel, has been neglected in material culture studies. We can start understanding this neglect through the observation that many modern humanists shy away from dead human bodies (not even excepting archaeologists). That discussion will allow me to move on to a discussion of the politics of dead human bodies at the time that Bentham’s own was converted into the Auto-Icon. This critical historical analysis of “native points of view” on the Auto-Icon will, I hope, show that Bentham’s version of the modern veneration of transparency and utility was haunted by material residues from his past. Finally, this sense of being haunted can be generalized to explicate four modern ways of dematerializing social relationships that, I believe, prevent material culture studies from achieving its full potential—ways that, I think, have both a Protestant Christian and capitalist genealogy. (The problems these genealogies create for material culture studies will be discussed in Chapter 2.)

“Turn Left at Bentham”: An Encounter with an Excessive Object When studying material engagements between Dutch Catholic missionaries and East African mountain dwellers, I argued that the “thick description” of webs of meanings (pace Geertz 1973) should not be allowed to efface the thin description of their material mediations (Pels

6

The Spirit of Matter

1999: 27). In the same vein, a phenomenology of an encounter with the Auto-Icon may prevent us from overly sociologizing or culturalizing its social life (by employing a “fetishistic” methodology; cf. Appadurai 1986: 5).2 I cannot remember when exactly I was shown through the South Cloisters of University College London for the first time, but I cannot have been fully conscious of the fact that I walked on a marble floor and adapted my movements to the surrounding material constraints—plastered walls, corners, furnishings—once designed by an architect and built and maintained by construction workers. Being distracted by my UCL colleagues’ interesting conversation, I was most likely only subconsciously aware of the Cloisters’ Victorian aura—unless, of course, my companions explicitly drew my attention to their design. This subconscious tactility characterizes all our quotidian dealings with our material surroundings, just as I am not fully conscious of the computer I write this particular sentence on, or the room I write it in.3 These material frames are effective precisely because the level of skill I need to engage with them is embodied, sensory, and intimate, to such an extent that I can forget that these are all artifacts— supremely social things, once assembled by people who had a certain communication with or manipulation of other people in mind when they did so. It is one of the achievements of current material culture studies to have drawn our attention to the fact that such material frames constitute the normality of everyday life (Miller 1987, 2005: 5). However, at the Cloisters, when turning left4 and coming face-toface with the Auto-Icon, something peculiar may happen: walking and conversation—our normal frames—are interrupted by the object as it forces itself on our attention. My second encounter with the AutoIcon retained some of the wonder and curiosity of the first: while dulled by previous familiarity, the moment of interruption was not erased. (In fact, I seem to recall repressing a kind of juvenile jocularity—“Hey, Jeremy!”—when coming up against it once more.) The Auto-Icon is capable of arresting people’s movements, or even drawing them to itself. In most people, three reactions seem to stand out. Firstly, as my own experience indicated, the encounter with the AutoIcon makes people stop short and interrupt what they are doing—unless, of course, they were drawn by curiosity to the Auto-Icon in the first place. Secondly, they feel some of the wonder, curiosity, or horrified fascination with which people usually confront human skeletons or wax images—the kind of uncanny feeling that has been exploited by wax sculptors in Europe for centuries (Pilbeam 2006).5 Even when ignorant of its provenance or identity, we already feel we are in the

The Auto-Icon

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presence of something that is both more than an object and less than a human person. Thirdly, most people would experience a desire for identification: who is that? In fact, the Auto-Icon’s outer cabinet immediately gratified that craving, since its large, gilded letters proclaimed the sitter to be “Jeremy Bentham” (see Figure 1.1)—as if we are confronted with a person rather than a dead object. This identity of the dead object with the person was, as we shall see, also important

Figure 1.1. A 1980s photograph of the Auto-Icon in its cabinet, with the desiccated head set between the feet. The cabinet itself is encased by a second one made in 1940. © UCL Educational Media, used with permission.

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to Bentham himself, and it is echoed by many commentators (to the extent that head curator Sally McDonald felt she should address the Auto-Icon personally, in conformity with other contemporary museum relations with the deceased).6 It is this process of bringing dead matter and identity together—by stages of interruption, ambivalent animation, and personalizing being—that produces most of the object’s excess, and invites a more thorough consideration from the vantage point of material culture studies. Like a fetish, the Auto-Icon “comes to life . . . [when] some process has been suddenly interrupted” (Freud 1950: 201). Yet, the reemergence of the study of material culture in the late 1980s did not pay much attention to these interruptions. The seminal work of Arjun Appadurai and Daniel Miller, among others, has reinvigorated material culture studies by bringing commodities and consumer items back into the limelight—a limelight they had lost when anthropology and its neighboring disciplines turned away from museum collections to more immaterial objects such as culture, function, and structure (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987). Despite their desire to restore all things to the position of social importance they take up in everyday life, however, their focus on commodities and consumption runs up against certain limits. Appadurai, while promoting material culture, banished “fetishism” to a subordinate methodological role, despite the fact that it is a matter of ethnographic record that objects move people (if not, perhaps, as often as people move objects). Like Appadurai, Daniel Miller has, after he justifiably criticized the negative view of consumption that follows from the critique of commodity fetishism, increasingly dismissed fetishism as a chimera cherished by academics only (compare Miller 1987: 204 to Miller 1995, 1998a: 128). His desire for “a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction” (2005: 38) reads, just like Appadurai’s “social life of things,” too much like a people-things romance to allow much room for objects that forcibly interrupt our everyday routines and generate anxiety by doing so. This, I think, can be explained by the fact that they employ a model of materiality that is largely (but not exclusively) based on consumption and the commodity, and thus, on the human artifact—a model that generates, I think, a different concept of material culture than one that is based, just like the Auto-Icon, on a dead body.7 So how does this dead body achieve the rupture of our everyday frames? Its monumental context helps to distinguish it from its immediate surroundings, and since my first encounter with it (some-

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Figure 1.2. The Auto-Icon in the South Cloisters of University College London in 2011. A visitor studies the digital information about the effigy. The Auto-Icon was moved in 2020 from the Wilkins Building to a glass cabinet at the UCL Student Center. © Peter Pels.

time during the 1990s), the space around the Auto-Icon was turned increasingly into a museum space that invites contemplation. Still, Bentham’s presence in 2011 stood out from the interactive textboxes on the walls and the Koptos Lions (replicas from the nearby Petrie Museum) that faced him from across the hallway (see Figure 1.2). The Auto-Icon’s materiality and materials impressed themselves on my senses with their humanity and antiquity in more forceful ways: on the one hand, the spotlight in the cabinet made me immediately sense the Auto-Icon’s immobility and lack of animation, despite its human appearance; on the other hand, this apparently dead object looked at me (in the 1980s photograph of Figure 1.1) with its two pairs of glass eyes: one set in the wax head, the other in the original desiccated head between the feet. If my normal frames consisted of objects that remain inanimate and mute, this object seemed to possess at least a minimal social capacity for interlocution or address—a capacity that inanimate objects are not supposed to possess, at least in the modern humanism that informs much of the cultural contexts in which I normally move. The rupture in my everyday proceedings,

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therefore, had much to do with the fact that I was confronted with an object that seemed to behave like a subject, even at a nonverbal level. The object—to use Alfred Gell’s words—indexed an agency that was not my own but “distributed” over matter (1998: 96). But in a modern humanist context, where objects are not supposed to move subjects, “distributed agency” often also means “alienated agency”—agency not in its proper place, not under the sway of human sovereignty. More about that later. For now, we can propose that the interruption caused by the AutoIcon is a complex form of signification, one where iconicity and indexicality seem to work together in a supplementary fashion. One the one hand, the identity of the object clearly says it is an icon, a mimetic representation—we don’t even need Bentham’s own affirmation of its iconic status, the labels on the wall, or even the letters on the Auto-Icon’s cabinet, to see that. On the other, even when we do not yet know that the effigy contains Bentham’s bones, clothes, chair, and walking stick, or that his real head was originally supposed to top his stuffed body, we already suspect that some form of contiguity played a role in the making of this object: the wax head and the visibly old clothes and attributes index a past moment when the materials of the image were close to, or part of, some original living being. Of course, I use the terms mimesis and contiguity here to suggest a parallel with what James Frazer defined as the two basic operations of magic— homeopathy and contagion (Frazer 1922: 12–13). Like Michael Taussig (1993b) and Zoe Crossland (2009: 73), I believe that these joint operations help us to understand why certain signifiers tend to be associated with the powers of magic and the uncanny. Crossland makes these suggestions on the basis of an analysis of a photograph of the dead body, the death mask, and the skull of the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, thus reinforcing my hunch that—while they are also artifacts—all three things are mimetically as well as causally connected to dead human bodies, and that this seems essential for understanding their excessive or uncanny working. Human remains have always generated an uncanny oscillation between animation and dead matter and a fascination with the personal identity that was, at some time in the past, the source of their animation. And yet, the answer to the question “who is that?”—while adding a discursive element to the sense-impressions we already have, and thus triggering a different, symbolic process of semiosis—does not dispel the Auto-Icon’s uncanny impression and our suspicion that Bentham or some other subject (such as the UCL Board) is, indeed, addressing us across a temporal void through the icon of a dead human body.

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Humanism Dislikes Dead Human Bodies The supplementary working of mimesis and contiguity in our apperception of dead human bodies seems universal, but dead human bodies have rarely played a role in sociocultural theory.8 Dead human bodies show, indeed, how difficult it is to become fully modern (Latour 1993): despite strenuous efforts by modern people to erect rigid boundaries between the living and the dead in a majority of modern social institutions, modern people have been repeatedly frustrated by the refusal of the human corpse to remain unambiguously dead. Not even the most stringent medicalization of corpses, historicization of human remains, or denial of death has been able to purify away the excess we perceive when faced with skulls, bones, skeletons, corpses, and even icons of the dead (such as waxworks or photographs). To the contrary, the contrast with our modernist everyday frames may have enhanced the corpse’s excess, and made it haunt our modernist reassurances with its ghostly presence. This is why the dead human body may provide interesting new insights in our understanding of both modernity, religion, and material culture. The human body as such has, of course, been extensively theorized, especially in recent attempts to go beyond a Cartesian dualism of mind and body. The anthropology and archaeology of the body have moved away from the body as a kind of tabula rasa on which to inscribe sociality and culture, to emphasize the body as lived experience and as subject (Bourdieu 1977; Csordas 1990; Joyce 2005; Meskell 2000). However, this move still “rejects the notion of the body as object” (J. Mitchell 2006: 386).9 In fact, some of those studies may have reinforced our sense that the human body is strange material indeed. Judith Butler points out how she found the materiality of the body impossible to fix, as if the movement beyond their own boundaries was central to what bodies “are” (Butler 1993: ix). The materiality of the human body seems inherently transgressive: being both subject and object, both social construction and raw material, both cultural history and nature, it seems to throw some of the basic classifications of modern social theory in disarray. While sex—like other materializations of the body such as childhood and old age—is certainly a product of a process of social and political iteration (Butler 1993; see also J. Mitchell 2006: 387), the organic nature of the body introduces agencies into the process that interfere with such direct readings of the social and political. Thus, even if social theorists recently tried to correct an earlier modernist tendency to treat the human body as “mere (biological)

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material” by strongly emphasizing the body as living subject, this does not take away the oscillation between the body’s object- and subjectness. I propose that this oscillation is one of the main reasons that social theory has, until recently, mostly avoided discussing the material corpse, and that those disciplines that were forced into discussions of the materiality of the dead body by their subject matter are usually caught on the horns of a modernist dilemma that often reintroduces a mind–body dichotomy through the back door. Avoidance of dead human bodies in social theory follows different trajectories of purification. The Handbook of Material Culture does not seem to discuss dead or dying human bodies, and it pays attention to mortuary practices only in passing, that is, in discussions of objectification (Tilley 2006: 63) and of monumentality (Rowlands and Tilley 2006: 509–10).10 A specific focus on death and material culture still seems rare (see Hallam 2016; Hallam and Hockey 2001; Crossland 2009, 2010). Anthropological studies of death have always been able to take distance from death through exoticization (Fabian 1973)—death as something that happens to others (Humphreys 1980: 6). They often followed psychologists and sociologists by theorizing avoidance of the dead as a universal fear of death, yet this may be a modernist preoccupation more than anything else (Robben 2004: 3; see the end of this section). From the earliest studies onward, anthropologists have contrasted the modernist conception of an unambiguous biological separation of life from death—one that not even medical professionals consistently share (Youngner et al. 1989)—with the presumed “non-Western” tendency to treat death as a social process (Hertz [1907] 1960; Lock 1997). A comparative anthropological look at death and dying was long neglected after the first pioneering studies at the start of the twentieth century (Palgi and Abramovitch 1984), but a focus on dead human bodies in society may have taken off since the 1990s (Kaufman and Morgan 2005: 325). However, an early twenty-first-century reviewer still claims that the anthropology of death is “life-centered” rather than “death-centered” (Robben 2004: 13). A different mode of purification can be found in a discipline that is professionally committed to handling dead human bodies—archaeology. The passing in 1990 of the US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a particularly illustrative example of this: previous legislation dealing with so-called human remains more or less unambiguously lumped them with other archaeological resources—as objects of antiquity or the base materials of scientific research. However, NAGPRA redefined the contents of a grave as be-

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longing to the persons of the deceased and their descendants, thus granting the latter the right to determine their disposal—an act that redefines human remains in terms of living people and their ancestors rather than dead objects (Highet 2005: 434–35; Rose, Green, and Green 1996). With NAGPRA, “the specimen on the slide looked up through the microscope, stood up and shook a fist in the air” (Lackey 2006: 146). For this book, it is significant to note that this opposition between so-called human remains as an archaeological resource or object on the one hand, and as relatives of living people on the other, is often portrayed in terms of a dichotomy of “science” versus “religion” (Highet 2005: 429; Lackey 2006). But those classifications may also reintroduce the dichotomy of (living) minds and (dead) bodies through the back door. The dichotomies that marked the introduction of NAGPRA can be found elsewhere in archaeological relations to the dead as well. The idea of human remains as an archaeological resource was long supported by a view of archaeological excavation as an act of destruction that separates the past from the present by presenting the past as “something which has been arrested, as something static, dead,” but that view has now been challenged (Lucas 2001: 37). Archaeological practice is thus increasingly open to unexpected transgressions of its classification of human remains as a dead resource. Earlier overviews of the archaeology of the “recently dead” proclaimed that the “sanctity of the grave”—a moral principle also invoked by discussions around NAGPRA—was a survival of “animistic beliefs” that should not be allowed to make consideration of the dead more important than consideration of the scientific value of an excavation for the living (Celoria 1966: 183). However, excavations of burial grounds and crypts in England spread the argument that the dead have rights that archaeologists should respect (Scarre 2006; Tarlow 2006). Whereas “traditional styles” of archaeological writing “trend to objectify human remains as data and treat them like any other find or artifact,” a more “subjective” approach to them has become more appropriate (Downes and Pollard 1999: xi). One can even question to what extent this approach is, indeed, “more subjective.” For example, while initially the excavation of a church crypt in Spitalfields, London, was surrounded by protective measures largely because of the threat of contagion by possible smallpox spores in corpses, a more insidious health risk was discovered only later: “little air movement, high dust levels, poor visibility, restricted working areas, and the morbid nature of the archaeological material” (Boyle 1999: 190, emphasis in original). Indeed, excavators elsewhere also fell ill, or even quit their

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jobs altogether, because of handling Victorian corpses (Rahtz 1994). In these excavations, the dead were not only granted rights (Bahn 1984), but, as in the discussions about NAGPRA, they seemed to act on excavators through their material remains, thereby establishing a kind of agency.11 The disturbing experience of excavating human remains, therefore, cannot be simply put down to an opposition between the scientific definition of corpses as archaeological resources and the “animistic belief ” in the “sanctity of the grave.” Whether invoked by the need to protect Native American ancestors or seen as rights of (once) living Victorian subjects, much archaeological engagement with dead human bodies also seems to show a confusion of subject and object and the transgressive nature of the material human body that Judith Butler observed. To heighten confusion, and contrary to those who want to classify it as premodern religion, the notion of the “sanctity of the grave” may turn out to be a modern sentiment as well. Historians from Philippe Ariès onward have documented how modern institutions increasingly banished death and the dying, cemeteries and hospital wards, from everyday life (Ariès 1974); others, how disturbing a grave may not have been a major source of worry until early modern times (Rahtz 1981). Ironically, Ruth Richardson has shown how worries about disturbing graves increased by the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century due to the growing need for corpses for anatomy lessons in medical schools; this led to major class differences in “body-snatching” from fresh graves with middle- and upper-class cemeteries being protected while it remained comparatively easy to illicitly exhume fresh corpses in “Potter’s Fields” or in African and Native American graveyards (Richardson 1988; cf. Highet 2005). This, in fact, is the context in which the Auto-Icon was produced. In his 1824 essay on the “Use of the Dead for the Living,” Thomas Southwood Smith (1788–1861), who was Bentham’s doctor and became his personal taxidermist in 1832, remarked on the fact that, while it was not difficult to obtain bodies for dissection fifty years earlier, one now found riots, mobbing of medical men, grave guardians, and “mort-safes” (expensive iron cages that completely enveloped a grave; Southwood Smith ([1828] 2002a: 38). He attributed the regrettable reluctance of people to donate their body for the advancement of medical science to “ancient superstitions” (Southwood Smith ([1828] 2002a: 31). Likewise, Bentham himself thought the invention of the Auto-Icon could counter the profits sought by the famous Edinburgh body-snatchers-turned-murderers, William Burke and William Hare, who killed people to provide a medical school with corpses (Bentham

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[1831] 2002a: 7). Since this raises the question of how the discussion in the 1820s echoes some of the themes in debates about human remains today, let us turn to a thick description of the Auto-Icon.

The Making of the Auto-Icon The Auto-Icon—a unique invention of the man who became famous as the founder of Utilitarian philosophy, rational law, and the mechanics of prison or workhouse surveillance—cannot be understood outside the general context of British class politics, struggles over anatomy, dissection, and medical professionalization, and struggles over religion. Bentham originally decided to will his remains to science in 1769 (“on coming of age,” see Bentham [1831] 2002a: 2) so that “mankind may reap some small benefit” from someone who “had small opportunities to contribute thereto while living” (quoted in Marmoy 1958: 78). That may have had as much to do with his atheism and his disgust of clerical fictions and fraud (about which more soon) as with his utilitarianism. His own thoughts about the Auto-Icon, penned a year before his death, were posed as an explicit sequel to Thomas Southwood Smith’s essay “Use of the Dead to the Living,” first published in the 1824 Westminster Review, the quarterly co-sponsored by Bentham himself. Appearing just four years before Burke and Hare were hanged for murdering people in order to provide bodies for the Edinburgh Medical School, Southwood Smith—a Unitarian minister with an Edinburgh medical degree, who became one of the founders of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Crimmins 2002a: xxiii)—addressed the problem of how to advance medical science in the face of ancient superstition and the scarcity of bodies for dissection. Southwood Smith’s plea to legalize posthumous dissection was only realized by the Warburton Anatomy Act in 1832, the year of Bentham’s death. By that time, “burking” and “burked” had become familiar words (Crimmins 2002a: xxxvi, xl). In “Uses,” Southwood Smith claimed that, without anatomy, medical science was little more than quackery. A host of superstitions, however, caused, on the one hand, by the “natural feeling” that a body of a deceased friend was more than “a senseless mass of matter,” and on the other, by the prejudice that dissection threatened resurrection and the soul’s immortality, had prevented the legalization of dissection to keep pace with medical demands (Crimmins 2002a: xxvii; Southwood Smith [1828] 2002a: 29). After detailing the riots and protests against exhumation, he then not only proposed to legal-

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ize posthumous dissection but also that all unclaimed bodies in hospitals, and all bodies from poor-houses, work-houses, and prisons, be legally appropriated for medical science—as was already the practice in France.12 The class consequences of this were obvious: while the lower classes first suffered the consequences of medical research after they were buried in the so-called Potter’s Fields, now they were supposed to do so even before being buried—a rather cynical restoration of the sanctity of the grave. More importantly, Southwood Smith’s plea for anatomy locates the discussion in the attempt of a group of middle-class medical professionals to break the hold that the Oxbridge establishment (dominated by the clergy and aristocracy) had on the institutions of higher education. To achieve this end, an accusation of “ancient” religious prejudice against dissection was, indeed, functional rhetoric, although (at least in the British case) the violation of graves was not just a “illusion” (pace Foucault 1976: 125). More importantly, the subordination of anatomy and clinical practice to the Oxbridge emphasis on law, theology and history was seen by upper middle-class reformers like Southwood Smith and Thomas Hodgkin as one more sign of the corruption and backwardness of British medical education (Rosenfeld 1993; Poovey 1995: 40–42)—a movement of which the foundation in 1826 of University College London itself (by, among others, Bentham’s disciple Henry Brougham) was a symptom, although it did not acquire a hospital until after Bentham’s death. Bentham’s own “Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living,” written seven years after Southwood Smith’s essay, and a year before his own death, is a facetious and almost sarcastic addition to the latter. Bentham says he need not add to Southwood Smith’s “anatomical or dissectional” discussion, and will, instead, deal with the “conservative, or statuary” uses of the dead. Of course, he writes, “animal bodies” have been preserved for ages, in ice, bogs, rocks, or even under the Vesuvius’s ash rains at Pompei, but that all happened accidently, without a thought of “futurity, or of any use of which the dead might become for the living.” If the progress of the age asks that every man be his own broker or lawyer, he proposes, he should also be his own statue: every man should have his Auto-Icon.13 Bodies are interchangeable, and the soft and corruptible parts of one human body can serve for medical instruction as much as any other; but “the head of each individual is peculiar to him, and, when properly preserved [by, as Bentham’s will stipulated, Maori techniques], is better than a statue.” Why? Because identity—the source and standard of equality in geometry and similitude in Art—is preferable to similitude (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 2–3).

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Bentham subsequently proceeds to outline different moral, political, commemorational economic, and scientific uses of auto-icons, many of them directly connected to the positivist and anticlerical core of Bentham’s philosophy. Churches, he says, can be turned into “ready-provided receptacles for Auto-Icons—provided for all classes,— for rich and poor.” There, “every man would be his own monument.” But such equality was not mandatory: “Lords Spiritual and Temporal” could be disposed of in their own Honorable House, and in their sumptuous attire would form “a galanty-show” that would outdo the waxworks in Westminster Abbey and Mrs. Salmon’s Museum in Fleet Street (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 3–4). Bentham’s positivism and his dislike of spiritual or legal fictions show through when he argues that Auto-Icons will ruin the Heralds’ office: since Auto-Icons cannot be invented or forgotten, control over the invention, forging or otherwise corrupting of names of noble descent would become superfluous (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 5). Auto-Icons would generate “virtuous curiosity” because pilgrimage would be to benefactors of the human race rather than to see “miracles” and “impostures” (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 7). Auto-Icons would also save the expenses made on funeral rites, which now function like a tax “more grievous than any by which the lower orders, as they are called . . . are at present afflicted” (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 9). The more the essay proceeds, the less finished it seems, and the more Bentham seems to be joking with his audience, as he plays with the grand opportunities provided for phrenologists, who can posthumously measure the heads of their dead subjects at will (Bentham [1831] 2002a : 7), or the “dramatic and theatrical uses” of auto-icons, illustrated by a series of dialogues between great philosophers, among whom, of course, Bentham himself occupies center stage (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 12–15). Bentham has been accused of self-aggrandizement, narcissism, and vanity, and he also liked a joke (Dinwiddy 1989: 17, 18; Richardson and Hurwitz 1987: 197). But it was an age of hyperbole, and however facetious and vain both essay and Auto-Icon may seem, Bentham had been contemplating something like it since he was first impressed by Southwood Smith’s essay of 1824 (Crimmins 2002a: xx, xxxi). His last will not only struck a serious tone but was treated as such by his disciples. It asked Southwood Smith to dismember his body in order to reassemble his skeleton, stuffed and dressed “in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me,” “in such manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of the time employed in writing” (Bentham [1832] 2002b:

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8). This figure (accompanied by his favorite walking-stick)14 was to be placed in an appropriate box which, like the labels on the glass cases in which the soft parts of his body were to be contained, had to be engraved in conspicuous characters with his name and the day of his decease. On days on which “previous friends and other Disciples” should want to commemorate “the Founder of the greatest happiness system of morals and legislation,” Bentham’s executor was to convey the box “in such part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet” (Bentham [1832] 2002b: 8). In a paper annexed to the will and witnessed by Bentham’s signature, Southwood Smith wrote that Bentham’s head was to be prepared in the “New Zealand fashion,” just like the Maori mokomokai or preserved tattooed heads Bentham himself had seen and approved. Bentham’s body was to be used in a series of lectures for scientific and literary men, to expound the “structure & functions of the different organs the arrangement & distribution of the vessels & whatever may illustrate the mechanism by which the actions of the animal economy are performed.” This was meant to communicate “curious interesting & highly important knowledge & secondly to show that the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance & is kept up by misconception & that the human body when dissected instead of being an object of disgust is as much more beautiful [sic] than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful” (Bentham [1832] 2002b: 16).15 Southwood Smith held a public lecture over Bentham’s body on 9 June 1832, at the Webb-Street School in the presence of Henry Brougham, James Mill, George Grote, and other famous Bentham disciples, and proceeded to its dissection a day later (Crimmins 2002b: 31, 34; Marmoy 1958: 81). The published version of the lecture was far more critical than his 1824 essay about coercing “the uninstructed and ignorant” by legal means to give up their bodies from the poor house (which nevertheless would happen when the Anatomy Act was signed only three weeks later: Richardson and Hurwitz 1987: 198). The lecture also directly copied several passages from “Uses” about how understandable the veneration of the dead body of a friend is. Now, however, they referred to Bentham personally: his dead body and other materials—“his ring, his watch, his books, and his habitation”—“have an empire over my mind . . . they are capable of inspiring me with the powers, the feelings, and the heart of the master” (Southwood Smith [1832] 2002b: 69; cf. to Southwood Smith [1828] 2002a: 29). Note that Bentham’s death gave his surgeon the opportunity to state that the matters Bentham left behind exert a power

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of their own, a capacity that Southwood Smith likened to primitive thought in 1824 (“the virtue which the Indian is said to attribute to the spoils of him he kills”). However, another “savage” element—the preservation of Bentham’s head in the New Zealand fashion—spoiled it for exhibition. In its stead, Southwood Smith asked Jacques Talrich, a French wax artist, to make a model based on a recent bust, several paintings, and the mourning ring that Bentham had donated to twenty-four friends (“with my Effigie and some of my hair”: Bentham cited by Crimmins 2002a: xxxviii). The disciples’ and other visitors’ posthumous meetings with Utilitarianism’s founder did, indeed, take place until 1850, when Southwood Smith moved out of his practice in Finsbury Square and donated the Auto-Icon in its mahogany case with folding glass doors to University College London (Crimmins 2002a: xlvi)—but that starts yet another phase in the story.

The Auto-Icon after Bentham The University College London authorities received the Auto-Icon with embarrassment and confusion. Southwood Smith complained about the shame and secretiveness with which they treated it in 1857 (Crimmins 2002a: xlvi)—despite the fact that none other than Lord Henry Brougham, cofounder of UCL, recommended Bentham’s effigy to the UCL Council as “the most valuable wax figure I ever saw” containing, as it did, the “real clothes and staff of J. B.” and his “real skull,” and being founded on the “whole Skeleton” (cited in Marmoy 1958: 83). Both Bentham and Southwood Smith were conscious of the potential for ridicule that the Auto-Icon (both effigy and text) posed (Crimmins 2002a: xiv). Critics suggested that the text, when published, would dim the fame of Bentham’s followers’ “idol” (Crimmins 2002a: xv). Indeed, the Auto-Icon caused the secularist Bentham to be increasingly described in religious terms: a cleric and former amanuensis of Bentham, the Reverend John Colls, ridiculed the posthumous meetings of the Utilitarians as an attempt to “cheat themselves into the belief that the father of their sect, ‘though dead, yet speaketh’”—the precise Biblical words that Bentham used when outlining auto-icons’ utility to the clerical establishment (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 6; Marmoy 1958: 83). And inevitably, the Auto-Icon was described as a “self-composed relic,” although Bentham invited the religious description himself by classifying his disciples as “Pilgrims, the votaries of the greatest-happiness principle” (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 15; Richardson and Hurwitz 1987: 198).16

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Whether embarrassed about idolatry or vanity, the UCL Council kept the Auto-Icon in hiding for decades. When public attention was drawn to its existence in 1891, it was moved to the Anatomical Museum in 1897—not coincidentally, at a time when Britain was “mass-producing” invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983). On examination by a professor and a curator, the desiccated head was found interred in the cavity of the trunk (Crimmins 2002a: xlviii). The AutoIcon was passed, first, into the custody of the UCL Library in 1926, and subsequently, after being examined and restored by Egyptologist Violet LaFleur, placed in the Cloisters’ South Junction, where (after a sojourn in the countryside during World War II, and twenty years residence in the Senior Common Room) it mostly stayed until recently. The head is no longer on display because it is too fragile. Numerous legends and stories have sprung up around the Auto-Icon: he is said to attend the College Council meetings, and even to vote (invariably for the motion) when votes are equally split. In reality, he seems to have attended meetings only at special ceremonial occasions (Crimmins 2002a: li). His real head is said to have been stolen for ransom by King’s College students, and even to have been used for football practice.17 It played a minor role in the history of the “mismeasure of man” when Karl Pearson demonstrated that, contrary to what Victorian theories of hereditary or racial genius might predict, the measurements of Bentham’s head were in fact “mediocre” (Crimmins 2002a: lvii; see Gould 1981). Most ironically (for the secularist Bentham was scared of ghosts at night), a plaque on the South Cloister’s wall tells us about a report from Ripley’s Believe It or Not, that Bentham’s ghost went on a rampage when the Auto-Icon was banned from attending the UCL Council’s meetings. So whatever one thinks of the argument that human remains in museums should be addressed personally (as Sally McDonald addressed the Auto-Icon), it cannot be denied that Bentham’s conception of the object he called an Auto-Icon has provoked an uncommon variety of human responses.

The Auto-Icon as Iconoclash What kind of object is the Auto-Icon, and what can it tell us about excess in the relationships between humans and things? In the course of its cultural biography (Kopytoff 1986), Bentham’s dead body migrated through or assimilated a large number of, sometimes incompatible, object forms: a secularized specimen of medical study, a monument for the Founder of Utilitarianism, a mokomokai, an an-

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thropomorphized walking stick, an idol or relic of a quasi-religious sect, an object of curiosity and wonder, an object of ridicule and embarrassment, a gift unhappily received, a possession disowned, a “valuable wax figure” modeled upon several artworks, uncanny funereal remains, a grisly tourist attraction, a ghost—even a football. The materiality of the Auto-Icon is so excessive that, indeed, Judith Butler’s remark on the difficulty of containing human bodies in an unambiguous material form becomes an understatement. Hence my doubts about the tendency in material culture studies to understand the power of objects by means of the model of the artifact, for the “iconoclash” that characterizes excessive objects like the Auto-Icon is generated precisely by “the uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in the production of a mediator” (Latour 2002: 18). Human bodies are, especially when dead, ambiguous constructions, products (as the Auto-Icon shows) of both organic growth, self-manufacture, and somebody else’s hands. And as soon as such uncertainty raises its Hydra heads, it brings in the modern preoccupation with religion, objectivity, and acheiropoiesis—or the presence of things not (only) made by human hands (Latour 2002: 16). The Auto-Icon, therefore, helps us to define the problem of how to understand the excessive power of objects and images at minimally three interrelated levels: firstly, excess seems to point to uncertainty about the role of human hands in an object’s manufacture (and therefore about its classification as an “artifact”); secondly, an excessive object or image seems to be able to call up a multiplicity of times, places, and object forms in relation to its observers; and thirdly, the uncertainty and multiplicity of an excessive object or image seems to be directly related to a specifically modern set of preoccupations with religion, manufacture, and objectivity. The main proposition of this book is that we need to work through these problems—“timeful” in more than one sense—to be able to fully understand how we can deal with the more universal problem of how objects can become powerful enough to move people. Historically, the classification of the Auto-Icon as a relic or an icon of a sect testifies to the Victorian desire to reduce its transgressive power by banishing this object to another, “religious” time or place. At first sight, this seems quite similar to the earlier tendency of Protestant travelers to West Africa—Andreas Ultzheimer, Olfert Dapper, Willem Bosman—to compare African “fetish”-worship with Catholic “idolatry” (and both with the devil: Kohl 2003: 17–18; Pietz 1985, 1987). Indeed, the emergence of the notion of the fetish and the classification of the Auto-Icon as a relic have common roots in a Protestant Chris-

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tian history of iconoclasm that suspected “popish” idolatries and tried to reduce all material objects to either human artifacts or things made by God or nature—an iconoclasm that reverberates in the processes of secularization that followed in its wake. One of these traces was a secularized conception of religion that, by copying the Protestant emphasis on belief, divested it of most of its material mediations (Asad 1993), and that required recent studies of religion to rediscover them (see De Vries and Weber 2001; Editors 2005; Houtman and Meyer 2012). Both the early modern Protestant merchants in West Africa and the Victorian critics of Bentham’s self-monumentalizing perceived the Catholic practice of mediating salvation through (at least partially) manufactured materials as fundamentally superstitious and irrational, and they projected this irrationality on African “fetishists” and Bentham’s “sect” alike. The similarity is important: as I will show in this book, it gives access to genealogies of material culture studies that allow for a more accurate understanding of the place and power of objects in the present as well as the past. However, it may also be deceptive, for, as the history of the making of the Auto-Icon shows, it may gloss over fundamental historical discontinuities. The fact that Bentham himself was an iconoclast, and a secular one at that, suggests that anything like reproducing a Catholic relic was far from his mind. The making of the Auto-Icon suggests, to the contrary, that this object was meant to convey a transparent, “statuary” commemoration of his identity, supposed to render clerical and aristocratic traditions of material mediation—the Church as a sacred place, the priesthood, the Herald’s office—obsolete. In their stead, auto-icons should provide more objective, this-worldly, evidence of identity. This seems a form of identitarian positivism quite comparable to the rise of the modern notion of mechanical objectivity, and to the celebration of fetishism by Bentham’s fellow-positivist, Auguste Comte (Daston and Galison 2007; Kohl 2003: 86–91; Logan 2009; Pickering 1998).18 And yet, the stories around the Auto-Icon after Bentham also show that his ideal to immortalize a transparent identity could hardly compete with the response of modern people to the materials required for human taxidermy. In fact, the afterlife of the Auto-Icon shows little of the aniconism of the Reformation, or its emphasis on the this-worldly nature of the artifact that we may associate with British Protestant society, or with Bentham’s own iconoclasm. Bentham’s dead body seems to resist certain forms of subjectivation and dematerialization that we associate with modernity. What does the Auto-Icon tell us about these forms?

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Modern Dematerializations: What Occludes Excessive Objects A genealogy of opposition to Catholic idolatry and magic has shaped Protestant semiotic ideologies and defined the value of the human in “its distinctiveness from, and superiority to the material world” (Keane 2002: 71). Modernism has inherited this iconoclastic habitus from Protestantism and maintains the conceit that humans are and can be in control of their symbols and artifacts. This created a stratified social imagination in which this-worldly materials (matter, hands, wealth) were supposed to be treated as superficial and morally inferior, subject to faith and reason, spirituality and mind. This stratification affects secular scholars to this day: some assume that religion is about the “transcendence of the concrete” (Rappaport 1999: 5), others, that “most of the religions that dominate recorded history” were responsible for the idea that “materiality represents the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is real” (Miller 2005: 1). The first idea may obscure—as the study of “material religion” has amply shown (Meyer et al. 2010)—that even the most iconoclast religions may require material(ist) forms of “superstition” (such as the Protestant presumption that wealth may be a sign of Grace: Weber 1947a: 197). The second is historically misleading, since the attitude described by Miller also characterized most scientific revolutions since the 1880s, when objectivity started to shift from visible specimens to the relational invariants and family resemblances behind these appearances, accessible only through scientific training (see Daston and Galison 2007: 318; cf. Pels 2014a: 215). The Auto-Icon’s strange secularity helps to break down such imagined modern boundaries between science and religion, partly because it allows us a distanced view on iconoclasm’s utopian and futuristic (and hence, disembodied and dematerialized) tendencies in the recent past; and partly because it embeds these imaginations in the biography of a material body, and thereby suggests alternative, more critical ways of approaching them. The following outline of four modern ways in which social life is or can be dematerialized does not pretend to portray Protestant and secular iconoclastic legacies—that is neither a possibility for, nor an aim of, this book. It is meant to suggest how Protestant and secular iconoclasms have come to inhibit material culture studies, and thereby amplified the latter’s tendency to deny or explain away excess in objects. All four modern dematerializations, as well as their intersections, will be studied in the chapters that follow.

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The Unfinished Secularization of Matter In Bentham’s time, the secularization of matter was in full swing. Even if Bentham was firmly convinced that death was merely an “alteration in the modification of matter”—and we noted that he was, paradoxically, afraid of ghosts—it was wise to remain secretive about one’s atheism while ecclesiastical authority still dominated social careers (Crimmins 1986; 98; Richardson and Hurwitz 1987: 196; Schofield 1997). The self-proclaimed “Luther of Jurisprudence” may have explicitly wanted to shatter legal “fictions” to give people more democratic access to the law, but his editor, John Bowring, found it prudent to exclude Bentham’s essays on religion from the first edition of the Collected Works, because of their similar argument that natural religion “subverted the capacity of the people to know and promote their own interests” and because of the “sinister” alliance it forged between ruler and priest (Schofield 1997: 5–6; Yelle 2005: 157). Nevertheless, Bentham’s critique of natural theology should not obscure that natural theology had already partially secularized matter, epitomized in William Paley’s famous argument for the intelligent design of the universe in his “watchmaker analogy” (Paley [1802] 2008). Moreover, Bentham, Paley, and Southwood Smith all took part in the formation of a society in which the secularized abstractions of the body as a machine and as a specimen of a collective species formed the scientific foundation of the strategies of knowing and disciplining the modern nation-state’s population (Foucault 1980: 139; Poovey 1995: 37).19 But if Protestant natural theology turned “Nature” into an immanent mechanical resource—raw material for the scientific experimenter, inventor, taxonomist, or capitalist—it also contributed to its fetishization. Written with a capital “N,” nature was increasingly turned into an entity with independent power, an abstract “out-side” for humanity (J. Bennett 2010: 3). Natural theology combined the acheiropoietic agency of a Divine designer with the independent “natural” power of nonmanual production. But “Nature” also generated “wonder” beyond Christian theology, and Bentham was only one of the many inventive polymaths in this period who put nature on a pedestal in the hope that it would produce both independent authority and a career: the term “scientist” was coined only two years after Bentham’s death, to enter the Oxford English Dictionary in 1840 (Holmes 2008: 449–50). Bentham’s faith in the postmortem performance of his identity by means of the durable parts of his body, and his head in particular, show an early—and not widely adopted—version of the

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belief in liberation by “positive knowledge” that became widespread among Europeans at the time. It was directly related to the rise of “mechanical objectivity” and its pretense that the visual inspection of objects (usually in museums) would suffice to gain knowledge about them (Daston and Galison 2007).20 However, the positivist reification of “Nature” was, like its Protestant predecessors, only a partial secularization. What Talal Asad identified as the three major formations of secular modernity—nature, history, and the human (2003: 192)—emerged in a peculiar relationship to each other: as the next subsection will also attest, modern people have sacralized both “nature” and “the human” to such an extent that they came to stand in the way of the development of a truly secularized history. Bentham again provides an excellent illustration: his iconoclasm did not extend to destroying his own icon. Instead, he tried to monumentalize his human identity, to transcend history and achieve “futurity.” However, this initiated a history that neither his secular powers nor those of his followers managed to keep under control. Why does the Auto-Icon give us the shivers? Primarily because it reminds us of the other time of things, times of death and decay. However, its history also shows embarrassment at a misplaced monument, an embarrassment that reminds us today, at a time when “Rhodes Must Fall,” of its potential political resonance.21 Bentham’s desires with the Auto-Icon also highlight common “unnatural” and ahistorical tendencies of modernity that have lifted linear progress and “development” out of historical lifecycles, and assumed that identity can be treated as essential and timeless—thus laying the foundation for modern racism (see, again, the next subsection). We shall see, in the remainder of this book, that material culture studies still suffer, in trying to understand the power of objects, from this unfinished historicization of the relationships between humans and things. The excessive power of objects may still seem ephemeral, contingent, and transient to many modern eyes, but the point of “the spirit of matter” is precisely that those historicizing adjectives do not make it any less real.

The Tyrannical Sovereignty of the Human Subject Bentham’s preoccupation with retaining his identity posthumously— including his view that every man is his best biographer, and that every man should become his own monument—is based on a sacralization of secular humanism. Such sacralizations are usually based on the long-term development of a “possessive individualism,” which as-

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sumed that a fully developed man should be his own author, a person in possession of himself as well as his wealth.22 Daniel Miller rightly criticizes a transcendent tyranny of the subject, but we should question whether his desire for “a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction” (2005: 38) does not anthropomorphize the actual power of objects by subjecting it to a future ideal of popular sovereignty, now including “things.” The fate of Bentham’s own head reminds us of this: its preservation in the “New Zealand fashion” failed, recalling, once more, the power of objects to determine their own history of decay. This required his disciples to uphold the sovereignty of Bentham’s subject identity by rendering his head in wax instead—a plastic rather than acheiropoietic medium. Miller’s projection of a romance of “mutual self-construction” may cover up a physical history that highlights mutual destruction, with the tyranny of the subject being undermined by the power of the object’s decay. This is indeed a powerful metaphor for the understanding of modern popular sovereignty: at least partly a translation of the omnipotence of a Christian God to an impersonal and secular sovereign identity, whether in terms of “the people,” the nation, the population, civilization, or “the economy,” the future ideal of sovereignty always required putting certain people and present matters beyond the pale or in a state of exception—as not belonging to the proper ways in which the modern state should care for its citizens’ lives (Agamben 1998; Foucault 1980: 135–45; Schmitt [1922] 1988). The invention of infinite Progress and human development excluded, at least since Bernard de Fontenelle in the early eighteenth century, those people who were “still” too immersed in the concrete and the material to profit from them (Kohl 2003: 70; Logan 2009: 24; Rist 1997: 36). Even more, those excluded became collateral damage, victims of the death and destruction that would remain strewn over the landscape after the sovereign bourgeois subject, like a sorcerer “who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up” (in the words of the Communist Manifesto), had “developed” his environment—as Goethe’s Faust came to realize (Berman 1983: 75). The hubris of the modern sacralization of the human appears perhaps most traumatically in a version of what David Theo Goldberg called the “central paradox, the irony perhaps, of modernity” (1993: 4): the fact that those who formulated some of the core principles of modern humanism—such as the idea of human equality—also made sure that people whose skin color had condemned them to enslavement as chattel were excluded from humanism’s benefits.23

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The fate of enslaved people, in fact, highlights a central theme of this book: the fact that discussions in terms of subjects and objects may obscure that human beings do not experience materiality as a subject confronting an object, but as a body (both subject and object) confronting more or less inanimate objectifications (see especially Chapter 2). The fact that North Atlantic racism turned Africans into a colored object of proto-capitalist forms of exploitation cannot erase that enslaved people remained subjects of history, however much their physical bodies condemned them to servitude. Likewise, modern racists felt, from the very first New World slave-uprising onward, visceral anxieties and fears that such exploitation could not be condoned by some of the humanist principles they proclaimed, and that it might put their own bodies at violent risk. Thus, Bentham’s failure to have his presumably transcendental subject triumph over the debris that his body left behind after its death and (concrete as well as abstract) remembering becomes another powerful metaphor for the analyses in the remainder of this book.

The Evisceration of Aesthetics The previous subsection proposed that the sovereign subject’s selective violence needs to be carried out on some material thing, just as iconoclasm is ineffective without the performance of material destruction. This paradoxical act—a dematerializing operation on materials—is epitomized by two of the Auto-Icon’s constitutive features: one, the uncanny replacement of Bentham’s capacity for interlocution by the visual focus on his two sets of glass eyes, looking back at his audience from both the wax simulation and the desiccated head (see Figure 1.1); and the other, the stuffing of his body with the latter, making the seat of the mind serve as a kind of ersatz entrails. Both of these gestures index the third form of modern dematerialization: the evisceration of aesthetics (cf. Collings 2000). The glass eyes symbolize a tendency in post-Reformation natural theology to reduce sense-perception to distanced visual contemplation, from which all visceral perception—especially that which might be connected to taste, touch, and smell, and therefore to desire, disgust, and the body—was meant to be excluded. Such abstract visualism emerged during the Enlightenment, in the Linnean tradition of taxonomy, as a secularizing “diagrammatic reduction of the contents of thought” (Fabian 1983: 116), supported by a visual regime that proclaimed to be “true to nature” by the scholarly and artistic translation of the observation of individual specimens into depictions of ideal species (Daston and Galison 2007: 60).

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To the extent that Bentham’s Auto-Icon has been interpreted as part of the nineteenth century’s “monument mania,” a visualist discipline that concentrated, especially since the Great Exhibition of 1851, on turning spectators into proper contemplative bourgeois subjects, this reduction to visual aesthetics and its near erasure of the “lesser” senses was part and parcel of a broader movement toward modern social discipline. Bentham’s tendency toward ignoring the morbid, that is, the visceral foundation of auto-icons, is consistent with the tendency of the modern “exhibitionary complex” to banish excessive objects (despite their continuing popularity) to the margins of freak shows, fancy fairs, wax works, and, eventually, the entertainment industry (see T. Bennett 1995; Harris 1973; Kasson 1978). The history of modern museums and exhibitions shows a close but transient relationship to the live display of “savage” peoples, yet excluded such overly visceral excitements from bourgeois high culture. Like Bentham’s Auto-Icon, this once again suggests how we can learn to undermine modernity’s forms of self-congratulation by placing them in a more historical assessment of their unfolding, including, not least, the North Atlantic popularization of race science (I elaborate on this topic in Chapter 5). The critique of contemplative visualist aesthetics has been a recurrent feature of antimodernist critique in the twentieth century (Jay 1994), and work in the anthropology of the senses has shown that the scholarly neglect of the oral/aural, olfactory, and tactile registers of our material interactions has to be corrected (Classen 1993; Howes 2006; Taussig 1993b). While such ideas were hardly prevalent in Bentham’s time, it is striking how much value Bentham, Southwood Smith and his fellow disciples attributed to the material contiguity of Bentham’s body parts: a mourning ring was apparently incomplete without real hair, a wax bust became more “valuable” with the addition of the real skeleton, clothes, and walking stick, and only the failure to preserve the head forced a more artistic and aesthetic replacement to be manufactured in wax. At least Southwood Smith confessed to Bentham’s material remains as exerting—as excessive objects generally do—an “empire over his mind,” although we are not sure through what specific aesthetic channels. This all took place around the same time that “mechanical objectivity”—the representation of objects with as little intervention of the human hand as possible, soon to be exemplified by photography—came to displace the artistic depiction of ideal species (Daston and Galison 2007: 161). Such faith in objects was, of course, prefigured by at least two centuries of the collection of “rarities” (see Chapter 3). Even if we are not

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completely sure to what kind of semiotic ideology of re-membering Bentham and his disciplines subscribed, both the mourning customs as well as mechanical objectivity suggest a presumed capacity of objects and specimens to communicate their meaning directly to humans without a subject interfering.24 However, the most visceral reminder of the materiality of Bentham’s Auto-Icon may be the fact that, contrary to his and his disciples’ expectations of permanence, the maintenance of his “identity” after the transfer to UCL required ongoing work to prevent decay: the restoration of the body’s stuffing, the disinterring of Bentham’s real head, the replacement of the moth-eaten vest, the rediscovery and protection of the head that is now too fragile to put on display, the chemical process to kill an infestation of beetles (Richardson and Hurwitz 1987: 196; Crimmins 2002a: l)—all show that the evisceration of aesthetics, despite its desire for contemplative visual permanence is haunted by the organic, and hence, processual and temporal nature of matter, for the simple if paradoxical reason that the former is materially conditioned by the latter. While the other forms of dematerialization discussed in this introduction also—on closer scrutiny— manifest the spirit of matter, this is perhaps the dimension that makes its presence most inescapable. Again, this initially neglected aspect of material culture is crucial to understanding excessive objects and will turn out to be important in the chapters that follow.

The Reduction of Signification to Representation The desire of Bentham and his followers to work toward an immediate and nonarbitrary presentation of Bentham’s identity—one that, if we are to believe the rumors, even haunted UCL corridors—suggests yet a different counterpoint to the Protestant legacies inherited by modern culture. Bentham’s fantasy—of presenting his singular identity immediately, instead of representing its absence by a symbol—is commonly associated with “religion” (Bird-David and Naveh 2008; Eisenlohr 2009; Lester 2003) but is equally present in (post)modern technological and secular wishful thinking (Pels 2002a; see the Conclusion to this book). Often, studies juxtapose a prior divine immediacy to (inevitably material) mediation, but more recent work has complicated this assumption (Meyer 2013). This co-presence of immediacy and material mediation characterizes Bentham’s desires, expressed by his fantasy that Auto-Icons cannot be invented or forged, and can therefore give the transparent lie to, among other things, deceptions operated via the Heralds’ Office. Bentham’s sense of immediacy in

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the Auto-Icon did not derive from any “spiritual content” (Crimmins 2002a: lxv); neither should the Auto-Icon be seen as a symbol—as “standing for” or “representing” himself—since similitude or simulation were, to Bentham, decidedly inferior to the “identity” provided by his own head (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 3). Bentham’s desire for the immediacy of identity should, instead, be interpreted as a peculiarly modern desire not to have religious mediations (of the soul and its Anglican forms of redemption) determine what would happen to his person in the future. His presence was not to be materialized in the miraculous acts of a saint: Bentham’s Auto-Icon was not expected to procure the happiness of humanity other than by commemoration. Many of its critics notwithstanding, the Auto-Icon was never a relic in the Medieval sense (see Brown 1981): its nonarbitrary connections were supposed to move people by immediate identity, not by a miracle. This points to a characteristic that both fetish and Auto-Icon seem to have in common: their resistance to representation. Re-presentation was crucial to Protestant iconoclasm: it unmasked religious objects as symbols of divinity masquerading for the divine presence itself, and turned transubstantiation into a magic that was not becoming to a Christian (see Part III). This form of secularization was transferred to scientific circles, where representation privileges the symbolic, a kind of signification that, modeling itself on the abstract capacity of the word to label concrete entities, presumes a materially absent referent that reduces the material sign to a mere mediator of the sign’s meaning. Saussurean structural linguistics has elevated this divorce of the material signifier from the immaterial (structural) signified in terms of the doctrine of the arbitrariness of signs (see Keane’s critique: 2003: 412–13). Yet we know that, at a phenomenological level, people— modern or traditional—do not behave as if signs are arbitrary. We often act as if categories are valid descriptions, ignoring that their immediate congress with objects in the world is only a promise. Part of this willful amnesia is functional and allows our everyday essentialisms to operate without asking too many unnecessary questions about the extent to which the category is actually useful in describing our surroundings. Twentieth-century structuralism can be read as a running critique of the naivety of a pensée sauvage—both modern and other—that thinks that words and discourse give access to reality. The Auto-Icon, however, is nonarbitrary in a much more radical sense; it is not primarily discourse, nor a category: it is a singular material object. I think that Bentham’s Auto-Icon was intended as a proto-objectivist entity, an identity that anticipated, with only a few years, the promise of immediate knowledge offered by the me-

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chanical, yet often magical medium of photography (Aperture 2000: 7; Daston and Galison 2007: 161) If I am right, then the Auto-Icon should be seen as a botched attempt at abolishing representation. The more interesting thing, however, is to consider why it was botched: the failure to preserve Bentham’s head, its replacement by a wax model, the embarrassment that beset the UCL authorities on receiving the effigy, their investment in the restoration of its materials: all show that direct simulation is impossible without a temporal process of substitution of one set of concrete materials by another—glass for the eyes, straw for the entrails, wax for the head.25 This poses a radical alternative to a structuralist idea of representation, where the signified inheres in an immaterial as well as (largely) timeless structure. Processes of signification-by-material-substitution suggests that the Auto-Icon can make us reconsider the role of the material in communication in general. In one sense, the Auto-Icon was always—and in defiance of the objective transparency desired by Bentham himself— an “other,” that is, an excessive sign, one that (as I tried to point out by my “thin description” earlier) stands out from its surrounding frames and arrests people in their tracks. But in another sense, it may point us to a universal feature of human (and probably nonhuman) forms of signification: the fact that they have to be based on concrete processes of mediation. As this chapter has argued that such processes cannot be understood in terms of abstractions of subject and object, but have to be studied as a dialectic between, or even an assembly of, bodies and objects, the next will pursue how to engage with such concrete interactions methodologically.

Notes 1. I found the phrase on http://golondon.about.com/od/londonforfree/p/ jeremybentham.htm, retrieved 02 March 2009. 2. For more extended critical discussions of Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism,” see Chapters 2 and 3. For an excessively symbolic interpretation of the Auto-Icon, see Collings (2000, 2009: ch. 3). 3. I use “tactility”—as I have done earlier (Pels 1999)—more as a metaphor pointing to a particular form of “intersensoriality” (Howes 2006) than to indicate the sense of touch in isolation. 4. “Turn left at Bentham” was how an anonymous visitor was shown the way at UCL. Comment retrieved 13 January 2011 from http://atlasob scura.com. 5. “His embalmed head with glass eyes gave me nightmares for a week”; “creeping the hell out of my mother and other students”; and “a bit weird

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6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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[but] fairly fascinating” are just three of the comments on the Auto-Icon to be found on http:/atlasobscura.com, retrieved 13 January 2011). Sally McDonald, personal communication, December 2011. “It is the artifact which is the focus of habitus and indeed much of recent material culture studies” (Miller 2005: 12). In contrast, this book argues that the focus of habitus is the body. See, however, Hallam and Hockey (2001) and Hallam (2016). The two extended discussions of the materiality of the body in the Handbook of Material Culture (Warnier 2006: 186–88 and J. Mitchell 2006: 385–87) emphasize “body conduct” or the embodied subject, and thereby reinforce the tendency of material culture studies to focus on things (or artifacts) made by humans only (see Miller 2005: 5; and my discussions of materiality in Chapters 2 and 3). The same goes for the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Hicks and Beaudry 2010) despite some very useful essays (i.e., Crossland 2010; Fowler 2010; and Jones and Boivin 2010). I do not claim that this section covers how archaeologists have dealt with death and human remains in general: its purpose is to show that the discipline was involved in negotiating the dilemmas sketched in this chapter as much as other social sciences. Indeed, French medical science was, especially because of the advances in anatomy, seen as way ahead of Britain at the time, especially after the Burke-and-Hare scandal further deepened the crisis of Edinburgh medical education. My later discussion of “possessive individualism” (in Chapter 2) shows that this gender classification should be taken literally: women were, at the time, rarely regarded as being sufficiently in possession of themselves. Called “Dapple,” according to John Dinwiddy, after Sancho Panza’s mule (1989: 17). One wonders, if that made Bentham into Sancho Panza, whether the Don Quixote chasing windmills was meant to be the British Government. Alternatively, a more mundane interpretation might be that the stick was made of dappled wood (Sally McDonald, personal communication, December 2011). This shows that wonder and curiosity were still regarded as functional passions at the time (see Holmes 2008). I address the problem of wonder and curiosity produced by objects in Chapters 3 and 5. The designation of the Auto-Icon as a relic has become common: see Lowenthal (1975: 10); Semmel (2000: 15); Twining (1998: 36); Wimsatt (1975: 243); see also www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/info/jb.htm, page 2 (retrieved 26 February 2009), and my critique later in this chapter). This, however, is complicated by the fact that in current English the word relic has come to mean something different from its Medieval origin (see Chapter 3). At which one may wonder what kind of act would be more desecrating: a soccer kick or a rugby pass? See www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/info/ jb.htm, page 3 (retrieved 26 February 2009.

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18. Van Eck’s pioneering study of French reflections on idolatry suggests that Comte’s celebration of fetishism was rooted in an increasingly secularized Catholic culture (2013). 19. I discuss this emergence of the human body as a modern, abstract object further in Chapter 2. 20. I cannot discuss the ramifications of this further, but two elements stand out: the insufficiency of the opposition between religion and science, or faith and reason, for understanding the history of modern culture (see, for a critique, Aupers, Houtman, and Pels 2008); and the ways in which nineteenth-century science contributed to the cultural parochialism of a nature/culture dichotomy that threatens the survival of humanity on planet Earth as I write. 21. The Rhodes Must Fall movement started at the University of Cape Town in 2015, directed against the campus’s towering statue of Cecil Rhodes, despised colonialist. It mutated into cognate movements in UK universities, not least when the movement added the slogan “fees must fall” in protest against the prohibitive costs of higher education, especially for South Africans of color. 22. The gender is intentional and historically appropriate: this principle applied primarily to wealthy white men (wealthy men of color were often regarded as not in possession of themselves). I interpret “possessive individualism” in relation to materiality in Chapter 2 (see MacPherson 1962). 23. I am, of course, thinking primarily of Thomas Jefferson, coauthor of the American Declaration of Independence and Monticello slave plantation owner. (See Chandler [2014] for an analysis of his thoughts on the inferiority of the enslaved.) However, that child of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, also deserves mention for his reintroduction of legal slavery to the French Caribbean in 1804. 24. This is reinforced by the fact that some, at least, assumed that one could “travel the world” in a European museum (Cuvier, cited in Chapter 5), and that factual knowledge about aboriginal inhabitants of the colonial was supposed to sway a home audience in a moral sense (Pels 1999: 104). I intend to research this semiotic ideology of direct objective communication and its ethical message by a study of abolitionist propaganda in the late eighteenth century. 25. Current tendencies in the anthropology of photography emphasize precisely that: the concrete actions and materials that turn photographs into objects rather than images, with a provenience and provenance that requires historical study. I owe these insights to the dissertation of my PhD student Christopher Rippe (2021).

Chapter 2

TOWARD A METHODOLOGY OF THE CONCRETE OR, REMATERIALIZING MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES

If the Auto-Icon suggests that there are such things as excessive objects (or images)1 and that they form a subset that should make us reconsider how to approach material culture, what would such a reconsideration look like? Chapter 1 already pointed to some possible (but hardly new) ingredients of such an approach: a phenomenology of interruption that underscored the uses of a thin description of the body’s encounter with matter; the anthropological injunction to take the native point of view seriously, not just as evidence for thick description but also as a potentially valid interpretation; and the requirements and rewards of studying the object’s afterlife—the “biography” of things. However, one cannot develop a methodology without embedding it in epistemology, understood as the empirical study of conditions for knowledge-production.2 As we have seen, the Auto-Icon suggests some peculiar epistemic conditions that such a methodology would have to come to terms with: not only does the interruption by the Auto-Icon mess up its spectator’s everyday temporality, its knowability is also influenced by the tendency in certain dominant modern cultural patterns to downplay the very existence of excessive objects, or relegate them to another, usually traditional, time and way of thinking. Indeed, positivist thinking often neglects time as an epistemic condition, and once we do take it into consideration, methodology becomes a future ideal rather than a recipe for research (Pels 2022). The temporal phenomenon of interruption that I used to understand the Auto-Icon invited comparison with the fetish. Like the Auto-

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Icon, the fetish seems at home in modernity, yet too excessive to be given a normal place in it (hence the European tendency to contain it in some imaginary elsewhere called Africa or the primitive; see Pels and Salemink 1999: 9–11, and several of the chapters in this volume). If the subset of excessive material culture is, however, defined by the objects’ capacity to interrupt our everyday material frames, the classification may include many more objects, both modern and other: works of art, museum pieces, souvenirs, curiosities, rarities, fetishes, amulets, shrines, religious icons and idols, monuments, dead human bodies, stuffed animals, wax images, brand logos, certain commodities, certain tools and machines, even certain photographs (and these classifications are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, just as some may well be seen as classifications of each other). While all these objects may, at times, behave as subjects, their capacity to arrest and move us differs depending on what affects they provoke. Material culture studies since the 1980s were built on the observation that most objects exert a certain agency in our everyday frames, in the sense that even the simplest tool or building compels us to act in one way rather than another. However, the observation of material agency was still treated in the twenty-first century with suspicion or ridicule (Ingold 2007; Robb 2004) instead of an invitation to further examine how powers that objects exert on people may differ (but see Jones and Boivin 2010; Pinney 2005). Yet the realization that a multitude of things that we engage with remain unremarked and below our threshold of consciousness, while specific others can stop us in our tracks is theoretically profound: it implies that excess in objects or images is a shifter3 and that its agentive qualities change relative to the historical and material constitution and location of the frame against which they stand out. A used shoe, for example, may be an everyday garment in one frame, or rubbish in another, but it is only in a specific historical (often sexual) relationship that it may turn into a fetish.4 Moreover, excess in objects can be domesticated by picture frames, vitrines, museum walls, screens, or, in Bentham’s case, a cabinet (even two). Or, alternatively, their interruption can be confined by the intangible walls of ritual or play that demarcate sacred from profane, public from private, or serious from ludic realms. Most importantly, the observation shows that the excess of objects manifests itself as a material change in the social relationship with the observer—something that invites a rethinking of the notion of materiality as such (as I attempt to do in Chapter 4, in particular). Most societies have contained how we relate to excessive objects in some way (and experience shock or anxiety when such institution-

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alizations fall apart). But we enter a unique and paradoxical situation when, on the one hand, a society’s dominant semiotic ideologies dictate that, for rational human beings, objects ought not to behave like subjects, and on the other, this same society produces an unprecedented number of objects intended to interrupt people’s everyday frames. That is what seems to happen in modern societies. On the one hand, the reign of a rationality with Protestant roots dematerializes people’s relationships with objects and images by firmly subjecting them to spirit and mind (as we have seen at the end of Chapter 1). On the other hand, these societies also seem to proliferate the excessive aspects of those relationships through consumerism, art, spectacle, and heritage. This book charts some of these paradoxes, but in order to understand how that can be done, we need to look at certain epistemic conditions and methodologies in material culture studies first. If, indeed, the very form of the word “materiality” performs its own abstract nature—to some critics, in a “language of grotesque impenetrability” that seems as far removed from concrete materials as possible (Ingold 2007: 2)—material culture studies may seem haunted by the absence of what they pretend to study. Can we lay that ghost to rest so that the concrete materials that theories of social objectification want to rehabilitate can be brought more into plain view?

Haunted Modernities At this point, we should remind ourselves of the story from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not that Bentham’s ghost once went on a rampage when the Auto-Icon was banned from attending the UCL Board’s meetings. Even if the story is impossible (whether we believe in ghosts or not, the UCL captions in the South Cloister assure us that the Auto-Icon did not attend UCL Board meetings), it shows that Bentham’s ghost is a concrete phenomenon (although not fully material). More importantly, it supports the idea that “haunting is a constituent element of modern social life” (Gordon 1997: 7).5 The UCL exhibition around the Auto-Icon in 2011 mentioned that Bentham himself was afraid of night-time ghosts—which tells us something about the relative power of his rational convictions in keeping the afterlife of bodies at bay. Elsewhere, I have argued that, in theorizing magic, modern social theory haunted itself, in the sense that Emile Durkheim’s “mechanical solidarity,” Karl Marx’s “commodity fetishism,” and Max Weber’s “charisma” actually seemed to produce certain modern specters of the primitive past that they hoped to overcome, while James Frazer’s ratio-

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nalist dismissal of “magic” both built on and helped to create modern occult movements (Pels 2003a: 17–29, 2014b). The biography of the Auto-Icon shows several other hauntings of its normal modern frames—UCL’s embarrassment, the nightmares of the visitor, the desecration of the head—that remind us of the irrepressible matters that modern cultural patterns may try to deny, but not without paying the price of contradiction and paradox. In other words, the four forms of dematerializing social life practiced by modern people, spelled out at the end of Chapter 1, are haunted by the spirit of the matter they repress. Moreover, this history of repression forms an epistemic condition for the methodology of material culture studies. The secularization of matter remains unfinished when the temporality and historicity of materials themselves are not recognized. We should acknowledge the change and decay of the Auto-Icon as physical and material conditions of the knowledge it offers before we consider the symbolism of its social life. We cannot fully understand the modernity of the tyranny of the subject over the objects and images it confronts, unless we recognize that the early modern mantra cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is the historical contemporary of the equally persistent but more materially manifested principle habeo ergo sum (“I have, therefore I am,” also known as “possessive individualism” [MacPherson 1962], discussed in the next section). The evisceration of aesthetics is an oblique reminder of the fact that even the most distanced contemplation and the most technologized observation cannot dismiss the material conditions posed by growing and decaying human bodies. Nor can we reduce signification to representation, or icon and index to symbol, because even a symbol standing for an absent referent is unknowable without some material carrier, and all abstractions need to be made present in some concretely materialized form. Such modern hauntings show the deeper meaning of the title of this book: my original essay about fetish and rarity (Chapter 3 in this book) was meant to show that, after these concepts indicated the historical emergence of a consciousness of irreducible materiality in the context of European early modern global trade, humanity could never fully repress this spirit of matter again—yet this is precisely what modern forms of dematerialization attempt to do. This means, firstly, that the historical contingency that characterizes both the Auto-Icon and the fetish can be generalized into an epistemic condition that a methodology of studying material culture can only ignore at its own risk. To circumvent Europe’s provincial dematerializations and formulate a methodology that can aspire to the universal, we must face both this

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historical irreversibility and ask to what kind of spirit of matter we may be able to return. The spirit of matter, however, also shows that being modern means living with an irreducible tension between the spiritual, the ideal, the desirable and/or the abstract on the one hand, and their physical or material manifestations on the other. In this sense, the Auto-Icon illustrates the hypothesis that “we have never been modern,” to the extent that the effigy unsuccessfully tried to purify the memory of the founder of Utilitarianism of its physical mediations and translations (Latour 1993). However, acknowledging the spirit of matter can and should also be understood as a refutation of Latour’s hypothesis, precisely because it identifies being modern (in a “provincially European” way: Chakrabarty 2000) with the conundrum of living inside this contradiction between purification (or abstraction) and its material mediations. Its contingency shows that “we” have been and still are modern, in the sense that we allow the purifications and abstractions of the “modern constitution” to define our reality by, for example, using concepts like “nature” and “society” (Latour 1993: 32). But it is also modern to find this desire for a purified reality materially wanting, and inevitable that it is haunted by the pasts and presents it seeks to repress. This also explains the continued importance, in a modern secularized society, of religious and magical discourses of causation— and the importance of the latter in this book. However, if we need to treat haunting as a real social phenomenon, we cannot ignore a general conundrum that the sciences of religion and magic always call up: the fact that Bentham was haunted by something that is there and yet not there, concretely manifested by human affect yet seemingly non-existent in a material sense—a ghost. As Avery Gordon suggests, haunting demands a peculiar mode of writing in which both belief and disbelief in the referential capacity of words have to be suspended (1997). Adding this to the resistance to representation that excessive objects put up, and we may start to interpret why some of the writing in this book takes routes that may seem unusual (see, for example, the Introduction to Part II). Nevertheless, no amount of experimental writing can circumvent the problem that in secularized social science, many religious and magical categories—epitomized here by the term ghost—seem to have no material referent.6 A more sophisticated approach to categories and classifications may focus on their historical construction and social interventions, rather than taking their descriptive function for granted (Pels 2022). However, for making the epistemic transition from encountering a corpse to perceiving a ghost, or from perceiv-

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ing the actual excessive object to the question of knowing a hard-tobelieve entity, we may have to consider certain epistemic conditions of consciousness first.

From Haunting to Double Consciousness Whether we can and should move beyond the modern constitution is debatable, but at least a minimal requirement for a firmer grasp of both modernity, religion, and the power of objects seems to require that we proceed from being haunted to a less anxious (but no less paradoxical) state of double consciousness—a position that is, as we shall see, adopted anyway by a number of authoritative statements in material culture studies. In social science, the term originates in W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation that the “peculiar sensation” characterizing the “souls of Black Folk” is a sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” that is, always having to reconcile one’s present situation with the definition of “true self-consciousness” by white Americans (Du Bois [1903] 1994: 7). Despite long and serious neglect of his pioneering work by white social scientists (see Harrison 1992; Itzigsohn and Brown 2015), the term inspired many, including a study of the global legacy of transatlantic slavery as a “counterculture” of modernity, and arguments that the “double consciousness” exemplified by the history of African American subject positions should become sociology’s common sense rather than its suppressed history (Gilroy 1993: 19; Gordon 1997: 211; Harrison 1992). This connection between material culture studies and race consciousness seems forced only if we fail to acknowledge that slavery was not only a crucial step in theorizing the “cultural biography” of things (Kopytoff 1986: 64– 65) but also helped to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the capitalist conceit that “commoditization must be controlled by the laborer himself ” and the fact that it is precisely under capitalism that human labor is most likely to be commodified itself (Kopytoff 1986: 84–85). When related to the commodification of labor in transatlantic slavery, this contradiction can be easily interpreted as one more manifestation of Goldberg’s “central paradox of modernity” (cited in Chapter 1), in this case, of expressing human equality while excluding the laborer from it. The global perspective adopted by Du Bois, Gilroy, and Kopytoff supports the acknowledgment that, in Africa as elsewhere, modern forms of witchcraft provide “images of a world in which humans seem in constant danger of turning into commodities,

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of losing their life-blood to the market and to the destructive desires it evokes” (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxix). Indeed, witchcraft and race are, like ghosts, things that are both there and yet not there.7 Closer to Bentham’s early nineteenth-century situation, we find a form of double consciousness in that charter for the bourgeois way of life, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol of 1843: ghostly appearances tell the miser Scrooge that, if he is to escape being possessed by his wealth, and to carelessly surrender to Christmas commodities’ sensual seductions, he must become sufficiently sovereign over his possessions to be able to give them away without expectation of something in return. Since Dickens, as a Unitarian, hardly gave credence to the hellfire and ghosts portrayed in the Carol, the moral lesson to his audience must be interpreted as a message from Scrooge’s subconsciousness about the proper way to possess, control, and be possessed by, wealth and commodities—a message about the tension between thrift or retention and Epicurean excess spending that, as Colin Campbell has brought out so well, forms a structural contradiction within the culture of modern consumerism (Campbell 1987).8 Modern attitudes to material culture show a form of double consciousness, therefore, in the humanist sentiment that, to be fully human, one should be in full control of the objects in one’s possession, coupled to the nagging suspicion that one is, in fact, possessed by these same objects at the same time. Humanists are, in that sense, always looking at themselves through the eyes of the fetish, even if they despise themselves for it. They mistrust their own bodies to the extent that the body’s visceral movements are the channel through which fetishes—the things they cannot help but desire—undermine their self-control. The possessive individualism that informs humanist thought indeed negotiates similar modalities of contradiction, two more positive, one negative. The first is the most basic conception of “the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (MacPherson 1962: 3). This implies “self-possession,” a definition of authentic humanistic being that translates the “tyranny of the subject” into the liberalist celebration of individual rational (or at least conscious) choice. This relegates the constitution of and constraints on personality by social and cultural relationships to second place. Some of its intellectual conditions can be traced to the “interior” sovereignty progressively developed among European philosophers since Augustine (Taylor 1989). One of its present-day most salient forms is the modern gnostic’s choice against materialism and for self-realization (Hanegraaff 1996; Heelas 1996; Pels 2002a; Aupers and Houtman 2006).

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The second ideological modality of possessive individualism is “property,” or, better, the reduction of property to “things” (rather than human rights to things: MacPherson 1978: 2). Evident, for example, in the common nineteenth-century practice of granting full individuality and citizenship rights to male property-owners only (see Fraser 1985), it is contradicted by the observation, common at least since Karl Marx, that such commodified wealth obscures its own conditions of production. Finally, the third ideological modality may be called “being possessed”: it is a negative and passive quality that modern people often associate with people whose subjectivity is in thrall to something—for example, fetishists or idolaters, who are seen as people who fail to master the excess of objects and thereby remain incomplete and lesser humans, like the African “fetish-worshipers” who were invented by modern consciousness in the seventeenth century (see Chapter 3). Note that all three modalities of possessive individualism reduce the basic units of analysis to agentive subjects and passive objects—for even “being possessed” is seen as a state of malfunctioning subjectivity rather than any action we can attribute to objects as such. All three modalities of possessive individualism portray things as inert, as a material tabula rasa over which a proper, self-possessed subject exerts its sovereignty. The possessive individualist should be the subject of, and not subject to what he owns (see the next paragraph and Chapter 8). The initial thrust of the resurgence in interest in material culture studies of the 1980s was, of course, directed precisely against this tyranny of the subject, by denying the passivity of things and restoring them to their proper social life. Many of these studies, however, could not do so without at least partly reproducing the double consciousness exemplified by liberal possessive individualism. Arjun Appadurai’s recognition of the agency of things in social life by a “methodological fetishism” still retains the theoretical primacy of human intentionality, artifice, and traffic, that is, as subject of things (first discussed in Pels 1998, here reprinted as Chapter 3). While this double consciousness, or theoretical contradiction, may be a solution to some of the problems created by misleading oppositions between gifts and commodities, or use and exchange value, it does not solve the problem of how specific goods acquire fetishistic power. Particular materials such as money and cattle can acquire “a peculiar aptitude for abstracting and congealing wealth” (John Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 151), but this clearly does not exhaust the varieties of fetishistic experience (more on this variability in Chapter 9). This contradictory form of double consciousness subordinates the differences in the capacities of

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things to objectify value to an “ultimate re-inscription of culture’s potency” (Pinney 2005: 259; Weiss 1996: 14). Put differently, Appadurai’s methodological recognition of the concrete fetishistic generation of excessive objects is once more made subject to an abstract theory of “normal” human traffic. A similar double consciousness characterizes Daniel Miller’s account of materiality. He argues that, from a philosophical point of view, subjects and objects are merely “appearances” that emerge in the wake of the process of objectification. Anthropologists have to acknowledge the opposite: they “descend” from the lofty heights of philosophy to “return to the mass populations who consider themselves to be, in fact, people using objects” (2005: 10). This paradoxical, and somewhat condescending, double consciousness of holding abstract theory and concrete ethnographic reality in mutual abeyance can, however, only be mistaken for a solution when we forget about a prior abstraction that Miller has executed on the concrete processes of objectification. When discussing Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (Miller 2005: 6–7), Miller forgets that Bourdieu does not talk about subjects and objects in a dialectic of objectification, but about a “dialectic of objectification and embodiment” (1977: 87, my emphasis). Where Miller seems to prefer abstract subjects interacting with equally abstract objects, Bourdieu’s theory of socialization (exemplified by his famous discussion of the Kabyle house) seems to privilege concrete embodied persons confronting a material environment. In this light, Miller’s “dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction and respect” (2005: 38) appears as wishful thinking, just like the primacy of “exchange” assumed by Appadurai (1986: 3) and Thomas (1991: 7). They are “late purifications” (Pinney 2005: 258) of a modern constitution that obscure the concrete differences in power and capacity between people, and between the people and things that Bourdieu’s theoretical reformation targeted. It is not surprising that such ways of thinking reduce fetishism and the power of objects to a marginal idiosyncrasy (Appadurai 1986: 54) or a “prejudice” (Miller 1998a: 127-8). A third and final form of double consciousness shows that these legacies of possessive individualism are not restricted to sociocultural anthropology. When W. J. T. Mitchell first asks an art historical audience “what do pictures want?,” he feels he has to apologize for such “dubious personification of inanimate objects” that smacks of a regression to fetishism and idolatry (1996: 71). Nevertheless, he thinks that “the subjectivized object . . . is an incurable symptom” which, at best, we can transform into something less pathological (1996: 72).

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Mitchell seems to confess that we suffer from premodern magic but have lost the faith that modernity will cure the disease—a kind of fatalist Enlightenment. He continues to make useful and enlightening remarks on the power of pictures, by emphasizing that the “legible signs of desire” that pictures convey cannot be reduced to either the desires of the artist, the beholder, or even the figures in the picture (1996: 80–81). Mitchell endorses the diagnosis of Michael Fried (1980) that modern art is characterized by a denial or renunciation of “direct signs of desire” (W. J. T. Mitchell 1996: 79), but he seems hesitant to follow Michael Freedberg’s argument that art history has consistently “suppressed” evidence for the power of images and ignored “magical” behavior in the West (1989: xxi)—despite the fact that such recognition has been a staple of the theory of film and photography from the very start (Benjamin 1977a; Rachel Moore 2000; Sobchak 1987: 55–63).9

The Ideology of the Artifact in Material Culture Studies What is striking about these forms of double consciousness—of simultaneously asserting and denying the agentive role of objects and images—is that they all rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the model of the artifact, in the shape of commodities, consumer items, or artwork. Chapter 1 showed that ideologies of the artifact impoverish the study of material culture: the iconoclash that marks our relationship to excessive objects arises precisely from uncertainty about the role of human hands in their production. The Auto-Icon attuned us to the fact that such uncertainty seems structural once we allow human bodies back into the equation: the difficulties in containing the human body noted by Judith Butler seem to stem from the fact that we do not need philosophy to recognize (empirically and concretely) that our bodies figure as both subject and object, both maker and made, both owner and object possessed. The ideological modalities of possessive individualism and the double consciousness of material culture theory seem complicit: neither seems capable of theorizing the embodied mediations that make a dialectic of objectification and embodiment both concrete and empirically observable. Both the model of the artifact and the theory of possessive individualism are inherently dualistic: opposing an active subject/owner to a passive object, possession, or product, they exclude what is necessary to relate the two, and condemn themselves to living with a contradiction between the abstract ideals of the modern constitution, and the empirical and concrete

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processes of everyday life where people are subject to objects. Thus, the model of the artifact turns into an ideology that has to be overcome if material culture studies is to fulfil the promise of reforming social theory that it carried at least since Bourdieu formulated his theory of practice. Given that the resurgence of material culture studies since the 1980s was concerned with “material presence” (Buchli 2002: 11) and meant to underscore the critical point that we should stop dematerializing and treating material objects as epiphenomena (Miller and Tilley 1996), it is ironic that major critics observe that notions of materiality remain too little concerned with the concrete study of “materials” and “things” (Hodder 2011; Ingold 2007). Interestingly, the Handbook of Material Culture’s emphasis on “materiality” as connoting substance (the tangible, concrete, and corporeal as opposed to the spiritual, ideal, or value-laden), thingness or objectivity (as opposed to the personal or subjective), and value (but as material quality; Tilley et al. 2006: 3) contrasts sharply with some dominant meanings of materiality that one can find on the Internet. There, materiality is defined (in the discursive realm of business, auditing, and accounting) as “relevance,” “impact value,” or the relative importance of information in deciding financial transactions—that is, as a concept almost immaterial in its emphasis on relationship.10 Such ironies and contradictions can be better understood when we realize that the new material culture studies emerged in the 1980s from a broader and deeper historical background, one that included the nineteenth-century abstraction of things into objects in a museum as well as the simultaneous reaction to treating the human body as an object in terms of race. A brief discussion of the emergence of these twin reifications will help to understand how some of the dematerializing tendencies of material culture studies came about. While usually traced back to Edward Burnett Tylor’s “object lessons” in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in late Victorian anthropology (Buchli 2002: 2; Hicks 2010: 34), the pleonasm “material culture” emerged as a separate term for the study of museum objects only when social and cultural anthropology banished the latter to a subordinate realm, in favor of the study of functional and cultural patterns by ethnography (Hicks 2010: 37). In 1912, in the same edition of Notes and Queries in Anthropology that saw the publication of William Rivers’s “General Account of Method”—the “foundation document of the modern British ethnographic tradition”—fieldworker and Pitt-Rivers curator Barbara Freire-Marreco advised that objects should no longer be collected just like that, but needed to be

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studied in situ, by the ethnographic standards set by Rivers in particular (Stocking 2001: 181–82). This methodological change was historically conditioned by an earlier abstraction (or “surgical cut”: Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 18) of those objects effected by museum collecting and natural history’s classifications, constituting what was defined as an archive of objective knowledge of human types (Hicks 2010: 33; Pels 2014a). Recent genealogies of material culture studies tend to ignore, however, that many “object lessons” offered by the Pitt-Rivers had been subjected to a second process of abstraction, in which human bodies—and especially the heads and skulls that were the empirical sine qua non of scientific racism in the nineteenth century—were increasingly marginalized from anthropological analysis. This happened firstly by transmuting polygenism (the doctrine of a plurality of human races) into the polygenesis of art and technology in the developmental sequences of the museum, and subsequently, by a critique of racial determination tout court.11 In other words, “material culture” emerged from paradigm shifts based, firstly, on the abstraction and subsequent reification of the museum object, and secondly, on the marginalization of the human body in anthropological analysis (except as raw material on which the human mind is at work). We therefore need to reconsider the concepts of materiality, material, object, and thing against the background of a double reification effected by ideologies of the artifact, that made the body into a subject, and the materials the body confronted into a “cutout” object. I argued earlier that a proper understanding of materiality requires us to recognize it, not as concrete substance or concretized thingness or value, but as a quality of social relationships, and that this quality changes meaning depending on whether the relationship is contested in terms of vectors of abstract and concrete, subject and object, spiritual and material, or culture and nature (Pels 2008, here reprinted as Chapter 4). Only then can one analyze people’s fears of certain matters, and hence, the power of objects—which, after all, does not reside in their substance only. Such vectors of contest over materiality not only make us include the spiritual as well as nature in understanding excess in objects and images. Even when we do not relate to the Auto-Icon as something spiritual or super-natural—difficult, to say the least, given its possible hauntings and transcendent identifications (“Jeremy Bentham”)—the Auto-Icon still evokes an acheiropoietic animation: the suspicion that it was once alive, and, more important, that it was animated by life of a kind that humans cannot manufacture.12 Even a skeptical and irreverently secularist attitude toward the Auto-Icon has to acknowledge that some of the object’s materials are

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not exclusively made by human hands, and even more, that they were partly intended to deny manufacture. Likewise, taxidermists often pride themselves on their success in giving dead animals an animated appearance, and this lifelike appearance equally explains the uncanniness of wax likenesses, death masks, and certain photographs (see Bodry-Saunders 1998; Crossland 2009; Haraway 1984). It evokes the “eerie animation” of the fetish, the appearance of being “not alive, not dead, not useful, not useless” that we also find in still-life painting (H. Foster 1993: 257).13 In this class of objects, the subject-object relationship is often reversed and may be too unstable to provide a reliable point of departure for analysis (cf. Spyer 1998). Moreover, once we see both stuffed animals and a stuffed Jeremy Bentham as partial abstractions of life in a concrete form, it is clear that the Hegelian focus on objectification that took center stage in discussions of materiality (Miller 2005: 7, 10) has to be made less idealist and more concrete by considering the dialectic of objectification and embodiment more insistently than before (see also Chapter 9). Indeed, concrete processes of objectification are particularly obscured by Hegelian abstractions of subject and object once an ideology of the artifact is allowed to reify things and ignore human bodies, idealizing such stubborn materials as tools and free agents. This helps to explain the forms of double consciousness noted earlier. Centuries of institutionalization in museums and galleries have cultivated such “fear [of] the body in the image” (Freedberg 1989: 12) and generated such a “desire not to show desire” that the empirical fact of the experience of certain artistic images or objects as animated beings can only be reduced to a “constitutive fiction” (W. J. T. Mitchell 1996: 80, 81). Once we forget that museums, shopping malls, and advertising practices emerged from the “exhibitionary complex” of reified commodity spectacle (T. Bennett 1995: Richards 1990), it becomes easy to reduce “the stuff of ‘material culture’” to “commodities” defined as “things intended for exchange” (Appadurai 1986: 5, 9; see also Thomas 1991: 7). The focus on exchange betrays its abstract origin in a liberal notion of contract when it makes those moments where human bodies most concretely shape and are shaped by things—moments of production, display, consumption, and use—secondary, or even negligible.14 Another effect of this reification of objects as artifacts is the exaggerated attribution of the excessive value of things to “immaterial” conceptualizations associated with religion or the art world (Miller 2005: 28). While such attributions may not be altogether inaccurate, they do a disservice to material culture studies to the extent that

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they neglect the typically modern history of disembodiment and dematerialization that characterizes both religion and art (Asad 1993: Freedberg 1989). Finally, theories of consumerism, by focusing on artifacts as “the negation of the commodity” (Miller 1987: 192), have a tendency to bypass the human body by ignoring, firstly, an important etymological meaning of the word “consumption”—of one’s body being “wasted” by disease—and, secondly, the more general modern sense of consumption as “using up” things, of which the classical model is eating (see Arendt [1958] 1998: 99–100). It is therefore not surprising to find that such studies make little room for the social or political, but inescapably organic, practices of feeding and health, or waste, decay, and death (see Miller 1987, 1998a).

