BORDER FETISHISMS:

Material Objects in
Unstable Spaces
Zones of Religion
Edited by Peter van der Veer

Also published in the series:

Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia
Amrita Basu & Patricia Jeffrey
Conversion to Modernities
Peter van der Veer
BORDER FETISHISMS:
Material Objects in
Unstable Spaces

Edited by Patricia Spyer

ROUTLEDCE
New York and London
Published in 1998 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10017
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Abingdon, Oxon, 0 X 1 4 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2011

Copyright 1998 by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Border fetishisms : material objects in unstable spaces /by Patricia Spyer.
p. cm. (Zones of religion)
"This book is the result of a conference on the topic 'Border
fetishisms' that was held in December 1995 at the Research Centre
Religion & Society at the University of Amsterdam"
Acknowledgements.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-91856-1 (hardcover). ISBN 0-415-91857-X (pbk.)
1. FetishismCongresses. 2. AcculturationCongresses.
3. ColoniesCongresses. I. Spyer, Patricia, 1957- .
II. Series.
GN472.B65 1998
306.4DC21 97-21461
CIP

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
Contents

Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
Patricia Spyer

1. Calvin in the Tropics: Objects and Subjects

at the Religious Frontier 13
Webb Keane

2. From Brooms to Obeah and Back: Fetish Conversion

and Border Crossings in Nineteenth-Century Suriname 35
Susan Legene

3. Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money:

Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia 60
Robert J. Foster

4. The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy 91

Peter Pels

5. Stealing Happiness: Shoplifting in Early

Nineteenth-Century England 122
Adela Pinch

6. The Tooth of Time, or Taking a Look at the "Look"

of Clothing in Late Nineteenth-Century Aru 150
Patricia Spyer

7. Marx's Coat 183

Peter Stallybrass
vi Contents

8. Wearing Gold 208

Annelies Moors

9. Crossing the Face 224

Michael Taussig

Afterword: How to Grow Oranges in Norway 245

William Pietz

Contributors 253

Index 255
Illustrations

Figure 1. Two Surinamese obeahs 48

Figure 2. Design of P.N.G. two kina note 72

Figure 3. Designs of P.N.G. five, ten and twenty kina notes 73

Figure 4. Housewife 1960; Housewife 1970 76

Figure 5. Highlanders shopping in a self-service supermart 77

Figure 6. Cover of textbook Money 78

Figure 7. Pepsi Ad 79

Figure 8. Regent in Official Costume (1919) 155

This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a conference with the title "Border Fetish-
isms" that was held in December 1995 at the Research Centre Reli
gion and Society at the University of Amsterdam. In addition to the
authors whose essays are collected here, Leora Auslander, Inge Boer,
Johannes Fabian, Peter Geschiere, Thomas Holt, Prahbu Mohapatra,
Shoma Munshi, Danilyn Rutherford, Marc Shell, and Bonno Thoden
van Velzen also took part in the "Border Fetishisms" conference.
Their contributions, comments, and ideas enriched the conference
and this book, and I would like to express my gratitude to them here.
The conference received financial support from the University of Am
sterdam, The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, The Netherlands
Foundation for Scientific Research, and Crea Studium Generate, for
which I am very grateful. Special thanks are due to Peter van der Veer
for encouraging me to pursue this project and for seeing it through
its present stage as both a colleague and as editor of the Zones of Re
ligion series. I also express my appreciation to my other colleagues at
the Research Centre Religion and SocietyGerd Baumann, Birgit
Meyer, Peter Pels, and Peter van Roodenfor their help, humor, in
tellectual stimulation, and vital support at different stages along the
way. Inge Boer, Webb Keane, Prahbu Mohapatra, Annelies Moors,
and Adela Pinch all proved invaluable when it came to the practi
cal and intellectual tasks involved in organizing this book. Rafael
Sanchez's sound advice and enthusiasm never flagged from the first
moment the idea for a "Border Fetishisms" conference popped into
my head through the final details of putting together the present col
lection, and I thank him much for this. I also thank Ingrid van den
Broek for her truly good spirits and detailed attention during the con
ference and its organizational prelude, and for her dedicated work on
the manuscript thereafter. Finally, at Routledge I am grateful to Mau
reen MacGrogan, her assistant, Laska Jimsen, and Bill Germano for
their work on this project.
X Acknowledgments

The following institutions and persons kindly gave their permis

sion to reproduce the photographs and illustrations included in this
book: photographs of "Two Surinamese Obeahs" and a "Regent in Of
ficial Costume," Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; "De
sign of PNG two kina note," "Designs of PNG five, ten, and twenty
kina notes," and "Cover of the textbook Money," the Department of
Education of Papua New Guinea and The Bank of Papua New Guinea;
"Housewife 1960" and "Housewife1970" and "Highlanders Shop
ping in a Service Supermart," Maslyn Williams, In One Lifetime (1970).
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the authors of the
essays in which they appear.

Patricia Spyer
Amsterdam, February 1997
Introduction

Patricia Spyer

Border Fetishisms, the title of this collection, is deliberately oxymoronic.

Neither here nor there, past or future, fully absent or unambiguously
present, the notion of a border fetish is meant precisely to foreground
the unresolvable oscillations, the restless toing-and-froing, and the cul
tural, commercial, and political crossings that distinguish fetish forma
tions. In the wake of Pietz's illuminating genealogy of the fetish as an
idea-problem in which the historic trajectory of the word itself and the
fetish's specificity to situations of encounter emerge as crucial, the pres
ent volume focuses on a variety of border fetishisms in which different
economies of the object and distinct valuations of things, persons, and
their relations are at play (Pietz 1985; 1987; 1988; cf. Apter & Pietz
1993). In this view the concept of the fetish is intimately linked to the
history of European expansion, to the discourses and power relations
developed within novel cross-cultural landscapes, as well as to the En
lightenment elaboration of fetishism to typify precisely that which was
held to be irrational, misguided, founded on fancy or "caprice." Since
first described outside of Europe by Portuguese and then Dutch mer-
chant-adventurers as the pidgin fetisso on the Gold and Slave coasts of
West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fetish has
been a composite, border phenomenon.
Fetish's characteristic hybridity applies to its most literal manifes
tation or apparent haphazard piecing together out of heterogeneous
elements as, for instance, the fetish brooms of Susan Legene's essay
here"freakish" palm branches encrusted with lumps of resin, chalk,
2 Patricia Spyer

cowrie shells, nails, beads of diverse colors, and hung with small brass
chains, dotted with paint, and wrapped with cotton thread. Or,
somewhat differently, the iconography of the coins and paper cur
rency of postcolonial Papua New Guinea discussed by Robert Foster,
which draws together traditional "monies" from disparate regions
falling within the boundaries of state territorythings like pearl-
shells, clay pots, and pigswould be another example in which,
moreover, the new money constructs the new nation as itself a fetish
in the sense of a composite fabrication. Hybridity also infuses the
fetish's initial role as the material sign of a cross-cultural agreement
trade treaties and other commercial contracts between Europeans and
Africans were often sworn on fetissos in an attempt by the former to
ensure the latter's compliance with the terms of the agreement. In
this capacity, the fetisso figured not only as the physical reminder of
a border crossing but increasingly came to stand in the eyes of the
Europeansas evidenced by mercantilist denunciations of the time
for a confusion of the religious and the economic or, in other words,
for a denial of the proper boundaries between things and the distinc
tions these are held to delineate.
One unifying aim of the contributions collected here is to gain a
better sense of the fissured, performative spaces where the fetish
moves (as it were!) by exploring the forms of difference that fetishism
both marks and negotiates in the process of producing or alluding to
novel, creative hybridities. If the articles that follow suggest some dif
ferent ways of thinking of the fetish, and if interdisciplinary in orien
tation, they all pay close attention to the specificities of time and place
distinguishing the contact zones (Pratt 1992), boundary markers, and
border incidents that the fetish in its migrations variously territorial
izes, unsettles, displaces, and reaffirms. It should not surprise that the
bulk of the historic situations that contributors focus on here are well
positioned within the history of European expansion, its colonizing
projects, and postcolonial aftermaths, and relate, more generally, to
the opening of new markets and territories. They range in focus from
early talk about rarity, wonder, and the shuffle of things (Pels); to
Christian missionization in Sumba, Eastern Indonesia in the first de
cades of this century and today (Keane); and the nineteenth-century
conversion of recently emancipated Surinamese slaves with the con
comitant baptism of their objects as "fetishes" by Dutch colonizers
(Legene); from government fears, fantasies, and programs aimed at
"cargo cult" activity in one of the last colonial frontiers, present day
Papua New Guinea (Foster); the great turn-of-the-century feather hunt
in the far islands of the Dutch East Indies (Spyer); the European lux
 Introduction 3

ury market in lace in late Georgian England (Pinch); the rag trade at
home (Stallybrass) and abroad (Spyer); to the social and political mo
bility of persons and property in (post)colonial contemporary Pales
tine (Moors). In the fissured colonial and postcolonial spaces that are
the historical terrain for most of these articles, the fetish continually
oscillates between a Eurocentric and an Other dimension, between
recognition and disavowal, absence and (negative) presence. Gestur
ing as it does toward a beyond that guarantees its own futurity as well
as toward a posited past moment of origin, the fetish more generally is
never positioned in a stable here-and-now and thereby confounds es-
sentializing strategies that aim for neat resolutions and clear-cut
boundaries among things and between persons and objects.
Perhaps this is why the remaining essay in this collection that
explores the notion of border fetish foregrounds the represention of
representation itself as a crucial problem. For Michael Taussig, the ul
timate, overlooked fetish and public secret in its own right is that
"mother of all borderlands" and unfathomable territory that is the
face. Both screen and window to the soul, the face holds out a promise
of insight that it never can fulfill and, like Subcomandante Marcos of
Zapatista fame, continually displaces itself along a chain of unmask-
ings and remaskings that describes the shifting game of political peek
aboo played by this trickster folk hero with that most masked of
entities, the state.
It is more than anything else in its capacity to fix and unsettle
borders and the essentialisms that these hold in place that fetishism,
following Pietz, demarcates a "space of cultural revolution" (1985:
11), or one that invites comparison between distinct social orders,
possibilities, and schemes and that, in so doing, also opens up the
possibility for cultural criticism. It is with this possibility in mind
that contributors here are especially attuned to the "sinister pedigree"
(Pietz 1985: 5) of the fetish concept as a derogatory term for the illu
sions of Others and thus the repetition of an all too familiar hege
monic move that inevitably sets in every time the concept is invoked
negatively. At the same time, they also hone in on the border zones
that fetishisms trace out by considering the effects of the crossings
through which relations between subjects and objects may be re
assessed, redrawn, and at times overturned, and how thereby distinc
tions such as those of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality
might be negotiated, transgressed, and perhaps most of all, exposed.
Along these same lines, several articles focus on the ways in which
various fetishisms generate social hierarchies and differences while at
the same time opening up novel spaces for the construction of agency.
4 Patricia Spyer

Robert Foster argues forcefully that once people pay attention to the
material matter of money, thereby recovering money's characteristic
erasure and dematerialization, the possibility also emerges for them
to question the connection between themselves and money's source,
the state.
Gold, another globalized fetish object, is a prize possession that is
acquired by Palestinian women upon their marriage and subse
quently worn and transacted by them in a wide range of settings. In
her contribution, Annelies Moors draws attention to the marked dis
regard of Euro-American observers to these women's gold as opposed
to the veil, which they repeatedly seize upon as the material expres
sion of Muslim women's oppression by their men as well as a sign of
the erasure of individuality that such subordination would further
entail. Her detailed discussion of the wide range of variety in kind,
carat, and liquidity value of the gold worn by women of different
class and regional backgrounds shows how they variously construct
and display the visible signs of their autonomy on their bodies,
thereby complicating the more familiar picture of Muslim and Mid
dle Eastern patriarchy held in place, as it were, by the veil. Objections
voiced by Palestinian women to their alleged objectification by the
old dower payments"am I a donkey that he has to pay for me?"
or the objectification of their person that some associate with the
new urban token dowers"is she a cow that he needs to see her?"
suggest that what it is to be "modern," married, and a woman de
scribes a contested and much debated field in present-day Palestine.
Like the articles by Moors, Spyer, and Stallybrass, Adela Pinch's
elegant and nuanced piece also deals with clothing and its accou
trements. Lace, a border in itself and a classic fetish-object, evokes
the national boundaries between England and France and the regu
lations pertaining to international traffic in luxury goods. If lace and
other articles of clothing were the objects of the (primarily) female
genteel shoplifting of late Georgian England, a bit of lace in Pinch's
account does much more than disclose the burdens placed especially
on women in an emerging consumer culture. Nor is Pinch satisfied
with merely exposing the true meaning of shopping, as such would
be revealed by its transgression in shoplifting, with the latter's
underscoring of the compulsive power accorded to things by the
commodity fetishism of a capitalist society. Lace, in her reading, is
also the site of a vicious class warfare that pits genteel women
shoplifters against the "shopocracy" that stands between them and
the coveted goods. If then, at certain moments, these genteel female
shoplifters might be construed as critically engaging prevailing
 Introduction 5

Georgian notions of gender, their practice also spoke vehemently in

a rhetoric of class contempt of a desire to buttress the eroding visi
ble boundaries of social position and privilege. In my own contribu
tion, European colonizers writing about a Moluccan island's human
inhabitants and birds at the height of Dutch imperialism construct
an authoritative, utopian imaginaire for themselves that covers over
their own sense of off-centeredness vis-a-vis the metropole. In their
writings, these late nineteenth-century visitors to Aru insist repeat
edly on a separation between "savage" bodies and "civilized" clothes,
thereby underscoring the impossibility that the island's natives
would ever approximate the European civilization that the coloniz
ers in giving out their clothes also aimed to introduce. At the same
time, in descriptions as detailed as those of Aruese in European and
Eurasian dress, the colonizers invest the archipelago's famed birds
of paradise with the signs of a fully fledged, fetishized, "tropical
Gothic" vision of monarchical and uncompromised rule.
The material relations between bodies and things and the fetish
object's "irreducible materiality" (Pietz 1985: 7) raise a number of is
sues that are explored by different contributorsthe relationship be
tween materiality and immateriality and the hierarchical ranking of
spirit and matter that is still with us today as an Enlightenment
legacy; and, relatedly, the powers that things have to entrance, raise
hopes, generate fears, evoke losses, and delight as well as the social
attitudes towards the wide range of sentiments produced in the face
of such objets charges. To be sensuous is, indeed, to suffer, in the sense
of being acted upon (Marx in Pietz 1993: 144), and it is especially this
aspect of fetishism that also has the potential to move our discus
sions beyond the idea of social constructionism. While the latter rep
resents a great insight that has borne considerable fruit in work
produced both interdisciplinarily and across a range of disciplines,
theoretically this perspective begs the question of how and why cer
tain things exercise the immense powers they do over persons and
collectivities. The disadvantage, in other words, of a social construc
tionist perspective is that it tends to flatten out the passions, ener
gies, and motivations with which, in the case of fetishism, things are
so fiercely invested (cf. Taussig 1993: xiii-xix). Social constructionism
explains away the extraordinary power that with fetishism is pre
cisely the problem.
If at the conclusion of her article, Pinch calls somewhat cautiously
for a phenomenological or psychoanalytic understanding of the force
of things within a historical approach to the emotions these elicit,
Peter Pels's characterization of the fetish as an agressive "matter that
6 Patricia Spyer

strikes back" is probably the most phenomenologically informed

statement of the present collection. Opposed to animism as a "spirit
in matter" resulting from human interventions, in relation to which
its aliveness always remains derivative, fetishism for Pels is a "spirit o f
matter," by which difference he would foreground the possibility
"that the materiality of things can stand in the way of, and deflect,
the course of human traffic." With this in mind Pels cites Freud's fa
mous assertion that "when the fetish comes to life . . . some process
has been suddenly interrupted" (Freud in Pels). Yet if for Freud this in
terruption remains a human-derived onecall it repression or simply
"forgetfulness" that allows the fetish to assume a life of its ownfor
Pels acknowledging the spirit o f matter as an independant force offers
the fetish "a chance to unfold its otherness." This, in turn, means rec
ognizing the physicality of things and their capacity to carry over cer
tain forms of signification from one context of human behavior to
another, as well as to strain or transcend the human designs and con
structions to which they are subject.
Here, however, we are somewhat beyond the "striking" distance
of the fetish and more within the realm of resistance posed by the
material itself or what Norman Bryson refers to as the "authentically
self-determining level of material life" (Bryson 1990: 12-15; cf. Pinch,
this volume). For Bryson, the "low-plane reality" of things like the
tankards, jugs, and plates familiar from European still-life painting
describes the slow, creeping rhythm of alternations in their basic
shape and differs dramatically from the abrupt, dictatorial swings of
fashionindeed, often and tellingly spoken of thus, fetishistically
where the evidence of "the tooth of time" is almost immediately ap
parent and can have important social effects (Spyer). In Foster's
account, the matter of moneyits physical, coin and paper phenom
enal realitywas something that repeatedly threatened to under
mine the programs launched by the Australian colonial government
in Papua and New Guinea that were aimed at dematerializing the
matter of money with an eye toward discouraging the cargoism they
feared it might otherwise elicit. Thus, fostering a practice of saving
among the colony's population and familiarizing New Guineans with
the new system of banks meant highlighting money's material
fragility as well as the fetishistic pleasure a person might derive from
showing off his bankbook to friends.
If the return of its materiality to money potentially elicits fetish
istic desires or may become the avenue for social criticism of the
powers-that-be, it can also have important shock value. Such I would
argue is, for instance, the effect of a photo in a Granta collection ti-
 Introduction 7

