A01=J. Lorand Matory
AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion
AAR book award winners
AES Senior Book Prize recipient
American Ethnological Society book award winners
Author_J. Lorand Matory
Category=JBSL
Category=JHMC
Category=QRRT
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
J.I Staley Prize winner
School for Advanced Research award winners
Product details
- ISBN 9781478001058
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 Nov 2018
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.
J. Lorand Matory is Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. He is the author of Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America; Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian CandomblÉ; and Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion.