“Things in Life”: (Dis)Entangling the Hand Do critics of material culture studies—stressing “things . . . in life” rather than “life . . . in things” (Ingold 2007: 12)—escape the abstractions of artifact ideology? By stressing “operative chains” that enable a dialectics of embodiment and objectification, they certainly do, but usually by failing to address how entanglements with excessive objects differ from more mundane interactions.15 Ian Hodder, in an impressive attempt to reconcile archaeological paradigms of “human-thing entanglement,” moves beyond artifacts, to include “naturally occurring objects, animals, plants and humans” (2011: 155). Etymologically, he argues, “thing” does not designate a reified unit, but a “drawing together” of materials and humans (2011: 157; compare to Chapter 4). This is exemplified by the operative chains one finds in the entanglements with clay for building and plastering houses in the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. When digging pits for clay, Çatalhöyük people created a habitat for reeds to grow in. As people started cutting these plants for roofing material, they stimulated the reeds to grow to such an extent that they contributed to lowering water levels and driving out other plant species, changing the settlement’s environment and way of life. Given this entanglement of humans, plants, and materials in mutual dependencies, it is puzzling to see Hodder conclude this section by reiterating an aspect of artifact ideology: “Things cannot reproduce and therefore cannot exist without humans. Of course, a house that has fallen down still exists. And domesticated species can revert or go feral if untended. The argument is more that things cannot exist for humans, in the way that humans want, without human intervention (Hodder 2011: 162)”. But non-

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human reproduction and decay also happen for humans, yet without human intervention, so it becomes puzzling why one would replace concrete entanglements of human bodies with plants and materials by the abstraction of intentionality (or “what humans want”), if not to rescue the flawed definition of artifacts as products of human mental action imposed on materials (Ingold 2007: 5).16 Tim Ingold has similarly questioned the assumption of the difference of humans from their animal, vegetable, or material environment by his conception of contingent “taskscapes” built by human/ nonhuman engagements (1993). He moves beyond intentionality not only by questioning the definition of artifact but also by putting dexterity—the training of the human hand—center stage in his review of André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech ([1964] 1993; the source of both Hodder’s and Ingold’s notion of “operative chains”). Ingold admires Leroi-Gourhan’s focus on the hand, but criticizes his “double bind”—or, perhaps, double consciousness—of assuming, on the one hand, that stone tools are mere “secretions of the human body,” and on the other, that such artifacts are the product of deliberate mental design (Ingold 1999: 420–21). The latter still defines manufacture in terms of impressing a human mental form upon a lump of shapeless raw material. Instead, Leroi-Gourhan’s examples point “in another direction altogether—namely, toward the dissolution of the distinction between the technical and the intellectual” (Ingold 1999: 438). “Thinking with one’s hands” is, in other words, “an emergent property of the entire ‘form-creating system’” of interacting, synergic things (Ingold 1999: 440–41). This explains why Ingold mistrusts Leroi-Gourhan’s “technological optimism” that says that the future homo sapiens will be transposed into its artifacts and take leave, “once and for all, of the natural world” (Ingold 1999: 441). Yet he remains ambivalent, calling Leroi-Gourhan’s idea of a “regression of the hand” by electronics that will alienate humanity from “direct dexterous contact with the environment” a “truly prophetic” prediction (Ingold 1999: 450). Despite such ambivalences, the technophile Leroi-Gourhan stands opposed to the neo-Luddite Ingold and that distinction is indeed important for discussing the future of things (see the Conclusion). While unmasking Leroi-Gourhan’s technophile prejudices as a result of reifying artifacts as mental constructs, Ingold’s neo-Luddism (or “primitivism”) keeps him from a more differentiated study of things in life, one that goes beyond discussing stone masons or gardeners to include our “plastic age” (Miller 2007: 25–26). Miller, however, reproduces Ingold’s almost exclusive interest in mundane matters, which may ig-

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nore how excessive plastic materials can become in “plastic religion”: the worship of products of supreme malleability, such as Tupperware or television (Chidester 2005: 52–70; Alison Clarke 1999). Excessive objects made by plastic materials predate industrial modernity (think of paint, sculpture, or waxworks) but their production exploded into unprecedented forms of simulation through the introduction of steel (and neo-styles), photovoltaic plates and celluloid (and montage), plastic, or digital technology (to name just a few materials). NeoLuddists and proponents of modern materialities can both ignore excessive objects. A similar neglect of excess in objects characterizes Hodder’s essay on entanglements: the Çatalhöyük “history houses” are, after all, marked by an entanglement with clay that produced a lifespan of houses well exceeding those of its households or inhabitants, suggesting that the house was an agent of continuity that turned the latter into its subjects (Pels 2010: 226; Hodder and Pels 2010).17 The internment of both human bones and artifacts in previous layers of building and the iconic bucrania that symbolically marked the house’s relationship to a nonhuman outside—mixing the plasticity of clay with bones and skulls—show that these entanglements worked through an iconoclash of manufactured and acheiropoietic materials comparable to that of the Auto-Icon. They are as likely as the latter to stand out against quotidian life and to point to temporalities not contained by it—a reason for calling them “history houses” in the first place. While we lack the access to Çatalhöyük people’s native of point view that Bentham and Southwood Smith provided for their society, the available evidence suggests that the plastic medium of clay was instrumental in making them subject to (rather than a subject of) the house. This response to a plastic medium can be compared to an admiring spectator of Johannes Vermeer’s Lacemaker who “break[s] off in bewilderment and can follow Vermeer no longer through the maze of his artistic agency” despite confronting mere paint. Alfred Gell autobiographically concluded that the painting then constituted him as an “amateur” painter by a moment of suspension between the world in which he ordinarily lives “and the world adumbrated in the picture, which defeats explanation” (1998: 69). (I will return to art when considering an ethnographic museum in Chapter 7.) Even more, for a more differentiated understanding of human-thing engagements, human-thing disentanglement seems a somewhat neglected analytic. This may be shown by the common failure of theories of material culture to clearly disaggregate “materials” from “things,” “objects” and “materiality.” As I am writing this, my hands are entan-

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gled with plastic materials (the keyboard of my computer), in a movement synchronized with the interaction of my eyes with a screen. My hands embody enskilment in the speed and dexterity of typing, after gradually unlearning to hammer down the mechanical levers of a typewriter by shifting first to an electronic machine and then to a computer keyboard (around the mid-1980s)—which does not exclude that my exasperated (and vain) pounding of keys when they refuse to put their characters on the computer screen is still haunted by those typewriter gestures. Likewise, the operative chains that my eyes are following presuppose learning to interact with the screen in the 1980s just to be forced to unlearn, in the 1990s, the text-based intelligence of the multiple (front-and-back-staged) levels of WordPerfect, in order to deal with the Apple-ized, that is, iconized surface adopted by Microsoft Word as it became the hegemonic word processor.18 This example shows that the things that momentarily make my persona (a scholar writing a book) are multiple: my screen-and-keyboard interaction coevolved with me, but in temporally separate sequences of training. I may be entangled only with my whole laptop as a thing when I carry it on my lap (rarely) or turn it on or off, or plug in its feed, but it becomes a crucial object (of consumption) once I engage in buying a new one or do not know where to discard the old one after use. However, the materials I am entangled with while working on a laptop all seem secondary to, yet an epistemic condition of, these more conscious forms of relating my person to things: the plastic of the keyboard, the ceramics and/or metals in the chips, the material of the screen (which I do not even know) are as essential to, as they seem absent from, my (semi)conscious human-thing entanglements. Even more, the materiality of the software “writes thought” in ways so far removed from my consciousness that it must be understood in terms of hegemony, haunting or even prosthesis, just as the materiality of the screen implies a “theoretical foreplay” that escapes my awareness, and even modified my body and that of my ancestors long before computers became everyday things (Thrift 2005).19 Material culture theory should therefore disentangle such disjunctures into their respective abstract and concrete manifestations. This underscores Webb Keane’s call for breaking down a “monolithic concept of ‘objectification’” that is too much “identified with capitalism, metaphysics, Protestantism, rationalization, states, or science” to allow for a proper investigation of the “different possible modalities” of objectification (2003: 422)—not least, the investigation of the modalities of the human body’s multisensory interaction with its material environment. Museum objects and consumer goods, for

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example, have already undergone a process of temporal abstraction by turning them into future objects for spectators or consumers. Yet they remain concrete things that retain certain qualities of use even while reposing in a vitrine or on the shelf of a supermarket. The mutual constitution of persons and things, or subjects and objects, is not something defined by common people in ethnographic practice yet denied by philosophical reflection (pace Miller 2005: 10). It is an empirically demonstrable fact of changes in signification involving both material qualities, “meta-level semiosis” of types of signs, and semiotic ideologies that connect the indeterminacy of these changes to specific historical relationships and futures (Keane 2003, 2005). I hope the Auto-Icon helps to bring out that, in understanding contemporary materialities, a monolithic notion of objectification and its accompanying artifact ideologies not only fail to sufficiently understand material culture but were themselves produced by nineteenthcentury historical contingencies that may be on the wane as I write.

Human Life as Thing: or, Representation Is History Around the same time that Bentham’s body was decapitated and eviscerated, Europeans adopted two doctrines that continue to haunt us today: the notion that “race” represents a biological fact, and the idea that objective reality cannot be accurately represented without expunging the “subjective” from it. They seem to be related, in the sense that both depend on the separation of culture and nature and of human mind and human matter, and on the representation of the latter by the former. In the previous century, the Enlightenment regime of being “true to nature” was dominated by the “four-eyed sight” of scholars and artists and their joint attempt to produce the most representative picture of a species from a multitude of observations. The rise of “mechanical objectivity” around 1830, however, made the “blind sight” of reproducing individual specimens hegemonic, banishing “subjective” artistic intervention to another realm. Henceforth, nature should speak for itself, “no human hand having touched it” (Daston and Galison 2007: 120–21). This preoccupation with representing individual specimens of “Nature” and the concomitant reification of the latter20 emerged together with an increasing self-confidence in representing “things in human life” through, amongst others, the artifacts assembled by the industrial exhibitions that culminated, less than twenty years after Bentham’s death, in London’s Great Exhibition (Greenhalgh 2011; Richards 1990). It was also accompanied by

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anxieties about the fetishism of “human life in things” (Logan 2009). Perhaps most importantly, it coincided with a rising interest in “human life as thing”: what Igor Kopytoff discussed as the commodification of the human body (1986). In the century bisected by the year 1800,21 the “governmentality” of capitalism and statistics produced an “anatomo-politics” of the body as machine (represented by technoscientific disciplines) and a “biopolitics” of the body as species that turned the human body into a disembedded object, “bare life,” an animal laborans (Agamben 1998; Arendt [1958] 1998; Foucault 1980: 139; Lefebvre 1991; Poovey 1995; E. P. Thompson 1967). And yet, these engagements with human life as thing stand in paradoxical contrast to its separation from humanism’s insistence on the sovereignty of the subject. Bentham’s will seems to exemplify that separation: to him, Southwood Smith, and many others, bodies were interchangeable specimens, fit for medical instruction in the human “animal economy,” while his head represented the identity of its subject “when properly preserved . . . better than a statue” (Bentham [1831] 2002a: 2–3). Such distinctions between human and animal, head and body, and singularity and seriality express what Foucault once called the “threshold of modernity” (1980: 143).22 The paradoxes appear most painfully in the observation that, on the one hand, many of Bentham’s contemporaries’ most explicit representation of human life as a thing emerged in race science, where those at the bottom of its hierarchies ended up on the animal, bodily, and serial side of those distinctions; while on the other, Christian humanism and its respect for the human subject manifested itself in the slow, paternalistic yet ultimately successful abolition of chattel slavery. Together, they show another variation of Goldberg’s “central irony of modernity.” In the last three decades of the previous century, a crisis of representation has increasingly focused on such paradoxes and eroded the claim that the human mind can accurately and universally depict the material and natural world. The positivist faith in natural law and objectivity not only lost credibility among anthropologists, literary critics, and historians (Fabian 1983; Said 1978; White 1973), but also in bastions of techno-science, where “engineering-style presentational” approaches seem to displace earlier visual re-presentations of nature, and formerly prestigious “natural history” collections may be increasingly transformed into sources of consumption and entertainment (Daston and Galison 2007: 395; Secord 1996: 455). Such diagnoses echo accounts of the apparent “postmodern” demise of modernist realism and authenticity in the face of consumerism (Jameson 1984; Baudrillard [1981] 1994; but see Chapters 5, 9, and 10). I do not trust

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the epochal time-conceptions of modernity and their assumption of a “sudden death” of a period, tradition, or other cultural pattern (see Pels 2015). At least, the insistence of material culture studies since the 1980s on the power of objects to move human beings can itself be read as a sign that what we represent as objective, material, natural, or past is, instead, itself a product of specific historical conjunctures. Whether it will survive the twenty-first century or not, the modern faith in representation is both contingent and irreversible: it was not available in the same form before approximately 1830 (Daston and Galison 2007). Even more, our past and present conjunctures are themselves multi-temporal, as is demonstrated by the fact that each new scientific modality—“four-eyed sight,” “blind sight,” and the late nineteenth-century questioning of the visibility of objective reality as such—“supplement[ed] rather than supplant[ed] the others” (Daston and Galison 2007: 318; see also Pels 2014a). Representation is history—but also a history of the present. As the final point of Chapter 1 also indicated, this questioning of representation as a historical construct will often be a subject of discussion in the following chapters: it is fundamental to rematerializing material culture and understanding the materiality of excess in more ways than one. As material culture studies since the 1980s have shown repeatedly, material things have “the function of stabilizing human life” by a capacity to “stand against” human designs and desires that is not dependent on humans and their history only (Arendt [1958] 1998: 136–37; cf. Hodder 2011: 160). But the fact that Bentham’s real head is now too fragile to be put on display, that moths ate his clothes and bugs infested his eviscerated insides, even that people experience a horrific fascination with the undead when coming up against his remains, remind us that things decay and die, and that even “the durability of the human artifact is not absolute” (Arendt [1958] 1998: 136). In other words, the temporality of things is not exhausted by their historicity, even if we can know that temporality only through a specific historically shaped conjuncture. Indeed, the “time of things”—historical as well as material—may be the most important direction of analysis offered by this book as a whole (and will be discussed further in Chapters 9, 10, and the Conclusion). If the excess of objects and images indeed interrupts the everyday flow of human-thing entanglements, this in itself identifies excessive objects as multitemporal: as indicating a modality of halting or even reversing the onward movement of our quotidian relations with our material environment. Two other provisional conclusions also stand out: the second is that ideologies of the artifact seem to

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obscure not only that excessive objects problematize and pluralize the direction and temporalities of objectification, but also that we failed to study them as a manifestation of a dialectic with human bodies. That was epitomized by the suggestion I derived from Tim Ingold that the hand (the “manu-” in manufacture) is not a given but a historical problem. Thirdly and finally, the concept of objectification remains insufficiently material and concrete if we fail to study the sensual and visceral experience of excess, and forget that objects only come to stand out when spectators embody their relationship with them within a specific frame. These three forms of rematerializing material culture studies—time and contingency; the reflexivity about our human (academic) handiwork; and the bodily intimacy of the sensuous and visceral—are crucial to what I think we should call a methodology of the concrete.

Toward a Methodology of the Concrete: On Contingency, Reflexivity, and Intimacy as Epistemic Conditions Most human sciences adopt the assumption that their discipline works by turning concrete research materials into data for more universal, abstract terms—an ideal that steers many of this book’s aims as well. Its inescapable ubiquity, however, may explain why the assumption is rarely explicated. This should puzzle students of material culture, however: their aim to rehabilitate the concrete and substantive (Tilley et al. 2006: 3) seems difficult to realize without critically interrogating modes of abstraction and generalization. The current form of this ideal seems to emerge only late in the nineteenth century, when the increasing ideological dominance of laboratory science and mathematics and statistics relegated most field sciences, including those whose “field” was a collection’s depot, to secondary status (Asad 1994; Kuklick and Kohler 1996: 1). Field sciences are not only essential to gathering knowledge, they are also characterized by the primacy of the confrontation of the observer with a concrete site, situation, or object. Material culture studies are dominated by field, collection, and archival sciences (anthropology, archaeology, museology, art history, geography, and studies of science or culture that employ ethnography or historiography). They all seem to have shied away from opening a big, black, epistemological box that stands at the heart of their methodologies: their encounter with the concrete.

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This section’s plea for contingency, reflexivity, and intimacy in research is itself not very original. However, its contribution to theorizing the concreteness that researchers embody and encounter is, I think, novel, and necessary for this chapter’s proposal to rematerialize material culture studies. Methodology is a theorization of the possibility of correcting epistemic biases in the future.23 As such, it should be subordinate to an empirical epistemology, defined as the study of ways in which forms of life obtain and process information (Bateson 1973: 478) or as the “reflection on the constitution of communicable knowledge” (Fabian 1971: 20). In this light, my preceding arguments about haunting, double consciousness, and the working of artifact ideologies were critical epistemological reflections or “deconstructions” that should be turned into methodology if they are to become effective aspirations for constructing positive knowledge.24 I hope this contributes to countering qualitative human science’s appalling dearth of reflection on some of its most basic research practices. When a theory of objectification fails to recognize a dialectic with human embodiment, it commits a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”25 How do we place concreteness, anyway? The question remains largely unexplored, yet the blurred interdisciplinary genre of material culture studies seems difficult to conceive without field research, as constituted, among others, by archaeology, anthropology, and geography. Fieldwork practice may differ from one discipline to the other, but all field sciences confront the material conditions of particular places, cope creatively with local exigencies, negotiate with a socially diverse array of collaborators, and value craft skills. All face the challenge “of bringing some order to phenomena that, far more than those of the laboratory, are multivariate, historically produced, often fleeting, and dauntingly complex and uncontrollable” (Kuklick and Kohler 1996: 2–3). Field science practices deal with what is “qualitatively unique,” and face “the content and material substratum of the object concerned” while “theoretical contemplation leads to the neglect of this very factor” (Lukacs 1971: 126). A hydrologist found that his field science proceeds from “complexity at small scales leading to relative simplicity (the hydrograph) at large scales” (Beven 1987: 393). I think we partly neglect such problems of complexity and scale because concrete confrontations in “the field” are ideologically disparaged as impure: field sciences rub against the tidy representations of scientific problems that statistics or laboratory science can manage by subordinating or excluding “polluting” relationships such as those with “lay” research participants (Kuklick and Kohler 1996: 1). Claude

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Lévi-Strauss (1966) and Jean Piaget (1960) may deserve credit for attending to some of the epistemological complexities of the concrete by their partial and paternalistic rehabilitation of “savage” bricoleurs or children’s concrete styles of thinking, but they have also reinforced their marginality vis-á-vis the enduring appeal of the timeless knowledge and laws aspired to by positivist science. Instead, the three complexities and forms of rematerialization indicated at the end of the previous section may return the concrete to some of its epistemic primacy.

Time and Contingency The concrete assemblages that human beings in general and scientific observers in particular confront cannot be true or false; they are neither necessarily given nor pure accidents. But since late nineteenthcentury positivism reinvented a Platonic ideal that contrasted such corruptible spatiotemporal givens with a more “real” abstract reality, we have only too rarely asked the question how and why abstract generalizations can take leave from the concrete assemblages that form their inevitable point of departure. It may well be that “mythical” thought and the bricoleur’s structures are built up by fitting together “remains and debris of events,” while science, by elaborating abstract structures, “[creates] its means and results in the form of events” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 22), but this begs the question by displacing it to a temporal ontology of divorcing past from future events. Neither bricoleurs nor scientists can escape the “basic problem of language”: that the construction of types (or “classification”: Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15) can never timelessly capture the material being of the concrete individuals they aim to describe (Valentine 2004: 217), or that classifications work in real time, and may change what they classify in a “looping effect” (Hacking 1995). The aggregate facts of statistics seem to require prior events if they are to aggregate anything in the first place. The selections that statistical classifications make from these prior events dismiss at least a portion of them as unusable—as “debris,” to use Lévi-Strauss’s word—thus raising the question of what differentiates them from those concrete epistemic preconditions that constitute a scientific event. If the abstractions of statistical analysis are dependent on a selective mining of the contingencies of the concrete, we may suppose that different scientific practices may uncover other treasures of knowledge that the latter contains. In philosophy, the historical given has been increasingly portrayed as the road to both truth and justice (Rorty 1989). In biology, con-

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tingent conjunctures rather than timeless natural laws are more and more seen as sufficient explanations of evolutionary change (Gould 1989). Disciplines engaged in material culture studies point in similar directions. Archaeologists, for example, have recently revisited their field practice in terms that both reassert their strong sense of the contingency of concrete excavation sites, and critically revise it: instead of regarding the material relationship with excavation as one of necessary and almost final destruction (which, according to the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England in 1991, should make preservation in situ the preferential treatment), Gavin Lucas proposes an alternative view of excavation as temporal displacement and transformation: “we can never go back: acts of excavation are unique, but equally they transform or displace material in a unique way” (2001: 41, emphases in original). Likewise, an early twenty-first-century review of anthropology argues that the strength of its methodology lies at least in part in sharing a concrete historical context with people studied: unlike historians (who may choose the periods they study) ethnographers are “constrained . . . by the times which we and our coeval others inhabit” and have to cultivate the ability to both receive and recognize the surprises it provides—surprises that prior categories can never fully accommodate (Spyer 2010: 154, 161). Such is life, we may say—but this gains additional meaning once we consider that some social scientists regard social statistics as cultivating timelessness and death (Abbott 2001). Perhaps the most radical proposal in this respect can be found in a monograph that studies the matsutake mushroom, a delicacy in Japan: it argues that ethnography and natural history can only study and understand cross-species forms of life and planetary survival because the latter work by contingent symbioses between different humans and between humans and nonhumans. The quantifiable abstractions of capitalist “scalability,” necessary for plantations and factories to produce controllable consumer items, fail to do so (Tsing 2015). These are only initial steps in mining the contingency of the concrete, but they have three immediate consequences for this book. Firstly, they explain an idiosyncrasy of my writing: in Part II, both Chapter 3 (on animism and fetishism) and Chapter 4 (on materiality) are organized as a general theoretical critique followed by illustrations of its applicability to a concrete historical conjuncture. These chapters do not draw generalized conclusions from “data,” but use theory and the abstract to analytically disentangle an otherwise contingent practice.26 While this may not differ from many other ethnographic or historical monographs, it is correctly read as my suspicion of, or

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lack of inclination to respect, the independent value of abstract theory. Secondly, this book as a whole turns contingency into something more than mere accident, but also something less than determination by “natural” law, by its insistence on a layered conception of historical causation. Taking my cue from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007: 318), I think that a history written on the basis of visual and/ or material culture will see previous periods and previous regimes of relating to objects as “supplementing” (or “composting”) the past in compounds that bring its historical ingredients together with more recent ones in unstable and changing reactions, while stubbornly resisting the discreteness that discursive constructions of periodization and historical classification often presuppose.27 Thirdly, the above remarks already point forward (again) to the importance of the time of things (see Part IV): the contingency of the concrete not only tells us that the concrete may put “untimely” surprises (such as the Auto-Icon) in front of us, but also that these surprises are inherently historical, and even if they are meant to stabilize or arrest historical change, they will still decay, disappear, or otherwise fail to comply with what human beings want from them. Ignoring that dimension will make our studies less secular and less scientific, although it should be clear by now that I am not an unqualified supporter of either secularism or science.

Reflexivity and the Double Break The forms of “double consciousness” of material culture that I outlined above are, of course, forms of reflexivity: ways of telling ourselves that (if I may paraphrase Appadurai and Miller), while we may think that normal human traffic in the end gives things their meaning, we need to suspend our belief in the supremacy of culture or manufacture if we are to understand how things can have their say in social life. However, if we are to fully “provincialize” the European conceptions of materiality implicit in this position (cf. Chakrabarty 2000), we need to unpack the “we” in such reasoning, and the arguments of Appadurai, Miller, and Mitchell leave little doubt that they selfidentify as academics. Yet, academic work also has its own dialectics of objectification and embodiment: a large part of the time it materially manifests itself in the relationships that our hands establish between our body and mind on the one hand, and the discursive objectifications we thereby put on computer screens and paper on the other. This concreteness helps to reinterpret the double consciousness of simultaneously affirming and denying that excessive objects have a place in science: it suggests that such discursive objectifications may be pro-

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jections—forms of misplaced concreteness—of our own handiwork on to the material relationships that we study. As such, it is closely allied to the denial of the temporality of these material relationships in favor of academic temporal constructions—a process akin to the “denial of coevalness” in ethnography (Fabian 1983). Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a double methodological break, necessary for all human sciences in the course of their research and reporting, can clarify how this works. He argued that “objectivism” is constituted by a primary break (both epistemological and social) between popular or “native” perspectives and practices and the academic point of view (Bourdieu 1977: 1, 3). Nineteenth-century natural historians, for example, “broke” with native use values by abducting artifacts, to turn them into ethnographic specimens in the museum. Sociologists like Durkheim did so by quantified research designs, and British and French anthropologists did so by first collecting and then breaking with native points of view or indigenous collective representations in favor of armchair-generated concepts like “function” and “structure.” Archaeologists do so by often literally breaking up the stratigraphy and provenance of the objects they collect, to reconstruct them in their labs. Bourdieu’s unique contribution to reflexive methodology lies in his recognition that, if we want academic representations to be valid, it is equally necessary to make a second break, this time with the academic objectivist point of view itself. A particularly effective example of Bourdieu’s critique of objectivism is his argument that Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualization of the gift ignores concrete “temporal structures” and strategies of social life. The maps and generalizations produced by academic manufacture— such as the law of reciprocity that Lévi-Strauss perceived to govern the gift—turn into objectifications that generate “fallacies of the rule” by the fact that they come to obscure concrete determining factors that also steer social life, such as the refusal or timing of a counter-gift (Bourdieu 1977: 9, 22). This shows that a second break is required: a reflexive, critical, and more concrete assessment of academic practice is needed to avoid academic generalizations that tend to spuriously appropriate research participants’ cultural expertise and exclude these concrete interlocutors’ experiences from the academic temporality in which cultural knowledge is produced. Bourdieu’s interpreters have mostly ignored that his “double break” extends the concrete fields in which we study cultural practices to incorporate our academic environment. Most scholars studied the dialectic of objectification and embodiment that Bourdieu put forward at a safe cultural distance, using his famous example of the embodiment

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of habitus through the objective structures of the Kabyle house (Bourdieu 1977: 90–91). However, it literally comes home once we realize that Bourdieu’s second break implies a critique of how academics do and do not recognize their own material practices and institutions. By following his methodological injunction, we can achieve three goals: firstly, we move beyond the separations that the modern constitution inserts into material relationships and further provincialize Eurocentric history by admitting the possibility of a scientific “bad habitus.”28 Secondly, it furthers the investigation of the concrete social relationships (and thus, the epistemic conditions) on which asymmetrical claims to academic representation and authority are based. And thirdly, it advances field science methodology by asking the question which aspects of such asymmetrical claims are unethical and which are inevitable, and whether even a decolonized field science can completely avoid these asymmetries (for a discussion, see Pels 2014a). Applied to material culture studies, this should have the further consequence that we not only stop treating excessive objects as alien to “normal” human traffic (like the forms of double consciousness discussed earlier) but also as foreign to scientific self-understanding. This book can be read as an attempt to contribute to a normalization of science itself—following in the wake of an impressive number of science and technology studies and historians of science—by questioning some of the historical processes by which our religious heritage and our conceptions of modernity have seemingly excluded fetishization from science. Excessive objects abound in science, and not just in the “Lost Worlds” of Victorian science fiction (see Pels 2017): from the often fanatical search for a “missing link” in human evolution (Meredith 2011) to the loss of control over visual reproductions of the “double helix” by one of its Nobel Prize–winning authors (McManus 2003: 878), the boundaries that help to maintain a double consciousness about this all too human and material relationship have turned out to be fragile and permeable. The denial that excess in objects has a place in scientific practice should itself be studied as a peculiar cultural and historical pattern—a task to which this book is devoted, and at which most of the following chapters aim.

Intimacy and Sensory Registers Field sciences and material culture studies maintain a more concrete, immediate, and material relationship to the evidence employed than other human sciences: archaeology, anthropology, geography, (art) history, studies of visual culture and consumption, and the ethnog-

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raphy of science require being in touch with, or at least in intimate proximity to, objects and practices studied. At first, natural history’s paradigmatic practice of collecting was dominated by the passion of wonder, but it was marginalized by Enlightenment taxonomy, Victorian evolutionism, and the routinization of spectacle (see Chapters 3 and 5). Natural history abstracted objects by extraction and classification, as manifested by the desire to complete collections of species and materials, guided by questionnaires and selective histories (Jardine, Secord, and Spary 1996; Fabian 1983: 8; S. Stewart 1993). Such taxonomic desires, however, had to meet the epistemic condition of sharing time and place during field research with both objects and assistants (usually indigenous ones). Naturalists, archaeologists, and ethnographers were thereby confronted with complexities, transgressions, and confusions of identity that threatened the ideological constitution of European science and its heroic explorers, and by implication, colonial control (Camerini 1996; Driver 2001; Fabian 1983; Kuklick and Kohler 1996; Simpson 1975). In the twentieth century, these complexities of knowledge were often banished to a subordinate genre like the anthropologist’s autobiography (Bowen 1956; Read 1965). However much eschewed in public, such contact nevertheless remains the bedrock of the production of knowledge in field research. This means we have to attend to at least two basic methodological features of field research’s reliance on the body’s sensorium and its intimate and concrete proximity to objects: the way fieldwork constitutes the validity of statements, and the way primarily visual and textual representations are distilled from a more encompassing sensory context. These features are illustrated by the way Alfred Russel Wallace’s zoological fieldwork in the Moluccas involved a long process of transforming an object (a bird skin) into an authoritative scientific classification (in his case, as a “specimen” of a “new” species of paradise bird). Starting with the bird being spotted, shot, and skinned by Wallace’s trusted servant Ali (Wallace himself being unheroically prostrated by illness in Ternate), the skin was physically prepared and described by Ali and Wallace together. It could only be definitively classified by scientific authorities in London upon Wallace’s arrival back home, but the process transformed Wallace himself into a bona fide scientific naturalist, by also excluding Ali’s contribution to knowledge from the published report. Yet Ali took on Wallace’s surname, showing that both his and the bird’s identities were transformed in the process. (For quite some time, paradise birds, only known in Europe by their skins, were often assumed to have no legs; see Camerini 1996: 59).

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The example shows a crucial contribution of the concrete intimacies of field research to the validity of scientific statements: it makes us recognize that such validity is not initially an abstract correspondence between the representations produced by the scientists about the object studied, but that it is based in concrete social interactions between researcher and research participants. Leaving aside nonhuman research participants (but see Tsing 2015), local inhabitants, authorities, and coworkers rarely participate in research or share knowledge about themselves or other objects of study without benefiting from concrete social transactions with researchers. These concrete transactions transform not only the research relationship, but also (especially in the case of ethnography) both observers and observed (Cho and Trent 2006). Transactional and transformational validity are therefore necessary conditions of the production of knowledge, most obviously where it is coproduced in the intersubjective exchange of language competences, embodied social skills, and historical awareness (Fabian 1971). The fieldworker is transformed, not only in the case of an ethnographer learning “native” competences, but also in other disciplines’ understanding of fieldwork as initiation and enskilment (Camerini 1996; McCook 1996: 182; Spyer 2010). The object of study is also transformed, if only because something collected in the field can never be straightforwardly translated into an authoritative specimen for a museum or “data” to be used in a scientific argument (McCook 1996: 183; I already reflected on the transformations effected on and by archaeological excavation as discussed by Lucas [2001]). Without such concrete transformations, neither the subject (i.e., an authoritative naturalist) nor the object (i.e., a new species) can emerge.29 The sensory registers of concrete research likewise remain methodologically under-theorized (at least until recently). The evisceration of aesthetics referred to at the end of Chapter 1 is the result of the (sometimes violent) abstraction of a contemplative visual relationship to things from a much broader embodied aisthesis, in the Aristotelian sense of the process of mediation of knowledge through the senses (Eagleton 1990: 13). In art, the ideology of visual distance has resulted in a kind of schooling that represses, for example, “the sensuality of the representation” of a nude (Freedberg 1989: 17), or, in an ethnographic context, the “fear-inducing” aspect of a shield (Gell 1998: 6). In exhibition practices more generally, the desire to keep out such sensuous apperceptions resulted in a tenuous relationship between the educational model of museums and the excessive sensations of freak shows and visual and visceral entertainment. These

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tensions are epitomized by the ambivalent attitudes not only toward sensational wonders and curiosities in ethnographic displays and museum life groups (see Corbey 1995; Zimmerman 2001; and Chapters 5, 6, and 7) but also toward the “magic” of film and photography (Griffiths 2002; Rachel Moore 2000). These ambivalences were part and parcel of the researcher’s habitus, and they also resurfaced as necessary for attracting visitors to places where they could acquire scientific knowledge. For the study of material culture, we should note that this multisensory intimacy with the objects we confront takes place on (at least) two levels: as my encounter with the Auto-Icon shows, we are often only subconsciously aware of the material frames within which we move, but they also co-determine when and how an excessive object comes to stand out and interrupt our movement. Equally important is that this concrete and material aesthesis where we use all our senses—including gut feelings like wonder and fear—is fundamental to interpersonal interaction. Of course, our intimate encounters are shot through with prior—so-called immaterial—classifications, generalizations, and narratives as well (and the relationship between materiality and immateriality will resurface throughout this book). But for a methodology of the concrete, it is vital to acknowledge that not even the most academic subject position can avoid moments in which “to be sensuous is to suffer” (Marx, quoted by Pietz 1993: 144; see also Chapter 3) and one becomes subject to the full sensory impact of one’s surroundings.

The Composition (and Composting) of This Book This finally allows me—with apologies for delaying this by two full chapters—to say why this book is put together as it is. Its composition is, most appropriately to some of its arguments, a composting of themes that have preoccupied me since at least 1998. The book chapter published in that year gives the book its title, but that title needed the writing of this book to crystallize itself out. I needed the two introductions of Part I to give the themes of that original publication—the emergence of fetish and rarity as forms of “untranscended materiality”; and the ambivalence of material culture studies toward it—a proper place. Chapter 1 focused on excessive objects—and dead human bodies in particular—to show that we do experience untranscended materiality (at times), and that the ambivalence of material culture studies toward the latter points to the existence of stubborn

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cultural patterns of modernity that tend to dematerialize our relationship to it. Chapter 2 could then take excessive objects as a point of departure from which to reassess how material culture studies dealt with those modern cultural patterns, diagnose its major problem as the neglect of a dialectics of embodiment and objectification, and suggest ways to rematerialize our methods of studying the latter. The original 1998 essay is reprinted here in Part II (as Chapter 3) and is followed by a chapter that was written as its immediate sequel but published ten years afterwards (as Pels 2008). Chapter 3 provided the first formulation of my critique of the double consciousness of material culture studies toward excessive objects, by focusing on fetish and fetishism. My relocation of fetishes and rarities as objects of wonder and curiosity in the context of global trade first set the tone for two main themes of this book: the historicization of material culture, and the attention for knowledge constitution by passions and affects like wonder. Chapter 4 emerged as an attempt to understand the concept of “materiality” in the face of the fact that Victorian scientists—many of them Protestant Dissenters, with a problematic relationship to the hegemony of the Anglican Church—showed another kind of affect: the fear of being regarded as “materialists.” I found this fear difficult to reconcile with the fact that they also, and obsessively, promoted material objects—rocks, bones, skulls, artifacts—as the bedrock of their science. Placing this contradiction in its historical context, I was able to formulate a conception of materiality that foregrounds its relationality and allows an approach to material culture that circumvents some of the modernist biases outlined in the first two chapters. Together, I regard these chapters as a kind of theoretical prehistory of this book, locating it in the contingencies of the discussions of the 1990s by adding a critique of the modernist and Protestant addiction to representation—a critique that not only triggered my interest in the Auto-Icon but also led me to rethink some of my earlier experiences with studying Catholic missionaries and their relation to Africa. That is why the essays are here reprinted unchanged—see the Introduction to Part II for further clarifications. Writing Chapter 4 on Dissenting Protestants, however, also revived my interest in Catholic Christian, presumably less iconoclastic, attitudes toward objects and impelled me to turn a rising interest in museums into an investigation of representation and mimesis in the worlds of modern exhibitionary complexes. The book continues the focus on cabinets of curiosity of Chapter 3 by interrogating, in Chapter 5, the routinization of wonder in nineteenth-century museums and popular displays, with particular emphasis—fed by the

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focus on the Auto-Icon in Chapter 1—on the display of human bodies (and their confrontation with the visceral responses of visitors). This sets the stage for a discussion of Catholic missionary uses of photographs (by means of an elaboration of the argument in Pels 1989) and objects (by means of expanding an hitherto unfinished essay on the emergence of a Catholic missionary museum, now the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal in the Netherlands). These discussions are ways to consider possible alternative relationships to materiality in modernity and asking further questions about the nature of the relationship between the visceral experience of wonder (that was often invoked by the Catholic curators of the exhibition) and the representation of that experience by means of specific ethnic values (such as “Africa”). Part III concludes with a chapter that reflects on these findings, in order to update the 1990s critique of representation by thinking through European forms of mimesis, especially those based on a classification of things “African.” Throughout, Part III uses the history of museums for an empirical demonstration of the way historical patterns supplement each other: a composting that will be taken up in the conclusion to the book as a whole. Part IV concludes this book by returning to the topic of the time of things, and by using this focus on temporality for a rematerializing approach to the often-heard thesis that capitalism, and exchange-value in particular, dematerializes. Chapters 9 and 10 address a topic that became inevitable as this book progressed beyond the original essay of 1998: a historicizing reconsideration of commodity fetishism vis-ávis material culture studies. Chapter 9 starts from the suggestion that Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism by a dualism of use- and exchange-value could not address the phenomenon of branding—or “identity-value”—and thereby produced a far too static conception of how the performance of commodities enchants its consumers. The chapter uses insights from the broader history of exhibitions (especially Chapter 5) to confront them with the changing faces of consumer culture since the time of Dickens’s Christmas Carol, and the way material culture studies dealt with them—or failed to do so. It suggests that to grasp this dynamic, we need not only to study how the fetishization of commodities unfolds, in a dialectic of objectification and embodiment, in time, but also that the dualism of use- and exchange-value is too crude to grasp this movement, and that one needs at least a third term: identity-value. Chapter 10 then takes up the suggestion that Marx could ignore this kind of excess valuation, because he did not live to see the flourishing of advertising and branding. The chapter uncovers through a history of advertising how this

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professional industry of manipulating the performance of commodities is marked by an oscillation between trust and mistrust. It allows us to see that, rather than “false” consciousness, the notion of double consciousness can also help to better interpret consumers and consumerism, also when dealing with the, only seemingly immaterial, identity value of brands. The book concludes by another reflection on things and time, by taking another presumed agent of dematerialization, techno-fetishism, as a way to consider the future of things. It discusses several approaches to the so-called digital revolution in an attempt to show that techno-fetishist fantasies of leaving our material bodies largely behind (pioneered, as we saw, by André Leroi-Gourhan) need to be countered by a different time of things, one that shows a more humble approach to the object that, in the end, confronts us all with inescapable objectifications: planet Earth.

Notes 1. As other chapters (such as those in Part III) suggest, and has been worked out at length by Rippe (2021), I think images should be treated as objects too, taking account of their specific material and semiotic affordances. 2. This conception of epistemology is an empirical alternative to the philosophical notion criticized by Richard Rorty (1980). I derive that understanding of epistemology from Gregory Bateson (1973) and Johannes Fabian (1971). See also the penultimate section of this chapter. 3. I borrow “shifter” from linguistics, where it designates words that change place depending on the mode and medium of address (like “I” and “you” in conversation; see especially the decolonizing use Johannes Fabian has made of the ideas of Emile Benveniste: 1983: 84–85). 4. See the cover picture of Apter and Pietz (1993). The shifting of goods from rubbish to (excess) value is the topic of Michael Thompson’s highly original Rubbish Theory (1979), but I have refrained from using it here because of its excessive sociologizing and culturalizing of material culture—see also the critique of Appadurai, Miller, and Mitchell in the next section. 5. On the transformation of ghosts from early modern to modern romantic manifestations, see G. Bennett (1987). 6. I do not mean to suggest that social science is by definition secular: the fact that it seems so in its current manifestations it is not an argument for eternity. If our methodologies indeed aspire to universality, we should consider to what extent social science is or can be open to practitioners of different religious persuasions. 7. See Fields (2001). I do not intend to trivialize the agonies of the racial discrimination from which Du Bois derived his notion of double consciousness by associating it with commodification. To the contrary, I think it is

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

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crucial to undo the misrecognition of Du Bois’s theoretical achievements and to pursue Kopytoff ’s (1986) example further by examining the thesis that race is a form of identity fetishism (see Chapter 10) and as such, a crucial aspect of understanding its early economic role in European expansion. I elaborate on the Christmas Carol in my discussion of commodity fetishism (see Chapter 9). I used the Carol in reflections on haunted modernities earlier, but without fully realizing that Dickens didn’t believe in ghosts (see Pels 2003a: 17–29). To be fair, this may be the result of W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1996: 82) desire to also counter an excessive appeal to semiotic or discursive models in the study of visual culture, as displayed by Bryson and others (see Bryson et al. 1991). See the Business Dictionary (www.businessdictionary.com/definition/ materiality.html); the Wikipedia-lemma on “materiality”; and the online edition of Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus (http://thesaurus.com/browse/ materiality). All accessed on 9 January 2013. See my elaboration of the history of objectivity in science in relation to the history of anthropology as a field science (Pels 2014a; Daston and Galison 2007). The locus classicus of the history of race in anthropology remains Stocking (1968, 1987). For the closely related reduction of the human body to a tabula rasa, see Jonathan Mitchell (2006: 386); for bodies as ethnographic objects, see Corbey (1995), Zimmerman (2001) and my discussion in chapter 5. My formulation elides reducing the acheiropoietic to Divine or natural causation only because I reserve room for artificial life. I return to the argument in the context of technological fetishism (see the conclusion to this book). And, we may add, in some museum objects’ “semiophoric” functions (Pomian 1987). See also Chapters 5 and 7. To feminists, a particularly irksome version of this emerged in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reduction of female bodies to objects of exchange ([1949] 1969). Miller pays much attention to gender, but also acknowledges his debt to structuralism (see Chapter 9). This explains Ingold’s misunderstanding of my 1998 essay, now Chapter 3 of this book (see Ingold 2007: 11–12). Compare to my critique of the role of—what I now would call—artifact ideology in the mistaken archaeological thesis that the “Neolithic Revolution” made human culture become “more material or substantive” (Pels 2010: 223). Thus realizing a subjectivation comparable to the result of the dialectic of objectification and embodiment that Bourdieu theorized as fundamental to the Kabyle house and the generation of individual habitus (Pels 2010: 226). Turkle provided a seminal account of the rediscovery of the concrete inherent in this abstract move (1995: 50–73).

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19. This paragraph is another example of the uses of thin description. 20. This reification was discussed as contributing to modern forms of dematerialization at the end of Chapter 1. 21. The period 1750–1850 is referred to by Reinhard Koselleck as the Sattelzeit (2004) between early modern and modern cultural patterns. 22. However, one should note that Foucault used the notion of threshold rather ambivalently (Golder 2007: 166n18). 23. This does not exhaust the social functions of methodology: two others are sale (in grant applications, for example) and critical evaluation (in peer review). For its aspirational function, see Pels 2022. 24. Not everyone, however, agreed that methodology deserves room in social science, not least Johannes Fabian (see the rest of his quote about epistemology [1971: 20]). I hope my rethinking of methodology as aspirational can counter his seminal and still relevant critique of its positivist reification. 25. Alfred North Whitehead famously defined this fallacy as the attribution of concrete existence to concepts in isolation, rather than in relation to other space-time coordinates (Whitehead [1926] 2001: 51). This was derived from paradigmatic shifts that denied objectivity to anything but logical and/or mathematical relationships (Daston and Galison 2007: 254–55, 289). My use differs: it addresses the empirical work of “trained judgment” that emerged at the same time (Daston and Galison 2007: 314) and that was developed, among others, in early twentieth century ethnography (Pels 2014a). 26. I discuss this writing style further in the introduction to Part II. 27. I therefore prefer the chemical and earthy metaphor of composting over recent pleas for interpreting the interpenetration of historical layers in terms of scriptural metaphors like “palimpsest” or “articulation,” although they aim at a broadly similar understanding (Clifford 2013; Lucas 2005: 37). See also the conclusion to this book. 28. This inspiring notion was coined in a critical review of “multimodal” anthropology (Takaragawa et al. 2019). 29. This negotiation over concrete differences is also illustrated by those processes where the transformation almost fails, as in the scientific contest over Paul du Chaillu’s discovery of the gorilla (McCook 1996).

PART II

Fetish and the Fear of Matter

INTRODUCTION

The following chapters on fetish and materiality were the product of conversations in which I was involved in the 1990s and therefore both anticipate and lack later developments in the thinking surrounding these issues. The chapter on fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy not only gave this book its title and spurred me on to clarify what it meant but can also be retrospectively read as my first attempt to differentiate kinds of object relationships within material culture (resulting in Chapters 1 and 2). The book in which it first appeared (Spyer 1998) was part of a revival of interest in fetish and fetishism that has not abated since. Its pioneer was William Pietz, and to me his most revolutionary, yet most often ignored finding was that both the word and the material reality of fetish were an authentic product of global trade on the West African coast (instead of a mere misapplication to African ritual of a Portuguese term for amulet, as not a few people still seem to think).1 This historical context implies that this will not be the final statement on fetish and fetishism, nor will this book (despite Chapter 9’s return to the fetish of the commodity) attempt to cover the vast range of meanings it has acquired. I need to make several features of Chapter 3, however, more explicit here. The notion that certain object relationships have an independent signifying effect on human consciousness has been elaborated since, perhaps most elegantly by Jane Bennett’s philosophy of a “thingpower” that comes to humans from an “out-side” (2010).2 The “afterlife” of fetishist discourses has been massively documented by Rosalind Morris (2017). Yet the crucial point that Chapter 3 makes, and that shallow readings of Pietz’ work overlook,3 is his observation that the emergence of fetishes on the West African coast was both a discursive creation and a material reality (see Chapter 3)—both fetishism and fetish, both false and functional. This contradiction between idea and practice became constitutive of modern traditions, not only in the way Karl Marx’s material poverty forced him to pawn, that is, commoditize and fetishize, his overcoat in order to obtain money for writing his

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critique of commodity fetishism (Stallybrass 1998; see also Chapter 9), but, more profoundly, in the way Dutch merchants turned the, to them, unfamiliar role of objects in the practice of West African global trade into a description of both Protestant Christianity’s and rational capitalism’s “other.” My twinning of the fetish and the rarity historicized that contradiction, attempted to decolonize that othering, and tried to provincialize Europe by insisting that global capitalism formed the (often subconscious) framework for understanding both. Bringing the rarity into the discussion of fetish and excessive objects also brought a major institutional building block of modernity—the museum—into view (see Chapters 5 and 7). It made me realize the subaltern role of the passion of wonder in the history of objectivity.4 It also turned the fetish into an inalienably European thing, despite, or perhaps because of, its location in global trade. Both fetish and Marx’s overcoat can serve as reminders that the spirit of matter practically conditions human designs, and that even the latter’s conscious rationalism does not safeguard modern people from being haunted by what they (want to) forget. But as both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 demonstrate, this implies a far greater historical role for affect and emotion—for wonder, anxiety, and fear—than our conversations in the 1990s addressed. The theme has gained much attention since (Edwards 2012; Newell 2018; D. Rutherford 2016; Smith and Campbell 2015). This gives a new impetus to my discussion of haunting and amnesia as a contingent formation of social power that cannot be taken as a rational assessment of universal forms of subjectivity or desire.5 Fetish, rarity, fact, and fantasy were and are such contingent formations, and they repressed the signifying effects of excessive objects to such an extent that they could not but return as a kind of independent agency somewhere else (even if, at first, in the mirror of “fetishistic” Africa; but increasingly, in “our own” modern worlds). The affect of wonder, in particular, may in the context of the emergence of modern thingness (especially in terms of objectivity) be seen as something positive, even revolutionary: it could be understood as the essential (and I would almost say nonideological) ingredient of positivism, the doctrine that there is something “out there” in the world that we are obliged to know if we are to maintain a sound relationship with it. But it manifested itself in repressed form, thus also giving rise to anxiety and fear—not least in the face of the possibility of limiting the capacity for representation, addressed at the end of Chapter 3, and worked out in Chapter 4 with examples from Victorian science.

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Chapter 4’s focus on different vectors of contest over materiality (in terms of abstract and concrete, spiritual and material, subjective and objective, or culture and nature) was my way of digesting our conversations about materiality in a way that addressed the essential abstractness of the term, and was another step toward differentiating human relations toward matter that evolved into the approach outlined in Chapters 1 and 2. My earlier attempts to write ethnographic and social histories of Victorian anthropology had shown that accusations of “materialism” made since the eighteenth century rarely specified what materiality they targeted. Moreover, my interest in contemporary intersections of anthropology and occultism (Pels 2000, 2003b) fed my suspicion that, around 1870, the tyranny of the subject emerged in British anthropology in a new and more secular mode, by privileging a culture of abstraction as symbolic construction and mathesis. In retrospect, I think it could have become a far more convincing chapter for this book if I had overcome my habitual neglect of Francophone scientific history sooner, and contrasted both Thomas Huxley and Edward Tylor more explicitly with the association between positivism and fetishism made by their teacher Auguste Comte (see M. Pickering 1998), from whom they both departed in significant ways. (But I decided against revising the essay for reasons to be discussed shortly.) What stands out, however, is that in the careers of all three, the determining role of religion points directly to the inescapable affective dimensions of their secularizing work—and yet, that should at the same time put quotation marks around “religion,” since the term seems to displace crucial affective dimensions of the production of both the secular, the universal, and the spiritual at the same time (see Masuzawa 2005; Engelke 2015). Chapter 4’s insistence on acknowledging the cultural role of contemporary conceptions of the future will be picked up in the chapters on the time of things, but its emphasis on time and the historical contingency of “materiality” also points to two further aspects of these two chapters: firstly, Chapter 3’s discussion of substitution as an alternative to signification by representation may have to be rethought in the light of my emphasis in Chapter 2 on a layering of history by supplementation rather than supplanting. As indicated in that chapter, the metaphor of a historical composting appeals to me more, yet what that means for our understanding of semiosis needs to be addressed elsewhere (see also the Conclusion). Secondly, my historicizing focus also explains how these two chapters are structured: rather than illustrating a theory about materiality (deductively) by a

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historical case, or presenting a case from which to draw (inductive) conclusions, I wanted to clarify the contingent emergence of certain meanings of materiality by contextualizing theory in a sequence of historical events. Such historical sequences contingently determine their own outcomes, just as much as they do not fully determine what comes next. Chapter 3 argues that the fetish and the rarity emerged at a certain cultural moment in global mercantilism as twins in a racially divided intellectual family. But while the trajectories of the fetish diverged into European sequences of the criticism of commodity relations and sexual obsessions and West African sequences of cross-regional comparisons of occult practices, those of the rarity diverged into musealized control of collections of factual evidence and the popular culture of fancy fairs and freak shows. By focusing on such specific trajectories of subalternity, the two chapters are aimed at writing in a style that does not presume a discourse of European dominance as its analytic starting point. Even where European dominance is something to be expected, a methodology of the concrete requires it to be interrogated it in a way that brings out how such subordination to dominant discourses of the human bodies and materials surrounding us is brought about (see especially Chapter 5 for a further elaboration by means of the passion for wonder discussed in Chapter 3). If we want to know how abstraction works in practice, the abstract reproduction of dominant structures offered by academic theory may not be the most effective means to find that out: instead, a genealogy in which history contextualizes theory rather than the other way around seems more appropriate (and explains my recurrent appeal to the work of Michel Foucault in this book). In the same spirit, I thought it more appropriate to leave the texts of one article that tried to show in 1998 how the fetish stays with us (despite numerous modern attempts to exorcise it), and another that tried to show in 2008 how a kind of fear of matter haunts the modern world of anti-iconic abstraction, in their original shape (except by the occasional typographical correction, and a few additional footnotes).

Notes 1. We found these relationships build by fetisso—as performances of both trade brokers and their oaths—and their essentialization as “African religion” to be a model for understanding colonial ethnography (Pels and Salemink 1999).

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2. See also Jean-Paul Warnier’s matière á penser school (Mohan and Douny 2021) or Graeme Were’s How Materials Matter (2019). 3. See, for example, Kohl (2003) and Silva (2017). A European preoccupation with the etymology of fetish and its presumed mistranslation dates from 1760, when Charles de Brosses popularized the term (Morris 2017: 138–39). 4. The discussion about what kind of collecting determined early European collections, however, is still ongoing. Against those who insist that curiosity cabinets are primarily marked by rational classificatory schemes (Arnold 2006), I have in the meantime found that my use of Lorraine Daston’s views (1994) on the primacy of wonder was supported by other in-depth historical research (Findlen 1994; Smith and Findlen 2002). 5. This may explain my relative neglect of psychoanalysis in favor of a less sexually fetishist focus on memory, forgetting, cultivating style, and socialization (see, for example, Bourdieu 1977 or Ferguson 1999). While my note 20 in Chapter 3 may have been too angry a comment on psychoanalysis, David Bennett’s argument that sexual fetishism was turned into a popularly accepted truth in the 1950s by being spread through the advertising industry (D. Bennett 2005; see Chapter 10, this volume) has reinforced the early twentieth-century suspicions by anthropologists that it is difficult to apply to anything but Western hegemonic discourses.

Chapter 3

THE SPIRIT OF MATTER ON FETISH, RARITY, FACT, AND FANCY

This chapter is an attempt to use the concept of fetish for an inquiry— begun elsewhere (Pels 1999; Van Dijk and Pels 1996)—into the place of materiality in present-day cultural and social theory.1 The fetish is a good guide in such explorations, because, ever since it emerged from the cultural tangle of West African trade, it has signposted an untranscended materiality and beckoned its students to sojourn in the border zones that divide mind and matter, the animate and inanimate. The fetish foregrounds materiality because it is the most aggressive expression of the social life of things: not merely alive, it is an “animated entit[y] that can dominate persons” (Taussig 1980: 5). Fetishism is animism with a vengeance. Its matter strikes back. My inquiry is divided into two parts. The first addresses the way in which “fetishism” can be distinguished from other expressions of the social life of things through a discussion of Arjun Appadurai’s seminal essay on the subject. In particular, this section addresses the difference between fetishism and animism in terms of what I call the “spirit in,” as opposed to fetishism’s “spirit of ” matter. Next, Appadurai’s positive evaluation of the alterity of the fetish leads to a discussion as to what extent the fetish is an “other thing” in cultural and social theory. It addresses the paradox that the fetish is commonly regarded as something negative, a denial of an accepted reality or “normal” hierarchy of values, yet also is made to function within this normality in some way. Thirdly, I will argue that Appadurai’s focus on commodities leads away from the questions of materiality raised by the fetish, and discuss what concept of materiality will accommodate the contradictions sketched in the preceding sections. This theoreti-

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cal part reflects the way in which the fetish functions to question the boundaries between things and the distinctions they are held to delineate (cf. Spyer 1998). Abstract theory, however, is never sufficient to counter the threat posed by the fetish’s materiality and historicity. The second part of this chapter, therefore, investigates the possibilities for advancing another mode of argument by suggesting a historical contextualization of the first, theoretical part, a contextualization that I feel is essential for a proper understanding and use of fetish. By linking the discourse on fetish to the, historically synchronous, discourse on rarities, and both these discourses to the emergence of Western notions of “fact” and “fancy,” I hope to show that the possibility of thinking of an untranscended materiality of things is historically contingent on the emergence of a global trade in objects, in which “fetish” was the derogatory term of a pair of which “rarity” was the appreciative one (both being, in a sense, the “others” of the commodity). The persistent idealism of a Western discourse of representation that emerged afterwards, during the Enlightenment, subsumed this untranscended materiality to orders of classification, and made it into something of an occult quality of Western philosophy. As such, it points to a theory of signification that cannot be thought from within an intellectual tradition that is still heavily inflected by Enlightenment thought. Since that is also my provenance, this chapter doesn’t really have a conclusion: it disrupts and unsettles rather than clarifies. If that lack of conclusiveness is not caused by my lack of mastery of these issues (and it may very well be), we can always blame the fetish. It would not be the first time in its history for it to be declared guilty of confusion.

Methodological Fetishism Arjun Appadurai formulated the methodological prerequisite for the analysis of the social life of things as follows: Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves. . . . [E]ven though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. No social analysis of things (whether the analyst is an economist, an art historian, or an anthropologist) can avoid a

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minimum level of what might be called methodological fetishism. (Appadurai 1986: 5, emphases in original)

This profound and puzzling paragraph rules out the possibility for any independent “life of things” in its first sentence (“things have no meanings apart from . . . human transactions” etc.), but allows “things-in-motion” sufficient independent activity to “illuminate their human and social context” further on. This struggle for primacy between people and things may be clarified by setting Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism” within the context of the genealogy of the fetish. Appadurai assumes that the theory that says things have no meanings except those that humans endow them with is a “necessary condition” of “our” approach. At the same time, he posits a methodology that assumes that human life cannot be understood without the illumination provided by things-in-motion. He thereby inverts the relationship of continuity between theory and method of normal science, where theory provides hypotheses that method translates into research practice. Instead, Appadurai seems to use method here to obtain an alternative or counterpoint to a theory that, for the understanding of the “concrete, historical circulation of things” stands in our way. But why cultivate such an incongruity? I feel this can be clarified by zooming in on the genealogy of the fetish. William Pietz has beautifully shown how, in the seventeenth century, the fetish emerged from the hybrid wilds of West African trade, allowing Dutch merchants to name those aspects of their trading relationships with Africans that could not be understood in terms of mercantile ideas of the rational calculation of value (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988). Merchant ethnographers like Willem Bosman transformed the fetisso—an object functioning within African trading relationships—into the fetish—the central feature of “African” religion.2 This essentialization of the fetish tends to obscure that it was, in a sense, an uncontrollable object that burst the bounds of capitalist calculation. Even though European ethnographers try to bring its hybrid inexplicability under control by making the fetish into something essentially “African,” this same discourse gave the fetish a life and a career that eventually allowed it to migrate from Africa and (un)settle down in two of the most important intellectual landscapes of Western modernity, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Even in this diaspora, it retained parts of its original identity: whether as “African” religion, as the overvaluation of Western commodities, or as a specific articulation of sexual desire, the fetish remained an object of abnormal traffic.

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Appadurai’s injunction to be methodologically fetishist, therefore, seems to call for an “abnormal” traffic in information, in which the norm to be deviated from is obviously given by the theory—providing “necessary conditions”—that says “meanings” cannot but come from humans. The answer to the question about Appadurai’s intended relationship between theory and method could then be that “methodological fetishism” is a reversal of the commonly accepted hierarchy of facts and values in social and cultural theory, which says that things don’t talk back. Or, better, which says that those people who say that things talk back may be dangerously out of touch with reality. Now, there are two ways of saying that things talk back, of which one seems more out of touch with this commonly accepted reality than the other. Things can talk back because they are animated by something else, or they do so because of their own “voice.” The first possibility is in fact what Appadurai means: the sentences that I left out of the quotation given above say that the meanings of things are inscribed in their forms, uses, and trajectories and that we can understand how human traffic “enlivens” them only by analyzing these trajectories (Appadurai 1986: 5). The notions of “inscription” and “enlivening” indicate that, whatever things can do in this way of thinking, their agency is derivative. In contrast, one can also say that things act, emit messages and meanings on their own. The first attitude is animist: a way of saying that things are alive because they are animated by something foreign to them, a “soul” or, in the evolutionary anthropologist Edward Tylor’s words, “Spiritual Being” (Tylor 1873, vol. 1: 424): a spirit made to reside in matter. Animism, as applied to things, transcends their materiality by saying that the perception of the life of matter is possible only through an attribution of a derivative agency. In contrast, fetishism says things can be seen to communicate their own messages. The fetish’s materiality is not transcended by any voice foreign to it: to the fetishist, the thing’s materiality itself is supposed to speak and act; its spirit is of matter. As I see it, Appadurai’s social life of things is more properly the life of the ventriloquist’s dummy, a “methodological animism.” A call for a “methodological fetishism” would entail something more radical, for it would indicate a relationship in which such transcendence of materiality by human intention or artifice is not possible.3 An obvious objection at this point seems to be that one can only come to such a theoretical distinction by ignoring the actual “life” of a thing, its biography in which, at a certain point in the thing’s career, it is inscribed with human intentions, while at a later moment it may appear, fetishistically, as a Ding an Sich emitting the messages of such

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inscriptions on its own. In such a view, the fetish would be merely an isolated, phenomenological moment within a culturally and historically encompassing process. However, there is a danger of tautology if such an argument is used within the context of Appadurai’s methodological propositions, which are meant to “illuminate . . . the concrete, historical circulation of things” (1986: 5). These propositions define materiality as contingent while positing human intentionality and artifice as transcending that contingency, thus introducing the terms that need to be explained as facts into the explanation. A crucial point of the different discourses on fetishism is precisely to outline the possibility that the materiality of things can stand in the way of, and deflect, the course of human traffic (“when the fetish comes to life . . . some process has been suddenly interrupted,” Freud 1950: 201).4 Defining this human traffic as the transcendence of materiality and contingency theoretically outlaws the fetish before it has been given a chance to unfold its otherness.

The Fetish as Other Thing By discussing the fetish animistically, Appadurai appears to reconcile his call for the abnormal traffic of things with the theoretical primacy of human intention and artifice. This coupling of social determination by humans with “fetishism” is something Appadurai owes to his emphasis on commodity fetishism. Commodities occupy front stage in Appadurai’s argument, and an astonishing range of commodity fetishisms appear in his text (1986: 50–56). Yet Appadurai’s use of “methodological” fetishism is quite unusual, as a further examination of Appadurai’s relationship to the discourse on fetish will show. Appadurai significantly departs from most uses of fetishism in refusing to deploy it simply as “a critical discourse about the false objective values of a culture from which the speaker is personally distanced” (Pietz 1985: 14, emphasis mine). His call for a useful methodological fetishism partially reverses this negative judgment. At the same time, Appadurai’s derivation of the life of things from human agency (for which, in my terms, a methodological animism would seem to be conceptually sufficient) downplays the actual danger posed by talk of the fetish: its threat to overpower human beings by its materiality. Appadurai’s use of a methodological fetishism retains fetishism as an “other” of existing theoretical assumptions, yet reverses its valuation as something “false.” This move can be understood as being analogous to the ways of rationalizing difference of many anthropol-

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ogies: “this custom may seem weird, but it is not as strange, irrational or useless as it appears on the surface.” There are two primary ways of thus demystifying curious customs: the comparison with things done by “us” that turn out to be similar, and the demonstration that a curious custom actually fulfilled an active function in social survival. In the case of fetishism, demystification by comparison (which often implies a reenchantment of “our” world) is used by Michael Taussig in juxtaposing a Latin American “fetishism” with the Western commodity variety;5 or by Appadurai in juxtaposing the different commodity fetishisms arising from Chicago stock exchanges and New Guinean cargo cults (Appadurai 1986: 50 ff.). This debunking use of “fetishism” goes back to Marx, who both rehabilitated West African fetishism and reenchanted capitalism by applying “fetishism” to the world of commodity production and exchange (Pietz 1993). It is important to bear in mind that, while such positive assessments of fetishism are unusual, all the examples given are regarded as seminal moments in the development of social and cultural theory. The second demystification—rationalizing fetishism by showing it has a social function—is even more unusual within the discourse on fetish. It is a part of Appadurai’s reasoning to the extent that his methodological fetishism leads him to propose, in the wake of Baudrillard and others, a rehabilitated, that is, social, relational, and active notion of consumption (Appadurai 1986: 31). Appadurai translates Baudrillard’s critique of the Marxian emphasis on production into a theory of demand, which is no longer seen predominantly as a passive false consciousness but also as an active intervention in the world by consumers: now, they do not just suffer but also make the market (cf. Miller 1987). Whether this critique of Marx is completely justified is a moot point: Marx’s own account of the fetishization of capital can serve to show consumption’s potential importance for understanding fetishism. Capital is fetishized by the process of valorization by labor, the realization of that value by market circulation, and the accumulation of realized value through capital investments. The last part of the process can be interpreted as the fetishistic consumption of capital by the capitalist, for it “becomes identified as wealth itself,” “the very embodiment of desire” (Pietz 1993: 147). This process is, therefore, simultaneously a fetishization of capital, and an investment of it that may set in motion further cycles of valorization, realization, and accumulation—that is, its motivation is both “false” and functional, both “subject to” and “subject of ” culture, both product and producer. Similarly, we can say that less privileged consumers are both passively subject to, and active subjects of, fetishized commodities: under capi-

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talism, their demand—which is both determined by, and determining, social and economic forces (Appadurai 1986: 31)—more often than not takes the form of the fetishized commodity. Nothing brings out the inevitability of this contradiction as well as the story of Marx’s overcoat, the fetishized commodity that, in a fully capitalized world, was a necessary material condition for the production of the book that would “unmask” the fetishization of commodities (Stallybrass 1998). This “double attitude” of the fetishist, the simultaneity of affirmation and denial of reality (Freud 1950: 202–3) helps to explain why fetishism has been such a successful exemplar for understanding ideology, and why it can be easily inserted within arguments that endorse the thesis that any regime of truth is a regime of power and vice versa. This bringing forward of a more “positive” conception of the otherness of the fetish is, I feel, the most valuable element of Appadurai’s approach. Of course, fetishism is not Appadurai’s main topic, and he uses it merely instrumentally, as a counterpoint to an over-emphasis on the causative role of human traffic. That means that his interesting departure from the traditionally derogatory notion of the fetish is subordinated to a theory that proclaims the opposite: that things are ultimately and necessarily subject to human traffic. This does not sufficiently acknowledge the central importance of the “untranscended materiality” of the object that Pietz argues is crucial to the discourse on fetish (1985: 7). Appadurai’s elevation of fetishism from the status of a falsehood to that of a method for understanding object relations addresses the dimension of fetishism that defined the fetish as the “other thing” of the commodity, thus making (African) fetishism into an irrational (that is, noncapitalist) attribution of value; while at a later Marxian stage, criticizing the capitalist attribution of value itself as being fetishistic. But Appadurai’s theoretical interests steer him away from the other side of the fetish’s genealogy: the fact that the Dutch merchants of the seventeenth century not only defined the fetish as the other thing of the capitalist commodity, but also as an alternative to their own Protestant Christianity.6 In contrast to the idolatrous others of Christianity, who were thought to worship material representations of false spirits, the worship of the fetish implied revering the terrestrial and material object’s presence itself (Pietz 1993: 131). This powerful object remained, in the discourse of fetishism, underdetermined by a system of commensurable human values: any “trifle” that “took” an African’s “fancy” could become a fetish or object of worship (mark the active tense of “to take”). I shall return to this notion of “fancy” below, where I discuss an aesthetics in which

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the positive power of an object to influence a human being is coupled to its underdetermination by a system of (rational) human values. Suffice to say here that this untranscended materiality provided the Enlightenment with a radically novel, because atheological conception of religion (Pietz 1993: 138). This threat of the fetish to undercut the primacy of human signification by the materiality of the object is not sufficiently recognized by Appadurai’s account of the social life of things, because he concentrates on the spirit of the commodity, which is its exchangeability (Appadurai 1986: 13). By concentrating on the commodity phase, commodity candidacy or commodity context of the thing (1986: 13–15), Appadurai highlights its systematic social life, its transcendence by a system of human exchange values, while downplaying the way in which fetishism insists that the fetish is an object that has the quality to singularize itself and disrupt the circulation and commensurability of a system of human values. This capacity to singularize itself in relation to an ongoing process, and thereby to arrest it, is what makes the fetish into an “other thing.” It is “other” in relation to accepted processes of defining the thing by its use and exchange value. The fetish is one of the “other kinds of worth” that, according to Igor Kopytoff, are “attributed to commodities after they have been produced, and this by way of an autonomous cognitive and cultural process of singularization” (1986: 83). However, its singularity is not the result of sentimental, historical, or otherwise personalized value: the fetish presents a generic singularity, a unique or anomalous quality that sets it apart from both the everyday use and the exchange and the individualization or personalization of objects. The fetish presents a general difference from the everyday valuation of objects, for a fetish can be a commodity at the same time—be it an “other” commodity, like velvet or fur (Freud 1950: 201), lace (Pinch 1998), or blue jeans (Miller 1990). The fetish may be commoditized (in the broad sense of being exchangeable against something else: Appadurai 1986: 9, 13), but even then its system of circulation is different from the everyday: an exchange of things already used, as with shoes or underlinen (Freud 1950: 201); pawning, as with Marx’s overcoat (Stallybrass 1998); the theft of a piece of lace (Pinch 1998). Unlike souvenirs (S. Stewart 1993: 132ff.) or foodstuffs (Kopytoff 1986: 75), the fetish is not singularized by being absorbed into the person or history of the consumer: although it is often close to the body, it maintains an aesthetic value that radically distinguishes it as a material object from the subject it confronts. In this confrontation, the fetish always threatens to overpower its subject, because—unlike our everyday matters—its

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lack of everyday use and exchange values makes its materiality stand out, without much clue as to whether and how it can be controlled.

Materiality? Thus, we can see that one of the possibilities provided by the discourse on fetish is the existence of objects—“other” things—that disrupt everyday valuations, and thereby raise doubts about the ability of human beings to maintain control over their meaning. Again, an untranscended materiality impresses itself upon the argument. One of the aims of this chapter is to show why the discourse on fetish serves as a continual reminder of that materiality—why, in fact, talk of untranscended matter has such a fetish-like attraction in Occidental discourse. But we cannot address that cultural and historical question without first asking what we might be speaking of when we discuss materiality. Most cultural and social theorists that address the issue will agree that in using “matter” or “materiality,” we cannot be talking of a Ding an Sich, let alone a thing that, like a fetish, has an independent agency, capable of making and breaking human beings. Yet that does not necessarily imply that one has to affirm the eventual transcendence of the materiality of things by human intentionality and artifice.7 Daniel Miller has argued that there is a “physicality” which carries over certain forms of signification from one context of human behavior to another.8 This would imply attributing at least a minimum capacity for transcendence to material objects, although, since they are artifacts, this transcendence is achieved by human intentionality and artifice, and matter remains an empty signifier, a tabula rasa on which humanity inscribes meanings differentially. But despite reinstating this primacy of human intentionality and artifice, this first step enables Miller and Van Beek to argue—rightly—for a recognition of materiality in social process, by systematically treating materiality as a quality of relationship rather than of things. Van Beek has recently formulated this in terms of materiality as an “ontological commitment” of human beings, their acceptance of the autonomy of the things with which they come in contact (Van Beek 1996: 18ff.). Yet, Van Beek’s critique that Miller’s theorizing of a dialectic of objectification addresses the theory of culture in general rather than the specifically material (Van Beek 1996: 9; see also Miller 1996: 27) seems equally applicable to his own argument, for “ontological commitment” implies that human beings attribute an autonomous materiality to a thing, not that

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there is anything specifically material about the relationship between people and things. Instead, I would suggest that the materiality of human interaction with things is best studied in terms of aesthetics: the material process of mediation of knowledge through the senses (Eagleton 1990: 13). Such a step is supported by recent studies arguing for the crucial contribution of different sensory regimes to the construction of social knowledge. These studies have opposed a predominantly visualist, Occidental sensory regime to oral/aural (Fabian 1983), tactile (Pels 1998), and even olfactory registers (Classen 1993). However, such a separating out of different senses is itself a discursive construction, just as the distinction and ranking of five senses is peculiar to “the West” (Classen 1993; Howes 1991). Moreover, there is nothing “natural” about senses whose functioning is constantly changing under the influence of developments in human technology.9 Yet, despite this constructedness of human perception, there is a level at which it becomes useful to distinguish a material, nonreflective politics of sense-perception from the way it is talked about (Van Dijk and Pels 1996). At this level, one can recognize ethnographically how a certain training of the senses and a certain construction of material culture come together to deflect, halt, or change the rhythm of an ongoing social process (Seremetakis 1996). This happens, for instance, when the “stillness” of a souvenir or monument suddenly changes our everyday rhythm, to connect it with a memory or a history that is commonly absent; or simply when a cup of coffee reminds us of a necessary break in the work process (Seremetakis 1996: 12, 14–15). It also happens—and this will become more important below—when we are confronted with the difference from everyday life presented by strange museum objects or other curiosities. This implies, however, that we recognize that materiality is not some quality distinguishing an object from a subject—that one should, in fact, question the slippage from the epistemological to the ontological notion of “object” which undergirds arguments like Miller’s (1987). Also, it implies that the “material” is not necessarily on the receiving end of plastic power, a tabula rasa on which signification is conferred by humans: Not only are humans as material as the material they mold, but humans themselves are molded, through their sensuousness, by the “dead” matter with which they are surrounded.10 It is in this way that I understand fetishism—which confers a measure of plastic power to things—as providing an argument against idealism. In a Hegelian perspective, fetishism was associated with sensuous determination, which could never attain categorical universality and

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therefore obstructed the liberation by Geist (Michasiw 1992: 80; Pietz 1993: 140). Such atheological worship, of a thing “untranssubstantiated into the signifier or allegory of a concept or ideal” could not be honored with the name of “religion,” just as Africa as a whole could not be admitted into “history” (Pietz 1993: 140, 1985: 7, n10). Marx turned this on its head. Although he, too, identified fetishism as the “religion of sensuous desire,” he thought it was closer to reality than monotheism (Pietz 1993: 140). This allowed the double movement of rehabilitating fetishism and reenchanting capitalism which I mentioned above, in an explicit anti-idealist critique. Marx’s formula of fetishism as the “religion of sensuous desire” recognized the notion of materiality implicit in fetishism, and took its threat to elevated spiritualities like Hegel’s seriously. It recognizes that human passion—both of possessing and of being possessed, of greed and fancy—emerges within a material dialectic between human sensory routines and material objects. Marx himself shows how difficult it is, within this dialectic, to demarcate subject from object and determine the direction of their mutual influence: To be sensuous, i.e., to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense perception. To be sensuous is to suffer (to be subjected to the actions of another). (quoted in Pietz 1993: 144)

This conception of materiality and reality no longer excludes the possibility brought forward by the discourse on fetish, that to be sensuous is “to be subjected to the actions of another thing.” The fetish, therefore, is both discursive creation and material reality (Pietz 1999), something that emerged historically to designate a process in which objects constitute subjects. It points to an aesthetic sensibility in which the direction of mutual influence of human subject and thing-like object can be reversed; in which we cannot only think animistically, of anthropomorphized objects, of a spirit in matter, but also fetishistically, of human beings objectified by the spirit of the matters they encounter. The greed or fancy evoked by the fetish constitutes humans as sensuous, and therefore suffering, beings, as both subject and object of a historical configuration of desire in which neither humans nor objects possess a predetermined primacy. However, the exploration of the possibilities which the discourse on fetish opens up is fairly recent, fed by, among other things, a more consistent attention paid to consumption, where the immanence of the object plays a more independent role than it does in the study of production (which privileges human agency) or exchange (which em-

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phasizes the transcendence of a system of commensurability). Why this recent emergence of the materiality of things, and of the fetish in particular? The fetish has been a possibility in Occidental discourse since the seventeenth century. Since then, similarly hybrid objects like caste, totem, and taboo have arisen, without having an impact in the West equal to that of the fetish.11 The fetish somehow possesses an intellectual force that makes one wonder whether it is sufficiently served by a theoretical discussion like the preceding, that turns it into a general human trait (whether one calls this an aesthetic sensibility, or a cognitive process, or something else). Such theoretical exercises, although useful, will never “tame the beast” of fetishism (cf. Ellen 1988: 220), for such domestication implies that it is possible to arrest the continual, paradoxical movement that most uses of the concept entail. Any merely intellectual attempt to go “beyond” fetishism (see also Miller 1990) fails to recognize that fetishization is both “false” and functional, a form of misrecognition as well as recognition of reality; that it implies a “double attitude” (Freud 1950: 203) or “double consciousness” (Pietz 1985: 14) on the part of the fetishist. As (part of) an aesthetics of untranscended materiality, fetishism tells us to move in, rather than escape, the sensuous border zone between our selves and the things around us, between mind and matter. In the remainder of this chapter, I will argue that the aesthetics that produced the—predominantly “false”—fetish was also the source of—predominantly “functional”—commonplaces of Western objectivity like “rarity” and “fact,” and that this gives us a reason why the fetish has so preoccupied European minds. So let us shift from metaphor to metonymy and go back to the period in which the fetish first materialized.

Singularity, Chance, and the Shuffle of Things The seventeenth century, wedged in between the first (Marees 1602) and the most widely read ethnography of the West African fetish (Bosman 1704), was also the heyday of the curiosity cabinet and the object displayed in it, the so-called curiosity or rarity. I think it can be argued that the rarity—in Francis Bacon’s words, “whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form, or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept” (1594, quoted in Impey and MacGregor 1985: 1)—is the twin of the fetish: it was not just born at about the same time, but also duplicated its mercantile features, if with a European

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complexion. Since the rarity is an important source of the Western notion of objectivity, this comparison sets the fetish within the history of Western objectivity and gives us another angle from which to consider the reasons why a majority of (post)Enlightenment scholars shied away from its untranscended materiality. Like the commodity (Appadurai 1986: 16), the rarity can only be understood as a thing in motion, a thing being “shuffled.” Unlike the commodity, however, the rarity’s motion makes it into a marvelous object, something that stands out as “curious” and “rare” from the everyday world of commodities, something that possesses a generic singularity over and against everyday commodities that we also found with the fetish. The rarity stands somewhere between a magical or miraculous substance like a relic—an object with power of its own—and the modern museum object, which represents some broader concept or reality other than itself. The rarity substantiates categorical transformations, things that confuse the everyday, like natural mimicry, nature’s freaks, or exotic imports. The categorical mobility of the rarity is above all manifested in a specific performance: the arousal, in its spectators, of a sense of wonder, the feeling of being in the presence of the extraordinary, out-of-place, or radically different. This sense of wonder was an attitude as applicable to the marvels of natural magic, the meditations of Protestant pietist science, or the novelties of exotic artifacts, flora, or fauna. Curiosity cabinets or Wunderkammern are often regarded as the origin of the museum, and of course they provided many museums now extant with a collection with which to start. According to stereotype, these “not-yet” museums were deficient in order and not as publicly accessible as one might have wished, yet “in terms of function, little has changed” (Impey and MacGregor 1985: 1). In such views, the curiosity cabinet is taken to be an ordered display of things, a “collection” which erases the context of origin of its objects, to make them dependent on principles of interior classification, organization, and categorization (Stewart 1993: 153). Such taxonomic collecting is thought to characterize the curiosity cabinet, even if some of its orderings were symbolic rather than functional, and for private display rather than public education (Olmi 1985: 5–7).12 However, it is doubtful whether this story can be upheld. The museum order of arranging objects in such a way that they form a collection representing “history,” “nationality,” or “nature” only comes up as taxonomy in the eighteenth, and as series in the nineteenth century (T. Bennett 1994). It is characterized by a discourse of representation, based on the idea that the things displayed “stand for” something else (T.