tied Money that depicts "banknotes abandoned in the courtyard of

the National Bank of Cambodia after Pol Pot suppressed all money"
(Granta 49, winter 1994: 89). The eery vision of these "dead fetish
hulls" (Legene) strewn across the former bank's deserted lot relies for
its effect on the overlooked spectral character that the immaterial,
supra-sensitive exchange value money normally has and not on any
knowledge of the larger killing fields that historically surrounded this
scene of wreckage (though that of course doesn't help). Vis-a-vis
money, the shock effect of this photo can go either wayby expos
ing its normalized fetish status under capitalist conditions or, in
versely, by reinforcing it.
For Dutch Calvinist missionaries on the island of Sumba in the
early decades of this century, who with the islanders themselves are
the focus of Webb Keane's fine contribution, the ubiquity of sacrifi
cial meat in all aspects of Sumbanese social life and its difficult-to-
deny practical implications stood in the way of their attempts to
segregate pagan and Christian religious practice, as well as, more the
ologically, spirit and matter. Many of the missionaries saw in the con
verts' consumption of meat that had been ritually dedicated to pagan
spirits a transgression of "the injunction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 in
which Paul warns against eating sacrifices as tantamount to 'fellow
ship with devils.' " Not unlike the double-bind in which Foster argues
Australian colonizers were caught in their programs regarding money,
antiprohibitionists in this heated debate argued that by emphasizing
the materiality of meat over its symbolic purpose, the mission ran the
risk of enforcing rather than diminishing the power ascribed to ma
terial thingsif meat is only symbolic, these antiprohibitionists
claimed, it should have no effects on the souls that consume it.
In his paper on "Marx's Coat," Peter Stallybrass wonders how it is
that material things have come in for such contempt. For Marx him
self, as Stallybrass so wonderfully shows, material things, at least the
oretically speaking, were never the problemsomething which is,
indeed, often misunderstood. Rather, for Marx the erasure under cap
italism of the material particularity of, let's say, a coat and its inscrip
tion with the immateriality of the phantomlike commodity form is
the issue and one with which he was, indeed, all too familiar. Stally-
brass's narrative takes us back and forth between the writing by Marx
of Capital and the material circumstances of his own life, which time
after time drove Marx to the pawnshop with the prized possessions of
his household, where these were emptied of the memories, possibili
ties, and respectability that they in all their particularity subsumed
for his family. Fetishizing commodities, Stallybrass insists, entails a
8 Patricia Spyer

reversal of the whole history of fetishism with the impassioned re

sponse to the material, tangible, sensuous character of things in the
latter substituted under capitalism by an intense focus on the invisi
ble, spooky quality that commodities as exchange values have. Thus,
much as in the daily life of the Marx household in London in the
1850s and 1860s (where, among many other things, Marx's great coat
migrated back and forth to the pawnshop), a coat puts in an early
appearance in the first pages of Capital only to disappearonce it as
sumes commodity statusimmediately thereafter. If Capital, follow
ing Stallybrass, can be glossed as Marx's attempt to give the coat back
to its owner, the stories Marx told to his children disclose a utopia in
which the marvelous toys sold by a magician toyshop owner to the
devil to redeem his never-ending debts return of their own accord
back to their owner. Denying the alienation that corresponds to the
moment of sale, these magical toys insist somewhat giftlike on the
powerful play that exists between persons and things, and in return
ing draw a charmed circle around the magician toyshop owner, his
enchanted toys, and the Marx children who listened to their father
invent these happy tales.
The fear of the power that things might have together with what
Pinch calls "the thematics of things coming too close" surfaces dra
matically in several contributions. Most of these also intimate how
the excessive worry about things goes hand in hand with a concern
for the autonomy of persons, pointing thereby, as Stallybrass argues,
to an intimate connection between the historically situated con
tempt for material things and the "impossible project of the tran
scendental subject." One aspect of this may also be the fear that,
according to Keane, dogs fetish discourse, namely, that the observer
who accuses Others of the mistake of fetishism might herself be se
duced into error, and in so doing collapse the important "double con
sciousness" on which the fetish discourse turnson the one hand,
"absorbed credulity" and, on the other, "degraded or distanced in
credulity" (Pietz 1985: 14).
Efforts to stabilize the boundaries between persons and things
thus also often entail an assertion of the distinctions between differ
ently valued persons. Legene's contribution clearly shows, for in
stance, how the baptism of recently emancipated Surinamese slaves
as Christians coincides with the naming of their former obeah brooms
as "fetishes," and the redefinition of these objects as pertaining to the
Maroon escaped slave populations. By way of a displacement of the
"fetishes" onto the Maroons, this double baptismal event reinstates
the "fetish" as the frontier marker of Christian colonial civilization.
 Introduction 9

In other colonial situations, talk about the fetish and attempts to es

tablish the proper boundaries between persons and things covered
over anxieties about racial miscegenation. Foster speaks, for instance,
of the elision of cargo cult and miscegenation "inasmuch as both are
taken to be cognate forms of confusion, of radical heterogeneity and
unacceptable coupling." Similarly, Spyer argues that for the Euro
peans frequenting Aru at the high point of colonial racism in the
Dutch East Indies, the physical fact of being confronted with native
bodies in one's own colonizer clothes and the sheer materiality of
this form of "contact" may have had profound, unsettling effects.
In both Keane's and Pinch's contributions, the disturbing effects
of things coming too close provoke embodied responses that, once
again, underscore the project of creating an autonomous subject, al
beit quite differently. If in Keane's example this project is inspired by
the Protestant suspicion of outward, materialized representations, in
Pinch's discussion of the schizophrenic Lola Voss, her fear of being
overwhelmed by the world translates into a pathological dread of
shopping and a phobia of clothes. Notwithstanding the great differ
ence between these two examples, the bodily reactions provoked in
each are uncannily the same. Protestant converts in Sumba close
their eyes when they pray to avoid the temptations of the fetishized
word, and by thus marking off the boundary between exterior and
interior allow their speech to "come from the heart." Being the next
best thing to bodies, and therefore the most threateningly intimate,
clothing was what Lola Voss was especially terrified of; when induced
to shop she could only do so with her eyes shut. And it might not be
pushing it too far to suggest that European colonizers confronted by
the off-centered "look" that was reflected, I argue, back to them by
Aruese "savages" made over in quasi-metropolitan clothes, might
have at times, been tempted to close their eyes as well.
With these insights we have arrived at that "bottom line of being
a social being," at the face that is the focus of Michael Taussig's con
tribution. One of the reasons that the face fascinates Taussig is that,
much like the fetish holding out a promise of fulfillment and ulti
mate arrival, the face seems to initiate access to a beyond. But like the
fetish the face, as it were, never arrives. A blush in this perspective is
therefore a sign that the looked-for, longed-for innerness, the kind of
haven that those shutting in their eyes aim to mark off, is an impos
sibility. In Tierra del Fuego in the 1920s, the most important lesson
that a young person could learn in the initiation rituals that Taussig
draws upon, was not about the illusions of masking but instead the
realities of demasking. The successive demaskings in the ritual and
10 Patricia Spyer

the fact that what was revealed to the initiates was mask after mask
after mask or, in other words, masks all the way down, rendered, fol
lowing Taussig, the reality of the spirit world represented by the
chain of masks all the more powerful and real.
Whether explicitly or implicitly, the articles in this collection
seem to concur that the point is neither to demagicalize the fetish (as
Karl Marx in the stories he told to his children also seemed to imply),
nor is it to normalize the commodity (though, admittedly, Marx's ef
forts to undermine the latter are more famous). Treated as an other to
the commodity, the fetish valorizes and normalizes the social rela
tions of capitalism (in whichever of its historical moments), in the
same way that shoplifting from a certain perspective normalizes
shopping. Yet for Marx the commodity and the fetish were in fact
one and the same. It was by bringing the two together as a curious
hieroglyphic hybrid that he aimed to show the "mist-envelopped
regions" and thereby the absolute strangeness of the normal capital
ist everyday. For Marx, moreover, the law of equivalence governing
the workings of the capitalist marketplace itself covered over a criti
cal excessthat of surplus value. (I am indebted to Prahbu Mohapa
tra for this argument.) Another way of gettingmore concretelyat
much the same thing, or of resisting either demagicalizing the fetish
or normalizing the commodity, is to take seriously the protestations
of the (anti)heroine in the first section of Pinch's piece, the genteel
shoplifter who insists in court that "lace is not necessary to my hap
piness," admitting thereby the possibility that it very much might or
could be. Rather than divesting the objets charges of diverse historical
moments and circumstances of their powers, this volume argues for
the inclusion of material thingswhether as fetishes or, more loosely,
fetishes after a fashion, within the wider calculus of human sufferings
and joys.

R eferences

Apter, Emily and William Pietz (eds) (1993) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bryson, Norman (1990) Looking At The Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life
Painting, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Granta 49 (winter 1994) Issue "Money," Bill Buford (ed).
Pietz, William (1993) "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in
Marx/' in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Dis
course, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
 Introduction 11

-------- . (1988) "The Problem of the Fetish, Ilia," Res 16, 105-123.
-------- . (1987) "The Problem of the Fetish, II," Res 13, 23-45.
-------- . (1985) "The Problem of the Fetish, I," Res 9, 5-17.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London: Routledge.
Taussig, Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History o f the Senses,
New York: Routledge.
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1

Calvin in the Tropics:

Objects and Subjects
at the Religious Frontier

Webb Keane

It is common to treat the various ideas grouped under the word "fe
tishism" as fundamentally concerned with material objects. Thus
William Pietz begins his history of the concept by distinguishing the
fetish in its "irreducible materiality" from the idol, which is the
iconic image of some immaterial original (1985: 7). But the allure
that the supposed fetish holds for some and the anxiety it provokes
in others have less to do with objects than with the problems that ob
jects pose for subjects. For example, Marx's (1967) commodity fetish
is not simply a way of misunderstanding goods but a way humans
misunderstand themselves. In the process of attributing life to things,
they lose some of their own humanity and come to treat themselves
as objects in turn.
The imputation of fetishism carries a strong charge; more than
mere error is at stake. Indeed, something of the original religious
character of the concept of fetishism seems to remain amidst its subse
quent, more secular, exfoliations. In its secular uses, talk about fetish
ism may hint at dangers; in the religious context, the danger becomes
14 Webb Keane

apparent. Consider the Dutch missionary D.K. Wielenga's account of

the ancestral ritualists on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba:
"The primitives confound that which is a fruit of the imagination
with the reality, the objective with the subjective, the outer phenom
ena with their own spirit life" (1909: 332).1As a missionary, Wielenga
has the task not simply of education and correction but, above all, sal
vation. This mission makes evident that the confounding of the ob
jective and subjective has dire, even eternal, consequences.
But talk about fetishism often seems to harbor a sense of thrill and
anxiety as well, as if the danger threatens not only the fetishist but
also the outsider who, it would seem, should not taken in by the error.
For some of the approaches that have been developed since Freud, this
may be because the fetish remains a temptation even to those whose
knowledge would deny the existence of that which they desire (see
Apter and Pietz 1993; Ivy 1995). In the case of some traditions of
Protestantism, it may have to do with the way in which other people's
illusions threaten the very autonomy of the subject, for the autonomy
of the human subject is not unproblematic even for the Protestants
themselves. In this essay I explore these ramifications of the idea of
fetishism by looking at the encounter between Dutch Calvinists and
the practitioners of ancestral ritual on Sumba. I suggest that the diffi
culties posed for Calvinists by Sumbanese understandings of the rela
tions among subjects and objects go well beyond the theological
niceties beloved of colonial missionaries. They may reveal certain
problems endemic to efforts to stabilize the boundaries between per
sons and things, or to determine the status of language in human ac
tivities. To see this means listening to how Calvinists articulate some
of the core concerns of the West's self-understood modernity.

T h e F etish as H ist o r ic a l E n c o u n t e r

Despite its isolated, even pastoral, surroundings, the twentieth-

century colonial mission on Sumba was inseparable from the larger
background of Dutch industry and commerce.2 Since Weber (1958),
of course, the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has
been common disputational coin. Leaving aside the Weberian ques
tion of historical causality, it is apparent that when Protestants on
Sumba draw on the discourse of fetishism, several aspects of their re
lationship to their context come to the fore. One is the missionaries'
own ambivalence, torn as they are between economic rationality and
spiritual commitment. As I have discussed elsewhere (Keane 1996),
 Calvin in the Tropics 15

the Dutch saw Sumbanese ancestor ritualists as both excessively ma

terialistic and as believing in too many spirits, as too calculating and
as irrationally blinded to economics by their moral commitments.
The island of Sumba came under Dutch rule during the final pe
riod of the expansion and consolidation of the East Indies early in
this century.3 Having little to offer those with more worldly ambi
tions, the island was left almost entirely in the hands of a small band
of missionaries. Official policy sought to prevent competition be
tween rival missions by distributing them among discrete territories;
most of Sumba was placed under the tutelage of a conservative sect
of the Reformed (or Orthodox Calvinist) Church (Gereformeerde
Kerken). In 1947, not long before Sumba entered the independent
Republic of Indonesia, the tiny indigenous congregation formed the
autonomous Sumbanese Christian Church (Gereja Kristen Sumba),
which continues to have close ties to the Dutch church to this day.
Despite the efforts of several generations of missionaries and indige
nous evangelists, and increasing pressure from the Indonesian state,
however, at the time of my first visit to the district of Anakalang in
1985, the unconverted marapu (ancestral spirit) followers formed the
majority of the population of West Sumba and remained a strong
presence in East Sumba.4 Although it was becoming increasingly ap
parent that Christians would soon be dominant, resistance by marapu
followers could be quite vociferous.
Despite the important changes that have transpired over this
century's colonial and post-colonial periods, the encounter between
Christians and marapu followers has produced recurrent discourses
about their differences. The themes to which these discourses return
again and again can be made apparent in two quotations. One is
from the early years of the Dutch mission, the other from a conver
sation I had with a Sumbanese gospel teacher in 1993.
The first quotation comes from D.K. Wielenga. He was the first
missionary to spend a long period on Sumba, persevering despite
having been wounded in a spear attack and twice seeing his house
destroyed by arson. In 1909, not long after his arrival, he described
the religion of the Sumbanese in this way:

The two constituents of the nature religion . . . [are] the dogma that
everything has a soul, that is, fetishism, the worship of sensual percep
tible objects, as having souls . . . [and] the dogma that the soul is free
in its movement and not bound to a fixed body, spiritualism, the wor
shipping of the souls of the dead and of the invisible spirits in the air
(1909: 332; emphases in the original).
16 Webb Keane

He wrote this passage while still fairly new to Sumba, and thus relied
more heavily on the comparative religion of the day than in his later,
more ethnographically precise, writing. But this passage is useful pre
cisely in its generality, for it shows in broad outlines what was at
stake for the Protestant. The errors of paganism do not lie, for exam
ple, in immorality, cruelty, or absence of faith. Rather, the fundamen
tal problem is the pagan's confusion about what kinds of beings
inhabit the world, and how animated material things really are. Their
confusion is twofold: first, taking what is really inanimate (matter) to
be animate, and second, mistaking the attributes of the visible (that
is, material) and invisible. Fetishistic error revolves around questions
of animacy or agency, and visibility or materiality.
The second quotation comes from Bapak U.S. Kadiwangu. His fa
ther had been a powerful ratu (ritual specialist), and his brother had
succeeded to the office. He himself had been among the small num
ber of children of the nobility to be selected by the Dutch for a for
mal education, and was eventually ordained as a minister. When I
knew him, he was an elderly man with the bittersweetness of some
one who had spent a lifetime with little evangelical success, only
now, in retirement, to witness the emergence of a Protestant major
ity. With quiet pride he told me in 1993 how he preached in the
1940s and 1950s:

I'd ask them, why are they afraid of the marapu? "Because they cre
ated us, and if we don't respect them, we'll get sick." I'd tell them,
"Yes, that's true, we must be afraid. We're afraid because we can't see
Him. So the ancestors used gold, gongs, spears, those humans [i.e.
the spirits of earlier, now deceased, ancestors]they became signs
that Lord God is therelike a king or a ratu people fear them be
cause of their power. So now we don't need to pray. God doesn't
want us to bring chickens anymore. God sent me so you can return to
Godnot that wood, not that rock [i.e. traditional altars]. What saves
us isn't wood, rock, cattle, but Lord Jesus."

Like Wielenga, Pak Kadiwangu stresses the error of using objects in rit
ual, attacking their use in marapu ritual, as well as the fallacy of ascrib
ing divinity to ancestors who were mere humans. He sees this in terms
of substitution, the material taking the place of the spiritual.
Both men mention the difference between the visible and invisi
ble, which raises the fundamental religious problem of presence.
Marapu follower and Christian alike must in some way contend with
the fact that the deity is invisible and (usually) silent. Marapu follow
ers are quite explicit about this. Many have told me that they have
 Calvin in the Tropics 17

little understanding of the spirits, since they cannot be seen, and rit
ual speech often asks whether the spirits are present. Although the
ubiquity of God might make presence less problematic for Protes
tants, the question persists in somewhat different form. Calvinists (al
ready, in some sects, uncertain about their personal salvation) cannot
be sure if their sermons and prayers have truly been inspired by the
Holy Spirit (see Peacock and Tyson 1989). For both religions, the ef
fort to encounter and interact with an otherwise inaudible and invis
ible world creates unavoidable dilemmas.
The problem of presence gives rise to another theme mentioned
by both men. According to Wielenga, the invisibility of the spirit
world explains the fear that permeates pagan life. The source of this
fear is twofold, the human's imputation of agency to external agents
(see also Dijkstra 1902), and the invisibility of those agents. Pak Kadi-
wangu's remarks pick up the theme of fear and, extending the point,
hint at the temptation that fetishism might hold for people. Faced
with invisibility, marapu followers turn to material objects. These ob
jects stand for immaterial entities that should be present but whose
immateriality puts this presence at any given moment into doubt.
Thus, according to Pak Kadiwangu, the objects used in marapu ritual
are in truth only signs and thus not actually fetishesexcept for
those marapu followers who do not recognize their semiotic function.
Moreover, according to Pak Kadiwangu, the use of material signs
makes up for something that seems to be missing. But once people be
come aware that that something is not really missing, they can aban
don those signs in favor of the real thing, Jesus Christ. The passage
from material signs to full acceptance of the invisible is something
that transpires over historical time. Material things seem to have the
status of temporary stopgap measures that are now no longer neces
sary.5 Once one can call them "fetishes," one is in a position to aban
don them.
The historicizing view has two further implications worth noting.
According to this view, the proper way to understand the material
forms of religion is as signs of invisible spiritual presences. But this ulti
mately leaves the solution of the problem of presence to the inner faith
of the beholder. For the weaker members of the congregation, the ap
peal of some external guarantee of divine presence is likely to persist.
Protestants themselves are occasionally made aware of this temptation
when they perceive the small Catholic mission to be poaching on their
converts by means of the sensuous forms of masses, idolatrous statues,
and priestly robes.6 In addition, if the historicizing view is carried to its
logical conclusion, it also means that the conversion to Christianity
implicates the convert in more than just a new set of religious beliefs
18 Webb Keane

and practices. The new religion tends to be identified with an entire

historical epoch; as even persistant ancestral ritualists were prone to say
in the 1980s, the hallmark of the "modern era" (masa moderen) is that
"the foreign marapu has won" (taluneka na marapu jiawa). This new era
involves transformations in political economy and social organization,
which may be difficult for the missionary to keep distinct from spiri
tual transformation in the eyes of the convert.7

A m b ig u o u s A n im a c y

The fetishism that missionaries ascribed to the Sumbanese takes sev

eral forms, the most apparent ones being sacralia, offerings, and the
distribution of sacrifices. What I here call sacralia are objects known
as "the marapu's portion" (tagu marapu; see discussion in Keane
1997a, chapter 8). Among them are bits of rare imported cloth, metal
statuettes, spears, swords, gongs, old Chinese and Vietnamese trade
ceramics, and, most commonly, gold ornaments of the type normally
used in ceremonial exchanges. Every clan and its major divisions
should possess at least one of its own marapu portion, which is care
fully preserved out of sight in a designated house. Sumbanese often
speak of these sacralia as the true inhabitants of the house, for which
the human residents are only caretakers. Sacralia impose on their in
habitants specific ritual prerogatives and obligations. If the rituals are
regularly performed, the sacralia remain silent guarantors of the well
being of the living. Should the rituals lapse, however, the living will
be reminded of their presence by means of drought, fires, the illness
of children, lightning strikes, and infertility. On the rare occasions
when they have been transfered to another owner, people say, they
have resisted. One such valuable was given away to someone who
kept it in a wooden chest. But it banged around so vigorously in
there that the new owners returned it to its house of origin.
Such objects have many of the characteristics of the religious
fetish. They are material things to which people attribute animacy.
They are treated as if they were the ancestor and normally they bear
that ancestor's name. But in what exactly their personhood lies seems
to be a matter of ambiguity even to the Sumbanese. The missionary
Lambooy (1930: 281) reported that although they were usually iden
tified for foreigners as the marapu itself,

sometimes I ask of a Sumbanese, "is that now really the Marapoe."

Then he looks at me indignantly, for that is not the Marapoe, only the
 Calvin in the Tropics 19

Tanggoe Marapoe, the possession of the Marapoe. "But what is the

Marapoe then?" "We ourselves do not know the Marapoe, who for us
is concealed."

In my own time, some people told me that the ancestral body was
physically transformed into sacralia; others saw the objects as con
ventional symbols that stand for the ancestor (see also Kapita 1976:
90). When accused by Christians of idolatry, contemporary marapu
followers sometimes respond that the valuables are merely a meeting
place (like the altar), a mat of honor on which the spirit sits, or a
horse for, or a reminder of, the ancestor.
In conversations with me, people most often said that the object
is the "replacement" (na hepanya) of the ancestral body or its "sign,
mark, trace" (tada). This suggests that the ancestor is, at best, ambiva
lently present in it, since both expressions presuppose an absence.
For example, the son of a ratu "replaces" his father upon the latter's
death by taking over his office. The word tada can refer to the owner's
mark on a household possession that has been loaned to someone
else, or to the token given as a promissory note in lieu of an ex
change valuable. Similarly, it is only because the marapu are gone
that the living hold onto these objects. The sacralia thus index the
absence of the marapu at the same time that they make them present.
The various accounts of sacralia turn on the problem of invisibil
ity and the accompanying uncertainty. One reason these accounts
vary is that, since the invisible subject is unknowable, there is no way
of knowing exactly how it is present in or connected to the object.
Moreover, most marapu followers agree that it would be arrogant to
say otherwise. Herein lies one of the central accusations that marapu
followers make against Christians: that they are shamelessly brazen
in pretending to know God as well as they do. More specifically,
marapu followers often express astonishment that Christians claim to
be able to speak to God without the mediation of material things
and, as will become apparent below, formal speech. What Christians
see as fetishistic displacements are also forms of mediation that con
tend not just with invisibility, but with respect for the divine.

T h e T em pt a t io n s o f F lesh

Even though sacralia come closer to the classic definition of the fetish
than does the sacrificial offering, in practice the latter has posed more
of a problem for Christian efforts to stabilize the distinction between
20 Webb Keane

subjects and objects. Sacralia are easy for converts to ignore, since they
remain hidden in the houses and are only rarely drawn into ritual ac
tivity. When they are brought out, they are so dangerous that only
specialists are permitted to see or handle them, and the convert can
avoid them. Offerings are only slightly more problematic. The prob
lems they pose are due to the ubiquity of ritual speech events. In gen
eral, no speech is valid without the material "base" (lata) on which it
rests. The principle extends beyond ancestral ritual, since all formal
exchanges between living humans, such as those for marriages, also
require that speech be grounded in objects and objects in turn be
given direction by speech (Keane 1994). Thus when Christians per
form ritual speech for such occasions as baptisms and thanksgivings,
without making offerings, they can feel vulnerable to the accusations
of impropriety laid against them by marapu followers (Keane 1995).
This sense of impropriety turns on how one interprets the status of
objects. The official Christian view of the combination of words with
offerings in marapu ritual is expressed by a song, composed by an early
Sumbanese minister, meant to ridicule pagan practices. One line ran
"What good is prayer, the marapu words? They just use up chickens."
His argument was taken up by many Christians, who justify their con
version by appeal to economics: Offerings and sacrifices are wasteful.
This argument, by stressing rational calculation, also aligns the church
with the contemporary Indonesian state's discourse of economic de
velopment. But in the process, marapu followers are quick to point
out, Christians betray themselves to be vulgar and self-interested ma
terialists. Probably the single most common argument I have heard
against them is that they are greedy and lacking in the respect for an
cestors and (here people turn Christian expressions against them) for
the spiritual. Non-Christians never eat meat except when compelled
to make offerings, and they never slaughter animals without verbally
expressing to them the purpose for which the killing takes place. In
contrast, Christians simply eat meat because they are hungry, driven
by their own desires. In acknowledging nothing beyond the value of
the animals as meat, it is Christians who are the true materialists.
In varying degrees, sacralia and offerings are relatively straight
forward matters for the church. Since they usually come into play in
events that are unambiguously ritual, converts could eschew the en
tire event. But since arriving on Sumba, the church has faced great
problems with sacrifices. This is due to the inseparability of ritual
from the whole range of exchange and feasting around which the
bulk of Sumbanese public life is constructed. The problem of how to
deal with the problem of the meat distribution after sacrifice has
 Calvin in the Tropics 21

given rise to some of the most contentious and persistant debates

both between Christians and marapu ritualists, and among Christians
themselves (see Keane 1996).
Meat is a problem not only because of the exchange system, but
because of the difficulty of establishing its semiotic character. The
sacralia are easy to interpret as symbolic: Even some marapu ritualists
speak of them as signs of the spirits, and some Christians are willing
to accept them by treating them as "signs of social unity" (Keane
1997a: 199-201). As for offerings, if one does not believe in their
spirit recipients, or if one does not think they actually consume the
offerings, it is easy to treat offerings as signs of human intentions.
But once the offering has been transformed into meat to be eaten by
humans, the question becomes more complex. Unlike the token por
tions of the Christians' Holy Communion, sacrificial meat is concep
tually hard to categorize as lacking immediate practicality and thus as
purely symbolic. As a central medium by which social relations are
tested and reproduced, the sharing of sacrificial meat is difficult for
the convert to avoid.
Large-scale sacrifice and feasting occupy an important part of
Sumbanese ritual and social life (see Hoskins 1993). Even events
whose religious affiliation is ambiguous or overtly Christian, such as
funerals and thanksgiving ceremonies, can involve the slaughter of
scores of buffalo, pigs, or, occasionally, horses. The meat is then dis
tributed among those in attendance. Some is cooked and consumed
there. The rest of the raw meat is brought home and redistributed to
people who did not attend. As a result, some meat from a large feast
may end up in the hands of a substantial percentage of the house
holds in the area.
The problem is that when the sponsors of the event are marapu
followers or even sympathetic Christians, they offer the animals to
the spirits with ritual speech before the killing. To kill animals with
out prayer incurs several sanctions. The spirits of the victims, unin
formed of their destinations, will be lost, which may affect the
fertility of the herds. Those who feast without displaying the fact that
they are compelled by ritual obligations imposed on them from ex
ternal sources (the ancestors) will appear to be both arrogantly will
ful and shamefully under the sway of their desires.
Even a Christian who does not attend the original feast might
not elude the distribution of meat, and strong social pressures make
it hard to reject the gift (and the debt it entails). To insist that con
verts refuse sacrificial meat would be to condemn them to social iso
lation. But to consume that meat runs against the injunction in
22 Webb Keane

1 Corinthians 8 and 10 in which Paul warns against eating sacrifices

as tantamount to "fellowship with devils." The issue gave rise to a
series of sharp debates, evident early in this century and persisting
in the 1990s. Some missionaries insisted on the letter of the scrip
ture, some on a more liberal practicality, and a third group found a
middle position, forbidding the eating of meat at the sacrificial feast
but not that delivered to the house.
Some of the antiprohibitionists pointed out that the prohibition
ist position carried a theological as well as social danger, since it
risked crediting the power of material things. If meat really is only
symbolic, it should have no effects on the souls of those who con
sume it. The next logical step, then, would be to work towards rein
terpreting feasts as symbolic activities. This led to proposals that
Sumbanese practices might take on new functions:

The giving of food to the dead and the dead-feasts can be renewed in
a commemoration speech on New Year's Eve. Harvest feasts become
thanksgiving days. . . . In funerals, animals may rightly be killed but
only those which are necessary to provide food for those in atten
dance. The custom among the Sumbanese, to bring home the meat
given to the spirits, is transposed into support for the poor. (Lambooy
1932: 342)

In other words, what is required is that the outer forms of tradition

be retained, but that they be endowed with new functions both ex
pressive and practical. In order to bring this about, those functions
should be portrayed in terms of the intentions of the participants. By
placing a functional interpretation on the meat, Christians find
themselves stressing its materiality at the expense of the spiritual di
mension, something the marapu followers are quick to point out. But
by stressing intentions, Protestants suppress the materiality of things
in favor of their symbolic character, treating them as objectified ex
pressions of immaterial meanings.
The most direct way to effect the latter transformation, the one
that best eludes the threat of materialism posed by the former, is
through the use of speech. As Lois Onvlee put it, writing of the pro
posed harvest ceremonies, the Christian should stress the disinterested
character of the event: "The feast then is no longer a necessity but a
gift. Not in order to influence but to thank; not 'supaja' (in order) but
'sebab' (because)" (1973a: 156-57). That is, Christians should not see
the performance as marapu followers do, an externally imposed oblig
ation to the ancestors, but as the outcome of choices made by persons
 Calvin in the Tropics 23

who possess free will. In order for the will to be properly located in the
person, it must be clearly distinguished from the material objects that
serve as its media. This can be done by restructuring the actions per
formed by ritual. What had been an action anterior to an outcome
("in order" to obtain a harvest from the ancestors) must become the
response to a prior action ("thank you" for the harvest conferred by
God). But the physical activities of killing and butchering animals re
main the same for marapu followers and Christians. The meat that re
sults, as a material substance, remains silent about its possible
meanings and purposes, and inherently subject to mistaken interpre
tations. The reconfiguration of the relation between material things
and immaterial meanings, therefore, must be effected through speech.

T h e S pir it o f t h e W o r d

When flesh and other material objects have been banned from the
intercourse with God, what remains? How can divine presence be as
certained and what mediates between the humans in the visible
world and the agents of the invisible? For one ritual specialist of my
acquaintance these were serious questions. Umbu Paji had converted
to Christianity, but after his wife died suddenly, while they were both
still young, he returned to the marapu and eventually became a ratu.
In our many conversations over the years, he continually returned to
the problem of presence. Once, for example, he explained to me how
he responds to Christian polemics:

Christians say we make stones into God, but that's not so. The stone
altar is where we meet. It's like if I promise to meet you, we need to
have someplace to meet, right? How can we meet if there's no sign?
. . . The Psalm says God exists everywherein the house, on the ve
randa, in the forest. Well, if this is so, how come when we pray [in
these places] they tell us it's Satan?

By my understanding of marapu ritual, Umbu Paji is correct in saying

that Christians misrepresent the role of stone altars. Still, Umbu Paji's
experience with the Christians, who form the majority in his village,
has made him a skilled casuist, and his words should not be taken to
represent the views of all marapu followers. But he does touch on a
central problem for adherents to both sides of the debate.
As the problem of meat shows, material objects, especially those
subject to ordinary uses like eating, cannot unambiguously determine
24 Webb Keane

and delimit their semiotic and practical functions (see Keane 1997a,
chapter 3). Thus such objects cannot in themselves either guarantee
the autonomy of the subject or resolve the problems posed by the in
visibility of the deity. They are available for too many conflicting uses
and interpretations, and offer the temptations of fetishism. If the pos
sible meanings of objects are to be constrained, they must be subjected
to the reflexive powers of language, with its capacity to speak from
within the act itself about what is being done and what is intended.
Language can seem to promise a way to stabilize the distinction
between subject and object. This is both because of what it can say,
by virtue of its own reflexivity (see Lucy 1993), and because of the in
timate nature of its relationship to the speaker. For many strands of
the Christian tradition, the chief mediator between material and im
material, visible and invisible, and interior and exterior is speech (see
Keane 1997b). Words, which arise from the true, spiritual locus of the
will, are the spirit made manifest (Niesel 1956: 212-26). Central to
the origins of the Protestant tradition was the question of the status
of language. Translation of the Bible into vernaculars was to make the
scriptures available to the lay reader, without the mediation of cler
ics. In contrast to doctrines that hold sacred words to be untranslat
able (as in some understandings of the Qur'an, for example, or of
Vedic mantra), the emphasis on scriptural translation tends to pre
suppose the transparency of language. This transparency means that
it is not its sound shape, for example, that grants scriptural language
its divinity, but its semantic content. Translation tends to place
greater value on meaning than linguistic form.
One of the classic accounts of linguistic meaning from medieval
theology (Asad 1993) through contemporary linguistic pragmatics
(Grice 1957) is that words give outward expression to the inner in
tentions of persons. If those intentions are truly the speaker's own,
and if speech truly arises from the speaker's own inferiority, then that
speech would be sincere. In many Protestant sects, the sincerity of
prayer is the necessary condition for true communication with God.
But language is in some ways exterior to its speaker. Therefore even it
does not entirely unproblematically guarantee the autonomy of the
subject and its separation from objects. Some Protestants discover
that language presents its own temptations to fetishism. There seem
to be two reasons for this; its material embodiment, and its social
character. This holds not just for writing but even for the spoken
word. Thus utterances, however spiritual might be their place of ori
gin in the soul, are inescapably material. The sounds of speech are
produced by mechanical action, are received by means of physical ef-
 Calvin in the Tropics 25

fects on the listener, are governed by linguistic conventions about

form, and, what is theologically most at issue, have some degree of
existence outside both speaker and listener. After all, since we can
hear ourselves speak, our words once uttered come to us much as the
words of others.
Our words also come to us from others ontogenically; we learn a
language that exists prior to our own utterances. In speaking we dis
play the extent to which others have entered into our own words
(Bakhtin 1981). These aspects of language thus seem to pose obstacles
to sincere prayer, if, as in many Protestant views, it is defined by its
origin in the individual subject. If we could guarantee the divinity of
the words that come from others, this might not present a problem
for religious practice. But to the extent that language is social in ori
gin, it reveals the incipient insincerity that threatens to intervene be
tween speaker and the divine addressee.
Both the materiality of utterances and the social character of lan
guage threaten the word's association with the intentions and in
feriority of the individual speaker. This has led some Protestant
denominations to reject liturgical speech and others to seek its radical
transformation. For all their differences, for example, the silence of
Quakers and joyful noise of Pentecostals share a suspicion of both or
dinary and liturgical speech. Quakers seek to eliminate any but the
most spontaneous speech in religious service, which should other
wise remain in silence. The marks of sincerity include austerity, often
linguistically marked by a rhetorically "unadorned" style.8 In con
trast, Pentecostal services typically involve emotional display and
noise, as participants try to achieve glossolalia (speaking in tongues).
This is language whose very unintelligibility is the guarantee of its di
vine source and the sincerity of the inspired speaker.9
In Sumba, the parallels between the exteriority of language and
that of the fetishistic object are evident in the Calvinist critiques of
marapu ritual speech. Marapu ritual has two inseparable components,
the offering and the speech that must accompany it. The authority of
ritual speech remains very strong, even for Sumbanese Christians. In
deed, the more that ritual speech is performed without the "base" of
material offerings, the more authority is invested in the speech itself.
Nonetheless, the marapu words" (//marapu), have three defining fea
tures that, for Christians, implicate them with the general threat of
fetishism. For one thing, the words, by definition, do not come from
the speaker but from the ancestors themselves. In addition, this ori
gin is marked by the form the words take, for ritual speech must fol
low strict poetic rules and is composed of a fixed canon of couplets.
26 Webb Keane