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Mitchell 1991; cf. S. Stewart 1993: 152). In contrast, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets do not display an order or system of that kind (Olmi 1985: 15). Some argue they are “not even a vague or half-formed gesture” toward the museum (Mullaney 1983: 41). Instead, it might be better to avoid the museological and taxonomic discourse of representation as much as possible, and look upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Wunderkammern with a theatrical metaphor, as a place for the production and performance of aesthetic difference.13 This may be clarified by the relic, for despite their mutual differences, both the rarity and the relic stand on one side of a divide that separates them from the museum object. The late Medieval relic collections of the great religious houses and the Renaissance curiosity cabinets were, in content at least, related: while the former included “secular” rarities like giants’ teeth and bones, or natural marvels like “thunderstones” (prehistoric stone implements; MacGregor 1983b: 70–71), curiosity cabinets sometimes included relics and statues of saints (Daston 1994: 256; MacGregor 1983a: 21). This correspondence in content is reinforced by the fact that both relic and rarity were not meant to represent anything (if that is understood in terms of being a sign that stands for an absent referent). The relic did not represent but was the saint, and this identity proved itself by the performance of a miracle (P. Geary 1986). Similarly, a rarity demonstrated its identity by evoking “wonder” in its spectator, a feeling of being in the presence of the extraordinary and marvelous. The performance of the wondrous or marvelous also covered the miraculous, and that explains the presence of relics in a rarity collection, although the performance of wonder meant, as we shall see, much more than the kind of miracle commonly expected from a Medieval relic. An important difference between the relic and the rarity is that the singularity of the former was personalized: the relic was, properly speaking, a saint. In contrast, the singularity of the rarity was, like that of the fetish, generic rather than individual. The rarity collections did not represent the world because “they ignored 99.9 percent of it in favor of the singular and anomalous” (Daston 1988: 458), and this departure from the accepted categories of the everyday was an important reason for their selection as rarities, objects meant to produce astonishment in their audience. Rarities and curiosities were not held together by a classification imposed on them before or after the fact, their character was based on their criteria of entrance in the collection: they were selected so as to “defy classification in principle” and “break the rules of the normal and predictable” (Daston 1988: 458).

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Rarity collections included magical substances like bezoar stones and unicorn horns (only later “disenchanted” as the horn of the narwal whale), substances expected to perform miraculous cures and regarded as preternatural, a category that was always “wondrous” but only sometimes a sign or representation of something else (like a religious lesson or satanic influence; Daston 1994: 256). But they also included collections of antiquities, meant to reproduce the atmosphere of the classics (Evans 1956); or works of art, for as long as genres like the still life—often depicting rarities—had not yet secured the nobility of painting (H. Foster 1993: 255); or the magic of mechanical innovations like the automatons of Inigo Jones and Salomon de Caus (Yates 1972: 39–40). Most importantly, they were dominated by exotic objects, first brought by Columbus and his successors to the cabinets of the Medicis and other Southern noblemen, and later by Dutch and English traders to those of Northern collectors. The performance that the curiosity cabinet was meant to achieve, therefore, ranged from the magical through the classical, artistic, and scientific, to the exotic, and it was theatrical in the widest sense of the word. The sixteenth-century Italian, and the early seventeenthcentury English curiosity cabinet and garden were private theatra natura, arranged according to the conventions of the art of memory (Laurencich-Minelli 1985: 19; also, Bostrom 1985: 100–1; Hunt 1985: 198). These conventions derived from the rhetorical practice of memorizing speeches by furnishing an imaginary architectural trajectory through a “memory palace” with the symbols needed for the narrative sequence of the speech (see Spence 1984; Yates 1966). The speech could then be given by passing through each room or corridor in sequence, retrieving the symbols that evoked that specific section of the speech required. Thus, the sections of the memory palace’s display did not represent so much as produce an oral performance aimed at the persuasion of an audience; a presentation of otherness, rather than a sign of its absence. Similar productions of affect among the audience were what was aimed at in the itineraries produced by Italian and English landscape designs (Hunt 1985; see also Paulson 1975: 19ff.) It is significant that both John Tradescant’s rarity collection and Shakespeare’s plays were thought to fall under the College of Revels, which controlled such performances. Both performed the “fullness of the world,” the former in his house, The Ark, the latter in his theatre, The Globe (see Hunt 1985: 198; MacGregor 1983a: 20; Mullaney 1983).14 The Ark and The Globe were “theatres of the world” (Yates 1969; Fucikova 1985) in the sense that theatre also meant “conspectus” or “collection” (Hunt 1985: 197).

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As Frances Yates has shown, the idea of a “theatre of the world” was common to what she called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the work of a set of innovative practitioners of natural magic and Hermetic philosophy (1969, 1972). For these scholars, the art of memory symbolized the possibility of a knowledge of the world that could lead to truly miraculous performances (Yates 1966, 1969). However, the idea of the rarity collection as theatre goes beyond the sphere of the Rosicrucians, and connects them with Protestant pietist critics and the main protagonists of the “Scientific Revolution” that were otherwise critical of magic and its aura of demonic persuasion. Early cabinets in Italy and England were often the property of an aristocracy, or of the scientific, clerical, or technical personnel they employed or protected, and often displayed a perception of the world in terms of Rosicrucianism. Later Protestant owners of curiosity cabinets in Northern Europe, like the members of the Royal Society, and Dutch and Scandinavian mayors, bankers, scientists, and merchants may or may not have been hostile to Rosicrucianism, but many of them substituted the architectonic imagery of the art of memory with the two-dimensional block- and tree-diagrams popularized by the philosopher Petrus Ramus and his followers (Stagl 1995; Yates 1966), an epistemological shift that was necessary for the idea about the representation of the world through taxonomy of later philosophers of “universal language” (Knowlson 1975; Slaughter 1982).15 However, until the urge toward taxonomy came into its own in the eighteenth century (along with the work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and the creation of the first museums), the idea of a theatre of the world, and more particularly, of the role of wonder as the essential performance of the rarity, was not displaced. Despite the growing suspicion of the leaders of the Scientific Revolution toward rarity collections and marvelous performances, major collections (such as those of the Royal Society and of the University of Leiden) were made more, rather than less marvelous, during the seventeenth century (Hunter 1985: 164–65; Olmi 1985: 14; Schupbach 1985: 171). Dutch collectors spoke as easily of the “theatre of wonders” of their cabinets as their Italian predecessors (Amsterdams Historisch Museum 1992: 89). The University of Leiden perfected a display that—though clearly opposite in intention to the magicians’ hubris implicit in Rosicrucianism—did not in the least undermine the power of the rarity to arouse wonder: the anatomie moralisée of the summer display of skeletons and rarities in the anatomy theatre, where, instead of the winter performances of dissection, visitors could now be impressed by the lessons of worldly vanitas conveyed through these palpable images of mortality and

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human insignificance (Lunsing Scheurleer 1985: 120; Schupbach 1985: 169), was copied widely (on Oxford, see Hunter 1985: 160; on Copenhagen, see Schupbach 1985: 172). As the Dutch collector Jan Swammerdam, writing to a Parisian colleague in 1678, shows, “moral anatomy,” Protestant piety, and wonder went very well together: I present you herewith the Almighty Finger of God in the anatomy of a louse; in which you will find wonder piled upon wonder and God’s Wisdom clearly exposed in one minute particle. (quoted in Lunsing Scheurleer 1985: 120)

Similarly, the wonders of God’s creation were meditated upon by Protestants through, for instance, their collections of shells (Lunsing Scheurleer 1985: 116). And this piety did not prevent more mundane uses of wonder, as in Swammerdam’s apothecary, where the display of tortoise shell, alligator skin, or rhino horn would advertise his mastery of the secrets of medicine (George 1985: 186). Such moral imagery of objectivity would endure well into the nineteenth century (Daston and Galison 1992). However, since morality was something following on wonder rather than inherent in it (according to Descartes and Spinoza: Greenblatt 1991: 24), such moralizing was already an attempt at controlling wonder’s potential insubordination.16

Wonder, Fact, and Fancy: The Rarity as Fetish In fact, the wonder aroused by the displays of theatres of the world was, from the late Medieval period up to the Enlightenment, regarded as a primary passion, and the fount of all knowledge. It was an experience that seemed “to resist recuperation, containment, ideological incorporation,” and this may be why Descartes and Spinoza suspected the suspension of categories that it entailed, and the “freezing” or “paralysis” of the subject that an excess of wonder brought about (Greenblatt 1991: 17, 20, 24). Of course, the most perfect wonder was one that was also a material reality (1991: 36). Descartes’s skepticism as far as rarity collections was concerned may be explained by his suspicion of an excess of wonder, yet he regarded wonder as the fount of all science (Daston 1988: 459). Francis Bacon suffered from a similar skepticism, yet he regarded the rarity as a necessary possession of the philosopher, for in his conception, the wondrous provided a novel sense of “fact.” It has been recognized that rarity collections are related to the Scientific Revolution in the sense that they raised the classificatory quan-

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daries that bore fruit in the eighteenth-century work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and Lamarck (George 1985: 179). They provided a “granular view” of the world that facilitated the eighteenth-century disposition of things in the slots of a taxonomic scheme (Daston 1988: 462, 465). But the bizarre, rare, and monstrous are not usually included in the history of science, despite the crucial role they play in the history of Western objectivity (Daston 1988: 453).17 Rarity collections, in bringing together automatons and natural freaks, helped assimilate art to nature and prepare for a mechanistic philosophy (Daston 1988: 464; Hunt 1985). Most important, they created a sense of factuality separate from scholastic “natural philosophy” (Daston 1988: 465). Despite Bacon’s skepticism about the frivolity of the curiosities on display, he also regarded “singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things” as essential contributors to philosophy. He could use “marvels” in order to break down the distinctions between artificial and natural, and between natural and preternatural, and criticize natural philosophy by asking it to also explain the “singular instances” that, particularly in the case of the preternatural, it had defined as being out of its bounds (Daston 1994: 261). This is why the first scientific facts retailed in the annals of the Royal Society and the Paris Academie des Sciences were often such strange ones, for natural philosophy required the shock of repeated contact with the bizarre, the heteroclite, and the singular in order to sunder the age-old link between a “datum of experience” and “the conclusions that may be based on it”; in other words, to sunder facts from evidence. (Daston 1994: 261–62)

The cabinet of curiosities, that “museum of the preternatural” (Daston 1994: 256), provided that shock through wonder, aroused by preternatural freaks of nature, exotic objects from overseas, works of art, or the products of human technical or artistic virtuosity. Thus, rarities helped promote our familiar sense of the word “fact” as a datum of experience separate from the conclusions we may base on it (Daston 1991: 345). The word entered the English language in this sense in the early seventeenth century, when Bacon praised the rarity cabinet and De Marees disparaged the fetish. Thus, the seventeenth-century career of the rarity suggests its pivotal role within an aesthetics of wonder that concentrated on the singular instance or anomalous “fact.” This aesthetics dominated the thinking of a European intelligentsia that was rich, cosmopolitan, and prone to travel, and could, at times, disregard incipient divisions between magic and science or between religious denominations in the name of knowledge and curiosity (Daston 1988: 455).18 While in

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the new science, one could talk of a “new creed of particulars” that opposed anomalies and singularities to the commonplaces of everyday life (or the topoi of the rhetoric of natural philosophy; Daston 1991: 341), in other fields of European culture, one can speak of an aesthetics of the fragment and the quotation, that is often subsumed under “Mannerism” or “Baroque” (Bunn 1980; Olmi 1985: 9, 14). This aesthetics is apparent in the “metonymic or synecdochic tabulation of objects” of Dutch still life (H. Foster 1993: 259); its affinity with scientific culture appears in the label of an “art of describing” (Alpers 1983). James Bunn identifies this aesthetic as “mercantile,” for to him it thrives on displacement, on the removal of a form or figure from its context or ground, to make it stand on its own. The curio collection is the soul of this aesthetic (Bunn 1980: 303). Like its artistic cousin, the seventeenth-century still life, it displays little taxonomic logic, but presents things as having a “power of their own” (H. Foster 1993: 255). Within these aesthetics, the things themselves call for an immediacy of description that cannot be assimilated to the narrative conception of art that emerged in fifteenth-century Italy and dominated art history’s major analytic strategies (Alpers 1983: xix–xx). Mercantile aesthetics, whose “ultimate principle of order . . . may well be the imperial market” (H. Foster 1993: 259) presents things without a narrative connecting them, or, better, with the homogeneous and empty space of global exchange forming their only connection. Hal Foster links this aesthetic to fetishism through the Dutch still life, but despite noting the historical convergence of ethnographies of the fetish and depictions and collections of “rare commodities,” his analysis is largely metaphorical, treating the still life “as if ” it is fetishistic. It is as important, however, to emphasize the metonymic, historical link between fetish and rarity—for which one has to acknowledge that the still life did not just depict rarities, but was in itself a rarity, to be included in a collection. James Clifford has hinted at this congruity of fetish and rarity when he argued that, in order to undo the effects of power of the taxonomic museological regime, we shall have to return to the museum objects their “lost status as fetishes” (1985: 244)—when he was patently referring to a museum, the Pitt Rivers, in which the status lost would rather be that of rarities, at least partly derived from the Tradescants’ cabinet (L. Williamson 1983). Rarity and fetish are easily confused because both are objects “close to being sui generis” (Daston 1988: 456). Rarity, fetish, and still life all present objects with a “power of their own,” displaced from the economies in which they functioned and that Dutch merchants encountered in the course of the expansion of the global market; objects that therefore

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appear “not alive, not dead, not useful, not useless,” in “eerie animation” (H. Foster 1993: 257), promoting the conceit that they have a factual presence of their own. Just as the fetish emerged, as an object, out of the trading relationships established by Dutch merchants on the West African coast, so too was the rarity to a large extent the result of the import of exotic products and artifacts. As the rarity collector John Tradescant asked West African traders: he desired “Any Thing that is Strang” (MacGregor 1983a: 20), that is, anything that was set apart from existing systems of signification. Of course, a West African fetish was itself “strang” enough to be included in a rarity collection. But I am suggesting that rarity and fetish are twins—one bright, the other of a darker hue—born on the shipping routes frequented by European merchants and christened as either outlandish fact or bizarre fancy. The rarity was “any thing that is strang”; the fetish—according to William Smith’s account of 1744—“any thing [the Guinea Pagans] fancy” (Pietz 1987: 41). Both strangeness and fancy combine the positive power of an object to fascinate with its underdetermination by the systems of signification with which the subject is familiar. My interpretation of the rarity’s “wonder” as the inversion of the fetish’s “fancy” is reinforced by the fact that, as “wonder” became subordinated to the taxonomic urge of the Enlightenment, the rarity was increasingly described like the fetish, in terms of “fancy,” or related terms like “trifle” or “bric-a-brac.” As the “fact” separate from systems of interpretation became an accepted category, and the clamor for systems of classification of such facts increased, “wonder” became a threat rather than a liberation.19 No longer serving as an escape from scholasticism, the rarity’s singularity became suspect, and redefined as a thing insufficiently controlled by subjective discipline. Already in the seventeenth century, suspicions toward the “fancy” that could lead to the erroneous acceptance of evidence from miracles accompanies attempts to naturalize the preternatural (Daston 1994: 265); just as Descartes and Spinoza suspected the “paralysis” of the subject which wonder could effect. The Enlightenment replaced wonder with doubt, and questioned the naming of things by drawing up ever-perfected systems of classification (which, among other things, declare fetishism, the religion of materiality, to be the most primitive expression of mankind). By the early nineteenth century, Samuel Coleridge could describe the often riotous category transgressions of the rarity and the curio as an “epistemology of fancy” (Bunn 1980: 319). “Fancy” was the way in which Victorian culture reacted to a form of collecting that was too passionate, too subject to the article collected, too feminine to measure up to the discipline and rigor of contemporary male collect-

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ing and its model, the museum. This “other” kind of collecting was domesticated in the “fancy fair” (Dirks and Dolin 1993). Even Bunn, in describing the aesthetics of the rarity, mostly adopts a depreciative tone, the style being one of “bric-a-brac,” “randomly purchased knickknacks,” a “prodigious yet patternless” Baroque (Bunn 1980: 303) that apparently still threatens the subjective discipline of art history, just as its kind of collecting was felt as a threat overburdening the island by late eighteenth-century British intellectuals (Bunn 1980: 316). Present-day museologists’ negative assessment of the rarity cabinet, as a museum deficient in order, can be traced to this eighteenth-century suspicion of the unordered object. But note that such a negative assessment of a perception of and dealing with objects that is “developing out of the hands” of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists and thinkers (Bunn 1980: 303), that this disparagement of an uncontrollable aesthetics, builds on this aesthetics itself. It does not deny its truth as much as it displaces it by the idealism of an epistemology of classification. The threat of mercantile aesthetics may have had to be contained in such a way because “wonder” is such an easily democratized attitude, one difficult to discipline within any “style” or “taste.” To restore hierarchy, wonder had to be domesticated as kitsch, “fancy,” or “bric-a-brac,” objects collected at home, by women and children—without order or use. But as such, these unordered objects still recall a period in which their riotous independence was functional; when the falsity of fetish and fancy emerged together with the functionality of rarity and fact, and the displacements effected by the globalizing market made them all appear as Dinge an sich, with an “eerie animation” of their own.

Fetish and the Limits of Representation Thus, we see that the fetish is not the only substantiation of the spirit of matter: Its emergence coincides with that of “fact” and “rarity,” two other ways of discussing an untranscended materiality. Moreover, it seems this spirit of matter is largely released by the dominance of market relationships. In the same tentative and exploratory mode of the rest of this chapter, one might suggest that this is also a step toward explaining why consumption and fetishism are again at the center of attention in cultural and social theory, for this resurgence seems to coincide with global developments that have given market ideology a new lease of life. However, this chapter was meant to suggest that the fetish is not merely a symptom of, but also a challenge

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to some of the ways of thinking that characterize the present; just as, at other moments in its genealogy, the fetish threatened to disrupt everyday processes of human signification. In particular, it sits uneasily with the new magic of constructionism, which tends to treat the social as nothing but a human product and to see the materiality of social life as just an empty carrier or representation of human intention and artifice. The fetish, or the spirit of matter in general, militates against this idealism and suggests a counterbalancing materiality. The fetish provides an alternative to those theories that say everything is representation, if representation is understood as a process in which a material signifier is made to stand for an absent signified defined as a mental category or human process of construction. Already at the point of its first emergence, the fetish’s material presence was opposed to the idol as representation of a (false) spirit (Pietz 1993: 131). In conclusion, I want to suggest that the fetish still occupies a similar position today: that of an occult counterpoint that marks the limits of a dominant discourse of representation. Of course, I do not deny that fetish can itself be a representation. It has, for example, long “stood for” something typically “African” (whether “religion,” or something pre-religious in its stead). Twentieth century anthropological consensus, however, has branded this representation of Africa as false, since it did not and does not accord with West African practice (cf. MacGaffey 1994).20 Pietz’s genealogy of the fetish has shown that its discourse does not represent (West) Africa. Rather, it marks “a space of cultural revolution” (1985: 11). The fetish, like the rarity, indicates a crossing of categorical boundaries, a border zone where one cannot expect the stability of meaning that is routine in everyday life. Even more, whereas in everyday life, we can usually supply the meaning of things, by giving either their use, or a description of their place in life, such a distinction between the thing and its meaning, symbol and referent, or representation and represented is subverted by fetishistic relationships: the fetish erases the distinction between signifier and signified on which the present-day discourse of representation is based (Ellen 1988: 226). It is too powerful a presence to be a mere re-presentation of something else. The discourse of representation is idealist in so far as it maintains the Saussurian distinction between a material signifier and an ideal signified, and assumes the former is given meaning by the latter. Such a theory makes human intention and artifice—communication on the model of human consciousness—a prerequisite of signification, excluding all other forms of natural interaction (cf. Eco 1976: 14–15). Saussure rediscovered this relationship of material signifier and ideal

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signified, for it was forged in the seventeenth century, and became dominant by the eighteenth (Foucault 1973: 67). This emergence of the modern concept of the sign is directly related to the systems of classification that subsumed the formerly unruly Baconian “facts” and that helped to label collections gathered without such classifications as “fanciful.” The prime example of the modern concept of the sign’s binary relationship with the signified was the map or diagram (Foucault 1973: 64), and this shows its affinity with the “diagrammatic reduction of thought” characteristic of eighteenth-century taxonomic schemes (Fabian 1983: 116).21 The modern discourse of representation, the modern concept of the sign, and the systems of classification that subsumed the uncontrolled objects released by market relationships, were all products of the Enlightenment. This is the historical provenance of the systems of meanings that, in Appadurai’s words, “encode things with significance” (1986: 5), the “necessary condition” of the primacy of human traffic that Appadurai mentioned as the context for his methodologically fetishist counterpoint. The aesthetics of order and taxonomy that displaced the fetish and the rarity to the margins of occidental thought has made them into occult qualities, things that live hidden lives in demonic or domesticated form. Yet they are necessary for the order of representation to pretend to extend itself over a surface of chaos that needs to be disciplined. But this universal extension of the sign “precludes even the possibility of a theory of signification” (Foucault 1973: 65). The fetish foregrounds the basic problem of signification that the idealist theory of representation has attempted to submerge in the binary model of the material signifier and the ideal signified: that our only way to know of a distinction between material and ideal, or actual and virtual, is through an actual material sensation. On the one hand, the fetish is a material presence that does not represent but “takes one’s fancy,” making us suffer sensuously. On the other, it is only fanciful to us because it reminds us of a displacement and signals a loss or denial. Thus, the fetish shows the limits of representation by disrupting the continuity of reference and replacing it by a substitution (not a re-presentation but a presentation of something else). Yet at the same time it asks how we can know the substituted by the signals emitted from what substitutes for it; or how we can know the virtual if that can only be conveyed through the material itself. This is the poststructuralist question of how we know of “codes” or “encoding” without such entities or operations being, practically speaking, present. It may also be the first step that makes a theory of signification possible.

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Notes 1. This chapter was written while I enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Michigan’s International Institute and Department of Anthropology as Netherlands Visiting Professor for the 1995 fall term. I thank Fernando Coronil and Nick Dirks for their critical comments on an earlier draft, the participants in the “Border Fetishisms” conference for their lively reactions to the presentation of the material, and Patricia Spyer for her acute editorial remarks. I alone can be held responsible for the result. [Added 2022: Except for certain updated references, the addition of a few footnotes, and correcting a few typos, the text is identical to the version originally published in Spyer’s edited volume (Pels 1998)]. 2. Such essentializing movements, in which a practical relationship between unequal (groups of) people is translated into an “essential” difference between subject and object, are constitutive to ethnography. In order to understand its operation, however, one has to acknowledge that ethnography was a genre of and for colonial relationships from the inception of early modern colonization and trade (Pels and Salemink 1994, 1999). [2022: My discussion of a “methodology of the concrete” can help to decolonize ethnography when essentializing classifications are incorporated and deconstructed as part of the concrete field of study; see also Pels 2022.] 3. [2022: I would qualify this statement now, arguing that methodological fetishism entails the more radical position that untranscended materiality is the focus of analysis.] 4. See also Daniel Miller’s account of Marx’s idea of objectification as rupture (1987: ch. 3). 5. “If they can see the maintenance or the increase of production under capitalism as somehow bound up with the devil and thereby make a fetish of the productive process, do we not also have our own form of fetishism in which we attribute to commodities a reality so substantial that they acquire the appearance of natural beings, so natural in fact that they appear to take on a life of their own?” (Taussig 1980: 30). 6. “Fetish could originate only in conjunction with the emergent articulation of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies of two different types of noncapitalist society” (Pietz 1985: 7, my emphasis), that is, the Iberian, Catholic Christian, and the West African. 7. As the work of Appadurai shows, the implication of this distinction is to avoid the question of materiality in favor of a concern with commodity and use values. 8. “The importance of this physicality of the artifact derives from its ability thereby to act as a bridge, not only between the mental and physical worlds, but also, more unexpectedly, between consciousness and the unconscious” (Miller 1987: 99). One might add that objects can also

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transfer form—and consequently, signification—from one historically or culturally distinct context to another. Cf. the changes in human sensory regimes under the influence of the technologies of the linear perspective, the lens, the camera (Jay 1993a), or the telephone (Van Beek 1996: 8). “Dead” in this context, means little more than “without intention,” but in semiotics, intention is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for signification (Eco 1976: 14–15). The complete genealogies of these concepts on the lines of what William Pietz did for the fetish remain to be written, but they will surely reveal that they are similarly placed in a context of “cultural revolution”: caste, as an originally Portuguese term inflected by colonialism in India and orientalist imagery to denote a human group other than class or nobility (see Dirks 1992); totem, as a North American term domesticated by anthropology to denote an improper understanding of the relationship between the human and natural realms; and taboo, as an Oceanic term inflected to give European languages a non-legal and non-religious notion of prohibition. Susan Stewart’s otherwise brilliant observations on the collection (1993: 151ff.) fail to recognize the difference between taxonomic collections and curiosity cabinets; the latter are closer to the collections of the pack rat (1993: 153) than to those governed by a “narrative of interiority.” See also below, on the “entrance criteria” of the curio collection. This is a paraphrase of Steven Mullaney’s description of the curiosity cabinet in terms of a “rehearsal” of cultural difference (1983: 42, 48). Despite a number of agreements in our argument, I have avoided the term “rehearsal,” to counter any association with a preexisting script being interpreted. However, if I understand Mullaney rightly, he, too, means a repetition of the same production, rather than the representation of an absent original. The rarity collection of the Rosicrucian Jesuit Kircher in Rome was actually meant to recreate the contents of the Ark (George 1985: 186); a shop for rarities in Paris was called “Noahs-Arke” (MacGregor 1983b: 91). Given the general association of magic with Catholicism, Rosicrucianism might be expected to have found few adherents in Northern Europe. However, the origin of the term Rosicrucian needs to be sought in Reformation Germany (Yates 1972); while many Northern rarity collectors were Protestants (such as the Dutch [Lunsing Scheurleer 1985: 117; Amsterdams Historisch Museum 1992]), they were not necessarily hostile to Rosicrucian thinking (like the Swede Hainhofer [Bostrom 1985]). Hostility to Rosicrucianism was more likely to be found among those scholars who wanted to replace the magical worldview of Rosicrucianism by taxonomic thinking (Knowlson 1975; Vickers 1984). [2022: The Lunar Society (Uglow 2002), Erasmus Darwin’s Linnean poetry (King-Hele 1999), and their early nineteenth-century successors

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(Holmes 2008) have taught me that wonder, objectivity, morality, and art are more complexly interwoven in British scientific history than this statement allows.] [2022: it is therefore surprising how little Daston and Galison address rarities (and the field sciences that collected them) in their recent history of objectivity (see Daston and Galison 2007; Pels 2014a).] See also Marie Louise Pratt on the “continental, transnational aspirations of European science” in the early eighteenth century (Pratt 1992: 25). [2022: This interpretation seems too linear today: see the remarks about layered history in the next paragraph and Chapters 2, 10 and the Conclusion, and my uses of wonder in the whole of Part III.] To interpret Freud’s theory of fetishism as saying first of all that the fetish represents the mother’s phallus is, I feel, as silly as saying that the fetish is a typically African thing (cf. Freud 1950: 199). Another important model is the disparity between the book and the text, where material form is easily separated from ideal content in a similarly binary model (cf. S. Stewart 1993: 22–23).

Chapter 4

THE MODERN FEAR OF MATTER REFLECTIONS ON THE PROTESTANTISM OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE

This chapter continues the inquiry into the genealogy of materiality and materialism—a project of helping to clarify the confusions that beset scientists, modernist thinkers, and other participants in Occidental culture1 when they start to use notions like “fact,” “fetish,” “matter” or “material object.” 2 I believe that the confusion of modern people who assume the autonomy of fact and matter arises at least partly from the paradox that, despite their inclination to associate the material with the concrete, their focus on the material is part of a sociohistorical process of abstraction. A genealogy of the modern fact shows that it cannot be understood as a Ding an sich without also recognizing that it is always a “fact for” or “evidence of ” some larger system. Moreover, the history of the isolated, seemingly concrete and material, “modern” fact seems to end in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time that the aggregate fact of statistics becomes dominant (Poovey 1998). Likewise, a genealogy of the notion of “fetish” shows that, like the “fact” and the “rarity,” these understandings of matter also emerge, in the early modern period, on the basis of a form of abstraction—the alienation of objects from their contexts of use through global capitalism—but that during a later, nineteenthcentury phase, they are yet again transformed by colonialism, modern aesthetics, and anthropology (Pels 1998, here reprinted as Chapter 3; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1999). The subsumption of the “fetish” under “animism” in the work of Edward Tylor can be read as marking a certain transcendence of the sociocultural over the material (Chapter 3), so that, despite the evolutionists’ heavy focus on the

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museum object, their “dematerializing” thought can also be seen as having prepared the way for the marginalization of material culture studies in early twentieth-century anthropology (cf. Stocking 1985: 114; see Chapter 2 and below). This Victorian moment in the history of understandings of materiality seems, therefore, to be important. I want to return to it because, when thinking about it earlier (see Chapter 3), I failed to spell out the religious dimensions of these developments—religious developments that, summarized in the concepts of prophecy and iconoclasm, will help to explain modern anthropology’s dematerializing bias. As Webb Keane has argued, Protestant ontology defines the value of the human in “its distinctiveness from, and superiority to the material world” (2002: 71). It thereby seems to define this materiality, by implication, as a Ding an sich, something that cannot but resist, and yet get its meaning from, human traffic. It seems no coincidence that the “modern fact” of early modern science is characterized by a similar juxtaposition of a material isolate to the systems of evidence that give it meaning (Poovey 1998). But what does the Protestant fear of matter (as evident from its different forms of iconoclasm: Keane 1996; Latour 2002; Wiener 2003) do for Victorians, caught as they are between the icons of Protestant worship and the contemporary idols of “materialism”? Firstly, this fear of matter shows that Victorian science’s opposition to religion should not be taken for a lack of continuity with its religious background. Secondly, it shows that Victorian “materialism” is opposed to “spiritualism” rather than being part of a secularist opposition to idealism. However, this shift in conceptual relations raises another set of questions: How specific is the conception of materiality in Victorian science, and how can we relate it to our own? If we are to study a situation in which scientists lambast Protestant theologians (like Tylor and his fellows did in their dealings with the Oxbridge establishment), how can the icons of the former iconoclasts, now smashed by a new breed of critics, be understood? Beyond the observation that the smashing of images will result in their proliferation, and in uncertainty about what the human hand may or may not achieve (Latour 2002), can one also analyze the different ways in which images do, or do not, objectify “material” truths? Is, in other words, the “materialism” opposed by Victorian Christians similar to the materiality that Victorian scientists claimed as the basis of evidence, or is it something different? What understanding of “materiality” can grasp the contests played out in the Victorian era, and their relevance for our present? I do not claim to be able to answer those questions in any definite

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sense, but I do need to clarify my position first by a digression on the relational character of “materiality,” and by suggesting that this relational character implies that “materiality” will change in meaning depending on how the relation is conceptualized. Thus, “materiality” or “materialism” may be significantly different to a scholarly audience for whom religious valuations are crucial (such as the Victorian scientists) as compared to an audience which has undergone various twentieth-century attempts at self-secularization. Yet, the latter may also learn from the former what latent religious meanings their understandings of materiality may still carry. Therefore, this chapter will adopt the same pattern as my earlier discussion of “fetish” (Pels 1998; Chapter 3 in this book): I use a more analytic section to clarify some of the meanings that I feel we need to understand a second, more fundamental genealogy of the concepts under study. It is only right and proper that, in an inquiry into how abstraction works in practice, history contextualizes theory rather than the other way around.

The Relationality of the Material As Daniel Miller argued in 1987, the materiality of an artifact “is always an element in cultural transformation” and a bridge between processes of abstraction and concrete specification (Miller 1987: 107– 8). Although the physicality of the object can be a symbol sui generis, there is always a danger to “fetishize” the object as an object an sich, for that would deny the essential location of the object in a relationship of objectification—that is, a relationship in which subject and object mutually constitute each other. Pierre Bourdieu reminded us that this relationship is one of objectification and embodiment—that is, a relationship between different types of matter, between (among other things) artifacts and bodies (Bourdieu 1977). Alfred Gell has argued that in this relationship, objects (“indexes”) have agency (1998); something to which our discourses on “fetish” also point (see Chapter 3). As Karl Marx put it when reflecting on the moment when human beings sense the materiality of their relationship with their objective surroundings: “to be sensuous is to suffer” (quoted in Pietz 1993: 144)—at the same time that he criticized the false consciousness of people who let themselves be suffered by the commodity. It takes two to tango: just as, in everyday life, one finds that people abhor becoming dependent on the objects that they cannot but desire to consume, just so one finds scholars of material culture stressing, on the one hand, that humans are the final cause of the social life of things, and rec-

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ognizing, on the other, that things act on humans with a life of their own.3 I argued that it may be useful to distinguish an animistic “spirit in matter” (where, as in Tylor’s view, the object is animated by some kind of intelligence modeled on the human or the divine) and a fetishistic “spirit of matter” (an untranscended materiality that makes human beings suffer the object’s agency, from whatever source it derived; see Chapter 3). Whatever the merit of such an argument, it seems to suggest at least two qualitatively different conceptions of materiality. I argued that this plurality of notions of materiality emerged from a historical layering of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenthcentury discourses deriving from different and historically particular engagements. If, in a certain relationship, some material exchanges look like rational “matter” or merchandise, and other, simultaneous and corresponding exchanges appear as “fetish,” from the point of view of an early modern Protestant merchant like Willem Bosman (writing about West Africa), we can say that material exchange is at the bottom of both, but that the relationship comes to be abstracted into certain material and spiritual “essences”—in this case, of European “rationality” juxtaposed to African “superstition” (Pels and Salemink 1999: 9–15). To put this differently, if nothing can be recognized as matter except within a relationship, the sociocultural inequalities in the relationship determine what is going to be abstracted as a material essence and what is not. The Dutch merchant on the West African coast had procedures by which to determine what counted as “real” matter—procedures that were, in many cases, different from those of his African trade partners. At the same time, Dutch merchants and African traders did exchange material goods—systematically, continuously, and in some form of relational (mis)understanding. In another colonial situation, the Dutch Protestant missionaries on Sumba related ideas about the valuation of material goods that were incommensurable with the ideas of those Sumbanese who heavily invested in ceremonial exchange, but they eventually came to share discursive, if antagonistic, elements of a critique of materialism and fetishism (Keane 1996, 1998). Likewise, “spiritualism” and “materialism” in Victorian public discourse do not point to any particular essential position, but to a relativity of values arising from a specific historical and material relationship. To recognize this tangle of relationships of mutually antagonistic statements on materiality does not merely point to a relativistic argument, as in the case of a functionalist anthropologist who wants to downplay his own description of something as “material” that the

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people studied do not recognize as such or not in the same way. Even if the churinga of Australian indigenous society, for example, appeared as a painted piece of wood to a classical anthropological observer, and as a manifestation of the spirits to native Australians, it is the historical analysis of the inequal material relationship between these views that gives us the ethnography to understand these material objects, and more importantly, the way their materiality was experienced by the different parties-in-contestation.4 More pertinent to the subject of this chapter, the material “facts” about which Victorian intellectuals disagreed around 1870—Bible texts, spiritual séances, fossil bones, geological strata, collections of artifacts, folklore stories, or ethnographic accounts—acquired a different “material” agency depending on the relationship in which they were produced. The value and possible meanings of objects are underdetermined, so the determination of their relationship with humans calls for speech, interpretation, and politics; yet the very materiality of objects means that they are not merely arbitrary signs and that the relationship cannot be determined by any sociocultural convention (Keane 2001: 70). The underdetermined nature of material facts, coupled to the fact that they are indexes of something—whatever it may be (see Gell 1998)—leads to the necessity of conjecture and abduction (cf. Ginzburg 1983). However, conjecture is not an operation that can be conducted without anxiety: if Victorian theologians derived a historical account (flawed or not) from certain Bible texts, some of their Scientist opponents perceived the same material only in terms of primitive superstition hiding an original moral code (see the next section). Similarly, the spirit-manifestations of the Victorian séance were the material “facts” of a higher intelligence to a Spiritualist like Alfred Wallace, but appeared like manifestations of female hysteria or working-class fraud to Edward Tylor (Pels 2003b). Certain pieces of stone5 were, to Victorian scientists, the material signs of “evolution”; the same stones were mere illusions or botched reflections—that is, fallacious material images—of a spiritual, eternal reality to contemporary Theosophists; and both scientists and Theosophists poured scorn on those nineteenth-century creationists who regarded these stones as lusus naturae, intellectual traps and tricks built into the material world by God’s creation. To belabor the obvious: what is material to some is spectral illusion to others. What is perhaps less obvious is that the uncertainties of conjecture make the impossibility of a final determination of what is “material”—for the Victorians of the 1870s, the Sumbanese of the 1980s, and I wager a large number of other “moderns” besides—a source of fear. Improper determinations of the

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material not only trigger contempt by the properly converted, but also the fear that their subject-position might not be as unassailable as their conversion seemed to signify (Keane 1996: 139). Iconoclasts, in other words, frequently fear that the hammer of the righteous may descend on their own idols as well. The fear of matter haunts the modern world of anti-iconic abstraction.

Some Vectors of Contest over Materiality That suggests that we can profitably try to locate the modern contempt, as well as its fear, of “materiality” and “materialism” within different types of relationship, as a way of preparing for the diversity of contests in which we can find these terms embedded—both on the analytical and the empirical level. I would like to briefly indicate four conceptual relationships in which materiality and materialism gain different meanings and work towards different outcomes: abstraction as opposed to concreteness, the spiritual as opposed to the material, the subjective as opposed to the objective, and the cultural as opposed to the natural. Materiality acquires different meanings and locations in each relationship—let alone when several of these relationships apply simultaneously to the social action under study. The same goes for “materialism,” except that the addition of the—ism signifies that the abstraction of “materiality” now serves as a prescription as well as a description.6 Occidental culture’s invocations of “materialism” rarely explicate what kind of materiality it prescribes (although one might have to make an exception for Marx in this regard; see Pietz 1993: 144–50), despite the fact that such invocations have become a global phenomenon since the 1870s. Let me discuss some implications of these oppositions without pretending to be exhaustive or systematic. Regarding materiality or materialism as an aspect of a relation between the abstract and the concrete, it is necessary to point out that three of the main terms that Occidental culture used to talk about an untranscended materiality—the fetish, the rarity, and the fact—all emerged within a historical process marked by abstraction, and are located in relation to the abstract spaces of the global market, of statistical enumeration and bookkeeping, and of early museum displays (for details, see Chapter 3; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988; Poovey 1998). It seems, therefore, as if such radically concrete forms of materiality are impossible to think without the conditions created by this process of abstraction—that is, without capitalist calculation, mathesis, and (scientific) taxonomy.

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Thus, it seems necessary to stress that radical materiality emerges in Occidental discourses at least partly on the basis of the neglect of the ways in which such abstract frames have been materialized in everyday practice, and how these abstract frames produce untranscended materiality in contrast (cf. Poovey 1995). We encounter something quite different when we discuss materiality in relation to the spiritual: here, the emphasis lies on the (im)possibility of discerning the invisible structures or causes of the human or natural world with the human eye or its prostheses. The spiritual is a super-sensory entity that can only emerge as a “fact” by conjecture, that is, by treating the material as a mere effect of something invisible yet more fundamental.7 The opposition of spirituality and materiality, therefore, always implies the possibility of gnosis: a mode of reasoning away from the data of everyday experience towards a hidden or esoteric realm in which materialism is impossible and materiality never really real. This is the mode of reasoning of the Theosophist mentioned above (among many others), who says that fossil bones may not be lusus naturae, but that their true reality lies several planes of existence above our sense-perception. This is a globally popular mode of reasoning: it was not restricted to nineteenth-century occultists or their Indian nationalist counterparts (see Chatterjee 1986; Van der Veer 2001), but spread into twentieth-century forms of nationalism and “New Age religion” as well (Hanegraaff 1996; Heelas 1996; Kahn 2004). As we shall see, Victorian “agnosticism”—Thomas Huxley’s attempt to escape the accusation of being an atheist and materialist—uses conjectures in some ways similar to modern gnosis when it invokes “statistical returns” and its patterns of “culture.”8 The modern gnostic (see Hanegraaff 1996: 384ff.) perceives all reality as a contrived “fact,” as something that forms a barrier to understanding the virtual reality of the spiritual. This shows that the opposition of subject and object—one of the ways to think the process of “objectification” as referred to by Daniel Miller (1987); and also my third conceptualization of the relationships in which materiality takes place—cannot determine the location of materiality either. In the modern occultist’s world of “spiritual” reality, the subject is fettered by flesh and convention, an individual who confronts an objective world that has no material reality except as an effect—something that seems to be diametrically opposed to the scientific notion of a transparently cogitating subject (usually generated by calculation and mathesis) that processes the “real” sensory data of the modern “fact.” As Mary Poovey has argued, the modern fact is composed of Francis Bacon’s notion of deracinated particulars (which brings it quite close to the

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rarity and/or fetish: see Chapter 3) coupled to the idea that the fact should be “evidence for” some theory (Poovey 1998: 9). This view (which many argue was basic to the so-called Scientific Revolution) opposes a material isolate to an autonomous theoretical subject.9 The modern gnostic, however, opposes a material subject, which is not autonomous but bound by its own incarnation and socialization, to the immaterial, transcendent, and spiritual object of hidden wisdom—it is only through the latter that s/he can reach autonomous subjecthood. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of materiality, for in the scientific confrontation of subject and object, matter and morality have been separated from each other, while in the modern occultists’ view, matter is inherently moral, that is, evil.10 Modern occultists, therefore, point to another, more phenomenological understanding of objectification, in which the autonomous theoretical subject has been replaced by an embedded perceiving subject that is itself material, and that may become the object of (or “suffer”) an object with agency—a process more akin to Bourdieu’s dialectic of objectification and embodiment.11 This materiality of the perceiving subject comes out better in the opposition of culture and nature. One needs to distinguish two dominant views here: one, fundamental to Victorian science and positivism in general, in which the cultured human being confronts objective nature “out there”; and the other, more common among romantic forms of humanism, in which “human nature” is confronted by objectifications of culture and the social in a mostly threatening way. In the former view, “nature” (or even the supernatural) is a material truth (a “fact”) if one can be certain that it is not man-made (that it is not culture in disguise)—for if truth would be a cultural construction, rather than a reflection of nature or divinity, it would become subject to the iconoclastic action of critique (Latour 2002: 18).12 The second view builds on this suspicion of man-made matter, since it regards the human subject as a natural organism that has difficulties in coming to terms with the alienating objectifications of culture. This subject fears to become enslaved to the machines of industry and bureaucracy, or to be turned into a mere effect of commodified desires—in short, to succumb to what many romantics, modern Gnostics, and psychotherapists depict as the “materialism” of the modern world that threatens our authentic spiritual development. These two views point to a peculiar modern conundrum: in the former, materiality is positively valued—as natural fact, a source of certainty on which to build human knowledge—as long as it is not man-made. However, it is not moral in itself—unless, of course, the fact turns out to be of divine

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origin, something that mere matter, in this view, can never prove. In the latter view, materiality is always moral, but only if man-made; and in that case, it is either of a lower order—as matter under control by human agency—or regarded with suspicion, as potentially agentive, alienating, and evil. This attitude to materiality has been identified as typically “Calvinist”: the combination of contempt for inferior, that is, man-made, signs, and the fear that these material signs will nevertheless reduce human autonomy (Keane 1996: 139). The modern fear of matter arises from this combination, which says that the visible and material can never be social agents unless animated by human or divine intention. This view thereby “dematerialize[s] exchange and treat[s] material objects as merely signs of some immaterial value” (Keane 2001: 86). If we suppose—following Max Weber—that Calvinism had an important influence on the development of capitalist conceptions of rational calculation, we can expect this combination of contempt and fear of materiality to play an important role in Victorian science and inform much of the content of contemporary “materialism.” At the same time, one may wonder how such fear of matter can be reconciled with the reliance of Victorian scientists on material evidence as a source of certainty—the positivist vector of culture and nature discussed above. All of the vectors of contest over materiality that I discussed—in a very sketchy and unsystematic fashion—play a role in understanding the complexity of this situation, to which we now turn.

Late Victorian “Materialism” The dominant Victorian use of “materialism” does not go back on an opposition of materialism and idealism—that would be a nineteenthcentury philosophical innovation, which space does not allow me to deal with here.13 “Materialism” emerges in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a primarily Protestant accusation of a way of thinking that, since the early Christian patriarchs, was identified with Epicurean philosophy and its perceived tendency to liberate lust and gluttony—a tendency that John Stuart Mill still had to counter when explaining the meaning of utilitarianism (Mill [1863] 1998: 55). If “materialism” was, in Victorian intellectual circles, opposed to anything, it was “spiritualism” rather than idealism. Materialism was seen as a denial of the divinity of the soul, of God’s natural plan, and of the divine provenance of morality—never mind that those

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who explicitly adhered to these propositions were scarce, and rarely labeled themselves as “materialist” until well into the nineteenth century (Braun 1982).14 This does not, of course, deny that there was an increasing number of scientists and philosophers who maintained a certain primacy of material evidence in order to reach conclusions about the order of things, but materiality was here predominantly understood as “fact”—as evidence for an as yet insufficiently understood system. Rather than a denial of the moral heritage of Christianity, such a Scientific treatment of material evidence became subsumed under the prophecies of a “New Reformation” that, despite its huge differences, strongly resonated in tone as well as content with its Protestant predecessor.15 The ideas of the arguably most prominent exponent of this secularizing movement, the “Pope of Agnosticism,” Thomas Henry Huxley, can illustrate this. Huxley consistently refused to accept the accusation of being a “materialist,” arguing that the doctrine that matter was the all-determining instance of life and mind was just as metaphysical as the position that everything has to be explained by divine intervention. Unlike the physical determinism of his friend and colleague John Tyndall (whose position Huxley caricaturized by saying “Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom”), Huxley told his Christian interlocutor Charles Kingsley that I know nothing of Necessity, abominate the word Law. I don’t know whether Matter is anything distinct from Force. I don’t know that atoms are anything but pure myths. Cogito, ergo sum is to my mind a ridiculous piece of bad logic[,] all I can say at any time being “Cogito.” The Latin form I hold to be preferable to the English “I think” because the latter asserts the existence of an Ego—about which the bundle of phenomena at present addressing you knows nothing. (quoted in Desmond 1994: 319)

To Huxley, the only sensible axiom was that “materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity” (quoted in Desmond 1994: 319). To escape the accusation of being a “materialist,” therefore, Huxley invented the word “agnostic,” as a way of saying that, if it would ever become available, he did not yet have the evidence required to prefer one metaphysical position over the other. Agnosticism was the ideal middle ground between the Spiritualism of someone like Alfred Wallace (about whom more below) and the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel’s materialism—provided it was regarded as a method rather than a creed (Huxley 1892: 362). Thus, to Huxley, materiality was ideally meant to appear as a “fact” of nature—that is, a neces-

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sary methodological category that was destined to be subsumed under some, at present still unknown or hypothetical, system. At the same time, Huxley—a true admirer of Thomas Carlyle—was a Romantic in his refusal to adopt a Cartesian subject position (and, in addition, a Protestant interiority and autonomy of the “soul”) by seeing himself as a mere material “bundle of phenomena.” Note that Huxley’s agnosticism retains both the positivist materiality of objective fact and the romantic materiality of the fettered and limited subject. However, Huxley’s “New Reformation” could never do without conjecture about an encompassing and enduring system of knowledge to be reached in the future, and his agnosticism therefore retained an aspect of modern gnosis. When countering Christians who argued that “agnostic” was merely a euphemism for “infidel,” that is, someone who does not believe in the authority of Jesus Christ, Huxley said that either the evidence of the Bible shows that the authority of Christ was (partly) based on the primitive “survivals” of spirit possession and witchcraft (a position that he felt could not be defended), or that it suggests that Christ’s moral doctrine had been covered up by the superstitions of the evangelists (Huxley 1892: passim). This conjecture turned the largest parts of the texts of Scripture into mere man-made and mistaken matter that, in a gnostic fashion, betrayed the true spiritual causes of the success of Christianity: its morality— thus bypassing the theologians by reducing religion to moral philosophy. Despite criticizing the “Gnostic” tendency in Auguste Comte’s prediction that Science would be the religion of humanity, Huxley, too, divined that such a “new idol” could not endure, and that religion as theology would die (whereas religion as morality would live: Huxley 1892). Huxley’s prophecies were, as Adrian Desmond has brought out so well, the apotheosis of Dissent, the iconoclastic “last act of the Protestant Reformation” that, by shifting the emphasis of reform from dog-collar to white collar experts, proclaimed the liberation of the industrial and professional classes (with a heavy emphasis on the primacy of the latter; Desmond 1994: 625). In such prophecies, material evidence was reduced to a sign of the new Scientific expertise embodied by a rising “intellectual aristocracy” of which Huxley was the most prominent advocate (cf. Annan 1955).

Victorian “Spiritualism” Huxley’s paradoxical opposition to gnosis was not only informed by his attempts to counter the authority of Christian theologians, or the

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adherents of “Comtism,” but also by his aversion to his contemporaries, the “Spiritualists”—those who believed in the possibility of communicating with the spirits of the dead through a sensitive medium.16 The main representative of this group was Huxley’s former colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, who was famous for co-inventing “natural selection” together with Charles Darwin around 1860. Wallace described his conversion to Spiritualism as follows: Up to the time when I first became acquainted with the facts of Spiritualism, . . . I was so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other agencies in the universe than matter and force. Facts, however, are stubborn things. My curiosity was at first excited by some slight but inexplicable phenomena occurring in a friend’s family, and my desire for knowledge and love of truth forced me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed from anything that modern science taught or modern philosophy speculated upon. The facts beat me. (Wallace 1896: vi–vii)

Here, the “fact’s” materiality—the events that Wallace experienced during séances held at his house and at others’—is allowed to subvert “materialism” (as an abstract system associated with “modern science and philosophy”). As I argued elsewhere, Wallace’s “spiritual facts” mark a moment at which a more Baconian emphasis on the democratic epistemology of domestic experiment was superseded by a conception of “fact” founded on statistics and laboratory experiment, adopted by the recently triumphant intellectual aristocracy of John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, John Lubbock, and Edward Tylor (Pels 2003b; see Poovey 1998). Statistics and the laboratory made public science increasingly inaccessible to lay audiences, and this new conception of expertise pushed the Baconian image of the “humble and self-taught” scientist and the field of domestic experiment into the margins—among other things, into the modern occultism of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott (see Pels 2000, 2003b; Shapin and Thackray 1974: 6, 11). Blavatsky’s modern gnosis tried to make this field of domestic experiment inviolable to Scientific critique by arguing that, although the methods of the “psycho-spiritual” and “natural and physical sciences” did not differ, “our fields of research are on two different planes, and our instruments are made by no human hands, for which reason perchance they are only the more reliable” (Blavatsky [1889] 1987: 87, emphasis mine). Similarly, Wallace—whose plea for spiritualism

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stood halfway between triumphant Science and emerging occultism—thought that “spirit-photography” was a method untainted by human manipulation (Wallace 1896: 211).17 In contrast, Scientific opponents such as Edward Tylor described the materiality of the seance as a human construction: as the result of either fraud or hysteria, as voluntary or involuntary deception (Tylor 1872, 1873; see also Stocking 1971). Both Scientists and their plebeian and popular opponents, therefore, valued their subject-matter the more it shed the taint of human hands. However, if both display a fear of matter that is inherited from Protestantism, it can be argued that the Scientists were more responsible for the process of dematerialization that occurred in social science as a result. Edward Tylor’s understanding of “spiritualism” can clarify this. Tylor shared, of course, Huxley’s suspicion of theologians, and was the probable source of Huxley’s classification of Biblical stories of spirit possession and trance states as superstitious “survivals.”18 But even though Tylor distanced himself from the séance of the Spiritualists by inserting it in the same “allochronic” slot, he was much more coevally involved with Spiritualism than that suggests.19 Not only did Tylor feel compelled to research spiritualist phenomena himself— most likely, because a debate with Alfred Wallace in 1872 pushed him to do so—but their emergence robbed Tylor of the chance to apply the term “spiritualism” to the field that he wanted to describe in Primitive Culture. I cannot go into this entanglement here (but see Pels 2003b and Stocking 1971), except by noting that Tylor’s historically contingent decision to choose “animism” over “spiritualism” and “fetishism” for his anti-theological description of “primitive culture” is highly significant for our understanding of Victorian “materialism.” Tylor’s decision to define the earliest religion of humanity as “spiritualism”—and when this turned out to be uncomfortably contemporary, as “animism”—contrasts sharply with the similar use of “fetishism” by his teacher, Auguste Comte. With Huxley, Tylor confronted theologians who could heartily agree with a romantic like Samuel Coleridge in saying that “from the fetisch of the imbruted African to the soul-debasing errors of the proud fact-hunting materialist we may trace the various ceremonials of the same idolatry” (quoted in Pietz 1993: 131). For theorists of fetishism from De Brosses to Comte and Marx, the fetish’s untranscended materiality provided a way to critique Christian monotheism, but to Victorian anthropologists like Tylor and Huxley such materialism was a hindrance to achieving respectability in competition with, and in the eyes of, the contemporary Christian establishment (see Pietz 1993: 142, 1999: 59–60). The

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choice of “animism” over “fetishism” as a critique of the theological establishment was partly motivated by the fact that “fetishism” was too close to “materialism” and hence, to immorality.20 Even if Huxley openly dissociated himself from materialism as a form of metaphysics, he was still subject to the suspicion of attaching more value to material evidence than to morality, and was continually anxious about it (Desmond 1994: 427, 464 and passim). Likewise, Tylor tried to avoid being associated with a materialist “idolatry,” and in retrospect, his consequent psychologization of the fetish in terms of animism stands (together with McLennan’s socialization of the fetish in terms of totemism and kinship: see Pietz 1993: 132) as one of the more important steps in the dematerialization of culture that would characterize anthropology at least until the last decades of the twentieth century. Such dematerialization seems the more paradoxical because Tylor was employed by an institution with firm roots in the Baconian reverence for material rarity and fact: the Pitt-Rivers Museum, holding the ethnographic collection from the Tradescants’ cabinet of wonders and the Ashmolean Museum (see Daston 1994; Williamson 1983). However, if Tylor, like Lubbock and Huxley, measured human progress at least partly on the basis of the evolution of artifacts or technology, one should be careful not to confuse this interest in material objects with an interest in their materiality as such. As any visitor to the Pitt-Rivers Museum will notice, objects only take place there as part of a classificatory system: in particular, the series that was a staple of the nineteenth-century exhibitionary complex (T. Bennett 1994; see also Chapman 1985). The minimal abstraction of such classificatory acts consisted of the distinction between “survivals” and living examples of human construction, and Alfred Wallace unsuccessfully attacked their arbitrariness when opposing the material facts of the séance to the materialist classifications of “modern science and philosophy” (Pels 2003b). Primitive Culture shows that it was not material culture that interested Tylor. “Culture,” that “complex whole” (Tylor 1873, vol. I: 1), was presented as an effect of the scientist’s expert operations modelled on “the statistician’s returns”: The fact is that a stone arrow-head, a carved club, an idol, a gravemound where slaves and property have been buried for the use of the dead, an account of a sorcerer’s rites in making rain, a table of numerals, the conjugation of a verb, are things which each express the state of a people as to one particular point of culture, as truly as the tabulated numbers of deaths by poison, and of chests of tea imported, express in a different way other partial results of the general life of a whole community. (Tylor 1873, vol. I: 12)

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In other words, Tylor was looking for the abstract categories that tools and idols expressed, at the same level of, and thought analogously to, the abstracted facts of statistics and political arithmetic that, as Mary Poovey argues, were replacing the Baconian “modern fact” at around the same time (Poovey 1998: 3; see, for his love of statistics, Tylor 1888). Thus, the dematerialization of anthropological objects was reinforced by the implicit frame of abstraction and mathesis that was about to push ethnography into the margins of science (Asad 1994). This prophecy (of, among other things, ridding ourselves of present “survivals”) identifies Tylor as a descendant of the same Dissenting stock as Huxley, and both as representatives of a secularized Protestantism that—adopting the frame of mind of its theological enemy— regarded materiality with both contempt and fear. In this frame of mind, both “culture” and statistical “returns” were immaterial, occult entities—but they derived from an ideology that regarded them as more real than the matters that met its eye.

Conclusion One can conclude that at least some of the forms of materialism that emerge in the nineteenth century are—paradoxically—major steps in a process of social and natural abstraction (cf. Carrier 1998). One might even say that the gnostic move towards the spiritual made by Alfred Wallace in his assessment of spiritual séances employs a more “material” (because phenomenological) sense of “fact”—one that was marginalized in the decades to follow.21 Prophetic dematerialization played a central role in the emergence of social science—through, for instance, the reification and deification of “Society” and “State” by, among others, early sociologists like Emile Durkheim (see Durkheim 1992; Poovey 1995; Taussig 1993a). That declaration of independence of the social expert (or the priest of the secular welfare state) legitimized his project by reifying its object, supported by a repetition of iconoclastic gestures that, in Durkheim’s case, include the attempt to destroy his predecessors’ “materialistic naturalism” in order to prophecy that “social life is defined by its hyperspirituality” (Durkheim [1898] 1974: 34; emphasis in original; see also D. Pels 1983). Similar processes of dematerialization can be said to constitute the objects of the “State” and the “economy,” and thus to legitimize the rule of the social scientific expert (T. Mitchell 1999, 2002), confirming that social science is, in many ways, the heir of the abstractions of Protestant dissent.

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Early on in this intellectual process, when reflecting on the Protestant roots of rationality and capitalism, Max Weber equated prophecy with rationality, studying the combination of rationalization and disenchantment in theodicies that explained why the morally corrupt were usually materially better off and that proclaimed, through the prophet, a lower-class ethical mission of renouncing the material means of salvation (Weber 1947b: 245–46). He also said that the spiritual motivation supporting this ethical mission has long since evaporated from the iron cage of calculation (Weber 1947a: 203). Coupled to my examples, this suggests that the voice of reason may now merely be prophetic because of its opposition to materiality—understood here as the relationship of objectification and embodiment—and conversely, that the modern fear, or contempt, of matter, is a this-worldly materialization of a desire for an otherthan-this-worldly existence. Putting this differently, one might say that Huxley’s or Tylor’s prophetic reduction of material evidence to a sign of an encompassing (future, immaterial) system announces the twentieth-century’s Saussurian temptation to collapse the problem of the fetish (that is, the question, not if, but how and why things act on human beings) into the problem of ideology (that is, the question of how and why systems of signification act on human beings) thus eliding the question about the material existence of these systems (cf. Pietz 1993: 122, 129). Anthropology, like the other social sciences, was from the outset a “reformer’s science” (Tylor 1873, vol. II: 576), and any reformer needs an immaterial future—an ideology—to be able to disregard the material contingencies of his existing relationships—or “mark them out for destruction” (Tylor 1873, vol. II: 576). It may, therefore, be time to reverse Weber’s identification of dematerialization and disenchantment, and recognize that in current social science, the abstractions of culture and the social produce a magic, or a fetish, of their own, and that we need a non-Protestant sense of materiality to counter such enchantments.22

Notes 1. I use “Occidental” whenever I want to refer to the “imaginary figure” that Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as “Europe” (2000: 4)—a virtual reality that one cannot afford not to think with when analysing the constitution of modernity (cf. also Latour 1993). [2022: More recently, I have come to prefer the more geographically accurate label “North Atlantic,” after Trouillot (2002).]

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2. [2022: This chapter was written for an American Anthropological Association panel on “Materiality” (resulting in Miller 2005) and presented once more in 2007 during a conference on religion and materiality (see Houtman and Meyer 2012). It was first published in Material Religion (Pels 2008). I thank its editor, Brent Plate, for the generous permission to reprint this chapter. The text has not been changed except for the addition of an occasional footnote and cross-referencing to other chapters.] 3. In recent work on material culture, some stress discourses of the object’s or “fetish’s” agency (Gell 1998; Pels 1998; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1999); while others (Appadurai 1986; Myers 2001a; and, to a lesser extent, Keane 1997) stress the human regimes of value to which objects are subordinated. The more remarkable thing about this literature, however, is its recent convergence of human and objective agency and intention (see especially Gell [1998], Miller [1987], Keane [1996, 2001] and Spyer [1998]). [2022: This footnote now seems outdated to me, but it captures the conversations I was engaged in at the time. I now find that the embedding of theories of objectification in a material dialectic of objectification and embodiment provides a more radical critique.] 4. As Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1965: 144–45) and, commenting on Durkheim’s work, Michael Taussig (1993a) bring out, the relationship is much more complex, especially when one considers its historical layering (see, e.g. Myers 2001b; Wolfe 1999). 5. [2022: That is, fossils.] 6. Cf. Carrier (1998) and Miller (1998b) in their discussion of virtuality and “virtualism.” I have neglected to discuss these notions, as well a number of other relevant concepts (such as “idealism,” or “metaphysics,” or “theory” versus “empiry”). I readily admit, however, that such different vectors of contest may generate important modifications of my present argument. 7. Such conjecture is, among other things, the standard operation of medical diagnosis—when based, that is, on finding out what ails living organisms (see Ginzburg 1983). One can find its equivalent in social science in terms of the conjecture of evolutionist schemata, cultural patterns, or functional relationships on the basis of their perceived effects (as in the case of Wallace and Tylor: see Pels 2003b). See the remarks, below, on Durkheim’s “hyperspiritual” conscience collective and Tylor’s notion of “culture.” 8. [2022: See our overview of modern gnosis from Victorian times to present-day “cyberculture” that was published in the same year that this chapter first appeared (Aupers et al. 2008).] 9. See Taylor’s analysis of the emergence of the interior, autonomous self in Western philosophy (1989). 10. This is, of course, ideology: as I have argued in juxtaposing Alfred Wallace’s spiritualism and Edward Tylor’s taxonomic schemes, all determinations of the material or the factual involve moral and political decisions (Pels 2003b).

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11. [2022: This was obviously an important source of my critique of theories of objectification in Chapter 2.] 12. I use the gender of the “man-made” intentionally, as “male” mechanic manufacture and “female” natural procreation have long been opposed by the hegemonic discourses that I target. In contrast, see Donna Haraway’s exploration of the liberating possibilities of the person that is both “made” and “grown”—the cyborg (Haraway 1991). 13. [2022: I have yet to see a proper Begriffsgeschichte of “materialism,” but agree with Daston and Galison (2007) that the introduction of “mechanical objectivity” around 1830 added new layers to Occidental conceptions of matter. “Materialism” (as both ontology and consumer bias), while primarily a target of Christian critique earlier, increasingly seems to be more opposed to secular idealism afterwards (Braun 1982; Williams 1983: 197–200).] 14. [2022: Chapter 1 showed that Bentham’s secularism and materialism were largely kept sub rosa even after his death because of the risks generated by a public declaration of atheism.] 15. I use “Science” and “Scientific” with a capital S when referring to the ideology of science current in the Victorian era, to distinguish it from more general scientific practice (which has, to me, no definable unity). 16. [2022: This shows how profoundly the term’s meaning shifted since it was opposed to materialism ca. 1800.] 17. [2022: As Daston and Galison show (2007: 161) photography did not cause “mechanical objectivity,” but supported its materialism to such an extent that Wallace’s ideas were in fact late emanations of that attitude.] 18. [2022: My original essay failed to note that Tylor, like Huxley, descended from Protestant Dissenters (with Quaker roots), except for note 20.] 19. I borrow these terms from Johannes Fabian’s analysis of anthropological rhetoric (Fabian 1983). 20. As far as I can tell, Tylor used “Materialism” only once in Primitive Culture, as a way to define “the deepest of all religious schisms, that which divides Animism from Materialism” (1873, vol. I: 502). Placed at the end of Volume One, one wonders whether this—obviously radical— pronouncement was not too controversial to be repeated (especially for someone who could still be banned from an academic position by the Oxbridge religious establishment because of his Dissenting background). 21. Marginalized, that is, from mainstream Science. Despite the overwhelming philosophical literature on hermeneutics, phenomenology, and like approaches, the social history of the survival of the more phenomenological and democratic attitudes towards research in scientific disciplines vis-á-vis the “hard sciences,” in the humanities, in the field of anthropological method (cf. Asad 1994), and in popular science, occultism included (Pels 2000, 2003b), is still in its infancy. [2022: but see Pels 2014a.] 22. [2022: I will return to the materialization of abstraction and the future in Part IV.]

PART III

Do Catholics See Things Differently?

INTRODUCTION

When, in 1954, Father Piet Bukkems first furnished two rooms of Villa Meerwijk with artifacts from the Holy Ghost Fathers’ missions, collections of butterflies, and stuffed animals, he most likely did not realize that he had just inaugurated the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal. Hanging the “threat of the jungle . . . peacefully on a nail,” he seemed half aware of the contradictory powers that his museum could evoke for tourists in this picturesque area near Nijmegen: designating it as a “museum of rubbish,” he nevertheless claimed it to be “most remarkable.” This ambiguity had a lot to do with the first item on the list of things that Bukkems asked his colleagues to send from the missions: “everything relating to superstitious customs, sorcery, fetish worship, especially old figurines, amulets and the like” (Ons Orgaan 31 [1954]: 13; 32 [1954]: 17).1 It is easy to assume that a mission museum exhibits mission trophies: emasculated objects, decontextualized to signify the success of Christian conversion—former “threats” now hanging on a nail. Yet, for such “rubbish” to become “most remarkable,” these objects have to exert some kind of power. Could it be that the mission museum paradoxically conserved some of the pagan powers of the converted “idol”? How many of their dangers could threats of the jungle shed without becoming valueless or boring? The Afrika Museum took part in the movement of missionary collections in the Netherlands “from idol to art” (Leyten 2015), but neither term seems to adequately cover the spirit of the materials that Bukkems put on display: the “idol” had been converted into “rubbish” and was not (yet) “art” but still “remarkable.” So, what other powers of objects apart from the spiritual and the aesthetic were at play? One type of power appears in an advertisement for the Afrika Museum (five years and two museum directors after its foundation), which recommends the museum’s open-air section with the slogan “Africa is not as far as you think! It lies close to Nijmegen” (Figure P3.1). We should not interpret this in terms of the “maniacal desire of the museologist . . . for an absolute presence between signifier and

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Figure P3.1. Article advertising the Afrika Museum in a local journal, St. Jansklokken, 10 July 1959. Thanks to Richard van Alphen and Marit Jacobs, Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, for providing the digital image.

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signified, object and context” (Stewart 1993: 34). Most museum professionals, especially after they disenchanted themselves of the ideas that a museum provides a neutral context and of the conceit that the museum presents objects in unmediated, ahistorical, and transparent ways, would recognize the slogan as everyday advertising magic (Saumarez Smith 1989; Clunas 1998: 44; see Chapter 10). However, the Fathers also described the African buildings shown in the picture as constructed by “authentic” materials under the supervision of “African experts.” Both the authenticity claims and the critique of an “absolute presence” of the unmediated object suggest that the conceit of the museum object’s capacity for enchantment by authenticity was seen as historical fact, even among commentators who distanced themselves from such beliefs. Indeed, the ethnographic displays of European exhibitionary complexes often held out the promise of being “transported as if enchanted into oriental lands” (Edward Said, quoted by T. Mitchell 1991: 6). I had found a comparable exotic power also operative in the Holy Ghost Fathers’ propaganda journal, where largely “mute” exotic photographs helped to fill the missionaries’ collecting-bag without explicitly interfering with the conversion stories they preached from the same pulpit (Pels 1989: 35; see Chapter 6). However, I had not asked myself how such powers were generated in the first place, and whether the terms which were used to designate their material carriers—rubbish, fetish, threat, trophy, curio, magic, religion, the exotic, even “Africa”—explained how they were generated.2 I was aware, however, that the Afrika Museum was part of a broader drive by Catholic mission congregations in the Netherlands to demand respect for African art in the postwar period, and that one’s Christian denomination might influence how such respect was generated.3 Did modern Catholics somehow see exotic things differently, paying them more respect or attention than other Christians, or than those more secularly inclined? Posing the question may bring stereotypical essentializations of Christianity—for example, that Catholics are culturally less modern and more prone to magic—to the fore. The two examples of the powers of attraction mobilized by the early Afrika Museum, however, already complicate such essentializations. Father Bukkems’s ambiguous description of his “converted artifacts” (Thomas 1991: 151) could well signal that visitors were fascinated in a more secular way: these objects perform, like the Auto-Icon I discussed in Chapter 1, a collapse of multiple temporalities, since they “fold” pagan and Christian time into a single object (Serres and Latour 1995: 60). But since Nicholas

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Thomas coined the notion of the converted artifact largely by deriving his examples from Protestant missions, it does not suffice for addressing differences between Protestants and Catholics. Catholic attitudes toward material culture have been stereotyped as a greater appreciation of the autonomous performance of objects and their power and agency in ritual, even recognizing this among pagans (Welling 2002: 43). Putting this less politely, Protestants often abhorred the magic of the Catholic Mass, in particular what they saw as the fraud of transubstantiation: the priest’s conceit that ordinary bread was literally turned into the Body of Christ, or wine into His Blood. On the positive side, this provided a reason why Catholic missionaries could more easily accommodate indigenous ritual, whereas many Protestants tended to denounce it wholesale.4 Such views may essentialize Christian identities to the point of caricature (Mayblin, Norget, and Napolitano 2017: 24–25). There is also, however, a history behind such essentializations: the Cartesian doctrine of mind over matter—which helps dematerialize processes of signification, as argued in Chapters 1 and 2—clearly arrived in a historically contested territory, where many Protestants insisted that the bread and wine of Communion could only be a representation of Christ’s body and blood, while for many Catholics such a reduction of sacraments to mere symbolism was blasphemous, since it denied the mimetic and salvific circulation of the material presence of the Divine. The Roman Catholic Church tried to defend transubstantiation by means of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent’s counterreformation decrees, yet Church dogma led an ordained follower of Descartes to ask his superiors in 1643 whether Cartesian doctrine did not imply the absence of Christ from the host (Shorto 2008: 59). Even if Catholic dogma ceased to be hegemonic in the subsequent development of many modern societies, one therefore cannot deny that such antagonistic relations to the power of material objects in ritual exist historically, and that Catholics tried to canonize their own. The second example, however—of the 1959 advertisement—raises a different complication: that exoticism may support a power of objects to enchant that is more related to musealization itself. The promise of “transportation” of visitors to a distant realm, especially when supported by “authentic” materials, suggests what I call a “magic of realism” of modern exhibitionary complexes, and one that sits uneasily with dominant narratives about museum modernization (see Chapter 5). As Chapter 7 documents, those who founded and developed the Afrika Museum often underscored its modernity by such narratives, claiming to have emancipated it from earlier displays of “rarities” or

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“ethnographic horrors,” even from its very inception. Similar stories were told by museum professionals, yet my interest in the afterlife of “live” exotic shows in modern museums—in dioramas, for example— generated a hunch that such public pronouncements did not always reflect the full range of attractions by which they tried to pull their audiences inside. Therefore, assessments of a kind of “magical” power in both museum history and in the history of Catholic Christianity seemed congruent: regardless of whether we believe in the magic of an African or Oriental presence in European surroundings, or in the magic of Catholic attitudes toward ritual objects, both attitudes were, at least, accepted as a historical fact by other people, including those who tried to reform or criticize these attitudes. Such assessments of a historical aberration in need of reform seem to characterize the Protestantization and secularization of the world and its expectations of progressive disenchantment (Weber 1947a). However, Max Weber’s account of disenchantment can be criticized as partial and contradictory (Campbell 1987; Pels 2003a: 26–29). In global practice, linear narratives of modernization generally turn out to obscure a far wider “bush of variation” of modern developments, including apparent regressions and reversals (Ferguson 1999). James Clifford’s call to reform ethnographic museology away from its colonial impositions, mystifications, and narratives by returning to objects “their lost status as fetishes” (Clifford 1985: 244) promotes such variation. My earlier attempt to interpret the fetish as the dark twin of the rarity (Chapter 3) may therefore help to break open some of the totalizing classifications of Christian and traditional religions, ethnography, and art that accompanied the rise to hegemony of European exhibitionary practices. This part of the book tries to realize Clifford’s call by showing how modern museums, of which the Afrika Museum is a special example, are haunted by the, supposedly outdated, primary passion of “wonder” (or the “marvelous”: Clifford 1985: 241) of early modern Wunderkammer. Even more, museums cannot escape mobilizing it for their own publicity. Clifford accompanies his injunction to return to objects their lost status as fetishes or rarities by the need to make the histories of the power relations of both collecting and exhibiting more visible (1985: 244–45). Chapter 5 will therefore zoom in on the biography of some of the objects that found a place in European exhibitions and that have been criticized as colonial trophies, like the “converted artifacts” collected by missionaries. I argue that one needs to carefully keep historical moments of collecting, recollecting, and exhibiting apart if one is not to collapse the heterogeneity of European perceptions of

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museum objects, and therefore the attractions they exerted on spectators, into a linear narrative of modernization (whether triumphal or critical). A reflection on how exotic bodies were put on display in the nineteenth century helps us to understand such biographies better, firstly because—in line with my focus on dead bodies in Chapter 1 and my critique of the ideology of the artifact in Chapter 2—bodies tend to resist the objectifications imposed on them when alive, and secondly because even dead or artificial bodies tend to produce more visceral responses in their audience than ordinary artifacts do. Reflections on ethnographic showcases, especially as they appeared in world exhibitions, therefore serve as a contrast that allows me to assess how the dominant narratives of the modern exhibitionary complex tried to keep out popular wonders, and, at a later stage, worried about how to manage the boundaries between animate and inanimate in the use of ethnographic dioramas. I mobilize the visceral entertainments of Phineas Taylor Barnum, Coney Island, and Walt Disney to show that the hierarchies that elites imposed on popular culture never completely excluded the subaltern magic of modernity. Such enchantments have been and continue to be “composted” into exhibitionary practices, despite the fact that high modern Europe tried to position itself at the end of history by pretending to rationally purify the latter from the former. They affirm that it is impossible to keep sensation out of education, or the spirit of matter out of mind.5 This recognition of the heterogeneity of the modern exhibitionary complex sets the stage for Chapter 6 (largely based on Pels 1989) on the Catholic missionary use of photographs in the period directly preceding and accompanying the foundation of the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal. It builds on the insights of Chapter 5—that critiques of colonial representations tend to misrepresent them as totalizing and ideologically homogeneous—by applying it to Catholic missionary visual culture. Chapter 6 also attempts to improve the methodology of studying colonial representations by a more explicit recognition of the materiality of the image, and therefore of the multisensory heterogeneity of our relations to it. This serves to show that the material carriers of colonial representations were and are not transparent, and that proper understanding of their materiality requires us to proceed with more epistemological sophistication than simply reading them as if they were an open book (E. Rappaport 2008: 291). This chapter also provides additional evidence that structuralist assumptions that tend to privilege meanings imposed by a classifying subject at the expense of the powers of the object tend to linger on in poststructuralist critiques of exhibitions, collections, or modern systems of objects in

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general. At the same time, Chapter 6 performs the more modest aim of providing a historical baseline against which to situate the subsequent history of the Afrika Museum in Chapter 7. Chapter 7 provides the empirical pièce de resistance of this part of the book. It zooms in on the history of the Afrika Museum itself, paying particular attention to the heterogeneity and (potential) clashes of criteria by which objects were collected and displayed and of the aims of the Museum’s directors and curators during the early years of its existence. While references to the Afrika Museum’s collection as “rubbish” and the magic of advertisements claiming that Africa lies close to Nijmegen have gone out of fashion today, my hunch that their friction with the aesthetic evaluation of African objects as “art” was somehow unique proved to be right: the chapter demonstrates that these frictions and tensions were composted into a typically Catholic “transubstantiation” that was supposed to give the objects exhibited a voice through Divine love. Taking, perhaps, some nontheological liberties with the notion of “transubstantiation,”6 Chapter 7 allows me to empirically explore a relatively rarely visited niche of modern exhibitionary complexes where spirituality, exoticism, and materiality were made to interact, and unique boundaries between representation and mimesis, ethnography and exoticism, and realism and magic were both drawn and transgressed. This can be glossed by saying that Father Bukkems was still recognizably Roman Catholic in his emphasis on the demonic but converted artifact—“Rome” here symbolizing the apex of a global, yet European hierarchy of value—while later curators and directors of the Museum increasingly cultivated a more openended Catholicity that employed the vocabulary of aesthetics and art to position Africans in a dialogue with dominant European narratives. However, the hypothesis that this demonstrates linear progress is refuted by the fact that different audiences—internal, external; Catholic, non-Catholic—were served with different messages. Chapter 7 is also important for this book by showing that European classifications of exhibits as “African,” which involves hierarchies of representation, both depend on and block the mimetic circulation of the objects thus classified. This relationship stands at the core of the conclusion to this part of the book, which uses the insights from the three previous chapters to propose an analytical distinction between (colonial) mimesis, mimicry, and representation that clarifies how a spirit of matter may upset and haunt modern global hierarchies of value—in a subaltern (but not exclusively Catholic) way. At least since the work of Michael Taussig (1993b), mimesis and alterity have been granted a kind of mystical status as a counterpoint to the rational

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discipline supposedly cultivated by North Atlantic cultures—and indeed, all chapters of this part of the book are intended to upset hierarchies of value that position representations of reality as rational and modern, and mimesis and mimicry as something reserved to so-called primitive minds. However, the romanticism of such reversals and celebrations of difference has not been sufficiently theorized and requires a careful disaggregation of the epistemic conditions on which mimesis and representation are based. The conclusion that alterity may also celebrate centuries of racial differentiation, despite the existence of subaltern, more Catholic appreciations of wonder at others (not least in ethnographic museums), prepares the ground for the discussion of commodity fetishism and identity value in Chapters 9 and 10.

Notes 1. Ons Orgaan was the internal bulletin of the Holy Ghost Fathers in the Netherlands, which I studied in their archives in Gemert in 1989–90. I discuss the ambiguities of these objects and images in Chapters 6 and 7. 2. Lacking a sufficient understanding of modern object culture at the time of my first acquaintance with the Afrika Museum, I did not publish any of my research until now (as Chapter 7). 3. Next to the Holy Ghost Fathers’ Afrika Museum (started 1954), the Afrika Centrum was set up by the Society for African Missions in 1946 (Leyten 2015: 5); while the mission museum at Steyl (of the Society for the Divine Word) was older (and kept its 1934 display format until today) and the ethnographic museum of the Tilburg Fathers closed in 1987, with its collection partly transferred to the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In contrast, the traveling mission exhibitions of Dutch Protestant societies left no lasting ethnographic museum, although some collections were transferred to secular institutions (Coppus 1988: 7; cf. Hasinoff 2011). 4. This seemed the case when I compared the different intervention of Protestants and Catholics in neighboring districts of Tanganyika Territory (Beidelman 1982; Pels 1999). Therefore, my critique of Beidelman’s totalizing stereotype of missionaries (Pels 1999: 15, 20, 29, 43) may have been caused by the totalizing tendencies of the Protestant mission he studied as well, in addition to his own anthropological prejudices. 5. Cf. my long conversation about magic, religion, and sensation with Birgit Meyer (see Meyer and Pels 2003; Meyer 2015). 6. I realized only later that the “theological undercurrent” in Karl Marx’s work made him take similar liberties with “transubstantiation,” using it for capitalist fetishism in particular (see Boer 2012: 198, 203; Morris 2017: 196). See also Chapter 7, note 33.

Chapter 5

TROPHY AND WONDER OR, BODIES AT THE EXHIBITION

In 1835, three years after Jeremy Bentham willed his body to be transformed into his Auto-Icon, Phineas Taylor Barnum bought and put on display Joice Heth as “the greatest natural and national curiosity in the world.” An enslaved woman who, Barnum claimed, was 161 years old, Heth performed in a lively manner her claim to have been George Washington’s nanny (Harris 1973: 21). When Barnum noticed that his public’s interest and the accompanying high profits were decreasing, he wrote an anonymous letter to the press claiming that she was not a live human being but a clever automaton, which sent visitor numbers once more through the roof (Harris 1973: 23). Barnum became the stereotype of the unscrupulous impresario exploiting so-called freaks for commercial gain, using the Siamese Twins Chang and Eng, “Captain” Tom Thumb (a little person and his star performer), and the “Aztec children” Maximo and Bartola, to dupe a supposedly gullible public. Together with Carl Hagenbeck’s Völkerschauen in Berlin, Barnum’s shows are often condemned as pioneering the display of live humans as objects, a practice that seemed to end in disgrace with the Congolese Village at the 1958 Brussels World Exposition (Allegaert, Cailliau, and Scharloo 2009; Stanard 2005).1 Tony Bennett’s justly famous The Birth of the Museum dismisses the likes of Barnum and Hagenbeck from museum history, as cultural zones “still dedicated to the display of human and animal curiosities,” marking a past distinct from the present of bourgeois “rationalist and improving culture” (1995: 222–23). Indeed, accusations of immoral commerce by the display of less privileged people and the exploitation of simple-minded curiosity were already voiced in Bar-

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num’s own time. However, the North American bourgeois public may have differed from Bennett’s assessment: ill at ease with the presumed high culture of European art and its class distinctions, United States audiences may have accepted Barnum’s “operational aesthetic” of hoaxing and faking as a challenge (Harris 1973: 57, 72). For people who got rid of a domineering and arrogant European aristocracy only fifty years earlier, Barnum’s provision of initial puzzlement, followed by a literal truth that emerged from unmasking deception, may have trumped the elevated values of beauty, significance, and spirituality associated with the European upper class (Harris 1973: 33, 79). More importantly, Barnum’s career suggests a critique of Bennett’s historical assumptions: in 1841, Barnum added the collection of Charles Willson Peale, once arranged by the rational discipline of Linnean taxonomy, to his American Museum exhibits, alongside sensational spectacles comparable to Joice Heth (Harris 1973: 34; Hart and Ward 1988). Were Barnum’s “natural wonders” regressions, reversals, or even refutations of the narrative of linear progress toward rationality and bourgeois discipline that Bennett, together with a majority of museum historians until recently, presumes? This chapter takes a critical look at such narratives of progress, by returning commercial uses of human bodies to their vital role in the exhibitionary complex. Nineteenth-century Barnum-like tricks and hoaxes may be compared to the counterpoints offered by excessive objects in the first two chapters of this book: they exemplify as well as upset the race, class, and gender hierarchies institutionalized in narratives about modern museums, similar to what excessive objects do to Protestant and humanist ideas of objects supposedly dominated by human traffic and intention. However, the chapter first reflects on the category of “trophy” visá-vis the passion of “wonder.” This does not just seem appropriate for addressing the Catholic missionary’s exhibitions that form the topic of the next two chapters, but also because it helps to reconsider some of the anticolonial critiques that seemed to dominate the field when I first tried to make sense of the Afrika Museum in the 1990s. Trophies are artifacts with a conscious biography: they refer to an event of collecting in the past that is recalled in the present. This made the term particularly useful for anticolonial narratives about museums, because once that event is defined as colonial imposition or theft, so-called trophy display uncovers an alternative political and ethical conjuncture. Chapter 3, however, tried to show that wonder has been conceived as a passion that precedes moral judgment, and makes space for a material presence that resists being fully encapsulated by human categories and the narratives in which they are put to use. The

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juxtaposition of trophy and wonder in museum history invites a more explicit comparison with other souvenirs, museum objects, and objects of wonder, and allows me to identify certain conceptual slippages in critical theories of museums and collecting that may be similar to the forms of double consciousness about material culture that I discussed in Chapter 2. These critiques of the 1990s seem to share a line of descent from dualist forms of representational thinking, in which the existence of a “third” material presence in-between sign and referent, or signifier and signified, remains out of intellectual reach. This critical prequel allows me to argue that bodies at the exhibition—the visitors’ as much as those put on display—may restore the role of affects such as wonder, but also fear and loathing, in visitors’ experiences. Commercial initiatives made ethnographic showcases with live human beings central to display techniques in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, we seem to need more differentiated and varied narratives of exhibitionary complexes: not only to restore Barnum’s commercial ventures to some of their historical role, but also to reconnect museums and capitalism through the history of world exhibitions, which demonstrate that the visceral wonders of Walt Disney’s “Magic Kingdoms” share a genealogy with the more disciplined and disembedded exhibits in established museums (see Kratz and Karp 1993). In other words, histories of wonder and curiosity in North Atlantic exhibitionary complexes, ranging from crass colonial capitalism to elevated and inalienable museum heritage, suggest that museum walls could never keep out, and that museums were even forced to rely on, sensations that those devoted to the educational and civilizing functions of the museum thought to be too visceral, material, and emotional to be admitted inside. In fact, comparable dilemmas may face museums today, when called upon to become more inclusive and breach the walls that confine them (Lynch 2017; Naidoo 2016). This is supported by my final discussion of the “routinization of wonder,” a magic of realism that—while clearly rooted in the live display of ethnographic “specimens”—cultivated the passion of wonder to make visitors forget about and suspend their material frames in favor of the interruption by a particularly striking object. Franz Boas became aware of its uses when experimenting with live displays of Kwakwaka’wakw2 ritual at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and later life groups at the New York American Museum of Natural History. Similar challenges occupy exhibition designers today—showing the relevance of Stephen Greenblatt’s attempt to prevent the passion of wonder from being “poisoned” by xenophobia and possession (1991:

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ix), and, I might add, by exaggerating otherwise righteous forms of critique. As a whole, this chapter tries to subvert North Atlantic epistemic arrogance by demonstrating that the rationality of the latter was undercut by mimetic forms of sensation that invoked an authentically “real,” and that this spirit of matter, fundamental to the magic of realism, cannot be fully captured by critiques based on discursive analyses that remain based on notions of representation.

Trophy and Wonder The argument of the following section is that totalizing narratives of a linear modernity—narratives that, for example, declare museum objects to be an endpoint of knowledge, or trophies of successful colonial conquest—obscure the history and biography of the object and the powers it exerts in encounters with its audiences. As such, the argument is not new. The spurious sense of ahistorical truth that museums may try to convey by conflating different moments and trajectories of collecting, recollecting, and exhibiting and imposing classifications of origin, function, or ethnic identity on them has been criticized ever since the “new museology” emerged (Saumarez Smith 1989). In current discussions of how to “brand” museums, however, whole collections and exhibitionary conventions are still routinely subsumed under a singular identity. Such identities collapse and reduce the museum’s particular histories of collecting and exhibiting: the material practice of divorcing the churn from the making of Hungarian butter, the neck-rest from Sepik sleeping habits, or the idol from Indigenous African worship not only removes an artifact from its original context, but also alienates it further by commodification and representation—by reducing functional desires and material uses to exchange- or sign-values. Johannes Fabian (2004: 54) describes this as a process of dematerialization, and this is true to the extent that it temporarily erases the object’s material affordances. But if “destination culture” commonly reduces objects to semiophores (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Pomian 1987), that does not turn museum objects into mere signs or commodities: they do not lose the material capacity to be more than that by merely traveling into an exhibition hall or museum depot. If a museum object can be reconverted back into an object of worship (as happened, for example, to a Balinese keris in the collection of Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden: Wiener 2007), then object biographies seem to allow an at least partial reversal or negation of the alien-

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ating moment of collecting.3 Moreover, this moment can be multiply determined: by military conquest, conversion, contractual exchange, “fancy,” or obsession. The sailors of Cook’s first voyage, for example, threw away the “curiosities” they had bartered for after becoming bored with them, or becoming interested in new ones (Thomas 1991: 125). We should resist the tendency to use a specific originary moment—such as barter, conquest, or conversion—to determine the act of collecting. We should also guard against defining an “exhibitionary complex” as a coherent whole: neither Bennett’s educational and civilizing mission, nor the commercial spectacle discussed by Martin Hall (2006) provide a singular telos for the museum. Instead, it might be more fruitful to talk about exhibitionary complexes in the plural (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 36; I will return to this debate shortly). Consequently, the following reflections on the notion of trophy in museology are meant to keep museum collecting and exhibiting open to its full historical “bush of variations.”4 This starts with the moment of alienation, since the act of collecting is always multipolar, the product of a mutual engagement, however unequal (just like ethnography: Pels and Salemink 1999). Even the indigenous “idols” that the newly converted hand over to Christian missionaries retain a form of mutual interest and attraction because they objectify the multiple temporalities of a transition from spirit or fetish into idol, trophy, or rubbish. The converted artifact5 remains ambiguous even within its new hierarchy of values: it cannot be reduced to a single meaning and complicates our understanding of cultural contact—in fact, this is what seems to attract visitors to a mission museum. Like a pidgin—a new medium of communication that wedges itself inbetween the superstrate and the substrate language—it materially adds a “third” that complicates and negates dualistic conceptions of the colonial encounter (Pels 1996: 740). I focus on often relatively indiscriminate uses of the classification by “trophy” to show how critical accounts of collecting and exhibiting can conflate such multiple polarities and temporalities of objects. It seems empirically valid to borrow the classification when a missionary in Oceania notes how a boat returned from Rurutu “laden with the trophies of victory, the gods of the heathen taken in this bloodless war” (Thomas 1991: 153). However, whether one should class a Polynesian cape worn by Joseph Banks in a portrait as a virtual trophy of European mastery—especially when it is likely that Banks acquired it in gift-exchange during the time he “went native” among Tahitians on James Cook’s first voyage—is questionable (Thomas 1991: 143; see Holmes 2008: 13–33).6 Similarly, exhibits of the slave trade or the

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recently conquered Zulus or Dahomeans at the Horniman museum may well be described as humanitarian or colonial trophies. However, it seems too hasty to describe the same Museum’s 1890 guide—which reads like a catalogue of a curiosity cabinet—as foreclosing spaces for re-evaluating denigrating representations of Africans “by the reiteration of descriptive terms such as ‘curio’ and the persistence of the ‘trophy’ form of display” (Coombes 1994: 115)—since it is not spelled out how and why the term curio or a trophy display can effect such closure (as I will discuss shortly). A final example concerns an object that was looted from China in 1901, sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1922, and put on display as “the throne of Emperor Ch’ien-lung.” Even if the caption indeed transformed it into a trophy,7 it does not turn Craig Clunas’s reverential bow in front of the throne, when he first encountered it as a fourteen-year-old, into a colonial gesture, nor does it justify his interpretation that all visitors perceive it as a nostalgic trophy of a vanished British empire (Clunas 1998: 41, 48). In all three cases, anticolonial lenses seem to be projected on the object collected to give colonial ideology a spurious coherence and collapse the biography of the object into a singular gesture of appropriation. They conflate such activities as war, looting, hunting, or missionary converting with exploration and its souvenirs, with cherishing an exotic identity, arranging objects in a certain conventional pattern, or classifying something as a curiosity versus experiencing it as wonder and rarity. Some studies of collecting do, indeed, take care to distinguish missionary “trophies” from their “mementoes and curios,” and thereby invite us to think about epistemological differences between trophies and souvenirs as objects and their relationship to the moment of collecting (Cannizzo 1998: 163; see the next paragraph). Others, however, interpret trophy display—a scenographic convention, not necessarily connected to collecting practices—as a direct and transparent sign of a violent “political act” (Wintle 2008: 282).8 Yet others seem to assume that its use by a specific collector immediately turns the objects arranged in this way into his trophies (Coombes 1994: 71). The latter two are examples of the common mistake to impute transparency to colonial material culture (E. Rappaport 2008: 291). Even if “trophy display” is a commonplace of curatorial rhetoric, the uncritical adoption of the term shows a conflation of the social relations of collecting and exhibiting and a tendency to metaphorically subsume the biography of an object under the subjective categories that define its destination of display as an endpoint. Trophies are a kind of souvenirs, but even in that capacity they invite reflection on the difference between “souvenirs of death” such

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as the relic, the hunting trophy and the scalp, and other objects of recollection (S. Stewart 1993: 140). If most travel souvenirs are “a nostalgic celebration of the past” that allows a “personal narrative” (this could, for example, be an alternative description of Joseph Banks’s Polynesian cape), souvenirs of death instead erase, Susan Stewart says, “the significance of history.” On the one hand, this underscores the important point that the trophy, as a souvenir of violent struggle, may be different from mementoes that recollect other experiences (partly because of the different motives behind their collection). On the other, it shows that Stewart, by subsuming both the relic and the human remains used by voodoo ritual under the category “souvenir,” ignores that both these objects are supposed to act on people of their own accord, rather than solely through the memories of those who collected such death or destruction. This conflation can, I think, be explained by recognizing that Susan Stewart’s On Longing, for all its brilliance, makes no room for the autonomous agency of objects. Her discussion of the exotic object shows that she can perceive only its representational functions: The exotic object represents distance appropriated; it is symptomatic of the more general cultural imperialism that is tourism’s stock in trade. To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy; on the one hand, the object must be marked as exterior and foreign, on the other it must be marked as arising directly out of an immediate experience of its possessor. (1993: 147, my emphasis)

Note how exotic objects are reduced to categories imposed on them by subjects: cultural imperialism, tourism, taxonomy (since “specimen” implies a determination of “species”), violence (“trophy”), exteriority, property. Objects are only allowed to signify by the meanings they represent to—here truly tyrannical—subjects. Stewart assumes rather than researches the “intimate distance” attributed to the exotic: she seems to ignore that souvenirs also abolish distance. In contrast, the intimate abolition of distance that characterizes the visceral sensation of “wonder”—whether by the “systole of the heart” of medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus (Greenblatt 1991: 16), or by the sensuous suffering of Karl Marx (see Chapter 3)—seems hard to grasp by theories dominated by tyrannical subjects. Stewart may, in fact, incorporate some of the more objectionable discursive moves that characterize the bourgeois subject she criticizes—its tendency to dismiss both object and embodied experience—into her critical theory. Instead of countering the reduction of objects to commodities and signs by modern exhibitionary complexes, such critical theories amplify its dematerializing tendencies, as discussed in the next section and in Chapter 6.

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“Trophy,” therefore, is used by at least some critical museum theorists as a classification that conflates and collapses collections, recollections, and exhibitions in a totalizing perspective (as we shall see, “curio” can be another). The practice ignores, perhaps unintentionally, the historicity of such different moments in the biography of the object. This tendency may be—at least partly—countered by the counterpoint of the “untranscended materiality” of the rarity and fetish. My twinning of rarity and fetish in Chapter 3 was supported by Stephen Greenblatt’s investigation of ways “to keep the capacity for wonder from being poisoned” by juxtaposing it to “resonance” (1991: ix, 1990). Greenblatt focused on visual displays to bring out the difference: By “resonance” I mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which . . . it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By “wonder” I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention. (Greenblatt 1990: 19)

As Corinne Kratz and Ivan Karp have noted in their—indeed, wonderful—essay on the Disney Museums, this allows us to multiply viewer’s relations to objects and pluralize forms of display. They rightly point out that if we follow Greenblatt in saying that the sense of wonder changed during the Renaissance, this means that wonder possesses resonant aspects (Kratz and Karp 1993: 32). In other words, wonder has a history too. If we do not relate the phenomenological experience of wonder to the different conjunctures of regimes of knowledge in which it was caught up (signposted by classifications like rarity, fetish, fact, curiosity, curio, trophy, fancy, trifle, obsession, or possession), we will fail to grasp its contingent value, and misjudge its epistemic conditions. A “History of Curiosity” argues that the historical shift from pilgrimage to methodized travel rehabilitated the epistemological status of wonder and curiosity, which medieval sages associated with instability and mobility (Stagl 1995: 48–49). This argument sits uneasily, however, with the “medieval sage” Albertus Magnus’s appreciation of wonder as “the origin of philosophy” (quoted in Greenblatt 1990: 33). In Bacon’s time, the resonance of wonder still allowed its amoral freedom from evaluation to oppose scholastic dogma, but this changed under the sway of Enlightenment taxonomy, when curiosities or rarities demanded systematic classification or experiment. Descartes may have thought that wonder was the fount of all knowledge but he also

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suspected its lack of moral judgment (see Chapter 3); and for Edmund Burke, curiosity, while still the “first,” had also become the “simplest” emotion, denoting a childlike attitude toward things (quoted in Thomas 1991: 127). Burke may not be the best representative of Romantic scientists, however, since the latter felt from Erasmus Darwin’s 1791 Botanic Garden onwards that the wonder generated by a poetic image could and should be joined to the work of Linnean taxonomy, chemical experiment, and even the discovery of “deep space” and “deep time” (Holmes 2008). Nicholas Thomas nevertheless accepts Burke’s judgment: rather than treating “curiosity” as a symptom of an epistemic regime in its own right, he conflates the eighteenth-century dominance of the term with the denigrating nineteenth-century classification of “curio” (Thomas 1991: 126). “Curio,” however, marks a further domestication of wonder by reducing it to a decontextualized trifle (Fabian 2001: 137). Thomas uses this anachronistic conflation to justify his diagnosis that “curiosity” is, in fact, “colonialism in its infancy” (1991: 126)—a reduction of epistemology to politics that my insistence on the historicity of wonder is meant to resist.9 As Chapter 3 argues, wonder, like the curiosity cultivated by the field sciences, was subordinated to strict nineteenth-century epistemic hierarchies of race, class, and gender when scientific expertise became increasingly specialized and opposed to infantile “fancy” or feminine “curios” (Fabian 2001; Kuklick and Kohler 1996). Museums were instrumental in setting up these hierarchies of value. However, we shall see that they could not fully erase wonder from the world of science and museum display. Subdominant and less visible cultural layers retained it—partly as (“fancy” or “trifling”) commercial entertainment guiltily rubbing up against the uplift of education, partly as a poiesis increasingly confined to “subjective” realms of artistic production, partly as an effect of “objective” representation in science and museums. In that process, the words “curio” and “curiosity” lost their overt connection with “wonder” as a primary passion, and they acquired the derogatory meaning of a colonial souvenir or a childlike sentiment asserted by current critical theories (Coombes 1994: 115; Fabian 2001; Thomas 1991: 143). However, even when such developments took place at the level of discourse and classification, the material sensation of objects, in or outside museums, did not allow for the drawing of unambiguous discursive boundaries between scientific wonder and trivial fancy. However much the mind was declared to rule over matter, we shall see that the visceral power of objects and images to touch someone by Albertus Magnus’s “systole of the heart,” or to

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“reverberate” like sound in a way that “immediately take[s] root in me” (Bachelard [1958] 1994: xvi), could not be ruled out from either the history of museums or of science, if only because there were, and will always be, bodies at the exhibition.

Bodies at the Exhibition: Contradictory Stories and Ambiguous Practices Since the latter half of the twentieth century, we associate exhibits of living people with freak shows (Qureshi 2011: 8). They are sometimes conflated with the rise of scientific racism, but more usually with the immoral exploitation of people by commercial exhibitors invoking the ideology of social Darwinism. Their archetypes are Phineas Taylor Barnum and Carl Hagenbeck—Barnum because he displayed physically and mentally challenged people as ethnic, historical, or evolutionary wonders; Hagenbeck because he collected ethnic groups like he did animal species (Sliggers 2009: 10–11). Critical research targeted such exhibitions especially in the 1990s, and scholars suggested that these displays signaled an ethically questionable form of commercial “entertainment” because they taught visitors to see themselves as the higher race, rather than satisfying their “curiosity” by making them better acquainted with the people displayed (Allegaert et al. 2009: 6). Such a positive notion of curiosity is, as we have seen, anachronistic. Even before the rise of the ethnographic showcase, both scientific racism and biopolitics were ingrained at the heart of modern European nation-states and empires: even die-hard citoyens of the new French Republic baulked at granting to the Black revolutionaries of Haiti the equality they thought all humanity deserved (see Dubois 2004). It may be as historically appropriate to reverse the 1990s critiques of ethnic showcases: that the latter’s moral questioning may obscure moments in which such displays worked against North Atlantic racism to stimulate positive curiosity. Taking the moral high ground may even close the eyes of a critic to the spirit of the materials they criticize: a critical examination and re-presentation of colonial nudes from Africa on postcards (Corbey 1989), for example, was itself criticized because it reproduced colonial pornography in pictures, despite criticizing its colonial voyeurism in print (Bal 1991; see also Mieke Bal’s contemporaneous critique of museum exhibits: Bal 1992).10 Narratives of progress, if less normative, also characterize influential 1990s theories of museum development. Tony Bennett argued

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that “museums and the like were explicitly conceived and planned as cultural zones distinct from the world of the fair, the tavern, music-hall or popular theatre.” Popular fairs were “still dedicated to the display of human and animal curiosities and still strongly associated with carnivalesque inversions of established cultural values and hierarchies” and thereby constituted “a moral and cultural universe that was radically distinct from the emerging rationalist and improving culture of the middle classes” (1995: 222–23). Bennett borrowed this narrative from Stallybrass and White (1986) to argue that popular fairs of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exoticized the grotesque displays of European carnival by projecting it unto alien cultures. He extended this linear development to the point at which museum rationality subsumed such displays under “a temporally organized order of things and peoples” (T. Bennett 1995: 79). A decade later, Bennett updated this teleology by adding that museums developed into “differencing machines” that facilitate “cross-cultural exchange,” so that contests between the imagined community of the nation and multicultural diversity can be played out (T. Bennett 2006: 61–62). The linear temporality of increasing rationality and civil discipline has been criticized, significantly, partly because it bypasses museums’ material culture. Martin Hall takes issue with Bennett’s claim that in the (governmental) exhibitionary complex, the artifact has no autonomy and is a mere semiotic carrier of the identification machine that aims to discipline citizens. Like Kratz and Karp (1993), Hall notes that Bennett’s exhibitionary complex cannot explain the global spread of Disneyfied simulations and “imagineering” as anything but escapism or false consciousness. Yet Hall seems to replace Bennett’s civilizing process by another, more recent linear development: he anchors the Disneyfied “experience economy” in a self-referential “third-order simulation” borrowed from Jean Baudrillard (whom I will discuss in Chapters 6 and 8) that requires material objects “to reinsert ‘realness’ into the simulation,” as a “hysterical” but vain defense against “late capitalism . . . spinning out of control” (Hall 2006: 92). Hall’s use of the “reinsertion” or “reinjection” of the real, or the “reversal” of the movement toward ever-greater simulation and reproduction (Hall 2006: 92, 93, 95) betrays that he, too, habitually reproduces assumptions of linear development—if a less optimistic one, that posits the arrival of a new epoch in which the autonomous artifact has become fully subordinate to postmodern simulacra. Instead, the compromise suggested by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in reviewing this debate—that we have to speak of several “exhibitionary complexes,”

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capitalist and governmental, existing side-by-side (KirshenblattGimblett 2006: 36)—seems a more promising approach to museum history. Perhaps even more significantly, she draws attention to another meaning of “complex”: of the European world of exhibitions as a source of anxiety (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 37). Assuming a linear development creates trouble for those who critique the commercialized nineteenth-century ethnic shows: some blame them for the emergence of racism (Schneider 1977: 108), but others reverse that order, and even argue that instruction by ethnographic showcase could be followed by carnival. “What had begun to develop into a means of scientifically educating and edifying the public about faraway peoples and their customs turned into a form of amusement again, yet without impeding the persistence of a third function, that of political and imperialistic propaganda” (Corbey 1995: 69). Much earlier, William Schneider said the same (although dropping Raymond Corbey’s nuanced “again”) without noting how it contradicts the statement I quoted above (Schneider 1977: 99). The fact that P. T. Barnum could combine Joice Heth, Captain Tom Thumb, and the “missing link” (performed by the physically challenged actors Hervey Leech and William Johnson) with the practice of museum display, suggests that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is right and that the walls of the museum do not seem to separate the audience of the carnivalesque and commercial fair from the rational “order of things” of the museum as neatly as Bennett would like us to assume; nor that Hall’s frisson of a simulated experience was denied to Victorian audiences, as his category of postmodern displays may lead us to believe. Like Susan Stewart, Tony Bennett and Martin Hall seem to adopt the totalizing effect of the bourgeois discourses they want to criticize. However, both the bourgeois narrative of linear progress and the linear version of its critique have to be nuanced. A closer look at the exhibits of living human “specimens” may instead suggest that they were—to use the Foucauldian rhetoric also favored by Bennett—never fully “incarcerated” within the ideological and material framework of imperial culture (Corbey 1995; MacKenzie 1984). The scientific racism of William Edwards, founder of the Societé Ethnologique de Paris in 1837, emerged in 1820 (Blanckaert 1988), well before ethnographic showcases became popular entertainment. Edwards’s friend Thomas Hodgkin was the founder of the Ethnological Society of London in 1841 and therefore another main protagonist in the story of the spread of scientific racism. Yet as a Quaker, Hodgkin was also devoutly committed to the potential equality of all humanity: he supported the abolition of slavery, received Afri-

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can Americans working on the uplift of Africa at his dinner table and corresponded respectfully with an Iroquois chief (Rosenfeld 1993: 234, 237). Moreover, Sadiah Qureshi argues that British people routinely met foreign peoples in London streets well before ethnographic showcases became popular: not only did port cities like London, Liverpool, and Bristol witness a regular succession of visibly strange peoples stepping ashore, they were often more permanently present. An 1829 painting by Benjamin Hayden of May Day festivities in London shows that its mix of classes also implied a mix of races, especially exemplified by the colored faces of servants in the crowd (Qureshi 2011: 39). Turning North Atlantic ethnic shows into “first encounters” is therefore historically problematic: in Britain, at least, more horizontal images of difference were common in the abolitionist campaign for the ending of the slave trade, popularized by the image of the enslaved African begging to be recognized “as a man and a brother” since 1787, and the Romantic image of Africa of Mungo Park’s bestselling Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799). Half a century later, David Livingstone and his successors successfully turned Africa into a “Dark Continent,” transubstantiating the British from slavers into the slave trade’s main opponents (Brantlinger 1988; Holmes 2008: 221; Uglow 2002: 412). In the meantime, the material and sexual sensation of Sarah Baartman’s body earned her the terrible honor of embodying a transition from “freak”—who were usually advertised with at least the minimal dignity of “being unique and individual”— to a “specimen” in Georges Cuvier’s museum (Strother 1999: 25). The rising popularity of displays of living human beings and their “spectacularization” in industrial modernity took place at the same time that both ethnology and colonialism were increasingly systematized, both in the colonies and in the metropoles. To define the one as modern progress and the other as atavistic prejudice ignores that they are both equally modern. The recognition or denigration of human difference (as in the simultaneous British opposition of early Orientalism to “Anglicism”; see Pels 1999) depended on Christian humanitarian as well as violent phases in the extension of colonial rule. Indeed, many of the groups put on display in Europe were recently conquered, explaining why the warlike Zulus, Ashanti, and Dahomeans became icons of Africa by the 1880s. But even in conquering mode, North Atlantic colonialism was neither monolithic nor linear, and was divided among warring factions of traders, missionaries, soldiers, colonial officials, and (usually parsimonious) authorities at home (Cooper and Stoler 1997).

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Missionary exhibitions, indeed, seem to have had qualms about displaying living human beings (Corbey 1995: 70), probably because many of them were loath to reduce potential converts to the natural history vocabulary of specimens (which might evoke discussion on whether other “races” could be missionized at all). Where they did contain an “African village” (as in a London missionary exhibition of 1908), Africans working there as skilled artisans were said to produce “specimens of remarkable beauty and taste” (Coombes 1994: 181)— that is, the specimens emphasized were artifacts rather than the bodies of their makers. Displaying so-called freaks did not imply that contemporaneous Zulu performers were presented in the same terms (Qureshi 2011: 8). Qureshi’s sustained reflection on the agency of performers in ethnographic shows highlights cracks that a totalizing critique of colonial ideology glosses over, and contradictions that other critical writers fail to notice. The Bakhoje Native Americans performing on English stages in 1844 came with the “full assent of the individuals,” while Zulus brought by Charles Caldecott a little later could not leave South Africa before giving consent before a diplomatic agent (Qureshi 2011: 131, 133). Even Sarah Baartman, the first exotic celebrity exhibit of the century, and notorious for being transformed from “freak” to a French natural history “specimen” before her remains were repatriated in 2002, seems to have chosen to sail for London in 1810 of her own free will (Qureshi 2011: 129; Strother 1999). Of course, “free will,” even when legally certified, was an ambiguous label: not all performers were present by consent, and even fewer were fully informed about what to expect. Some were, literally, prisoners from India, while others may have been lured by false promises or too mentally challenged to resist, like the famous “Aztec children” Maximo and Bartola (Qureshi 2011: 128–29, 134). But even Maximo and Bartola had a varied forty-year career that took them as seasoned performers from England to Barnum’s America and back to get married in London. It is in any case, puzzling to see an argument that ethnographic performers’ agency was “strictly controlled” and that “it was unthinkable they could mix spontaneously with visitors and there were few possibilities for contact” followed almost immediately by the story of a Berlin scholar’s astonishment to see an African from Castan’s Panoptikum appearing in European clothes on a tramcar smoking a cigarette (Corbey 1995: 62). Even when performers’ behavior was controlled, open resistance was possible: when Bismarck Bell, a Cameroonian dignitary, refused to be photographed except in suit and tie, the director of the Berlin Museum, Felix von Luschan, was furious (Zimmerman 2001: 28).

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Barnum and Hagenbeck themselves blurred the boundaries between rational museum edification and entertainment and faking. We have already seen how Barnum combined “freak show” and museum, and challenged audiences to educate themselves by the “operational aesthetic” of unmasking a fake claim. In Europe, such playing with authenticity was less common, and the hierarchy between educators and performers more likely to be expressed by academic guarantees that the spectators’ experiences were “real.” Both Hagenbeck and the Castan brothers (who opened the first Berlin Panoptikon in 1873) collaborated with Berlin anthropologists in staging and promoting their Völkerschauen, not only to satisfy the formers’ scientific interests, but also to have them testify, to the public as well as the police, that the performers’ ethnic identity was, indeed, authentic (Zimmerman 2001: 18). They had good reason to worry about authenticity: Maximo and Bartola, for example, who went on tour to Barnum’s American Museum in the 1850s before returning to England in the 1860s, were most likely not of Aztec descent but handicapped children of a Salvadorian couple who could no longer afford to care for them (Qureshi 2011: 128). Doubts about ethnic authenticity, whether justified or not, were standard fare in showcasing ethnic identities, as we shall see. Barnum played with them: true to type, he headlined the exhibit of the “missing link” by asking “What is it?” (Sliggers 2009: 10). More “serious” exhibits, however, relied more often on a kind of magic of realism—the impossible presence of the “real thing” through mimesis (see Taussig 1993b)—as the preferred way to fuse popular spectacle with the uplift of education. This magic of meeting “others” in their “authentic” environment without having to travel to remote and dangerous places was most insistently cultivated by world exhibitions.

The Magic of Realism: or, the Routinization of Wonder Europeans saw the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London as a “living picture” of the development of mankind, and sometimes thought that museums with objects from the East could transport people “as if enchanted into oriental lands” (Said quoted in T. Mitchell 1991: 6). In contrast, an Egyptian delegation, on its way to the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm, was offended by the realist magic of the Paris 1889 World Exposition when they saw that the rue de Caire open-air exhibit mimicked old Cairo to the extent that its designers had even dirtied the paint on the buildings, and even more when discovering that the mosque was a façade hiding a coffee house.

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At the Orientalist Congress, they found themselves “stared at as in Barnum’s all-world show”—“Oriental” objects rather than Orientalist subjects (quoted in T. Mitchell 1991: 1–2). Egyptians wondered at the “entire machinery” of European representation—panoramas, dioramas, world exhibitions—yet failed to find an Arabic translation for the notion of le spectacle (T. Mitchell 1991: 4). Timothy Mitchell used these contradictory assessments of representations of Egypt in Europe—Egyptians being alienated by exhibits, while Europeans reveled in their visual magic to the extent of even turning respected visitors into objects of their gaze—to point out that this regime of knowledge was a colonial imposition. These representations produced not a reproduction of reality but ever more representations: sequences of material re-enactments that shaped a labyrinth performing a semiotic dualism, rather than proving the latter’s epistemic claims (T. Mitchell 1991: 12; cf. Fabian 1990: 754–55). Here, I want to shift attention away from the effect that this “order of appearances” had on Egypt and Egyptians, and ask how Europeans managed such contradictions and double consciousness: on the one hand, they knew that their museums and exhibitions contained representations rather than realities; on the other, they eagerly consumed this mimetic magic.11 The magic of realism was part and parcel of European museums at least since Georges Cuvier challenged that consummate traveler, Alexander von Humboldt, by arguing that “the traveler can only travel one road” while the museum observer in his own cabinet “can roam freely through the universe” (quoted in Outram 1996: 261). In other words, Europeans had inured themselves for a considerable time against the labyrinthine effects of representation experienced by, for example, visiting Egyptians, but it seems difficult to understand how they inured themselves without also noting the semiotic ideologies and the accompanying materials that induced amnesia about the material reality of actual representations. If one could forget about the material of representation—for example, because of its plastic capacities—something “other” could become spectacularly and materially present to one’s senses. The explosion of plastic materials like steel, wax, and plaster in nineteenth-century exhibitionary complexes could not but impress audiences, whether they believed in the magic of their realist performance or not.12 It became publicly visible at World Exhibitions, in particular. Its paradigm, London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, was less a “living picture” of the development of mankind than modern architecture furnished (at least partly) by copies, and when the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham in 1854, its halls became an orgy of plaster rep-

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licas of the arts of humanity (Griener 2014). Pace Martin Hall and Jean Baudrillard (more about the latter in Chapters 6 and 8), the simulacrum exerted its material magic over European’s semiotic consciousness long before modernity became “post”. The genealogy of exhibiting human life groups includes a long tradition of waxworks, mostly in commercial exhibitions like Hagenbeck’s, but museums only started to copy them after the “vivid and innovative” life groups of Alfred Hazelius, director of the Museum of Swedish Ethnography, were put on display at the 1878 Paris World Exhibition (Jacknis 1985: 81n2; see also Corbey 1995: 69). Another part of that genealogy is, of course, the eager use by the likes of Barnum and Hagenbeck of that most plastic of material, the human body. Designers of World Exhibitions would incorporate it by 1889. Although the influence of earlier performances by Zulus, Native Americans, and Hazelius’s life groups cannot be discounted, the first successful use of an ethnic showcase in a World Exhibition may be Daniel Veth’s 1883 Javanese village, at the World Exhibition in Amsterdam, the first to be exclusively devoted to the colonies (Bloembergen 2006). It inspired a whole series of dramatic ethnic encampments at the Paris 1889 Exposition universelle, which also adopted Veth’s desire to visually contrast modernity and tradition—in Paris, exemplified by the shining magic of Eiffel’s tower dwarfing the dirty rue de Caire. Paris 1889 was the direct source of the introduction of “life groups” to the United States (Jacknis 1985: 81), as well as of that almost hysterical apex of mimicking the real, the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Art historians have long regarded the Chicago World Exposition as distinctive, partly because it seemed to break all kinds of records, and partly because it marked a change in style, from the creative engineering by the likes of Joseph Paxton in England in 1851 and Gustave Eiffel in France in 1889 to the imitative style of the plaster buildings of the White City (Gideon 1967: 125–26). Gideon’s modernist ideology of original design is contradicted, however, by the fact that both Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower, and other engineering feats of the World’s Exhibitions of 1851 and 1889 were accompanied by vast swaths of exhibition space presenting copies, mostly in plaster, of everything from Roman art to, indeed, a rue de Caire. The routine use of plaster underpinned European claims to represent the world in exhibitions, but in Chicago it created almost the entire center of the White City.13 These included the (not so prominently situated) Anthropology Building, which was supervised by Frederick Putnam, the director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and his assistant Franz Boas. The Anthropology Building was largely devoted to physical an-

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thropology and archaeology, although Putnam also found room for a stuffed mammoth, a giant octopus, and a “prison exhibit” consisting largely of a collection of gruesome torture instruments (Bolotin and Laing 2002: 78)—showing again how bourgeois rationalists could find uses for “freak show” horrors.14 But the most influential engineering feat of the Exposition (if we ignore Louis Sullivan’s Transport Building and the Exposition’s piers) was not located within the walls of the World’s Fair proper, in the White City, but in the entertainment section: the famous Ferris Wheel, rising up over “Dahomey” and “Chinese” villages. Most ethnographic showcases found their place there, on the Midway Pleasance, among the Moorish Palace, the Turkish, Austrian, Irish, and Javanese villages, and a Cairo Street (the latter two almost obligatory for World Exhibitions since Paris 1889). Indeed, all were located near “Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena.” National sentiment may explain why only the open-air exhibits of native Americans were situated inside the White City, near the Anthropology Building—Putnam was not, it seems, responsible for other ethnographic showcases in the Midway Pleasance because the Chicago investors had appointed Sol Bloom, a future real-estate developer, as manager of the latter (Hinsley 1991: 347–48). Putnam highlighted educational goals: in a kind of reverse time-travel, he wanted to show the ways of life of peoples at the time Columbus arrived in the New World. However, he was also conscious of the exhibition’s capacity to generate wonder: “even those of us who know in part what it is to be will be surprised and astounded when we see it from day to day as a grand whole” (Hinsley 1991: 347). Putnam and Boas spent two years on collecting tours, resulting, among other things, in exhibiting Mayan architecture at the Fair, and having Northwest Coast Kwakwaka’wakw perform ritual in a reassembled village. Yet, the Midway seems to have outcompeted them with its “jumble of foreignness,” “gorgeous with color, pulsating with excitement, riotous with the strivings of a battalion of bands” (Julian Ralph quoted in Hinsley 1991: 351). The commercial “language of the Midway” was one in which, in the words of H. H. Bancroft, exhibits are “striving to outshriek each other” for monetary gain. Visitors experienced a nonstop succession of images which, in contrast to the “serenity” of the Anthropology Building, resembled window-shopping or prefigured cinema (Hinsley 1991: 352–53, 355). Adding torture instruments, however, seems to contradict that serenity, nor was Boas, as we shall see, unaware of the enchantment that “life groups” exert on an au-

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dience after experimenting with Kawkawka’wakw performing in the open air.15 The Columbian Exposition may indeed have been one of the first shocks to Boas’s faith in public anthropology (Hinsley 1991: 363). However, there is reason to think that it may have been caused by his slow discovery that the “language of the Midway” employed techniques of enchantment very similar to those employed by learned professors. In the meantime, “Dahomeans” at Chicago’s Midway Pleasance sang war songs and staged mock attacks, all particularly exotic and exciting because the group included a number of the Amazons who unsuccessfully defended King Behanzin against the French colonial army when the latter conquered Benin only a year earlier. If that gave Dahomeans the character of a colonial trophy, just like “Ashanti” or “Zulus” in Britain or “Dakota” in Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” the ethnic term may not fully cover the technology of enchantment that they performed: in an American context, and unlike, say, Kwakwaka’wakw or Dakota, Dahomeans did not show the “development of great nations on the continent” (as Putnam put it: Hinsley 1991: 347). Of course, the United States citizens also wanted to take part in imperial spectacle, but not so much as substitute members of a European colonizing nation as much as in experiencing the frisson of coming face to face with a “live” danger to civilization—without running any physical risk themselves. To achieve this end, the ethnic label Dahomean was indispensable: it connected the war dances, songs, and “Amazons” to recent events reported in the printed media, that globally connected Chicagoans to Paris and West Africa. Therefore, to understand the modern spectacle as a “factually real illusion,” these ethnic labels should be seen as part and parcel of the “principle of commodity fetishism”: it replaces its production with an intangible value that complements and gives meaning to its exchange value.16 Nor can we regard it as a “basically tautological” simulation whose “means are simultaneously its ends” (Debord 1983: I.13, II.36, 47). To understand how modern spectacle touches the spectator viscerally requires both intangible value and real production, and material means that go beyond its commodified ends. The spectacle requires what one could call a routinization of wonder: a regular and predictable procedure by which one generates an object or image that can move the spectator (at least to pay money for it). This procedure does not so much aim at the sense of wonder as a primary passion that leads to an amoral appreciation and intimation of novelty, but at a reduction of wonder to (mere) emotion—an emotion that can and is,

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indeed, commodified, but that also leaves a labyrinth of physical and tangible signs that can themselves generate new sensations.17 Just as the Ferris Wheel produced the predictable sensation of viewing all the World’s Fair from a great height (as well as a queasy stomach as one went up or down), just so ethnographic showcases followed an equally predictable routinization of wonder, counting on sensation of meeting a certifiably dangerous stranger face to face. Of course, exotic wonder did not require the trophy of an emasculated martial tribe to be routinized.18 The rue de Caire or Chinese and Javanese Villages at the Midway Pleasance proved that the impresarios who set up these exhibits also expected less militarized attractions. In all three cases, however, the machinery of producing the ethnographic showcase in Chicago 1893 was essentially similar to that routinized in Britain, France, and Germany in the previous decades, up to the point of employing the same impresarios and running into the same problems with authenticity. The impresario who brought the “Dahomeans” to Chicago via Paris, to demonstrate their martial skills there, told reporters that he had certificates of attestation from local authorities for each of the seventy members of the troupe. No such records can be found in the French colonial archives, however, and Thomas Bruneau, who had organized a highly successful Dahomean show in Paris earlier that year, was caught out in 1894 hiring “Touaregs” from the Algerian coast to play their role (Schneider 1977: 105–6).19 The play with authenticity and faking, a kind of stage magic of revelation and concealment (see Meyer and Pels 2003), was a structural part of these exhibits, even if Barnum was probably more conscious of, and less scrupulous with it, than some of his successors. Indeed, “both supporters and critics of the exhibitions referred to the promoters [of the “Dahomeans” in Paris/pp] as ‘barnums’” (Schneider 1977: 105). The routinization of wonder was, of course, easier to reproduce through the machinery of the Ferris Wheel: it was less recalcitrant than human bodies, and unlikely to raise questions about generating an inauthentic experience with the audience. It is no coincidence that the routinizations of wonder of the Midway Pleasance were a direct inspiration for successful twentieth century amusement parks like Coney Island, including the copying in plaster of their Orientalist pleasure domes from the “Moorish palaces” of World Fairs, with their suggestions of “Arabian night” enchantments (Kasson 1978). Wonder was more difficult to routinize in the live encounter with exotic strangers: it was cumbersome to hire the large troupes required for an ethnic village, and especially after World War I, increasingly difficult

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to reduce them to “authentically” traditional peoples, whose encounter with “civilization” was restricted to defeat in a colonial war. Especially for ethnographic museums, devoted to maintaining the conceit of essentializing human differences—of displaying the “traditional” in the sense of “from time immemorial”—there was little choice but to fall back on the older technology of the immobile diorama (see the next section). Corinne Kratz and Ivan Karp have noted that museum professionals often define themselves and their institutions against popular entertainment, opposing “what they see as serious culture and popular culture, educational motives and economic motives, and the authentic versus the facsimile” (Kratz and Karp 1993: 32). We have seen that critics of ethnographic showcases and the entertainment side of exhibitions cherish such sentiments too. Studying the objectification of bodies at exhibitions—often defined by the negative side of these pairs of oppositions—shows that the purchase of the ideal of educational purity is limited when considering the history of the exhibitionary complex. Kratz and Karp’s study of the Disney Epcot Center (heirs to the Coney Island legacy) confirms this: they note how the “Imagineers” of Disney generate blurred genres—mixing the “real” of an authentic museum object with a disregard for the museum’s purifications—but also that permeating the boundaries between genuine and fake increased as twentieth-century museums adopted more and more display techniques from theme parks and amusement centers. This generates what Umberto Eco called a “hyperreality”—not in the sense of a “simulacrum” (a “truth that hides the fact that there is none” [Baudrillard (1981) 1994: 1]) but in the more profound sense of a “mixture” of a fake or a copy with the material presence of the real (quoted by Kratz and Karp 1993: 39).20 Eco, however, like Baudrillard, seems to reduce the prevalence of hyperreality to its “homeland” in postmodern America (Eco 1986: 7). I hope to have shown that the “hyperreal” representation of some remote people and its expectation to magically transport the visitor into a strange land by a technique of enchantment was operative in both education and entertainment from the nineteenth century onwards, and therefore must be regarded as quintessentially modern (rather than postmodern). Realist mimesis was magical in modern societies from the outset, denials by an incompletely tyrannical bourgeois subject notwithstanding. Interestingly, that seems to remain valid when turning our attention from living bodies at the exhibition to the dead mannequins of the ethnographic museum proper.

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After Chicago: Franz Boas and the Paradoxes of the “Lifeless” Diorama Kratz and Karp note a peculiar irony of the Disney museums: the fact that the hyperreal museum exhibits in World Showcase, the section of Epcot Center meant to be seen after Future World, are actually made to perform the traditional (confirming, so to speak, the reversed modernization theory that structures the Epcot Center’s itinerary, from future to tradition)—and that these exhibits do so by using, not the Disney “imagineers’” superlative Audio-Animatronics technology, but the “lifeless mannequins of early dioramas” (Kratz and Karp 1993: 37). Indeed, one of the signs of the shifting historical resonances of wonder at the museum is that many museums today face the question whether to abolish dioramic displays. Dioramic materiality seems to be able to generate a kind of wonder on its own—disturbing for some critical museum curators, but a treasure to others, precisely because of its power, as demonstrated by the nostalgic use of these display styles at the Disney Epcot Center. One may not like the museum nostalgia exploited by the Epcot Center, but few critics doubt James Clifford’s credentials, even when he expressed the hope, after hearing the rumor that the Boas Room of Northwest Coast Artifacts in the American Museum of Natural History was going to be “modernized,” that the plan would be abandoned (Clifford 1985: 245). It is worthwhile to inquire further into the making of that exhibit: Boas noted the lack of “life” of mannequins in a diorama as well, but when setting up the dioramas at the AMNH, he situated this lack of animation in the relation between entertainment and educational values differently— at least when compared with the Disney “imagineers,” and perhaps also with Clifford, Kratz, and Karp. Boas, living at a time when the technique of the diorama was new rather than old, seemed to be more nostalgic for a “live” display of native culture. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the life group that Boas designed for the National Museum and the American Museum of Natural History only a year after the Chicago World’s Fair. Boas’s Hamatsa ceremony diorama seems to have been copied from a real-life performance that Boas must have organized with Kwakwaka’wakw researcher George Hunt in the Chicago fair grounds (cf. Hinsley 1991; Hinsley and Holm 1976: 306). It became the model for the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. While the inspiration for his ethnographic dioramas came from ethnographic shows at World Exhibitions, Boas did not see them as the primary stuff of museum display: this would have to be the objects themselves, displayed with min-

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imal labeling (Jacknis 1985: 97). This attitude shows that Boas shared a sense of museum objectivity with other anthropologists. Berlin Museum director Felix von Luschan, for example, equally focused on objects rather than texts—even resisting such minimal labels as fetish and idol—as a means to turn visitors away from subjective narration to obedient observation (Zimmerman 2001: 54–55). Such “objective” displays, however, generated a problem common to any production of scientific objects for laypeople: how to represent the “ideal type” of the object without introducing subjective biases (a problem shared with scientific atlases: Daston and Galison 2007: 63)? This may explain Boas’s thought that life groups were not the real thing, but only “glorified stop signs,” interruptions of the visitors’ itinerary that could guide them to the more important knowledge displayed by the objects nearby. Yet he also resigned himself to the thought that 90 percent of the audience came only for the entertainment that the life groups provided (Jacknis 1985: 84, 100). It is precisely at this juncture of entertainment and education that Boas situated his reflections on sensation and realist magic in a museum: It is an avowed object of a large group to transport the visitor into foreign surroundings. He is to see the whole village and the way the people live. But all attempts at such an undertaking that I have seen have failed, because the surroundings of a Museum are not favorable of an impression of this sort. The cases, the walls, the contents of other cases, the columns, the stairways, all remind us that we are not viewing an actual village and the contrast between the attempted realism of the group and the inappropriate surrounding spoils the whole effect. (Boas quoted in Jacknis 1985: 101, emphasis mine)

Boas regretted, among other things, that he could not use the dark and light contrasts of ethnographic displays because his cases had to stand in the middle of the hall if they were to function as “stop signs”; and that the attempt at realism of the mannequins actually led to ghastly effects, because their lifelike appearance was combined with the immobility of a dead human body, just as in wax works from which the diorama descended in the first place (Jacknis 1985: 102). (Given my argument about Bentham’s Auto-Icon in Chapter 1, however, I would suggest that “ghastly effects” are rather effective as “stop signs.”) It is more important, however, to note that Boas’s private notes in fact lament the lack of realist magic: “the whole effect” of magic was spoiled by the museum’s walls, its cases and their contents, and it was not possible in this case to use a kind of boutique lighting to conceal

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the museum surroundings and the lifelessness of the mannequins. This shows, firstly, that the core problem of realist representation could not be avoided: that a successful (“true”) revelation of the reality represented must somehow abolish the fact that the materials of representation conceal this reality by standing in the way, regardless of whether one exhibited living (but possibly fake) peoples or genuine but lifeless mannequins. Secondly, it shows that Boas consciously wanted to design an entertaining exhibit, and he argued that entertainment would serve education best when the display could enchant the visitor out of his own surroundings, and “transport them into” foreign ones. This magical transport was a condition of persuading visitors to learn something about the people being exhibited. Yet he felt that the materiality of the museum’s walls and cases prevented this from happening. Dioramas still bother museum professionals in comparable ways. Kirk Denton notes with some concern that the current museum boom in China has led to a massive increase in the use of means of mechanical reproduction: the more audiovisuals, dioramas, and miniature models complement eighteenth-century waxworks, nineteenth-century plaster, and twentieth-century photography, the more “Chinese museums seem to be moving away from the traditional mandate of the museum, which emphasizes the powerful experience of being transported to the past by being in the presence of authentic objects from that past. Authenticity has been replaced by images, modes, and miniatures—imitations of the real, not the thing itself ” (Denton 2003: 577). This may seem to deny Chinese museums an independent space for the development of museum magic by imposing what seems essentially a nineteenth-century European model, but the diorama is by no means dead in North Atlantic exhibitionary practices. Mary Jo Arnoldi presents an (all too rare and therefore valuable) history of displaying “Africa” at the Smithsonian Institution, whose dioramas emerged from a historical context similar to Boas’s. While careful to avoid “voyeurism” and representations of “primitivism,” the Smithsonian’s curators still wanted “to exploit the popular appeal and dramatic potential of the diorama” in the new Africa exhibit (Arnoldi 1999: 722). Their elegant and apt solution was to present a Somali tent by videotaped reminiscences of how it was used by a member of the Somali diaspora, and by a film showing Somali American women collaborating with Smithsonian curators to set the tent up: it subtly avoids the essentializations of classical ethnography and the denial of coevalness of presenters and represented. However, we should note that even this successful reinvention of ethnography still needs the

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“dramatic potential” of the diorama—its magic—to attract visitors, as it did in Boas’s time. What, we might provocatively ask, is wrong about “voyeurism” in a museum? And aren’t museums partly meant to be spectacular?

Conclusion In her account of the “reinvention” of Africa in British exhibitionary practices, Annie Coombes describes the magic of realism of the Stanley and African Exhibition of 1890, where spectators were “constituted as . . . explorer[s],” entering through an explorer’s camp (including a palisade adorned with skulls) and finding themselves “in the heart of Africa” (Coombes 1994: 69). The “great sensation” of the exhibition were artists’ impressions of a village scene and a slave raid, which includes “the voyeuristic fascination with objects of torture and degradation,” and the sexual desire raised by witnessing girls being abducted to a harem, yet it “exonerated [visitors] from any guilty association” (Coombes 1994: 78–80). Why, I asked in this chapter, do accounts of exhibitions and their exotic attractions so rarely zoom in on this magic of display, except by an analysis that slips them into a (now morally suspect) register of colonial discourse wishfully confined to the past? When is it necessary or desirable to subsume sensations of being virtually constituted as visitors to Africa under the guilt of voyeurism that we associate with it?21 It seems obvious that a “village scene” is not exhausted by “objects of torture and (sexual) degradation,” just as much as the symmetrical arrangement of miscellaneous objects on a wall does not immediately turn all souvenirs into trophies of colonial conquest and conversion. When do such blanket interpretations of nineteenth-century exhibitions shade into prejudices of public opinion, comparable to today’s many Europeans who think the wearing of a headscarf can only signal suppression of women (cf. Moors 2009)? If voyeurism is defined by witnessing violence or sexual abuse without material involvement in the act, the larger parts of the global cinematic industry, from Hollywood to Nollywood, are guilty of the same. Voyeurism defines spectators’ relationship to objects and persons by subjective guilt. What happens when we try to acknowledge (as this book attempts to do throughout) that the subjectivity of spectators may not be the cause, but an effect of wonder—an outcome of a spectacle that transports spectators into a magical realm, even if temporarily? If this book may not be able to provide a final answer to these questions, it emphatically

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advances the possibility that wonder and enchantment may precede normative judgment and the will to power, and that the spirit of matter will always resist the assumption that colonial materials are transparently legible.22 In this chapter, I have tried to show that such questions at the very least require complex and layered historical answers. One layer shows that nineteenth-century secularist and objectivist pretensions of museums have tended to conflate collection, recollection, and display into a single product, presenting the knowledge provided by the museum as final, and Europe as its endpoint. In a critical reversal of this stance, museums have since the 1990s often been interpreted as almost totally devoted to a colonial and nationalist discourse masquerading as rational discipline that should produce docile bourgeois subjects. Another layer of answers would be that this bourgeois subject and its fear of agentive matter can be traced back to Protestant exemplars, yet also shines through in these secular pretensions. This secularized Protestant (male) subject used museums to dematerialize objects, by removing them from everyday use or visceral sensation, but also by reducing objects to signs, symbols, and representations by rematerializing them as, supposedly disembodied, display designs governed by temporal and spatial classifications (Fabian 2004; Freedberg 1989). Yet another layer, however, underlies such attempts to keep embodied forms of display outside the museum’s or exhibition’s walls, by showing how magical intentions of realist display, or denying the museum’s intimate historical relationships with more popular, commercial, and therefore suspect exhibitionary practices were “backstaged” or denied. More perceptive accounts of museum practices have pointed to the subversive status, in respect to classical museum ideology, of the museum shop, situated as it is inside the museum’s walls, while violating the inalienability of the objects on display in museum exhibits proper (Clifford 1985; Kratz and Karp 1993: 42n10). The museum shop, indeed, reintroduces commodity fetishism and the visceral magic of personal possessions and souvenirs to places from which it is often supposed to be ideologically banned. The dematerialization and disembodiment characteristic of Protestant culture and much of the secularism that it nourished are thereby offset by material presences slipping in through capitalist back doors of commercial modernity. This chapter can therefore be read as a theorization of museums that regards their material attractions as being “composted” in different historical layers of human relations with objects on display.

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An historical analysis of the visual materials of scientific atlases has shown that the “four-eyed sight” of the Enlightenment taxonomic regime was not displaced by the “blind sight” of nineteenth-century mechanical objectivity, just as the latter visual regime was not fully replaced by twentieth-century structural mathematics or “trained judgment.” Instead, “each new regimen of sight supplements rather than supplants the others” (Daston and Galison 2007: 318). Just so, museum displays incorporate previous relationships with objects in new forms, even when a newly hegemonic regime of (judging) display tries to assert itself. This becomes apparent when we use the biography of things to understand museum objects, and discover that their material being allows spectators to recover, rearticulate, or reinvent a thing’s previous affordances. We can also keep track of such “composting” by being careful to note the heterogeneity of signifying materials—texts, images, frames, bodies, plastic materials, originals—and the different, and often contradictory significations they allow (a recollection of an event, an ethnic identity, a visceral affect, authentic knowledge, monetary value, “mere” entertainment), and the accompanying heterogeneity of our attitudes toward them. Above all, I have tried to show that wonder and its visceral magic cannot be excluded from the recent history of museums, if only because museums need to receive visitors and display bodies in some form or other, and cement an affective relationship between them, if they are to exist at all. “Wonder” as an embodied sensation thereby becomes the symbol, in this chapter, of the “bush of variations” of modes of display that, despite the hegemonic intentions of many museum curators and museologists, continued to grow through the cracks that open up along the fault-lines of empire (Ferguson 1999; Cooper and Stoler 1997). In this way, I hope to have responded with at least partial success to James Clifford’s call to recover the “lost fetish” in the museum, by setting the fetish and rarity (as discussed in Chapter 3) as a positive “spirit of matter” against critical theories that do not seem to appreciate them sufficiently. Fetishism may, in its guise as an acquisitive desire, imply that “appreciation implies appropriation” and thereby turn aestheticization inevitably into a political act (Thomas 1991: 174). But, as I argued in Chapter 2, there is a sense in which the fetish also points to the opposite movement, that of “being possessed”—or enchanted—by the object or image perceived. As the introduction to this part of the book has suggested, Catholics may have a more positive appreciation of this movement, an appreciation that does not lead to appropriation but to its opposite—to being possessed (but happily, by a Holy Ghost). Auguste Comte used the con-

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sciousness of untranscended materiality provided by the doctrine of fetishism as a way to formulate a positive “religion of humanity” (see Chapter 1). A recent and important addition to Pietz’s study of fetishism has argued that such consciousness of the positive appraisal of a “possessing” object may have been cultivated in French arguments about art ever since François Lemée defended the overwhelming effect on spectators of the giant statue of Louis XIV in 1686 (Van Eck 2013). Of course, many French remained creatively Catholic at least until (and including) Comte, and this may well be a part of a genealogy of the fetish’s positive appreciation that most social theorists have so far missed (but see Morris 2017: 204–9). A rethinking of epistemology from a more material basis does, indeed, counter the tendency to treat material goods as transparent, and read human meaning-making directly from the artifacts’ surface (as Erika Rappaport [2008: 291] argued against Bernard Porter and David Cannadine). This chapter put forward that the notion of wonder requires us to grant objects on display a material presence that frustrates, stands in front of, and sometimes even contradicts the representation of reality that their surface presents to us. Museum materials and collections indeed objectify colonial violence and transport it into our present. Yet they also possess an “ecstatic” dimension ranging from brutal and “savage” acts to moments of joyful communion (compare Hicks 2020 to Fabian 2000). To end with an example from Johannes Fabian’s analysis of colonial travels: being possessed by the wonder of a strange and exotic object also may recall the extraordinary moment when Germans and Africans got “in touch” with each other in a more appreciative way, when laudanum and marihuana had mutually stoned them out of their minds (2000: Ch. 7). One may not even need the chemical intoxicants themselves: the next two chapters, at least, find ecstatic magic produced by a coupling of the exotic and religious fervor in the Catholic missionary predecessors and proceedings of the Afrika Museum.

Notes 1. Note that, like Hagenbeck, the “Aztec” children signal Barnum’s interest in showing off ethnic others. This was also exemplified by his promotion of the “missing link,” of the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, and of—recently defeated—Native Americans in Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. The progressive history of a mid-twentieth-century end to ethnographic showcases, however, seems too simple (see Arnaut 2009). 2. Boas labelled them “Kwakiutl” at the time.

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3. Interestingly, such negations or reversals seem more difficult in human biographies, possibly related to the difference between embodying and objectifying a past. However, I cannot discuss such issues in this book. 4. The term is James Ferguson’s, who invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of evolutionism in an effort to study multiple trajectories of modernization, while recognizing that its ideals mainly supported the dominant myth (1999). Likewise, I have to navigate dominant discourses to bring out the variations they tend to obscure. 5. This includes “conversion” of indigenous objects to signs or commodities for museums or art markets. 6. This is not to deny Banks’s colonial sentiments, as when he quipped that he would keep Tupia, the Tahitian priest who joined him on the Endeavour’s return journey, as a “curiosity” (Holmes 2008: 34). Yet, Tupia was a friend and guest, and may have helped navigate the ship, or even owned the cape (Paul Tapsell, personal communication, 14 November 2015). 7. An invented one, since Clunas argues that Chinese imperial authority did not see a single throne as its emblem. 8. I suspect that the symmetrical arrangement of weaponry around a central piece (such as a hunting trophy) is a European convention, quite likely used to commemorate conquest as well, but I have yet to come across a historical analysis of such trophy displays. In this particular case, Claire Wintle misreads Nicholas Thomas (1991: 174): he does not argue that the “trophy” layouts in the Fijian Governor’s house are themselves political acts, but that the transformation of objects into them is. She equally misreads Ludmilla Jordanova’s discussion of the “mastery” displayed by museums (1989: 32) as exclusively employing a trophy paradigm, by ignoring the room Jordanova’s text makes for the passion of wonder. 9. Thomas seems to retract this labeling in a recent book on the “return” of curiosity (2016). 10. Studies like Allegaert and Sliggers (2009), Corbey (1989, 1995), Lindfors (1983, 1999, 2014), MacKenzie (1984), Nederveen Pieterse (1995), and Schneider (1977) tend to emphasize a totalizing imperialism; more nuanced descriptions of exotic entertainers in Europe can be found in Parsons (2009), Poignant (2004), Qureshi (2011), and Shephard (1986). 11. Elsewhere, I argued that Mitchell’s “order of appearances” was ineffective in understanding the material operations of colonialism (Pels 1996: 739–40) which, in theory, includes colonizing Egypt. However, his notion of a “labyrinth” of material re-enactments of representation (T. Mitchell 1991: 12) can be seen as another manifestation of the spirit of matter. 12. See my discussions of plasticity in Chapters 2 and 10. 13. According to Gideon (1967: 394), these were copied from French academicians’ Prix de Rome façades “because of an unnecessary inferiority complex.”

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14. We can find a “Spanish” torture exhibit—when I visited it last, it had been “unmasked” as a fake composition—at the Horniman Museum as well (Coombes 1994: 116). 15. Other studies raise doubts about Hinsley’s distinction between more serious “Hagenbeck-type tours” and “Barnum-type sideshow[s] of human freaks and oddities” (Hinsley 1991: 346; see Zimmerman 2001). 16. I will return to the question of identity value in commodity fetishism in Chapters 9 and 10. 17. This turns Weber’s “routinization of charisma” on its head because the latter pertains to the “inner” aura of a subject rather than an object (1958: 246). My “routinization of wonder” is close to Birgit Meyer’s concept of “sensational form” (2013: 26), except that the latter concept seems less suited to modern secular rather than religious assemblies, and that I stress wonder as an interaction with material substances rather than immaterial entities. 18. “Emasculation” shows, I readily admit, a gender bias inappropriate for Behanzin’s defeated “Amazons.” Moreover, early performances of “Zulus” included women cooking and singing (Lindfors 1999: 66). 19. Schneider (1977: 105) confuses the Dahomey battlefields in the south of Benin with “Timboctou” in present-day Mali. 20. I examine this quote by Jean Baudrillard in more detail at the start of Chapter 8. 21. Chapter 7 on the Afrika Museum will show why this question is, at least, empirically necessary. 22. See, for the opposition of enchantment to “will-to-power,” Curry (2021).

Chapter 6

AFRICA CHRISTO! THE MATERIALITY OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN DUTCH CATHOLIC MISSION PROPAGANDA, 1946–1960

“When describing the discourse of missionaries,” I wrote in 1989, “we usually let them tell a simple tale. Its narrative structure moves from black heathenism down below to shining Christianity up here. It is a tale of progress, of the possibility that “they” will become like “us.” Anything that is in the way of progress becomes an occasion for heroism and villainy, with the missionary as hero and his adversaries—usually a sorcerer or medicine man—as personifications of evil. As Hayden White would say, it is a tale of continuity (“conversion”) interspersed with articulations of contiguity that is, of differences that call for “war and extermination” (1976: 189–90).” 1,2 At the time, I was concerned that this representation of missionaries’ representations was more based on stereotype than on actual research into missionary practices. I worried that anthropologists, in particular, wanted to boost their anti-ethnocentric ego by putting forward selective views of communication across cultural boundaries that reduced missionaries to the bringers of a message, and ignored that missionaries needed cultural learning too—if only to communicate with those whom they wanted to convert (see Pels 1990). I felt such representations did not stand up to scrutiny because they wrongly suggested that the discourse of missionaries could escape the ambiguities created by the contradictions of the colonial encounter.3 My research had shown that Catholic missionaries, at least, could be skeptical of the necessity of unilinear progress, but more importantly, that they felt the need to explore and exploit cultural differences in

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ways that escaped the boundaries of a simple tale of conversion. The example of Maurice Leenhardt could be extended to the Holy Ghost Fathers I studied (Clifford 1982; Pels 1994, 1999: ch. 2). The use of photographs in missionary propaganda was another example. At the time, I could not recognize the argument as one based on an awareness of the materiality of the photographs and therefore did not draw methodological consequences from it. By republishing this photoessay with an additional interpretation of how and why the power of these photographs struck me, I hope to bring out its contribution to understanding the spirit of matter, as well as provide a historical context for Chapter 7 about the Afrika Museum. I somewhat reluctantly started reading Africa Christo! (“Africa to Christ!”), a journal published by the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost for its lay supporters, as part of my research into the dispositions that the Holy Ghost Fathers brought with them to the Uluguru mission field in Tanzania (see Pels 1999). Expecting that most mission propaganda would conform to the civilizing myth of conversion, I was daunted by the prospect of having to go through thirty-five volumes of possibly salvific prose and triumphant denigration of pagan superstitions. At first sight, Africa Christo! indeed seemed to represent “others” in the prefabricated binary oppositions that Europeans had used to identify differences between Christian and pagan: black versus white, wild versus civilized, ignorant versus rational, the free reign of passions versus self-control (see Figures 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4). Searching for reports on the Vicariate (or mission diocese) of Bagamoyo in Eastern Tanzania, on the brink of being recognized as part of the Roman Catholic Church, I was disappointed that their frequency in the predecessor to Africa Christo!, the Bode van de Heilige Geest (“Holy Ghost Messenger”) decreased during the 1950s to give way to more exciting tales from Cameroon and Angola, where the church was still not fully established and true missionary pioneers could supposedly be found. At first sight, their message seemed clear: glowing accounts of individual conversions under difficult circumstances and surveys of the increased number of Christians in the mission areas alternated with tales of the fight against superstition, Islam, and the medicine man. To that extent, White’s analysis seemed to fit the material at hand. However, some of the messages, but more importantly, a lot of the pictures, failed to fit into this mold. In the issues of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the photographs often do not tell the tale of progress and opposition to it. They present alterity without articulating or referring to the goal of mission work and what stands in its way. These exotic images abounded: what was represented as distant in print seemed

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Figure 6.1. 1948. A Holy Ghost Fathers’ stand at a Dutch mission exhibition. While the stand is labelled “Africa,” a photograph of a mission exhibit from the 1930s shows the same mannequin dressed in Amazonian style next to a world map that also shows the Spiritan missions in Brazil. Note the mix of natural and cultural objects, although I found the former rare in missionary propaganda (compare with Corbey 1988). The counter carries utensils and other objects that visitors were allowed to touch (and perhaps buy). As the stand attracted visitors, a missionary standing next to it took the opportunity to tell his tall tales, using the artifacts on the stand. Religious brothers and sisters were allowed their own stands but were prohibited from speaking. Photograph by Fotografie Fictoor. Thanks to the Catholic Documentation Center, Nijmegen, for providing the digital image. Efforts to identify the current copyright holder were unsuccessful.

present in pictures.4 This use of exotic imagery of the other was not innocent: as its one-time editor, Father Rijnen, wrote, the journal was “both pulpit and collecting-bag” (Africa Christo! 48/5 [1952]: inside front cover). While the message “from the pulpit” stressed conversion and the necessity of helping in the effort to bring all heathens into the Church, this help was also secured by commodifying the ambiguous attractions of the exotic for sale, without explicit reference to the work of spiritual transformation. These commercial attractions could hardly be publicly endorsed in Catholic print, but pictures were a fairly innocent alternative. Obviously, negative images that stressed the “threat of the ‘jungle,’” wilderness, large animals, the evils of sorcery, or worse, were also important means in attracting supporters. Such images had been used in Catholic missionary circles since the end of the last century (Prud’homme 1984; Salvaing 1984). During the “grand mission hour” of Dutch Catholicism (Roes 1974), these images were exploited

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Figure 6.2. Bode van de Heilige Geest 47/12 (1951): 166. The caption at the bottom of the right column reads: “Father Henk Govers, CSSp., has arrived, together with his camera, among the still very primitive people in the Oussoye area (Senegal, A.O.F.). His mission area is still full of fetishism and other primitive practices. 1. The King of Oussoye; one can hardly judge from his looks that he is also head-magician and grand-féticheur of the area. 2. A burial-ground of fetishes in Oussoye. Father Govers has already found scores of these huts. 3. A hut of fetishes, that accommodates pigs’ jaws and palm-wine pots, apart from other, here unnamable, objects.” The text next to it is not related: it discusses the Holy Ghost Fathers’ mission to the Amazon. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Figure 6.3. Africa Christo! 52/6 (1956): 20. A South African fortune teller. In another issue, this same photograph is captioned more ominously “a sorceress.” This is not the only example of rebranding photographs: one picture of an old man was first used with the caption “My Old Friend,” but some years later with “the power of the sorcerer still has to be broken.” In this case, the picture illustrated an article about South Africa; in the other, one about féticheurs. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Figure 6.4. Bode van de Heilige Geest 38-42/4 (1946): 48. The caption reads, “The gentleman has just earned a good sum in the mines.” This is a classical topos of missionary, anthropological, and other colonial discourses: so-called évolués who seem to make fools of themselves by wearing European clothes all wrong (“not white/not quite”: Bhabha 1994: 89). Current in missionary literature since at least the end of the previous century (Prud’homme 1984: 38), it became the target of Bernard Magubane’s wrath in an early publication (1971). © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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in journals like Africa Christo!’s predecessor, the Holy Ghost Messenger, and in mission exhibitions (see Figure 6.1). But even nineteenthcentury efforts toward Catholic mass propaganda for the missions contained pictures not burdened with the oppositions of the civilizing myth (Prud’homme 1984). Judging from the publications from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the relationship between print and picture varied. While photographs of the activities in which the missionaries engaged were published, they usually served as a direct accompaniment to reports that narrated the work of salvation (about, for example, a visitation journey by a superior). Pictures of “witch doctors” (féticheurs) and their shrines and instruments could be published with only a caption, but most laypeople were familiar with the accompanying narratives, because they attended or heard about mission exhibitions where missionaries related their experiences in battling superstition and magic. Moreover, as medicine men or women could usually not be identified as such by photographs only, a clarifying caption was always necessary (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). However, what intrigued me above all was the presentation of strange pictures without textual accompaniment or with only a minimal caption, especially on those pages where they would most forcefully strike readers: the front (and later on the back) covers of the journal. These pictures were, from 1946 to 1954, mainly exotic. They coincided in that period with a veritable hausse of publications about sub-Saharan Africa in the Netherlands, many of which were written by Catholics, both missionaries and laypersons (see Pels 1999: 77). A classic image in the mission journal was that of the African in European clothes, which jokingly deplored the adoption of civilization by the native (Figure 6.4; see also Prud’homme 1984, Magubane 1971, and Chapter 8)—a trope that characteristically combined laughing at “natives” with skepticism about the value of modern development.5 Less paradoxical pictures often display a kind of ethnographic curiosity common to many missionaries in the field (Figure 6.5; see Pels 1994). In all the exotic images, the associations with promiscuity, animality, wildness, or aggression, often attributed to Africans in European discourse, are absent (Figures 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7; compare with Corbey 1988). The financial benefits that missionary propagandists hoped to gain by selling the journal may well explain the ambivalences toward the civilizing myth that these pictures suggest. However, we should not forget that the photographers did not publish the photographs; the intention to make the photograph may not have been governed by the (same) exotic attraction that motivated its publication.6

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Figure 6.5. Cover of Bode van de Heilige Geest 46/1 (1950). Carrying the minimal caption “Handa-woman made up for puberty-feast,” this is one of the photographs of Charles Estermann, a French Holy Ghost Father who took part in a network of missionary ethnographers in Angola. Editors of the Bode van de Heilige Geest frequently used his photographs for the journal’s covers, usually stressing their ethnographic character, sometimes by explicitly referring to the ethnographic prowess of the photographer, but mostly by using an ethnicizing caption such as this one. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Figure 6.6. Cover of Africa Christo! 48/3 (1952). The elaborately adorned Maasai is exotically different, but difference is here much less associated with wildness compared to the exhibition stand shown in Figure 6.1. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Figure 6.7. Cover of Africa Christo! 49/2 (1953). In 1989, I suggested that the headdress and necklace conspicuously mark difference, but without being frightening or repulsive, because of the romantic pose of a noble savage shading his eyes to stare in the distance with the enormous powers of observation that modern urbanites presumably lost. Now, I would say a salute (to a colonial flag?) is perhaps a more plausible (but not less ambiguous) interpretation. This illustrates that speculative iconography or semiotics can easily replace knowledge of the photographer’s motivations and practices. Corbey’s interpretations of colonial nudes may suffer from such defects (see 1988: 79, 80, 89). © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Until 1954, the covers of the Bode van de Heilige Geest and Africa Christo! Carried exotic images, interspersed with only the occasional image from Dutch Catholicism or a missionary on trek.7 In 1955, the visual hegemony of exotic images was broken. From that time onward, the predominantly ethnographic pictures were increasingly outnumbered by Christian images, pictures that had nothing to do with either Africa or Christianity, or pictures that did not display difference in any conspicuous manner. In 1959, a new type of photograph came to dominate: that of African Christianity, in which Africans no longer articulated cultural difference, but stressed (Christian) continuity instead (Figures 6.8 and 6.9). The exotic image would occasionally reappear in the 1960s, but it had lost its dominant position to pictures that subordinated differences (mostly of skin color) to marked continuities, in religion, in industry, in clothing, or all at the same time. This happened simultaneously with the efforts of the Dutch Holy Ghost Fathers to turn the objects they used for traveling mission exhibitions into what was to become the Afrika Museum. It also involved negotiating the transformation of exotic images used earlier—attracting visitors by the threat of the witch doctor, the wildness of the jungle, or strange wonders and beauty—and their connection to the goals of raising money and recruiting new missionaries. However, the propaganda journal adopted a new emphasis on cultural continuity, as testified by the images of African Christianity and African industrial skills on the covers after 1959, while Chapter 7 will discuss how the museum managed the shift away from exotic images more ambiguously, by turning itself into a place where visitors could learn to appreciate the values of African culture (Hogema 1988; Eisenburger 1988). This change in missionary imagery was not unique to the Congregation of the Holy Ghost. In Dutch Catholic mission circles, it had already been in the air from the late 1940s onward, when some missionaries started to warn their colleagues that the struggle against the “carnal lusts of the uncivilized or half-civilized” was being replaced by the fight against “the satanic lust of power of godless communism and exaggerated and irrational nationalism” (as a 1947 report in the main Dutch Catholic missiology journal had it). This writer argued that one should no longer exhibit exotic products and sensations, or merely use them to collect money for the missions, but strengthen one’s “mental armor” by prayer (Drehmans 1947: 89–90). The impatience with “missionary romanticism” grew during the 1950s. It seems that growing political consciousness and aspirations toward independence in Africa and parts of Asia were foremost in the minds of the missionaries who asked for more mature accounts of political

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Figure 6.8. Cover of Africa Christo! 56/1 (1960). An early example of the topic of African Christianity, comparable to the baptism by an African priest at the AMATE exhibition (Figure 6.10). In pre-1955 covers, a different color of the skin was reinforced by other markings of difference (see Figures 6.5, 6.6, 6.7), but in this photograph the skin color reinforces the universality of the church by showing how it bridges all differences. The African sister embodies a fulfilled mission. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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Figure 6.9. Cover of Africa Christo! 58/4 (1962). An earlier issue’s article on the Spiritans’ Afrika Museum discussed an African crucifix (Africa Christo! 53/3 (1957): 23), and it may be interpreted as one of the earliest examples of the “respect for African culture” that would dominate the museum’s policy for well into the twenty-first century. The curious paradox of the essay was that it stated that African Christians deplored the use of African statues in their church: they preferred the “real” art of white saints with golden crowns (see also Chapter 7). The statue on this cover may therefore not indicate “respect for the African,” but a form of relativist Christian aesthetics becoming more and more common in Europe during the years of the Second Vatican Council. © Archive of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, used with permission.

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decolonization in the former mission areas (Huber 1988: 170; for the same process in Belgian mission movies, see Vints 1984). These discussions came to a head in the Netherlands when the old-style mission exhibition was questioned and eventually replaced by a completely renewed format. The AMATE exhibition (an acronym for Algemene Missie Actie Tentoonstelling, “general mission action exhibition,” but also the Latin imperative for “Love!”) was first set up by the Associated Missionaries (Verenigde Missionarissen) in 1957. The presentations included “as few ethnographic items as possible,” mostly stressing the missionary effort and the successes of African development (Dirkse 1983: 46; see Figure 6.10). One commentator qualified the old mission exhibition as a jungle of “crowing parrots, blinking light-effects, movable puppets, ethnographic horrors and papua-skulls and . . . sensational stories.”8 A collaborator in the AMATE exhibition said: “For Africa, this meant that one could talk about masks and magic, but only in relation to the work of conversion, not just to sketch the atmosphere” (Eggen 1988b: 60–62). The Catholic

Figure 6.10. 1960. Part of the African section of the AMATE exhibition, in which the functional design of 1957 remains unaffected by the objects smuggled back in by missionaries (Dirkse 1983: 46). The dominant message is civilization and progress: the diagrams show the increase in the number of African Catholics, the photograph is a young man reading Afrique Nouvelle, a portrait with the caption: “professional training” (vakopleiding), and baptism by an African priest. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission.

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elite supported the functionalist style of the new exhibition, but many missionaries regretted the loss of “atmosphere”: they felt handicapped without their ethnographic items, that is, without the visual aids by which they could recollect their missionary stories. Instead, during AMATE they were asked to lecture upon the general missiological aspects of the process of Christianization, something in which they had never really been trained.9 Soon, the original designers of the AMATE had resigned and the missionaries again smuggled in the curiosities with which they used to tell their tall tales (Dirkse 1983: 46). In the discussions about AMATE, it is important to see that the wrath of the functionalists was often directed against the use of exoticism because that “was merely meant to pick the purses of the people.”10 Those revenues were slight, and “functionless exoticisms” merely distracted from the lectures on missionary progress and its obstacles.11 This puts the use of exotic images by the missionaries into perspective. On the one hand, one could say that the builders of the AMATE exhibition, the editors of Africa Christo! after 1957, and others who wanted to present a modern view of Africa within mission circles penetrated the hypocrisy of presenting exotic images in order to raise money. On the other hand, one of the commentators on the AMATE exhibition stressed that the presentation of exotic artifacts gave the missionary the opportunity to spread appreciation and respect for the country which had become his second home.12 This might seem a fanciful argument if it was not strengthened by the fact that the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal (among others) took precisely that course around the same time, as it tried to shed its make-up as a mission museum and dedicated itself to the proclamation of the value of African art and culture. To some extent, then, the move toward a more modern, less distracting and hypocritical form of mission propaganda also strengthened the simple story of the civilizing myth, at least in AMATE and the pages of Africa Christo! The ambiguities of the original presentations of exotic images were suppressed in an attempt to reassert this story, if now no longer as a future goal but as an accomplishment. Now that the mission areas were on the brink of political and religious maturity, missionary propaganda reversed its original attitude toward “exaggerated and irrational nationalisms,” to escape the accusation of being an obstacle in the way of progress at a time when African countries became independent, beginning with Ghana in 1957. This story could not be held up in the face of what the older missionaries wanted; but more important, neither could it be sustained after the relativist doubts accompanying the Second Vatican Council and

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the renewed eruption of secular “modernization,” now in the guise of the emerging development industry, to which many missionaries turned instead. But that is another, equally complex story: in so far as it touches upon the Afrika Museum’s history, it will be addressed in Chapter 7.13 When I first published this material in 1989, the study of colonial photography was in its infancy, and I was not particularly conscious of the methodology one could use for it.14 My framing of the photographs in the context of the missionary exhibitions (Figures 6.1 and 6.10) shows that one relevant analytical context was formed by the common missionary practice of using objects as souvenirs, collections that got their meaning from recollection. The missionaries’ souvenirs indeed allowed “a nostalgic celebration of the past” that could, at least partly, shape a “personal narrative” (S. Stewart 1993: 140). However, the missionaries I interviewed often fondly described the stories they told at the exhibition as “tall tales” (sterke verhalen). The description shows that the nostalgia of the souvenir made room for more than a personal narrative: recollections could classify objects as trophies of spiritual conquest or as items of exotic wonder, but also generated—as the term “tall tale” suggests—accounts that amplified missionary propaganda with a little exaggeration, skirting, or maybe even crossing the boundary between travelers’ memories and travel lies (cf. Adams [1980] and the ambiguities about authenticity discussed in Chapter 5). If the pages of the journal, but also the personal recollections during interviews I conducted in 1988–90 were anything to go by, the recollections could vary from a particularly successful defeat of a witch doctor, to gruesome tales of superstition or stories of hunting, but also to sheer amazement about artistic or devotional qualities of African expressions of religiosity (an attitude that, as we shall see in Chapter 7, becomes important for understanding the Afrika Museum’s exhibits). At the time, I found the heterogeneity of such expressions in missionary propaganda particularly important to assess the expectations that missionary recruits brought with them to Africa (see Pels 1999: Ch. 2). In the context of this book, however, it raises questions about the nature of exoticism and the heterogeneous attractions of the objects that missionaries exploited to attract audiences or new recruits. Initially, my interest was raised by how this heterogeneity seemed to give way, during the second half of the 1950s, to a more insistent emphasis on a story of successful conversion and modernization in the propaganda journal and the AMATE exhibition on the one hand, while, on the other, the Afrika Museum seemed, on the surface, to

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follow a more exoticizing track. However, that turned out to be too simple a conclusion, as the detailed analysis of the Afrika Museum’s advertisements and exhibits in Chapter 7 will show. Here, however, I think it is important to show that the use of photographs in mission propaganda suggested hidden, maybe unconscious assumptions about knowledge that I could not explicate thirty-five years ago. In conformity with Chapter 5’s argument about historicization, it is important to single out the biography of the photograph— including their material placement in new contexts (see especially Figures 6.2 and 6.3). Among other things, captions were needed to change some of these meanings from one placement of the same photograph to another. This emphasizes not only the overdetermination of the photograph by missionary discourse (for instance, when evoking the frisson of being brought into the presence of the missionary’s archenemy, the féticheur; see Figure 6.2), but also the underdetermination of such meanings by the material presence of the photograph itself (as when the image could change from a “fortune teller” to a “sorceress”; see Figure 6.3). This is particularly evident with the exotic photographs, for while their alterity was manifest to both editors and audience, the captions—if present at all—mostly refrained, in the objectivist manner of much classical ethnography, from moral commentary (Figures 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7). Put differently, if photographs and their placement leave the “webs of significance” (Geertz 1973: 5) in which either editor or audience moves discursively implicit, they are freed to allow their iconic and indexical signification come to the fore. This semiotic layering has by itself generated a kind of realist magic: photography has, since its invention, been taken as providing particularly faithful depictions of the real.15 Even if we know that photographs are constructed by posing, framing, composition, and the manipulation of images, there is hardly a photographic practice outside the realm of fine art that does not exploit or safeguard the photograph’s privileged presentation of the real.16 The photographic images’ uncanny proximity to the photographic occasion—the event of the “shot”—affirm their iconic resemblance of, as well as their indexical relation to the event, and these have been interpreted as equivalent to James Frazer’s homeopathic and contagious magic (see Crossland 2009; cf. Frazer 1922: 13). When a photograph is therefore placed in an underdetermined position vis-á-vis the material instances of discourse that surround it, as happened in the missionary journal, the material autonomy of the photograph is then doubly affirmed: its mimetic potential can, as it were, blossom in its viewers’ sensorium without being explicitly

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fettered by discursive meanings. As such, it creates a relatively amoral space where exotic wonder can unfold. This use of photographs, I submit, can be compared to the material presence of things in museums. Chapter 5 argued that the latter cannot be fully confined by the classifications and series that Tony Bennett focuses on (1995), nor contained within the representation/ real dualism as a political instrument that Timothy Mitchell theorized (1991). We may more profitably turn to Homi Bhabha’s reflections on colonial mimicry and its “double vision,” which “in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (1994: 88). As the conclusion to this part of the book hopes to bring out, this seems to propose that materializing copies of an original by mimesis and mimicry stands next to representation as writing and discursive performance (1994: 87). While representation certainly influences the understanding of these copies’ mimetic potential, it cannot exhaust how they generate meaning and affect. It is, therefore, insufficient to describe the heterogeneous spaces of Africa Christo! and the early Afrika Museum as consisting of both “pulpit and collecting-bag.” Especially the need to fill the latter generated a space for excess signification that raises the question which material affordances of these signifiers attracted such donations in the first place—nor can it be answered by the pulpit alone. The materiality of the images that I presented above, and the room for excess signification it allows, cannot be reduced to a bifurcated semiology borrowed from structural linguistics and the way it reduces signification to langue or structure and parole or contingent meaning. Jean Baudrillard argues in his The System of Objects that a technological langue determines people’s relations to objects, but that technical structure cannot make us understand what functions these objects fulfill for people at the level of the “spoken” system of objects ([1981] 1996: 2–3). Again, we see that theory adopts a quasi-Protestant subsumption of objects under human traffic and intention (“functions” that objects “fulfill for people”). However, the missionaries’ photographs and their material performances escape both the level of technical determination (to the extent that their “magic” exceeds their mechanical reproduction) and their perceived function (of being both “pulpit and collecting-bag”): whether they generate attraction or revulsion, the images perform on the basis of their material presence in ways that neither structure nor function can express. Similar reductions seem to occur when Susan Stewart subsumes both the souvenir and the collection under a narrative of desire (1993: 132–69): by focusing on desire, she privileges subjects and

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their subordination of material signifiers by the function of “longing” that they confer on them—reproducing the tyranny of the subject that I discussed in Chapters 1, 2 and 5. What attracted these subjects to their exotic possessions in the first place? Both Baudrillard and Stewart seem to reproduce the bourgeois/Protestant subject’s desire to erase the material presence of signifiers from consciousness, just as emphasis on discourses of representation by Bennett and Mitchell seems to erase it from the museum or colonial social relationships. Thus, the missionary photographs presented in this chapter suggest that their materiality—their spirit of matter—deserves epistemological recognition in its own right. This is partly because, as icon and index, photographs seduce viewers by seamlessly conflating multiple temporalities—they index the past moment of the “shot” that is folded into the presence of the icon—in ways that recall the action of the Auto-Icon on its spectator that I discussed in Chapter 1. However, the editors of Africa Christo! amplified the photographs’ mimetic and semiotic potential for wonder and curiosity—whether by conscious intention or not—when they placed the photographs in such an underdetermined way. This effect even seems relatively independent from their own motivations and those of the audience: it literally does not matter whether people interpret the photographs as a sermon and an invitation to donate freely, or as a secular commodity to be exchanged for money—both functions are useful within the relationship, yet both require the photograph’s material attractions. Note, by the way, that this also gives an additional reason for using an abstract term like “materiality”: the photographs also generate effects beyond their status as things or materials, because their placement produces an almost intangible relationship between editors, objects, and audience (cf. the discussion in Chapter 4). It is, finally, important to note that the cultural changes exemplified by the mission’s propaganda journal may have reduced the capacity for “disrupting” (colonial) authority that Bhabha signaled in his essay on mimicry. As the pages of Africa Christo! and the AMATE exhibition became increasingly devoted to representations of the Catholic Church’s unilinear progress in Africa, we can question whether this was a change for the better: it is possible that what Bhabha described as a “double vision” produced by mimesis and mimicry may also be interpreted as a human achievement—as a celebration of human curiosity—in addition to the fact that it worked to support colonial inequalities. After all, the hegemony of unilinear progress has, at least to some, left destruction and ruins in its wake (Benjamin [1940] 1977b: 255; Berman 1983: 37–86). The denial of heterogeneity

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and multiple temporality in representations that support or criticize colonial relationships and material culture studies was already important in previous chapters, and will continue to occupy me in the arguments about the Afrika Museum, North Atlantic mimesis, and commodity fetishism in the chapters to come. One of the conditions for its affirmation is not only that linear progress may not be the only, or most healthy, form of reckoning time (see Pels 2015), but also that material mimesis may possess a capacity for disrupting the histories that it objectifies at the same time—just like the exotic photographs in Africa Christo!