Finally, not only do the words and their formal properties come from
others, the performance too is normally delegated to specialists, who
speak on behalf of sponsors or other beneficiaries who themselves re
main silent during the performance.10
Marapu ritual speech takes advantage of the material and social
exteriority of language to respond to the problems of presence posed
by communication with invisible addressees. By using only canoni
cal couplets with their strict poetic form, ritual speakers return to
their addressees the very words that those addressees had provided to
their speakers. Although there is no certainty that the ancestors can
hear these words, at least in this way ritual speech establishes its ap
propriateness for spanning the semiotic gap that intervenes between
speaker and listener (see Keane 1995). In contrast, the linguistic
forms of Protestant prayer resemble those of everyday speech. Thus,
at least for the unconvinced, Protestant prayer displays no manifest
evidence of its capacity to communicate to the invisible world.11
On the other hand, although marapu speech has a clear relation
ship to its addressee, it leaves some doubt about the relationship
between words and their speaker. Since they originate with the an
cestors, the words are clearly distinct from the speaker in at least
some respects. Ritual speakers neither claim to be the origin of their
words, nor, unlike practitioners in some religions, do they go into
trance or states of possession, and thereby lend their bodies to invisi
ble speakers. They must use offerings and verbal self-reference to es
tablish their identities and their rights to address the spirits.
The response to marapu speech by contemporary Sumbanese
Protestants is exemplified in their insistence on the importance of
shutting one's eyes while praying. This puzzles marapu followers, one
of whom asked me, "What are they afraid of?" adding sardonically,
"Maybe they're afraid their sins are visible!" For Protestants, shut eyes
help the speaker avoid the temptation of the fetishized word. They
mark off the boundary between interior and exterior. One church war
den explained to me that you close your eyes so that your speech will
come from the heart. Pointedly he added that Catholics not only
verge on idolatry by worshipping statues of the Virgin, they also pray
with their eyes open. That is, unlike Calvinists, they read from the
Prayer Book. Note here the explicit association between the fetishizing
displacement of idol worship and that of reciting the written word.
In a 1993 sermon, one young minister criticized his main com
petitors in this way:

Yes, as for Catholicism, there are often formulae. Can't go skip over or
go contrary to the way of praying. Have to follow exactly. . . . Like in
 Calvin in the Tropics 27

Islam, for example, it has to be so many times.12 We (on the other

hand) are not taught like this. It's not enough, just five times. Breath
ing goes on and on, doesn't it?

By comparing sincere prayer to breath, this minister rhetorically en

dows it with the authority of natural processes. If Catholic liturgy, Is
lamic prayer, and marapu words take their authority from the
distinctiveness that sets them apart from ordinary conversation, the
appeal here is the reverse. The authority of Calvinist prayer lies in its
sincerity, and its sincerity is marked by its ordinariness. In this way,
it is identified with the full presence of the everyday, physical locus
of the individuated self.13
The Calvinist criticisms of inauthentic prayer view it as like the
fetishized object. Like the spirits inauthentic prayer addresses, it
stands outside the subject, and to it the speaking subject surrenders
its own capacity to act. These become apparent as the linguist and
Bible translator Lois Onvlee ponders the difficulty of rendering the
meaning of "prayer" in a Sumbanese language:

I think of the word with which we render our "to prayer," viz. paren-
gena li'i, which literally means to make someone hear the word, direct
the word to.. . . After my use of the word in a religious service was re
jected by one of the elders, we thereafter intended to be on "safe"
terrain. But this "safe terrain" did not exist. Once I went along when
summoned for the killing of the chicken, one of the officients was told
to parengeni li'i no manu, in other words, make the chicken hear the
word, in order that by and by the chicken intestine should then speak
what the forefathers mean to say, to be able to serve as oracle. And in
another context, regarding what was "hot", and thus perilous, and to
be cooled, they said parengengge li'i ne we'e, make the water hear the
word. . . . And thus I am here in the neighborhood of the magical
word, which confers coercive power onto that over which the word is
spoken. And now we use this word in another connection and say
parengeni li'i Mjori, to make the Lord hear the word. Shall this word
continually be clear for those who hear it? (1973b: 202)

Notice here the way in which the problem of translation leads irrevo
cably from speech practices to mistaken views of agency and of the
kinds of beings that inhabit the world. By addressing the chicken,
marapu speech treats as an agent that which ontologically lacks agency,
and in cooling that which is hot, it falsely attributes efficacy to words.
From a Calvinist perspective, Marapu words are like the fetishized
object in that the speaker attributes to words and their forms powers
28 Webb Keane

that properly lie in persons and their intentions. Marapu words seek
to have effects on material things when, for Protestants, words can
only express meanings emanating from the speaker's immaterial
spirit. By contrast, the authentic prayer of the Protestant must origi
nate within the speaker, be guided by intentions, and, since its effi
cacy depends on the meanings of its words and not just their forms,
refer to a world beyond itself. According to this opposition, authen
tic speech is primarily a form of symbolic expression. The forms it
takes are relatively arbitrary, in the Saussurean sense, in contrast to
the canonical couplets of marapu speech.

C o n c l u s io n

As Quaker silence and Pentecostal glossolalia suggest, speech cannot

be fully relied on to determine the boundaries between external ob
jects and the interiority of subjects. In Sumba, Dutch Calvinists coun
terpose the sincerity of expressions arising from individual and
internal sources against what they take to be marapu ritual's fetishistic
displacement of agency onto objectified verbal formulae. A mistaken
view of language is inseparable from mistaken understanding of the
human subject. Wrong speech thus forms an obstacle on the way to
achieving an interior state of grace. As Wielenga writes,

whenever one has a bad understanding of "redemption," then it is

also given that one has a bad understanding of "thankfulness." He
shall answer the question: how shall I be thankful to God for such re
demption?thank and love God. Words and nothing but words. . . .
And it turns out that the thankfulness stands in acknowledging that he
says thanks. Only seldom shall he convert it into a deed both saying
and doing: I am your servant and will do work for you. His heathen re
ligion has cost him much, many pecuniary and material sacrifices. . . .
[In marapu ritual] a removal of guilt must "be purchased," for all must
be "paid for." But a Christian "asks" forgiveness, receives it, and
"says" his thankfulness. (1923: 223)

The lack of interiority is mutually implicated with the misuse of

words. If words are deeds, a view Wielenga imputes to marapu follow
ers, they would be sufficient in themselves. But if words are only sup
plementary to deeds, something closer to Wielenga's own view, they
lie external to the subject, and so in themselves remain unbound to
the subject's condition and acts. Inauthentic speech is then insepara
 Calvin in the Tropics 29

ble from materialism, going hand in hand with the corruption that
conflates economic exchange (the purchase of an indulgence) with
spiritual effects (forgiveness). Wielenga's view of speech, in its very
appeal to interiority, recognizes the supplementary and ambiguously
external character of language, which needs some additional re
sources if it is to be bound to inner states and outer works.
This opens up a possibility that finds some echoes in the marapu
followers' response to Christian criticism. Marapu followers frequently
assert that Christians display overwhelming hubris in seeking to ad
dress the deity directly.14 In contrast to the forms of direct address to
which Protestant prayer aspires, marapu followers see their ritual forms
not as insincere but as deferential. It is respectful modesty on the part
of speakers to insist that the words they utter are not their own, an in-
sistance displayed in the canonical forms of the poetic couplet. In
contrast, marapu followers commonly attribute to the isolated speaker
of Christian prayer an excessive willfulness that is at once dangerous
and ineffective. For marapu followers, Christians are suspect precisely
because they take the warrants of sacred speech to lie in persons rather
than in the exteriority of words. That is, through its efforts at sincerity
and spontaneity, Christian prayer seeks to deny that language and its
powers do not originate in the individual speaker. To marapu follow
ers, this means an illegitimate transfer of responsibility from the invis
ible world of spirits to the fleshly domain of the living. If the ultimate
agents are divine, from the marapu followers' point of view it is as if
Christians fetishize themselves.
As I have suggested, however, both sides have to contend with
the problems of ambiguous presence. Their concrete practices reveal
a lingering doubt: For marapu followers, it is about the presence of
the invisible spirits; for Christians, the presence of the sincere in
tentions in the worshipper. What both sides share is evidence that
neither takes the subject to be fully autonomous and self-present.
Neither, then, is in an unassailable position to portray the other as
the real fetishist. This may even lend force to the charges each lays
against the other, since each may in turn find tempting some of the
displacements and assurances offered by the other's "fetishism."

N otes

1. All translations from the Dutch are my own. Twenty-four months of

fieldwork in Anakalang (1985, 1986-1987, and 1993) and research in the
Netherlands (1988) were generously funded by the Department of Education
30 Webb Keane

Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, the Joint Committee on Southeast

Asia of the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of
Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re
search, and the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies
with funds from the Luce Foundation, and was conducted under the spon
sorship of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia and Universitas Nusa
Cendana. An earlier version of this article was presented at the University of
Amsterdam Research Group Religion and Society conference "Border Fetish-
isms" (December 1995). I am grateful for the comments of Adela Pinch and
Patricia Spyer, and for countless Sumbanese for their conversations.
2. In addition to the axiomatic point, there is a more specific one
to make as well. The Gereformeerde Kerken, the Dutch Calvinist sect that
missionized Sumba, split off from the mainstream Nederlandse Hervormde
Kerk in the mid-nineteenth century in part as a reaction against the latter's
liberalizing tendencies. A small minority (some 8.18 percent of the Dutch
population in 1899), this sect appealed to the small farmers, artisans, and
small tradesmen, whose were likely to see themselves at the margins of in
dustrial mass society (Wintle 1987).
3. Sumba is about the size of Jamaica, with a population of some
350,000. The economy is predominantly subsistance agriculture, with some
trade in cattle and horses. What is most relevant to this article is the thriving
and in some places hugely expensive system of ceremonial exchange (involv
ing cloth, gold, silver, buffalo, horses, and pigs) that mediates most social re
lations (for details see Keane 1997a). Sumba is home to speakers of some
half-dozen closely related languages, identified with distinct territories which
they inhabit. These territories vary greatly in social organization, ritual, and
economic structure. Nonetheless, there is enough basic similarity among
themwhich Sumbanese themselves recognizethat for purposes of this ar
ticle, the ethnographic differences can be glossed over. Indeed, the mission
ary writings with which I work frequently do not specify what part of Sumba
is in question. When I draw on my own fieldwork and the language used
there, I am refering to the domain of Anakalang, located in the west-central
part of the island.
4. The word marapu properly refers to the most ancient and powerful of
the ancestral spirits, and the chief interlocutors in ritual. In Sumba, the word
is also used to refer to the religion and its practitioners. "Marapu follower" is a
somewhat infelicitous shorthand; one does not "follow" the marapu as one
might a cult leader or savior. But people do say that to perform the rituals is to
"follow" (keri) the tracks left by the ancestors. This is a better solution than to
call them "marapu worshippers," which inaccurately assimilates the ritual re
lationship with marapu to very different sorts of religious practice.
5. Pak Kadiwangu's historicizing version of the relation between ma
rapu and Christian religions shows interesting parallels (whether intentional
or not I cannot say) to the typological reading of the Bible. In this hermeneu
 Calvin in the Tropics 31

tic tradition, the New Testament reveals the truth which was only immanent
in the Old Testament.
6. Many of the debates between Dutch Calvinists and marapu followers
not only replay the original conflict between Protestants and Catholics, they
seem at times to contain a subtext about their present-day rivalry as well.
Catholic missions historically have been a much smaller presence on Sumba
than those of the Dutch Calvinists (see Haripranata 1984). In recent years,
however, as both missions begin to prostelytize the final and most stubborn
holdouts among the unconverted, their rivalry has intensified. In particular,
marapu followers often find Catholicism far the less onerous choice. One ratu
told me that if he were forced to enter a church, he would choose the Catholics
both because they have the older faith (next only to marapu ritual), and be
cause their ritualism has some resemblance to his own. On the latter point
Protestants would gleefully concur.
7. A good example of the relationship between their traditionalism and
the problem of fetishism can be found in the following passage by Lois
Onvlee, describing what he sees as a noble but vanishing world. After show
ing how people and their possessions exist in an intimate relationship, he
writes: "Possessions on Sumba . . . must be seen in terms of broad social and
religious relationships. These relationships are now breaking down.. . . As the
Sumbanese come increasingly to regard their possessions in an economic
sense, I can only hope that they will view these goods in the proper context,
without which these possessions could become a dangerous and threatening
power. I can only hope that the Sumbanese people will find a new control
over their possessionsone that will provide a new context and a new re
spect" (1980: 206-207). Here a native fetishism is counterposed favorably to
something very like the fetishism of the commodity (see also Keane 1996).
8. As one Quaker has pointed out to me, not every form of sponta
neous speech is acceptable in meeting. What counts as spontaneous speech
is subject to strict conventions, which will vary from congregation to congre
gation. These conventions, however, are likely to be largely tacit, and possi
bly unconscious. For Quaker views of language in their formative period, see
Bauman 1983.
9. Pentecostals cite the Biblical gift of tongues as the precedent for
their practices, but different sects vary in how they view the words of glosso-
lalia. Some take them to be part of some ordinary human language that hap
pens to be unknown to the speaker; others believe they are a divine language.
In addition, sects differ on whether these words can be interpreted (see Good
man 1972; Samarin 1972). For a comparison of Quaker and Pentecostal treat
ments of language, see Maltz 1985. For language in other religions, see Keane
1997b.
10. This brief sketch is meant only to draw out the points relevant to the
encounter with Calvinism. The complex topic of Sumbanese ritual speech
32 Webb Keane

has been addressed at length elsewhere; see especially Kuipers 1990; Keane
1997a.
11. The Lord's Prayer was indeed taught to its speakers by its addressee,
by way of Jesus Christ. Its divine origin is known, however, only by virtue of
the surrounding narrative, not through its linguistic form.
12. He is refering to the Islamic obligation to pray at five specified times
over the course of the day.
13. In marapu ritual, the apparent displacements of the intending and
acting subject by ritual objects and the external word are also echoed in its
participation structure and by continual reference to its obligatory character.
Speaking of the delegation of marapu words to specialists, one Protestant put
it this way: "As for marapu people, they don't even pay attention during the
prayers, as long as they have their ratu doing the job for them. They don't
concentrate like we do, but just chat away." As fulfillment of an obligation,
the performers of marapu words insist that their words are not the expres
sions of personal intentions and volition.
14. In doing so, marapu followers often overlook such theological nu
ances as the mediation of Christ and the role of Grace in the production of
sincere speech. But then so do many of the local Christians, who in this re
spect are perhaps more modernist than the theologians.

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Asad, Talal. (1993) "On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monas-
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Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Mer-
son and Michael Holquist; Michael Holquist ed, Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bauman, Richard. (1983) Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism o f Speaking and Si
lence Among Seventeenth Century Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Dijkstra, H. (1902) "Den Duivelen Offeren." Het Mosterdzaad v. 21. In van den
End, Th., ed. 1987 Gereformeerde Zending op Sumba: Een Bronnenpublicatie.
Alphen aan den Rijn: Raad voor de Zending der Ned. Herv. Kerk, et al.
Goodman, Felicitas D. (1972) Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study o f
Glossolalia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
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Grice, H.P. (1957) "Meaning." Philosophical Review 64: 377-88.