Notes 1. Like this quote, this chapter is drawn from an earlier publication (Pels 1989). The empirical analysis and pictures have hardly been changed (except the first, which now shows a Spiritan exhibit rather than that of another congregation; and two other images have been left out), but I have added interpretations or theoretical insights and changed some captions. The original research for this publication was made possible by the Graduate School of Sociology of the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam (now AISSR), and the Dutch Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). I thank Ineke Eisenburger for admitting me to the archive of Afrikamuseum in 1989, where I found much material for this and for Chapter 7. Without the support and advice of the late Joop Hogema, CSSp. the material on the Holy Ghost Fathers’ journal could not have been reproduced nor this chapter been written. I also gratefully acknowledge permission from the Board of the Dutch province of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost to reprint the photographs in 2022, and thank Richard van Alphen and Marit Jacobs for further help with locating images at the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, in 2019 and 2022. 2. White distinguishes between two “modes of relationships” between the normal and the abnormal: a mode of continuity which presupposes a “common stuff or essence” shared by both, and a mode of contiguity which appeals to a criterion of difference in the first place. According to White, the mode of continuity is more amenable to practices of conversion, while contiguity lends itself to “war and extermination.” This photo-essay chapter can be read as a critique of White’s view that the relationship of continuity “is certainly more productive of tolerance . . . than that of contiguity” (1976: 190). 3. At the time I referred to Gerald Sider (1987); I only later learned about those “tensions of empire” (Cooper and Stoler 1997) and how they might be related to wonder and “mimetic circulation” (Greenblatt 1991: 121).

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4. As recorded earlier (in Chapter 5), Mieke Bal (1991) similarly observed— if topsy-turvy—that Raymond Corbey’s critique of colonial nudes in print (1988, 1989) may revive colonial pornography in its pictures. 5. The ambiguities of this attitude are compounded when one realizes that Catholic missions, rather than the colonial government, set up secondary schooling in colonial Tanganyika, and that missionaries were skeptical of settlers’ and colonial officials’ preference for teaching Africans manual skills only (see Pels 1999: ch. 5). 6. This shows that the “biography of things” analysis used in Chapter 5 can also be applied to photographs. 7. Among “exotic” images, I counted not only the pictures of Africans which emphasized difference but also pictures of palm trees, tropical forests, and other representations of natural exoticism. 8. Compare to Figure 6.1. The critique, however, was thought to be too extreme by B. Sondaal S.J. (Volkskrant, 27 April 1957). 9. De Tijd-Maasbode, 6 December 1960. 10. W. v.d. Marck en C. Brakkee, in De Bazuin, 14 July 1957. Note the similarity with the arguments of museologists of the 1990s against the “live” display of ethnic groups (cf. Griffiths 2002). 11. Editorial, De Linie, 1957 (I failed to find the precise date of publication in the Afrika Museum’s archive). 12. G. van Winsen, De Linie, 1957 (I failed to find the precise date of publication in the Afrika Museum’s archive). 13. But see Brinkman (2010) for a history of the secular development industry in the Netherlands, and Claessens (1983) for the contribution to it by Christian confessional organizations. 14. I also cannot review the vast amount of research that has been published since here; but see the influential studies of Behrend and Wendl (1998), Edwards (1992, 2001), C. Geary (1990, 1991), and Pinney (1990, 2008). 15. See Henry Fox Talbot’s description of his 1841 invention as a magical “pencil of nature” (Aperture 2000), or Alfred Wallace’s trust in the “proof ” of an afterlife by spirit photographs in the 1870s (Pels 2003b: 262). 16. The struggle of photojournalists with the ”truth” of images became particularly clear to me by the Master’s thesis on the debates inside World Press Photo about digital enhancements by my student Jamie de Groot (2016).

Chapter 7

“I AM BLACK, BUT COMELY” MISSION, MODERNITY, AND THE POWER OF OBJECTS IN THE AFRIKA MUSEUM, BERG EN DAL

Late in the summer of 1958, Father Jan van Croonenburg welcomed television host Jan Willem Hofstra at the door of what the Holy Ghost Fathers claimed to be “the most modern museum of the Netherlands” (Neêrlands modernste museum: Africa Christo! 54/4 [1958]: 13).1 Van Croonenburg would in the years to come often be—wrongly—credited with founding the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, and giving it its distinct identity of offering Africans “the opportunity of a repartee (de kans van weerwoord) and thereby of a more honest view of [their] often extraordinary qualities” (quoted in Weinhold 2002a: 11).2 However, in the Vademecum documentary about the new Afrika Museum that the Dutch Catholic Broadcast Corporation (KRO) screened in September 1958, Van Croonenburg roundly subordinated an emphasis on African aesthetic prowess to Catholic missionary values: as he guided Hofstra into the Museum hall, he pointed out a so-called nail-fetish (spijkerfetisj; a nkisi nkondi from the Congo region), and informed the anchorman that the “mastery of abstraction” of the African artist should not hide the fact that “every nail represents a murder” and that “fear and revenge” dominated African religion.3 On the one hand, Van Croonenburg’s 1958 comment on the nkisi was quintessentially “modernizing” in its reminder of Catholics’ civilizing duty to combat fearful tradition. On the other, it remains uncannily close to the “tall tales” that missionaries told their audience when reminiscing with objects at the mission exhibitions that predated the Museum (as discussed in Chapter 6). Never having set foot in Africa, himself, Van Croonenburg’s tall tale must be interpreted

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as a simulacrum of a souvenir, maybe copied from fellow Spiritans who claimed personal experience of a nkisi’s homicidal effects. Given that it seems more appropriate to say that minkisi were provoked into redressing (collective) harm by hitting a nail into them (see Gell 1998: 59–62; MacGaffey 1994; see also the conclusion to this book), the comment can be interpreted as an invention of colonial ethnography.4 It raises doubts about Van Croonenburg’s claim (a few shots later into the documentary) that the museum showed how Catholic exhibition practices had become “less sensational and incidental”: his own representation of the nkisi nails as indexes of murder was, indeed, both. The documentary was screened under the title “I am black, but comely” (Zwart ben ik, maar schoon; see Figure 7.1), a Biblical quote (from Song of Solomon 1:5) that exemplifies the paradoxes and his-

Figure 7.1. Article announcing the documentary “I am black, but comely” about the new Afrika Museum. Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958): 60. The caption describes the object as a “Bapende initiation mask.” Thanks to Richard van Alphen and Marit Jacobs for providing the digital image.

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torical layers that conditioned the devotion of this museum of “Africa” to the service of the Holy Ghost Fathers’ mission.5 In addition to Van Croonenburg’s attempt to negotiate the paradox that his Congregation exhibited power objects that it wanted to erase at their source, the accompanying page in the Catholic Radio and Television Guide (Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids) seems to rehearse the frictions, analyzed in Chapter 6, between exotic images and the narratives of Catholic progress in the mission propaganda journal. Marking a “Bapende initiation mask” by only a minimal caption, the photo is placed within a text that restricts itself to the conversion narratives of the guests in the documentary’s opening scene.6 Father Loffeld, professor in missiology at the Congregation’s major seminary, emphasized how important “responsible” exhibitions and museums were for Catholic missions, which he defined as the core effort of the Church. Van Croonenburg underscored this by emphasizing how, in contrast to the earlier “popular” and “folkloristic” exhibitions, their “modern” Museum enabled a “serious acquaintance” (serieuze kennismaking) with the way of life of strange peoples, and turned Dutch Catholics and others into “sympathizers” (sympathisanten) with the Church and people in Africa. Miss van Dam of the Missionary Formation Centre, a social science graduate of Nijmegen’s Catholic University, recommended the Africa Museum for educating the lay women she prepared for nursing, teaching, and social work in Africa. Neither of them had been to Africa,7 and their messages subordinated the Museum’s activities directly or indirectly to the work of conversion (see Figure 7.2) The BaPende object’s “repartee,” if any, remained muted. Nigra sum, sed formosa—the Latin version of the documentary’s title—symbolizes the Afrika Museum’s historical layers and contradictions even better, because Van Croonenburg’s later idea of a “repartee” resonates with the first person singular “I am black.” That makes the use of the Biblical quote even more ironic in relation to his comment on the nkisi, an irony that becomes apparent from the less well known historical fact that the mistranslation of the Hebrew phrase “black and well-formed” by a Latin conjunction (sed)—“black but comely”— seems to date from the inception of the transatlantic slave trade (Lowe 2012). The racializing “but” is reinforced by Van Croonenburg’s 1958 use of the nkisi to essentialize and subordinate African worship, while nigra sum invokes an interlocution that upsets that hierarchy. This hierarchy is also subtly undermined by the cover of the 1958 visitor folder that advertised the Museum’s exhibits under the headings “Primitive Art” and Ethnografica (see Figure 7.3). Below a stylized image of the BaPende mask—now wearing three horns, but softening

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Figure 7.2. Cover of the Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids 31 (14 September 1958) announcing the “Vademecum” broadcast on the Afrika Museum. Sitting, from left to right: Director Wim Bary, Father E. Loffeld, and anchorman Jan Willem Hofstra; standing: Miss Van Dam, Father van Croonenburg. The meeting prepared the opening shot of the actual television documentary. Thanks to Richard van Alphen and Marit Jacobs for providing the digital image.

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Figure 7.3. Cover of a printed guide detailing the permanent exhibition of the Afrika Museum around 1958. © Archive of the Afrika Museum Berg en Dal, used with permission. Thanks to Richard van Alphen and Marit Jacobs for providing the digital image.

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this possibly diabolical sign by closing the gaping mouth and making the eyes sleepy and more serene—“Africa” is made to speak through a Dinka poem: When in the mists of time, God created things, he made the sun to rise and wane and rise again; he made the moon—to rise and wane and rise again; and he made man—to rise and wane and ne’er return.8

If this poem was intended to enable the “serious acquaintance” with African culture that Father van Croonenburg thought would make the Museum’s audience support the Catholic mission, the last sentence is puzzling: it seems to deny the triumphal life after death that Christian salvation promises. Of course, the poem may be interpreted as signaling that the Dinka lack original revelation, just as the BaPende mask could be interpreted as diabolic. But since such comments or captions are lacking, both poem and drawing seem to generate friction with the reasons why missionaries went to Africa in the first place. (I will discuss the content of the guide in a later section.) This chapter, therefore, aims to show that the hierarchies implicit in the narratives of linear progress of the Holy Ghost Fathers and their coworkers—narratives of conversion, but also narratives of building a more “responsible” museum—are upset by the materiality and materials required for a modern museum and for Catholic attempts to adapt to a changing world. A museum needs visitors, but I failed to find missionaries reflecting on the fact that Dutch Catholic bodies were rarely attracted by Black comeliness, or that their sacrificial economy of the collecting-bag was affected by commodification in the form of the Museum’s entrance fee. The materials needed for the museum were embedded in earlier “worldly” needs of the missionaries— not least, the “collecting-bag” also represented by the propaganda journal, and the desire to attract an audience by “tall tales”—but their modernization increased this material heterogeneity by also composting historical features of the exhibitionary complexes that I discussed in Chapter 5: colonial ethnography, an “African village,” and the magic of realism attached to it. Moreover, these changes produced an additional heterogeneity of categories and values that calls into question any linear history of missionary collections as a movement from “fetish” or “idol” to “art” (Leyten 2015; Silva 2017). On the one hand, this chapter will therefore again support the arguments by James Clifford (1985: 244) and Stephen Greenblatt (1990) that modern exhibitions—including “ethnographic” ones—crucially and inevitably rely on materials that generate curiosity and wonder.

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I think museums will be the poorer the more they try to rationalize that positive side of “fetishism” away—usually in vain. On the other hand, it would be naive to think that Afrika and Ethnographica are innocent classifications: in this context, they signal a blockage of mimetic circulation (which the objects of course set in motion in the first place) that controls free movement through past and present, culture and history, and between subject and object (Greenblatt 1991: 139). This blockage is constructed by defining the museum’s interiority as a space of alterity, as “Africa.” However, we should not describe this space as exhaustively constituted by a single “narrative of interiority” that articulated only the Dutch Catholic subject’s longing (Stewart 1993: 158), because “Africa” acquired different meanings over time, and those meanings continue to coexist. At the Afrika Museum this was most apparent from the alternation between defining Black Africa as negative, in need of Catholic mission, and as a positive alternative source of spiritual insight. Yet, we will also see that, once the latter meaning became dominant, the Afrika Museum constituted in the eyes of its missionary curators a space of “anti-contest” (Pratt 1992: 7) where hierarchies were suspended and the need for intervention temporarily put on hold. Given all those analytical considerations, we have to ask whether African objects indeed can “speak back.” Is this not a form of Catholic transubstantiation in exotic dress? What kind of power allows a museum object to voice a repartee? And what, if anything, do answers to such questions tell us about the spirit in or of matter, and its relations to missionary or ethnographic discourses? The sections of this chapter do not follow a strict chronological order, because one of the striking features of the Museum’s history since its inception in 1954 until at least 2002 is that so many themes that seemed new in later phases (such as Van Croonenburg’s idea of a “repartee”) turn out to have been present earlier in some form or other; just as older themes (such as Van Croonenburg’s tall tale about the nkisi) manifested themselves at the same time that less hierarchical relations with objects from Africa were first put into practice by other curators. This is not to deny change at the Museum—crucial processes of reinventing Divine Love and museum professionalization and modernization indeed took place—but it does argue that the composting of such historical layers does not follow a straight line. I first have to address the founding of the Museum, and how it transmuted from a mission museum proper into an “Afrika Museum,” but this first section also discusses the initial role of curiosity and wonder at the museum, and the emergence of a focus on Africa and “ethnology,” in relation to missionary and monetary values. The sections that fol-

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low sometimes roam back and forth across the history of the Afrika Museum between 1954 and 2002, in order to keep track of certain other themes. The second section elaborates on what the missionaries meant by the “different apostolate” of the museum, and how they constantly struggled with that difference. The third section addresses pivotal moments of professionalization—such as the one that led to the KRO documentary—and how the Museum indulged in its own forms of the magic of realism discussed in Chapter 5. Finally, the fourth section records the perhaps most persistent identity of the Afrika Museum until the twenty-first century: a Catholic aesthetic of the “speaking” object, introduced by Father Gerard Pubben in 1959, that was still reiterated in a recognizably similar form by the Museum’s Director Ineke Eisenburger in 2002. My account is partial and will leave many museologists with unanswered questions: I am relatively new at museology and African art curation, and my acquaintance with the collection of the Museum is mostly limited to its archive. I focus on display and message rather than the provenance of objects. I could not make a thorough study of the scenography of the early museum, partly because much material seems to have disappeared, partly because I only came across relevant photographs too late to be studied with the kind of detail and the Africanist curatorial expertise they require. I hope, however, that the conclusion will bring out that the Afrika Museum offers good reasons to rethink museum histories, especially to the extent that their relationship to “religion,”9 mission, and materiality remains underexposed.

Founding Father of Wonder: Piet Bukkems Piet Bukkems became the Father Superior of the Spiritans’ house in Berg en Dal in January 1954, after his return from the Uluguru Mountains in what was then Tanganyika.10 That spring, there was “more and more talk about the museum to be founded to profit from the busy tourism” in the area, since a touring car stopped right in front of Villa Meerwijk during the summer season. In the mission house diary, Bukkems recorded that both Provincial Superior Blommaert and bursar (econoom) Van Horrik responded enthusiastically to his suggestion to set up a museum.11 They immediately took him to the Congregation’s headquarters in Rhenen to collect the objects that had hitherto been used for the Holy Ghost Fathers’ stands at travelling mission exhibitions (see Figure 6.1). On 13 March 1954, “all the rub-

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bish that Rhenen possessed” was packed into a van destined for Berg en Dal. Bukkems managed to persuade Blommaert to have Brother Landelinus Sukel help him furnish “this most remarkable museum of rubbish.” In April, a lay friend of the Fathers, Harry Wijdeveld, volunteered to organize the exhibition, so that in May, “utensils from Africa and Latin America are safely displayed behind very fragile glass panes, to give the curious European a sense of the life of those we call primitive people.” On 16 May, when the Museum was officially opened by the mayor of Groesbeek (the municipality to which Berg en Dal belonged) the “threat of the jungle now hangs peacefully from the walls of the room on a nail or a rivet” (Ons Orgaan 30 [1954]: 16, 18; 31 [1954]: 13).12 The main motive to start a museum in Berg en Dal seems to have been that Huize Ooster Meerwijk threatened to become a financial burden after it was acquired in 1949 to house the Holy Ghost Fathers’ students enrolled in the nearby Catholic University of Nijmegen. Bukkems hoped that his “museum of rubbish” would become Meerwijk’s “hope for existence” (hoop van bestaan). He therefore reinforced the commodification of the Congregation’s exhibition material with other attractions: a bird and butterfly collection received from the Spiritans’ house in Weert, and the sale of stamps donated by his colleagues from the missions. In August 1954, the museum was surprisingly successful, adding the revenue of 2,500 visitors to Meerwijk’s annual budget, and a plan to expand the exhibition to occupy the villa’s entire ground floor (Ons Orgaan 32 [1954]: 17). In the same issue of Ons Orgaan, Bukkems asked his colleagues to help by sending in objects, with a list of desiderata: A. Everything relating to superstitious customs, sorcery, and fetish worship, especially old figurines, amulets, and the like; B. Musical instruments, dancing dress, or ornaments; C. Stuffed birds, insects, snakes, spiders, scorpions, and butterflies, and also animal heads large and small; D. Everyday tools, objects, and utensils of the natives, especially those decorated with carvings, from the household or for hunting, dance or play; E. All kinds of wickerwork and carvings: we request these goods to sell them to museum visitors. Br. Landelinus will make sure that, if need be, donors will receive their 60 percent [of the sale]. They are much in demand as souvenirs of the museum. For really rare pieces the Museum is even prepared to cover the costs of purchase and shipment if need be.

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This jumble of cultural, natural, and commercial objects not only evokes the broad range of entry criteria of curiosity cabinets but also illustrates some of the entanglements of the museum with monetary and market values, if only through the simple need to generate revenue or visitor numbers—an entanglement which museologists (including some of their critics) tend to ignore when they define the museum as a space where inalienable goods are conserved to educate the public.13 However, if the latter connects Bukkems’s initiative to the “collecting-bag” of mission propaganda, the prominence of the first item—superstition, sorcery, fetish worship—provokes questions about the Museum’s relation to Christianity: is “fetish worship” entangled with “rarity,” wonder, and curiosity (see Chapter 3)? If so, how is this related to the “pulpit” from which the need to missionize “pagans” was preached? And was this already related in 1954 to the goal of giving “the curious European a sense of the life of those we call primitive people”? In the remainder of this section, I will discuss Father Bukkems’s Catholic values (which did not differ significantly from Van Croonenburg’s ideas in 1958) and his engagement with the materiality of the objects on display (his “remarkable rubbish”) to highlight the nature of a mission museum, and how it stayed close to missionary values. For the shift toward a museum of “Africa,” however, we should pay attention to Harry Wijdeveld’s contribution to missionary values, but also, and especially, to his interest in ethnology (in so far as it is on record) and how that involved missionary ethnographers of the Congregation—most of them with experience in East Africa—to work on the materials in the collection. This will show that what came to be called the “different apostolate” of the Museum—one that defined the struggles of the new Director, Father Verdijk (see the next section)— was already recognized by certain visitors by 1956. Bukkems’s inauguration of the Museum was embedded in the history of mission exhibitions that, as Chapter 6 documented, had been a standard feature of the Dutch Catholic landscape from the early 1920s onwards (Roes 1974: 27). He shared the heterogeneity of values of his fellow Holy Ghost Fathers who deplored the mediocrity of their African artifacts in comparison to the cultural wealth brought by other Congregations from the Dutch Indies, only to be reassured by their propagandist that their stuff “illustrate[d] admirably the battle against heathendom” (Ons Orgaan 8 [1948]: 132). Bukkems’s initiative was not new: eight years earlier, the Dutch province of the Society of African Missions decided that Father Frits van Trigt, Professor of Bible Studies, should register the objects they had collected and give them a permanent exhibition at their major seminary (Leyten 2015:

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5).14 Bukkems’s juxtaposition of artifacts and stuffed animals and insects, and the emphasis on stamps and souvenirs for sale, however, suggest that he was more focused on generating revenue and lacked some of the museal rigor that Van Trigt applied to the collection of the SMA. By falling back on the materials of the mission exhibitions, Bukkems seemed to reproduce the kind of display that Father van Croonenburg called “popular” and “folkloristic” in 1958 and that other critics identified as “ethnographic horrors . . . and sensational stories,” and that one of the later collaborators of the Museum pejoratively described as a collection of “rarities.”15 I have found neither photographs nor a description of the displays in Villa Meerwijk’s interior in 1954, which makes it difficult to judge the validity of such qualifications. Bukkems and Wijdeveld may have adopted the museum display of the Society of the Divine Word at Steyl, ordered since 1934 in missiological, ethnographic and natural history sections (see Van Uden 1988).16 While it brings together heterogeneous classes of objects that today are divided over different museum types, the evolutionary order at Steyl prevents a simple description as a “curiosity cabinet,” certainly when this carries the negative connotation of “fancy” that the notion of curiosity acquired in the nineteenth century (see Chapters 3 and 5). The resemblance between Villa Meerwijk and Steyl, however, is evident once we realize that the objects displayed came from all the mission fields of the two Congregations, with the Holy Ghost Fathers’ collection containing objects from Latin America (see the mannequin in Figure 6.1) as well as Africa, just as Steyl included those from the SVD’s missions in China, New Guinea, and Africa. Both were, indeed, “mission museums”—as Steyl still is. We should study how Bukkems’s values and his relation to museum objects expressed this, also to understand how the transition to an Afrika Museum took place. The priority that Piet Bukkems gave to objects showing “superstitious customs, sorcery, and fetish worship” in his list of desiderata, underscored by the observation that neither sorcerers nor their instruments can be easily identified without the words in a caption (see Chapter 6 and Figures 6.2 and 6.3), suggests that the Fathers who worked as guides in the early Museum were likely to illuminate the objects by telling tall tales, which includes narratives of the struggle against superstition. Van Croonenburg’s idea that traditional religion held people in fear was widely shared among missionaries, as my interviews in 1990 showed (see also Pels 1999: 56, 240). While that was certainly a rhetorical topos of missionary and colonial ethnography (more about that soon), it could also be reinforced by the experience

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that Waluguru, at least, often found Christianity ineffective in countering the paranoia of uchawi (Swahili for “witchcraft”: Pels 1999: Ch. 7). Bukkems himself seemed more firmly convinced of the nefarious presence of the devil than his colleagues in the Luguru missions (Pels 1999: 5). He was also reported to preach fire and brimstone to the Spiritan novices who visited the Museum, singling out “Africa and its devils” in particular (Ons Orgaan 35 [1955]: 8). We do not know whether other members of the public were similarly enlightened, but it seems plausible that at least part of the attraction of the exhibits was the frisson of being in the presence of the demonic—safely presented, of course, by a triumphant representative of the Divine. The “converted artifact” (Thomas 1991: 151) seems to gain at least a part of its power from this juxtaposition of values, and its ambiguities are crucial for explaining Bukkems’s relationship to his material, which he simultaneously expressed by the terms “rubbish” and “remarkable.” Like other excessive objects (such as the Auto-Icon) the converted artifact multiplies the space-time coordinates of its relationship with spectators, and its “remarkable” status—at least for items of “fetish-worship” displayed in Berg en Dal—predates its qualification as “rubbish.” The explanation for that should note, firstly, that the recollection of an African power object by means of a tall tale that selects from its biography a demonic theme positions it vis-á-vis its conquest by the Divine, and thereby divests the object of its spiritual use and turns it into debris, “rubbish.” In this aspect, it resembles the “worthless” souvenir, left in an attic or cellar, or displayed to call up a story about past experience (S. Stewart 1993: 150). But this is not its only aspect: when, in a second step, it becomes a museum object (whether utensil or fetish), it not only indicates a value that the object has lost but also a preservation or rehearsal of that past in a material form that gives it a new value by the kind of sacralization that occurs whenever something is classified as heritage (Meyer and De Witte 2013: 277). In the context of the mission’s converted power objects, this lost value gains an additional qualification, since many of the objects displayed are not intrinsically useless or valueless (as many souvenirs are), but actively made worthless by the intervention of the missionary. Even as trophies, the mission museum’s “fetishes” are indeed both worthless and sacred; in Bukkems’s words, both rubbish and remarkable. They become fascinating because the power that was stripped from them still determines their appeal to the spectator, but now in a safe way. The “threat of the jungle” may hang on a nail, but in order to become sufficiently commodified to attract an audience and raise revenue, it has to remain a “threat.”

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Of course, not all mission museum objects are trophies: even the mission exhibition stands displayed utensils and tools, some of which, like Father Bukkems’s wickerwork and carvings, were meant to be bought by the public so that they could bring an exotic object home as a souvenir of their visit (see Figure 6.1). This raises the question what the exotic—in this case, the racioethnic label “Africa”—was thought to bring to the commodification of the Museum, and how it is related to the “different apostolate” that took shape in Berg en Dal between 1954 and 1956. Harry Wijdeveld noted, a year after he had set up the exhibition with Bukkems and Brother Sukel, how Nijmegen was increasingly “inundated by tourists from home and abroad” and needed an “ethnographic and missiological” attraction. “We Spiritans are the first to show the tourist something of the primitive peoples from dark Africa,” and not only as “a considerable source of revenue,” but “also and especially an object of tremendous propaganda value.”17 The Holy Ghost Fathers (rather than other Orders and Congregations) should provide all those students of missiology, ethnology and linguistics of the Catholic University with “the practical opportunity to study and work.” Here, we see the two missionary values, pulpit and collecting-bag, joined by what increasingly became an indispensable pillar of the Museum’s apostolate: research, and “African” ethnography in particular. As he recorded the ambition to expand the collection and add an ethnographic and linguistic library with catalogues of cards and photographs, he asked missionaries in the field to contribute objects and knowledge to realize their ideal of a “large, important and internationally famous Afrika-Museum” (Ons Orgaan 34 [1955]: 19–20): the first instance of the use of that name in the congregation’s internal bulletin. Wijdeveld’s ambitions were already put in practice in October of the same year by a visiting missionary, Father Jan de Rooij, who was an active ethnographer in East Africa (see Pels 1994: 337, 338) and who worked on the catalogue and “scientific justification” of many of the objects exhibited. This begins to explain the emergence of the Museum’s exclusive focus on Africa: unlike colonial administrators, and just like his confrères in East Africa, De Rooij focused his ethnography on generic “African” customs and regarded tribal differences as negligible (Pels 1994: 338). Since he and his colleagues also read and published in ethnographic journals (not least the SVD’s Anthropos), it is not surprising that the Congregation maintained international relationships with Africanists, resulting, for example, in the donation of hundreds of books about the Belgian Congo from the Royal Academy of Colonial Sciences in Brussels (Ons Orgaan 36 [1955]: 14). The next

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year, De Rooij visited again to help “identify” some of the hundreds of objects that arrived from the missions, raising the suspicion that their provenance was unknown in Berg en Dal, and that little effort was devoted to classifying them as other than “African.” Nevertheless, Wijdeveld’s first public announcement of an “ethnological Africa museum” remained firmly tied to the inculcation of “mission-fever” by showing witch doctors and fetishes, whose “satanic” influence was also noted in missionary ethnographers’ texts (Wijdeveld 1956; Pels 1994: 337). This shows the wide range of meanings that “ethnology” and “ethnography” could evoke: it should be emphasized that any civilizing mission (and contrary to the prejudice of many an anthropologist) has to be able to communicate effectively with the people to be converted—even if this resulted in the kind of colonial ethnography that maintained that African traditional religion made people essentially live in fear (cf. Pels 1990). In 1955, at least, ethnography—which, colonial or not, requires some form of listening to and learning from people studied—was not thought to be incompatible with mission-fever or missiology. It may therefore be equally important to note that one of Bukkems’s successors in 1956 was Father Loogman, whose devotion to East African linguistics and ethnography, and interactions with highly educated Africans, provoked an early plea to “listen to the African” (Pels 1994: notes 20, 25; Welling 2002: 45). Sources remain silent about Loogman’s influence in reformulating the goals of the Afrika Museum, but the little we know about the Museum’s audience at the time clearly indicates that the Museum’s “different apostolate” became clearer to outsiders. Even a socialist club asked for a guided tour (Ons Orgaan 40 [1956]: 12)—unusual in the Netherlands, which was still divided between hermetically closed Catholic, Protestant, socialist, and liberal “pillars”—and this suggests that the Museum’s guide offered knowledge beyond parochial Catholic interests. Ons Orgaan claimed that museum professionals found the Museum’s collection of masks, in particular, extraordinary: “As museum of Africa, we are the top in the Netherlands” (Ons Orgaan 40 [1956]: 12). Most tellingly, a local newspaper perceived some of the relativist consequences of this growing sense of “ethnographic” identity under the title “different but not inferior to us,” arguing that “primitive humanity” was very religious, even as European paganism and Eastern communism penetrated quickly in Africa.18 Meanwhile, the leadership of the Museum changed: Jan van Croonenburg succeeded Bukkems as Father Superior in November 1955, and successfully expanded the museum along the lines adopted

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by Bukkems and Wijdeveld, even as the latter went on to study ethnology in Nijmegen (and disappeared from my sources). Van Croonenburg added open-air zoology to the “curiosities” of the Museum: an apery, a deer, crowned cranes, Nile-geese, tortoises, and some Dutch swans and ducks, while routinely adopting Wijdeveld’s christening of the museum as an “Afrika-Museum.” Van Croonenburg was credited with pushing visitor numbers through the roof: the internal bulletin estimated visitor numbers at 10,000 in 1956 (Ons Orgaan 40 [1956]: 12). He further professionalized the Museum by setting up an official Museum Foundation Board of five that contained only two members (including the chairman) from the Congregation itself. The Foundation defined its official aim as “raising cultural, scientific and religious interest in Africa among a broad public” (Eisenburger 1988: 36).19 Father Alfons Loogman succeeded Van Croonenburg as Father Superior in 1956 and further developed the latter’s plan to expand to a new building. In another professionalizing move, Loogman, while remaining Villa Meerwijk’s Father Superior, handed over the museum to a separate director, Father Piet Verdijk, who became a non-voting advisor to the members of the Foundation’s Board. It was Father Verdijk and his assistants who most explicitly experienced the tensions and contradictions that surfaced as a result of the crystallizing out of the Museum’s “different apostolate.”

“A Different Kind of Apostolate” The contingent social structure within which Father Verdijk’s narratives unfolded is perhaps best represented by the fact that neither he nor the other Spiritans who actually worked at the Museum had a voice in the 1958 television documentary that celebrated the opening of the new Museum. The narratives about what the Museum was supposed to be doing—which, as we shall see in the next section, did not necessarily represent what it actually did—differed depending on which public sphere(s) they addressed. The tensions of this “different apostolate” became most explicit in the messages of Father Verdijk to his confrères, through the medium of their internal bulletin. The relation with the Catholic public sphere—the television broadcasters at KRO, the audience of Africa Christo!, the Catholic Volkskrant and the visitors at the AMATE exhibition—was, as we have seen, dominated by the story of a “responsible” modern museum which should modernize to keep on playing its role in the civilizing mission to Africa. The audience of paying visitors to the Museum—which included many

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non-Catholics—was, to the contrary, often addressed in a much more neutral “ethnographic” voice. When the new building was opened, both the title of an essay in the propaganda journal (Muermans 1958) and the main Catholic newspaper reiterated Fathers Loffeld and Van Croonenburg’s narrative that the Museum had abolished the era of the mission exhibitions’ rariteiten,20 and that “no one will object to find that Africans are no longer represented with a sentimental and arrogant ‘really just like us’ nor exhibited as a rather sorry type of fauna” (De Volkskrant quoted in Welling 2002: 47). But before the opening, Father Verdijk felt that the Museum’s public success under Bukkems and Van Croonenburg needed to be defended to his colleagues in the missionaries’ internal bulletin: “The things that missionaries throw away as reprehensible remains of animistic or whatever-istic superstition, are here carefully placed in cases and draw numerous visitors. But this is a museum and that is a different kind of apostolate.” Among the ten or twelve thousand visitors of 1956, many had never heard of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and many were not Catholic, “with which I mean to say: this is mission work too, and you can help us with it” (Ons Orgaan 42 [1957]: 9). When revealing even more ambitious plans in 1959—the addition of an “African village” and a “deep sea show”—Verdijk exhorted the missionaries in the field that “now is the time to bring or send something, since there will not be much to get a few years hence.” Verdijk then repeats his defense of this kind of mission work by reminding his colleagues of the results that emerged from the 30,000 visitors of 1958: “Several boys started their missionary studies, we found several people who wanted to support the missions as lay helpers, and visitors became benefactors of our missionaries, donated study grants for indigenous seminarians, shipments of goods, even a complete trousseau for a maternity ward at a mission” (Ons Orgaan 49 [1959]: 17–19; 50 [1959]: 16). In 1959, therefore, Verdijk clearly still felt the need to defend the Museum’s use for advancing “normal” aspects of mission work before he could solicit the support of those who collected for the Museum and tell them what collection criteria to adopt. In relation to the more neutral tone of the Museum’s visitor guide, which I will discuss shortly, it is interesting to see that those collection criteria did not differ radically from those of Bukkems: “especially old and used objects (even if damaged or dirty)” including masks, dance costumes, or fetishes; “everything concerning sorcerers and medicine-men, initiation, circumcision and marriage”; furniture, everyday tools, and utensils, musical instruments, old books, and good photographs. Like

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Bukkems, Verdijk was conscious of the commodity status of objects, telling contributors not to worry about costs (they would be reimbursed where necessary) or about sending in “doubles,” since these could be swapped with duplicate objects from other African mission Congregations. The only more professional move was that, contrary to Bukkems, Verdijk asked that his colleagues should add the name of the object in the native language, its meaning, the area from which it derived, its tribal origin, and, if it was old, its age (Ons Orgaan 49 [1959]: 17–19; 50 [1959]: 16). It is no longer possible to ask whether Verdijk meant the phrase that there would “not be much to get a few years hence” to refer to the expanding African art market, or to the diagnosis of his Provincial Superior, Father Blommaert, that Africa was beginning to “burn under [the missionaries’] feet.” Verdijk’s listing of specifically missionary benefits produced by the Museum seems optimistic in contrast to the knowledge that, in the late 1950s, Dutch Catholic missions, and Dutch Roman Catholicism as a whole, were entering a crisis from which they never fully recovered. The choice to start a museum was fed by other motives as well, but few Dutch Catholics doubted in the late 1950s that their practices were in a state of flux, and that more “modern” forms were needed, even if they could not foresee how fast the process of “de-pillarizing” Dutch society would go in the 1960s (but see Pels 1999: 77). Father Blommaert, in any case, hoped that efforts to recruit more novices and brothers would be helped by the “indirect propaganda by means of our mission museum.” Significantly, the Holy Ghost Fathers found that even two full years of museum work hardly allowed them to reach the same number of people as the AMATE exhibition did (see Figure 6.10)—yet they joined it by means of a large stand of the Afrika Museum’s ethnografica. Despite such innovations, “the secondary schools do not report any new vocations” (Ons Orgaan 44 [1957]: 11; also 49 [1959]: 17–19; 50 [1959]: 16). As “European paganism,” “Eastern communism,” and, perhaps even more insidiously, American consumerism increasingly undercut colonialism and vocations for the mission, the “Grand Mission Hour” of Dutch Catholics reached its end. In public, the likes of the contributors to the KRO documentary did not address this sense of crisis, invoking the “modernity” of Catholic missionizing instead, but in the pages of Ons Orgaan and inside the Museum the tensions of the “different apostolate” were palpable. Father Adriaan Hertsig, who was appointed to assist Verdijk in January 1958, found that the “mission-character” toward which Bukkems and his fellows had “heavily oriented” the Museum, was lacking in

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the exhibits. As bursar of Meerwijk, he was to straighten out financial difficulties with the new building, but he was also supposed to add his African experience, which no other member of the museum staff possessed (Verdijk and the students who assisted him “knew nothing at all”). Hertsig’s comment that exhibits failed to show the Museum’s missionary character because missionaries always sent in ancestral figurines, amulets, and the like—rather than a picture of their church or other “missionary things”—is notable: it not only brings out the decisive importance of the collection’s materials, but also identifies the collecting criteria of both Bukkems and Verdijk, who asked for precisely those “converted” items, as a source of tension within the “different apostolate.”21 Father Hertsig added that mission themes only came up in guided tours, suggesting again that the mission exhibitions’ performance through “tall tales” was composted into the Museum by the fact that the missionaries (but most likely Spiritan students too) gave those tours themselves (Welling 2002: 47). The tensions between missionary work and what Father Hertsig called the “cultural orientation” of Verdijk and his student assistants comes out in an interesting way in the discussion by one of these students of an object that fitted the only new category of object (apart from the “African village”—see the next section) in Verdijk’s 1959 list of requests to missionaries: “modern African art.” Johannes Muermans wrote in Africa Christo! that the “modern mission apostolate” increasingly felt the need for a deeper study of different peoples. He used an Angolan funeral statue collected by Father Jan Vissers to argue that its gesture of resignation before God showed the “unexpected depth” of African art and that Europeans had a lot to learn from them, even if they were thought to be “underdeveloped” (Muermans 1958).22 If this signals the “cultural” orientation deplored by Father Hertsig, Muermans’s discussion of an African crucifix shows another possible source of tension: Muermans not only deplored that the missionary who sent it in had a very low opinion of the tribe of the carver, but also that the sculpture was commissioned by the wife of a European colonial official. Even more, he regretted the disgust with which the crucifix was greeted by a visiting African novice, who preferred the white-skinned “kitsch” statues produced by the mission in Morogoro, Tanganyika over an authentic African product (Muermans 1957). The success of the mission could apparently also negate the possibility of authentic Afro-Christian art in the eyes of the newly converted.23 One gets a good sense of this more “cultural” orientation from the text of the visitor guide, the cover of which I discussed in the introduction to this chapter:24 it can only be identified as a “different form of

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apostolate” when one is armed with tools to interpret contemporary Catholic missionary culture—tools that, as I already indicated, many of the Museum’s visitors may have lacked. The folder’s text opens with the relativist statement that the term “primitive” does not imply a qualification or valuation, but simply denotes people whose history has not been written.25 This sets a note of value-free realism that, judging from the rest of the folder, was also maintained in the scenography of the museum itself (see also the next section). It starts with “the African and his means of existence,” singling out a “weird” planting stick whose form shows “that planting is a magical and religious occasion.” The guide then moves on to the “cult of the dead,” where the example of the funeral statue obtained by Father Jan Vissers and discussed by Muermans underscores once more, in a narrative that moves skillfully between recollection and ethnography, that it was this particular missionary’s African language skills, his respect for the elders, and the fact that he could persuade them that they should show Europeans the skills and wisdom of Africans, that allowed Vissers to acquire this object for the collection. As we shall see in the fourth section, this prefigured the typically Catholic transubstantiation of African objects that Father Gerard Pubben would propose in 1959. The third theme—“fetishism and ancestor worship”—is most clearly connected to the missionary message, because the text reduces a “fetish” to something that Africans are always afraid of. This is the theme of fear caused by paganism (whether through fetishes or sorcerers) that was a standard narrative of Catholic missions since the nineteenth century and was also repeated by Van Croonenburg in his “tall tale” about the nkisi during the television broadcast. Among Catholic visitors, it would have generated the frisson of recognition that one is in the presence of the diabolic. However, I think that the realist discourse—stating Africans’ fear as fact—most likely prevented many non-Catholic and secularized visitors from seeing the Catholic message behind the text. It seems, therefore, as if verbal (mis)representations—an authorizing recollection by Father Vissers, an oblique reminder of the Christian joy that replaces fetish and sorcerer, Van Croonenburg’s “tall tale” about the nails—were needed to make the exhibited collection publicly display missionary themes. The rest of the exhibition guide’s text remains neutral in the “objective” ethnographic sense we encountered earlier (also in Chapter 6). Yet the existence of the tensions within this “different apostolate” between mission work and realism suggests that the latter was adopted as a museum convention, rather than from an ethnographic commitment to listen to African voices. This realism acquired, just as in the muse-

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ums discussed in Chapter 5, a magical aura that is discussed in the next section.

Modernity, Professionalization, and the Magic of Realism Father Verdijk can also be seen as a founder of the museum, not just because he shared a “cultural” orientation with Father van Croonenburg, but perhaps even more so because he modernized the Museum by such innovations as the new building, the African village, and introducing temporary exhibitions. He also continued to professionalize its organization, and this section will show that both sets of innovations amplified significant materialities, or generated new ones, in the Museum’s public performance—modern magic and excessive objects that composted older themes, but also generated even more frictions with the apostolic. The professionalization and secularization of the organization, started with the setting up of the Museum Foundation in 1956, increasingly involved the Holy Ghost Fathers in new attractions for the public, in official recognition by the Dutch state (which adopted the Museum formally in 1987), and in national and international circuits of museum ethnography. This public momentum of the Museum developed in cooperation with the Fathers, but also relatively independently of its apostolic design, and Father Hertsig told me that his doubts whether the latter was sufficiently present, which I discussed in the previous section, were reinforced by new attractions (to be discussed shortly). I already recorded international contacts in the form of a donation of books by the Belgian Royal Academy of Colonial Sciences, but an overview of acquisitions of 1956 also lists three “king’s stools from Ashanti” acquired from the British Museum (Ons Orgaan 39 [1956]: 14). After permission for the new building was granted, it was officially opened by the Queen’s Provincial Commissioner on Easter 1958, accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Adriaan Gerbrands from the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden (Ons Orgaan 47 [1958]: 14). Gerbrands addressed, most appropriately given the theme of this section, a tension between “dubious greed” (bedenkelijke winzucht) in dealing with Africa, and an interest “beyond the material,” since ethnography was already practiced among Dutch slavers at Elmina in the seventeenth century (see Africa Christo! 54/4 [1958]: 13; for the latter ethnographies, see also Pels and Salemink 1999 and Chapter 3).

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The increasingly national mode of operation of the Museum and its Foundation becomes apparent from a history of the Museum written by Father Verdijk in July 1963 for the Congregation’s General Assembly in Rome: its Board is then chaired by Father Blommaert, the provincial superior, and he is joined by the Dutch Province’s bursar. The non-Spiritan members of the Board include Professor Dr. R. Mohr, of the Catholic University’s Ethnology Department, P. A. Frequin, the administrator of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, and H. Verburg, the director of the Art Academy in nearby Arnhem— the three members representing professional and secular standards in ethnology, museum administration, and education, respectively. Director Verdijk and Father Gerard Pubben, curator since June 1959, advise the Board, aided by P. H. Pott, director of the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden.26 In 1963, the collaboration with Mohr’s Ethnology Department was formalized, and increased the Museum’s academic functions by hosting the Department’s praktika on Africa from 1964 onwards. However, the recruiting of non-Spiritan members on the Foundation’s Board since 1956 does not seem to have been followed up by hiring non-Spiritan personnel until 1967. The Museum Foundation was taken over by the (secular) Provincial authorities in 1973, and the Museum itself was adopted and (partly) subsidized by the Ministry for Welfare, Health, and Culture (WVC) in 1987 (Eisenburger 1988: 37–39). Father Hertsig told me how his financial acumen was recruited to back up Verdijk, who had unwisely started constructing the new building without subsidy, and this must also have helped with managing the growth in number of visitors in 1958 (toward 30,000). Those were not the only material entanglements of Verdijk’s innovation drive: some were decidedly more spectacular. I opened this part of the book, with the Museum advertising itself as a magical transport to Africa, “lying close to Nijmegen” (Figure P3.1). Before 1958, the Museum still advertised with “the old mysterious Africa . . . caught in the grip of sorcery and superstition” (in 1957, quoted by Eisenburger 1988: 36), or with showing “dark Africa in an evocative way” (Wijdeveld 1956), which both seem appropriate to the early mission museum. From 1958 onwards, however, most advertisements held out that “a visit to this museum is like a sojourn among primitive peoples” where one can experience their “fears and joys” (21 July 1958) or offer “a trip through mysterious and interesting Africa”— inviting, like the 1959 advertisement in St. Jansklokken, a suspension of visitors’ reality to allow for the secular magic of virtual travel to someplace else.

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The photograph accompanying the article in St. Jansklokken shows that the material presence of the “African village” supported the suggestion of magical transport to Africa: it allowed a visceral experience of otherness comparable to what I discussed in Chapter 5 in terms of uncanny visitor relations with the diorama. In Berg en Dal, the “reallife” exhibit contained, among other things, a chief ’s house from Cameroon (on the left in Figure P3.1) and a “Morogoro-hut.” According to Father Verdijk’s history, the African village (negerdorp) was planned and executed in December 1958 (six months after the new building was opened), and received an additional boost when the Museum acquired a “Kongo-hut,” canoes and a tom-tom from the 1958 World’s Exposition in Brussels in January 1959.27 It was opened on June 6, 1959, by the Dutch Bishop of the Spiritans’ diocese of Doumé (in Cameroun), significantly by means of a “live” mimetic performance of Africa, that is, by a group of boy scouts who “played little negro” (negertje speelden) for the occasion (Ons Orgaan 51 [1959]: 13). Blackface-by-children was a regular event in Dutch Catholicism. One of the more intriguing aspects of the mimetic circulation that characterized Dutch Catholics’ efforts for the missions was the annual celebration of the day of the Holy Childhood, where processions allowed children to dress up as priests, nuns, and, indeed, “little negroes” (among other to be converted peoples; see Figure 7.4).28 It is interesting to reflect on the question of authenticity in these paired

Figure 7.4. Two boys in blackface during the Feast of the Holy Childhood in 1954. They are flanked by two boys in “Chinese” dress. © Missio, used with permission. Thanks to the Catholic Documentation Center, Nijmegen, for providing the digital image.

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forms of mimicking “Africa,” one carried by building materials and the other by children’s bodies, for they display a form of the double consciousness that we also found in other modern social relations (Chapters 2 and 5). The first public announcement of the African village firmly ties it to the context of childlike attractions and “curiosities”: at the end of the report in Africa Christo! that detailed the official opening of the new building and Gerbrands’s professional reflections on the history of Dutch ethnography of Africa, a final comment states that “to keep impatient children busy, the Fathers have laid out a small menagerie in the garden of the museum, with exotic animals and birds. A few authentic negro huts will also be erected. As soon as the materials are present, they will be built, painted and furnished by an African expert” (Africa Christo! 54/4 [1958]: 13). The references to children and an authenticity guaranteed by an “African expert” indicate modern double consciousness because of the way it ties the acquisition of knowledge (the Museum’s need to teach about “Africa”) to the experience of exotic spectacle. Analogous to my discussion in Chapter 2, the advertisements seem, on the one hand, a well-understood joke:29 “of course we moderns are not like children,” who can believe temporarily that they are magically transported to Africa by an object or building that we have classified and constructed as such. On the other, modern people constantly perform, in advertisements as well as museums, cinema, and other forms of entertainment, statements and “authentic” materials that mimic that we do act with such childish naiveté. Such double consciousness is shown once we juxtapose the article in Africa Christo! about the new building of the museum with the public advertisements about the open-air exhibit: the article emphasizes, at first, the “broader view” that the Museum’s “different” apostolate offers understanding for and sympathy with Africans rather than focuses on converting them. Via the description of its professional museum background (in the person of guest lecturer Gerbrands), the article ends by telling its adult audience that they can bring their children too—even if they do not share the goal of learning to sympathize with Africans through acquiring knowledge about them—because the distractions of a menagerie and soon also of an “African village” are available. If I may ventriloquize the writer’s intentions, the magic of an immersion in the open-air part of the museum through play is thought to be permissible when approached in the innocent and childlike attitude of wonder. (Note that scholars since Edmund Burke attempted to infantilize curiosity and wonder around 1800: see the discussion in Chapter 5 and Thomas [1991: 127–28]).

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In the final passage of the article, however, a twist occurs: an additional (and presumably more adult) justification for this wonderful visceral experience is provided: the huts will be built with authentic materials and by “African experts.” While evidence remains circumstantial, there is little reason to doubt the Museum’s efforts at producing such authenticity: the presence of the Bishop of a Cameroonian diocese at the opening shows that the Cameroonian chief ’s house in Berg en Dal might well have been built with assistance of his priests or their parishioners; and it is a good guess that the “Morogoro hut” was built with the knowledge provided by Luguru students for the priesthood visiting Nijmegen at the time (see note 23). The irony of this sort of authenticity is, of course, that these apprentice priests were quite likely similar to so-called évolués whose lack of appreciation of indigenous African Christian art was deplored by Muermans (Muermans 1957). In their home area, such well-educated Waluguru and their families were, in any case, replacing the “Morogoro-hut” itself by a modern mud-brick Swahili-type house (see Pels 1999: 173).30 Whatever the buildings’ “authentic” origins, however, double consciousness is suggested by these twinned passages because one can hardly suppose that the argument about authentic materials and African experts was directed at the children who were supposed to play among these buildings. Childlike innocence can mediate this double consciousness because the excessive curiosity of a child is allowed to cross the boundary of the “as if ” by mimicking the representation as a reality—perhaps (and this is not a trivial observation) because we grant children the “wonderful” possibility that modern people often deny to adults: that acting “as if ” may lead to genuine knowledge and education (see the conclusion to this chapter). The as-if “reality” of the child is, in this modern context, often subordinate or subaltern; yet even then, it proves that the Afrika Museum displayed this subdominant tendency toward the magic of realism that (as I argued in Chapter 5) also characterized North Atlantic exhibitionary complexes as a whole, ever since they were invented in the nineteenth century. (And if my own, perhaps childlike, curiosity when visiting the much-expanded open-air museum in the past decades can count as evidence, it still does.) There is, in any case, nothing particularly Catholic or missionary about it: it goes together with the basic professionalism that we associate with secular—indeed, realist—museums. Museum realism fetishizes—everywhere. Nevertheless, this was a kind of material enchantment that fed Father Hertsig’s worries about the missionary character of the Afrika Museum itself.31

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In 1958, however, another advertisement suggested that subaltern museum enchantments would also appeal to adults: it said that the Afrika Museum was “more than a museum. It is a breathtaking revelation of a completely unknown and strange world.” The statement clearly is meant to feed the expectation that, firstly, the museum appeals by exotic excess (“more than”), and secondly, that it will viscerally capture the visitor (“breathtaking”). This becomes particularly clear from responses to the first two temporary exhibitions in 1959 (“Mother and Child” and “Animal Motifs”), which indicated to its later director that the Afrika Museum had realized a “modern and open museum policy” (Eisenburger 1988: 36). The comments by R. E. Penning, a critic from the Haagse Courant, suggest that “modern” and “open” also included adult enchantments: Penning recommended the exhibitions by saying that they showed art that might be “alien” (wezensvreemd) but is nevertheless “fascinating.” This is partly because the “old Adam” in us feels affinity with the “primitive” in African sculpture; yet the sculptures appealed to him in particular by their “mysterious impenetrability” (geheimzinnige ondoorgrondelijkheid)— making them equal to the best art from other cultures (quoted in Welling 2002: 49). This secular aesthetic shows a set of modalities of the exotic as contradictory as they are encompassing: both alien and close, impenetrable and “art,” it fascinates—raises wonder—by its undisclosed secrets. It presupposes a dimension in excess of ordinary ethnographic information (if that is defined as a transparent disclosure of knowledge, rather than a performance of opaqueness or secrecy). Penning thereby pointed to a manifestation of wonder that would be coupled to a kind of Catholic “ecstatic” knowledge—of going “out of our minds”—which I will address in the next section (see Fabian 2000, 2001: 119). Despite the qualms expressed by Father Hertsig, it would tie the Afrika Museum’s exhibits to a recognizably Catholic—if perhaps not strictly speaking “missionary”—perspective in the years to come.

Fetish into Art? Announcing the Museum’s new summer season of 1959, an article in Africa Christo! exhorted its readers to be aware that the Holy Church’s interest in Africa also implies “mission-love” (missieliefde), something that contrasts sharply—the article suggests—with the more fashionable interest in Africa currently displayed by “world politics, communism and Islam.” Without knowledge, the article continues, it is hard

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to love Africa. At this point, its writer employs a familiar trope: since we cannot go there ourselves, the Afrika Museum has been founded to bring people “in contact with the Africa that now raises so much interest.” A new season is starting, and new exhibitions await visitors, who will therefore leave with an enriched knowledge of, but also with “more love in your heart” for Africa (Africa Christo! 55/2 [1959]: 33). This, of course, is partly advertisement: a ploy to get the Holy Ghost Fathers’ regular supporters (who subscribed to Africa Christo!) to visit the museum more than once. But it is advertising with a difference: the magic of realism is here put in the service of a sympathy that, in Catholic circles, is often phrased as a Divine imperative: “Love!”—just like the title of the AMATE mission exhibition (see Figure 6.10). This section argues that “Love!” gave a typically Catholic, positive twist to excessive experiences at the Africa Museum and formed the main pivot of the process of “transubstantiating” converted artifacts from Africa into artistic African voices at the Museum. While Father Verdijk’s 1957 addition of the category of “African art” to his list of desiderata from the missions was therefore visionary, there is no other evidence that identifies him as the author of this transformation, except that it seems to take place in the first half of 1959. We can be sure, however, that Father Gerard Pubben, his new curator from June 1959 onwards, formulated ideas about the Museum’s objects’ capacity to speak for themselves, ideas that composted as well as transformed missionary actions in the Museum. To describe this, however, as a linear process of “fetish” or “idol” into art (Leyten 2015; Silva 2017) would miss the complex magic and the Catholic spirituality that the transformation required. But to understand how this transformation would brand the Museum’s identity for the next fifty years, we need to flash forward to 1978 first. The 1970s were years of critical change for many ethnographic museums in the Netherlands, and in 1978 the then director of the Afrika Museum, Maria van Gaal, and her adjunct Ineke Eisenburger instituted a task force to respond to it by significantly reformulating the Museum’s aims. The Museum, they argued, possessed a “very important” collection that expressed the worldview and vision of life of “traditional African humanity.” This vision of the world was “religious,” and the Afrika Museum had to emphasize this religiosity (Eisenburger 1988: 38). The contrast with the Society of African Missions’ Africa Centre at Cadier en Keer shows the significance of this choice at the time: in the same year, Father Frits van Trigt passed away, and his former amanuensis Harrie Leyten advised the Society of African Missions to switch from Van Trigt’s emphasis on art to the Amsterdam Tropen-

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museum’s emphasis on the linear narratives of development cooperation. Five years earlier, the Tropenmuseum had responded to Secretary of Development Cooperation Udink’s offer to give money to those ethnographic museums that would bring development aid to the attention of the public.32 In contrast, Van Gaal and Eisenburger argued that the religious emphasis of the Afrika Museum implied that they would not pay attention to politics and economics except when they were related to religion, and would refrain from discussing development work except when mediated by African mentality and modes of thought (Eisenburger 1988: 38). As a result, the two main missionary centers for African art started to diverge in their styles of display. In Cadier en Keer, African objects were thought to be too traditional to give good expression to modernization (Eggen 1988b: 52). In Berg en Dal, it was the object that, mysteriously, should express an African voice. Knowing this, we should flash back again to the temporary exhibition on “Animal Motifs” in April 1959. A typewritten explanation of the exhibition (author and position unknown) was still recognizably Catholic and missionary, but from within it, a consciousness of how an African voice can speak through objects to a Dutch audience seems to emerge. It starts with a classification of “primitive art” as something that has to be approached differently than Western or Eastern art.33 Africans, the text elaborates, live in a different climate, where plants and animals show nature “at its most exaggerated and hellish” (het meest overdreven, het meest hels). Therefore, Africans try to control the powers of these living things by naming them and expressing them in statues and figurines. These objects are not meant to accurately represent “what it is” but to show “how it is.” They express these powers of nature and thereby become a “real god or spirit” surrounded by “fear, uncertainty and mystery.” Yet as we Westerners serve them with attention, we also recognize in those figures something of the mysterious, often scary world in and around us. As we see how truly and skillfully everything is expressed, we surrender ourselves to this art however alien it is to us.34

While the “conversion” motif of Bukkems—the “scary world” of an “African” traditional worldview—is still recognizably present, it is now turned into an “alien” source of mystery to which one should “surrender” oneself. This is the wonder and exoticism that the critic of the Haagse Courant, R. E. Penning, also discovered, and his recognition of how this distinguishes the Afrika Museum from many others seems visionary when compared to the decision to focus on African art made by Van Gaal’s and Eisenburger’s task force almost twenty years later:

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It seems only a matter of time before these works of art in geographic and ethnographic museums (musea voor land- en volkenkunde) will be untied from instructional and educational materials, from rubberproduction and tobacco-culture, to take their equal place next to Egyptian, Greek and Asian sculpture. (Penning quoted in Welling 2002: 49)

However, Penning’s advocacy of a shift from development to the wonders of art seems to miss that the “surrender” to the exotic proclaimed in the “Animal Motifs” exhibition guide was crucially mediated by Catholic spirituality and a refiguration of the relationship between the sacred and the profane: it produced a recognition that was thought to allow African objects to “speak” to a Dutch audience. This recognition, as we shall see, was echoed thirty-three years later by Ineke Eisenburger. However, I hesitate to adopt the use of the word “religious” from Van Gaal and Eisenburger in the latter’s reflections on what happened in 1978: not only may the word carry North Atlantic meanings that do not necessarily apply to practices on the African continent (Engelke 2015, Meyer 2020), it also seems to simplify what happened at the Afrika Museum—as the conclusion to this chapter will discuss in more detail. In any case, it should be clear that the choices made in the late 1970s were only the culmination of different trajectories followed by the Afrika Museum’s exhibitionary practice, and they cannot simply be attributed to the second tenure of Father Jan van Croonenburg as curator (since 1967) and his notion of the African’s “repartee” (weerwoord). Van Croonenburg shared, at least until 1958, in Piet Bukkems’s missionary zeal. We have seen that missionaries with African experience (Fathers De Rooij and Loogman) brought in ethnographic knowledge, and possibly reinforced the focus on “Africa” as a label. Father Verdijk may have lacked this knowledge but welcomed it, and was thought to have a more “cultural” orientation, and he also initiated the temporary exhibition that produced the guide quoted above. Father Gerard Pubben, however, explicitly articulated the exhibitionary philosophy that may seem embryonic in the “Animal Motifs” exhibition in April 1959, after he was appointed as curator under Father Verdijk on 2 June 1959. Pubben introduced his approach to African art more than once by the story of a fertility bird sculpture of the Vatchiwokwe, the people among whom he had worked in Angola (“for 22 years,” as the texts usually added; Pubben 1962, van Aerde 1960). The story’s form replicates the missionary recollections that were standard fare at mission exhibitions: “One morning I opened the door of my hut” (Pubben 1962: 266). He saw a woman giving maize meal to a wooden

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bird stuck on the roof and wondered why. Elders told him the reason: the woman had been married for a year and was still not pregnant. Kalunga, the Supreme Being of the Vatchiwokwe, had once sent a fertility bird to the single woman who lived on earth to enable her to procreate. “Then I understood,” Pubben wrote, the gesture was that of “a helpless creature supplicating his Creator” (Pubben 1962: 267). In an interview published in the popular weekly Katholieke Illustratie, this message is still missionary, in the sense that “the world of magic begs for salvation” (as a caption to a picture of African divination in the article states). But it also quotes Pubben as saying that missionization in Africa has too often neglected to “recognize the people’s own [way of life],” and that a moment of great insight occurred to him when his language skills had advanced to the extent that he understood his carriers to sing “we are only children of the ants”—after which he refused to be carried in a sedan chair (van Aerde 1960: 31). That explains why Pubben saw this recognition as a form of psychological decolonization—of himself, but in extension, of the Museum’s visitors. Invoking the notion of “life-force” popularized by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, but also taken up later by African scholars (Tempels 1945; Mbiti [1969] 1990: 10), Pubben then argued that the sculptures in which this (desire for) life has been expressed should not be seen as representations (voorstellingen) of dark and higher creatures, but as incorporating them, being them—material mimesis. This interpretation of African objects is then broadened to ancestral worship in general and, just as in the introduction to the Animal Motifs exhibition, related to how the Dutch Catholic may recognize this lifeforce: “Who does not think here of concepts like the community of saints, communion, the Mystical Body?” (van Aerde 1960: 32). Even if we sometimes see the philosophy of such force in “demonic, distorted” form in, for example, African magic and witchcraft, we should “love our enemies” and try to understand what they are saying (van Aerde 1960: 33). In a later article, Pubben makes his spiritual take on African art even more explicit: if we “meet and admire these cultural expressions solely in aesthetic terms, we short-change them.” Instead—and here the transformation through Divine Love is most immediate—“an honest openness, observing with the eye grafted on to our hearts, enables us to enter Africa deeper, to love it but in a way that also allows Africa to love us”—and, thus, perhaps decolonize our own inner being. Divine Love allows us, Pubben wrote, to recognize African cultural expressions in museums as “more honest” reporters than the stories he himself can tell (Pubben 1962: 266–67). Instead

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of being ventriloquized by the missionary at a traveling exhibition, now the objects seem to speak for themselves. Compare Pubben’s view to the aesthetic perspective adopted by Jan van Croonenburg in the TV-documentary in 1958: the latter said that objects hide “very cruel, unchristian” meanings behind their “magnificent” manufacture, but for Pubben they signify “honestly,” as a cultural expression to be listened to. Van Croonenburg had clearly moved closer to Pubben’s views when he returned to the Museum in Berg en Dal in 1967 and, in a radio speech, subordinated his joy at collecting African art to the chance to have objects offer the African an “honest” opportunity of “a repartee” (quoted in Weinhold 2002a: 11). Ineke Eisenburger later attributed this 1960s change in the Museum’s presentations to Van Croonenburg and described it as a shift from amazement (verwondering) about the customs and mysteries of people from the “dark” continent to admiration (bewondering) of their artistic qualities (Weinhold 2002a: 11). While I think it may be more appropriate to attribute this aesthetic and spiritual shift to Pubben’s curatorial use of his experiences in Africa, the distinction is a good way to describe the two modalities of the exotic at play here, especially since in Dutch, “wonder” is at the root of both. In the conclusion to this chapter, I will discuss how amazement may still be closer to wonder’s amoral phase (a “mystery” that may still turn into abjection) while admiration turns positive because of the essential ingredient of Divine Love. In other words, Pubben moved the converted artifact away from Bukkems’s and Van Croonenburg’s initial repugnance of “fetishes.” When Jan van Croonenburg returned to the Museum for the first time since his efforts turned Piet Bukkems’s Museum into a success in 1955–56, he brought his secretary, Ineke Eisenburger, whose affinity for Africa he had cultivated by involving her in the collecting and study of African ethnographic objects—with the result that she would leave only more than forty years later, after succeeding him as director. Shortly after she started working for Van Croonenburg as a sixteenyear-old at the Central Mission Commissariat in The Hague in 1962, she saw African statues standing on a cupboard in Van Croonenburg’s office that, as she recalled in 2002, “wanted to be noticed by me just as they had noticed me” (quoted in Weinhold 2002a: 15). It is not surprising, therefore, that she also perceived a “life-force” in objects that, indeed, forces you to notice them by an agency of their own. Eisenburger became the adjunct to the new director, Maria van Gaal, in 1970, and started to study ethnology in Nijmegen around the same time that director Van Gaal welcomed Senegalese President Léopold Senghor and Queen Juliana to what was then the national “Museum

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of the Year.” This happened at the same time that the government tried to persuade Dutch ethnographic museums to popularize development cooperation. The Catholic University of Nijmegen was, together with the University of Amsterdam, the strongest bulwark of Dutch critical anthropology in the 1970s (Pels 2002b: 373), and Eisenburger must therefore have confronted—and as we may surmise, possibly resisted—its tendency to promote development cooperation and its political or economic engagement. Some effects of adapting to a world in which African countries had become independent became visible when the Museum removed the glass from the exhibition cases in 1972 (“to remove barriers between those differently oriented”; Eisenburger 1983: 42), and when the Catholic “competition” in the Africa Centre at Cadier en Keer moved the artistic value of objects more and more aside in favor of its development cooperation exhibits (Eggen 1988b: 50; but see note 32). I already referred to the reformulation of the aims of the Museum by the 1978 task force, in which Eisenburger assisted director Van Gaal to aim the Museum more explicitly at disseminating “religious” meanings carried by African objects. Whether this was related to the fact that the park and open-air exhibit became increasingly dilapidated in 1973 is not clear (Eisenburger 1988: 39). Eisenburger graduated in anthropology in 1981 and succeeded Maria van Gaal as director in 1989 (after the open-air part of the Museum had been restored and reopened by Prince-consort Claus in 1986; Weinhold 2002a: 13). In an interview published two years before the Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, and eight years before her retirement, Eisenburger returned to the “dialogue with things” that she first experienced in Van Croonenburg’s office. She held this dialogue at least partly responsible for her collecting and exhibition choices: seeing a gorgeous bead or a beautiful pipe, or even being forced to stay in a hospital, could help her decide on specific exhibition topics and collecting activities. When asked whether that does not result in a loose and arbitrary collection, Eisenburger answered that the collection “was not only brought together by knowledge, eye for quality and ethnographic significance, but especially by what fell to us [wat ons is toegevallen]” (quoted in Weinhold 2002a: 17). This affirms that professional and rational connoisseurship characterized the Afrika Museum’s operations as much as any other—confirming how all its directors and curators underscored its “modernity”—yet shows that Eisenburger clearly also perceived an external agency, mediated by the object’s (or her own embodied) materiality, that determined her choices and the Museum’s identity and collection before her:

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It’s a kind of trust in the workings of what I, from my Catholic upbringing, call the Holy Ghost, but that can equally be compared to African thoughts about powers. . . . Today, many people would say that “Energy is everywhere, you just have to plug in!” (quoted in Weinhold 2002a: 15)

Here, the concept of “life-force” which Pubben borrowed from Placide Tempels returns in a form recognizable to Christians and New Agers alike, as both the Holy Ghost and New Age “energy.” This leads us to further examine the proposition that Catholics may see things differently, at least at this museum of “Africa.”

Conclusion Do Catholics see things differently? The findings in this chapter suggest the question can be answered by an equally resounding yes and no—and requires an important follow-up question, by which I end the conclusion to this chapter. If “transubstantiation,” when applied to the Catholic Mass, means a transformation of the value of profane material—bread, wine—into a sacrament—the body of Christ to be incorporated by communion—then it seems legitimate to apply the term to the reverse process as well: the conversion of sacred objects to profane rubbish.35 Yet, once we allow the vector of sacred and profane to determine the materiality of these relationships (see Chapter 4), the boundaries of so-called religion become fragile and permeable. As Emile Durkheim argued, the classification of sacred and profane includes, on the side of the sacred, both the divine and the demonic (Durkheim [1912] 1965: 53). He also drew the conclusion that this focus on the sacred makes it difficult to draw clear boundaries between religion and magic. We may add that opposing sacred to profane values equally threatens the boundaries between religion and the secular, if the latter are to include secular enchantments like commodity fetishism and the magic of realism—both heavily inflected, as this book tries to show, by the passion for wonder and curiosity that is enabled by the spirit of matter. A critical discussion of the Museum’s shift from amazement (verwondering) to admiration (bewondering) that Ineke Eisenburger attributed to Father van Croonenburg may clarify the ambiguities indicated by the word that stands at the root of both Dutch terms: wonder. In a prelude to the book that celebrated fifty years of collecting at the Afrika Museum (entitled Vormen van verwondering; English title Forms of Wonderment), Wilfried van Damme starts with the theme of

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recognition that we have encountered with Pubben and Eisenburger earlier: that African objects display a wonder and amazement at the conditions and mysteries of existence, and that the collection of such forms in turn generates wonder and amazement in their new audience (van Damme 2002: 25). This acquaintance with the “animating power” (bezielende kracht) of such forms forced, according to Van Damme, the missionaries to understand the worldviews of Africans and thereby to relativize their own. The point of gravity of the Museum lies with “the acquisition of knowledge of African perceptions of the world and humanity, and the attempt to transmit this knowledge through exhibitions and publications” (van Damme 2002: 25). While the phrase “animating power” suggests that we still have to delve deeper into what may distinguish “animation” and animism from the “power” of objects to fetishize (see Chapter 3), Van Damme clearly focuses on acquiring knowledge of “others” by an unspecified “us.” I read Ulrike Weinhold’s contribution to the same book as arguing precisely the opposite: that the museum is not primarily about the problem of knowledge of authentic “other” identities, but about “contact” between self and other (Weinhold 2002b: 366). Once we write captions saying “Africans believe that . . .” or “this is a symbolic expression of . . .” then “we” take a distance from both the objects on display and the Africans who produced them. Weinhold counters this by arguing that we should look upon an exhibition as an “artificial and fantastic” way of changing our sense of reality instead (2002b: 368, 374, my emphasis). Ethnographic museums, instead of competing with scientific “objectivity,” offer a realm of enchantment (Weinhold 2002b: 375), which to me suggests Pratt’s space of “anti-contest.” Weinhold, therefore, seems to stress wonder as amazement (verwondering), which requires the mimesis of an external agent that stops the viewers in their tracks by enchanting them into another “sense of reality,” while Van Damme discusses a more domesticated form of wonder, admiration (bewondering), which is predicated on the “resonance” that comes with the familiarization with representations of the “larger world” for which the object of the “other” stands (see Greenblatt 1990: 19 and my discussion in Chapter 5). In Van Damme’s view, the “other” is not a “contact” or agent, but a classification of alterity (“African”). Both views invoke “wonder,” but Weinhold’s focus on amazement celebrates the mystery of a mimesis of the exotic, the lack of purchase that spectators have on the object of their gaze, and the visceral sense of being “touched” by the object without—as yet—knowing how (“touch” is the root of “contact”: see

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Pels 1999: 25). Admiration, in contrast, requires recognition, memory and/or acknowledgment (Fabian 2000: 227), or, in Greenblatt’s terms, the “resonance” of representations and norms. The history of the Afrika Museum seems to prove that (pace Van Damme) its forms of recognition may require knowledge, but also something in excess of it, since they evoke a common mystical ground— what Pubben discussed as the “Mystical Body of Christ,” Eisenburger referred to as the Holy Ghost, life-force, or “Energy,” and Weinhold captures by the term “enchantment.”36 So what makes this excess in the experience of museum objects typically “Catholic”? The transubstantiation of an object into museum values was first effected by Bukkems’s description of the converted artifact as “rubbish,” whose character as a possibly diabolical “fetish” nevertheless made it “remarkable” for a Dutch Catholic audience. Van Croonenburg’s 1958 gesture that turned the “magnificent” aesthetics of the material nkisi nkondi into a cover hiding a traditional religion full of “fear and revenge” shows a similar double consciousness, since its attempt to divest the material object of occult power did not strip away its exhibitionary value—a sacrality also bestowed by the label “heritage”—for an audience at the same time. In other words, having lost the “animism” of its presumed original location (even if by a diabolical spirit), the object’s affordances retained a measure of “fetishist” agency (cf. Chapter 3). The possibility of interlocution that was already announced by the “I am Black” of the documentary title was materialized by the subsequent transubstantiation of the Afrika Museum’s objects into the value of Divine Love. Initially effected by the first temporary exhibition and Pubben, and later by Van Croonenburg’s “repartee,” it reduced this double consciousness and reamplified the objects’ “animism” by an external spirit: the Mystical Body of Christ, the Holy Ghost, coupled to African notions of a “life-force.” In a typically Catholic fashion, this gave objects an independent voice, while the Museum thereby turned into a space of “anti-contest” that should allow a (partial) decolonization of the Dutch visitors’ minds.37 If both forms of transubstantiation were ways to routinize wonder (see Chapter 5), Bukkems’s mission-museum tried to suppress the “fetishist” subalternity of the object and use it at the same time, while the shift—in nonlinear fits and starts—toward a museum of “Africa” allowed forms of interlocution that seem in retrospect more “animist” and transparent. However, this also demonstrates that this “most modern museum of the Netherlands” was not fully determined by Catholic perceptions, since modernization presupposed that, next to reinventing Catholic culture, the Museum also had to import the materialities and en-

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chantments of capitalist spectacle and the authenticity of display and knowledge that they required from scientific research and education. A first trajectory of secularization happened because making a museum produce revenue requires visitors, and this replaced the “collecting-bag” of missionary propaganda by commodifying the museum: turning it into an item for visitors’ consumption in exchange for entrance fees. This turned a gift-economy largely based on voluntary sacrifice into the need for selling images of the museum as well as souvenirs of a visit. Since the sacrificial economy of Dutch Catholicism included the hope that gifts—including the sacrifice of one’s child to a missionary career—would be amply repaid in the hereafter (Pels 1999: 54), this can be interpreted as replacing sacred reciprocity with a profane market relationship.38 A second trajectory of secularization took place in the field of collecting, where, again, gifts of objects from missionaries to the Museum (only repaid when costs where high)39 were accompanied, and gradually replaced by the missionaries’ and Museum staff ’s involvement in the African art market, represented by Van Croonenburg’s early forays into collecting African art. A third trajectory may be related to the second, although my sources rarely connect collecting with writing (missionary) ethnographies except through the figure of Father De Rooij “identifying” objects in the Museum: the accumulation of knowledge that was required to affirm that the Museum’s objects, and its accompanying stories “authentically” represent “Africa.” Authenticity was affirmed in different ways. The mere material presence of the missionary telling “tall tales” served as its initial anchor for a Dutch audience during mission exhibitions. Composted into the “modern” museum, Van Croonenburg’s comments on the nkisi adopted the fictions of colonial ethnography, but one should note that even the academic circles in which Adriaan Gerbrands moved in 1958 had not shed such fictional presuppositions themselves—the critique of colonial ethnography would not gain much momentum among North Atlantic scholars before the 1970s and 1980s (Pels 2014a). It is perhaps more important to stress that the Museum most clearly performed its modernity and its authenticizing and secularizing rationality by repeating North Atlantic narratives of museum history of having left behind cabinets of curiosity, collections of rarities, and sensational horrors (see Chapter 5). However, just like nineteenthand twentieth-century exhibitions undermined their “modernist” conceits by displaying torture instruments and “live” spectacles, Van Croonenburg used the nkisi in precisely the sensational ways that he abjured in other statements in 1958.

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The market imperative of advertisement, as we have seen, required such spectacle, not only by fetishizing the Museum as commodity by advertising the promise of a magical transportation to “Africa” but also by enhancing the embodiment of such mimesis by the African village. There was nothing specifically Catholic to this, and I suspect this may not even explain the composting of the mimicking of people of color by children during the day of the Holy Childhood into the mimesis of Africans during the opening of the open-air exhibits at the Museum. The double consciousness manifested by infantilizing, on the one hand, these open-air exhibits, and emphasizing, on the other, their authenticity by original materials and the supervision of “African experts,” is common fare, as this book tries to demonstrate, in everyday modern social life. The childhood recollections of an anthropologist friend from Nijmegen, however, suggest a deeper layer that I already hinted at earlier: while he recalls the wonder of the “nail-fetish” and the delights of playing “cowboy and Indian” and hide-and-seek that were offered by the open-air section of the Museum, he also wondered whether this didn’t install in him a curiosity for the exotic that would determine his further career.40 I have often wondered whether the two of us, both children of a secularized Catholic upbringing, would not have joined a missionary congregation, had we both been born in the earlier age of Dutch Catholic mission fervor: we would not have been the only ones whose childhood play at “cowboy and Indian” resulted in a missionary vocation (see Pels 1999: 52). More profoundly, it may signal a deeper layer of a children’s playground capacity for generating wonder: it might prefigure the space of “anti-contest” that was also formed by the museum, by sacralizing objects to a dominant audience by the mere material gesture of singling out another “heritage” for display (cf. Meyer and De Witte 2013: 277). However, if displays of the exotic could generate a kind of serious play among adults as well, this leaves a big question unanswered— one I hinted at repeatedly in this chapter, as well as in the previous two: what does the exotic label—“Africa”—itself do to these processes of routinizing wonder and providing it with the resonance of collective representations? Father de Rooij and his colleagues in the East African mission must have had their reasons for thinking that “Africa” represented a sound unit of ethnographic study, but as I argued elsewhere, conferring the label cannot escape being a political gesture— however much it aimed at creating a space without contest—once we realize that its meanings vary from referring to a continent, to a place restricted to the south of the Sahara (that is, where mostly Black people live), to a much wider diaspora that has a global presence across

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the Atlantic as well as the Indian Ocean (Pels 2004). This raises the question of how visitors interpreted “Africa.” Even more, how is this classification of the exotic—a representation—related to the forms of material mimesis that anchor the routinizations of wonder in modern exhibitionary complexes? Put differently, did visitors “interpret” its meanings at all, or merely experience the Museum as entertainment? The next chapter concludes this part of the book by turning to the problem of how North Atlantic mimesis of “others”—a flipside of what Bhabha called “colonial mimicry,” but now from a position of power—may help to seek out an answer.

Notes 1. Some of the quotes in this chapter employ terms that are offensive to many people, yet were in common use in the 1950s. In the interests of scientific validity, I have let them stand, but want to apologize if they cause pain or embarrassment. 2. All translations from Dutch sources are mine, unless indicated otherwise. 3. Wim Bary and Jan Willem Hofstra: Vademecum: Zwart ben ik, maar schoon. Talk show with Jan Willem Hofstra, KRO, 17 September 1958. 4. See the great variety of meanings and powers attached to minkisi in Leyten’s account (2015: 49–64). 5. I put “Africa” between inverted commas to question the meanings of this classification (see the conclusion to Part III). 6. The attribution “initiation mask” sits uneasily with Kramer’s discussion of similar objects as BaPende mbuya or ancestral images (1993: 181). 7. Loffeld and Van Dam taught future missionaries at Dutch institutions, while Van Croonenburg worked at the Central Mission Commissariat, which coordinated shipments to and from the mission areas. Van Croonenburg probably started collecting African objects while working at the CMC. 8. The late Gerd Baumann made my clumsy translation from the Dutch presentable in 1996. Original: Toen in grauwe oertijd God de dingen schiep/ schiep hij de zon -/En zij ontstaat en vergaat en keert weer/schiep Hij de maan -/En zij ontstaat en vergaat en keert weer/schiep Hij de mens -/En hij ontstaat en vergaat en keert nooit weer. 9. I put “religion” in quotation marks because the concept is overdetermined by North Atlantic genealogies of meaning, especially those constructed at the time of the emergence of the study of “world religions” in the nineteenth century, which denied to all “religions” their universal claims (Masuzawa 2005). The concept may be inappropriate for African practices of worship (Engelke 2015, Meyer 2020). In this chapter, I try to use “religion” and “religious” as Indigenous concepts of the Afrika Museum’s staff. See also Chapter 8.

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10. For an account of his missionary adventures in Uluguru, see Pels (1999: 1–5). 11. This proves that Bukkems founded the Museum. Father van Croonenburg was its second director (1955–56) and was influential in redirecting the course of the Museum when he returned between 1967 and 1972. In the documentary, Van Croonenburg did not mention Bukkems but named himself as “one of the founders.” 12. The late Father Joop Hogema kindly sent me an extract from the Berg en Dal 1954 diary published in Spinet of April 1994 (the successor bulletin to Ons Orgaan). When not otherwise referenced, information about the museum’s history is derived from scrap-books with advertisements, typewritten material, and newspaper articles held in the Museum’s archive. I thank the then Director, Ineke Eisenburger, for letting me work on this material in 1989–90. I am also grateful for additional support of later research in 2019 and 2021 by Marit Jacobs and her colleagues. 13. An ideological tendency that is also illustrated by the neglect of the museum shop as constitutive of a museum’s material make-up (see Kratz and Karp 1993: 42, n. 10). 14. This collection became the basis of the Africa Centre of the SMA when it moved to Cadier en Keer in 1959 (see Leyten 2015: 6–7). Like Van Croonenburg, Van Trigt never went to Africa, but he also directed the Africa Centre toward an appreciation of African art. 15. Critique mentioned in De Volkskrant, 27 April 1957; “rarities” by Muermans (1958). 16. Still visible today at Steyl, the natural history section of the 1934 scenography overpowers the rest. 17. Wijdeveld’s use of “we” seems inappropriate: he was not an ordained Father or initiated Brother. 18. J. Mittelmeyer in “Ontginning” Ons Erf (Berg en Dal), consulted in the Afrika Museum’s archive in 1989. 19. “Interest” translates the Dutch belangstelling, which also may connote “sympathy.” 20. The Dutch rariteit not only evokes the “rare” of the English “rarity” but also the Dutch word for “weird” (raar). 21. Interview with Father Adriaan Hertsig, Gemert, 25 May 1990. 22. The use of “underdeveloped” here does not seem related to the missionaries’ development work (since the later 1960s) but a secularization of the term “pagan.” It may therefore lack the techno-fetishist meaning of the term that President Harry Truman introduced in his Point Four speech of 1949 (Esteva 1996: 7; on techno-fetishism, see Chapter 9). 23. This “Indigenous” student for the priesthood was most likely Adrian Mkoba, who visited the Netherlands around this time and became the first African bishop of Morogoro diocese in 1967. For authentic AfroChristian art that is much older than the majority of objects in the Afrika Museum’s collection, see Fromont (2014).

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24. I have no evidence it was written by Verdijk, but it was certainly published under his authority. 25. There were alternatives to the pejorative connotations of “primitive” at the time: “prehistoric,” denying Africans a place in our present; or the more neutral “non-literate.” “Primitive” was still in use among Dutch social scientists after World War II, but rapidly lost legitimacy in the 1960s (see Köbben 1964). 26. Verdijk’s history also notes the enthusiasm of a large group of Dutch museum professionals who visited the Afrika Museum on 27 May 1961 during “National Museum Day.” 27. In Brussels, they served much the same purposes of magical transportation, but with the—later regretted—addition of “live” performers from the Belgian Congo (see Stanard 2005: 272–73). 28. The Congregation for the Holy Childhood emerged in nineteenth-century France following Catholic outrage about the maltreatment of children in China. It remained so popular a part of Roman Catholic propaganda that, at least in the Netherlands, its journal only started to react to the crisis of the apostolate in 1961 and 1966. 29. Jokes can suspend the “as if ” in ways comparable to child’s play: a 1958 cartoon in De Gelderlander’s section on “Nijmegen from day to day” showed a giant African warrior in the doorway of the Afrika-Museum chasing away a frightened white man with his spear and shield. Today, one recognizes that this joke was racist. 30. See note 22 above. Note that its abandonment in its original context makes the “Morogoro hut,” despite being built at the Museum, as much a “converted artifact” as the former “idol” of the BaPende mask (Figures 7.1 and 7.3). Not all objects collected in mission collections are spiritual trophies; they may not differ from more secular ones. 31. Interview with Father Adriaan Hertsig, Gemert, 25 May 1990. 32. Harrie Leyten had left the SMA to join the Tropenmuseum as curator of Africa in 1975, two years after the museum had responded to Udink’s call. Leyten advised the Africa Centre to do the same in 1978 (personal communication, April 2009; see also Leyten 2015). The Centre’s exhibition makers, however, seem to have emphasized a critical “African” voice more than a “developmentalist” message (interview with Wiel Eggen, Cadier en Keer, 22 December 2023). 33. This classificatory focus of “primitive art” on so-called tribal art from Africa and Oceania is itself a product of the early twentieth century (Rubin 1984: 2-3). 34. Whether Verdijk or Pubben or someone else wrote this is unclear: the document is not dated or signed, and Pubben was only appointed two months after the temporary exhibition started in April. It seems likely that the document was meant to instruct guides who took visitors around the exhibition. If so, it represents a stage in the professionalization of the guides’ narratives beyond the “tall tales” of the mission exhibitions.

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35. Rather than confirming the “religiosity” of Catholic ritual, it seems transubstantiation is common in profane modern life, occurring whenever an object carries a transmutation from one type of value to another (most famously, from use- to exchange-value; see Chapter 9). It is not necessarily sacramental: even in the Catholic Mass, it requires the presence of the profane. See also the rest of this conclusion. 36. Wonder, as Curry argues, is the passion at the root of the experience of enchantment (2021). 37. Such a decolonization of the mind was also happening among missionaries in East Africa, largely under the influence of African nationalist movements (see De Jong 1994). 38. Some auto-ethnography: Sunday Mass required Dutch Catholics to carry coins to drop in the collecting-bag as it circulated while others filed the church corridors for taking Holy Communion. It was meant as a pure gift, underscored by the fact that one often hid from fellow parishioners how much one actually put in the bag. 39. Remember that an ordained Catholic priest’s vows included the vow of poverty, of not craving any personal gain or possessions. 40. Oscar Salemink, personal communication, 29 August 2022.

Chapter 8

SEEING THINGS AS DIFFERENT THE POWERS OF MIMING “AFRICA”

In mimesis, one conforms with something one is not and also should not be. —Fritz Kramer (1993: 250) The menace of mimicry is its double vision, which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of . . . the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. —Homi Bhabha (1994: 88)

The analysis I use in the following pages is perhaps best introduced by the way I was duped by Jean Baudrillard: I had long (and naively) accepted as true his attribution of the opening epigraph of Simulacra and Simulation (“The simulacrum . . . is truth that hides the fact that there is none”: [1981] 1994: 1) to Ecclesiastes—the Biblical source of the famous gnostic phrase “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12:8). Doubts about its Biblical orthodoxy only blossomed when I took up my King James version in search of the context from which Baudrillard seemed to have lifted this insight, after which the Internet quickly brought out that, indeed, I had been one of many who Baudrillard tricked into accepting the quote’s Biblical authority.1 Not expecting a fake citation in an academic publication authorized by reliable publishers,2 I was enchanted by the “spell” of the “two-ness” of imitation: an exclusive focus on the copy-original pair on display, at the expense of “the distributed ecology of behaviors that encompasses it” (Lempert 2014: 385). My return to this material ecology required an affective sense of incongruity (the desire to critique Baudrillard), some intellectual labor and the handling of specific materials (two books and a com-

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puter)—not to mention a sense of humor—to be able to realize my academic vanity of accepting intellectual authority and to redefine Baudrillard’s theory as playful fiction. Baudrillard’s theory is, of course, a version of the reduction of imitation to the dualism of copy and original (Lempert 2014: 383): his own production of “hyperreal” simulacra crucially depends on an absent original yet is a poorer version of the hyperrealities discussed by Umberto Eco, that materially mix up the fake and the real (see Chapter 5). My naive assumption that the quote was an accurate representation of the Bible was partly caused by its materiality, reproducing an “original” in the medium of authorized print. I began to discover that it was a simulacrum—a mimicry of academic authority—when I turned to other materials: the King James version on my bookshelf. But this temporal sequence demonstrates that the process of mimesis exceeds the “two-ness” of both representation and mimicry, because its encompassing “ecology of behaviors” was “distributed” along my material dialectic of objectification and embodiment (see Chapter 2). Yet, this also shows that both representation and mimicry—and the play of truth and falsity that they bring along—are also conditioned by this material dialectic and can be haunted by its spirit of matter. In this conclusion to Part III, I argue that these analytical distinctions are necessary to understand the relationships between the seemingly essentialized “Africa” that became an indispensable item in selling the Holy Ghost Fathers’ Museum and its material mediations. The comment on the nkisi by Father van Croonenburg clearly was impossible without the presence of the object, yet it seems to come close indeed to “a truth that hides the fact that there is none” in relation to its original. However, this specific relationship between copy and original, and its embedding in a behavioral ecology that involves both bodies and objects seems to differ from the authenticity claimed for the African village, or the “blackface” performances by the boy scouts at its opening.3 While the former seems to aspire to an accurate ethnographic representation, the latter’s status as child’s play, reinforced by the fact that it echoed a popular choice by (especially male) children during the day of the Holy Childhood, seems to fit neither the category of truthful representation, nor that of mimicry as a copy that fails its original: both play and the desire for authenticity invite us to dig for deeper nuances, not least in the relationship between mimesis and power. Even more, the plural powers of miming “Africa” invite a comparison between the mimesis that North Atlantic thinkers attribute to themselves, and that which they associate with Africans when the latter mimic whites. The comparison is not only useful for deepening our

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understanding of representation, mimicry, and mimesis in relation to materiality but also for bringing the global power relationships that condition them into sharper contrast. For a start, it is useful to ask whether the Afrika Museum’s fetishization of “Africa”—demonstrated by the materiality of its entrance fee—is the same as its essentialization. While the former is rooted in capitalism (and its increasing need to perform “identity value”—see Chapters 9 and 10), it seems impossible to understand the totalization and timelessness that characterizes essentialization (Herzfeld 2010) without reflecting on European “religious” sources of representation. Essentialization can be traced to the Protestant idea that no human being can manufacture a faithful representation of the Divine. This assumption—that “true” representation is possible, but not of the Divine—underlies the sincerity, iconoclasm, and desire for transparency of Protestantism, as well as its perception of the Catholic Mass and saintly sculptures as obscurantist and blasphemous. In preceding chapters, I referred to the secularization of such ideas by Enlightenment taxonomies and their promotion of the desire for pure representation—a desire for “objectivity,” or a mimetic relationship in which the copy can reproduce the original accurately and without residue. That assumption fits the frequent observation that sincerity, authenticity, and realism are typically “modern” or “Western” preoccupations (Auerbach [1953] 2003; Bal 1992; Daston and Galison 2007; Handler 1986; Keane 2002; see also Pels 2014a). Such a semiotic ideology has a subaltern counterpoint in the Catholic models that underpin doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation by insisting on the combination of an “invisible mysterium” with a “material tremendum” (Mayblin et al. 2017: 23), models that Catholic missions exported globally, certainly in material form.4 (Does this mean that I essentialize Protestants and Catholics? No, because I neither portray all Catholics as magically inclined materialists nor turn all Protestants into iconoclasts [Mayblin et al. 2017: 24–25]. I stress the diversity of these identities [in Chapters 4 and 7, for example], and avoid a totalizing and timeless characterization of people by discussing historically influential assumptions, ideologies, and affects that mutated in their global spread, yet retained recognizable features as they evolve.) Doctrines of representation nevertheless became hegemonic in the North Atlantic region, not least because Dissenters like Thomas Huxley opposed the—differently Protestant—Anglican establishment by transmuting its semiotic ideology into scientific expertise with “Protestant” fervor (see Chapter 4). More broadly, we can say that the possibility of true representation underpinned positivism

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in science as much as in Comtean religion, but that the subaltern validity of a “material tremendum” is supported by the “labyrinth” of a procession of material representations that Timothy Mitchell discussed in Colonising Egypt (1991: 12)—a labyrinth comparable to the one Baudrillard tricked me into. This Protestant-derived semiotic ideology also determined theories of the European exhibitionary complex, which, as I argued in Chapter 5, has usually been thought to be purified of immersive mimesis and its childlike or carnivalesque forms of entertainment (T. Bennett 1995: 222–23), but that this happened at the cost of ignoring a broader ecology, which includes its commercial routinization of wonder as spectacle. Similar linear temporalities of modernization have also been employed in understanding “Western representation” in literature and “African mimesis” in art and spirit possession, as part of a gradual “economic and cultural levelling process” leading to a “common life of mankind on earth” that inevitably levels the exotic, including “African art,” out of existence (Auerbach [1953] 2003: 552; Kramer 1993: 255). Such temporal assumptions also underly Martin Jay’s attack of Michael Taussig’s defense of the mimesis of alterity as a kind of “sympathetic magic”: Jay protests against obscurantism standing in the way of progress towards intellectual transparency, while Taussig and Paul Stoller mistrust Jay’s modernism because it lacks respect for the generative and poetic dimensions of mimesis (see Jay 1993b, 1994; Stoller 1994; Taussig 1993b, 1994). This is ironic when we acknowledge that mimesis (as mere “copying”) has long been regarded as inferior to “creative” poesis (see Turner 1982, criticized by Kramer 1993: 248). Linear temporalities of representation and mimesis rely on normative frameworks that institute global hierarchies of value (i.e., the global triumph of realism lauded by Auerbach and regretted by Kramer). My approach is different: the material excess that the concept of mimesis seems to add to the dualism of copy and original suggests amoral dispositions comparable to those of the conception of wonder discussed earlier in this book. Studies of African forms of mimesis, therefore, often exemplified by the embodied hauka performance of miming white power (made globally famous by Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fou) may raise the questions of whether and how they can be compared to the contemporaneous blackface performance of the boy scouts in Berg en Dal. Such comparisons, however, should be preceded by a warning: studying how European children mimed the African exotic for Europeans may seem to reverse the study of how Africans mimicked powerful Europeans for other Africans—whether

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in the form of fashion, art, or spirit possession—but it cannot assume symmetry: one cannot simply undo the global hierarchies spelled out by the majority of anthropological theories that declared mimesis to be “other” than modern (Ladwig 2017), by arguing that “we are all mimetic” (cf. “we are all nakaqs” Taussig 1991: 241).5 Such a relativist plurality that allows for romantic resistance-by-enchantment has been criticized (Ferguson 2006a: 192), not least by showing that mimesis and empathic relativism were more violently used by colonial rule (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015; Pels 2014a; Roque 2015).6 Many critical theories of exhibitionary complexes from the 1990s assumed that colonial meanings could be transparently read off of exhibitions (see Breckenridge 1989; Bal 1992; Coombes 1994; and the critique in E. Rappaport 2008). Likewise, studies of African mimesis—in which I include those of the adoption of “white” fashion—try to read its functions off the mimetic frames adopted by Africans, fighting amongst each other whether such mimesis should be regarded as anticolonial subversion, as a revitalization of “traditional” identities, as an obscurantist instrument in support of postcolonial power, or as a bid for world membership systematically denied to Africans (Ferguson 2006a: 175; Friedman 1990; Stoller 1994; Taussig 1993b). Meta-analyses of academic representations of African mimesis—how J. Clyde Mitchell, Jean Rouch, Jonathan Friedman, or Michael Taussig mimicked African urban fashion or hauka rituals—extend such functions to understanding “African” tradition, reviving sympathetic magic in modernity, or as attempts towards new forms of neocolonial domination or “racist exoticism” (see Ferguson 2006a: 163; Huggan 1998; Magubane 1971). Stoller’s recapitulation of the different functions that hauka possession alone fulfilled in the course of its long career (1994: 160) suggests, however, that it is indeed not a question of “pin(ning) actions to practices in one-to-one fashion” and settling once and for all what mimetic practice means (Lempert 2014: 387). If the mimetic action of hauka possession can carry the meaning of mimicking whites to master them, and of a tonic against postcolonial alienation, and of supporting a postcolonial will to power (and this summing up remains limited to the meanings provided by Nigerien interpreters: Stoller 1994: 160)—we are presented with a signifying process that multiplies meanings and resists transparent representation. It shows that mimesis cannot be reduced to the normative and discursive frames and functions that were the focus of the critiques of colonial representation of the 1990s—that, put differently, we cannot simply assume that the classification of “Africa” carried an essentialist meaning when

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Africans were mimicked at the opening of the Afrika Museum’s openair exhibit. Mimetic circulation should be understood analogously to James Ferguson’s study of the cultural styles and dress codes adopted by the urbanites of Kitwe in the Zambian Copperbelt: as embodied and polysemic skills, shared across social categories without a determinate essence, and irreducible to a simple linear trajectory of tradition giving way to modernity (Ferguson 1999: 95–98)—even more, by adopting Ferguson’s insight that such material media may generate a lack of mastery of their global meanings among both Kitwe urbanites and the ethnographer who studies them (Ferguson 1999: 207). Such material conditions of knowledge shows that mimesis exceeds representation to the extent that the latter is predicated on the symbolic defined in discursive terms (including the determination of meaning by functions that I discussed just now). Instead of affirming the “two-ness” of copy and original, or symbol and referent, or signifier and signified, this material excess makes mimesis go beyond, and remains irreducibly haunted by, an indeterminacy of meaning: as both Timothy Mitchell and Michael Lempert affirm, such a procession of “arbitrary” signs requires much “non-arbitrary” and contingent stabilizing labor and materials (T. Mitchell 1991: 12; Lempert 2014: 386). It is crucial to my argument in this conclusion to acknowledge that the material labor of stabilizing signs takes place simultaneously in subconscious dialectics of objectification and embodiment and at the conscious level of discursive enunciation: the first, through mediation by the materials and embodied labor of copying, and the second, by the ever-present work of metacommunication (“What is this ‘Africa’? A fake, a copy, an original?”). The correspondences as well as the incongruities that accompany the proper identification of the copy’s materiality as copy, “menace” every object (not just colonial ones) with a disruption of authority and a double vision (Bhabha 1994: 88). Only from the perspective of representation, which wants to determine meaning, does this appear as a “gap” (Lempert 2014: 388). Once we view this process from the material work of mimetic circulation, it shows plenitude, an excess of potential signification—the spirit of matter.7 Please keep this filling of the gap of representation by a plenitude of material substitutions and enactments in mind, while we turn to Fritz Kramer’s seminal study of African mimesis in art and spirit possession. Kramer enlisted the support of Godfrey Lienhardt and his assessment of Dinka religion in terms of passiones, a medieval European term for the powers that nonhuman agencies exert on humans (Kramer 1993: 58; Lienhardt 1961). The concept is close (but not

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identical) to Albertus Magnus’s notion of wonder, discussed in Chapter 5. Kramer does not see the extraordinary realism of African depictions of Europeans—contrary to Julius Lips, who first published about them (Lips 1937)—as critiques of European colonialism (i.e., they are not necessarily “politically conscious”: Kramer 1993: 127). Instead, he regards those objects, as well as many others, as attempts to come to terms with the forces that move the world, including colonialism. He cites African analogues (like the Tonga muuya, or the Cokwe cizulie) of such passiones that identify a power of objects that cannot be traced to a disembodied spirit (Kramer 1993: 65, 67)—what I have described in Chapter 3 as the difference between fetishism and animism.8 It pinpoints the moment when objects move us—phenomenologically, at least, before the dialectic of body and object turns to symbolic identification and moral judgment. Passiones and wonder can both be interpreted as varieties of the concept of mimesis found with Aristotle (which he modeled on an audience’s experience of tragedy) that emphasizes imitation and change, thus adding a “new element” to the “pure processes of representation” (Wulff 2014: 17)—but my argument that this transformative mimesis takes place inside a dialectic of objectification and embodiment implies, contra Wulff, that no such purity of representation can be permanently achieved. When, indeed, does wonder—a general epistemic condition—turn into passiones—a discursively articulated sensation—or vice versa? Wonder was described as a primary passion marked by visceral impact, but passiones (just like muuya or cizulie) classify a specific kind of power to move humans. It now becomes clear that the classification of “Africa” may be a similarly primary move of identification—not in the temporal sense of “first,” but in the sense of “fundamental”—just as Kramer’s use of the medieval passiones identified a specific kind of (amoral, ubiquitous, nonhuman) power to move humans. This is why this conclusion of Part III starts with an epigraph from Kramer’s text that defines mimesis as a material relationship constituted not just by an experience of visceral impact, but also by an awareness and articulation of difference. Such an articulation—for example, “Africa” as a place to visit “close to Nijmegen”—still leaves open whether amazement can turn into horror, or admiration, or even both. Thus, the boundless amazement of the Egyptian delegates who visited the 1889 Paris Exposition—the term itself classifying it as a space for amazement—turned into amazement at the Eiffel Tower, but also into horror and disgust in their material relation to the display of a rue de Caire. Labeling something as African reveals itself as a classificatory move by North Atlantic moderns that is comparable to

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medieval classifications of passiones or Cokwe classifications of cizulie: a discursive gesture that identifies an “other” power before it is morally judged good or bad (although a judgment as somehow sacred— extra-ordinary, either demonic or divine, or both—has already been prefigured by the classification itself). As such, the label African can generate wonder by itself, but in terms of a critical reappraisal of Stephen Greenblatt’s distinction of (visceral, nonjudgmental) “wonder” and (historically contingent and discursive) “resonance”—a reappraisal in which “conventional images” may themselves signal a routinization of wonder by drawing on their cultural resonance (Kratz and Karp 1993: 37). At this point, it is useful to return to the image in Chapter 6 (figure 6.4) of the smartly dressed African gentleman apparently miming European dress: it allows us to see how Homi Bhabha’s justly famous essay on colonial mimicry, focused as it is on colonial representations, may help to understand the materiality of mimesis as well. My second epigraph for this chapter shows how Bhabha identified a threat to colonial discourse by a “double vision” that also implied a partial “representation/recognition of the colonial object.” What Bhabha described as an “interdiction” applies directly to the photograph’s caption: it may seem to turn mimesis into mimicry by ironically verbalizing that this form of dress mocks the power of its European models—a simulacrum of what our gentleman vainly imitates. But the signifying potential of the photograph shows a nonverbal plenitude that stands next to and may oppose the discursive “excess” that “slips in” an inter dicta by the material of “a writing, a mode of representation” (Bhabha1994: 86–88, emphasis omitted). It adds material excess to the representation that may persuade us to read the caption with a different set of norms: “look how creatively this man has used his wages from the mines!” (We may even come to admire how he has “bent” the gender of colonizers’ dress codes by combining male and female attire.) In other words, the plenitude of the material of the photograph and its “interdicting” caption can suggest two opposed forms of “racial unconscious”: the racist’s “not white/not quite,” but also the racializeds’ assertion—discursively muted—of being modern. Once we have eyes for the full material procession of signifying substitutions and enactments, the menace to hegemonic representation by mimicry’s double vision may come from different, even opposed, directions. This, finally, allows for a more nuanced and empirically informed answer to the question of what a classification of material culture as “African” may do: in Van Croonenburg’s comment on the nkisi as “fearful” African tradition, it reduces its material plenitude to a hege-

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monic missionary narrative, but never completely “defetishizes” its material, retaining, at least, a capacity for amazing the visitor with its materials beyond what Van Croonenburg described as horrific. Later invocations of an “African” life-force, however, amplified the resonances of its material by reference to Divine Love or a sacred inspiration, calling up possibilities of relating its materials to other aspects of the spectator’s life-world (such as the “Mystical Body” with Pubben, or even New Age “Energy” for Eisenburger). These observations also allow a more nuanced view of the symmetry that the possibility of the Afrika Museum offering an “African repartee” seems to promise, perhaps in an equally romantic fashion as those who expect that resistance can be read from forms of African mimesis. Such apparent symmetry is complicated by two different circumstances. Firstly, that the selling of a museum as an “Afrika” Museum in the 1950s (and later) is very much caught up in a European material world that became increasingly saturated by North American consumerism and its branding practices—by an increasingly accelerated commodity fetishism (see Chapter 10). Secondly, that the recognition of “Africa” as a classification used in attempts to make space for a “repartee” and “anti-contest” in a museum makes this classification both less and more political. The Afrika Museum routinized wonder by composting an exhibitionary complex based on subordinating exotic images to Catholic sacrifice and preaching (the “collecting-bag” and “pulpit”) into a commodity for which one paid money to access it, and to be educated and entertained. It was complex because it showed a “double vision” and “double consciousness” that could only communicate its representations on the condition—on taking the risk—of presenting the potential menace of its material substratum: the tensions experienced within its “different apostolate” show that the connotation of anxiety that the term “complex” carries was present as well (cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 37). This is further complicated by the fact that even visitors who were physically attracted to the Museum by the message that “Africa lies close to Nijmegen” were hardly likely to believe it was true. It is a suspension of disbelief similar to that demanded by advertising messages that were increasingly processed by twentieth-century consumers, time and time again (“Be yourself! Buy our toothpaste and change your life!”). Both are branding messages that offer identifications that may be too good to burden with rational judgment and which need not be accepted as true. They do not seem to attract by the unlikely denotation of the message, but by materially re-actualizing the “self-conscious life force” of the object advertised

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(Benjamin, quoted in Bracken 2007: 17).9 Chapter 9 discusses how such promises unfold in a dialectic of objectification and embodiment, and will again establish that such “magical” mimesis is both unstable and powerful because its materials both index and iconically make present absent places and other times. That kind of semiosis may be true for African forms of mimesis (like that discussed by Kramer) as well, but it seems to lack the specific “commodity” aspect of modern fetishisms—and thus, of turning Africa into a museum commodity as well. This should be combined with an awareness of the hegemonic meanings that Africa as a classification carried at the time—and in many ways still does. As I discussed elsewhere (Pels 2004), since the 1950s, North Atlantic consciousness used “Africa” minimally to refer to three distinct geographical entities: least frequently, to the continent south of Europe (which would include the Sahara and the countries north of it); and more often and in equal measure, to either subSaharan Africa (the common object of “African studies” until recently) or transatlantic Africa (as in, for example, “African American”). Of course, we can accumulate additional meanings from earlier historical mutations by discussing histories of slavery, colonialism, panAfricanism, or wildlife conservation, or add more recent ones adduced by “world music” or “Afropolitanism.” This book is not the place to survey such changes. It is important, however, to realize that these three possible meanings, globally hegemonic at least since the start of the Afrika Museum, make our assessment of what the classification of Africa did to people since the mid-twentieth century both more and less political. More, because the sense of wonder generated by an entity classified as an Afrika Museum partly builds on a discursive differentiation: a classification of difference that is impossible without the spectator assembling and embodying long-composted layers of both violent, romantic, and respectful histories, whether from the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, or the wonders of African sculpture or African or African American “jazz.” Put differently, classifications of things that “Black” people seem to have in common—implicit in the concepts of sub-Sahara Africa as well as transatlantic Africa—can never completely erase the racial politics that put those things at the bottom of the global historical hierarchies that their longtime hegemonic meanings presumed and expressed. Less, because the early history of the Afrika Museum seems to tell us that such a routinization of difference can mutate into a non- or less judgmental moment of attraction by wonder, a moment for which

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one might choose to leave as much room as possible if one aims for the kind of liberation or enchantment that contact between people of different cultural backgrounds also promises (Clifford 1985; Pratt 1992; Weinhold 2002b). Sources that show more or less unmediated responses by visitors to the Afrika Museum from the 1950s or 1960s have not yet been studied, but a recent study of today’s visitors’ social media output reveals regrettable racialized stereotypes as well as the independent capacity of the visitors to probe the gap between the classification of Africa and its material mimesis in, for example, the open-air section (Buitenmuseum). They can do this without losing the visceral pleasures of wandering with their children through the “ruralist” style of the architecture—stereotypically traditional as it may be (Sandels 2017). The youthful experiences of my anthropologist colleague referred to in the conclusion to Chapter 7 suggest a similar variability. Variation and ambivalence, however, do not make the politics of classification go away, or turn the global relationships in which “Africa” is embedded into symmetrical ones.10 If hauka can be framed as a form of resistance, a mimesis that incorporates the power of the colonizer in order to master him (Stoller 1994: 160), we cannot simply reverse this function and describe Father Pubben or Director Eisenburger as people who attempted to mimic Africans to master their “life-force” or “energy.” If African forms of mimesis were mostly replicated on a future in which the differences put in place by a color bar could be erased, the Afrika Museum was not meant to erase difference, but to exploit it as a mission museum and even celebrate it as an Afrika museum—just like so many other “ethnographic” exhibitions all over the world. In other words, the mere recognition of difference does not necessarily change it—but we might want to hold open the possibility that its mimesis can. So, do Catholics see things differently? Not really—but it may be fair to argue that many of them (not all) select and value different items from the pool of potential discursive and material significations than many of those more inclined to Protestant Christianity. However, it may be more important to suggest that, in modern exhibitionary complexes, people tend to make use of such subaltern and only apparently “Catholic” forms of selection and affect more insistently and frequently than in other modern institutions, as Franz Boas’s dismissal of Brown Goode’s quip that “a museum is a well-arranged collection of labels illustrated by specimens” seems to show (Boas 1907: 924). But this may have as much to do with the close relationships between modern exhibitions and other forms of the modern fetishism of commodification and its enchantments. Part IV turns to the latter.

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Notes 1. See Baudrillard’s admission of his trick (2004: 11) and the vain attempts by others to find alternative sources for the quotation (such as Catholic or Orthodox Bibles: http://ask.metafilter.com/106459/Is-that-Ecclesias tesBaudrillard-quote-accurate, retrieved 21 November 2017). 2. For further reflections on “citationality,” see Nakassis (2012). I found his work particularly useful to criticize poststructuralist approaches in the discussion of branding in Chapter 9. 3. Indeed, while the latter invites the same critique of white appropriation as North American blackface minstrelsy, it may similarly uncover a more complex “racial unconscious” (Lott 1992). 4. However, I disagree with Karl-Heinz Kohl who uses the apparent historical convergence of Congolese and Portuguese powerful objects to argue for a “return” of the sacred object (2003: 29). This seems to neglect the secular and modern sources of powerful objects identified by the authors on which he bases this interpretation (i.e., Pietz’s thesis that “fetish” originates in West African trade oaths [1985, 1987, 1988]; and Kramer’s thesis that African mimesis is a non-realist form of verisimilitude [1993]; see also Cecile Fromont’s brilliant study of the materials of Kongo Christianity [Fromont 2014]). Kohl seems to rely throughout on a Saussurean semiology that my arguments aim to undermine. 5. My suspicions of “symmetry” in anthropology and ethnography, not only triggered by Taussig (1991: 241, 1993b), are discussed in Pels (2014a). Bruno Latour is more subtle (1993: 103). 6. Michael Taussig deserves credit for addressing this too, notably in his work on terror and colonial violence (1991, 1993a: 222-23). 7. My representation—indeed!—of this process is heavily indebted to, but only infrequently adopts the terminology of Johannes Fabian’s materialist critique of the literature on colonial representation, where he redefined representation as a praxis of substitution and enactment rather than fit, proof, and (re)product(ion) (Fabian 1990). 8. As indicated above, however, I feel Kramer unnecessarily complicates our understanding of these matters by borrowing a modernization perspective from Auerbach; he also too uncritically accepts a Eurocentric psychologization of passiones into emotions (“passions”; 1993: 61). 9. I quote Walter Benjamin’s “magical criticism” of works of literature here (as lucidly interpreted by Christopher Bracken [2007]; see also Caygill 1998) because it mirrors Benjamin’s understanding of the everyday temporalities and future promises of commodity fetishism, which I discuss in Chapter 9. 10. In fact, it plays a role in current debates between the National Museum for World Cultures (who run the Afrika Museum) and the Holy Ghost Fathers (who own the property and part of the collection) about the future of the museum (Opten and Nijtmans 2022).

PART IV

The Time of Things

INTRODUCTION FETISHIZING THE COMMODITY, IN REAL TIME

It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. —Karl Marx ([1867] 1972: 319–20)

In one of the most famous passages on excessive objects in modern social science, Karl Marx described how the mystical character of commodities—their capacity to hide their “real” nature as products “of the human hand,” and to appear “as independent beings endowed with life” ([1867] 1972: 321)—cannot be explained by their use-value and materials but arises from the commodity form. The way commodification transforms a social relation between people into the fantasy of a relation between things, he wrote, can only be described by an analogy from “the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world,” and more particularly by “Fetishism,” which at the time of Marx’s writing, was known to Europeans as the worship of material objects and the most primitive religion of humanity (but see Chapter 3). Thus, primitive religion came to haunt modernity (see Chapter 2 and Pels 2003a: 17). It is still discussed as a model of modern ideology (Graeber 2001; Haug 1986; Morris 2017; N. Rose 1977). Despite this prominence in social theory, earlier chapters showed that at least some proponents of material culture theory try to circumvent the notion, because it contradicts either the primacy of human traffic over matter or the “republic of mutual respect” between people and things (Appadurai 1986; Miller 2005: 39). All of this supports the idea that in a book

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about modernity, religion, and the power of objects, one cannot avoid a critical discussion of commodity fetishism. When discussing it earlier (Pels 2003a: 22–24), I did not yet think that the value-dualism of Marx’s suggestion of the 1860s—in which exchange-value divorces the commodity from use-value—might be outdated (that is, if the dualism did not already obscure the subtlety of Marx’s thought from the outset: see Morris 2017: 187–204). Many discussions of commodity fetishism retain this dual analytic (Haug 1986; Stallybrass 1998; Taussig 1980). It is possible, however, that Marx was so focused on “the human hand” and the labor theory of value that he did not pay sufficient attention to other possible sources of fetishizing identity, in consumption and its gendering, or in market reliance on global racial and colonial relationships. He died too soon to witness the changes wrought by the professionalization of advertising in the 1880s and 1890s (Baudrillard [1970] 1998; Burke 1996: 6; Miller 1998a: 131; Richards 1990; Williams 1999). New questions may have to be asked of a world in which advertising, on the one hand, tries to “dematerialize” exchange by insisting on brands (which foreground a longing for identity rather than utility), and on the other, cuts across all scales of social interaction, extending from bodily performance to globalizing standards of living (Lears 1994: 4; Lury 2004; Manning 2010; de Grazia 2005). Beyond a possible critique of the dualism of use- and exchangevalue, such questioning may also target what translation does to Marx’s original language: is commodity fetishism indeed about a “man” (in German: der Mensch) who “by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him”? What if human (rather than just male) bodies and their gender, color, or clothes significantly affect the business of social (re)production? What range of meanings should we keep in mind after noticing that in English, the commodity may change into “something transcendent,” while in German, it retains a relationship with a sensuous body with limited faculties of perception (ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding)? How significant is it that this English translation uses a phrase from modern esotericism’s Spiritualist seances (“table-turning”) instead of talking about a table that starts dancing “of its own will” (aus freien Stücken)? The translation betrays that Marx did have an eye for a dialectic of objectification and embodiment, even though he mostly seems to restrict the identity of der Mensch to predominantly male factory workers.1 To answer this main question—how relevant is commodity fetishism today, and what kind of cultural patterns do we need to interpret

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it?—the following chapters examine three major themes. The first is the question of the “reality” of commodities and brands: is it their material being and use, or their “real” value as products of human labor, or their monetary equivalence with other commodities, or their capacity for excess in animation or agency, or even their capacity for forming and/or regulating identities? Such an inquiry into the potential diversity of commodity fetishisms follows from my desire, fundamental to this book, to avoid conflating materiality and meaning and to embed them in a dialectic of objectification and embodiment. This inquiry starts in Chapter 9 with reflections on Marx and some of his contemporaries (such as Charles Dickens and the Planning Committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851) as well as some of their present-day interpreters, but this inquiry continues in Chapter 10 on advertising and its history. The second theme is the historicity and cultural contingency of “the commodity”: as already implied by the potential diversity of fetishisms, commodification under capitalism cannot be interpreted as a singular, one-time cultural performance—as we do when locating the “real” origin of the commodity in its moment of human manufacture.2 Instead, commodities are constructed at different moments and social locations in their history of consumption. The rise of North Atlantic advertising since the 1880s marks, in Chapter 10, the moment when trust in the “objective” value of the commodity, which still seems prominent in the Great Exhibition’s cultural environment, transmutes into a structural oscillation of suspicion and trust that characterizes professional advertising and consumer culture. This oscillation emerges in the context of significant shifts in the politics of scale of both capitalist enterprise and modern statecraft, and leads us to question how scale determines different commodity fetishisms. The third theme that runs through these chapters approaches the main theme of this book from a new angle: the question to what extent commodity fetishism is, indeed, a material phenomenon, given that we commonly interpret exchange-value and branding as immaterial forms, and “fetishism” often refers to an illusion that secular moderns vainly hope to render obsolete. In this connection it is once more important to recognize that both advertising’s oscillation of trust and mistrust, and the politics of scale of commodities and brands, have a tendency to provoke interpretations couched in the language of magic and religion. One might take the comparison of marketing to priestly fraud, of advertising to religious conversion, or of shopping to sacrificial ritual at face value or as mere metaphor. Instead, I interpret this recourse to a language invoking a past before

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secularization as another indicator of the typically modern double consciousness I targeted in Chapter 2. This language simultaneously admits and disavows that the scaling up of consumer relations in late industrial capitalism (or “Fordism”) mobilized a performance of commodities that tried to make consumers “suffer” them as excessive objects. By recognizing that consumers perceive such performances and their differential scales in time, and that, as Chapter 9 discussed, they do not unknowingly and helplessly succumb to the immaterial or invisible powers they evoke, I conclude Chapter 10 by suggesting that we should not get too worked up about commodity fetishism, because consumers’ care for “green” or more equitable relations of production and consumption must come to them in fetishized form as well. However, the potential threat of an immaterializing fetishization recurs in the Conclusion, where I argue that the future of things of modern techno-fetishism is not “my” time of things: the awareness of material duration (or the composting of history) that this book tries to promote is obscured by the futurist conceit of breaking with the past that is common to the modern “religion” of technology. Futurism’s tendency to “immaterialize” both humans and things may therefore both continue harmful modern habits, as well as inhibit a clear view of what more progressive habits (not necessarily “modern” ones) we should cultivate. These three themes reoccur throughout the following chapters. Chapter 9, however, is mostly concerned with the first theme. While Chapter 10 and the Conclusion make use of its basic insight—that commodity fetishism is multiple—they are more concerned with how commodity fetishism has historically mutated, and continues to do so. Chapter 9 discusses capitalist persuasion and fetishization before the rise of advertising. By means of examples from Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol ([1843] 1971; cf. Miller 1993), the story of Marx’s overcoat (Stallybrass 1998), and commodity display at the Great Exhibition (Richards 1990), I hope to show that we should diversify commodity fetishisms, and highlight how folk understandings of their morality confront as well as obscure their threats in the period before a professional industry tries to take control of commodities’ performance. However, I do not intend to re-essentialize the variety of such fetishisms by introducing a triadic value typology of utility, exchangeability, and identity. Instead, distinguishing different fetishizations of commodities should facilitate our grasp of an inescapably temporal performance of commodification that alternates attempts to dematerialize the power of these objects with moments of rematerializing them.

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Chapter 10 then zooms in, firstly, on the professionalization of advertising between 1880 and 1930: it employs an analytical approach that emphasizes the gap left in the commodity’s performance for its embodied subject between the material performance of the commodity and its material carrier. I use this phenomenon to understand why trust and mistrust became structural preoccupations of marketing and expressed in metaphors of priestly manipulation, fraud, and magic. This section also suggests that folk theories of “false” consciousness should be replaced by a more temporally oriented variety of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” (as addressed in Chapter 2). Chapter 10’s second section adds the history of branding and its post1945 politics of scaling up to this mix, showing how popular psychology and anthropology secularized forms of religious possession—by discussing them as “symbolism,” “suggestion,” and hypnotism—until the “conquest of cool” during the 1970s. The latter shifted branding towards a construction of desire of and for an increasingly diversified “new generation” that resonates with the mainstreaming of New Age esotericism. Chapters 9 and 10 both structurally incorporate inequality and disempowerment into the consumerist dialectic of objectification and embodiment by highlighting how capitalist culture prefigures the mainstreaming of a classification of consumers as defective and in need of the commodities it sells—an experience that reconnects my argument to the theory of double consciousness of second-class citizens (whether by race, gender, or class). Such post-1945 strategies were part and parcel of an “irresistible” imperial mode of social regulation and identification that mostly emanated from the United States of America (de Grazia 2005) and that my conclusion to this chapter compares to a deeper history of colonial control-by-consumption (cf. Posel 2010). Both chapters therefore also bring out the relationship between classifications that fetishize identity (much like the term Africa, as discussed in Chapters 7 and 8) and the material carriers that enable such classification. Chapters 9 and 10 therefore propose a more positive and less condescending attitude towards commodity fetishists, by looking at certain modern folk theories that produce such condescension from a distance—theories like those that blame commodification by money for disembedding itself from social relationships and disintegrating them in the process (Marx [1861] 1980; Simmel [1907] 1990; Polanyi 1944; for a critique, see Maurer 2006); or like the doctrine that objects do not have agency (except for less rational humans like savages or Catholics) that I criticized earlier in this book. By identifying

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something as a “folk theory” I do not mean to depart from the excellent and long-established anthropological practice of taking the “native” point of view seriously.3 However, we often fold our own folk theories into our descriptions and classifications in ways that obscure other elements of the situations we want to understand. The very popularity of the idea that capitalist social relationships are progressively dematerialized (by exchange-value, and/or by branding) should make us investigate the extent to which this must be interpreted as indigenous knowledge, not least because quite a few marketing professionals liked to congratulate themselves with being the “priests” or “magicians” who masterminded such dematerializations. However, that does not, of course, imply that processes of progressive abstraction do not exist in social life. Instead, Chapters 9 and 10 aim to rethink abstraction as a social practice since that will problematize its politics of scale, and thereby highlight strategies of power and social and cultural regulation that could otherwise masquerade as inevitable consequences of global economic growth.4 The chapter titles of Part IV and this introduction insist that commodities are only realized in time. Whether a specific commodity or brand performs utility, or exchangeability, or identity, such values promise an object’s future by indexing a part of its past biography. They can only do so in a material dialectic of objectification and embodiment. Self-evident as this may seem, many analysts abstract consumption, consumers, and commodity fetishism out of their everyday temporal being, replacing them by virtualities of academic or techno-scientific objectification. They derive such abstractions— whether in terms of a socially necessary amount of labor, or a process of objectification, or the semiotics of the brand—more often than not by projecting folk theories of modernity and thereby essentializing capitalist structures of domination. We need, therefore, Pierre Bourdieu’s second epistemic break—the reflexive aspect of a methodology of the concrete (see Chapter 2)—to do for commodity fetishism what Bourdieu did for gift-exchange: put it back in time. Once one restores the contingency and historicity of the fetishized relationship, and the intimacy and sensuousness with which consumers’ bodies interact with the commodities desired (the two other methodological requirements outlined at the end of Chapter 2) the diversity of fetishisms noted by an increasing number of scholars becomes easier to understand (Graeber 2001: 104; Lears 1994: 5; Stallybrass 1998: 184). Even more: once we try to put projections of the future of things back in time, as the conclusion tries to do, we may come to understand that those “present futures” in fact carry certain pasts into the future—

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but maybe not in the way we want. I therefore conclude the book by taking (especially digital) techno-fetishism as an example of how its apparent immaterializations may perpetuate material habits—largely derived from Protestant conversion—that imperil social life (not to mention the planet as a whole).

Notes 1. This translation problem highlights core themes of this book, and explains why I exchanged the English translation that I used earlier (Pels 2003a: 22) by a less faithful one. I have annotated the 1972 English translation used in this book by means of the version in the Marx-Engels Werke (MEW, Bd. 23: 85). 2. This shows the intimate relationship of ideologies of the artifact (see Chapter 2) to (early) modern labor theories of value. Appadurai’s focus on a thing’s “social life” (1986) multiplied its commodified aspects. 3. A principle often attributed to Bronislaw Malinowski ([1922] 1978: 25), which was in fact copied from his mentor William Rivers (see Stocking 1983; 2001: 181–82). 4. Similarly, a critique of the “uniscalar valuation” common to folk theories about modern money (Maurer 2006: 20) argues that theories of a Great Transformation that privilege the North Atlantic tend to neglect social scale-making (from local to [trans]national and vice versa).

Chapter 9

THINGS IN TIME COMMODITY FETISHISM BEFORE ADVERTISING

The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waist-coats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the streets in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. —Charles Dickens ([1843] 1971: 89–90)

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—that Victorian charter for urban capitalist sociability—portrays the fetishized commodity in all its still-life seduction. Its promise of future visceral satisfaction even causes girls to “demurely” consider a Christmas kiss to portly old gentlemen or, worse, corpulent Catholic friars. All this excess, however, remains proper: on the one hand, because the Carol contrasts it positively with the lonely hell in which the hoarding of money— that supreme commodity—has dumped Jacob Marley, the miser Scrooge’s late business partner; and on the other, because Scrooge learns, through being haunted by three Christmas ghosts, to temper his hoarding by the unselfish giving of gifts to family and employee alike. The Carol became a huge success in Britain and the United States immediately after its publication in 1843, even though Christmas was only turned into a national celebration of domestic love after the American Civil War, and was not reinvented as a materialist shopping-for-gifts by North American department stores until 1874. The Carol’s message became fundamental to the modern commercial Christmas—as a ritual reconciling department store materialism

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with family devotion—that spread globally from the United States since then (Belk 1987, 1993).1 Dickens epitomizes the native point of view that one may innocently enjoy the fetishized excess of commodities which one can obtain in “free” capitalist market-exchange—but only when free and impersonal exchange is balanced by its opposite, the pure gift that solidifies personal relationships without expectation of return (see Parry 1986: 466–67). Dickens can conjure with the magic of the commodity because he falls back on a specific temporal argument: a sequence in which consumers reduce the moral threat of the potentially selfish act of acquiring commodities by turning the latter into a gift to others—and therefore, to a mere phase in a more extended process of distribution that goes beyond individual consumption or calculation. Twenty-four years before Marx identified commodity fetishism in terms of its capacity to conceal laboring bodies, Dickens used the magic of commodities to define the consuming subjects’ sovereign purchasing power: their discretion to decide on enjoying commodities themselves or to turn them into gifts for other, more needy or dependent consumers. In his way he defused the alienating threat to consumer autonomy posed by the sensual attractions offered by the sale of commodities (which contemporaries denounced as materialism; see Chapter 4). This temporality requires, however, that consumers maximize their social relationships and multiply their identities: they should not just own and consume the commodity, but perform as family members, employers, and philanthropists by distributing it freely. One hundred and fifty years later, this liberal folk theory would be partly reproduced on a neoliberal North London street to become the empirical foundation for a theory of shopping (Miller 1998a). It again positions fetishism as unproblematic and even dismisses it as “an academic and colloquial prejudice” (Miller 1998a: 127–28)—despite the author’s earlier acknowledgment that an “obsessive concern” with material goods “describes an actual condition in modern life” (Miller 1987: 204). The (neo)liberal domestication of fetishism still composts Dutch Protestant merchants’ seventeenth-century misgivings about objects’ excesses, which they attributed to both African and Portuguese Catholic minds and which were subsequently adapted to modern thought (see Chapter 3; Logan 2009; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988; Stallybrass 1998: 185). Fetishism only acquired a specifically Marxist twist when the physical attractions of the commodity were coupled to the inscription of monetary exchange-value, that is, of an “immateriality [that Marx took] as the defining feature of capitalism” (Stallybrass

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1998: 184). Arjun Appadurai criticized the focus on the capitalist commodity when he argued that commodities appear in many other social relationships and reduced fetishism to a merely methodological tool subordinated to the primacy of human traffic (Appadurai 1986; see Chapter 3). But what kind of fetishism is thereby dismissed? Does it hide the “real nature” of things exchanged; or, instead, “[endow] them with life” as if they are “independent beings”; or does it fetishize a “value relation” that has “absolutely no connexion with [the commodity’s] physical properties” (Marx [1867] 1972: 320–21)? Can commodity fetishism do that all at once? Or do those forms take time? Appadurai and Miller’s stress on hedonist obsession or endowing goods with life is only a part of Marx’s argument: another part focuses on a fetishization of “the invisible, the immaterial, the supra-sensible” value that has been abstracted from the material constituents and sensuous characteristics of the commodity’s use-value (Stallybrass 1998: 184). It is commonly understood as the commodity’s “money-form” (Marx [1867] 1972: 313) although we shall see that commodified identities can be immaterial as well. Its ideological effect has often been defined as the way in which the commodity’s exchange-value— its price, expressed in monetary value—hides the real nature of the things exchanged as products of human labor. Here we have the root of much misunderstanding, for this suggests that commodity fetishism has to be based on a labor theory of value cherished by Marxists and liberals alike—one that depends on an ideology of the artifact, as discussed in Chapter 2. A more materialist phenomenology should make one suspect such theories, for how do consumers materially perceive the invisible, immaterial, and supra-sensible quantities of labor (or identity) in the commodity during their act of exchange? Labor theory’s focus on artifacts turns their manufacture into their real origin, and it seems to relegate the embodied part of the dialectic of consumption to a derivative status. Three examples will bring out some of the pitfalls of such folk theories. Together, they help us theorize how the conditions under which consumer perception occurs in modern societies can be understood. Daniel Miller’s A Theory of Shopping is a well-crafted and original study, that builds on an ethnography of shopping activities on a North London street and the way they express love to family and household members. Miller firstly finds an underlying structure of shopping in a comparison with sacrificial ritual, in which, secondly, the performance of thrift is the secular analogy to the portion sacrificed to the gods in nonmodern rituals. In a third step, he then tries to show that the analogy is not a mere structural one, but that historical conti-

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nuities in the modern transformation of notions of love can be connected to the (strongly feminized) positioning of thrift as the “central ritual in the transformation of shopping from spending to saving” (1998a: 132). Miller himself rejects what he regards as a folk theory that criticizes shopping as a form of hedonistic materialism because it prevents us from understanding that shopping is a ritual dialectic that constructs the shopping subject as devoted to the “other [household member] as a desiring subject” (1998a: 5, 148).2 Miller rightly thinks the Marxist doctrine of an inalienable “species being of labor” intrinsic to the commodity is a “rather mystical [principle]” (1998a: 131): what labor the London household members can perceive and measure can only derive from their concrete wage earnings, which, converted into money, have already been alienated from any concrete commodity’s history of production—the perception of which is even further divorced from the experience of those North London neighbors living on unemployment benefit. Miller goes further, however: he rejects any economistic, rational-choice theory of consumption because his ethnography shows that shoppers rarely know the prices of the goods they buy and often spend more on bargains because they think they save money in that way (Miller 1998a: 103; cf. Lave 1988). Instead, in the feminized field of provisioning the household, the performance of thrift is itself the end, and the power of the commodities bought derives from the way their ensemble objectifies and makes present “the other”—husband, children, grandchildren—as the future beneficiary of that act of thrift (Miller 1998a: 102). Miller acknowledges (in discussion with Colin Campbell [1987]) that his focus on shopping-for-provisioning on a North London street may be too narrow for him to be able to deny that hedonism plays a role in leisure shopping. In his North London material, such leisure shopping was rare and reserved for special holidays (1998a: 68–71). (Campbell may in fact agree [2010].) Miller’s focus on the material culture of provisioning, however, cannot sufficiently explain the emergence of advertising, since foodstuffs, which form the bulk of provisioning, were, in a list comparing products that were advertised in Britain drawn up in 1935, dwarfed by medicines, cosmetics, and sanitary products, tobacco and car fuel (Williams 1999: 419): not exactly the necessities that kept an average 1930s British household going. Scholars oriented on consumer research therefore argue that Miller’s is a narrow theory of shopping, indeed (Arnould 2000; Woodruffe-Burton, Eccles, and Elliott 2002). The general theory of shopping is, however, less interesting to me than the way Miller’s analysis can be connected to Dickens’s still

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life of fetishized commodities. Miller may reject a folk theory of hedonist materialism, but he seems to reproduce another folk theory of liberalism when he favors a theory of spending-to-save-for-thehousehold: the consumer morality that Dickens enshrined in A Christmas Carol. Indeed, Miller’s argument copies an earlier publication, where he borrowed from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of Christmas to interpret it as a ritual with the family as microcosm, preferring it to Russel Belk’s more commercial and materialist interpretation of Christmas (Miller 1993: 29; see also Belk 1993; Carrier 1993; LéviStrauss 1993). In A Theory of Shopping, the Christmas study is hardly mentioned: Christmas appears only when special gifts are contrasted with “thrifty” shopping (Miller 1998a: 33, 54), and when the closing stage of the sacrificial ritual of shopping is compared to the Christmas meal (Miller 1998a: 107). Miller’s analysis seems geared to defending a folk theory of thrift and prudent spending against a folk theory of hedonism, yet his ethnography seems to confirm Colin Campbell’s finding that two different Protestant traditions—Calvinist frugality opposing sentimental self-expression—together lie at the roots of the consumerist ethic (Campbell 1987). In fact, Miller’s finding that shoppers do not (always) rely on actual calculation, and lose themselves in spending money on bargains, seems to indicate another kind of commodity fetishism than that of the “still life” of goods described by Dickens: that of price. The performance of thrift can turn into a value relation that has “absolutely no connexion with [the commodities] physical properties” (Marx [1867] 1972: 321) at least when measured against the budget the household has available for satisfying its needs. Miller moves away from the phenomenon of the performance of thrift during shopping towards explaining it by a process of objectifying the household, but his structuralist critique of economism seems to obscure that the performance of thrift is itself “economist”. Shopping, in other words, suggests at least two different kinds of fetishism that determine what Miller’s shoppers do: a vestige of Calvinist frugality in a performance of thrift that itself fetishizes the performance—by advertising!—of price; and a temporary hedonism supported by the idea of buying a “treat” for the household on holidays like Christmas. However, Miller cannot pose the question “why (or when) this fetishism rather than another?” because he has ruled fetishism in general out of court. My other two examples do not follow Miller in denying that capitalism is fetishistic: they define capitalist fetishism in different ways. Thomas Richards (1990) positions the commodity at the cusp of an epochal change defining modernity: in his view, the magic of the

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1851 Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace transformed the commodity that the political economy of Adam Smith and his successors described as trivial and meaningless into the center and heart of capitalist representation. When, thirty-six years later, the spectacle of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee produced a plethora of objects carrying her image, advertisers finally got the point, and commodity culture and advertising took off. Richards’s study brims with original insights, but suffers from the same methodological defects as his main inspiration, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1983; see Richards 1990: 13): neither operationalizes the concepts of “commodity” and “spectacle,” and both therefore cherry-pick examples and misinterpret historical sources in ways that leave a large part of their statements unsupported by evidence. This becomes clear, for example, when Richards presents the commodity at the Great Exhibition as a coming together, for the first time, of a complex “semiotics,” while completely ignoring the much longer European history of commodifying and commercializing objects-on-display. This makes him ignore the curiosity cabinets and museums that I discussed in Chapters 3 and 5, and their embedding in global trade. Using decontextualized objects as spectacle was a long-standing practice among the elite of natural historians and aristocrats of Europe (Smith and Findlen 2002), and it was democratized and routinized by trade fairs, popular shows, and P. T. Barnum’s American Museum well before the Great Exhibition (Altick 1978; see Chapter 5). Richards’s hunch is sound to the extent that he identifies the Great Exhibition as an extraordinary coming-together of elements: “the first world’s fair, the first department store, the first shopping mall” (1990: 17; cf. T. Bennett 1995: 29–31). However, like others who interpreted these developments as the rise of a single “exhibitionary complex” (T. Bennett 1995), Richards totalizes the phenomenon, this time not to create a Foucauldian subjectivation machine or a transparent ideology of colonial representation (see Chapter 5), but to postulate a monolithic capitalist culture on the model of Debord’s spectacle that fused all these elements into a material style of display before it began to influence advertising. Instead, just as we should insist on multiple “exhibitionary complexes” with their own built-in anxieties (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 37), we should also recognize the multiplicity of different formations of capitalist culture and its variety of obsessions and fears. A first indication of this multiplicity comes from qualifying Richards’s point about the significance of the Great Exhibition as a prototype of the department store by observing that one could not go

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shopping in it: it did not display a single price tag. Instead, while most accounts of the Exhibition discussed the possible valuation of the things exhibited at length, they did so “under the surface” (Richards 1990: 38). Richards shows no awareness of the fact that despite the power of British commerce, the Victorian elite looked down upon it.3 The Planning Committee and Prince Albert most likely ensured that commerce did not perform too publicly at the Great Exhibition (reinforcing, contrary to Richards’s view [1990: 19], the North Atlantic desire to keep the “market” out of the “museum”). Put differently, the Planning Committee’s contribution to the evolution of spectacle probably came about by circumventing the fetishism of monetary value that Marx would later define as disconnecting itself from the commodity’s material properties. Richards calls the display of goods without monetary value a “transparency of exchange” that let things “sell themselves” so as to teach the audience the commodity spectacle (1990: 38), but this poetic license both obscures and raises the phenomenological question of how exchange and sale could be transparently perceived if all signs of sales and prices were banned from public display.4 I propose that it is their presence as finished and decontextualized products, that is, as a material performance of a future of comparison and exchangeability that made the objects displayed at the Great Exhibition into commodities, and fetishized them in the same move. It performed the fetishized still life of objects also described by Dickens, but it did so without reference to either labor value, or money. Its context, however, added another value: identity. This material performance of exchangeability was produced by the following steps: firstly, the space of the exhibition singled out things on display as unique by a material gesture that alienated them from their contexts of production and use and reified them as finished products. They kept only the slimmest of traces to their past production by their nationalist identity as “Russian,” “Chinese,” or “English.” Secondly, this display allowed for comparison, used by such luminaries as William Whewell and Charles Dickens to argue that some parts of the Exhibition (such as the “English” or “French”) were really “great” while others were “little” (such as the “Chinese”)—indicating the lack of progress of the latter (Whewell quoted in Richards 1993: 61; Dickens and Horne 1851). (As discussed in Chapter 5, this comparison became a fundamental feature of World Expositions after Daniel Veth.) Such progress and prosperity, especially as displayed by European industrial machinery, was attested by many contemporary publications. Thirdly, everyone was allowed physical access to that display of the materials of progress, even if working classes could not afford it except

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on “shilling days.” Such a democratic materialization of “the people,” allowing even the working classes access to the pinnacle of civilization materially established by the Exhibition space, was clearly perceived across the North Atlantic: in the words of Horace Greeley (founder of the New York Tribune), the objects from the “industry of all nations” were “articulate utterances of the human mind” now made equally available for visitors to “possess” themselves of their human spirit (cited in Richards 1990: 63). The effectivity of this access and possession can be gauged from the British elite’s sense of pleasant surprise at the disciplined behavior of the lower classes on “shilling days” (T. Bennett 1995: 72). Here we find some of the basic operations of what, around the same time, Europeans came to call heritage, patrimoine, or Erbe: a sometimes mute, sometimes more articulate, isolation of an object or site as a commodity in a gesture that “sacralized” it, usually by adding a nationalist classification that, importantly, qualified actual ownership and possession of the property by promising free access to its visual consumption by a much wider audience—foremost, the nation’s “people.” (I shall return to the distinction between access, possession, and ownership and its relation to materiality.) By banning price tags, this performance of objects allowed all visitors the democratic sensation of being in touch with finished products they could never afford, erasing all reminders of one’s lack of purchasing power by dispensing with price tags, and creating an imaginary equal opportunity for participating in national or international civic ritual (remember that, at the time, the popular vote was still denied to the majority of the Exhibition’s visitors—although many men did participate in its rambunctious rituals: see O’Gorman 2007). The example of the Great Exhibition, therefore, again proposes two fundamentally different, yet crucial possibilities for fetishizing a commodity’s performance: the (re)animation of an object by the double gesture of material isolation and decontextualization (the material “still life”), and the transformation of the sensuous subject by a promise of a future identity associated with this materialization of commodity space.5 That object and subject are fetishized together should come as no surprise since we acknowledged that materiality is a property of a relationship (Miller 2005; Chapter 4). However, who is the relationship’s agent, and who its patient? How is this sensuous dialectic affected by the awareness that even an acute critic of commodity fetishism like Karl Marx lives in a society where he is forced into fetishizing the commodities he uses and sells? Here, Peter Stallybrass’s telling of the story of Marx’s overcoat can be of great empirical use. In the impov-

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erished state in which the Marx family spent the decades in London before Marx finished Capital, Marx’s overcoat provided both a source of money by being pawned, a source of warmth when worn, and a source of respectability when, for example, Marx needed access to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he had to do his research for writing Capital. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Marx’s coat would go in and out of the pawnshop, and its possession directly determined in a “vulgar material” way what Marx wrote—commodified journalism when the family was hard up, critical analyses of capital and political economy when money was available and the coat could be pawned back (Stallybrass 1998: 187–88). The pawnbroker was therefore a familiar figure (colloquially known as “uncle” among many proletarians), and pawning was a heavily feminized domain, where Jenny Marx often brought the heirlooms of her Scottish aristocratic family (in fact, when Marx tried to pawn the Argyll family silver himself, he was arrested because his insufficiently respectable clothing suggested he had stolen it). Stallybrass notes that, despite the often weekly visits that factory worker’s families paid to the pawnshop, Marx could not use the pawnbroker in his analysis of the relation between object and commodity, because the pawnbroker was an agent of consumption rather than production (that is, he was temporally distant from manufacturing anything), and because he was as much as feature of precapitalist as of capitalist formations (Stallybrass 1998: 199). At the same time: it was at the pawnshop that the double life of things appeared in its most contradictory form. Things to be pawned might be household necessities and markers of achievement and success, but they were also often the repositories of memory. But to pawn an object is to denude it of memory. For only if an object is stripped of its particularity and history can it again become a commodity and an exchange value. (Stallybrass 1998: 195)

But can things ever be “stripped of their particularity and history” by merely shifting them into the realm of prices?6 This seems to ignore the biography of objects and the fact that they can go in and out of commodity status (Kopytoff 1986). This stacks the deck in favor of a dichotomy in which monetary value disintegrates all other value-relations—utility, identity, even the materiality of money itself. However, neither fetishized identities vested in “repositories of memory” like the Argyll family silver or Marx’s coat of respectability, nor the use-value of “household necessities” disappear when these goods enter a pawnshop: the practice of pawning explicitly works on the premise that used goods, once commodified as pawns, can be de-

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commodified by the previous owners (and this was indeed the practice with Marx’s overcoat as well as the average London worker’s Sunday clothes). The fictive kinship of “uncle” the pawnbroker indeed suggests a polyvalence in the relationship: it indicates a relation of intimacy in which the pawnbroker, too, is expected to remain aware of the personal particularity and history of the pawn he has taken in custody in exchange for money. To pawn one’s possessions therefore does not “denude it of memory,” but takes the material object into a different tournament of value where one has (temporarily) given up one’s access to it (Ribot and Peluso 2003; see also Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). Stallybrass downplays the material being of the object in favor of its human meanings, but silver remains silver, probably with the family crest somewhere on it, and the wrinkles in the elbows of a used jacket were not called memories for nothing—for if in Stallybrass’s view they devalued the commodity, they retain their value for previous owners when the latter can pawn the object back (Stallybrass 1998: 196). Marx’s overcoat was, in that sense, an excessive object for the Marx household—at least triply fetishized, for beyond its use-value of keeping Marx warm in the clammy British winters, it materialized the respectable identity needed to enter the British Museum, carried exchange value as a pawn, and possibly personal memories like the wrinkles in its elbows. This qualitative accumulation of value was most likely reinforced rather than lessened by the overcoat’s serial exit from and reentry into the pawnshop or the Marx household. This serial repetition of the changes of value of Marx’s overcoat are, indeed, expressions of capitalist contradictions, and below we will turn to the question of how contradiction might affect the doubling of consciousness that must have been its result. We should first note, however, that the contradictions exist sequentially, that is, they unfold in real time. Stallybrass seems to deny this dialectical temporality when he writes that the object is “denuded” of particularity and history, for the simple reason that this ignores that its particularity and history are restored once the object is pawned back. I think the statement that “money denud[es] the object” should once more be interpreted as folding, into the description of the Marx family’s pawning practice, folk theories that portray money as an acid that erodes social relationships (Simmel [1907] 1990) or as a means of disembedding economic relations from sociality in general (Polanyi 1944). Once one recognizes, however, that the spirit of matter does not allow Marx’s coat to be fully divorced from either his respectability or his personal use after being pawned, the question does not become whether money denudes the

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object of its other qualities, but when (that is, under what conditions) it may do so, and when it doesn’t (Maurer 2006). Pawning therefore brings temporal dimensions to the fore that amplify, yet converge with what we learned from shopping and the Great Exhibition’s displays: what kind of signifying phenomenon promises a consumer access to the past of a commodity, or to its future exchangeability? Whether pawn or finished (but unused) product, it is the promise of exchangeability that gives a thing its commodity status and allows for fixing a price, and this promise also requires an assessment of its future uses—clearly dependent on the seller’s and buyer’s differential assessment of the biography of the object, its production, and subsequent use. But the pawning relationship not only hides, like the objects on display at the Great Exhibition, the quantity of labor that went into the object: it makes it of secondary concern in relation to the other values the object has accumulated. (One might even say that the labor that the overcoat did to make Marx respectable—that turns it into a second-hand product—diminished its monetary value. But that kind of labor is not theorized by a labor theory of value.) Stallybrass’s highlighting of price as the fetishism of abstract, immaterial monetary value bypasses the discussion of where such other values originate—and therefore skirts the phenomenological problem that Miller addressed by calling the Marxist origination of value “mystical.” The labor theory of value cannot (fully) explain the conditions by which the pawn is fetishized as money. Moreover, the inalienability of the labor that went into the object’s manufacture has become obscured by subsequent layers in the object’s biography. Conversely, the commodity status of the pawn shows a more complicated temporality than the common focus on a linear transformation of use-value into exchange value can address. The pawn re-enters commodity status (assuming its owner once bought it) because it promises increased purchasing power in the hands of pawners once they transfer the pawn to the pawnbroker. But this granting of access and ownership to the pawnbroker is not absolute (just as the access of workers to the commodities on display at the Great Exhibition remains restricted to the visual): the pawn’s previous owner does not fully relinquish possession, for the Argyll’s family silver, and maybe even Marx’s coat, continue to have personal historical value—a kind of cultural property that its legal exchange has only potentially abolished—for at least as long as the possibility still exists of buying them back. The pawn remains an index of past events in its biography even when access to it has been (temporarily) given up, for such giving up of access can “keep-while-exchanging”: it certainly is

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a commodity, but it retains some traits of a gift (Weiner 1985). It is a different, partially separate sphere of exchange, like other spheres that folk theories of capitalism have long tried to deny or marginalize out of existence. However, capitalism did not make it disappear: instead, it generates new institutional articulations within dominant and subaltern capitalist practices (see Bloch and Parry 1989; Maurer 2006; Guyer 1995). Nor does the story of Marx’s coat, while showing a dialectic of material and immaterial fetishisms, allow for a kind of Hegelian resolution in the dialectical synthesis that Daniel Miller termed a “republic of mutual respect” between subjects and objects (2005: 39). The former dialectic is, instead, agonistic: the contradictions of the practice of pawning frustrate the realization of one desire at the moment of realizing another. Likewise, for most visitors the promises of the Great Exhibition’s commodities were only temporary and futuristic. In both cases, such attractions and contradictions of the circulation of goods are perceived viscerally, by “sensuous sufferers” (see Chapter 3) and produce at least a subconscious awareness of the fact that one’s body, while desiring to be its own agent, is also subjected to forces out of its control—whether it is the dream of possessing an English watch or Indian cloth at the Exhibition, or the wrench of parting with the family silver, or the warmth and security felt on entering the British Museum after one’s overcoat had been recovered from the pawnshop. Having to go to the pawnbroker time and again shows that his family’s poverty made Marx subject to (the agony of) what the pawnbroker wanted to give for the coat or the family silver, but this temporally alternated with moments of realized desire, when Marx was once more the subject of his coat (when buying it back or wearing it to be warm). This agonistic dialectic illustrates general temporal conditions under which people perceive and relate to capitalist commodities, but it gets a specific twist because of the role money plays in wage labor relations and the everyday acquisition of commodities.

Three Forms of Commodity Fetishism? The preceding examples suggest that a multiplicity of fetishisms exists in the relationship between commodities and consumers, and that they unfold in a temporality of alternating between being the agent and subject of one’s acquisitions and uses at one moment, to being the patient subject to those material goods at the next. In this conception, fetishization always applies to both subjects and objects at the

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same time—in fact, one could argue that speaking in terms of discreet subjects and objects already immaterializes and fetishizes the material dynamics of objectification and embodiment, just like exchange value and branding do. But that may not be the most important lesson these stories provide. Under capitalist regimentation (and even at present, not all of modern society is completely subject to it), we are, firstly, all subject to an economistic fetishism of calculating commodities’ value—but it may as often be a qualitative performance of thrift than actual numerical calculation. Shoppers, in any case, are engaged in a complex balancing act: they weigh a price or bargain against the household budget and its members’ desires, against the total purchasing power they possess at that contingent moment, and most likely against something resembling what Marx called “socially necessary” labor power: a complex and subjective assessment of what the desired product on average should cost.7 This is performative because the shopper’s weighing of monetary values in the supermarket rarely approaches an actual calculation (cf. Lave 1988)—just like Chicago stock traders emphasized a corporeal experience of numbers when they argued that the first step of becoming a successful trader “is learning not to calculate” (Zaloom 2003: 264). Economistic subjects therefore perform a kind of mastery of calculation, which may or may not make them agents and subjects of those calculations, but certainly makes them subject to (as in “dependent on”) numbers, whether these numbers are calculated or not. Money is a promise: the fetishized subjectivities of consumer sovereignty (whether of a hedonistic performance of buying power, or of Calvinist thrift) are, therefore, future-directed. This means they have a more immaterial presence, something they share with identity fetishism. Nevertheless, even those futures come to us in the form of a material performance. The second form of fetishism unfolds not in relation to numbers but in our relation to material commodities, and is much more tied to the temporality of the object’s biography. The previous section showed several capitalist prototypes of such fetishization: what I called the fetish’s “still life” in the case of Dickens, and the singular object or “curiosity” in an exhibition showed a material decontextualization of a finished product. Recommodification of used goods by pawnshops, second-hand stores or antiquaries also works by such material dislocation. Decontextualization in general ruptures the biography of an object by removing it from one type of possession and use to another—including from producer to salesperson, from natural habitat to museum, or from previous owner to pawnshop or

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vice versa. It therefore extends far beyond the mere possession and use of commodities in a market, and it deals in complex negotiations of (in)alienability, the exchange of knowledge or ignorance, and displacement in both space and time vis-á-vis the commodity status of goods. But while these forms of fetishizing a commodity require a material isolation, whether by a marketing zone’s space of desire or the exhibition’s space of singularization and sacralization of the object, they position the object’s biography—which, like previous chapters have shown, may be reduced to a routinized form of wonder—in relation to potentially different future values. Like Dickens’s shops or a department store with fixed prices, the Great Exhibition’s material display may have suggested to visitors a generalized exchangeability, but the form of comparison that the latter allowed did not say “Oh what delicious apples!” but “How great is it to be (a member of) the British Empire!” It thereby also generated a different identity value, not a sovereign consumer with purchasing power, but a civil subject of an imperial nation. The decontextualized displays that the modern industrial world developed are underdetermined by their materiality, and they can produce different material subjects: shopaholics as well as connoisseurs. But neither subject can emerge without this spirit of matter. The third form of commodity fetishism reifies identities and is well represented by the term branding (more about that in the next chapter). Fetishizing commodities by identity can neither be reduced to monetarization or the value of labor, nor to the display spaces of trading, exhibitions, or department stores. Instead, I propose that its sociality can best be circumscribed as a mode of capitalist regulation that runs parallel to and often reinforces nation-state’s regimes of citizenship: an object-subject relationship that tries to amplify the trust of the consumer in the (performance of the) commodity acquired, but not by its use-value or production, but by emphasizing its “personality” or identity. Here, the material commodity again becomes a secondary, necessary but not sufficient, condition for fetishization, just as in the case of exchange values. This kind of fetishization was not granted much room in Marx’s analysis, partly because he could not witness the rise of advertising and brands, partly because he failed to pay enough attention to consumption (for that could have shown that Marx’s pawns were themselves fetishized by immaterial identity values: respectability and family). However, the fetishization of all commodities during the Great Exhibition as mostly national signs of progress and backwardness—putting the “English” over and above the “Chinese”—signals a form of distinction that was more incipi-

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ently democratic, yet had precedents in the sartorial regimes of feudalism, colonialism, and slavery. Its fetishization of identities occurs to a large extent by self-fashioning, but, as we shall see, we would be much mistaken when we understand that to happen under conditions of self-possession—a fantasy favored by marketers until today. Before we turn to branding and advertising, however, we should assess where this leaves us in relation to fetish and fetishism and their discursive history. We have seen that a large number of Protestants and liberals tried to build a position of intellectual sovereignty by using “fetish” and “fetishism” to distinguish those people who lacked mastery of themselves vis-á-vis objects—Africans, Catholics, adherents of other religions. In contrast, Marxists, Freudians, and others have also used the terms to criticize such ideals of bourgeois modernity by saying that (some) bourgeois subjects do not possess themselves. What remains of those liberal and critical assertions of intellectual superiority after my preceding discussion? Recent celebrations of theories of rational choice, the equality of capitalist exchange, or secular sacrifice have been identified as heirs to bourgeois liberalism, and David Graeber was, I think, right in arguing that the late-twentieth-century popularity of such approaches owes much to the neoliberal climate inaugurated as state policy by Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s (Graeber 2001: 27–33; for the process of “neoliberalizing” nation-states, see Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002).8 However, Graeber’s own revivification of a Marxist alternative retains most of the disadvantages of that second position of superiority, since contrary to the lesser mortals who lack those critical insights, Marxists can see that we turn “our dreams” into “false coins,” that we are “mistaking the power of a history internalized in one’s own desires, for a power intrinsic to the object itself ” (Graeber 2001: 115) and that this is the kind of egocentric, subjective perception of the world that Jean Piaget attributed to children (2001: 63). It remains mysterious where Graeber acquired the gnostic spark that allowed him to escape his subject position as academic wage-earner and acquire the sacred inspiration needed to perceive social reality despite being caught in capitalist appearances. However, the fact that influential students of commodity culture like Appadurai, Graeber, and Miller pay very little attention to advertising suggests an at least partial answer: they failed to study capitalism’s core industry of manipulating the performance of commodity fetishes. The answer also suggests that our understanding of commodity fetishism may be fed by empirical evidence rather than by liberal or Marxist gnosis. Thomas Richards’s lament of thirty-three years

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ago, despite studies of advertising having proliferated since, still seems correct: that we lack a fundamental theory of advertising (1990: 9). These lacunae will not be filled, I suggest, unless we start with the materiality of commodity aesthetics (something that consumer studies also often fail to do). In Chapter 10, the performative gap this uncovers helps to explain the double consciousness of many modern people who oscillate between trust and mistrust of the advertisements that have come to dominate our social life.

Notes 1. Carrier (1993: 68) interprets the epigraph to this section as also referring to an older carnivalesque tradition of Christmas and New Year’s feasting and inverting hierarchical relationships. That may well be true, but the use of a passage penned in London in 1843 as a “demonstration” of later North American cultural patterns does not convince. 2. Miller therefore also rejects—with my full agreement—Georges Bataille’s notion of excess as spending, since it is insufficiently based on empirical studies of both sacrifice and capitalist consumption (1998a: 84–89). 3. The Victorian public school, which educated the elite, kept away from commerce and technology (Wilkinson 1962) and the ethos of the civil service was hostile to commercial thinking far into the twentieth century (see Furse 1962). Important Victorian intellectuals like Carlyle, Dickens, Froude, or Southey repeatedly lashed out against Mammon (Newsome 1999: 242; see also Michie 2001). 4. Richards’s explanation by a “semiotics of representation” excludes signification by the material presence of the commodity just like other theories of representation criticized in Part III of this book. 5. While I am indebted to Richards’s sixfold semiotics of the Exhibition’s commodities (1990: 58–68) for sharpening my thoughts, his slippage from the Exhibition’s mimetic media to an invocation of representations is speculative and confused. See also the discussion of mimesis and representation in Chapter 8. 6. Alternatively, stripping them of price does not (necessarily) de-commodify them, as my discussion of the Great Exhibition shows. See Johannes Fabian’s argument that all collecting presupposes commodification (2001: 126). 7. Marx’s famous example was that the abstract assessment of the cost of a piece of cloth must have dropped sharply after production costs were influenced by the introduction of power-looms in Britain. Note that this implies an abstract average, yet subjective and contingent assessment dependent on scale and location, that is, the position of the perceiver ([1867] 1972: 306; see Amariglio and Callari 1993: 198; Graeber 2001: 268n7).

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8. I agree with Graeber that Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social and cultural capital may lapse into economism (which explains why it remains the most moronically cited item from his work), but Graeber completely misses Bourdieu’s epistemological argument about breaking with objectivism, of which economism is a part (Chapter 2; Graeber 2001: 27–30).