Haripranata, H. (1984) Ceritera Sejarah Gereja Katolik Sumba dan Sumbawa.
Ende: Arnoldus.
Hoskins, Janet A. (1993) "Violence, Sacrifice, and Divination: Giving and Tak
ing a Life in Eastern Indonesia." American Ethnologist 20: 159-78.
Ivy, Marilyn. (1995) Discourses o f the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Kapita, U.H. (1976) Masyarakat Sumba dan Adat Istiadatnya. Waingapu: Pani-
tia Penerbit Naskah-Naskah Kebudayaan Daerah Sumba Dewan Penata
Layanan Gereja Kristen Sumba.
Keane, Webb. (1994) "The Value of Words and the Meaning of Things in East
ern Indonesian Exchange." Man (n.s.) 29: 605-29.
-------- . (1995) "The Spoken House: Text, Act, and Object in Eastern Indone
sia." American Ethnologist 22: 102-24.
-------- . (1996) "Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects in Colonial
Indonesia." In Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization o f Christian
ity. Peter van der Veer, ed. New York and London: Routledge.
-------- . (1997a) Signs o f Recognition: Powers and Hazards o f Representation in an
Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-------- . (1997b) "Religious Language." Annual Review o f Anthropology 26: 47-71.
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2

From Brooms to Obeah and Back:

Fetish Conversion and Border Crossings
in Nineteenth-Century Suriname

Susan Legene

In museums we see only the dead bodies of fetishes, "die toten Hiille. . . ,
ihre Kadaver." The museum catalogue accompanying the Frankfurt
1986 exhibition on African fetishes leaves us with no illusion about the
change the exhibited objects underwent before reaching their current
resting place in the collections of Western museums. Gone are their
spiritual inner powerstheir supposed inner energies. What remains
are ritual objects, composed of vegetal, mineral, and man-made ele
ments, each with a unique form.1To those who made them, who lived
with them, the artifact and its spiritual powers are supposed to have
been one and the same. As a rule, however, the Europeansobtaining
them by accident, by force, through bargaining or theftneither un
derstood nor accepted the communicating powers attributed to such
objects in the communities within which they functioned.2 While
crossing cultural and geographical borders on their way to Europe, they
underwent complex changes in meaning. But why were these objects
brought to Europe in the first place to end up in its museums? Did
their fetish power indeed stop there, as the Frankfurt catalogue seems
36 Susan Legene

to imply, leaving us with only their dead fetish bodies, or was it in fact
the museum that created their fetish identity?
At stake is a complex process of both a negation and an attribu
tion of meaning by Europeans to ritual objects that at a peculiar mo
ment in history came to be designated as fetishes. To discuss this
process, we will follow here the trip across the ocean of two Suriname
obeah. In 1824 these obeah arrived in the Netherlands, where in
1873 they ended up in the collection of the Colonial Museum in
Haarlem, (forerunner of the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum).3 The neg
ation, in retrospect, of what these obeah had once been to their
owners, will be interpreted as part of an overall Dutch colonial orien
tation towards the fashioning of African and Creole slaves into (de-
Africanised) Western Christian citizens and disciplined workers, and
the creation of a distinction between these Creole Christians as be
longing to "civilized society" and animistic maroons as situated out
side of "civilization."4
Reconstructing a biography of these two obeah helps us to un
derstand what has been called one of the paradoxes of the colonial
process: the paradox that religious symbols and systems were at
tacked anjd even destroyed on location, to reappearout of context
in European museum showcases.5 This should not be regarded as a
paradox. These obeah indeed are ritual objects from the Afroameri-
can wmf/-religion in which spirits and inspired objects play a crucial
role. What we will see is that these objects only could become visible
as religious symbols the very moment they were destined to disappear
from their own community. Within that community, the two obeah
could be regarded as "border fetishes" in a literal sense, referring here
to the crosscultural process in which they were created by enslaved
and displaced peoples from a variety of African ethnic and cultural
backgrounds, both newly arrived in the colony and born on planta
tions, who lived in close contact with indigenous Amerindian and
maroon communities in the rainforests, as well as with a growing
number of free blacks and mulattos. Likewise Europeans certainly in
fluenced these identities, due to their pervasive presence and power
over the slaves. The focus here, however, is not directed primarily at
the place of these obeah and the role of winti in processes of identity
creation within the diaspora slave community, but instead at the role
these objects played in contesting, confirming, or negotiating Euro
pean control of these identities.
Taking two obeah as a starting point for a discussion on border
fetishisms, I adopt a "biographical" approach that focuses not only
on the "commodity status" of things but explores their "social life"
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 37

as well (Appadurai 1985). Of special interest here are the effects of

things' movements, of the transformations that ensue from their cul
tural and geographic border crossings. A slave "broom"as it was
baptised by Dutch planters in colonial Surinameundergoes a "con
version" to become a "ritual" artifact in a Dutch museum. In the
process, through colonial meaning-making on opposite sides of the
ocean, its past-relationship is brusquely swept aside.6 A biography of
the two obeah after they left Suriname may provide some insight
into the ways in which Dutch society became acquainted with a for
eign culture that it simultaneously rejected and subsumed, exploited
and feared. It may provide us with a glimpse of the colonial mecha
nisms and power plays on which this rejection and incorporation
were based, as well as of its effects on the Surinamese communities in
which the objects originated.
The two obeah can only play this rolethe question of why and
under what guise they entered Europe can only be answeredif we
connect their biography to that of their human collector. It was he
who in 1824 brought these objects to Europe, together with the infor
mation that in 1873 made them into collection items in the Colonial
Museum. To him, the Suriname "brooms" were initially souvenirs to
remind him of his experiences as a plantation owner in some distant
place across the ocean. But once back home in Haarlem he substituted
their rather homespun status with an exemplary one. It is because of
this exemplary status that the objects that the Dutchman once knew
as "brooms" were handed over to the Colonial Museum in Haarlem.
And there they served as an illustration within a discourse about the
Dutch civilizing mission among animistic maroons, one that, impor
tantly, kept wholly silent about slavery and slave society. It was a dis
course in which the slaves themselves also lacked a voice and a say,
although their objects nonetheless played a role. Let me begin by in
troducing a Dutch plantation owner.

T h e B e n e v o l e n t P la n t a t io n O w n e r

In 1823 a young man traveled from the Netherlands to Suriname in

order to investigate the nature of his family's property there. His
motherremarried following the death of her first husbandhad in
1804 inherited her deceased second husband's shares in two planta
tions in this Dutch Caribbean colony: half of the Clifford Kocqshove
plantation, and a 13/60th share of Kocqswoud. Gaspar van Breugel was
25 years old when he left for Suriname as his mother's representative.
38 Susan Legene

He spent eight months in the colony. Back in the Netherlands, the

country of Suriname and especially the issue of slavery would keep him
busy for the rest of his long life.7
Absenteeism on the part of plantation owners was typical of the
Suriname plantation system at the time. Due to inheritance laws,
most plantations were parceled out among a large number of families
in Holland who, in many cases, had personally very little contact with
their estates. The common practice among estate owners was to en
trust the plantation administration to a banking office in the Nether
lands and, in Suriname itself, to engage administrators in the capital,
Paramaribo, and a director with an overseer on each plantation. They
were responsible for the day-to-day management and financial ad
ministration of the plantation. Being a Suriname plantation owner
had, within the Dutch context, become a rather abstract, administra
tive concern. Van Breugel's wish as a share holder to maintain per
sonal control over his plantation affairs was therefore exceptional.
From the Netherlands, the colony was very much a faraway place.
From Gaspar van Breugel's private Journal and other published
and unpublished notes and writings, we can piece together a picture
of someone who was initially ignorant of Suriname society with all
its intricate race and gender relations, and of the existing working re
lationships between slaves and their supervisors.8 Despite his tender
age, Van Breugel was, because of his social standing and background
as well as his involvement in plantation affairs, an accepted partner
in discussions with Paramaribo's ruling class on political, social, and
economic issues. In his publications he poses as a real adventurer, a
man who trusts local medical knowledge and dares to taste such
frightening delicacies as fried grubs. This adventurous and open-
minded attitude served, within the Dutch context, as a means to
show his expertise. He exploited this position to defend the colonial
elite whenever public criticism was voiced in the Netherlands about
the poor treatment of slaves in the colony as well as to object against
the emancipation of the slaves without their proper preparation for
citizenship. His claim to be an authority derived from the simple fact
of having been on the spot. He took this stand in favor of the colo
nial elite even though he himself had grown critical of their behavior
during the time he spent in Suriname. As far as he was concerned,
they chiefly engaged in gossip, financial trickery, lavish dinners, and
the rude or brutish treatment of women (slaves).
An essential component of this self-image and self-appointed role
as mediator is Van Breugel's identity as "plantation owner," a notion
which only seems to apply to the landed aspect of this property.9
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 39

Thus, wherever Van Breugel writes about plantation ownership, any

reference to the ownership of slaves is absent from the text; the term
"slave owner/' is never mentioned with one exception: In 1857, he
uses the term in an anonymous pamphlet against Dutch abolition
ists, Slave owners and Slave friends. . . . Here, "slave owners" has be
come a kind of honorary title set against those who dared call
themselves the friends of the slaves but in fact proposed to bring mis
fortune upon them by advocating slave emancipation (Breugel 1857).
"Plantation owner" was thus a euphemism for slave owner, referring
to land ownership over and above the ownership of people, even
though Van Breugel at the same time admitted that in the days of de
clining agricultural profits the value of a plantation depended largely
on the size and quality of its slave population.10
All this does not imply that Van Breugel did not have any per
sonal contact with his slaves in Suriname. He gleaned useful infor
mation from his peers concerning the hierarchy among plantation
slaves: field slaves (subdivided between Creoles and Africans), versus
house slaves (often mulattos), as well as men and women Of a wide
variety of descent, skin color, and "reliability." He met with the slaves
who were skilled in carpentry or medicine, and with their supervisor,
called bastiaanwho supervised the whole slave community often
being their winti priest as well (Lamur 1985: 19), and via whom Van
Breugel communicated with the other slaves. His involvement with
them seems to have been marked by an ambivalence between eco
nomic and humanistic reasoning, which enabled him to learn from
his slaves about their culture, hunting methods, plants, animals, and
trees, while at the same time inspecting them during roll call as if
they were simply a form of capital. Back home in the Netherlands
Van Breugel continued to keep track of his slaves through this regis
ter. In 1832 he notes with pride a natural growth of the slave popula
tion of Clifford Kocqshove in the period 1824-1831. Given that
many of these slaves were newborn children or old people however,
he concluded: "And thus, this comparison, although indicating a
larger number of heads, is not favorable in relation to 1831."11 This
statement reflects his ambivalent reasoning in which economics
clearly prevails.
Van Breugel's calculating approach is most clear in those cases
where irregularities were discovered, as in the case of a small boy who
lived in the administrator's house, or the black carpenter who profited
from irregular privileges. Here, however, Van Breugel ran up against
emotional and family relationships which he found rather embar
rassing. He discovered that sexual relations between the plantation
40 Susan Legene

administrators, directors, or overseers, and enslaved women was com

mon practice. Such personal liaisons, enforced or not, were noted in
his Journal in a veiled way, however. Only in those cases where a
woman from his own workforce had succeeded in loosening the
bonds of slavery, or (in one case) even in escaping from slavery, would
Van Breugel go to great lengths to reconstruct the situation in order to
discover whether it represented financial damage to his family. But his
experienced peers in Suriname convinced Van Breugel that he should
not bother himself too much with such things. They taught him not
to become involved in the personal relationships between the slaves
and the administrators or directors of the plantations. To avoid any
misunderstandings concerning his own lifestyle, however, he testified
in his travel account to his innocence, painting there a picture of him
self as someone oblivious to the beautiful women who, according to
his hosts, were all around him. The implication was, of course, that he
never touched a slave. He even made a point of explaining to his read
ers that, during a directors' party where everybody got drunk, he him
self drank only water and slipped away unnoticed and early at one
o'clock.

This careful, dutiful, and righteous young man, who went to Suri
name on a financial mission concerning the administration and
prospects of two coffee plantations, returned both charmed by the
overseas community and convinced that his family should sell its
plantation shares as soon as possible. This is not the place to go into
the economic details concerning the plantation administration and
the sales (Kocqswoud was sold in 1832, and Clifford Kocqshove in
1838/9). It was with a sigh of relief that Gaspar closed his accounts
after receiving the letter confirming that Clifford Kocqshove had fi
nally been sold and at that before his mother died, thus preventing a
situation in which due to inheritance laws the plantation shares
would have had to have been subdivided among still more share
holders. For the Van Breugel family the sale was a purely financial
decision.12 Uneasiness about slavery, which may have troubled them
and resulted in a drive to provide the slaves with everything they
were entitled to according to the formal regulations, did not play an
explicit role in the family's decision to sell its shares. But in the fif
teen years it had taken the family to sell its shares at a reasonable
price, Van Breugel had become an expert on both Suriname and
slavery, as well as a dedicated activist for the propagation of Chris
tian education among slaves. And here is where the two obeah enter
the story.
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 41

Together with detailed accounts, slave registers, plantation maps,

and other valuable administrative documents, Van Breugel's luggage
when he returned to Holland contained a wide variety of objects: veg
etable, mineral, and man-made, alive as well as dead. The papers and
numerous objectscalabashes, a wooden lock, two "brooms," an
apron made of beads, strings, dolls, drumssurvived him. One turtle
survived the ocean voyage and lived to a ripe old age in Van Breugel's
house in Haarlem. It may even have survived its master. But the two
brooms he had acquired underwent a transformation during their stay
in the Netherlands, where they came to be recognized as fetishes.

Two O b e a h F r o m S u r in a m e

"Donated by Jhr. G.P.C. van Breugel, Haarlem, 1873." The documen

tation cards of the Tropenmuseum collection corresponding to the
two obeah discussed here take their moment of entry into the mu
seum collection as the beginning of their genealogy (cf. Figure 1).
One obeah is called a brush (Dutch: kwast) and stored together with
other brooms. The other is kept with fellow obeah from various ages.
Some are brand new and seem never to have been used. According to
the documentation cards our two objects are rather old. They cer
tainly come from Suriname bush Negroes, the card tells us, and be
fore they fell into Dutch hands were probably used by a winti priest
to chase away bad spirits during a trance dance.
As a rule, such documentation cards are the first source of informa
tion about artifacts in museum collections. In many cases they are the
starting point for the researcher in search for a certain kind of object
that fits a given subject. Next comes the object itself. If this is not ex
hibited it has to be brought up from the depot to be looked over and
investigated. The documentation card, with its essential background
information, inevitably influences the ensuing analysis of the object.
And since ethnographical museums along with much anthropological
practice have, until recently, tended to regard non-Western societies as
peoples without history, ancient artifacts from non-Western cultures
have all too often been registered without precise dates and with little
information concerning their provenance.13 When I came across the
objects discussed here, I was not looking for winti and maroon obeah,
but rather for Van Breugel's two slave brooms. Relying on first-hand
archival sources, I spotted these brooms before I had studied the liter
ature on these museum objects and thus before, as maroon ritual ob
jects, they had lost their past relationship. This provided me with a
42 Susan Legene

critical stance towards their museum identity, which otherwise prob

ably would not have surprised me.
The documentation cards trace the obeah to maroon religious
culture. Recent historical and anthropological works on winti and on
maroon societies confirm that these objects may indeed have been
used by maroons. However, according to the Van Breugel archives the
obeah come from Clifford Kocqshove and played their role within
that specific slave community, at the beginning of the 1820s.14 Al
though Van Breugel wrote a detailed collection list with a description
of each item he donated to the collection of the new Colonial Mu
seum in Haarlem, this information was apparently lost after they en
tered the museum (Breugel 1842b). The genealogical relocation of the
obeah from slave to free maroon society is not without meaning. But
let us first have a closer look at the objects concerned, combining
Van Breugel's remarks with recent literature, and following the Frank
furt museum description system which distinguishes between veg
etable, mineral and man-made components.
The two obeah are basically two freakish branches of a tree (ac
cording to Van Breugel these are woody grainings of a palm tree; the
documentation cards call the wood "unknown"). They end (the doc
umentation card state) in a bundle of "a certain grass." According to
Van Breugel in the one case the bundle was taken from the top of a
date palm (Dutch: Palmiet dadelboom), while the other consists of the
veins of palm leaves. This seems to be a reasonable explanation.15 A
ring of black resin should also be included in this list of vegetable ele
ments. Mineral are the humps of kaolin chalk, on both obeah. This
white chalk, called pemba doti, plays a role in many winti rites, where
it is applied to both ritual objects and human bodies.16 Pressed into
the pemba doti are rows of cowries.17 The small brass chains on both
obeah are man-made. They are also pressed into the pemba doti and
seem to bind the brushes to the freakish stalks. The largest also has a
double string of small red beads on one outer side near the brush,
and a small black brass chain around the stalk at the other side, as
well as nails with round top covers, resembling drawing pins. On this
obeah, in the pemba doti, blue dots have been painted.18 Both obeah
have white cotton thread wrapped around them; one has a hole in
the freakish stalk through which the thread runs.
What did Van Breugel make of the elements that made up the
obeah? What strikes us first and foremost is that he did not attach
any explicit ritual or religious meaning to them.19 He focuses exclu
sively on their vegetable components, describing the palm trees and
their utility for making brooms and other household implements, as
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 43

well as food and drinks. The two obeah are for him such brooms,
used to clean the plantation yard in the same way as farmers in Hol
land used to sweep their farmyards to keep them clean and tidy.
Cowries, beads, blue dots, black resin, white cotton, brass chainsel
ements that anthropologists would surely focus on in investigating
the obeah's ritual powerthey all seem to have gone unnoticed.
I do not want to suggest that Van Breugel may not have had any
notion of the ritual dimension of the brooms. To his explanation that
the slaves used them to sweep the yard in front of the plantation
buildings, he adds that in this sweeping they liked to draw a carica
ture of a visitor, or of flower motifs. His reference to the Dutch yards
swept by (free, rather than slave) farmers, may have been a way of
translating his experiences for an ignorant Dutch audience, but does
not imply that he (and his readers) perceived this latter act of sweep
ing as entirely functional either. Folklore in the eastern part of the
Netherlands, for instance, still has it that each Friday before dark the
yard should be swept to prevent a certain mythical being from com
ing and punishing the lazy farmer. Decorations on old farms still de
pict the broom as a protective implement against thunder and fire as
well as ghosts.20
However, we can discern Van Breugel's orientation towards the
utility of everything that grew and flowered around him and that also
sparked his interest, in other descriptions of objects and products. In
general, the plantation owner poses as a connoisseur content to know
a great deal about the uses to which trees, plants, and nests, could be
or were putas in paper, ropes, food, beverages, body decoration, aro
matic fragrancesbut only in passing does he mention any alleged
ritual or cultural connotation of things. Let me give another example
of hisat times even forced and overstatedutilitarian, noncultural
approach to religious customs in Suriname. Both in his collection list
and in his published Travel Account, Van Breugel describes the nest of a
certain weaverbird, which he calls the ba n an eb ekv o g el2] These birds
would build numerous nests in the impressive South American silk-
cotton tree which the slaves called kankantri.22 In both accounts Van
Breugel tells his readers (a general public in his Travel Account, experts
in his collection list) a story about this tree. Both times he begins with
the birds' nests. These hang from the branches of the tree to prevent
the snakes that also live in the tree from raiding the nests. After this
introduction, which seems almost to be the point of the story, he fur
ther informs his audiences that the kankantri is the "Idol of the
Negroes." Thus they bring it offeringsfood stored in concave cala
bashes and small bead aprons which they called kwedjoe. In his Travel
44 Susan Legene

Account he connects the story about the tree to a snake-hunting trip

that took place in the vicinity of a Dutch military fortress in the rain
forest. The Negroes shot a huge snake from a branch of the kankantri
and once it fell from its branch, they dealt it a final blow on the head
with their gun. (Breugel 1842a: 99-100; 1842b: 1)
Van Breugel was quite correct in his characterization of the
kankantri as a sacred tree that also was a home to birds and snakes,
but something in his account does not sit quite right. We may doubt,
for instance, whether his fellow black hunters were the ones to shoot
the snake (which for them might have been a deity) from a sacred
kankantri, rather than the Dutch soldiers. In his private notes Van
Breugel does not mention this shooting incident, but only explains
that the Negroes were very adept at discovering a snake that used to
sleep, barely visible, on the branches of a kankantri. Looking and
shooting are, after all, activities quite different from each other, if one
is not a hunter, but he maybe saw it as just a difference in degree and
thus a small exaggeration on his part. Peculiar to this improbable
snake-hunting story in his travel account as well is that the author
incriminates himself in having (mis)appropriated the objects he
found as offerings in the niches of the trunk of one mighty kankantri.
Not only did he take a nest of the weaver bird, but his collection also
contained a concave calabash, carved with geometrical, circle-like
motifs with a bird in one of the circles, and a kwedjoeexactly those
items that he mentioned as the offerings put under a kankantri. In the
description of these items, however, no reference is made to any pos
sible ritual function of these objects. Van Breugel notes merely that
the objects were made and used by the slaves. Likewise, where he de
scribes in the kankantri story that the Negroes prepared a ritual medi
cine in order to gain protection against snake venom, he does not
discuss the belief in reptile spirits, but looks for comparison between
the Negroes' faith in their antisnake poison and the European cer
tainty about the effectiveness of their cowpox vaccin ation / The tree,
the birds, the snake, the offeringsthey all belonged together. To
Van Breugel, however, the point at stake was that birds built their
nests in such a way that the snake could not eat the birds.
Not only did he not waste many words on the "irrational" as
pects of Suriname slave behavior, Van Breugel also was inclined to in
terpret the slaves' actions as directly related to his own presence. This
happened in his story about the visitor's portrait drawn with the
broom in the sand, as well as, for instance, in his explanation that
the slaves were most grateful that he, as their master, had taken the
trouble to come and visit them. But also his egocentric rationalizing
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 45

does not prove that he did not notice the religious attitudes of others
and did not have any contact at all with their religious practices.24 We
only can conclude that he could not find adequate words to describe
these and each time sought a refuge in rationalizing rituals and the
search for Dutch equivalents. Besides, from his notes and texts, there
is no indication that during his stay in Suriname he ever contested
the religious beliefs of his slaves. On the contrary, as far as he was
confronted with expressions of their religion, he found it rather a
source of amusement.