Chapter 10

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS? THE RISE OF ADVERTISING

Copywriters are people who in another time would have been preachers or teachers or perhaps actors. My own best advertising writing was dictated walking up and down in the tone and manner of a political exhorter. To be a really good copywriter requires a passion for converting the other fellow, even if it’s something you don’t believe in yourself. No doubt the preacher who seems insincere is often dominated by the desire to convert people. This is an emotion in itself and has little to do with its object. —Helen Woodward (1926, cited in Lears 1984: 361–62) Let’s get right down to brass tacks. What folks want in a motor car is increased comfort and greater economy of maintenance and upkeep. The Franklin car is fact-backed on these points in a very marvelous manner. —Franklin Automobile Company advertisement (1913, cited in Lears 1994: 213, my emphases)

In Dorothy Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter Wimsey is struck, when investigating a murder at Pym’s Publicity, by the curious reluctance of marketers to use the commodities that they extol for a living ([1933] 1959: 52). Mr. Copley was known to be dyspeptic, and anything that came out of a tin can or a package was poison to him. Yet he had “a perfectly miraculous knack” for writing appetizing copy for sardines or tinned salmon. Mr. Ingleby, who lived in Bloomsbury and who dressed and argued in sympathy with communism, specialized in praising tea for Fashion’s Favorites, shoes for the Hunt Ball, or cigarettes to be conspicuously consumed in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or the Royal Yacht Club at Cowes. Miss Meteyard excelled at writing copy for almost anything but women’s goods and had to hand the latter accounts to her male colleagues ([1933] 1959: 27–28). If

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this is indeed an accurate reflection of Miss Sayers’s own experience of working for an advertising agency—she worked at S. H. Benson’s Agency when writing Murder Must Advertise, and modeled Miss Meteyard on herself (Hitchman 1976: 59)—she echoes Helen Woodward, who first started working for the Frank Presbrey Agency in 1912. Both observe that the emotion of advertising has little to do with the object advertised: however, “fact-backed” it may be, one still needs a “marvelous manner” or “miraculous knack” to bring that out. This discrepancy between product and performance appears a sine qua non of the profession of advertising in the UK and US as it became established in the early twentieth century. At first sight, it suggests that, contrary to anticonsumerist accusations of materialism, advertising is in fact a dematerializing agent that converts both people and products into abstractions (Lears 1994: 4). Both the tendency in material culture theory to associate anything “immaterial” with religion (Miller 2005: 1, 21), the idea that capitalism primarily abstracts (Stallybrass 1998: 183-86; Kopytoff 1986: 64), and the ubiquitous use of religious metaphors by “native” marketing creatives (as in my first epigraph from Helen Woodward) seem to confirm this. Instead, I hope to show in this chapter that the discrepancy between product and performance is an important indicator of a materiality specific to commodity fetishism: it seems to derive from an aesthetics of the commodity that suggests that the fetishist relationship resides in the performance (rather than the material constitution) of use and exchange-value (Haug 1986)—and I would add, identity-value as well. While the former perspective still may feed stereotypes of fraudulent marketers who dupe infantile consumers, my reframing stresses—in line with W. E. B. du Bois—that both suffer a kind of double consciousness. This explains, on the one hand, why marketers often associate advertising with Protestant sincerity, preaching, and magical enchantment, and on the other, why Karl Marx thought to describe commodity fetishism as a Religion des Alltagslebens (“everyday religion”).1 Rather than explaining advertising by a “false consciousness” spread by fraudulent secular priests to a gullible audience (a perspective on advertising still popular among late twentieth-century historians and social scientists: Leiss 1976; Preteceille and Terrail 1985), I propose that the aesthetics of the commodity show how both marketers’ and consumer consciousness intelligently “suffer” what is often called a “magic system” of modernity (Lears 1984: 388; Williams 1999) by a temporal alternation of doubt and positive action, as indicated by an oscillation between trust and mistrust. The question that a perspective through double conscious-

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ness answers may not be “what is advertising?” but “when is advertising?” When translated into an injunction to historicize, this may also return our attention to some of the racial relations that drove W. E. B. du Bois to formulate his theory in the first place. Werner Haug makes clear that seller and buyer of a commodity orient themselves to crucially different timescales depending on the value they covet. “As far as the exchange-value is concerned, the transaction is completed and the purpose realized with the sale itself. From the point of view of use-value and need, the sale is only the start, and is the prerequisite to the buyer’s realization of purpose in the use and enjoyment of the purchase” (1986: 16). The future exchangeability of the commodity therefore relies on a “double reality”: use-value and the appearance of use-value. In the act of selling, the “aesthetic illusion” of the commodity—its promise of use-value—becomes as important, if not more so, than the commodity’s material being itself (Haug 1986: 17). It becomes necessary, for economic reasons, to try and gain technological control of this sensual appearance, and control of the commodity’s performance is precisely what advertising tries to achieve. Likewise, we have seen that shoppers also respond primarily to the performance of exchange-value—the price, the supermarket bargain—rather than an actual calculation. In other words, the materiality of commodities’ fetishistic relationships resides in their performance more than in their materials. The spirit of matter is such, however, that the advertising materials by which the consumer sensually perceives the performance of the object’s use-values become an irreducible part of the communication: they signify in their own respect. Thus, a bottle of wine I buy may tell me it is organically produced, but my acceptance of this message is based on my perception of the label and its trustworthiness: it is, after all, a printed label, with little more than a symbolic connection to the production of the wine itself. The only other apperception of “organic” that I have available to my senses is when I taste the wine (and I may not be enough of a connoisseur to distinguish organic wine by taste alone).2 The material media of label and wine, when taken together, generate a perceptual gap between the meanings intended by the authors of the advertisement and the consumers of the wine—a gap that Marx described as sinnlich übersinnlich and that yet remains glued to a material Ding. This is the generative gap at the heart of the commodity form, which requires the suppression of particularities in the name of exchange- or brand-value on the one hand, but cannot do without the concretion and tangibility of use-value and their users on the

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other (Chakrabarty cited in Mazzarella 2003: 20). “What advertising and marketing professionals do is to attempt to manage the fault line at the heart of the commodity form in such a way that profit will accrue first to them, and subsequently, perhaps, to their corporate clients” (Mazzarella 2003: 20). Thus, the fetishized commodity is neither “transcendent” (as the English translation of Capital I used in Chapter 9 had it) nor “immaterial” (pace Stallybrass 1998: 184; Miller 2005: 21–22): it is “sensuously supra-sensuous” because it aims to materialize a future for the consuming subject. Fetishizing the commodity is a sensuous dematerialization, one that continues to rely on the material carriers of both its supra-sensuous meanings and the consumer’s perceptual framework. It also is inherently temporal, connecting a performance of the past to desire and hence to the future. This is equally true when one considers exchange-value, for the gap between the “real” exchange-value of a commodity (such as abstracted labor) and the performance of its exchange-value (such as its price) is formed by differences in scale-making that consumers can rarely perceive in full (as I will discuss in the next section). As the example of the wine label shows, this gap between sensuous and supra-sensuous, between the object itself and the performance of its commodified values, or between the materiality of the thing and its meaning, may generate meaning as well as doubt. Doubt breeds mistrust and suspicion and must be countered by new performances of trustworthiness. This partially explains why advertising as an industry displays a constant oscillation between trust and suspicion, whether it addresses a public of corporate clients or of consumers. When Lord Peter Wimsey has just gone undercover as a copywriter at Pym’s Publicity, he is informed by his superior that “the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client. They all have their fads” (Sayers [1933] 1959: 14). Yet, this is not the reason why advertising is “an awfully immoral job,” for that lies in the way the copy Lord Peter and his colleagues write is “forcing the damn-fool public to pay” for something it neither wants nor needs (Sayers [1933] 1959: 42). The discrepancies are not just between the conniving marketers and the gullible public, but everywhere: not only are Mr. Copley, Mr. Ingleby, and Miss Meteyard particularly good at praising products they have no affinity with, Mr. Pym himself is, according to Lord Peter, “a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money.” When Chief Inspector Parker then asks Lord Peter whether there is no “truth in advertising” at all, the latter admits there is some—like there is leaven in bread (Sayers [1933] 1959: 57).

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If we did not already know that Dorothy Sayers worked at an advertising agency, this statement would strongly indicate that she built her novel on more than fiction. The “Truth-in-Advertising” movement was started at the first meeting of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America (AACA) in 1911 and was partly derived, indeed, from a “rigid morality”: the one that characterized most American advertising professionals’ background in the Protestant Midwest (Lears 1984: 366). One of its proponents, G. W. Freeman of the Conklin-Mann Agency, opposed a 1930 plea by (underpaid) copywriters to sign their copy by name with the argument that the egoism and insincerity of the actor had no place in advertising. He extolled “the self-preserving need of truth and sincerity in advertising”: if not maintained, the consumer’s faith in the ad would be destroyed, because emphasizing the artist in public would fatally undermine the ad’s seeming naturalness and lack of artifice (Lears 1984: 361). (Note that this replicates the material display of finished products at exhibitions, shops, and department stores: it also hides their “artifice” by producing a sui generis, “natural” impression.) Freeman’s emphasis on sincerity is a typically Protestant performance of sincerity (Keane 2002). In Britain, the transformation of “puffmen” (who still copied eighteenth-century methods) into professional marketers went together with the founding of the Advertisers Protection Society in 1900, the name of which betrays that it had to defend itself against the mistrust of the Society for Checking Abuses of Public Advertising founded two years earlier (Williams 1999: 417).3 The first professional publication for marketers in the Netherlands, De Bedrijfsreklame (“Company Advertising”), proclaimed in its first issue in 1916 that advertisements needed to be “honest” (eerlijk) and its readers should be able to trust blindly the truth of what they said (Schreurs 2001: 50). It shows that professional advertising was not merely meant to stir up consumerist desires and materialist hedonism; it was also rooted in a culture of discipline, control, and regulation with strong Protestant overtones (Lears 1994: 10). However, there were important reasons to worry about the honesty, sincerity, and trust of advertising. Advertising emerged from social locations where suspicion and mistrust were endemic. In the marketplaces and on the streets where advertising seemed necessary, strangers tried to sell you dubious novelties such as patent medicines, miracle-working cosmetics, or exotic foodstuffs. Moreover, honest vendors were often difficult to tell apart from quacks and confidence men.4 The American advertising industry, in particular, was haunted by the specter of P. T. Barnum, who not only turned museums into spectacles and perpetrated hoaxes (see Chapter 5), but was the god-

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father of salesmanship and public relations in the eyes of many. He often seemed to embody the memory of frontier marketplaces where patent medicine sellers sat cheek by jowl with conjurors and confidence men, even after they had long disappeared (Lears 1984: 356, 1994: 64–72). Likewise, before the 1880s and 1890s, British “puffmen” still copied the techniques of eighteenth-century hustlers and mountebanks, because, as in North America, large-scale advertising was only needed at the margins of the commercial world, for patent medicine and foods, colonial products such as tea, soap, and cocoa, or novelties (Williams 1999: 415, 416). In the Netherlands, where American examples inspired the professionalization of advertising at a later stage, it began with similarly strange products, and at the first international exhibition of advertising in Amsterdam in 1897, the first prize in street vending was carried off by the famous quack Kokadorus (Scheurs 2001: 13). Thomas Richards may have been right in identifying the Great Exhibition as “a pivotal moment,” but not, as he claimed, for the history of advertising (1990: 52): the rise of commodity culture from the elite decontextualization of “curiosities” may have provided advertising with a necessary material condition, but the wild worlds of mobile markets, colonial products, and traveling spectacles provided a more important prehistory for decontextualizing objects and profiting from their alienation. T. J. Jackson Lears has shown at length how the friction between Protestant sincerity and the cultivation of the carnivalesque and magically transformative aspects of market culture determined the emergence and development of American advertising (Lears 1983, 1984, 1994). In the Netherlands and Britain, quacks, hustlers, and mountebanks also seem to shape the prehistory of advertising (Schreurs 2001; Williams 1999). However, an even more profound social explanation for the structural oscillation of suspicion and trust in advertising may lie in the conditions under which industry scaled up to today’s national and global markets. Advertising as we know it did not emerge during or directly after the industrial revolution, but at a time when new production techniques and larger oligopolistic companies produced more standardized products from—often colonial— raw materials. This required both the differentiation of companies from each other and the familiarization of a far wider audience with unknown goods. In the UK, the first major advertising campaign in 1886 promoted Pears’ Soap, made from palm oil, by the attractions of “Bubbles,” an adorable toddler, in imagery invented seven years earlier by artist John Everett Millais for mass reproduction in the Graphic’s Christmas Annual (Figure 10.1; I will come back to Bubbles’s colo-

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Figure 10.1. The “Bubbles” poster for the 1886 Pears’ Soap campaign by John Everett Millais. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

nial genealogy shortly). The British infatuation with children painted in eighteenth-century style served to sell an industrial product from the colonies using preindustrial nostalgia at a time when the great agricultural depression, mass unemployment, and a series of disastrous colonial wars had sapped British trust in imperialism and wholesome masculinity. In contrast, American advertisements for Pears’ Soap starred Admiral George Dewey, colonial hero of the conquest

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of the Philippines (see Figure 10.2; Bradley 1991). American advertisements that did not explicitly invoke external colonial conquest still promoted a view of progress, missionizing to country folk about the materialist need to raise standards of living and spreading abundance

Figure 10.2. The Pears’ Soap advertisement featuring US Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila (1898) during the US colonization of the Philippines. Wikimedia commons, public domain.

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and rationality (country folk, however, did not easily surrender their cultural and economic autonomy: Lears 1984: 364). Professional advertising emerged, in other words, in social contexts where faith in infrastructures of distribution and quality control was absent, eroded, or violently disrupted, and large corporations had to build trust in novel products and identities. This crisis in trust arose largely because commercial transactions were being displaced from local producers, grocers, and shopkeepers to national companies, five-and-dime stores, and brand names (Schreurs 2001: 17, 18; de Grazia 2005: 155, 160–62, 164). Local knowledge and circuits of production and circulation often had to be undermined in favor of the universal appeal and the “personality” of a nationally or globally marketed product or company (de Grazia 2005: 198, 209–17). Such disruptions also characterized the seemingly pacific appearance of US marketing in Europe after World War I: its “soft power” hides a series of concerted attempts by public-private partnerships to break up European commodity circuits in order to make room for a new mastery of market exchanges (about which more soon; de Grazia 2005: 7). The success of such campaigns in the longue durée is apparent given the ubiquity of American-style advertising today. Moral anxieties arising from crises of trust appeared in different guises: in the US, dominant WASP culture set Protestant sincerity as a performance of trust against the carnivalesque or orientalist guises of innocent leisure and the deceitful promises of confidence men. Dutch marketers were sufficiently insecure to publicly underscore that no company that advertised itself could be untrustworthy—for why would they spend money on advertisements if bad quality would make those investments futile (Schreurs 2001: 94)? In other European countries, the ascetic nature of socialism often produced mistrust of advertising, as either arrogant and loud, self-dissipating, or desecrating the face of the city (de Grazia 2005: 113; Schreurs 2001: 83–84). Trust and mistrust were, in Europe, perhaps more than among the predominantly middle-class culture of North American audiences, expressed in class distinctions: Dutch opponents of quacks and impresarios like Thomas Holloway and P. T. Barnum condemned them for their “low taste and firework effects” (lage smaak en knal-effecten), and Dutch young men would be advised not to enter the advertising profession if they wanted to remain righteous (rechtschapen). Some argued the opposite of the quote above: that there must be something wrong with a product that needed to be advertised in the first place (Schreurs 2001: 23, 54, 85). As Lord Peter Wimsey’s colleagues confirm, this lack of trust in the honesty of advertising was sometimes even shared by marketers

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themselves (cf. Schreurs 2001: 110). Here, however, we encounter a twist that I regard as essential to the history of advertising: advertising managed over the course of the twentieth century to even turn the very lack of trust in its own performance into a performance of the commodity. Raymond Williams claims that, by the 1930s, the advertising profession in Britain incorporated the oscillation of trust and mistrust in its own advertisements by the development of a “knowing, sophisticated, humorous advertising, which acknowledged the skepticism and made claims either casual and offhand or so ludicrously exaggerated as to include the critical response” (Williams 1999: 419). A great pioneer of this humorous style was Dorothy Sayers herself: she coauthored the ironic (and highly popular) Guinness “zoo” advertisements while working as a copywriter for advertising agency of S. H. Benson in London from 1922 until 1935 (see Figure 10.3). As advertising increasingly performed the awareness that its truths could not be trusted, attracting the consumer by irony and jouissance instead, the strategy of incorporating inauthenticity as an affirmation of one’s brand name became routine. Especially after the profound critiques of the 1960s and 1970s (when the “depth approach” of the psychology of advertising had been unmasked as dishonest: Packard 1958: 1), advertising worldwide bounced back by incorporating the critique in its performance, and thus (re)conquered the “cool” (Frank 1998). Especially the latter development proves that the assumptions of transparency behind the perspectives on consumer consciousness sketched at the end of Chapter 9—a liberal faith in consumer agency as opposed to the Marxist claim to be able to detect false consciousness—are inadequate for interpreting advertising. If both marketers and consumers adapt to the oscillation between suspecting and trusting the performance of the commodity, then their awareness of its reality is multiple. Common critiques of advertising, consumerism, and commodity fetishism—that the latter make people desire qualities they have no use for (Leiss 1976, Preteceille and Terrail 1985; J. Williamson 1978; for an overview, see Campbell 2010) or that consumer agency is screened and alienated from sovereignty over production and distribution (Williams 1999: 422–23; cf. Graeber 2001)—underestimate the epistemic complexity of commodity fetishism as well as the social intelligence of its consumers. However laudable as a moral ideal, social transparency may be more adequately described as an Enlightenment fantasy espoused by a bourgeoisie during its rise to power.5 We need approaches that do more justice to the variety of relationships between things and the meanings consumers attribute to them

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Figure 10.3. The Guinness toucan was painted by John Gilroy after Dorothy Sayers coined the following slogan for the S. H. Benson Agency in 1935: “If he can say as you can/Guinness is good for you/How grand to be a Toucan/ Just think what Toucan do.” Photograph by Jibi44, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

(Burke 1996; Mazzarella 2003: 26). This can start with recognizing that both consumers and the culture industry that supplies them with performances of the commodity are often aware of the gap between the commodity and its performance. (It can also acknowledge that at least some consumers are conscious of the expansion of scale that

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characterizes the production of the commodities they use, but scale will be discussed in the next section.) It is not that academic observers perceive a more real reality and consumers don’t, but that consumers, while aware of the possibility of fraud and deception, and while aware of the fact that production takes place largely out of their sight and orbit of control, simply do not always have the practical opportunity to act on that awareness. Consumer consciousness, therefore, may not be false but too complex and contradictory to provide clear paths for social action. Protests against Nike’s sweatshops and the growth of “green” consumption are only some of the examples that show that consumers are capable of acting on knowledge of how products are globally produced and distributed. This does not make that knowledge necessarily more “real” than the decision to buy something cheaper or less environmentally friendly. The story of Marx’s overcoat reminds us that even the most brilliant critic of commodity fetishism had to face, at other moments in his life under capitalism, the need to fetishize commodities and money—of “suffering sensuously.” It shows that, at least in practice, fetishism may be both false and functional. This mirrors Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of the timelessness of “objectivist” principles in the service of a theory of practice: just as the academic observer is wrong to elevate the practical morality of the hope for reciprocity in gift-exchange to a structural law, for the simple reason that this desired future may not materialize, just so would it be wrong to think that the presence of advertising messages about personal transformation means that they always determine what consumers will buy: even the purchase of the item does not transparently indicate the consumer’s acceptance of that performance as real. The cultural sociology of Black consciousness proposed by W. E. B. du Bois (see Chapter 2) provides, I think, an alternative approach. To Du Bois, the “American world” yields African Americans “no true self-consciousness,” but a view mediated by the categories and classifications of the white “other world.” African American “double-consciousness” means one is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” ([1903] 1994: 7). As we shall see, these last words accurately describe how many twentiethcentury marketers looked at consumers (especially middle-class women). The agony of experiencing “two warring ideals” in one body (Du Bois [1903] 1994: 7) can also be compared to the suffering of workers or the Marx family as they parted for the sake of the family’s survival with clothing that gave them respect. This should not be

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read as an argument that trivializes racist discrimination or argues that the predicament and trauma of African Americans can simply be reduced to a non-racialized capitalist experience—it cannot. His historical experiences, however, provided Du Bois with social insights that are hard to find among the priests of the white welfare state who long dominated sociology (and still continue to do so): an awareness of what it means to be subject to, rather than the subject of, a hierarchy of social classification, that strongly suggests that an empirically adequate theorizing of social consciousness in general requires the capacity to think from the experience of being discriminated against.6 Being discriminated against puts one in a situation where contradictory classifications of a situation are available, where what one may think, want, or need at one moment can, at the next, always be denied by another hierarchy of values. In much milder forms, it may be a social universal: so-called believers in the magic of a shaman may in fact be skeptical of his claims, but once confronted with the visceral experience of the shaman’s cure, they are swayed in the other direction (Taussig 2003; see Graeber 2001: 259). Moreover, this depends on the variety of relationships in which people relate to things: what is material to some is spectral illusion to others (Chapter 4; Burke 1996; Mazzarella 2003: 26). However, this is not relativism: “double consciousness” reminds us, on the one hand, that the bourgeois desire for Enlightenment transparency is, indeed, wishful thinking, and on the other, that a theory of “false consciousness” actually rehearses this desire and the value hierarchy that it tried to criticize in the first place. In other words, “double consciousness” acknowledges and negotiates a hierarchy of values (rather than declaring relativism), just as Du Bois wanted to make room within his country’s civil classifications for an African spirituality that would be integrated with American materialism (Bruce Jr. 1992).7 Du Bois anticipated another critical step in theorizing double consciousness in later work: the recognition that the white world may also be “haunted” by a suppressed consciousness, that racial discrimination proves that it does not practice its own ideals, and that a combination of fear and willful ignorance prevents white people from acquiring a similar knowledge of colored society that the racialized’s “second sight” gives them of whites.8 Likewise, the profession of marketing is haunted since its emergence by the suspicion that the lofty ideals of Protestant sincerity and bourgeois transparency cannot sufficiently erase the carnivalesque, magical, and fraudulent histories of commodity performance. In other words, like the consumers they target, marketers are themselves of two minds. Like consumers, market-

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ers may find it easier to silence the nagging suspicion that they betray some of the higher ideals cherished in their modern world, by developing value hierarchies and materials that sidestep such contradictions. This sidestepping of sociocultural hierarchies—acting as if they are not part of the history of one’s own images and texts—seems to me to be a recurrent strategy of modern advertising. A prehistory of the successful branding of Pears’ Soap through John Everett Millais’s Bubbles may illustrate this, since it built on a visual formula tested out and commercialized earlier with his painting Cherry Ripe. Cherry Ripe was originally produced for selling the Graphic’s Christmas Annual of 1879 with colonial imagery that should improve Britons’ self-assessment. Its cover showed a picture of Cherry Ripe “being shown by a female Pax Brittanica to naked savages, Turkish pashas, Chinese gentlemen and British soldiers alike” (Bradley 1991: 179). Such a restoration of British imperial self-confidence may have seemed necessary after the Empire had been clobbered by the Crimean War (1853), the Indian Mutiny (1857), disastrous wars against Afghans (1856) and Ashanti (1863) and, most recently, the massacre of a British regiment by Zulu warriors in January of that year. The Graphic’s Christmas Annual had no interest in the fact that Millais and his fellow Pre-Rafaelites had once reviled “Sir Sloshua” Reynolds, and was eager to adopt Millais’s use of Reynolds’s painting style, to remind the British public through pictures of adorable children of their glorious eighteenth-century art. The picture of childlike innocence in the British style contrasted favorably with other “races” in the British imperial orbit. It shows that the imagery of British advertising was at least partly inspired by a visual mode of colonial regulation, and could just as easily revert to it (as happened when American advertising received a boost from its collaboration with government propaganda in World War I: Lears 1984: 367).9 In fact, in this particular sense, the colonial value hierarchies of the Great Exhibition and its relation to nationalism were, indeed, a harbinger of the advertising styles that would be developed with branding. In fact, while American advertising still had to convince government of its uses during World War I, in Europe it was already perceived as part of the public sphere and in competition with other, more politically oriented messages (de Grazia 2005: 247). Moreover, advertisers sold their professionalism often with the appeal to their skill in promoting “public relations” (de Grazia 2005: 236; Williams 1999). In other words, marketers were well aware that in such public contexts the image of desirable humanity, which would become the heart of branding, was itself a form of regulation. It was, in fact, used

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to control consumption in colonial relationships well before advertising was professionalized (Posel 2010). In the world of social regulation, racial discrimination was rarely fully absent, if only because advertisements portrayed white faces as the social norm, or because the image of what advertising should not be—dishonest, out for a quick profit—was supposed to be personified by Jews (Lears 1984: 366–67).10 As with the first British brands, one sees a hierarchy of identities peeping out behind marketing, even if the latter sidesteps it by focusing on the commodity and its performance only; and one sees the embodiment of identity taking its place in a dialectic with the objectification of the commodity’s performance—another reminder that the commodification of the human body is never far away (Kopytoff 1986). Race, however, is also a classification at a global scale (Sanjek 2010), and scale and identity are precisely what the explanatory pairs of product and performance, or use- and exchange-value, have so far failed to theorize very consistently.

Scaling Up: Brand Value as Identity Fetishism What makes this country great is the creation of wants and desires, the creation of dissatisfaction with the old and outmoded. —American advertising executive (cited in Packard 1958: 16). I want you to realize that I am as amazed as the infidels are. How can such a contrived mixture between sexual allegories, mysticism, and caveman symbolism result in millions of dollars of very unmysterious cash through increased sales? —Ernest Dichter (cited in D. Bennett 2005: 13, my emphases)

My discussion of commodity fetishism is largely motivated by my perception that the available materials for teaching consumer culture lack, firstly, sufficient discussion of how brand value can be made to fit the Marxist dichotomy of use- and exchange-value (but see Lury 2004: 5); and secondly, sufficient discussion of the politics of scale of consumer culture, the latter point driven home by Victoria de Grazia’s path-breaking Irresistible Empire (2005). Branding and scaling up are closely related: the 1886 Pears’ Soap “Bubbles” campaign showed that brands arose at the time when oligopolistic corporations at the national and transnational scale had to bypass shopkeepers and other local circuits of valuation if they were to generate trust for their products among a new audience of consumers. The study of branding has mostly missed the chance for theorizing this because it is often hodiecentric (Goudsblom 1974: 112): brands are usually stud-

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ied from a present-day point of view, as a “postmodern” or “postsocial” phenomenon. Branding is supposedly modeled on or nourished by a new media culture (Arvidsson 2005; Lury 2004) or marked by a poststructuralist lack of referentiality to use-value or production (Baudrillard [1970] 1998). These presentist theories ignore contingent histories of branding and the commodification of identity—and therefore, a history of scaling up to national and transnational levels of marketing. Advertising’s roots lie embedded in this contingent history of scaling up to the nation (and further), in “making this country great” by transforming consumers all over the world. Presentist theory is also insufficiently reflexive: its scholars fail to explain why they copy corporate brand theories—the folk theories of advertising.11 Corporate brand theorists, such as the fathers of Motivational Research and brand “personality,” psychologist Ernest Dichter and anthropologist Burleigh Gardner, were (and still are) our academic colleagues. We should reflexively ask how and why we need to take our distance from what these disciplines have contributed to advertising. Dichter’s warning in the epigraph above that he, too, failed to understand why his vulgar psychoanalysis seemed to raise sales serves as a reminder: maybe even academically generated identity fetishism was simply wrong; maybe essentialized realities “made in Academia” do not straightforwardly subsume consumer practice (as I argued in the previous section); maybe they still produce “looping effects” (Hacking 1995) that change consumer identities temporarily, by contingent but persuasive performances that may fail to convince consumers yet allow them to navigate market corridors more assuredly. What, therefore, many studies of advertising and branding miss (but see Richards 1990; McClintock 1995) is that the identity politics of the first brands—such as Pears’ Soap’s “Bubbles” campaign— mixed the ingredients of governmental and market appeals, at least in the identities they addressed. That also explains why I think it is easier to understand how the “Bubbles” campaign worked when we compare it to two Barnum-inspired publicity campaigns of some thirty years earlier. P. T. Barnum became the father of public relations and advertising precisely by “creating wants and desires” that made migrants feet they could become American, citizens of the “land of the Free.” Such national and global identity politics entered a second phase when brand advertising (now reinforced by the identity of “Mrs. Consumer”) became part and parcel of an American package scaled up to be inflicted on Europe after World War I—becoming an inalienable part of the long struggle for cultural mastery by means

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of commodities that also included World War II and that culminated in the victory of the American model of the supermarket in the “Free World” after 1945. This paternalist American advertising culture of the 1930s and 1950s may not have survived decolonization and the generation gap and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet it is the source of our current brand culture, also because the subsequent “conquest of cool” (Frank 1998) generated an even closer elective affinity between advertising’s identity politics and what we today call “New Age”—the spirituality of the sacralized self (Heelas 1996)— than the paternalist “creation of wants and desires” did earlier. Before surveying this brand history, however, it is useful to reposition brands in relation to use- and exchange-value. Brand identity is generalized just like monetized exchange-value: it can be applied to a wide range of goods, institutions, and events. Yet unlike money’s tendency to “dissolve quality into quantity” (Simmel, cited in Lury 2004: 5), the brand presents “an alternative device for the calibration of the market” that seems diametrically opposed to this tendency: brand identity, while generalized, is presented as a qualitatively unique form of controlling exchange (Lury 2004: 5). Just like exchange-value (but unlike use-value), brand value is generalized and abstract; just like use-value (but unlike exchange-value), it is qualitative and unique. We have seen (among other things, in the values of Marx’s family and Miller’s shopper) that in the dialectical process of fetishizing the commodity, identities and memories are fetishized too, sometimes in competition with, sometimes in support of, the performances of use- or exchange-value. The previous section suggested that the double consciousness of consumers makes them oscillate between being subject of, and subject to, dominant classifications of identity, alternating conformity to hegemony with autonomous critical decision-making.12 The performance of exchange-value promises to constitute consumers as autonomous buyers, but consumers remain without much power to upset a system that denies them such individual autonomy—and in everyday life, awareness of this situation is as available as it is practically useless. Perhaps more importantly, brand performances usually remain restricted to appeals to potential consumers, setting up particular identities as future standards in the attempt to “create wants and desires.” White Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle classes, in particular, provided such standards in the process of scaling up advertising to North Atlantic proportions in the twentieth century, disregarding practices in which differences of race and class remained salient—but even WASPs could not always survive the sociocultural critiques of the

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1960s and 1970s and the adaptation of brand values that emerged after that. The familiarization of figures like Bubbles characterize brand advertising campaigns from their inception in the 1880s and 1890s (Lury 2004: 19; McClintock 1995). As we have seen, Bubbles enabled a process in which childlike and nostalgic innocence allowed a strategic sidestepping of recent blows to the British imperial ego, so that cultural hierarchies could be literally reimagined.13 It connected that powerful fetish of identity (constituted, indeed, by a “double attitude” of simultaneous affirmation and denial: Freud 1950: 202–23) to a thereby magnified object of sensuous desire: soap. (Given how ubiquitously early advertisements warned against bad breath and body odors [see Schreurs 2001: 112, 122], one should take “sensuous” literally.) This fetishizing of familiar figures operates on the basis of a dialectic of double consciousness: consumers have to be convinced that who they are is defective—“old and outmoded”—but that, with the proper cure (such as soap), a new personality is available to be “wanted and desired.” Two public relations campaigns inspired by P. T. Barnum can illustrate this further. To the 1910 advertising spokesman of Printer’s Ink, one of these campaigns—the selling of Jenny Lind as “the Swedish Nightingale”—redeemed Barnum as an impresario of “something substantial and real” rather than a mere “humbug” (Lears 1994: 214–15). Yet, Barnum unleashed on Jenny Lind all the skills he honed by selling frauds, freaks, hoaxes, and colonial identities like “Buffalo Bill” and “Sitting Bull” (see Chapter 5). He sold Lind, however, with more cultural prescience: presenting her to New Orleans in February 1851, he invented the Swedish Nightingale as a “sweet and unaffected, morally pure and benevolent, pious and tender” figure, while “concealing her petty ego, stubborn bigotry, Francophobia and antiCatholicism” (the latter not unimportant in the French and Catholic circles of New Orleans; Roach 1998: 46). In this way, his creation performed—and helped to create—the nineteenth-century American middle-class ideal of personal authenticity and sincerity (the opposite of Mississippi River confidence men and Barnums alike), which also became a mainstay of American marketers’ consciousness until World War II. Barnum’s move from freakish wonders in the 1830s to human nightingales in the 1850s was one of the first deployments of marketing on a large—in fact, (trans)national—scale (Roach 1998: 47). It worked because Barnum’s “trick of mass marketing . . . turns on the tactic of making consumers feel both good (full) and bad (empty) about what they are buying, even as they are induced to

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believe that what they are buying determines who they are” (Roach 1998: 47). Barnum poured Jenny Lind’s performance of authenticity and sincerity into the highbrow container of artistic performance and nationalism by having her sing: “for song has a home in the hearts of the Free!” He sold this idealized identity with the marketing ploy, typical of Barnum’s press-agentry, that consumers “had not lived” until they heard her perform (Roach 1998: 47). The strategy was copied a year later by other impresarios when Catherine Hayes was sold to New Orleans as “the Irish Skylark,” who sublimated Irish migrants’ experiences of rupture after the Great Famine and their underpaid and lethal work in malarial Louisiana into the nostalgic figure of Kathleen Mavourneen—the sweetheart who lost, or was lost on, Irish soil (Roach 1998: 49). Similar uses of the transfer of trauma and loss into a temporary and reinvented figure of belonging characterize the imagery of Bubbles and Cherry Ripe, and can also be seen in other brands emerging at the same time. A comparable mix of sidestepping violent loss and nostalgia for lost comfort or wealth appeared, for example, in the rather different figure of Aunt Jemima, a “Mammy” of color who offered all of white America a wholesome Southern breakfast for the R. T. Davis Milling Company: feeding on “blackface” minstrel show performances and successfully personified by the formerly enslaved Nancy Green between 1890 and 1923, this branding campaign—taking place in the context of a racist backlash by lynching and “Jim Crow” laws—led, during Green’s performance at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, to the ethnic advertising slogan “I’s in Town Honey!” Contemporary protesters worried that this “Uncle Tom” figure might set race relations back to the days before the Civil War. However, the protests did not prevent the acquisition, in 1926, of the Aunt Jemima Mills (its name since 1913) by giant corporation Quaker Oats.14 Race and ethnicity sold long before decolonization; the versions adopted by the Afrika Museum (Chapter 7), and more recently, Indigenous groups (John Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), deserve to be critically assessed, but are considerably milder. The Barnum formula of creating idealized “wants and desires” against the background of loss or rupture seems to apply to other forms of “making this country great,” not least by cultivating “dissatisfaction with the old and outmoded.” A craving for modernity and progress culminated, in particular, in the peddling of “Mrs. Consumer” by Christine Frederick after the Great War (J. Rutherford 2010). The scaling up from “customers” to “consumers” began around 1900, reflecting the need to address a new national audience. “Customers carried on face-to-face relations with local entrepreneurs;

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consumers were the target of standardized persuasion sponsored by corporations” (Lears 1984: 374). The shift in scale and increase in distance to the public required the “science” of marketing psychology, that initially defined the identity of its target (the consumer) as gullible and manipulable—at least in the paternalistic beliefs of marketers (Lears 1984: 375). Frederick’s typical mix of worshipping rationality and efficiency and infantilizing (female) consumers spread to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In the Netherlands, for example, Frederick’s work was, on the one hand, translated in 1928 under the title “the Thinking Housewife” (De denkende huisvrouw: Schreurs 2001: 118); on the other, Frederick portrayed “Mrs. Consumer” (during a lecture for the Dutch Advertising Association in 1932) as intuitive, not interested in larger social problems, and only interested in food, clothes, house and garden, her children, and the sanitary and cosmetic care of her own body. Moreover, the spouse of marketer J. George Frederick admonished her husband’s colleagues “that the average mental level of the American Mrs. Consumer lies below what one would commonly assume: in her mental development she has not risen much above a 14-year old who has attended a primary school of six classes, she does not master a vocabulary of more than 1200 words, and only 30 percent of this large category is in the habit of brushing her teeth” (cited in Schreurs 2001: 119–20).15 The discipline of psychology and its new targets—consumer behavior and its unconscious motivations—contributed much to this infantilization of the consumer, and shows a direct continuity between the brand advertising that started in the first decade of the twentieth century and the 1950s craze for subliminal suggestion and symbolism in which brand theory emerged: Printer’s Ink wrote already in 1897 that people are “grownup children to a great extent; full of emotion; easily excited through the eye and ear, the aesthetic sensibilities and the affections; slow to respond to cold logic; easily tired and bored by too much argument, by diagrams and prosaic common sense” (Lears 1984: 376). The style of fact-backed “reason-why” advertisements, invented in 1904 and dear to those who proposed the “Truth in Advertising” campaign, always competed with this desire to attack consumer common sense by the psychological manipulation of emotions and affections through sensual perception—although the latter was more arrogantly exploited in the 1950s. Psychology helped to create a new double consciousness of market identity, even though it remained restricted to marketers at first. Initially, “to brand a product [was] nothing more than to imprint it with the identity of the producer” (de Grazia 2005: 207). However,

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to “Barnumize” a sale (that is, “to create the sense of emptiness [in the consumer] on which promotion feeds” [Roach 1998: 48]) implies that marketers have to imagine an identity for consumers vis-á-vis the commodity to be marketed that can double as both lack and desire. Identities such as “Mrs. Consumer” served such purposes: they classified targets as manipulable by their excitement and emotions. Marketers were reflexive enough (just like shamans and their clientele: Taussig 2003; Graeber 2001: 259) to acknowledge that for every infantilized Mrs. Consumer one could find a rational counterpart—like “Andy Consumer,” unsurprisingly masculine16—who saw through the trick of creating wants and desires and approved of the reasons behind it. (Andy was, however, only used in a message primarily addressed to the clients of the advertising agencies.) Even when marketers liked to portray themselves as subject to “the people” as a new sovereign (Lears 1994: 229), this cannot obscure that they were the agents who tried to subordinate “the people” to their strategies of classification and persuasion, whether these strategies made consumers rational, childlike, or in the case of Andy and Mrs. Consumer, both. Before market segmentation emerged in the 1960s, the style hierarchies imagined by corporate advertising were monolithic, and the idealized figures were modeled on the marketers’ own way of life (Lears 1984: 381, 395; 1994: 191).17 Alternatively, such hierarchies could be imagined in a typically European class-conscious way: Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, contemplated the “Cloud-Cuckooland” thought up by his marketing colleagues, that was not founded and built up “on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it . . . but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion” (Sayers [1933] 1959: 136)—thus adding (at least in detective fiction) the British aristocrat’s identitarian insult to class injury. The argument that those who do not need to care about money are therefore not susceptible to advertising or commodity fetishism seems ludicrous when judged from the point of view of the twenty-first century’s celebrity cultures. However, it raises the more profound question about when marketers’ strategies for achieving symbolic control actually work, and when they are deceiving themselves into believing that their own classifications of identity are effective. If consumers perform the public ideals that marketers put forward, we have no way of telling whether they are true believers in the commodity fetish, or that they do so because, like Andy Consumer, they think it is a use-

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ful trick and are willing to play along. Either way, marketers achieve their ends. (This may improve the interpretation why workers, who had revolted throughout Europe in 1848, trudged docilely through the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition only three years later: rather than T. Bennett [1995: 72] and Richards [1990: 37] seeing this as a national success in disciplining citizen-consumers, I think they primarily came to see a spectacular show.) In other words, if consumers only perform the attitude that marketers impute to them—whether because of the constraints or the attractions of the market—the hierarchy of identifications that they negotiate turns back into something resembling the situation from which Du Bois started.18 Regardless of the kind of fetishes they offer, so-called free markets are always also material communication infrastructures that build on classifications that aim to turn consumers into lesser beings (Bowker and Star 1999). Du Bois’s analytic of double consciousness may apply more forcefully when the majority of public images portrays consumers as whites, and colored people, such as Aunt Jemima, as Black servants. However, it always implies a negation of symbolic control through hierarchies of classification and value—the aspect of commodity fetishism that theories of false consciousness insufficiently problematized. Such hierarchies of identity initially adopted an Americanized white Anglo-Saxon Protestant complexion, as material communication infrastructures scaled up to the size of the markets required by corporations like those of the Detroit car industry—the companies that gave “Fordism” its name and twentieth-century modernity much of its identity (see Harvey 1990). While modernization theorists often implicitly assume that its American models were consensually adopted, active struggle and missionization were needed to “modernize” Western Europe (de Grazia 2005: 8–9). According to one of its main proselytizers in Europe, Edward Filene, what was needed was a “Distribution Revolution” that went beyond Henry Ford’s assembly-line production system and its capacity to outcompete other manufacturers in price and quality: the scaling up of markets required a system of chain stores supported by national and transnational advertising (de Grazia 2005: 135, 140–42). In scaling up, American economic imperialism both spread and naturalized the concepts of “standard of living” and “purchasing power,” turning such contingent strategies into a foundation of economics (de Grazia 2005: 88, 91). Here, Henry Ford was crucial, despite his disdain for advertising: his autobiographical works inspired the Ford Company’s London-based European branch to push the International Labor Organization into adopting, for the whole of Europe, the notion of an individual standard of living measured by

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the weekly income required for a Detroit factory worker’s needs. It turned a Fordist classification at the scale of an American car factory into a North Atlantic socioeconomic infrastructure, especially after it found its way into welfare state economic thinking: often attributed to the likes of John Maynard Keynes, it was in fact pioneered by Roosevelt’s New Deal, Léon Blum’s prewar socialism, and Hitler’s Nazism (de Grazia 2005: 119–20). However, the carrot of the American standard of living and its materialization in refrigerators, “Hoovers,” and other Taylorist household appliances did not have to accomplish this on its own: it was increasingly joined by the sticks and hooks of credit or installment buying and the plans to reduce commodities’ lifespans—whether by accelerating the speed by which they turned into waste, or by outdating their technical or fashionable performance. This system of “obsolescence, free spending, and creative waste” was endorsed with enthusiasm by J. George Frederick, his wife Christine, and Andy Consumer alike (de Grazia 2005: 227). Nevertheless, this infrastructure of production, distribution, and sale was neither swallowed hook, line, and sinker, nor all at once. Once on the road to European expansion (with Woolworth’s starting in Britain in 1909), American companies encountered opposition at every junction, culminating in the 1930s when German National-Socialists mobilized disgruntled shopkeepers, who often identified the American culture industry of advertising and Hollywood cinema as Semitic (de Grazia 2005: 165, 167). American marketers’ WASP assumptions and propagation of class and cultural homogeneity was complemented by the use of the Detroit worker’s household goods as the “standard of living,” which De Grazia defines as a more democratic, “solidaristic” outlook that clashed with the class-conscious haute bourgeoisie sociality of, for example, the Galeries Lafayette in Paris or the Leipzig Fair. The struggle over global consumer hegemony was also reflected at an academic level, with Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption” representing the solidaristic and hard-working style of the American elite, and Werner Sombart reflecting on how the absence of socialism in the US was related to the absence of consumerism in class-conscious Europe (cited in de Grazia 2005: 109, 111). Indeed, the class differences expressed by both left-wing and Nazi or Fascist “socialisms” may at least partly explain why European workers expressed, until well into the 1950s, more interest in acquiring more leisure time than in acquiring more goods (de Grazia 2005: 113–14).19 Nevertheless, by the 1950s, the American “supermarket” was well on the way of becoming the dominant infrastructure of distribution

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in the North Atlantic, and European resistance against arrogant hierarchies of “solidaristic” identity was not only weak, but also seemed to succumb to its most paternalistic emanation yet. The American advertising of the 1950s—which many regard as the birthplace of our current “branding” practices—stands out for defining its target audience’s identities “as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages” and, not least, sexual yearnings (Packard 1958: 4). Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders—one of the great bestsellers of 1957—replaces the class opposition perceived by Lord Peter Wimsey by a division within the middle class: anthropological, psychological, and advertising professionals conspiring against the American public. Together with science fiction novels like The Space Merchants (Pohl and Kornbluth 1953), Packard helped generate the urban legend of subliminal advertising (the myth that movies and other advertising channels have been laced with hidden flash messages that subconsciously urge people to consume). This paranoid vision of consumerism very much belonged to a Cold War atmosphere that warned people against communists in their own backyard. Packard unveiled marketers’ disdain for the consumer as a conscious agent and their overriding interest in creating subconscious “wants and desires,” already displayed by the likes of Christine Frederick in the interbellum. He quoted the journal Advertising Age as saying, “In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do” (Packard 1958: 8). Such marketers moved the materiality and performance of the product’s use-values further out of sight: “The cosmetic manufacturers are no longer selling lanolin, they are selling hope. . . . We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige” (cited in Packard 1958: 5) This was the “deep approach” of Motivational Research, created by anthropologists and psychologists talking “symbols.” Ernest Dichter, who studied qualitative psychological research with Sigmund Freud and statistics with Paul Lazarsfeld in Vienna before the war, stands out as having boosted the idea of the “personality” or “image” of the product in order to appeal to the “hidden desires and urges” of the consumer. Dichter’s “soul of things” was a decidedly vulgar Freudianism: his explanation of the success of the 1950s Exxon campaign “Put a Tiger in your Tank” stressed that “A gas tank is mysterious and dark like a womb. . . . The hose of the gas pump resembles you-know-what. Rational? Who cares? . . . It worked practically around the world” (cited in D. Bennett 2005: 13). Yet, the second epigraph to this section shows how he followed it up by a confession of

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ignorance that seems completely at odds with this self-assured disdain of consumers. Dichter’s incomprehension raises the question whether his production of “symbols” and “motivation” in advertising was not itself an expression of largely subconscious notions of what would attract people. I recall being excited about Esso’s tiger as a Dutch fiveyear-old when my mother pulled up next to the pump, but she always said she liked the smell of gasoline (and the pump was the one closest to home), while I suspect that my own fascination had more to do with the tiger’s combination of strength and cuddliness than with pumps penetrating tanks. Dichter’s convictions about “deep” motivations of consumer spending seem as superficial as the affects he attributed to his target audience. David Bennett suggests that, rather than reflecting insight into the human mind, such statements (whose mimetic circulation may have been boosted rather than reduced by critics like Packard) taught consumers that they had such desires in the first place. “What is speaking here, of course, is neither Desire nor the Unconscious but rather psychoanalytic culture itself, in its banalized, commercialized, mass-mediated form” (2005: 23–24)—a material looping effect that made Dichter’s classifications of psychoanalytic thinking into a common currency of consumer self-definition rather than a response to imputations of universal mental pathologies (Hacking 1995). The unselfconscious way in which Dichter, an architect of many advertising campaigns informed by vulgar psychoanalysis, recognizes that he doesn’t know what is going on either, marks a new phase in advertising’s double consciousness—and yet this is the phase in which Dichter’s anthropological colleague Burleigh Gardner (another main target of Packard’s critique) would redefine “brand” in 1955 by the idea of the “personality” or “image” of a product. Together with his coauthor Sidney Levy, Gardner became the father of current brand advertising by arguing in a seminal article in the Harvard Business Review that, beyond being a “label employed to differentiate among the manufacturers of a product,” a brand name “is a complex symbol that represents a variety of ideas and attributes . . . [it] is a public image, a character or personality that may be more important for the overall status (and sales) of the brand than many technical facts about the product” (Gardner and Levy 1955: 34).20 The new opposition between brand and product was perhaps best symbolized by Dichter’s campaign to turn Mattel’s Barbie doll into a sexually racy personality (with, in Dichter’s words, “Mount Rushmore breasts”). Barbie was never sold as a doll but as a person, in the hope that both daughter and mother would mold the former’s personality on Barbie herself,

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assuring a continued flow of sales into the next generation (D. Bennett 2005: 14, 16). Such a focus on teenage desires in the emergence of branding was indeed visionary: if the “countercultural” critiques of the 1960s forced marketing strategy to shift away from a psychoanalytic subject haunted by repressed desires, the new “cool” countercultural consumers were mostly happily unmarried adolescents of whom Barbie was an early ancestor. Norman Mailer’s 1957 juxtaposition of the “hip” hedonist to the all-too-adult “square” provided the template for such a renewed infantilization of the consumer (Mailer quoted in Frank 1998: 12; Barber 2007). The countercultural desire to position oneself against a dull, materialist, or politically suspect older generation was hijacked by business culture and mainstreamed into a “cult of style worship” characterized by brands (Andrew Ross quoted by Frank 1998: 30). The 1950s form of branding or identity fetishism focused on the performance of consumer subjectivity as such: the mere desire to be different subsumed the desire to be different by using a specific product. The “Pepsi Generation” of 1963 introduced lifestyle marketing: according to Thomas Frank, it marked the “ursegmentation” of identity focused on youth that preceded all subsequent attempts to fuse being and having in a single (often textual or visual) symbol of “being different” (Frank 1998: 24).21 At the dawn of a new millennium, it had become the pinnacle of marketing achievement: a Dutch advertising “creative” wistfully stated that “people in America” have killed for a Nike shoe, showing that a brand “can take on the size of a religion” (cited in Vreeswijk 2001: 63). The composition of the retail price ($70) of a Nike Air Pegasus sold in 1995 exemplifies the political economy of such brand image performances: it consisted of $10 materials, $1.66 labor costs and $2.82 overhead, which leaves a more than $45 margin for profit and advertising.22 It shows that, in the era of branding, the materialization of performances of identity can almost completely outstrip the production of use-value. However, the Nike sweatshop scandals that came to dominate Nike’s public image at the time (Bartley and Child 2011) serve as a reminder that even the brand retains an anchor in materiality: despite all dematerialized branding, it is difficult to imagine Nike losing its real-time connection to sports, or Pepsi to soft drinks. This last reflection should take us back to what Marx called the “sensuous suprasensuality” of commodities, and how it relates to the fact that many academic analyses of branding end up affirming the dematerialization that marketing professionals desire from brands: a transcendent loyalty that sways consumers regardless of its material

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manifestations. Scholars reproduce marketing rhetoric partly because it is so much easier to analyze successful brands (such as Nike, or Louis Vuitton, or Pepsi) because they are visible, while branding processes that fail stay, by definition, out of sight (Robert Moore 2003: 36; Nakassis 2012). Equally often, scholars fail to see that the “brandthropology” of Gardner and Levy (1955) and their followers introduced an opposition between brand and product that faithfully reproduced the original folk dichotomies (form/function, decorative/functional, symbolic/technical, subject/object, virtual/material) by which modern religious and secular discourses dematerialized meaning in the first place—theories targeted by this book as well as by others (Manning 2010: 36; see Keane 2003; Masuzawa 2000; Pfaffenberger 1992). Partly as a result of such binary oppositions, recent academic analyses of branding often copy the epochal conceptions of time of advertising rhetoric (“we used to do product/object/function, but now we do brand/personality/image”; Manning 2010: 36; cf. Pels 2015), just as the academic focus on consumption of Appadurai, Baudrillard and Miller tended to copy elements of a “Thatcherite enthusiasm about the sovereign consumer” (Arvidsson cited in Manning 2010: 34). To be sure, a poststructuralist sense of signification-by-deferral or lack of referentiality (Baudrillard [1981] 1994, [1970] 1998; Butler 1993; Derrida 1988) can be profitably applied to the semiotics of advertising as well as to the semiotics of branding: it helps to understand advertising’s instability and the fact that the authority of a brand requires constant stabilizing work, yet remains insufficient to realize consumer desire (Lury 2004; Pang 2008). None of these analyses, however, can get past the fact that the brand is not a member of the class of objects labeled by it, or the fact that it is not identical to the classification that labels the class (for a Nike Air Jordan will always remain a shoe as well). “Nike” as a brand event would not be intelligible, nor even exist, without these material manifestations.23 In other words, what I call the spirit of matter is required for even the most dematerialized branding event: an adequate theory of brand needs to acknowledge the excesses of materiality and intelligibility that haunt and disrupt brand ontology in its performative heart, and that make us understand the brand as distinct from other forms of signification (Nakassis 2012: 635; see also Manning 2010; Robert Moore 2003). The brand can never be “suprasensuous” without being materially sensed through a medium, and the medium will always condition the message, for the simple reason that in order to purify the message of its medium, one at least needs to add another material medium to communicate the message of purification—in time.

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Nevertheless, branding does orient us to the performance of identity values. Branding helped to fetishize the commodity form from the moment advertising emerged. When we allow explanation by identity value to complement analyses of use- and exchange-value, it pushes thinking about commodity fetishism away from the object fetishized toward the bodies doing the fetishizing. These bodies’ health, cosmetics, fashion, sexuality, and (life)style have fueled advertising as it scaled up to national and transnational prominence. The temporalities that characterize a dialectic of objectification and embodiment of commodities mutate into the “condensed time-spaces” of the bodies that suffer the interpellation of brands (Munn, cited in Manning 2010: 39). In fact, there is nothing very mysterious about either the “sensuously suprasensuous” perception of the commodity or the constant deferral characteristic of brand citations once we see these perceptions not as timeless contradictions baffling marketer and consumer alike, but as differential moments in an ongoing process of alternating sensuous perceptions of inalienable pasts of the body and its identities, their deficits or affordances, or their future states. These temporal disjunctures explain why one should see consumer consciousness as “double” (or, sometimes better, “multiple”). Multi-temporality or alternation does not make the process less agonistic or unstable and does not reduce the contradictions between fetishizing the body’s relationship with a material object, its monetary value, or its identity— but it grounds it in a common human experience of time (Pels 2015: 788). Brand marketing reproduces a multiplication of “personality” that, while deeply rooted in advertising culture, also seems to have strong elective affinities with the gnostic construction of knowledge that we know today as “New Age,” whose cultural patterns emerged more or less parallel to modern advertising from the 1870s onwards (Aupers et al. 2008). This modern gnosis came into the mainstream of North Atlantic societies in the 1970s and it can be compared to the multiplication of a personality of a “Barnumized” construction of desire. New Age self-spirituality starts (according to Paul Heelas [1996: 18–20]) with suggesting a personal defect (“there is something wrong with you”), and follows up with the offer of secular salvation (“you are gods and goddesses in exile”—in other words, if you realize your “true” self you are saved) leading to a miraculous outcome (you can do incredible things once you “let go” of your wrong habits). We can substitute the antisocial effects of, for example, bad breath or a “tired skin” for “something is wrong with you,”; for the representation of salvation, the results that advertisements promise—of finding a faithful hus-

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band or new employment (see the cartoon versions of such ads in Schreurs 2001: 115–16); and for the means of achieving salvation, the use of Colgate toothpaste or Lux soap. Like Barnum’s promotion of Jenny Lind, and the brand ideal held up since Pepsi’s 1963 campaign, this type of advertising requires the multiplication of the addressee’s personality into a “before/bad” and an “after/good” version, and of an agent—accessible and to be personally acquired—that can realize the transformation. Such elective affinities prefigure as well as boost central patterns of neoliberal culture. Of course, they do not make modern gnosis and advertising identical, but they go beyond mere analogy, if only because New Age thinking found fertile ground among management and advertising “gurus” in the 1980s. Even more, while marketing professionals experienced the late 1960s and 1970s as a period of crisis because of the counterculture’s critique of materialism (Roszak 1969), countercultural spirituality and branding converged in a “conquest of cool” that by the 1980s had restored marketers’ faith in their profession, not least because “cool” critiques of consumerist materialism could be turned into new raw material of advertising, in a repetition of Dorothy Sayers’s ironic reversals in the 1930s (Frank 1998; Schreurs 2001: 273ff.). One might probe even deeper: if, indeed, globalized American advertising can be characterized as a secularization of the ideal of Protestant self-transformation, adapting standard conversion stories to secular salvation through, firstly, patent medicines, and, subsequently, the new therapeutic culture of self-realization (de Grazia 2005: 234; Lears 1983, 1994: 143), then it seems rooted in the same confessional stories that became a structural feature of modern gnosis (Pels 2002a, 2003b; Aupers et al. 2008; see van der Veer 1996 and the conclusion to this book). It gives a final extra twist to the (mis)translation of Marx’s dancing table (in the quote that opened Chapter 9) by the notion of “table-turning,” for the latter invokes the roots of modern gnosis in the Spiritualist séance.24 Maybe such multiple personalities and “occult” qualities are not the privilege of what we call religion, and all capitalist economies give rise to them (cf. Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).

Conclusion: Temporalities and Materialities of the Commodity Commodity fetishism is an unavoidable stopover in a book about modernity, religion, and the power of objects, precisely because its

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quintessential modernity has provoked so many to employ metaphors referring to a world before modernity. What does this Alltagsreligion do in supposedly secular social relationships? I want to highlight two main points to conclude this chapter: the time of the commodity, as crucial for the attempt to further secularize its sometimes mysterious workings; and its irreducible materiality, that reminds us of the time of things—their historicity—in a rather different way. I hope the preceding sections showed that accounting for the fetishized commodity in real time implies an ethnographic kind of attention to the contingent and temporal conjuncture of both the object desired (a bundle of material performances indexing past events), the person doing the desiring (a performing mind-and-body rather than a subject), and the material dialectics of their relationship. Analytically, one can distinguish three distinct temporalities that animate and give agency to a commodity: (a) its indexicality, or the way qualities of the commodity that it acquired in the course of its past biography come to be performed as alienable or inalienable to its material being (i.e., the utility or labor invested in the commodity’s production, the signs of use that may de-commodify it as waste or re-commodify it as secondhand or antique, or how it carries signs of branding or other forms of identity); (b) its exchangeability, which materializes the future condition of the to-be-alienated commodity in material forms of decontextualized display, monetary equivalence, and the promise of satisfying a need or desire; (c) the alternation characteristic of a dialectical movement that turns the sensuous body into an agent and subject of “passive” or “dead” objects at one moment, and into a person subject to the agency of the object in the next. By grounding analysis in the distinction of such temporalities (and locating a large measure of the power of objects’ excess in the way they evoke other times and places), I have tried to achieve a better understanding of the reasons why commodity fetishism can appear as an obsession with material goods (or, also, “hedonism”) in some studies, as a preoccupation with immaterial values in others, and why neither of those two seem to fully cover the domination that, as yet other studies claim, brand marketing exerts over capitalist culture today. The multiplication of fetishisms, but also the alternation of subject (and object) positions that it allows, show why “false consciousness”

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is such a feeble explanatory framework, and I propose that a theory that allows people to shift positions over time (from agent to patient, from materially obsessed to socially engaged, from worrying about social status to worrying how far one’s purchasing power will stretch this month) provides a better account. It is better, not only because “double” or “multiple consciousness” more adequately captures what people do with commodities, but also how they are caught up (as we learned from W. E. B. Du Bois) in hierarchies of identity and classification that are built into the infrastructures of modern commodity cultures and that individual consumers find hard to change or avoid. So, what is the role of the spirit of matter in this? I think we cannot but conclude that no theory of value can provide a sufficient explanation for what happens in the practical dialectic of objectification and embodiment by which we have to analyze capitalist commodification—for the simple reason that neither use-, nor exchange-, nor identity-value can grasp when these values become important (both in the sense of dialectical theory and historical contingency). Any classification of value (whether of utility, quantity, or identity) is realized in real time, in the time of things, even if it is their performance (rather than their material being) that decides which classification of value is privileged. Even if the money that Marx received for pawning his overcoat signaled a change of ownership, his cultural possession of the coat did not disappear with the exchange, since “his” coat was still there in the pawnshop. Regardless of whether the nozzle that “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” or a Barbie was intended to trigger unconscious sexual fantasies among all American car owners and teenage girls, a five-year-old Dutch boy enjoyed the image, just as many girls may have dressed a Barbie doll without desiring to possess her “Mount Rushmore breasts.” To account for this time of things, I have preferred to employ approaches that subordinate semiosis to materiality (Nakassis 2012; Keane 2003), that remain historically materialist by foregrounding a dialectic of sensuous and supra-sensuous perception (Mazzarella 2003) and that thereby allow for material variations in the ways people relate to things under capitalist conditions (Burke 1996; Mazzarella 2003). They do more justice to the way the spirit of matter manifests itself in commodification than do approaches that tend to adopt elements of neoliberal society’s self-image by their focus on virtuality and information (Lury 2004), circulation and exchange (Appadurai 1986; Lee and LiPuma 2002), or ritual sociality (Miller 1993, 1998a). These approaches may not go to such extremes as Jean Baudrillard, who in 1968 projected on consumers his own unquestioning acceptance of advertising slogans such as “Buy your way to prosper-

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ity!” because he thought consumers had a “mythomaniac” tendency to believe that “buying on credit amounts to the total appropriation of an object for a fraction of its real value” ([1968] 1996: 173–74). Many of them, however, seem to join Baudrillard in their explicit or implicit attempts to fold earlier liberalist biases into modern theories about signification, just as Ferdinand de Saussure originally borrowed his theory of sign value from Vilfredo Pareto’s economics of price, and thus provided the ideological foundation on which many of the structuralists and poststructuralists inspired by Saussurean theory built their semiotics (Maurer 2006: 16). Saussurean semiotics locates the production of meaning at the single scale of the differential structure of language, just like the “uniscalar” valuation of modern money (Maurer 2006: 20). This failure to recognize the different scales that consumer consciousness needs to negotiate from one moment to the other—by having to collapse past, future, national, and global scales into a local dialectic of sensuous bodies and decontextualized objects—may help to explain why such liberalist and Marxist biases remained unquestioned. In contrast, the oscillation of trust and suspicion that belongs to modern advertising not only suggests widespread doubts about its effectiveness among both its producers and consumers, but it also indicates that people may be practically aware of the scales at which contests over signification, meaning, and value play out. Marx himself can illustrate what happens when we reduce these contests to politics at a single scale: in the Grundrisse, he suggests that the consumer might be aware at one and the same time that “both his power over society and his association with it is carried in his pocket” (Marx [1861] 1980: 66). But while “money in the pocket” refers, as I argued above, to the individual scale of purchasing power and consumer sovereignty, the “association with society” derives from monetary values imposed at far larger scales, whether these are objectified as the source of consumer’s wages or as the provenance of the identities that saturate the national and global infrastructures of producing the objects desired. The latters’ production has become increasingly occulted since the rise of oligopolistic companies and consumer societies and the national and global connections on which this production was built. Given the difficulties of getting to know these larger scales, consumers can be forgiven for paying more attention to the small scales they materially engage with—it is, in fact, remarkable that such a thing as caring about the future of the people who produce the commodities one consumes (as in green, or more equitable consumption) has come into existence at all (see Foster 2005).

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Marx’s use of a labor theory of value sublimated in money did not improve our understanding of this oscillation, not least because of its implicit use of an epochal conception of time. His interpretation of money’s promise of empowerment makes individuals subject to alienating forces, because the forces that appear as buying power at the scale of “money in the pocket”—or, better, at the scale of the individual consumer confronting the commodity—“disintegrate” the products, activities, and communities that bind individuals together at the scale of social production as a whole ([1861] 1980: 65–67). This argument is an early version of the temporal dichotomy that structures the folk theory of a Great Transformation—a “disembedding” of the economy that occurs because money as universal equivalence eats at social relationships like acid (Maurer 2006: 23; criticizing Polanyi 1944; Simmel [1907] 1990). Marxists tend to reproduce it until today (Graeber 2001: 79–80). The dichotomy homogenizes both modern societies (as subject to “disintegration” by capitalism) and traditional ones (as lacking forms of disembedding production and distribution from consumption), not least by ignoring how all societies engage in “scale-making.” Fortunately, feminist and environmentalist thinking has developed far more sophisticated diagnoses of capitalism’s characteristic features (see, for example, Tsing 2000: 332–33, 2009, 2015). One feature that my attempt to historicize advertising and commodity distribution brings out in particular is the contingent constitution of the concepts of “purchasing power” and “standard of living” as monetary fetishes, that is, standard elements of the current global infrastructure of economic calculation: they emerged from a trunk of goods supposedly representing a Detroit car factory worker’s weekly needs in the 1920s. The fact that the material standard (the trunk of goods) was soon made obsolete and rejected as standard by a Europe in economic crisis does not hide the fact that initial phases of a struggle for global hegemony of American economic imperialism were partly anchored in a very contingent, intimate, local, and materially sensuous object. The rooting of a global fetishization of “purchasing power” in a performance by a trunk of goods from Detroit confirms the analyses of brand semiotics that I preferred in this chapter: that any attempt to manipulate the performance of the commodity needs the material being of the commodity to realize itself—or, simply, that Nike may be more than shoes, but cannot do without them. This materiality of fetishization is perhaps best represented by its performance as a finished product—the commodity-status that the Great Exhibition celebrated and which Thomas Richards assumed triggered the rise of advertising. Yet it commonly faced the opposite

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tendency, the performance of immateriality through the money-form that was highlighted by Peter Stallybrass. Nike’s swoosh may symbolize the qualitative version of such dematerializations, a valuation of identity that can be reduced to neither a measurement nor an individual commodity. Taken together, they show that neither use-, nor exchange-, nor identity-value is sufficient to describe the process of fetishization, since it cannot do without the materials that can carry these value-attributions from one person to the next—the spirit of matter that underlies the sensation that we are handling the same thing from one phase of commodification or decommodification to another. All in all, we should perhaps not get so worked up about commodity fetishism as we have been, if this means being guided by fears of materialism, of instrumental reason, or of the dumbing down of citizens by false consciousness. One of Daniel Miller’s more important contributions to material culture studies consists of his repeated suggestion that consumer agency and sagacity and their intervention in wider global patterns may be more important to contemplate than the fear of hedonism or a Marxist suspicion of the occultization of “real” relations of production. My critical analyses extend those worries in similar directions, especially toward the modern addiction to the obsolescence of the past, coupled to a promise of future satisfaction that may forever remain out of reach. Robert Foster distinguished between commodity futures of amor (brands desired as “lovemarks”) and caritas (goods desired to make commodity purchase care for social relationships “upstream” in the chain of production—such as fair trade or green consumption: see Foster 2005). My historical analysis of advertising and branding throws more suspicion on the sustainability in the long run of a capitalism based on an “amorous” identity fetishism, as long as it is tied to its relentless acceleration of replacing the “old and outmoded” for profit. Commodity caritas is not new either: if we follow Miller, it includes taking care for people “downstream” such as household members, through the practices of thrift and treat. What seems far more important at the current juncture at which the world’s production and consumption finds itself, is whether we can amplify the fetishization of the performance of commodity caritas to both “upstream” and “downstream” global relationships that can help to repair the material damage that our twentieth-century forms of fetishized consumption have caused to Planet Earth and its less privileged inhabitants—human as well as nonhuman. But that may require concluding reflections on the future of things first.

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Notes 1. MEW Bd. 25: p. 838 (48. Kapitel, “Die trinitarische Formel”). 2. This is a simplification for the sake of the argument: the sign “organic wine” may also spell out a new use-value for me, in the sense of caring for “upstream” winemakers’ environmentally friendly production. See also the conclusion to this book. 3. Given the large number of colonial products in early British advertising, the intertextual reference to the nationally famous Aborigines Protection Society (founded 1837) is intriguing. The common interpretation of the APS as the humanitarian wellspring of British ethnology and anthropology has been challenged by materials that demonstrate how at least some ethnologists and anthropologists were engaged in the “puffing” of colonial investments in the 1860s (Flandreau 2016). 4. In American literature, Herman Melville and Mark Twain located the stereotypical hucksters that peopled such places of mobility at the colonial frontier—the Mississippi River in particular—in The Confidence Man (1857) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; see especially Huck and Jim’s encounter with “the King” and “the Duke”). Dickens’s London streets—filled with migrants too—also count many memorable impostors and quacks. 5. Of course, critics of bourgeois ideology took up such assumptions of transparency as well (Habermas 1987). Bourgeois prejudice becomes particularly glaring when facing the near-absence of accounts of political secrecy in colonial social science: see, for an analysis of the biased rhetoric of colonial political development, Pels (2002c). 6. There is, of course, Marx’s notion of a class position an sich that acquires a consciousness für sich, but this still relegates racial or gender classifications to epiphenomena of political economy. Durkheim and Mauss conclude that social classification is everywhere important sui generis, but introduce Primitive Classification by the racist idea that “our” classifications are transparent and rational when compared to the intellectual confusion of “primitives” (Durkheim and Mauss [1903] 1963; see also Pels 2022). 7. Following his teacher William James on multiple personalities, Du Bois nevertheless feared that double consciousness was pathological (Bruce Jr. 1992); a conclusion that may be qualified when one accepts the anthropological recognition of the ubiquity of “dividual” cultural patterns (Strathern 1988). More importantly, Du Bois’s sociocultural insights seem more profound and universal than his psychology. 8. See Du Bois ([1940] 2007) and Itzigsohn and Brown (2015: 243). James Baldwin (1964) and Toni Morrison (2007) have most eloquently elaborated these insights. See also Pels (2003a: 17) and Chapter 2. 9. Like Bubbles, Millais’s Cherry Ripe was also used by a later Pears’ Soap campaign on its soap tins.

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10. Of course, gender discrimination was also ubiquitous in advertising, as pioneered by Erving Goffman’s study (1979), but in a more explicitly “ritualized” form of female subordination. See the discussion of Christine Frederick in the next section. 11. For Baudrillard as “folk” theorist, see Mazzarella (2003: 25); for a similar critique of Lury, see Nakassis (2012: 632, 635). 12. This alternation between hegemony and critique leaves room for the dreamlike revolutionary potential of commodities that especially Walter Benjamin tried to grasp (see Benjamin 1977a; Caygill 1998). 13. Of course, Pears also advertised its soap with much less oblique messages about racial hierarchies, such as those that showed children of color being “whitewashed,” or the American advertisement with Admiral George Dewey (see Figure 10.2). 14. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Jemima, retrieved 9 August 2017. The Quaker Oats website itself says very little about Aunt Jemima—a political correctness that is as understandable as it is obscurantist. 15. My translation from the Dutch. See also note 10. 16. See the advertisement “Go Ahead and Make us Want,” copied from Printer’s Ink 1926, in Lears (1994: 228). 17. This homogeneity of American advertising’s hierarchies of value may help to explain why studies of consumption in culturally heterogeneous (former) colonies more successfully addressed the politics of scale and identity (see Burke 1996; John Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Mazzarella 2003; Posel 2010). 18. Such a performative theory of ideology was suggested by Louis Althusser when he used Blaise Pascal’s example of one having to kneel in order to believe; and it is, of course, also fundamental to an understanding of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (which, pace Jean and John Comaroff, need not be uncontested to be effective: Althusser 1971: 168; Gramsci 1971; cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 22). The situations where people of color knowingly perform the attitudes that white Americans imputed to them are forcefully conveyed by many examples from Richard Wright’s historical overview of African American literature ([1957] 2008). 19. As Theodore Roosevelt is reported to have said: “we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water” (Lears 1983: 5). However, one should not reduce American economic imperialism to a contrast between “solidarism” and class-consciousness: in addition, Cold War and decolonization, negotiations at the scale of the hedonist individual and family (see section two), as well as more complex hierarchies of identity play a role. The fragmentation of the Netherlands in Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, and Socialist “pillars,” for example, could only allow “Mrs. Consumer” in after Marshall Plan and joint welfare state planning by Catholics and Social-Democrats began to break up “pillarized” circuits of consumption in the late 1950s. Schreurs (2001) hardly discusses this, but the

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20. 21.

22. 23.

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advertising associations that commissioned his book may not have been interested in American economic imperialism. Like “fetishism,” this brings modernity’s “other”—hitherto anthropology’s core object—into its self-regulation. Pepsi’s earlier competitive bids emphasized similarity and price (“just as good as Coca-Cola but for half the prize”), and its marketers took a leap into unknown territory in 1963 with their “Come Alive!” ads (that—this is the time of the Civil Rights Movement—also showed a couple of color). By 1971, Coca-Cola felt forced into lifestyle marketing as well (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Generation, retrieved 15 August 2017). As an admiring Dutch marketer told Vreeswijk, quoting from The Observer (3 October 1995; Vreeswijk 2001: 79). Or, to connect with my earlier critiques of Baudrillard, Stewart, and others (see Chapter 6): poststructuralism may be too much in thrall to a dualist Saussurean semiotic logic to have eyes for the material base of signification. The analyses that I find more reliable are based on C. S. Peirce’s triads (Keane 2003; Manning 2010; Nakassis 2012). I will return to such elective affinities in the final section of the Conclusion on techno-fetishism.

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION THE FUTURE OF THINGS

My technical skills in this digital age leave a lot to be desired. In fact, my impatience with the mechanical impenetrability of digital devices often drives me to the point of defining technology as that assemblage of mechanical prostheses and human skills that breaks down at the moment when you need it most. (Many of us who wanted to show PowerPoint or film clips or communicate online to an academic audience in the past decade will recognize the sentiment.) Before that is interpreted as a reluctance to engage with digital technology, however, recall the discussion in Chapter 2 about avoiding a choice between the neo-Luddism that leads Tim Ingold to illustrate his brilliant and useful views mostly by preindustrial human activities, and a techno-optimism that persuaded André Leroi-Gourhan, for example, that we would “immaterialize” our hands and do away with manufacture altogether.1 It would be a poor material culture theory that cannot address the power of industrial and postindustrial material culture carried by plastic, digitization, or both (Miller 2007: 25–26): they objectify much of the future of things for many people, both in the past and in the present. Even if my definition is seen as too frivolous, it has the advantage of addressing both computers and their plastics. It is also good for pointing out that technology is relatively independent from human intentions (because it regularly breaks down). Finally, it brings out that the material constitution of technology should be distinguished from the expectations of the future associated with it (because it often fails to do what we expect). Intentions and expectations—both futurities2—often give technology its deceptive unity as an object, grant it much of its presumed power, and explain our frustration when our PowerPoint designs (again!) fail to appear on our screens in the right way.

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Technology and techno-fetishism therefore seem a fitting conclusion to this book, not only because the way we grant technology power has been defined as a religion of modernity (Noble 1997), but also because it may reinforce the argument of Chapters 9 and 10 that the future—or better, the way objects, as commodities, point to a temporality other than and improving upon the present of their consumer—is crucial to understanding the power of objects in modernity. Moreover, a focus on technology may counter the suspicion that this book has overly concentrated on modernity, to the extent that it may be accused of forgetting about the epoch we live in, a time often supposed to be past or post-modernity—not least, because of the so-called digital revolution.3 I suspect such theorizing, not because I want to deny progressive sociocultural change by technology—that would be as Luddite as it is futile—but because epochal change is such a typically modern way of thinking. Its tendency to essentialize, archetypically represented by the colonial dichotomy of modernity versus tradition, burdens our thinking to the point of obscuring both the world around us and the worlds of the past (cf. Ferguson 1999; Tsing 2000: 332–33; Pels 2015). It would, in fact, be possible to argue that epochalism (whether represented by terms like revolution, utopia, [under]development, [de]traditionalization, making a break with the past, living in the end-time, or the postmodern coming of hyperreality) forms a sacralized temporal structure that upholds many of modernity’s diverse and contradictory stories about itself. This book is not the place to argue that point (I have made it elsewhere: Pels 2015). However, the unfinished secularization of matter that I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2—the fact that we insufficiently historicize things—requires us to deconstruct the sacrality and essentializations that thinking with technological epochs brings along, and how they grant “newness” a unity and power that it may not deserve (Tsing 2000: 332–33). Such a deconstruction can be helped by an alternative conception of time, in which earlier sociocultural patterns are seen to be materially “composted” into later layers of historical formation to produce a multi-temporality of human experience—a notion of time on which the argument in this book depends. I borrowed the concept of “composting” from the “design fiction” of cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling. The first section of this final chapter therefore addresses how he employs an important way of thinking about the history of object forms but disappoints when his sciencefictional artifact ideology again attributes a kind of miraculous future salvation to human products. In an effort to uncover an alternative

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and less modernist and futurist conception of technological time, the second section reflects on early computer hackers’ material experience of the “magic” of computer technology. In this experience, the power of technology does not depend on our expectations and intentions, but in what one cannot predict, even if this power resides in technology’s commodified status. Comparing this plastic technology with the past temporalities folded into a nkisi nkondi (the so-called nail-fetish discussed in Chapter 7; but now, as Alfred Gell interpreted it), I discuss the autopoiesis that occurs when plastic technology exceeds what human hands can manufacture, in a contrast with the acheiropoietic powers of the wilderness on which the nkisi relies. This distinction becomes the foundation for an analysis of the cultural longue durée of digital technology—the “spirits of the screen” (Pels 2002a). This analysis may help to show the present-day effects of a historically deeper (and less techno-optimistic) aspect of modern dialectics of objectification and embodiment: the way in which an object’s autopoietic performance amplifies an illusory autopoiesis of the subject as well. This autopoiesis, present in Protestant forms of confession since the early modern period, created—in the hands of those who promote self-sacralization in society today—a distinctly antisocial tendency in modern culture. Joined to the need to displace the amor of branding by an alternative fetishization of the commodity’s caritas (as discussed in the conclusion to Chapter 10), this sounds, in conclusion, a pessimistic warning against the ways in which certain futurities of things promote contemporary forms of social fragmentation.

Starting from the Artifact: Technology and Science-Fiction Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things (2005) is a course in design in the digital era with the cursor firmly pressed on the fast-forward button, both pointing to and hurrying toward the future. It marshals its design fiction—a novel combination of Sterling’s background as a cyberpunk science fiction writer and critic (Sterling 1985, 1986) and his nonfiction work on digital technology and design (Sterling 1992, 2003)—to outline new forms of design “that lack historical precedent” and provide a future that is denied us by the current, unsustainable forms of production that wreck the environment (2005: 6–7). Sterling wants to close down a past of unsustainable manufacture to produce ecologically responsible artifacts instead. However laudable (and widely shared), I don’t think this aim represents the

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booklet’s main strength. While processing an enviable number of themes in only 150 pages, I was particularly inspired by the second chapter, entitled “Tomorrow Composts Today”: it made me adopt its suggestion that our temporal experience is not one of discreet epochs succeeding each other, but of materials from previous historical layers being pressed down by, and made to react with, those of later ones.4 This idea of composting informed the previous chapters, for example in the ways in which epistemic regimes—of wonder and curiosity, of taxonomy, of evolution—both succeeded and interfered with one another (see Chapters 3 and 5; Daston and Galison 2007: 318). The routinization of wonder discussed in Chapter 5 was itself a good example of how wonder and curiosity were composted with capitalist commodification to create modern spectacle, just as examples in Chapter 10 showed that colonial identity values were composted into the first branding campaigns, or the frontier markets’ oscillation of suspicion and trust into ironic and self-critical styles of advertising in the North Atlantic. Sterling’s second chapter starts with an observation which I also exploited in this book and with which no current scholar of material culture can disagree: that the classification of a radical difference between subjects and objects blinds us to the ways and means by which we are both subject to and subject of our material environment. To Sterling, therefore, effective intervention in these changes takes place in a hybrid realm of the “techno-social.” He distinguishes historical layers not by specific objects only, but by object forms: the way an object category, a material practice, and a specific human subject historically belong to each other. So far, so good. Sterling’s analytic then brings him to the following evolutionary sequence: artifacts are made by hand, one at a time, and are used by hand locally, by rule of thumb and folklore rather than through any abstract mechanics, by “hunters and farmers”; machines are powered by some nonhuman, nonanimal source, require specialized support structures for engineering, distribution and finance, and are used by “customers”; the next technocultural object form is characterized by products, widely distributed, commercially available, anonymously and uniformly manufactured in massive quantities by a rapid division of labor and assembly-line techniques, supported by large and highly reliable transportation, finance and information systems, and used by “consumers” (since about the end of World War I). One may object that Sterling has managed to traverse ten thousand years of human evolution in only two pages, but the gist of the message—that object categories imply certain material engagements that imply certain subject positions—is

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original and inspiring: such a history of object forms, understood as total social facts, does not, as far as I know, exist.5 However, Sterling’s rapid sequence does not even come close to an empirical history of objects forms: his category of artifacts, for example, does not give much room for the differences between fetishistic and animistic objects, or, for that matter, between a trap used by hunters and a hoe used by farmers; nor am I much impressed by a sociology that couples machines to customers, and products to consumers. To social scientists, machines mediate between capitalists and factory workers in a social arrangement that is rather more complicated than Sterling suggests; and it was only after the expansion of oligopolistic companies that advertising made the shift from customers operating in local networks of distribution to consumers at a more anonymous national scale (see Chapter 10)—which also makes “machine” mean different things at different scales of social organization (compare, for example, the miller’s waterwheel with the industrial revolution’s steam engine). I salute how Sterling combines specific object categories with specific subject positions and material engagements, as a way to distinguish historical layers that are subsequently composted into others. I can even go along with his idea that a machine age forms an irreversible “Line of No Return” that also is a “Line of Empire” that subjects “farmers” to “customers.” But that seems the only recognition of imperial power relationships that Sterling is prepared to give. He thereby also ignores how these colonial hierarchies change what they compost—and how they are again composted into present-day relationships that disavow the imperialism of yesteryear.6 Sterling joins many others in ignoring the scaling up by colonial products, advertising, and the Fordist creation of brands and consumers that compost, but also subject, the smaller scales of “customers.” For concluding this book, however, I am more concerned with how Sterling lays out the future of things. The “product” is, according to Sterling, succeeded by the gizmo: “highly unstable, user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured objects, commonly programmable, with a brief lifespan” (2005: 11) . They are linked to network service providers and do not stand alone but are interfaces interacting with “End-Users.” Sterling illustrates the gizmo epoch (which he says begins in 1989) by the bottle of Sangiovese wine which he drinks while writing his book: it exceeds the materiality of a glass bottle containing a drink, that becomes waste after the drink is finished, by its barcode: it gives access to information about its ecologically friendly production, the wine’s quality for the potential oenologist drinking the wine, and gives advice how to pronounce its name, how to organize a tasting, and how to

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combine it with food. It represents a material instantiation of informational overload that actively nags people, demanding extensive, sustained interaction in the form of web-based upgrades, personal grooming, “plug-ins, plug-outs, unsought messages, security threats, and so forth” (Sterling 2005: 11). “Gizmo wine” offers Sterling “more functionality than I can ever explore” (Sterling 2005: 19). I can identify with the suffering end user whose material interactions with the gizmo are characterized by information overload. In fact, this procession of information recalls Timothy Mitchell’s labyrinth of successive representations that try to stabilize and govern the meaning of what is on display. But, firstly, we should ask whether these End-Users really bother; and secondly, how this distinguishes gizmos from brands, which are equally directed at end-users, at least since 1955 (as we have seen in Chapter 10). When not accepted as an addition to one’s identity, brands are often treated as information overload, a (minor) irritant to be ignored. As I argued in Chapter 10, labels and barcodes, like the “gizmatic” aspects, do not enhance the use-value of the wine, but its performance. Barcode, production descriptions, and oenological advice may indeed stretch into larger-scale imaginative distances than the certificates of origin and descriptions of the content that were previously put on wine bottle labels, but materially speaking their different performances hardly changed the product. The gizmo seems, like the brand, an attempt to dematerialize the product by extending its identities. It is also like the brand in the sense that the wine can still function without becoming a gizmo, but the gizmo becomes nonfunctional gibberish when not carried by something you can use. The material product is not composted into the gizmo: it is the condition for its derivative existence. Sterling’s next object form, the SPIME, is so far in the future that technophile dematerialization turns into cyberspace salvation and magic. (I will not discuss its successor, the BIOT, at all, because SPIMES already burden my futurist credibility enough.) Sterling takes the increasing replacement of barcodes by a patched-on Electronic Product Code or Radio Frequency Identity chip (RFID) to indicate that “the physical object itself ” will—probably through 3D replication—“become mere industrial output . . . merely hard copy” (Sterling 2005: 86, 96). Such “Arphids” will allow a new category of subjects (“Wranglers”) to model every object to their own wishes by digital manipulation, and thus become democratic managers of material production—if only we can invent machines that use “some renewable, recyclable, pollution-free goop whose material qualities—tensile strength, color, insulation, resistance to heat [Sterling ignores edibil-

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ity or potability]—are all specifiable on command. Materials like that don’t yet exist. On the other hand, we’ve lacked a good reason to find them” (Sterling 2005: 103). This is truly science fiction, if not science fantasy: Sterling reproduces the “substance X” of 1920s techno-fetishist science-fiction stories that allowed spaceships to happily ignore the materiality of extraterrestrial space and its temporal barriers to achieve instantaneous communication or travel—or, in Sterling’s case, production (see Pels 2013: 226). The “goop” is in fact secondary: a fantasy plastic needed to support the popular cybernetic mantra that information is the foundation for all life and intelligence.7 This fantasy led Mark Dery to declare that the so-called information revolution in the late twentieth century attempted to attain “escape velocity” through a “theology of the ejector seat” that tries to reduce labor and manufacture to the manipulation of symbols on a computer screen (1996). Of course, things do change: My running shoes may already contain arphids that can be used to monitor my whereabouts and velocity. 3D-printers are up and running and developing rapidly. But Sterling’s imagination is focused on a highly selective slice of the future that is established by his point of departure: artifacts and their users. Starting from human manufacture not only makes Sterling ignore the power relations of production and distribution through which his goop is acquired by end-users and their 3D-printers, he also ignores what it is made of, whether it can nourish organic creatures, and whether it is at all possible to produce it ecologically, that is, by renewable materials and energy. Significantly, he does not address the fact that hunters and farmers were completely dependent on acheiropoietic production—of things which human hands cannot make, and can only help to grow—or the fact that customers and consumers can only wish to become independent of the larger-scale production and distribution processes that rapidly destroy the Earth and increase inequalities among its people. (He also ignores that one of the less anticipated techno-futures of barcodes is that they allowed large supermarkets to economize by firing the majority of their cashiers and shifting the labor of scanning their purchases to consumers themselves.) Artifact-based technophilia, by denying the material realities that condition our lives, can only rethink these realities as illusions that constrain us. This turns the technophiles’ future desires into a gnostic reality (Davis 1998; for an historical elaboration, see Aupers et al. 2008).8 I will return to such modern gnosis in the final section. Sterling’s technophilia, therefore, undermines the secularist attitude that informs his attempt to outline a history of object forms.