C on tact and C o n v e r s io n

We could see the objects from his small collection Surinamica as a

means by which Van Breugel experienced a bond between himself
and the slaves, about whom he knew very little, but who nonetheless
seem to have aroused his interest. He writes about rituals in which of
ferings were made, and brings home to Holland a calabash and a
kwedjoe; he explains that slaves draw a caricature of visitors with
brooms, and takes such brooms home with him too.25 At least once
during his stay on the plantation, Van Breugel must have encoun
tered his slaves "sweeping" with obeah, and have obtained these in
order to show them, for whatever reason, to his relatives and friends
back at home.
I am not sure whether the kankantri was on the plantation itself,
or even whether it was from there that Van Breugel took the various
offerings.26 It was, however, very probably at Clifford Kocqshove that
Van Breugel saw the sweeping movement of the dancing brooms.
Twice at least during his time on this plantation, he was confronted
with a dancing and singing performance by the members of Clifford
Kocqshove's slave community. At the first, in November of 1834, he
had allowed the people a two-day party over the weekend. During a
second stay the dancing lasted for three days (March 7-10, 1824)
with a fourth day of rest. (This, according to Van Breugel, was a post
poned New Year's festival (Dutch: Doe) to which the slaves were enti
tled each year.) In his Travel Account, the two dance parties were
combined into a single one. Initially, the music and dance frightened
and embarrassed the inexperienced plantation owner. He draws a car
icature of the witch-like poses and unbearable din he had suffered
during these festivities. His private Journal, written during his stay in
Suriname, on the other hand, has a more positive tone, mentioning
as it does the "lovely music and dance of the Negroes" (March 7,
46 Susan Legene

1824). Over the next few days Van Breugel continued to follow the
dances, during which his slavesmuch to his own amusementalso
"paid him the honor" of carrying him around seated on a chair. He
learned that the dances were called banja and jurrie-jurrie, asked the
carpenter to carve him a miniature set of drums, and claimed that he
received some instruction about certain rhythms, with which he
amused his friends back home.27 He also ordered six dolls dressed in
various women's outfits, and he inquired about the preferred fabrics
among slaves, so that he could ship these from the Netherlands as
part of the regular supply of textiles and household utensils for the
plantation.28 And I am inclined to think that Van Breugel acquired
his obeah after this banja as well. The winti priest may have thrown
them away after the dancing, or given them to him, after their pur
pose had been spent during the dance.29

So not only during the roll call, but also because of the banja, jurrie -
jurrie dances and other ceremonies, Van Breugel sought and found a
certain measure of contact with some of his slaves, a contact which as
sumes a material form in the artifacts the plantation owner collected.
These objects helped make him feel like a connoisseur of Suriname
and of slave issues. As Talal Asad has stated: " . . . things have first to
be constructed as symbolic, before they can become candidates for in
terpretation . . ." (Asad 1993: 61). Van Breugel did not question slave
rituals, but took them for granted and observed them as part of the
wider social life of the plantation. He ascribed to himself an important
role in permitting the slaves to dance, interpreting their style of com
menting on what happened around them as an honor to him (Voor-
hoeve 975: 17). From his writings and his selection of objects, it seems
as if he sensed an implicit connection between religion, nature, ob
jects, and the dances. It is this feeling, combined with Van Breugel's
curiosity (at that time as yet unburdened by a passion to convert the
slaves) that let him to carry the obeah back with him to Europa. Once
there, these object acquired a new identity in European eyes.
The main reason for the interpretation of the slaves' obeah as
brooms, and as we have seen, their reinterpretation from brooms into
maroon obeah, is the changing attitude of the colonial elite about the
slaves' religious beliefs. Van Breugel's curiosity about the slave dances
and rituals was indicative of an uncontested view, shared by himself
and his peers about the institution of slavery. This attitude changed
however, shortly after Van Breugel arrived in Suriname. From the sec
ond half of the 1820s onwards, the issue of slave emancipation could
no longer be ignored, either in Suriname or in the Netherlands. * The
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 47

colonial elite became increasingly aware that with the prospect of

emancipation imminent, the everyday life, attitudes, and perceptions
of this vast, anonymous majority of the colony's population could no
longer be regarded with the same indifference or casual curiosity as
before. In Suriname, this change resulted in a new policy towards
slave culture, and one that aimed at the slaves' conversion to Chris
tianity. The Comaroffs' general statement that "in the context of Eu
ropean colonialism, 'conversion' has always been part of its apparatus
of cultural coercion" certainly seems to be true for Suriname. (Coma-
roff and Comaroff 1991: 251) The pressure on slaves to give up their
own religious and cultural practices and to convert to Christianity
would become great. And it was a pressure that went together with the
destruction of numerous obeah and other cult objects.
Back home, reflecting on the impossible future of slavery, Van
Breugel changed his personal views accordingly, both in practice and in
retrospect. A few years after his Suriname trip, he decided to become a
member of the "Society for the Advancement of Religious Education
among the Slaves and other Heathen People in Suriname." This organi
zation, based in the Hague with departments all over the Netherlands
and an overseas department in Paramaribo, was founded in 1828. Lead
ing forces were members of the colonial elite, and their counterparts in
the Netherlands.31 Van Breugel adhered to the society's main target:
fundraising to strengthen the religious education of slaves by mis
sionaries of the Moravian church, the Hernhutters who almost a century
earlier had begun their missionary work in Suriname. Up to the late
1820s missionaries had barely been permitted to enter the plantations
and proselytize among slaves. Instead they had (with varying degrees of
success) primarily focused their energies on maroon communities.
The Hernhutter brothers were supposed to teach the slaves the
Bible and Christian values, in order, it was said, to prepare them for
emancipation. Their religious teachings and presuppositions clashed
with the ritual beliefs and practices of the slaves living on the plan
tations. The latter were rejected, while the reasons motivating this
rejection were reported in the journal of the Dutch supporters of the
Moravian mission. It is in this journal, Berigten uit de Heiden-wereld
(Reports from the Heathen World) that Van Breugel, a dedicated ac
tivist and subscriber, would have read the brothers' explanation
about the obeah, the kankantri, and the worry that gripped the poor
slaves because they feared death and lacked an understanding of the
hereafter.32 The missionaries reported discussions they had had with
the slaves on the subject of idolatry and how they had cast obeah
into the local rivers. In the journal's many success stories about slave
48 Susan Legene

Figure 1. Two Surinamese obeah, acquired by Jhr. G.P.C. van Breugel in

1824donated to the Colonial Museum in Haarlem in 1873. Length: 65 cm
(left) and 52 cm (right). Collection Tropenmuseum / Royal Tropical Institute,
Amsterdam; collection number H 2965 (left) and H 2966 (right). (Photo: Lo
Lange)
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 49

conversion, one favorite theme was how slaves had been persuaded
to reject and destroy these idols and witchcraft objects themselves,
and this was seen as a true act of embracing the Christian creed.33
"Many of the Negroes' potential cultural-historical and religious val
ues were destroyed," concludes the Surinamese Hernhutter minister
and historian Zeefuik, who characterizes the early missionaries' ap
proach as "bulldozing." Music and dance were misunderstood and
suppressed; the Afroamerican blacks were forced to renounce their
own beliefs (Zeefuik 1973: 42-46, 187).
With their acceptance of colonial relations, their preaching of
Romans 13 and of Paul's lesson about the slaves' duties towards the
master and the master's duties towards the slaves (I Corinthians 7:
20-24), the Hernhutters did not seem to pose a serious threat to the
colonial elite. They were regarded as the most appropriate group to
teach the slaves and to make them over according to the Christian
norms and values of work, discipline, and family life. But not only
did the Hernhutters instruct the slaves regarding obedience to author
ity, they also tried to convince the slave owners that their slaves de
served to be treated humanely. More important than the freeing of
slaves, teaches Paul, is their baptism. The slave was a servant of God
and thus a sacred being and a brother of any white Christian.34 It was
this message that Van Breugel even transferred to the title page of his
Travel Account. There he poses pointing to heaven and explaining to a
slave that there is a place in heaven for everyone. As I have already
said, this Dutchman left us with little evidence that in Suriname he
really discussed such matters with his slaves. His publication from
Holland, of course, did not address slaves either. Van Breugel's raised
finger in fact warned his fellow members of the plantation-owning
circle to see to it that their slaves were properly educated and con
verted into civilized Christian people. Having sold his plantation it is
easier for him to take his position. His is a manifesto, arguing for the
humane treatment and conversion of slaves in order to prepare them
to become citizens of their own country.
Not surprisingly, in Suriname the Hernhutter mission did not meet
with universal approval. Many an administrator and director rejected
the idea of the religious education and conversion of slaves. Accord
ing to Zeefuik (1973), opposition to this idea arose because these peo
ple did not accept its basic implications: that black and white people
would be equal before God. I am inclined, however, to suppose that
Zeefuik with this explanation overestimates the theological capacities
of nineteenth-century plantation administrators. Van Breugel was
shocked when he wrote to his own administrator telling him to invite
50 Susan Legene

Hernhutters to his plantation, and received a reply full of objections at

a very mundane level, concerning obedience, leisure, the extra costs
involved in housing the missionaries, etc.35
The conflicts in Suriname between some administrators and di
rectors and the Moravian mission led to a highly critical article in
"Reports from the Heathen-World." This publication contained a
completely opposite interpretation of Gaspar van Breugel's own pleas
ant doe experience of 1824. In the crucial year of 1848 Nils Otto Tank,
the enlightened Norwegian president of the Suriname Moravian
Church, wrote a furious account of a dance festival that had been or
ganized by administrators who wanted to provoke the Hernhutters.
The poor slaves, according to Tank, were misused and misled during
this disgusting party in which they danced like crazy, and took some
honor in being ordered to carry the whites around on their chairs,
while the whites became completely drunk and raped young girls.
Tank rejected the attitude of the white colonial elite, stated that the
conditions of slavery in Suriname were the worst he knew, and urged
the plantation owners in the Netherlands to take responsibility and
correct their employees' behavior. He thus connected the issue of the
decent treatment of slaves and their religious conversion to a struggle
over the interpretation of slave rituals (in his view slaves were misused
for the amusement of the white overseers).36
The now fifty-year-old Gaspar, a subscriber to the journal, reading
this article, would most likely have been reminded of his own bachelor
nights at Clifford Kocqshove, of which he had written such innocent
accounts about being carried around on his chair, abstaining from alco
hol and retiring early to bed. It provided another context for his sou
venirs from Suriname as well. His own conversion into a dedicated
worker for the support of the Moravian mission, with the goal of prepar
ing the slaves for an orderly and disciplined life, provided him with a
new frame of reference to understand slave life and colored his public
writings about his Suriname trip, including his own behavior at a slaves'
dance party. In public he denounced the music that in private he had
enjoyed, and brought home through the obeah and other objects.

T h e F e t is h as M u s e o l o g ic a l O b jec t ,
T h e M u seu m O b je c t as F et ish

"Changing religious identity, itself a highly complex problem of

meaning and action, is always an element of more embracing histor
ical transformations" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 250). This state
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 51

ment is certainly true for Suriname in the nineteenth century, and

the two obeah illustrate this. From material objects imbued with
multiple significance and put to a range of ritual and nonritual pur
poses, they became representations of the everyday life of slaves
bereft of any reference to local religious practices and beliefs. Half a
century later, they reappeared as ritual objects associated now with
maroons. By that time the slaves had been emancipated and Chris
tianized, with the help of the Hernhutters. To paraphrase the words of
the twentieth-century Hernhutter author Van der Linde: The slaves
had been freed from their West-African religious bonds with gods and
deities which prevented them from attaining a true human existence;
the missionaries made them enter history in general and the history
of salvation in particular.37
In the process of making the slaves "enter history", many of their
obeah were destroyed. The two obeah under discussion here escaped
the missionaries, but disappeared from history, to reemerge exhibited
in the colonial museum as fetishes. Here for the first time Europeans
arrived at an explicit religious interpretation of the objects. But their
separation from the calabashes, the kwedjoe, and other objects, and
also from the archival and documentary sources that had accompa
nied them, washed these obeah ashore in the timeless, history-less
space in which the maroons were said to live, with the documenta
tion cards as their birth certificates.
This can be illustrated by looking at the first catalogues in which
the obeah appeared. The 1899 Colonial Museum catalogue intro
duces the Suriname population to the Dutch public, distinguishing,
in the following order, between: Indians, bush Negroes, Chinese, Ja
vanese, British-Indians and Negroes. These Negroes, the catalogue ex
plains, were imported into Suriname as "workers" (the term "slavery"
is avoided). The majority of the Negroes belong to the Moravian
church, but some are Roman Catholic. "In many respects, one can
find substantial progress in civilization among them, since 1863."
The museum catalogue makes no reference at all to other "religious"
beliefs among the Negroes. Bush Negroes, on the contrary, are said to
believe in winti and to use obeah. Taking our two obeah as an ex
ample (calling them sometimes obeah and sometimes "brush," or
"broom"), the catalogue explains that such obeah are difficult to ac
quire, "unless one happens to be around at the very moment the
owner decides to accept the Christian faith."38
The obeah on display were thus presented as the relics of a re
jected animistic religion. They had been obtained from someone
who, with a gesture of relinquishment, denounced his old beliefs and
52 Susan Legene

converted to Christianity. This is a remarkable echo of the missionar

ies' own success stories in their fundraising "Reports of the Heathen-
World," centering around slaves who themselves were said to have
destroyed their obeah in a true act of conversion. The obeah thus be
came symbols of conversion and at the same time "a mark of other
ness," to quote Pietzthe otherness not of the slaves who according
to the museum catalogue had become free Christian blacks, but of
the maroons.39 Whereas the Church had taken responsibility for the
new free workers of the colony, at home, in the Netherlands, slave
society had been ignored by its main protagonists: slave owners,
bankers, and (the majority of the) politicians, and was forgotten as
soon as slavery was abolished.
It was as part of this process that objects from slave plantation
life entered the museum, with their status changed from a unique
into an exemplary one. The founders of the museum were the very
same people who had owned slaves, controlled their lives and col
lected these objects. To them the museum provided a new strong
hold, a place to construct and interpret the world. One could wonder
whether Van Breugel's small-scale drums, his winnowing tray for
preparing cassava, wooden lock, kwedjoe, or any of the other artifacts
in his luggagethat still have their place in the museumcan be re
garded as "fetishes." Each object contains a story, related to the
slaves' material culture and to the collector's perceptions, which can
be distilled from his works and writings. Each object represents a mo
ment of contact between two worlds. And what is more, in Europe,
to the present day, these things have been made to play this "contact
role" as collection items exhibited to an ever-changing public, and
accompanied by continually updated explanations for subsequent
museum-going generations.
Nevertheless, I am here inclined to reserve the concept of border
fetishism for the obeah themselves instead of expanding it to the mu
seum collection as such. As (silenced) ritual objects, the obeahs refer
to a religion thatnotwithstanding the Dutch fervor about conver
sion and the straightforward repression of winticontinued to exist
among Creoles and maroons. It is a religion still practiced in Suriname
and for some decades now in the Netherlands as wellwhether inte
grated with Christian faith or not. The obeah as museum artifacts,
more than the other objects from Van Breugel's collection, are literal
border fetishes. They emerged as fetishes as an aftereffect of having
crossed borders. As such they can inform the conversation about the
effects of European perceptions and representations of Otherness re
garding slave culture and Creole identity in Surinameand also tell us
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 53

something about Dutch identity as a Christianity-motivated civilizing

power.