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Contrary to his felicitous choice of the term composting, it employs a—quite vulgar—linear modernization perspective that both studies of sociocultural development and of actual patterns of evolution fail to corroborate empirically (see Gould cited by Ferguson 1999: 20, 42). It is based on a sacred trust that technology is not the problem, but the solution to everything—to environmental disaster, to socioeconomic inequality, to lack of control over the production process. And it is this trust that explains why Sterling relies on an ideology of technological salvation that requires a magical goop and a social miracle of turning everyone into equal end-users and producers. Despite his statement that “nothing obsolesces like ‘the future’” (Sterling 2003: xvii), his trust in technological salvation unites him firmly with fellow Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose Profiles of the Future circumvented similar impossibilities of his desired techno-futures by stating, sixty years ago, that when a senior scientist says that something is impossible “he is very probably wrong” (1962: 23). Sterling’s phrase that it doesn’t matter that we do not have his magical goop, since we have never looked for it, shows the same unassailable “future positive” tone of technophile discourse that also characterizes doctrines of development (see Mosse 2004: 640; Pels 2015: 786). This technophilia is itself a major historical layer in the history of object forms: it seems to arise among late Medieval Benedictine and Cistercensian monks in a distinctly religious, even millenarian fashion, and was subsequently composted through layers of Christian scientific experiment and Protestant secularization, before it became the full-fledged claim to the morality and power of “industrial and scientific techniques” of US President Harry Truman’s Point Four Speech, which sacralized a global faith in “development” in January 1949 (Noble 1997; Rist 1997: 71). I do not stress technophilia’s religious roots to condemn it as superstition, but to show that it dematerializes even secularist prophecy by shifting attention away from processes in the present to an expected salvation— with or without gods—in the future. One effect of such doctrines of progress and development has been to sacralize linear growth and to close our eyes to the ruination it causes in both social and environmental respects (Berman 1983; Rist 1997; Tsing 2015). However, the magic of computers can also work quite differently.

Computer Magic, or Plasticity and Autopoiesis There is a much older and ambivalent modern tradition underlying the engagement with the materiality and power of digital technology:

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the expectations and fears about artificial intelligence that suggests that computers, while manufactured by humans, will become more powerful than their human makers—an alternative, but equally dominant feature of science fiction history.9 However, the social field of computer design and programming shows little fear of its matter getting out of hand: instead, it shows a consistent positive use of the term magic and its cognates for technological innovations and thus upsets the dominant modernist opposition of magic to rationality.10 Temporality will again be crucial for this section’s argument that in modern society, plasticity and the ways it materially supports the routinization of wonder may complicate Bruno Latour’s discussion of iconoclash, and its juxtaposition of human manufacture and acheiropoietic production, by introducing a specifically modern hybrid (Latour 2002: 16): autopoiesis, or the (presumed) capacity of a plastic object of making itself. I will return to this object form’s social embedding and subjectivation in the next section, but let us consider the autopoiesis of computer magic first. Computer aficionados rarely use the term magic in the classical evolutionist anthropological fashion, as based on mistaken or irrational beliefs (because they like the magic of their machines). They also do not employ “magic” in the dominant modernist sense of psychic powers (because they are focused on a material thing: a box wired with a human interface, chips, batteries and other technologies).11 This becomes apparent from Steven Levy’s Hackers ([1994] 2001), the book that, upon its first publication in 1984, turned hackers into heroes, together with Ridley Scott’s legendary 1984 Apple commercial and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).12 Levy and Gibson provided the computer revolution with myths of origin as well as an image of a future (although Gibson presented a far bleaker future than that cherished by the hackers whom he inspired). In the decade before 1984, computer technology (just like radio and television in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively: Williams 2002: 32) had not yet settled as a new social form. Levy’s book provided a “hackers’ ethic” and outlined (as in any heroic history of technology) three generations that marked the stages of technological innovation just before it was commercialized by the graphics user interface of the Apple Macintosh in 1985, and the spread of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Levy varnished his book with metaphors of magic and wizardry. While providing many of these glosses himself, the number of verbatim quotes show that Levy’s sense of wonder was derived from the native hackers’ point of view. The words magic (or magician, or magical) and wizard appear, according to my count, thirty-seven times

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throughout the book, an average of once every twelve pages. As Levy described the “Golden Age” of computer hacking at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab in the 1960s: “Art, science and play had merged into the magical activity of programming, with every hacker an omnipotent master of the flow of information within the machine” (Levy 2001: 129). The quote makes the computer magical by two dominant tropes: firstly, the wonder at the impossible agency of the “magic machine that had intelligence,” as hacker Steven Dompier put it. Secondly, the heroic image of the computer hacker as the “omnipotent master of the flow of information” who could therefore be seen as a wizard. Both portray the computer as a machine for “protean magic” (Levy 2001: 433), a shape-shifting capacity that generates worlds of its own. But they also contradict each other: the omnipotent “wizard” emphasized software programmers as manufacturers in control of their marvelous outcome, but hackers’ amazement at the magic of the machine (“that has intelligence”) abandons such control to grant it independent agency—at least temporarily. Levy’s book seems to apply the appellation “master magicians” or “wizards” most often to the production of software for computer games, celebrating, in particular, the creative power that the machine granted its users. The finished software product alone could generate such feelings: showing the Sol, one of the earliest personal computers, on a television show, the TV host Ted Snyder (a “technical illiterate”) was completely hooked by the “feeling of power” that playing a shooting-aliens game gave, and it gave him a sense of what it would mean when you could use such a machine “to actually create” (Levy 2001: 243, emphasis in original). Wizardry in computing was therefore close to the omnipotence experienced by playing the computer game itself: in the words of the sales line of Richard Garriot’s immensely popular Ultima 2 (“The Revenge of the Enchantress”; released 1982) it allowed a player to “travel throughout the solar system,” “be seduced in a bar,” “meet prominent people within the computer industry,” “cast magical spells at evil creatures,” and “grow to wield the most powerful magic known to man” (quoted in Levy 2001: 381). The omnipotent strand of computer magic—including the chance to network in the computer industry—was tied to the power promised by a finished product: the computer game. In contrast, those command-line and hardware hackers who materially created that separate realm, and who often had high hopes of the liberation caused by the spread of computer literacy beyond the world of games, tended to emphasize—judging from Levy’s book—a humbler way of realizing human potential vis-à-vis the computer. Coun-

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tercultural hackers and their promoters (like Les Solomon, editor of Popular Electronics) saw the first PC as a “magic box” that miraculously made “weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and places all hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flickety-flock” and turn them into “adventurers in a new land” just like American frontiersmen (Levy 2001: 19–92). Steve Dompier, hacker of the Sol PC, was flabbergasted by “that first magic where this machine talks back to you and does mathematics incredibly fast” and recorded everybody’s awe toward it “for the first four of five months until they understood it really wasn’t intelligent” (Levy 2001: 193). Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, wrote: “The dinky computers are working magic enough. They will bring about changes in society as radical as those brought about by the telephone or the automobile” (Levy 2001: 267). This is less a “primitive” magical omnipotence of thought (Freud [1919] 1938: 120) as a fetishization applied to the performance of a new technology (Pfaffenberger 1988: 242). Importantly, hackers displayed little fear of losing sovereignty over their own creation and instead seemed to welcome this fetishistic move instead. Here, a comparison with Alfred Gell’s interpretation of a nonmodern object may shed some light. Gell interpreted the nkisi nkondi (contrary to Father van Croonenburg: see Chapter 7) as an arbiter in judicial procedures, punishing those who lie on oath by the power that it has accumulated. First, a tree was infused with the power of a proficient hunter by a spiritual expert, and then turned into a sculpture that could be activated by driving a nail into it. This happens during a judicial procedure in which the power of the nkisi is supposed to act in favor of the claimant—but cannot be expected to do so (since it is an autonomous agent). The nkisi thereby becomes “the visible knot which ties together an invisible skein of relations.” It is not a symbol, “for these relations have produced this particular thing in its concrete, factual presence; and it is because these relations exist(ed) that the fetish can exercise its judicial role” (Gell 1998: 62). In this interpretation, it is the visible presence of abductions of agency from hunting, the forest, and spirits that give the nail-fetish the power to act as an agent. Its distribution of human and spiritual agency over diverse materials is not denied or feared but celebrated and put to a desired use. Both this distribution of agency and the celebration of its material container as an agent is shared by the hackers of the 1970s Sol or Altair PCs: while having made the computers themselves, they were still “blown away” by the object’s independent capacities for interlocution and speed (Levy 2001: 193). Clearly, it is only as finished products that both the nkisi and the early PC could be experienced as

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having an agency, at times unexpected, that could not be reduced to the intentions that governed the object’s material production. However, the comparison becomes particularly useful because of a crucial difference: while both hackers and users of the nkisi experienced strange powers that, importantly, they could not always predict, the source of those powers was not the same: users of the nkisi depended partially on an array of powers from the wilderness— hunting, wood—while hackers’ surprise was caused by the workings of the world of information. The first powers are manufactured, but also depend on acheiropoiesis (powers derived from spirits or natural growth; see Chapter 2), while the second are exclusively made by human hands and brains. Plastic materials are needed for both production processes but the infusion of computers with information is exclusively manufactured. The difference might be glossed as acheiropoietic power (for the nkisi requires production by nonhuman agents) versus autopoietic (or “self-making”) power—either by the omnipotent wizard hacker or the miraculous computer itself. Here we see how the temporality of things is, as I argued in Chapter 2, not exhausted by their historicity: African power objects like minkisi can also decay without human intervention (and may have to be carefully discarded when they lose power in that way). But autopoiesis can make us lose sight of those apparently natural (and perhaps Divine) conditions. The word acheiropoieton was originally used for an icon not made by human hands, either because such images of Christ or the Virgin Mary were produced by divine intervention (such as the Virgin of Guadalupe) or because they resulted from a miraculously lasting imprint (such as the Shroud of Turin which copied Christ’s face).13 Note that the power of the icon is coupled to and amplified by an index of the past contiguity of nonhuman causation.14 Bruno Latour argued that the invocation of terms like Nature and objectivity makes scientific authority also rest on acheiropoietic objects, and that human interference in this production destroys it, because scientific performance can then be labeled as subjective and unreliable (2002: 16). If we are to believe Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s history of objectivity (2007), Latour’s suggestion, taken strictly, would imply that such scientific acheiropoiesis only appeared around 1830 together with our current notion of objectivity. However, a longer history of natural history and its global collection practices allows one to recognize that acheiropoiesis in science was derived from a Protestant Christian secularization of Nature over several centuries, that nevertheless retained traces of its Divine genealogy.15 Especially the Protestant reluctance to recognize miracles turned natural phenomena increasingly into sym-

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bols of a system of laws of Divine origin—even if the “watchmaker” no longer interfered with His Creation, and humans had to find out how the watch ticked by themselves (see Chapter 1). Once God was taken out of natural theology (as happened through the likes of Bentham and Huxley: see Chapters 1 and 4), two separate sources of acheiropoiesis seem to remain: Divinity and Nature. I avoided answering the question whether artificial intelligence might be a third possible source of acheiropoietic production (see note 12 in Chapter 2). The foregoing suggests, however, that at least the reverence granted to objects seen as produced by acheiropoiesis can be extended to exclusively plastic products as well. A few examples show this goes beyond digitized production: in my discussion of exhibitions, I referred to the ways Chicago almost drowned itself in aesthetic selfcongratulation in 1893 at the sight of a White City made of plaster (and copied almost entirely from Paris, the primary North Atlantic source of aesthetic power at the time; see Chapter 5)—despite the fact that modernist commentators like Gideon saw it as architectural regression. In Chapter 10, we saw how marketers congratulated themselves on molding the plasticity of their brands to approximate the power of religion and magic. Above, Stephen Levy’s protean magic of the computer referred back to a Greek shape-shifting sea-god in order to point out an ambivalent combination of the wizardry of human manufacture as much as the magic of the machine itself. “Plastic,” wrote Roland Barthes, becomes the “spectacle of its end-products” ([1957] 1972: 97).16 That may explain how the Tupperware Party evolved into a “religion of service to others,” centered as it was on a cult of domesticity and neighborliness (Chidester 2005: 57–58). The performance of thrift that Miller described on a North London street relied on that supremely plastic fetish of exchange value, money. Both money and plastic seem to erase their production, appearing as commodities without little substance and no identifiable makers, pure “end-products.” It is that material quality of amnesia, an invitation to forget, that may substitute for acheiropoietic production—after all, the Auto-Icon was, just like any nkisi, Christian icon, or stuffed animal, also an attempt to make us forget about the human beings involved in its making, and give us direct access to its acheiropoietic powers of manifesting identity or power. The capacity for autopoiesis—a human self-making that almost imperceptibly slides into the object’s self-making—that both money and plastic seem to possess makes this amnesia possible. If we therefore want to further the secularization of matter (see Chapter 1), we have to be critical of the autopoiesis of plastic materials as much as of ideologies of the artifact.

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This autopoietic invitation to forget about production is, of course, one of the foundations of the commodity form, as argued in Chapter 9. David Chidester located it not only in “plastic or protean religion,” but also, as already discussed earlier, the “virtual religions” of the digital (2005: 53)—what we called cyberspace salvations earlier.17 Chidester, however, also notes another, older version of plastic religion, deriving from biopolitics and the conceit to manipulate what Hannah Arendt called the animal laborans—that is, the commodification of the human body (see Chapter 2). It evolved from the cults of health and eugenics of fascism and socialism into a belief in genetic manipulation and cosmetic surgery (Chidester 2005: 63–70). Its virtualized cybernetic equivalents appear in ideas about a “selfish gene” that needs only humans as “robot vehicles” to perpetuate itself (Dawkins 1976: ix), cyberpunk fantasies of uploading human consciousness to a machine, or gnostic movies like The Matrix (Chidester 2005: 69). There is a much deeper dimension to this, shown by discussions about reproductive technology and genetics that suggest that we may be at the point of breaking up the classical modernist distinction between nature and culture, on which much of our reverence for acheiropoietic nature is based (Fox Keller 1987; Franklin 2003; Soper 1996).18 Without going into that discussion here, we should note that the protean magic of computers or genetics refers back to a Greek sea-god, Proteus, who was clairvoyant, but who also kept changing his shape because he wanted to prevent people from seeking out his predictions of the future. This serves as a warning against reducing the dialectic of objectification and embodiment to “information” carried by “robot vehicles,” because Proteus’ shape-changing was meant to prevent transparent access to the future, both as the results of our manufacture, and as our communion with the acheiropoietic are concerned. The affinities between modern gnosis and screen media may serve to underscore this in conclusion.

The Spirit of the Screen In order to circumvent the epochalism of an assumed digital revolution and its accompanying techno-fetishism, we require alternative answers to the question of what changed in our objectifications, embodiments, and the material engagements and performances that connect them. We cannot homogenize what happened in the 1970s or 1980s (with the emergence of the personal computer), or in the 1990s (the Internet) or maybe in the late 2000s (the smartphone)

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into a one-time temporal break: the timeframe is already too enlarged. My alternative grand narrative does not rely on an epochal break (but it needs further completion). It has the advantage of displacing the exclusive focus that Sterling and others place on digital technology as the agent, and human end-users as the recipients of change—although digital technology certainly globalized some of the changes I target. Instead, I focus on a social and cultural materialization that I call the spirits of the screen (Pels 2002a). This described a cultural continuity of technologies of modern self-making (the “confessional ethic”) that stretched from Jean-Jacques Rousseau into the present, but which seems to evaporate from structures of communication and commodification in the twentieth century (much like Max Weber saw the Protestant Ethic evaporating from capitalism’s spirit of calculation [1947a]). This longue durée of objectifying and embodying autopoiesis and amnesia by plasticity—while composted into digitization processes more recently—has also been identified in modern cultural patterns in the preceding pages of this book. It requires us to consider the prehistory, as it were, of the two-dimensional screens that we now find on our computers and smartphones, and how similar screens helped to materialize modernist abstractions earlier. Before I address the confessional ethic and the spirits of the screen, however, it is useful to return to the concrete phenomenology—or thin description of the materiality—of my own current screens (as already discussed in Chapter 2). As I am focused on my laptop while trying to finish this book, I am only subconsciously aware of my material surroundings (now, a coffeeshop terrace with a lot of noise, a table too high for ergonomic typing, and the wind ruffling through the papers that I use to revise this text). They all fade into insignificance in relation to the center of my attention: my screen and my keyboard in relation to the whole nervous system that tries to bring this job to a decent close. In the process, I forget that screen and keyboard are human artifacts; I forget about the subconscious tactility that makes my fingers find the keys on the keyboard without my eyes and head paying much attention; I shut out the noise of my surroundings (with the exception of paying for my next coffee). In many ways, I become the text that appears on my screen, allowing my consciousness to lapse into amnesia about the complex temporalities that show how indispensable my material body’s engagement with these objects are for the future communication this book should become. And that is good: it is called concentration. Quite frequently, however, this relative tranquility of my labors is rudely interrupted by a bleep from either laptop screen or smartphone.

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My screen changes, forcing little windows on my attention or lighting up in the case of the phone. Other voices clamor for my attention despite the fact that I am still engaged with these screens in the same material way. Especially when these sometimes small but intrusive sounds trap me into opening my email or WhatsApp, a list of messages boldfacedly commands me to click on them. My prosthetic assembly of fingers-and-keyboard can still modify what appears on the screen, but I have lost control of parts of its content, and even when I return to the text of this chapter, these messages from outside may continue to flash up in the righthand bottom corner of the screen—seductively, for each beckons to interrupt my intention to stay put behind the screen and finish the book by the lure of social contacts and human interaction. Things tend to get even more out of hand once I open one of my browsers and enter the labyrinths of representations and simulacra offered by the proliferating suggestions of Microsoft Edge or the algorithms that Google has smuggled into my phone. My material engagement with these screens produces a kind of double consciousness: I tend to switch from my currently desired identity (that of someone finishing a book, or of someone who is in control of his correspondence and communications) to the embodied person whose intellectual skills and habits have become so entangled with the infrastructures of laptop, mobile phone, and Internet that it sometimes takes an almost physical wrench to switch back from the second plane of consciousness to the first. Brilliant colleagues have also taught me that such infrastructures are materializations of a history of sociocultural classifications, that fold forms of identification into such infrastructures below their surfaces (Bowker and Star 1999; Larkin 2013; Star 1999) at a “subscenary” level.19 I experience some of the effects of such subscenary identifications as a surprise: some of my smartphone’s news items are decidedly more gossipy or reactionary than my conscious subscriptions to “serious” left-liberal newspapers would warrant, while I positively resent many of the advertising banners that certain websites throw in my face. (Of course, I am also too much of a computer illiterate to understand how to defend myself against this.) And then I do not even use social media like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, where people perform being the subject of desirable identities every day by subjecting themselves to an infrastructure of gathering more hits, likes, and “friends” than their competitors. In the 1990s, this was often presented as a liberation: in cyberspace, aficionados argued, one could finally be what one wanted to be, and people could create a virtual home around non-normative identities. While liberation by digitization may still offer such a silver lining to some,

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the twenty-first century seems to increasingly gather dark clouds that obscure their view. The similarities of these screen systems and infrastructures to capitalist advertising and the politics of public relations do not seem coincidental. Fragmentation of the public sphere by advertising, starting with the “ur-segmentation of identity” of the Pepsi Generation campaign in 1963 (see Chapter 10), only preceded the development of the personal computer by a few years. It also largely coincided with the countercultural development that resulted in the mainstreaming of “New Age” from the late 1970s. I propose that these developments were not coincidental but serendipitous: the “spirits of the screen” are the commodified identities materialized on a flat surface, to be adopted or discarded by consumers who are swayed by the instant gratifications promised by advertising and increasingly sought out in what has been called an “experience economy” (Pine and Gilmore 1999).20 Most of the big digital media companies whose flat surfaces of primary objectification materially entangle our desiring bodies with their infrastructures, algorithms, and other subscenary identity work have roots in New Age countercultures (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak were once all “acid-heads”; for a historical account, see Zandbergen 2011). But the apparent coincidence of screen technologies and modern gnosis has deeper roots: not just in “Big Tech” and its gnostic roots, but also in the “Barnumization” of modern culture by exhibitions and advertising in relation to older screen technologies like cinema and television. To understand this, we have to go back to the recognition that modernity composted dominant Christian repertoires into an increasingly scientized and secular world through a modeling of personal transformation on Protestant conversion by means of the spirituality of Methodism. The latter anchored trust in conversion to a personal yet public performance of witnessing to an authentic visit by the Holy Spirit. This performance, which claimed authority to the individual convert at the same time that it rejected the need for spiritual mediation by priests, pastors, or Churches, also became the foundation for claims to authority of new Spiritualist and occultist movements (Pels 2003b). The paradox of such witnessing is that it authenticated sinners’ personal salvation and their future trustworthiness by faith in the performance of confession, but simultaneously undermined that identity because it manifested a past of sinfulness at the same time. By doubling their identity, the confessing individuals thereby also generated a source of potential mistrust in their performance by their audience (Pels 2002a: 96). The American advertising culture that became

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dominant in Europe after the two World Wars shared such Protestant models of personal transformation and demonstrated similar instabilities of trust and mistrust (see Chapter 10). The Protestant model of confession spread much more widely—on the one hand, because it was composted into the even more anticlerical movements of nineteenth-century Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other forms of modern esotericism that culminated in the North Atlantic mainstreaming of the New Age movement in the late 1970s; and on the other, because the Protestant model of transformation was employed in a number of secular guises in advertising and public relations (see Aupers et al. 2008 and Chapter 10). The latter, however, owed much to P. T. Barnum’s influence on impresarios like him, who fused the material and visceral technologies of modern spectacle that he experimented with in the selling of Joice Heth or Jenny Lind with the personal appeal and the technologies of identification of colonial and exotic displays (see Chapter 5 in particular). In the twentieth century, such experiments in combining entertainment and advertising with changing modes of performing one’s self was heavily boosted by the commercialization of cinema: Walter Benjamin, in particular, pioneered the view that the camera stimulated a new form of self-representation, embodied by the movie star as well as the modern political leader. He famously argued that the camera fragmented the person represented into discrete takes, turning the actor into a producer of a form of life specific to the screen: a commodified personality that made a lasting impression on an audience in the absence of the actor (Benjamin [1940] 1977a: 153– 54). Such forms of the commodification of identities had, of course, long preceded cinema in ethnographic shows and photographs, and doubts about the authenticity of these performances—a fear of matter being fetishized by subjective means—were transferred from the exhibitionary complex to photography and cinema (Griffiths 2002). The secularization of performances of a double-personalityby-confession (“there used to be something wrong with me, but substance X has miraculously transformed me into a new being”) received further boosts after 1945. While mainstream techno-fetishism was initially aimed at transforming “developing countries” (Ullrich 1996: 278), confessional culture underwent a subaltern popularization in science-fiction circles, where its spiritual roots in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy were fused with science fantasy and Ufology into characteristically modern, but quite different forms of posthuman psychic powers, from conspiracies about extraterrestrial visits to the foundation of Scientology (see Pels 2013). Still, such forms remained subdominant until the 1960s: then, a countercultural fusion

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of technology (such as LSD and computers) with the psychic liberation from whatever “square” humanist routines had indoctrinated a younger generation broke up North Atlantic public culture.21 This break in consciousness became particularly apparent in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, not least because conservative Protestant currents produced an aggressive Moral Majority that contested secularism by apocalyptic visions and combined Protestant confessions of salvation with a conspiracy thinking that, in secularized form, was also congenial to many modern, New Age gnostics. Anthropologists tried to capture this unlikely convergence of highly antagonistic views by the popular gnostic slogan of the occult television series The X-Files: “Trust No-One; The Truth is Out There” (K. Stewart and Harding 1999). This went together with the rise of communication-by-digital-screens, the mainstreaming of science fiction and fantasy by cinema, and the development of an experience economy promising instant gratification of requests for new identities and for transportation into other realms.22 As I put it in 2002, “commerce and the screen seem to increasingly set the two elements of the confession—the images of a sinful existing self and of the miracle of salvation by a desired ideal—that should, according to humanistic rationality, be related by the gradual work of Bildung or mental evolution, right next to each other, in a direct confrontation mediated by the screen” (2002a: 105). Rather than stressing laborious personal development or a denial of self by faith in Church authority or training in scientific rationality, consumers of cinema’s celebrity culture, advertising, and the promises of an alternative techno-fetishism of hallucinogens and computers were increasingly confronted with the possibility of instant therapeutic solutions, modeled increasingly on the screen technologies of channel-zapping and clicks of the computer mouse (2002a: 111–12). When supported by the self-sacralization of modern gnosis and New Age—which argues that we are alienated from our true, divine selves by socialization and convention; in other words, by our intimate surroundings—this takes on a distinctly antisocial complexion, reinforced by the commodification and fragmentation of self that Benjamin thought was characteristic of cinema, and the increasing tendency of advertising to address only specific target groups in society: what was referred to above as the segmentation of identity. Many complain that social media, which demand that one instantaneously tweets responses to people one does not agree with, lead to similarly antisocial, politically and culturally polarizing tendencies. If the phenomenology of my own screens that I described earlier can be generalized, such fragmentation

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also takes place inside ourselves: screens increasingly turn us into multiple competing forms of consciousness. This is what I call the spirits of the screen, a contemporary manifestation of the spirit of matter in the sense that the two-dimensional material surface of the screens that we engage with on a daily basis have an elective affinity with the ways in which identities are and can be represented on them. The identities that our screens make available, as they flash past by a click of the mouse or by a finger swiping our phone, are both instantaneous and flat. Their spirit of matter both haunts and inhibits the kind of care for social relationships and the planet that require accumulated learning, patience, the temporal work of forging compromises, and the ability—which a respectful study of excessive objects teaches us—to be humble in the face of powers that loom larger (nonhuman agents such as the planet Earth being one of them). Instead, the spirits of the screen seduce us into thinking that the autopoiesis that our daily objectifications seem to present to us is also an autopoiesis of ourselves, promising instant gratification instead of carrying the kind of ethos of responsibility, duty, and care that Protestant conversion once brought in its wake. Of course, I personally want to be as coherently autopoietic as anyone, and may have more privileges that allow me to do so than many others. Once we take excessive objects seriously, however, we have to stop seeing ourselves as living subjects that face dead and manipulable objects and recognize that we are material creatures who face and are awed by our own objectifications as well as the acheiropoietic materials that make them possible. This dialectic of objectification and embodiment remains inescapably agonistic: the repeated warnings we receive from both people, objects, and the environment around us that we are not in charge of our own destiny should remind us that autopoiesis may provide temporary delight or satisfaction, but will be uncovered as illusion at a later stage. This also means that we cannot definitively rise above the many forms of fetishized performance that confront us—and that we need. The Greek Gods demanded human humility for a reason, and Proteus’s shape-shifting should continue to warn us that we cannot make our futures transparent, simply because, despite what our technologies may suggest, we cannot independently make what we are ourselves. The word independence is itself rooted in dependence: while we may never get past some of the negative ways in which the world presents itself to us in fetishized form, some of these excessive objects may remind us that there is no social life without things, just as there is none without other human beings, even when they just copy others’ anti-

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social discourses and desires. If I can rephrase the different forms of fetishization discussed at the end of Chapter 10, the amor that Robert Foster says belongs to the brand may be a meagre echo of what Daniel Miller described as buying treats to family or household as a kind of “downstream” sacrifice to others. Even more, the caritas that makes the North Atlantic consumers of commodities care for social and environmental relationships “upstream” in global relations of production seems not only to redistribute (some) wealth, but also fetishize such relations of production in a manner that counters the fetishization of commodities that Karl Marx feared in the 1860s. Perhaps that proves that we can fetishize relationships with people and things so that we can better depend upon them, and perhaps that suggests as well that we may have to do so in a more humble relationship with that most excessive object faced by all humanity: Planet Earth itself. Without such humility, we may discover that the temporality of things in general will, indeed, exceed the historicity of human artifacts, by threatening the latters’ manufacturers with extinction.

Notes 1. In fact, it was a moment on the embodied side of our material dialectic— a virus, but not computer-generated—that forced many of us into new modes of objectifying ourselves via digital technology in 2020. 2. I adopt “futurities”—cultural forms of the future—from Reinhardt Koselleck’s seminal Futures Past (2004). 3. The epochal argument that computer technology ushers in postmodernism is often traced—perhaps unfairly—to Lyotard (1984). 4. See note 27, Chapter 2. Composting articulates between historical layers, as Stuart Hall and James Clifford argued, but it has the advantage of broadening thinking beyond linguistic metaphors (which signal more ephemeral historical layers) to organic processes—although a geological/mineral metaphor might have been a useful addition (see Clifford 2013: 60; Hall 1986; Slack 1996). 5. The term “total social fact” is, of course, borrowed from Marcel Mauss ([1925] 1966: 1). I am not sure whether such a history of object forms— interdisciplinary by definition—can be written at all, but I think it would be great to try. 6. Like many other privileged people from the North Atlantic, Sterling seems more worried about the environment than about shaping things in ways that will alleviate growing global inequalities between people. 7. This mantra turned anthropologist and biologist Gregory Bateson into a New Age guru, but his followers often ignore that he thought infor-

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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mation could not be exchanged without the material carriers of living organisms or machines supplied with energy (Bateson 1973, 1979). We have already encountered similar attitudes among Theosophists (in Chapter 4). It is debatable whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while it deserves the halo of being the first science-fiction novel (Brain Aldiss, cited in Pels 2017) already partakes in this fear of autopoietic human creation. But since Karl Capec’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) ([1921] 2004), the commercial excitement about this fear extended most famously through Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot ([1950] 1968) and its many sequels, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001 Space Odyssey (released 1968), and William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk to the present. This section reuses materials first published in Pels (2010). Modern meanings of magic are, of course, more complicated: for a discussion, see Pels (2003a, 2014b). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc. (retrieved 13 December 2017); Gibson’s book coined the term cyberspace, and was the primary representative of the “cyberpunk” genre canonized by Sterling (1986). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheiropoieta, retrieved 14 December 2017. See my earlier references to the magical combination of iconicity and indexicality in Chapters 1 and 6. See my critique of Daston and Galison’s neglect of the field sciences (Pels 2014a). While I may seem not to like structuralists, Roland Barthes remains my favorite representative of the tribe—maybe because he was so good at deciphering flat matters (such as plastic and photographs). “Cyberspace Salvations” was the title of a research project I ran together with Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman. It was funded by the Dutch Research Foundation (NWO); see Aupers et al. (2008) and the final section of this chapter for some results. This development does not mean, however, that I want to abolish reverence for acheiropoiesis completely, and just as much as we should critically secularize autopoiesis and manufacture. The increase of awareness that we oppose nature to culture only at our peril may be the only route toward safeguarding humane relations to other living beings and the use of renewable energy and materials. As in “below” or “behind” the scene as it is portrayed on the surface. “Scene” is here meant to cover both cinematic (two-dimensional) and theatrical performances (three-dimensional), but may also refer to the (three-dimensional) scenography of a museum hall or exhibition, or the flat pictures in an advertisement. As we have seen in this book, all can enchant us.

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20. Those surfaces presenting a succession of packaged identities are rarely Baudrillard’s simulacra: they rather present hyperreal identities in Umberto Eco’s sense of temporary assemblages of fakes or copies with a material presence of the real (see Chapter 5). 21. There was, of course, a more global decolonizing current at the bottom of this. I have discussed it elsewhere (Pels 2016). 22. The mainstreaming of science fiction happened through such movies as Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Blade Runner (1982), although it built upon the countercultural development of a Star Trek cult from 1969 onwards. While J. R. R. Tolkien had always been a hero of the counterculture and its hackers (even the vending machine at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab was named after Tom Bombadil’s bar in Tolkien’s Middle Earth [Brand 1972]), fantasy acquired a new mainstream audience with the screening of the first Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movies (both in 2001).

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INDEX

acheiropoiesis, 21, 24, 26, 45–46, 49, 67n12, 300, 304, 306, 309–10, 317, 319n18 advertisements, 261, 270, 271, 284, 306; Afrika Museum, 123–26, 202–3, 206, 217; consumers and, 275, 277, 279–82, 285–86; Pears’ Soap “Bubbles,” 266–68, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 295n9, 296n13; Pepsi Generation, 286, 289, 297n21, 314 advertising, 65–66, 291–92, 296n10; Barnum with, 265–66, 269, 276, 278–79, 281, 289; branding and, 258, 274–75; brand values as identity fetishism, 275–89; commodity fetishism and, 247–49, 257–59, 264, 275; copywriters, 261–62, 264, 265, 270; culture, 249, 314–15; Murder Must Advertise, 261–62, 264, 269–70, 281; with performance of commodities, 270–71; product and performance, 262, 275; professionalization of, 238, 241; race, ethnicity and, 279, 282; rise of, 247, 266, 293; temporalities and materialities of commodity, 289–94; in United Kingdom, 266–67, 270, 274, 295n3; in US, 267–68, 269, 276–78, 283–84, 289, 296n17

Africa, 14, 39–40, 78, 97–98, 105, 143, 155; art, 125, 129, 144, 175, 182, 189, 191, 198, 199, 206–13, 216, 219n14, 220n33, 225; mimesis, 225–27, 230, 232, 233n4. See also West Africa Africa Christo! (journal), 162, 165, 167, 169–73, 175, 178–80, 196, 199, 204; “mission-love” in, 206–7 African Christianity, 171, 172, 173, 174 Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, 127, 128, 130nn2–3, 132, 158, 174, 177–78, 180, 219n9, 219n18, 220n23, 220n26, 220n29, 224, 227, 279; advertisements, 123–26, 202–3, 206, 217; artifacts from missions of Holy Ghost Fathers, 123, 125, 171, 173, 189–94, 197–98; Bukkems as founding father, 189–96, 197, 198, 209, 215, 219n11; collection of, 129; cover of printed guide for, 184, 186–87, 199–200; desiderata list, 190– 91, 192, 207; with “different kind of apostolate,” 189, 191, 194, 195, 196–201, 204, 230; exotic images, 230; with fetish into art, 206–13; history of, 188–89, 219n12, 231–32; Holy Ghost Fathers and, 182, 184, 187, 197, 198, 201, 223; “I am

356

black, but comely” documentary and, 183–85, 189, 196, 198, 211, 215, 219n11; modernity, professionalization, and magic of realism, 201–6; rebranding of, 175; with routinized wonder, 230; secularization and, 216; temporary exhibitions, 206, 208, 209, 210, 215, 220n34; Van Croonenburg and, 182–85, 187– 88, 195–97, 200–201, 209, 211, 213, 215–16, 219n11 Algemene Missie Actie Tentoonstelling (AMATE) exhibition, 172, 174–76, 179, 196, 207 Althusser, Louis, 296n18 AMATE (Algemene Missie Actie Tentoonstelling) exhibition, 172, 174–76, 179, 196, 207 American Museum, 132, 145, 249 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York, 133, 152 Angola, 162, 168, 199, 209 animism, 13, 14, 57, 76, 79, 80, 86, 102, 105, 114, 115, 119, 197, 214, 215, 228, 302 anthropology, 28, 33n25, 44, 68n28, 73, 117, 118n2; of modernity, ix, xi; race in, 67n11; sociocultural, 42 Appadurai, Arjun, xii, 41–42, 58, 82, 98, 99n7, 243n2, 246; methodological fetishism and, 77–80, 81; social life of things and, 8, 76, 77–79, 83 archaeology, 12–14, 32n11, 57, 60, 62 Arendt, Hannah, 47, 52–53, 311 Ariès, Philippe, 14 Arnoldi, Mary Jo, 154 art, 45, 49, 62, 90, 91, 173, 307; African, 125, 129, 144, 175, 182, 189, 191, 198, 199, 206–13, 216, 219n14, 220n33, 225; history, 43, 54, 60, 94, 96

Index

artifacts, 49, 67n16, 99–100nn8– 9, 104, 299; converted, 125–27, 129, 135, 159n5, 193, 207, 211, 215, 220n30; from Holy Ghost Fathers, 123, 125, 163, 171, 173, 189–94, 197–98; material culture studies and, x, 32n7, 43–47 artificial intelligence, 306, 307, 310, 320n22 Asad, Talal, 25 Asimov, Isaac, 319n9 Associated Advertising Clubs of America (AACA), 265 Associated Missionaries (Verenigde Missionarissen), 174 Aunt Jemima Mills, 279, 296n14 Aupers, Stef, 319n17 Auto-Icon, 43, 49, 125, 179, 310; acheiropoietic animation of, 45–46; after Bentham, 19–20; of Bentham, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 22, 28–31, 36, 38, 46, 131; biography of, 37; as excessive object, 4, 5–10, 63; as fetish, 34–35; with humanism disliking dead human bodies, 11–15; as iconoclash, 20–22; interruption and, 6, 8, 10, 34; making of, 15– 19; modern dematerializations, 23–31; reactions to, 6–7, 25, 31n5, 53; as relic, 4, 19, 21–22, 30, 32n16; in South Cloisters of UCL, xii, 6, 9, 20. See also head, Auto-Icon “Auto-Icon” (Bentham), 16–17 autopoiesis, 300, 305–11, 312, 317, 319n18 “Aztec children” (Maximo and Bartola), 131, 144, 145, 158n1 Baartman, Sarah, 143, 144 Bacon, Francis, 87, 92, 98, 108–9, 138 Bal, Mieke, 140, 181n4 Banks, Joseph, 135, 137, 159n6

Index

Barbie by Mattel, 285–86, 291 Barnum, Phineas Taylor, 128, 131, 133, 140, 142, 144, 146–47, 149–50, 158n1, 315; with advertising, 265–66, 269, 276, 278–79, 281, 289; American Museum and, 132, 145, 249 Barthes, Roland, 310, 319n16 Bateson, Gregory, 66n2, 318n7 Baudrillard, Jean, 81, 141, 147, 151, 160n20, 178–79, 222–23, 233n1, 297n23, 320n20; advertising and, 291–92 Behanzin (King of Dahomey), 149, 160n18 “being possessed,” 40, 86, 157–58 Bell, Bismarck, 144 Benjamin, Walter, 233n9, 296n12, 315, 316 Bennett, David, 75n5, 285 Bennett, Jane, x, xi–xii, 71 Bennett, Tony, 131–32, 135, 140–41, 142, 178, 179 Bentham, Jeremy, 22, 24, 25, 32n14, 52; ghost of, 20, 29, 36; “turn left at Bentham,” 5, 31n4. See also Auto-Icon Bhabha, Homi, 178, 179, 222, 229 the Bible, 106, 112, 222, 223 biography, 20, 34, 37, 39, 157, 181n6 biological fact, race as, 53 blackface, 203–4, 223, 225, 233n3, 279 Black Lives Matter, xiii Blade Runner (film), 320n22 Blavatsky, Helena, 113, 315 “blind sight,” 51, 53, 157 Blommaert (Father), 189–90, 198, 202 Boas, Franz, 133, 147, 148–49, 152–55, 158n2, 232 Bode van de Heilige Geest (“Holy Ghost Messenger”), 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171

357

bodies, at exhibition: contradictory stories and ambiguous practices, 140–45; humans as objects on display, 65, 131–33, 140, 142– 45; paradox of “lifeless” diorama and Boas, 152–55; routinization of wonder, 64, 133, 145–51, 160n17, 225, 229, 301; trophy and wonder, 132–33, 134–40 Bosman, Willem, 21, 78, 105 Botanic Garden (Darwin, E.), 139 Bourdieu, Pierre, xii, 42, 59–60, 67n17, 104, 109, 260n8, 272 Bowring, John, 24 branding, 134, 174, 258, 274–75 brands, 239, 275–89, 302–3, 310 Brougham, Henry (Lord), 18, 19 Brown Goode, George, 232 Bruneau, Thomas, 150 Bukkems, Piet (Father), 123, 125, 129, 189–98, 209, 215, 219n11 Bunn, James, 94, 96 Burke, Edmund, 139 Burke, William, 14, 15, 32n12 Butler, Judith, 11, 14, 43 Caldecott, Charles, 144 Calvinism, 110, 248 Campbell, Colin, 40, 248 capitalism, 4, 39, 52, 72, 82–83, 102, 130n6, 248 car industry, 282–83, 293 Carlyle, Thomas, 112, 259n3 Carrier, James G., 118n6, 259n1 cartoons, racist, 220n29 Castan’s Panoptikum, 144, 145 Çatalhöyük (Neolithic settlement), 47, 49 Catholic Church, 21–23, 33n18, 221n38; Second Vatican Council, 173, 175–76; transubstantiation, 30, 126, 129, 188, 200, 213, 221n35, 224. See also Afrika Museum; Holy Ghost Fathers; photographs,

358

in Dutch Catholic missionary propaganda Catholic Radio and Television Guide (Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids), 183, 184, 185 Catholics, 5, 21, 22, 23, 33n18, 64–65, 99n6, 100n15, 125–30, 130nn3–4, 132, 157, 158, 161– 63, 167, 171, 174, 179, 181n5, 182–217, 220n28, 221nn35– 38, 224, 230, 232, 241, 244, 245, 258, 278, 296n19 Caus, Salomon de, 90 Chang and Eng (Siamese Twins), 131 Cherry Ripe, 274, 279, 295n9 Chidester, David, 311 children: in blackface, 203–4, 223, 225; double consciousness and, 205; Holy Childhood, 203, 217, 220n28, 223; Maximo and Bartola as “Aztec,” 131, 144, 145, 158n1; Pears’ Soap “Bubbles” poster, 266–67, 296n13 China, 136, 154, 192, 220n28 Christianity, 112, 171–74; Protestant, 4, 5, 21–22, 72, 82, 111, 232, 309 A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 40, 65, 67n8, 240, 244–45, 248 Clarke, Arthur C., 305, 319n9 Clifford, James, 94, 127, 152, 157, 187, 318n4 Clunas, Craig, 136, 159n7 Coleridge, Samuel, 95, 114 Collected Works (Bentham), 24 collections, 90–96, 100n12, 100n14, 129. See also trophies Colls, John (Rev.), 19 colonialism, ix, 135–36, 143, 149, 176, 231, 258; ethnography, 74n1, 183, 187, 192, 195, 216; mimicry, 178, 218, 229 Colonising Egypt (Mitchell, T.), 225 commodification, 39, 52, 66n7

Index

commodities, 8, 39–40, 47, 76, 94, 239, 264; exchangeability of, 83, 250, 254, 263, 290; performance of, 270–71; temporalities and materialities of, 289–94 commodity fetishism, xi, 8, 80–81, 99nn5–6, 239, 244, 294; advertising and, 247–49, 257– 59, 264, 275; Great Exhibition and, 248–51, 254, 255, 257; Marx, Karl, and, 36, 65, 71–72, 82–83, 237–38, 240, 245–46, 251–55, 262, 272, 291, 318; three forms of, 255–59 “Company Advertising” (De Bedrijfsreklame), 265 composting metaphor, 63–66, 68n27, 73, 157, 188, 299, 318n4; in Shaping Things, 301, 305 Computer Lib (Nelson), 308 computers, 300, 305–18, 318n3 Comte, Auguste, 22, 33n18, 73, 112, 114, 157–58 Coney Island, 128, 150 consciousness, 39, 99–100nn8– 9, 272. See also double consciousness consumerism, 36, 47, 52, 66, 283, 284; modern, 40; in US, 198, 230 consumers, 50–51, 65, 239; advertisements and, 275, 277, 279–82, 285–86; sovereignty, 256, 270, 292 Cook, James (Captain), 135 Coombes, Annie, 155 copywriters, 261–62, 264, 265, 270 Corbey, Raymond, 159n10, 170, 181n4 corpses, 11–15, 38 counterculture, 39, 277, 289, 314, 320n22 Crossland, Zoe, 10, 12, 13, 32n10, 46, 177

Index

curiosity, wonder and, 6, 32n15, 64, 133, 138, 179, 191, 213, 301. See also wonder curiosity cabinets (Wunderkammern), 75n4, 87–91, 93, 100nn12–13, 136, 191–92, 249 Cuvier, Georges, 143, 146 “Cyberspace Salvations” (research project), 319n17 Dahomeans, 136, 143, 148, 149–50, 160nn18–19 Dapper, Olfert, 21 Darwin, Charles, 113 Darwin, Erasmus, 100n16, 139 Daston, Lorraine, 58, 75n4, 101n17, 309, 319n15 death, 10, 12, 24, 46, 136–37. See also human bodies, dead De Bedrijfsreklame (“Company Advertising”), 265 Debord, Guy, 249 De Brosses, Charles, 75n3, 114 decolonization, 174, 210, 215, 221n37, 277, 279, 296n19 decontextualization, of objects, 256–57 De Grazia, Victoria, 241, 269, 275, 282–83 dematerialization, modern, 22, 23– 31, 37, 47, 66, 68n20, 114–17, 134, 156, 242, 264, 286, 294, 303; evisceration of aesthetics, 27–29; excessive objects and, 23–31; reduction of signification to representation, 29–31; spirit of matter and, 29, 37–38; tyrannical sovereignty of human subject, 25–27; unfinished secularization of matter, 24–25 Denton, Kirk, 154 department stores, 244–45, 249–50, 257, 265 De Rooij, Jan (Father), 194–95, 217 Dery, Mark, 304

359

Descartes, René, 92, 95, 126, 138–39 Desmond, Adrian, 112 Dewey, George (Admiral), 267–68, 296n13 Dialectic(al), 8, 26, 42, 84, 86, 223, 247, 251, 253, 255, 277, 278, 290, 291; of objectification and embodiment, x, xii, xiii, 31, 42, 43, 46, 47, 54–55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67n17, 86, 104, 109, 118n3, 223, 227, 228, 231, 238, 239, 241, 242, 246, 275, 288, 290, 291, 292, 300, 311, 317, 318n1 Dichter, Ernest, 275, 276, 284–85 Dickens, Charles, 40, 65, 67n8, 240, 244–45, 247–48, 250, 295n4 digital technology, 49, 298, 300, 305–12, 318n1 Ding an Sich (thing in itself), 79–80, 84, 102 dioramas, 127, 128, 146, 151–55, 203 Disney, Walt, 128, 133 Disney Epcot Center, 151, 152 Disneyfied “experience economy,” 141 Disney museums, 138, 152 Dompier, Steven, 307, 308 double break, reflexivity and, 58–60 double consciousness, ix, 58, 204–5, 217, 230, 277, 280; Du Bois and, 39, 66n7, 241, 262, 263, 272–73, 295n7; haunting and, 39–43 double vision, 178, 179, 222, 227, 229–30 Du Bois, W. E. B., 39, 66n7, 241, 262–63, 272–73, 282, 295n7, 296n7 Durkheim, Emile, 36, 116, 118n4, 213, 295n6 Dutch. See Netherlands

360

Dutch Research Foundation (NWO), 319n17 East Africa, 5, 191, 194–95, 217, 221n37 Eco, Emberto, 151, 223, 320n20 Edinburgh Medical School, 15 education, 33n21, 259n3 Edwards, William, 142 Egyptians, 145–46 Eiffel, Gustave, 147 Eisenburger, Ineke, 189, 207–8, 209, 211–15, 232 embodiment, objectification and, 104, 109, 246. See also dialectic of England, 13, 16, 91, 144, 145, 147 Enlightenment, xi, 27, 43, 51, 61, 91, 95, 224 epistemology, 34, 55, 66n2, 95, 96, 113, 139, 158 Estermann, Charles, 168 ethnic shows, 140, 142–51 ethnography, 57, 59, 147, 154; colonial, 74n1, 183, 187, 192, 195, 216; methodology of the concrete and, 99n2 Ethnological Society of London, 142 evisceration of aesthetics, 27–29, 37, 62 excessive objects, x–xiv, 3, 4–10, 20, 21, 23–31, 34–36, 38–39, 41–42, 43, 46–47, 49, 53–54, 58, 63–64, 72, 132, 193, 201, 206, 215, 227, 229, 237, 239–40, 244, 245, 253, 290, 317, 318 exchangeability, 83, 240, 242, 250, 254, 257, 263, 290 exchange-value, 262, 263, 264, 277 Exxon, 284, 291 Fabian, Johannes, 66n2, 68n24, 134, 158, 233n7

Index

fancy, 82, 92–96 Ferguson, James, 159n4, 227 Ferris Wheel, 148, 150 fetish: agency, 118n3; alterity of, 76; into art, 206–13; AutoIcon as, 8, 34–35; with “eerie animation,” 46; etymology of, 75n3; fancy and, 82; genealogy of, 102; generic singularity and, 83; with limits of representation, 96–98; occult and, 97; as other thing, 76–77, 80–84; Pietz and, 100n11, 158; rarity as, 37, 64, 77, 92–96, 98; trade and, 78; worship, 21, 41, 123, 190–93 fetishism, 86, 200; advertising with brand values as identity, 275–89; aesthetics, 94; animism and, 76, 80, 102, 115, 228; capitalist, 130n6, 248; Catholic Church and, 33n18; Freud on, 101n20; of “human life in things,” 52; idolatry and, 42; methodological, 41, 77–80, 81, 99n3; sexual, 75n5; techno-fetishism, 67n12, 243, 299, 304. See also commodity fetishism fetishization, xiv; Marx, Karl, and, xi, 81; of objects, 104; technology and, 308 fetisso, 74n1, 78 field sciences, 54, 55, 60, 67n11 Filene, Edward, 282 film, 43, 63, 154, 298 folk theory, 242, 245, 247–48, 294 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 26 Ford, Henry, 282 fortune teller, 165, 177 Foster, Hal, 94 Foster, Robert, 294 Foucault, Michel, 52, 68n22 “four-eyed sight,” 51, 53, 157 France, 16, 32n12, 145, 147, 150, 158, 220n28 Franklin Automobile Company, 261

Index

Frazer, James, 10, 36–37, 177 Frederick, Christine, 279–80, 283, 284, 296n10 Frederick, J. George, 280, 283 Freedberg, Michael, 43 Freeman, G. W., 265 Freire-Marreco, Barbara, 44–45 Frequin, P. A., 202 Freud, Sigmund, 101n20, 284 Fried, Michael, 43 Friedman, Jonathan, 226 “future positive,” xi, 305 Galison, Peter, 58, 101n17, 309, 319n15 Gardner, Burleigh, 276, 285, 287 Garriot, Richard, 307 Gell, Alfred, 10, 49, 104, 308 “General Account of Method” (Rivers), 44 Gerbrands, Adriaan, 201, 216 Germany, 100n15, 150, 158 Ghana, 175 Ghost(ly), 4, 11, 20, 21, 24, 29, 36, 38, 40, 66n5, 67n8, 244; specter, 36, 265. See also haunting Gibson, William, 306, 319n9, 319n12 Gideon, Sigfried, 147, 159n13, 310 Gilroy, John, 271 Gilroy, Paul, 39 gnostics, 40, 108–9, 112, 116, 222, 258; New Age, 288, 316; technology and, 304, 311, 314 Goffman, Erving, 296n10 Goldberg, Dan Theo, 26, 39, 52 Golden Jubilee objects, 249 Gordon, Avery, 38 Gould, Stephen Jay, 159n4 Govers, Henk, 164 Graeber, David, 258, 260n8 Gramsci, Antonio, 296n18 graves, 12–14, 16, 115 Great Britain, 20, 32n12, 143, 149–50, 244, 247, 266

361

Great Exhibition, London (1851), 28, 51, 145–47, 248–51, 254–55, 257, 266 Greeley, Horace, 251 Green, Nancy, 279 Greenblatt, Stephen, 133, 138, 187, 215, 229 Grote, George, 18 Guinness “zoo” advertisements, 270, 271 habitus, 23, 32n7, 60, 63, 67n17 hackers, 300, 306–9, 320n22 Hackers (Levy, Steven), 306–7 Haeckel, Ernst, 111 Hagenbeck, Carl, 131, 140, 145, 147, 158n1 Hall, Martin, 135, 141, 142, 147 Hall, Stuart, 318n4 Handbook of Material Culture (Tilley), 12, 32n9, 44 hands, human, 47–51, 54, 113, 301 Hare, William, 14, 15, 32n12 Haug, Werner, 263 haunting, ix, 11, 29, 36–43, 45, 50, 51, 55, 67n8, 72, 74, 107, 127, 129, 223, 227, 237, 244, 265, 273, 286, 287, 317 Hayden, Benjamin, 143 Hayes, Catherine, 279 Hazelius, Alfred, 147 head, Auto-Icon, 31, 37, 52, 53; desiccated, 3, 7, 9, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31n5, 32n17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 85, 86 Hertsig, Adriaan (Father), 198–99, 201, 202, 205, 206 Heth, Joice, 131, 132, 142, 315 Hicks, Dan, xvi, 32n10, 158 The Hidden Persuaders (Packard), 284 Hinsley, Curtis, 160n15 history, 25, 43, 51–54, 60, 67n11, 94, 96. See also natural history “A History of Curiosity” (Stagl), 138

362

“history houses,” at Çatalhöyük, 49 Hodder, Ian, 47, 49 Hodgkin, Thomas, 16, 142–43 Holy Childhood, 203, 217, 220n28, 223 Holy Ghost Fathers, 130n1, 162, 164, 168, 233n10; Afrika Museum and, 182, 184, 187, 197, 198, 201, 223; artifacts, 123, 125, 163, 171, 173, 189–94, 197–98 “Holy Ghost Messenger” (Bode van de Heilige Geest), 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171 Horniman Museum, 136, 160n14 human bodies, 33n19, 47–52, 54, 67n14, 113, 301. See also bodies, at exhibition human bodies, dead, 3, 16, 18, 21, 52, 91, 115; corpses, 11–15, 38; remains, 10–15, 20, 32n11, 137. See also Auto-Icon humanism, xii, 4–5, 9, 10, 11–15, 26–27, 40, 52, 109, 132, 316 human life, 51–54, 78, 147 “human life in things,” fetishism of, 52 humans, 25, 39–40, 100n9; as objects on display, 65, 131–33, 140, 142–45; remains, 10–15, 20, 32n11, 137 human subject, 4, 25–27, 52, 86, 109, 301 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 73, 108, 111–13, 114, 116, 117, 224 I, Robot (Asimov), 319n9 “I am black, but comely,” 183–85, 189, 196, 198, 211, 215, 219n11 iconicity. See index(icality) iconoclash, 20–22, 43, 49, 306 iconoclasm, 22–23, 25, 27, 30, 64, 103, 107, 109, 112, 116, 224 identity: commodity fetishism and, 257–58, 294; fetishism and

Index

brand values, 275–89; value, 65–66, 130, 160n16 idol(atry), 4, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 33n18, 35, 41, 42, 82, 97, 103, 107, 112, 114, 115, 123, 134, 135, 153, 187, 207, 220n30 index(icality), 27, 104, 106, 179, 183, 242, 254, 290, 309; iconicity and, 10, 37, 177, 179, 231, 319n14 Ingold, Tim, 48, 54, 298 “initiation mask,” BaPende, 183, 184, 218n6, 220n30 interiority, “narrative of,” 100n12, 188 International Congress of Orientalists, Stockholm (1889), 145, 146 International Labor Organization, 282–83 intimacy, sensory registers and, 60–63 Jay, Martin, 225 Jefferson, Thomas, 33n23 “Jim Crow” laws, 279 Jones, Inigo, 90 Juliana (Queen of the Netherlands), 211–12 Kabyle house, 60, 67n17 Karp, Ivan, 138, 141, 151, 152 Katholieke Radio- en Televisiegids (Catholic Radio and Television Guide), 183, 184, 185 Keane, Webb, 50, 103 Keynes, John Maynard, 283 Kingsley, Charles, 111–12 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 45, 134, 141–42, 230 Kohl, Karl-Heinz, 233n4 Kokadorus (street vendor), 266 Kopytoff, Igor, xiii, 39, 52, 67n7, 83 Kornbluth, Cyril, 284 Koselleck, Reinhard, 68n21, 318n2

Index

Kramer, Fritz, 218n6, 222, 227, 228, 233n4 Kratz, Corinne, 138, 141, 151, 152 KRO (Dutch Catholic broadcasting company), 182, 183, 189, 196, 198, 218n3 Kubrick, Stanley, 319n9 Kwakwaka’wakw people, 133, 148, 149, 152, 158n2 labor, 39, 247, 282–83, 293, 304 labor theory of value, 238, 246, 254, 293 LaFleur, Violet, 20 Latour, Bruno, 11, 21, 38, 233n5, 306, 309 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 284 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 266 Leenhardt, Maurice, 162 Lemée, François, 158 Lempert, Michael, 227 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 48, 298 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 56, 59, 248, 297n23 Levy, Steven, 306–7, 310 Leyten, Harrie, 207, 218n4, 220n32 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 227 life-force, 210, 211, 213, 215, 230–31, 232 Lind, Jenny, 158n1, 278–79, 289, 315 Lips, Julius, 228 Livingstone, David, 143 Loffeld, E. (Father), 184, 185, 197, 218n7 Loogman, Alfons (Father), 195, 196 Lubbock, John, 113, 115 Lucas, Gavin, 57, 62 Luddites, 48, 299 Lunar Society, 100n16 Maasai people, 169 magic, x, 10, 36–37, 43, 90–91, 130n5, 210; Catholic Church,

363

23, 30, 126; computer, 300, 305–11; mimesis, 231; photography as realist, 177; of realism, 145–51, 153–54, 201–6; system of modernity, 262 magical transportation, 217, 220n27 Magnus, Albertus, 137, 138, 139, 228 Magubane, Bernard, 166 Mailer, Norman, 286 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 243n3 Maori people, 18 Marees, Pieter de, 93 marketing psychology, science of, 275, 276, 277, 280, 281, 284 Marx, Jenny, 252, 259n7 Marx, Karl, 41, 104, 130n6, 250, 263, 292, 295n6; commodity fetishism and, 36, 65, 71–72, 82–83, 237–38, 240, 245–46, 251–55, 262, 272, 291, 292, 318; fetishism defined by, 86; fetishization and, xi, 81; labor and, 247, 293; objectification and, 99n4 material culture studies, xi, 4, 8, 39, 54, 60, 64; agency of objects and, 35; artifacts and, x, 32n7, 43–47; with power of objects, 21, 25, 53; tyranny of the subject and, 41 Material Culture Studies, at UCL, xii materialism, xiv, 40, 103–5, 107, 110–12 materiality, 44, 73, 84–87, 102–4, 107–10, 262, 289–94 materials, 23, 35, 102; plastic, 49, 50, 146, 157, 309, 310; relationality of, 104–7 The Matrix (film), 311 matsutake mushroom, 57 matter: fear of, 103, 107, 110, 114, 315; humanism and, 4, 5; secularization of, 24–25, 37, 299, 310. See also spirit of matter

364

Mauss, Marcel, 295n6, 318n5 Maximo and Bartola (“Aztec children”), 131, 144, 145, 158n1 mechanical objectivity, 5, 22, 25, 28–29, 51, 119n13, 119n17, 157; photography and, 119n17 medical science: bodies used for, 3, 14, 15, 16, 18, 52; scandal, 32n12 Melville, Herman, 295n4 methodological animism, 79, 80 methodological fetishism, xii, 41, 77–81, 99n3 methodology of the concrete, 74, 242; (dis)entangling hand, 47–51; epistemic conditions and, 54–63; ethnography and, 99n2; haunted modernities, 36–39; from hauntings to double consciousness, 39–43; ideology of artifact in material culture studies, 43–47; intimacy and sensory registers, 60–63; reflexivity and double break, 58–60; representation as history, 51–54; time and contingency, 56–58 Meyer, Birgit, 130n5, 160n17 Mill, James, 18 Mill, John Stuart, 110 Millais, John Everett, 266, 267, 274, 295n9 Miller, Daniel, xii, 8, 23, 26, 49, 58, 84, 294, 310, 318; on artifacts and consciousness, 99– 100nn8–9; excess as spending and, 259n2; on materiality of artifacts, 104; objectification process and, 42, 108; “republic of mutual respect” and, 255; shopping theory and, 246–47, 248; structuralism and, 297n23; virtuality and, 118n6 mimesis, 129, 222–28, 230–32, 233n4

Index

mimicry, 88, 129–30, 178–79, 218, 222–24, 229 missionaries, 5, 221n37. See also photographs, in Dutch Catholic missionary propaganda MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, 307 Mitchell, J. Clyde, 226 Mitchell, Timothy, 146, 159n11, 178, 179, 225, 227, 303 Mitchell, W. J. T., 42–43, 58, 67n9 Mkoba, Adrian, 219n23 modernity, ix–xi, xiv, 25–26, 36–39, 52, 201–6, 262 Mohr, R., 202 Moral Majority, 316 Morris, Rosalind, xi, 71, 75, 130, 158, 237, 238 Motivational Research, 276, 284 Muermans, Johannes, 199, 200, 205 Murder Must Advertise (Sayers), 261–62, 264, 269–70, 281 museum objects, 44–45, 85, 94, 103, 125, 128, 133–34, 151, 153, 157, 188, 192–94, 215; consumer goods and, 50–51; modern, 88; relic and, 89; with semiophoric functions, 67n13 Museum of Swedish Ethnography, 147 museums, 8, 33n24, 88, 131, 188, 232; branding, 134, 175; natural history, 133, 152; shops, 156, 219n13. See also Afrika Museum; bodies, at exhibition; specific museums Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, 134–35 mutual self-construction, 8, 26, 42 NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), US, 12–14 nail fetish (nkisi nkondi), 182, 215, 300, 308, 309 Nakassis, Constantine V., 233n2

Index

“narrative of interiority,” 100n12, 188 National Museum for World Cultures, 233n10 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), US, 12–14 Native Americans, 14, 144, 147, 148, 158n1 natural history, 52, 57, 144, 192, 219n16, 309; AMNH, 133, 152; classification, 45, 61 Nature, 24, 25, 51, 87, 238, 309, 310 Nelson, Ted, 308 “Neolithic Revolution,” 67n16 Netherlands (Dutch), 65, 72, 82, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 100n15, 105, 123, 130n3, 163, 167, 171, 174, 181n13, 184, 187, 191, 195, 198, 201, 203, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211–12, 215, 216, 219n23, 220n26, 220n28, 221n38, 245, 296n19; advertising in, 265, 266, 269, 278, 280, 286, 289, 297n22. See also Afrika Museum Neuromancer (Gibson), 306, 319n12 New Age: energy, 213, 230; movement, 108, 241, 277, 288, 289, 314–15, 316, 318n7 New Zealand, 18, 19, 26 Nike, 272, 286–87, 293, 294 nkisi nkondi (nail fetish), 182, 215, 300, 308, 309 “Noahs-Arke” (rarities shop), 100n14 North Atlantic, 117n1, 130, 143 Notes and Queries in Anthropology, 44 NWO (Dutch Research Foundation), 319n17 objectification, x, xii, 42, 46, 54, 99n4, 104, 108–9

365

objectivism, 59, 260n8 objects, 71, 104, 178, 249; decontextualization of, 256–57; excess in, 23, 34, 35, 45, 49, 60; human bodies as modern, abstract, 33n19; humans displayed as live, 65, 131–33, 140, 142–45; material culture studies and agency of, 35; power of, x, 4, 21, 25, 26, 42, 53; in Shaping Things, 300–305. See also artifacts; museum objects Occidental, 84–85, 87, 102, 107, 108, 117n1 occult, x, 37, 74, 97 Olcott, Henry Steel (Colonel), 113 On Longing (Stewart), 137 Ons Orgaan bulletin, 130n1, 190, 195, 198 operative chains, 47, 50 Oussoye area, 164 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 42 The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Hicks and Beaudry), 32n10 Packard, Vance, 284 Paley, William, 24 Pareto, Vilfredo, 292 Park, Mungo, 143 Pascal, Blaise, 296n18 passiones, 227–29, 233n8 Paxton, Joseph, 147 Peale, Charles Wilson, 132 Pearson, Karl, 20 Pears’ Soap “Bubbles” advertisement, 266–68, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 295n9, 296n13 Peirce, C. S., 297n23 Penning, R. E., 206, 208–9 Pepsi Generation advertisements, 286, 289, 297n21, 314 performance, 262, 264, 270–71, 275

366

photographs, in Dutch Catholic missionary propaganda, 161, 164, 165, 169, 177–78, 180; African Christianity, 171, 172, 173, 174; African man in European clothes, 166, 167, 229; African man in headdress and necklace, 170; AMATE exhibition, 172, 174–76, 179, 196, 207; exotic images, 162–63, 167, 171, 175, 181n7, 184 photography, 28, 31, 43, 63, 144, 154, 315; anthropology of, 33n25; with lifelike quality, 46; “mechanical objectivity” and, 119n17; spirit-photography, 114 Piaget, Jean, 56, 258 Pietz, William, xiv, 66n4, 71, 78, 97, 99n6, 100n11, 158 Pinney, Christopher, 181n14 Pinochet, Augusto, 258 Pitt-Rivers Museum, 44–45, 94, 115 plastic, 49–50, 146, 157, 298, 300, 304, 309–11 plasticity, 49, 305–11 Pohl, Frederick, 284 Poovey, Mary, 108–9, 116 possessed, being, 40, 86, 157–58 possessive individualism, xiii, 25– 26, 32n13, 33n22, 37, 40–43 Pott, P. H., 202 Potter’s Field, 14, 16 poverty, 71, 221n39, 255 Pratt, Mary Louise, 101n18, 214 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 114–16 Printer’s Ink (trade magazine), 278, 280 production, distribution and, 304 products, 301–2; brands and, 285, 287; performance and, 262, 275 professionalization: of advertising, 238, 241; Afrika Museum and, 201–6

Index

property, 41, 91, 115, 137, 251, 254 prophecy, 103, 116–17, 305 Protestant Christianity, 4, 5, 21–22, 72, 82, 111, 232, 309 Protestants, 30, 64, 265, 316–17; Catholics and, 126, 130nn3–4, 232; sincerity, 262, 266, 269, 273; WASPs, 269, 277–78, 283 psychoanalysis, 75n5, 78, 276, 285 Pubben, Gerard (Father), 189, 200, 202, 207, 209–11, 213–15, 220n34, 232 “puffmen,” 265, 266 Putnam, Frederick, 147–48 Quaker Oats, 279, 296n14 Qureshi, Sadiah, 143, 144, 159n10 race, 39, 40, 52, 53, 275; advertising with ethnicity and, 279, 282; in anthropology, 67n11 “racial unconscious,” 229 racism, xiii, 25, 27, 220n29, 229, 232, 273; ethnic shows, 140, 142–46, 147; “Jim Crow” laws, 279; scientific, 45, 140, 142; social classification and, 295n6 “racist exoticism,” 226 Ramus, Petrus, 91 rarity, 88–89, 101n17; collections, 90–93, 95, 100n14; as fetish, 37, 64, 77, 92–96, 98 realism, magic of, 145–51, 153–54, 201–6 relics: Auto-Icon as, 4, 19, 21–22, 30, 32n16; rarity and, 88, 89; trophies and, 137 religion, x, 23, 33n20, 73, 78, 103, 118n2; fear and, 192, 195; plastic, 49, 311; of technology, 240; “world,” 218n9 representation, xii, 3, 10, 28, 38, 60, 61, 62, 64, 72, 73, 82,

Index

88–89, 90, 91, 100n13, 126, 128, 129–30, 133, 134, 137, 139, 146, 151, 154, 156, 158, 159n11, 161, 178, 179–80, 183, 200, 205, 210, 214, 215, 217, 218, 223, 233n7, 249, 259nn4–5, 303, 313, 315; fetish and limits of, 96–98; as historical construct, 51–54; mimesis and, 223–30; reduction of signification to, 29–31, 37 “republic of mutual respect,” 237, 255 Reynolds Joshua, 274 Rhodes, Cecil, 33n21 Rhodes Must Fall movement, xiii, 25, 33n21 Richards, Thomas, 248–49, 250, 258–59, 259nn4–5, 266, 293 Richardson, Ruth, 14 Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 20, 36 Rivers, William, 44–45, 243n3 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 283 Roosevelt, Theodore, 296n19 Rorty, Richard, 66n2 Rosicrucians, 91, 100nn14–15 Rouch, Jean, 226 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 312 Sancho Panza (fictional character), 32n14 sanctity, of graves, 13, 14, 16 Sattelzeit (1750–1850), 68n21 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 97–98, 117, 292 Sayers, Dorothy, 261–62, 264, 265, 269–70, 271, 281, 289 Schneider, William, 142, 159n10, 160n19 science, 33n20, 52, 54, 55, 60, 67n11, 307; of marketing psychology, 275, 276, 277, 280, 281, 284; medical, 3, 14, 15, 16, 18, 32n12, 52; Victorian, 64, 103, 106, 109, 110

367

science-fiction, 60, 284, 300–306, 315, 316, 319n9, 320n22 scientific racism, 45, 140, 142 Scientific Revolution, 23, 91, 92–93 Scott, Ridley, 306 Scrooge (fictional character), 40 Second Vatican Council, 173, 175–76 secular(ist, -ism), ix, x, 3, 4, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 45–46, 58, 66n6, 73, 89, 103, 116, 119nn13–14, 125, 130, 156, 160n17, 176, 179, 181n13, 202, 205, 206, 213, 220n30, 233, 246, 258, 262, 287, 288, 289, 290, 304, 305, 314, 315, 316 secularization, xi, 4, 22, 27, 30, 33n18, 38, 73, 104, 111, 116, 127, 200, 201, 217, 219n22, 224, 240, 241, 289, 290, 305, 309, 315, 316, 319; Afrika Museum and, 216 secularization of matter, 20; furthering, 310; unfinished, 24–25, 37, 299 secular modern(ity, -s), x, 25, 176, 239 self, interior, autonomous, 118n9 self-possession, 40, 258 self-realization, 40, 289 Senghor, Léopold, 211–12 sensory registers, intimacy and, 60–63 sexual fetishism, 75n5 Shakespeare, William, 90 Shaping Things (Sterling), 300–305 Shelley, Mary, 319n9 shifter, 35, 66n3 shoppers, 247–48, 256, 263 shopping: department stores and, 244–45, 249–50, 257, 265; mall, 46, 249; theory, 246–47, 248 shuffle of things, singularity, chance and, 87–92, 93

368

signification, reduce to representation, 29–31, 37 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 222 singularity, 52; chance, shuffle of things and, 87–92, 93; fetish and generic, 83; of rarity, 95 slavery, xiii, 26, 52, 231, 258; abolition of, 142, 143; as counterculture of modernity, 39; Jefferson with, 33n23; trophies, 135–36 slaves, 26, 27, 115, 131, 279 Sliggers, Bert, 159n10 smallpox, in corpses, 13 Smith, Adam, 249 Smith, William, 95 Smithsonian Institution, 154 Snyder, Ted, 307 social classification, 273, 295n6 socialization, 42, 75n5, 109, 115, 316 social life: agency of things in, 41; of things, 8, 76–77, 79, 83, 104 social media, 232, 313, 316 social sciences, xi, 66n6, 68n24 Societé Ethnologique de Paris, 142 Society for African Missions, 130n3 Society for Checking Abuses of Public Advertising, 265 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 15 sociocultural, 105, 106, 277, 305, 313; change and technology, 299; hierarchies, 274; insights of Du Bois, 296n7; over material, 102 sociocultural anthropology, 42 sociocultural theory, 11 sociology, ix Sol PC, 307, 308 Sombart, Werner, 283 Sondaal, B., 181n8 South Africa, 33n21, 165 South Cloisters, of UCL, xii, 6, 9, 20

Index

Southwood Smith, Thomas, 3, 14–19, 24, 28, 49, 52 souvenirs: “of death,” 136–37; stillness of, 85. See also trophies sovereignty, ix, 41, 52; consumer, 256, 270, 292; of hackers, 308; human, 10; human subject with tyrannical, 25–27; intellectual, 258; “interior,” 40 The Space Merchants (Pohl and Kornbluth), 284 spectacle, 36, 46, 61, 132, 135, 145, 146, 149, 155, 204, 216, 217, 225, 249–50, 265, 266, 301, 310, 315 SPIME, 303 Spinoza, Baruch, 92, 95 Spiritans, 163, 173, 180n1, 183, 189–90, 193–94, 196, 203. See also Holy Ghost Fathers spirit of matter, ix–x, xiii, 4, 72, 105, 291; dematerialization and, 29, 37–38; fetish and limits of representation, 96–98; with fetish as other thing, 76–77, 80–84; materiality and, 84–87; methodological fetishism and, 77–80, 81, 99n3; rarity as fetish, 64, 77, 92–96; singularity, chance and shuffle of things, 87–92, 93 spirit-photography, 114 spirits of the screens, 300, 311–18 spiritualism, 103, 105, 110–16, 118n10, 315 Stagl, Justin, 138 Stallybrass, Peter, 141, 251–52, 253, 254, 294 Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, 320n22 Star Trek (TV show), 320n22 Star Wars (film), 320n22 Sterling, Bruce, 299, 300–305, 312, 318n6, 319n9, 319n12 Stewart, Susan, 100n12, 137, 142, 178–79, 297n23

Index

Steyl (mission museum), 130n3, 192, 219n16 Stocking, George W., 67n11 Stoller, Paul, 225, 226 structuralism, 30, 67n14, 297n23 subscenary, 313, 314, 319n19 Sukel, Landelinus (Brother), 190, 194 Sumbanese people, 105, 106 superstitions, 14, 15, 105, 176 Swammerdam, Jan, 92 tactility, 6, 31n3, 312 Talbot, Henry Fox, 181n15 Talrich, Jacques, 19 Tanganyika Territory, 130n4, 181n5, 189 Taussig, Michael, 13, 81, 99n5, 118n4, 129, 225–26, 233nn5–6 taxidermy, 14, 22, 46 taxonomy, 27, 61, 88, 91, 98, 107–8, 138 technological fetishism, 67n12, 243, 299, 304 technological time, 300 technology: computers, 300, 305– 18, 318n3; digital, 49, 298, 300, 305–12, 318n1; gnostics and, 304, 311, 314; humans and influence of, 100n9; Luddites and, 48, 299; plastic, 300, 304; polygenesis of art and, 45; religion of, 240; science fiction and, 300–305; sociocultural change and, 299; spirits of the screens, 300, 311–18; technoscience, 52 Thatcher, Margaret, 258 theatres of the world, 90–91 A Theory of Shopping (Miller), 246–47, 248 Theosophists, 106, 108, 113, 315, 319n8 thick descriptions, 5, 15, 34 thin description, 5, 34, 68n19, 312

369

thing in itself (Ding an Sich), 79–80, 84, 102 “thing-power,” of objects, x, 71 things: animism and, 79; biography of, 34, 39, 157, 181n6; fetish as other, 76–77, 80–84; human life as, 51–54; “human life in,” 52; in life, 47–51; property and, 41; Shaping Things, 300–305; social life and agency of, 41; time of, 25, 53, 56–58, 65–66, 73, 240, 290, 291 Thomas, Nicholas, 42, 125–26, 139, 159nn8–9 Tilburg Fathers, 130n3 Tilley, Christopher, 12, 32n9 time: technological, 300; of things, 25, 53, 56–58, 65–66, 73, 240, 290, 291 timelessness, xi, 57, 224, 272 Tolkien, J. R. R., 320n22 Tom Bombadil (fictional character), 320n22 Tom Thumb, 131, 142 torture, 148, 155, 160n14, 216 total social fact, 302, 318n5 trade, 37, 64, 71–72, 76–78, 95, 105, 249 Tradescant, John, 90, 95 transubstantiation, 215; Catholic Church and, 30, 126, 129, 188, 200, 213, 221n35, 224; Marx, Karl, and, 130n6 Travels in the Interior of Africa (Park), 143 trophies, 132–33, 134–40, 149 “true self-consciousness,” 39, 272 “true to nature,” 27, 51 Truman, Harry, 219n22, 305 “Truth-in-Advertising” movement, 265, 280 Tupia (Tahitian priest), 159n6 Tupperware, 49, 310 Turkle, Sherry, 67n18 “turn left at Bentham,” 5, 31n4 Twain, Mark, 295n4

370

2001 Space Odyssey (film), 319n9 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 44, 73, 79, 102, 106, 113–17, 118n10 Tyndall, John, 111, 113 tyranny: sovereignty of human subject, 25–27; of the subject, 37, 40–41, 73, 137, 151, 179 UCL. See University College London Udink, Berend Jan, 208, 220n32 Ultima 2 (video game), 307 Ultzheimer, Andreas, 21 “uniscalar valuation,” 243n4, 292 Unitarians, 15, 40 United Kingdom, advertising in, 266–67, 270, 274, 295n3 United States (US): advertising in, 267–68, 269, 276–78, 283–84, 289, 296n17; consumerism in, 98, 230; NAGPRA, 12–14 universality, ix, x, xi, 66n6, 85, 172 University College London (UCL), xii, 3–4, 6, 9, 16, 19–20, 36 University of Cape Town, 33n21 University of Leiden, 91 “Use of the Dead for the Living” (Southwood Smith), 14, 15–16, 17 use-value, 262, 263, 277 Utilitarianism, 3, 15, 19, 20, 38, 110 Van Beek, Gosewijn, 84 Van Croonenburg, Jan (Father), 192, 218n7, 223, 229–30; on African art, 211; Afrika Museum and, 182–85, 187–88, 195–97, 200–201, 209, 211, 213, 215–16, 219n11 Van Dam (Miss), 184, 185, 218n7 Van Damme, Wilfried, 213–15 Van Gaal, Maria, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212–13 Van Trigt, Frits (Father), 191–92, 207, 219n14 Veblen, Thorstein, 283

Index

Verdijk, Piet (Father), 191, 196–98, 199, 203, 209, 220n24, 220n26, 220n34; Afrika Museum and, 201–2; with desiderata list, 207 Verenigde Missionarissen (Associated Missionaries), 174 Vermeer, Johannes, 49 Veth, Daniel, 147 Victoria (Queen of England), 249 Victoria and Albert Museum, 136 Victorian era: anthropology, 44, 73; materialism, 103, 105, 110–12; public school, 259n3; science, 64, 103, 106, 109, 110; science fiction, 60; spiritualism, 103, 105, 110, 112–16 Villa Meerwijk, 123, 189, 190, 192, 196, 199 virtuality, 118n6, 291 Vissers, Jan (Father), 199–200 Völkerschauen, 131, 145 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 146 Von Luschan, Felix, 144, 153 voyeurism, 140, 154, 155 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 61, 106, 116, 118n10, 181n15; Spiritualism of, 111, 113, 114, 118n10; “sprit-photography” and, 114 Wallace, Ali (Malay naturalist), 61 Warburton Anatomy Act (1832), 15 Warnier, Jean-Pierre, xii Washington, George, 131 “watchmaker analogy,” 24, 310 waxworks, 17, 19, 28, 147, 154 Weber, Max, 36, 110, 117, 127, 160n17 Weinhold, Ulrike, 214, 215 West Africa, 21; fetishism, 81; occult practices, 74; Protestant merchants in, 22; trade, 71, 72, 76, 78, 95, 105 Whewell, William, 250

Index

White, Hayden, 161, 162, 180n2 Whitehead, Alfred North, 68n25 Wijdeveld, Harry, 190, 191, 192, 194–96, 219n17 Williams, Raymond, 270 will to power, 156, 160n22, 226 witchcraft, 39–40, 193, 210 wizardry, 306, 307, 309, 310 women, 32n13, 131, 132, 184, 209–10 wonder: curiosity and, 6, 32n15, 64, 133, 138, 179, 191, 213, 301; enchantment and, 221n36; fact, fancy and, 92–96; objectivity and, 72; passiones and, 228; primacy of, 75n4; of rarity, 88, 91–92, 95; routinization of, 64, 133, 145–51, 160n17, 225, 229, 301, 306; trophy and, 132–33, 134–40

371

Woodward, Helen, 261, 262 World Exhibition, Amsterdam (1883), 147 World Exposition, Paris (1878), 147 World Exposition, Paris (1889), 145, 147, 228 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893), 133, 147–50, 152, 279, 310 Wulff, Christoph, 228 Wunderkammern (curiosity cabinets), 75n4, 87–91, 93, 100n12–13, 136, 191–92, 249 Yates, Frances, 91 Zulu people, 136, 143, 144, 147, 149, 160n18, 274