N otes

1. Thiel 1986, p. 12, 65, 69, 117, 164.

2. Eugene A. Nida, in Smalley, 1978, p. 15, defines fetishes as "objects
in which a communicating power exists."
3. The Frankfurt museum uses "fetish" as a common denominator, ex
pecting that the modern anthropological museum will have left behind the
fetishes' pejorative meaning that such museums formerly had helped to es
tablish. (p. 37-39. See also Clifford, 1988, p. 199.)
According to the Encyclopedic van Suriname, the word obia is derived
from obeye, an Akan-word indicating healer/priest. Thoden van Velzen/Van
Wetering (1988) give the following description in their study of religious
cults of Ndjukas (Surinam maroons): "Obeah or obia is the name given by
Ndjukas to those parts of supernatural forces that have become available to
mankind." (p. 17), distinguishing between various types of obeah, related to
gods, people, objects and ritual devices. B. Thoden van Velzen recognized the
obeah that are discussed here as awidja's. I am very grateful for his comments
on the draft of this article.
4. I take this word from Siwpersad, p. 272. In his conclusion about the
Dutch political debate on emancipation (1824-1863), he states that the colo
nial elite, supported by the Netherlands, promoted a policy to de-Africanise
the black masses, in order to have them assimilated within a European social
and cultural framework.
5. M. Anderson and A. Reeves, "Contested identities. Museums and the
nation in Australia." In: Kaplan, 1994, p. 88.
6. Since the word "biography" has been declared applicable to things, I
suppose that to this end Pococks "past relationship", that is the "specialised
dependence of an organised group or activity within society on a past con
ceived in order to ensure its continuity", could be borrowed as well. (J.G.A.
Pocock, "The origins of the past: A comparative approach." In: Comparative
Studies in Society and History IV, 1961, pp. 209-246). In looking for transfor
mation in the metropole, of the meaning of objects from colonial society, I
follow Edward Said's statement on imperialism and culture. The development
of (in our case) Dutch society in the nineteenth century cannot be isolated
from the emerging imperialism. In cultural and ideological respect this impe
rialism can be traced within Dutch society as well. The ethnographical mu
seum is one of the institutional forms to be studied as such.
7. The involvement of Van Breugel (1798-1888) in the two Surinamese
coffee plantations is well documented in the Van Breugel archives and his
54 Susan Legene

publications deposited in the library of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in

Amsterdam. In 1873 he donated these archival sources to the Colonial Mu
seum in Haarlem, together with his modest collection of ethnographical ob
jects and books on Suriname. Besides, many personal Van Breugel documents
can be found in the archives of the "Society for the Advancement of Religious
Education among the Slaves and other Heathen People in Suriname", de
posited in the archives of the Moravian Mission in the Rijksarchief Utrecht.
Because of their dispersion over two separated archival institutions, the con
nection between the two archives has been lost. Even within the Royal Trop
ical Institute, the connection between the written sources stored in the
library and the collection items stored in the museum depot seems to have
been lost sight of since the beginning of this century.
8. Van Breugel's relevant publications quoted here are: Journal van mijn
vertrek naar, verblijf te en terugkomst van de kolonie Suriname in de jaren
1823-1824, de minuut dag aan dag in de kolonie bijgehouden. (Further quoted as
Journal); Intime berigt. . . , an archive about the plantations, with 14 chapters,
ca. 1806-1840; Dagverhaal eener reis naar Suriname (1842- further quoted as
Travel Account, Breugel 1842a); Lijst, vertrouwelijk geschreven, van Aardigheden
door mi) uit de Kolonie Suriname in 1823 aangebracht (Confidential List of cu
riosities collected in 1823 and brought from Suriname), 1842. (Further
quoted as Collection List, Breugel 1842b); Slavenhouders en slavenvrienden.
Eene stem uit Suriname beantwoord door een stem uit Holland. ("Slave owners
and slave friends; a voice from Suriname and a Dutch reply") Adiussi Massera
[G.P.C. van Breugel] Haarlem, 1857. These sources can all be found in the li
brary of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
9. For instance Travel Account p. 1, 44, 54-56, 76; 59, 66
10. Naipaul captures this same euphemistic use of words in the follow
ing statement by the Trinidad governor General Hislop, made in a conversa
tion with Francisco Miranda in 1806: "Now, General, you have been
following the debates about slavery and the slave trade in England. And I
don't have to tell you that when planters talk about 'property' and 'the free
transfer of property' and 'a free supply', they are simply finding a way of not
saying 'Negroes' or 'slaves'. They are not even talking about land. Most of
them got the land free when they came. . . . " (V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the
World. A Novel. New York, 1994, p. 280). Teenstra (1844) writes that the slave
owner should feel embarrassed to be known as such by his own friends, (p. 2)
11. Intime berigt, staat 9.
12. "Thank God, I am released, after having performed a difficult adminis
tration from 1823 to 1838, that is 15 years . . . " written in Dutch in pencil under
the final letter of the new owner, dated 14-06-1839. Intime berigt, staat 14.
13. The obeah-collection numbers are: H 2965 and H 2966 (length 65 cm
and 52 cm). In this respect anthropological museums and art museums have
different backgrounds, reflected in distinct exhibition styles. Notions of time-
change-progress that are crucial in art history make information about pro
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 55

venance and artists essential in art exhibitions. The exhibition on non-West

ern fetishes in Frankfurt (1986) and on European devotion pieces in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (1994) are two cases in point. See also Leyten,
"Non-Western art in anthropological museums", In Leyten (ed.) 1993, p. 17;
and S. Price, "Anonymity and Timelessness" in Price, 1989 pp. 56 interalia.
14. Thoden van Velzen/van Wetering (1988), Scholtens etal. (1992), S.
and R. Price (1980), R. Price, 1990, etc. Wooding (1972) traces many winti rit
uals to slave societies.
15. The explanation could correspond to the printa-sisibi (a broom from
the veins of palm tree leaves) and the prasara-sisibi (its blossom) mentioned
in Wooding (1972) in relationship to winti in the Suriname Para-region.
16. Thoden van Velzen/Van Wetering p. 37; Wooding passim; Goslings
p. 29; According to the Encyclopedic van Suriname the name is derived from
the western Bantu word mpemba. See also Thiel 1986: 80. Here the white mud,
(German: weisse Flusserde) in relationship to African ritual objects, is con
nected to the water, as the element of the ancestors; Van Capelle, has inter
preted this use of white chalk as a reference to the search for purity.
17. One obeah has 21 cowries, the other 29. Wooding p. 403 and 404
also mentions and interprets the number of 21 cowries for a certain obeah.
Thiel 1986:74 connects the number of cowries on a fetish with male and fe
male elements.
18. Wooding 1972: 431 refers to blue dots on a healing obeah. These blue
dots are related to bakru, a lower bush spirit.
19. I refer to the Collection List 1842b number 28 and 29, p. 12-13.
20. I learned these old Dutch folklore stories in my youth. See also J. and
E. Jans, Gevel en stiepeltekens in Oost-Nederland. Enschede, 1974, pp. 13-18 on
"Donderbezems" (thunder brooms) which have been stylized in protective
ornaments on farms. Years later, in Amsterdam, an English friend gave me a
new broom, when I moved house, to chase away the old ghosts belonging to
former inhabitants of my new house.
21. Collection List 1842b number 3, p. 1. Encyclopedic van Suriname: Ban-
abeki weaverbirds (Icteridae) of which some 14 species occur in Surinam.
22. Encyclopedic van Suriname: Kankantri Ceiba pentandra, L. gaertn. fam.
Bombacaceae. Thoden van Velzen/Van Wetering: Kankantri is the holy
dwelling of Agedeonsu (p. 37); Wooding (176-177) as well as Thooden van
Velzen/Van Wetering (p. 40) connect the tree with reptile spirits.
23. Interesting for our search for the meaning of the two brooms is that
Van Breugel here claims that the blacks used cowries (papamonnie) to prepare
their antidote. He mistakes these cowries for "a certain herb". This misunder
standing, however, may be an indication that he has seen a medical obeah
with cowries on it, maybe a sisibiwiwiri, a vegetable obeah with a brush, used
in purification rites (as described in Wooding p. 140-141). See also Voorhoeve
56 Susan Legene

975: 52 on the Papawinti-reptile spirits. The calabashes are described in the

Collection List 1842b number 23 p. 10 (collection numbers H2552 and
H2553); the kwedjoe is number 36, p. 14 (collection number H 2466). In the
Collection List they are attributed to slave society; the Travel Account suggests
that he took them from a kankantri near Groningen, which implies that they
could come from Saramaka maroons. This, however, I doubt. Van Breugel
would not have been unique in stealing offerings. See for instance Benoit
1839: 55.
24. Van Stipriaan (1993b), quoting among others Van Breugel, con
cludes that during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the white
colonists did in fact know and see very little about the inner lives and reli
gion of their slaves. The slaves hid this from white eyes, retreating into an
inner world; the planters only saw the outward expressions and very often
did not know how to interpret these, or even did not realize that they should
perceive these expressions in another way. To me, however, it is not clear
what we should expect to see within the early nineteenth-century context
about what Van Stipriaan calls the "knowledge" and "understanding" of "the
other". Not only the suppressed slaves, but also their conventional, class-con
scious and authoritarian masters lived both an inner and outward life. A
globetrotter like Van Breugel, behaving as he was supposed to do, thus estab
lished contact with the outer world of the slaves. What he himself made out
of it is also difficult to find out. I am inclined to interpret Van Breugel's dedi
cation, once back in the Netherlands, to have the slaves converted into Chris
tians, as a means to try and establish contact between the inner worlds of
civilized Europeans and uncivilized slaves.
25. See also the Comaroffs' explanation of commodity fetishism, con
cerning the relationship between people as dictated by the relationship be
tween objects, (p. 23)
26. On the plantation map (Tropenmuseum collection serienumber
3728, nr 531, 690-692) I cannot find the tree, whereas the trees that border
the alley from the river to the plantation house all are drawn. But the absence
of the tree on the map does not prove that this "idol" did not grow on or
near the plantation.
27. On banja dance see Voorhoeve/Lichtveld 1975: 15-17; Wooding
1972: 272-274; Van Breugel 1842a: 63.
28. The drums I have traced in the museum collection are a Poeja (num
ber H 2913) and a Kroema (H 2911) Others mentioned by Van Breugel are
Mandron, Kwakwa Bangi, Saka and Fluti negri. One doll was donated by Van
Breugel as well, but still has to be traced.
29. A strong indication of this is that Van Breugel listed, among the in
struments that were played during the banja two Kroema Tiekie. This could
refer to the krom tiki (the freakish branches) of the obeah. Van Stipriaan
1993b discusses the various instruments and dances of slaves, relying on Van
Breugel as well.
 From Brooms to Obeah and Back 57

30. Siwpersad (1979, p. 87) has characterized this period as a turning

pointa period in which slavery was still undisputed, but from which many
social, economic and cultural changes would originate.
31. Here I can not elaborate on this organisation, which in my view, was
initiated by the colonial elite, in order to keep government at a distance by
showing its dedication to prepare the slaves for future emancipation, cf Zee
fuik 1973.
32. Rijksarchief Utrecht 25.246 Subscribers Berigten uit de Heiden-wereld.
33. Berigten uit de Heiden-wereld 1847: 15, 16, 26, 57, etc.
34. Zeefuik (1973: 41, 139) whose study is written within a Hernhutter
theological context, criticizes the missionaries of that time because of their
biblical attitude.
35. Letters between Hans Klint (Surinam administrator of plantations)
and Van Breugel, 1833-1834. Klint, by the way, was himself a member of the
Paramaribo Department of the Society for the Advancement etc . . . [Rijks
archief Utrecht 25.376 EBG buiten Zeist 1833-1824.] See also Lamur 1985:
46-48 on Klints action against missionary work at Vossenburg plantation 1859.
36. Berigten uit de Heiden-wereld . . . 1848 nr. 5: 66-70. Th. Bray drew a
picture of such a scene in 1844, entitled Le nouvel an d Yhabitation. Collection
Tropenmuseum/Royal Tropical Institute; see also Brommer, p. 112. Tank also
published a questionnaire, circulated among absent plantation owners, in
order to get permission from the Netherlands to contact slaves on planta
tions. Opposition against Tank in the colony became strong, however, and he
was replaced by another Hernhutter. In 1848 slavery was abolished in the
French colonies; the communist manifesto of that year stated that proletari
ans had nothing to loose, except their chains. Colonial circles within the
Netherlands and in Suriname succeeded in postponing the question of slave
emancipation for another 15 years.
37. J.M. van der Linde, p. 31-32; like Zeefuik, Van der Linde expresses
his scepticism about the motives of the adherents of the "Society for the Ad
vancement etc.", but he praises the results of the Hernhutter mission.
38. Catalogue 1899, p. 30-31; 32, 70, 75. (my translation). Also Gids
1902: 79 and Goslings 1934: 28-30, 45-46.
39. Pietz, quoted in Clifford, p. 219

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Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies o f Religion: Discipline and Reasons o f Power in Chris
tianity and Islam. Baltimore. (Johns Hopkins University Press)
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Benoit, P.J. (1839) Voyage a Surinam. Description des possessions Neerlandaises

dans la Guyane. Bruxelles (Societe des Beaux Arts).
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Breugel, G.P.C. van (1842) Dagverhaal eener reis naar Suriname. Amsterdam.
(C.G. Sulpke)
-------- . (1857) Slavenhouders en slavenvrienden. Eene stem uit Suriname, beant-
woord dooreen stem uit Holland. Haarlem. (C. Zwaardemaker)
Bruining, C.F.A., en J. Voorhoeve (1977) Encyclopedie van Suriname. Amster
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Literature and Art. Cambridge/London. (Harvard University Press)
Comaroff, J. and J. (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity; Colonial
ism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago. (University of Chicago
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Gids voor de bezoekers van het Koloniaal Museum te Haarlem, met plattegronden
en vele illustraties. (1902) Amsterdam. (De Bussy)
Goslings, B.M. (1934) Gids in het Volkenkundig museum XIII. De Indianen en
boschnegers van Suriname. Amsterdam. (Koloniaal Museum te Haarlem)
Kaplan, F.E.S. (ed.) (1994) Museums and the Making o f "Ourselves": The Role o f
Objects in National Identity. London (Leicester University Press) New
York (St. Martin's Press)
Koloniaal Museum te Haarlem (1899) Catalogus der Nederlandsche West-Indische
Tentoonstelling te Haarlem 1899. Amsterdam (De Bussy)
Lamur, H.E. (1985) De kerstening van de slaven van de Surinaamse plantage
Vossenburg, 1847-1878. Amsterdam (Universiteit Van Amsterdam)
Leyten. H. and B. Daamen, eds. (1993) Art, Anthropology and the Modes of Rep
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Linde, J.M. van der (1953) "De emancipatie der negerslaven in Suriname en
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Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York. (Alfred A. Knopf)
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opvolging van Aboikoni, grootopperhoofd van de Saramaka Bosnegers. (With
a summary in English.) Paramaribo. (Surinaams Museum/ Minov)
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Siwpersad, J.P. (1979) De Nederlandse regering en de afschaffing van de slavertiij

(1833-1863). Groningen. (Bouma's Boekhuis)
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Teenstra, M.D. (1844) Bijdrage tot de ware beschouwing van de zoo hooggeroemde
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3

Your Money, Our Money,

the Government's Money:
Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia

Robert J. Foster

I n t r o d u c t io n : C argo an d F e t is h

Talk about cargo cult(s) permeates the fetish discourse associated with
Melanesia. Lindstrom (1994)doing for "cargo cult" something like
what Pietz (1985, 1987, 1988) did for "fetish"recently traced the ge
nealogy of the term while trying to account for its continuing cur
rency within and beyond anthropological circles. He asks:

Could it be, then, that we are entranced by cargo cults because we

are, at heart, commodity fetishists? That cargo cults are so titillating
and seductive because we imagine the natives to be exercised by our
own secret desires? We want cargo but we know also, at heart, that
the moral connections that dominant capitalist rhetoric narrates be
tween hard work and material success are fraudulent and ultimately il
lusory (Lindstrom 1994: 9).

Lindstrom's questions point to how the construction of and de

light in cargo talk tentatively reveals a range of otherwise hidden
 Your Money, Our Money; the Government's Money 61

doubts, fears, and desires: doubts about the connections between

labor and wealth; fears of an unsatisfied "endless yearning" (1994: 9);
and desires for a world of instant and unlimited abundance delivered
without the necessity of labor. In this view, the attraction of cargo
cult lies in the projection of Our secret fantasy onto Them.
Pietz's work suggests a related way in which cargo cult discourse
sustains an uneasy separation between Us and Them, namely, by in
dulging Our lingering Enlightenment fantasy of a world without
fetishes. Cargo cult discourse validates the conceit of a critical acuity
acquired from living in a world where the real and true value of ma
terial things is self evident and irrefutable. It is this conceit, I suggest,
that organized official cargo cult discourse in the context of post-
WWII Australian colonialism in Papua and New Guinea. And it was
this conceit that, in the context of Australia's role as administrator of
a U.N .Trust Territory, inevitably prompted a campaign of native edu
cation, a process whereby They would learn the truth and so become
like Us.
I begin this paper by first examining some of the means used by
the postwar Australian Administration to educate the people of
Papua and New Guinea about money and wealth. I go on to look at
other subsequent instances of discourse about money in postcolonial
Papua New Guinea (P.N.G.), focusing on the way in which construc
tions of money become entailed in constructions of both nation and
state. I ask: How did the fetish discourse identified by Pietz as origi
nating in the intercultural space-time of fifteenth-century West Africa
erupt in the intercultural space-time of late twentieth-century Mel
anesia? What specific forms did "the problem of the fetish" (Pietz
1985) come to assume for various agents encountering each other
along the final frontiers of European expansion?

My reply rehearses the themes of fetish discourse singled out by Pietz:

the irreducible materiality of objects; the composite fabrication of het
erogeneous elements; the nonuniversality (and hence social con-
structedness of value); and the power of fetishes over human bodies.
My aim is to show how the moral educational projects of first the Aus
tralian colonial state and then the national state of P.N.G. effectively
though differently sustained a fetish discourse through explicit teach
ings about money and wealth. I demonstrate how the peculiar differ
ence between money as an abstract medium of exchange, on the one
hand, and metal coins and paper notes as gross matter, on the other,
defined an arena for contesting and conjoining disparate conceptions
of "the nature and origin of the social value of material objects" (Pietz
1988: 109). In conclusion, I propose how some indigenous Melanesian
62 Robert J. Foster

understandings of money might furnish a critique of both commod

ity and state fetishism while at the same time construing money and
indigenous wealth objects as material media that articulate diverse
value codes.

Y o u r M o n e y : F ea r o f F et ish ism a n d C o l o n ia l E d u c a t io n

Lindstrom traces the first written appearances of the term "cargo

cult" to the pages of the news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (PIM),
more specifically, to a three-sided debate among expatriate planters,
colonial administrators, and Christian missionaries over the future of
the natives in Papua and New Guinea in the wake of WWII. Norris
Mervyn Bird, described by PIM as an "old Territories resident," initi
ated the debate in print with a 1945 article that invoked the govern
ment anthropologist's authority to argue that " 'ill-digested' religious
teaching" was the main cause of cargo cult. The following year, Bird
responded to the letters of several missionaries who criticized the
labor practices of the planters. His letter exposes in all its ugliness the
underbelly of cargo talk in Melanesia during the immediate postwar
years:

My views on the acceptance of primitive natives into a civilised soci

ety are well known, but as Mr. Inselmann [an American Lutheran mis
sionary] has raised the subject, in his letter, I challenge him with one
question: Is he prepared to accept, as an equal in civilised society, the
New Guinea native in his present state of development? Would, in
fact, Mr. Inselmann be prepared to allow the average New Guinea na
tive to marry his daughter or sister? I have asked other would-be re
formers this question and the stock answers are:

Having neither sisters nor daughters the question does not apply.
But would have no objection to these savages marrying other peo
ple's sisters or daughters.
Would not try to influence the women either way, but would rely
on their good taste and innate decency to prevent their making a
decision that they may later regret.
A long and pointless dissertation on the equality of man in the sight
of God.
Ditto on the inadvisability of mixing the races (i.e., the "colour line"
with reservations supported by quotations from the Bible) (Bird
1946: 45, quoted in Lindstrom 1994: 21).
 Your Money, Our Money, tfie Government's Money 63

Lindstrom's (1994: 21) observation is worth underscoring: "Breakouts

of cargo cults and miscegenation are both directly predicted if com
fortable structures of colonial inequality are permitted to decay."
Here surely is fear of fetishism. For like the offspring of a "mixed
race" union, the fetish is composite: a novel identity of "articulated
relations between otherwise heterogeneous things" (Pietz 1985: 8).
Cargo cult and miscegenation are elided inasmuch as both are taken
to be cognate forms of confusion, of radical heterogeneity and unac
ceptable coupling.
If miscegenation described the unacceptable mixture of racially
distinct bodies, then cargo cult described at bottom the transgression
of hierarchically distinct statuses. It is this sort of social confusion
against which educational campaigns about cargo cult were directed,
even though these campaigns often presented themselves as target
ing an intellectual confusionthe presumed incapacity of the native
mentality to sort out cause from effect and so to unite promiscuously
different value codes. Hence, for example, "How You Get It," a col
umn that appeared in the Papua and New Guinea Villager, a newslet
ter produced in English by the Australian Administration during the
1950s for the small population of literate natives. Each month, the
column took it upon itself to answer questions like these:

When you go to the store and buy a packet of tea, do you ever won
der how the tea got into the packet?

Most of us eat rice. We like to go to the store and buy a bag and take
it home. How does the rice get into the store?

Having posed the question, the column would go on to describe the

processes of production that got the tea or rice from India to Australia
and, finally, to Papua and New Guinea. The column apparently pre
sumed that what required explaining to the natives was the unseen
production of things rather than their manifestly unequal distribu
tion. So, for example, the "How You Get It" column dealing with
money explained the procedures for designing and minting metal
coins and printing paper notes. The implicit concern of the whole ex
ercise was thus to dispel the dangerous idea that things, including
money, were not produced, but rather somehow delivered ready
madesay, by benevolent ancestors or by potent magic.
The unarticulated assumptions of this educational effort became
explicit in later joint attempts by the Administration and the Reserve
Bank of Australia to provide the natives in the Territory "with an
64 Robert J. Foster

understanding of the management of money" (Australia 1962: 34). In

June 1961, "financial booklets" were produced by the Bank in English,
Pidgin, and Motu; they were distributed throughout the Territory,
mainly to secondary school students. The titles included: Prices, Sav
ings Clubs, What Is Wealth?, and Your Money. Film versions of the last
two booklets were also commissioned by the Reserve Bank for show
ing to native audiences (Reserve Bank of Australia 1964a, 1964b). Au
diences in Australia were informed of the project by a brief notice in
the government publication, Australian Territories. Here is how the no
tice describes the first booklet, Your Money:

This explains the use of notes and coins in everyday transactions, and
lays stress on the value of the individual's personal savings in planning
a well-ordered and productive life. It also stresses the need for the
health and growth of the co-operative enterprises so widespread now
throughout Papua and New Guinea (Australia 1962: 34).

It is in the attempt of Your Money to explain money to the natives

that one can glimpse the colonial strategy for preventing fetishistic
couplings, namely, the strategy of assimilationof replacing the old
with the new, the primitive with the modern:

In this country, metal coins and paper notes are replacing things such
as shells, clay pots, feathers and pigs, which earlier were used to buy
things which men and women needed. This change has occurred in
other countries in the past and is still taking place in parts of the world
other than Papua and New Guinea (RBA 1961a).

This strategy begins by identifying "money" (notes and coins) with

specific wealth items such as shells and pigs; but having done so, it
then discounts these wealth items as inferior forms of money due to
their irreducible materiality and localized or nonuniversal recogni
tion as valuable.
The irreducible materiality of wealth items impedes their capac
ity to discharge the function of money as means of payment: "Can
you imagine the difficulty of exchanging at a shop or a store a pig for
a radio set or guitar? Even if you could bring the pig to the shop or
store which had the radio set or guitar for sale, the shopkeeper might
not want a pig." (The film version of Your Money includes the pro
tracted scene of a man futilely trying to exchange shell valuables in a
tradestore.) Money, by contrast, is "small and easy to carry" and,
moreover, allows one to get what one desires in a single exchange,
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 65

whenever one so desires. Money therefore reduces the materiality of

the pig into that of the guitar, just as its own reducibility from note
into coin allows it to measure differences between the values of ma
terial items (such as pigs and guitars). Thus, the shopkeeper would al
ways accept money.
Not only would that shopkeeper accept money, moreover, any
shopkeeper anywhere in the country would accept money: "Money
can be used in all parts of a country for buying and selling, but other
things can not always be conveniently used." In other words, money
is recognized translocally; the social recognition of it as acceptable
extends beyond the localized society of the village, the archipelago,
or the valley system. The portability and spatial extensiveness of
money are of a piece.
In the same way, the essential and translocal immateriality of
money makes it a superior standard and store of value. Yes, the book
let does point out how "Money does not decay or go bad like such
things as taro, sugar or tobacco." But this is somewhat beside the
point that money transcends its materiality, and not only with respect
to the convertibility of paper notes and metal coins: "Even when
notes become soiled or worn, they can always be exchanged at a bank
for clean and fresh ones." Thus, money's spatial extensiveness is paral
leled by a deep temporal extensiveness. (It is the space-time defined by
money that practically defines "the country" of Papua and New
Guinea, a silhouette of which graces the covers of both Your Money
and What Is Wealth? But this definition is problematic, inasmuch as
the money in question is Australian money, which was also used in
the Territory from after WWII until independence in 1975; see below.)

Both materiality and locality of wealth items, then, make them less
convenient than "money," and it is convenience above all that ac
counts for the replacement of wealth items by money (a point also
argued by Adam Smith): "Money, then, has come to replace most of
the older ways of making payments, because it is much more conve
nient to use." The evolution toward "money" is thus imagined as in
exorable and natural, a consequence of the search for more efficient
ways of discharging the presumably universal functions of money.
The replacement of wealth items by money is an index of Papua and
New Guinea's inevitable participation in this unilinear evolutionary
progress toward a life of greater efficiency and convenience"a well
ordered and productive life."
The problem in and for this strategy of colonial education lay in
communicating to the natives that the matter of money does not
66 Robert J. Foster

matter (Pietz 1985: 15). In other words, the challenge of colonial ed

ucation lay in teaching a mode of symbolization in which money
could be apprehended as a signifier referring beyond itself (ibid). To
what? Work. Accordingly, the explanation of the "properties" of
money in Your Money gives way to a section called "How We Get
Money." It is here that one can sense the fear of cargo cult/fetishism
emerging anewthe fear that the natives will embrace money not as
a signifier that transcends its materiality, but as a substance whose in
trinsic material properties underpin its efficacy:

You have been told that the coins and notes are issued for the Gov
ernment. You may wonder why much more is not issued and given to
us so that we need not have to work, grow crops, or perform a service
for it (RBA1961).

The answer to this hypothesized puzzle involves revealing what

money "really" represents: work.

When people buy things with money they have earned, they are re
ally paying with their work or their goods or services which are stored
up in the money they have earned.

People who are paid with money are really paid with work and, as we
have said before, money can be either metal or paper, but it still rep
resents the value of the work or goods which people bring into exis
tence by their efforts (RBA 1961).

Accordingly, education about money required teaching the double

lesson that money is a form of wealth and all wealth is not (in the
form of) money.
Both the booklet and the film titled What Is Wealth? are lessons
in a labor theory of value and an ethics of industry and frugality that
seem drawn directlylike the stuff about money's convenience
from The Wealth o f Nations. The film version opens with a staged
scene of natives lined up on a beach, bowing and waving leaf wands
to the sea in an apparent attempt to summon the cargo. Ismael To-
Mata, Vice President of the Gazelle Peninsula Local Government
Council, announces an anticargo message: "This is ignorance and
foolishness. . . . " He goes on to assert that wealth comes from work,
and, explains how he went to Australia and saw that people there
have more wealth because of their work. Thus, in a stroke, this par
ticular labor theory of value takes care of the problems of production
and distribution. The booklet asks: How does a man get wealth? An
 Your Money, Our Money; the Government's Money 67

swer: Wealth can only be created by someone's work. The booklet

asks: Why are some people richer than others? Answer:

Some people in Papua and New Guinea will never be very wealthy but
every person can, by hard work and saving, become better off than he
is now. The man who wastes all the money he earns will always be
poor. The man who saves money whenever he earns some, will grad
ually improve his standard of living (RBA 1961 a).

And so the booklet catechizes along the lines of what Lindstrom

(1994:9) refers to as the "dominant capitalist rhetoric/' narrating "the
moral connections . . . between hard work and material success."
"Why cannot we be given Motor Cars, etc.?" Answer: "You will see
that it costs a lot of money to make a motor car and the people who
buy cars must pay a big enough price for each one so that the people
who own the factories can get back all the money they have spent
[paying for work and materials]." (Note: profits here means "reward"
and payment for "risk.") "Why cannot we make such things as Motor
Cars, Radios and Refrigerators in the Territory?" Answer: "People in
Papua and New Guinea do not yet have enough money to buy ma
chines and materials to set up factories . . . " And so forth.
I will return presently to the implications of the Australian Reserve
Bank's program in moral education for enforcing a particular notion of
personhoodthat of the modern individual. For the moment, how
ever, I would like to concentrate on a tension in the program sur
rounding the attempt to dematerialize money, that is, to render money
as no object. This tension derives, I suggest, from the dissonance be
tween the ideological explanation of money, on the one hand, and the
immediate practical goal of the Administration, on the other. That goal
was to get natives to put their money in one of the four Australian
trading banks operating in the Territory and thereby to accumulate
capital locally for financing the development of the Territory. Accord
ingly, the educational campaign emphasized the virtues of saving,
of "growing" money in a savings bank (see P.N.G.V. 1954: 69). At
the same time, the booklets and films raise the specter of losing
money, especially paper money, not through improper consumption,
but through its material dissolution: "Paper money not put into a
BANK may be eaten by rats or other pests, or, if there is a fire, it can be
burned." Even ordinary conditions might prove disastrous for notes
which "might be spoilt over a long period because the paper can de
teriorate in hot and humid climates." In other words, in order to
motivate natives to deposit their money in a bank, the educational
campaign emphasized the fragile materiality of money. This emphasis,
68 Robert J. Foster

I suggest, potentially fanned the flames of fetishism by making out of

money not a signifier that referred beyond itself, but a material object
that was intrinsically mysterious and potent.
The clearest evidence of this potential is The Luluai's Dream, com
missioned by the Reserve Bank as one of three films made for show
ing to native audiences. The Luluai's Dream, however, is distinctive in
that it presents its case in the form of a dramatic narrative enacted
entirely by New Guinea natives. (There is anecdotal evidence that
New Guineans also collaborated with the film's producer, Maslyn
Williams, in writing the script.) The story revolves around the at
tempt of John, a sophisticated young agricultural officer, to persuade
Tengen, an old untutored rustic and the government appointed
"chief" (luluai) of his area, to stop keeping his money in an old to
bacco tin and instead to put it in a bank. Tengen is depicted as a man
who, rather like Dobbs in The Treasure o f Sierra Madre, is obsessed with
his money, that is, his actual notes and coins. Tengen inspects his tin
frequently; he counts out his money again and again; and he lays
with his money at night.
The climax of the film is a dream sequence in which Tengen's
spirit leaves his sleeping body. This immaterial Tengen runs to a
burning village. An ethereal voice urges him to hurry or his money
will be cooked. But Tengen arrives too late and discovers his house
and money on fire. Waking suddenly, Tengen reports his dream to
John and vows to change his ways. John accompanies Tengen to a
bank in Rabaul, the district headquarters, where Tengen deposits his
money and receives in exchange a bankbook, the use of which the
narrator then explains. The end.
The Luluai's Dream precisely depicts Tengen's money as his fetish,
in the specific sense that Tengen surrenders his autonomy, his self-
control, to the force of his money-objects. Here we encounter one
more of Pietz's themes of fetishism: the subjection of the human
body to the irreducible materiality of the object. The film represents
Tengen's struggle as one of overcoming the influence or control over
his body exerted by a powerful external organ: his money.
Perhaps we can characterize this film as strategic fetishism. In
order to compel the natives to use banks, the film draws upon the
power of the fetisheven if this means suggesting that the matter of
money does, after all, matter. (Likewise, the film depicts banks primar
ily as secure places in which to store money, physical repositories of
money-objects.) In the end, though, Tengen does manage to establish
his autonomy by bringing his money-fetish under control, indeed, by
reducing the materiality of the money-objects into that of a bank
book. This is the trade-off that the film makes: Money's fetishization
 Your Money; Our Money, the Government's Money 69

facilitates projecting the image of a progressive, self-disciplined indi

vidualan image that returns us to the sort of moral education im
plied in the Reserve Bank's program.
Who is the "you" addressed in Your Money? It is first of all a sin
gular you, a you that presupposes a certain kind of individuated, self-
contained person, in short, an individual externally related to its (his)
possessions. It is this modern individual that the Reserve Bank's edu
cational campaign at once presupposed and naturalized in claiming
that each individual's security and status depends upon his relation
to money, not to other people. Consider this parable from the Papua
and New Guinea Villager (1954: 69):

Let us imagine a young man who has just got a job. He works at that
job until he is 50 years old, but he never saves any money. He spends it
all on himself. The time comes when he cannot work. His family have
to look after him. That is very hard on the family, and not very fair.

And consider this advice from the booklet Your Money: "A man with
money in a BANK is a more important man. People know he is a sen
sible man and respect him." Both of these declarations presuppose a
world of individuals defined not through their relations to each
other, but prior to and independent of those relations and hence de
finable only in terms of a common external standard, the standard of
wealth in the form of money. Indeed, there is a surprising openness
almost crassnessabout this state of affairs in the Bank's campaign.
In the booklet What Is Wealth?, it is suggested that if a man "puts
most of his money in a bank, he can show his friends how wealthy
he is by letting them see his bank book." And so at the end of The Lu
luai's Dream, Tengen can be seen displaying his bank book to some
interested onlookers, advertising thereby his identity as measured in
pounds and pence. But the outcome is indeterminate: Does not the
irreducibly material bank book itself take the place of Tengen's notes
and coins as his new fetish?

O u r M o n e y : F ro m C o lo n y to N a t io n

The bank book-a/m-identity card marks one of two moments in a

single strategy of moral education fitfully pursued by agents of Chris
tian colonialism in Papua and New Guinea. It indexes the moment
of individuation, the creation of individuated persons (individuals)
as the primordial units of modern society. The second moment, then,
is that of aggregation, the bringing together of individuals to form a
70 Robert /. Foster

society or "community." This community, in turn, is imagined as a

collective individual, the corporation formed out of many singular
individualssome of whom might be unknown to each other. It is in
this second moment of the educational process that one sees the con
nection between the Administration's talk about money and wealth
and its U.N.-mandated program for nation building.
The Reserve Bank's effort to explain the nature of money and
wealth was bound up with its concern to accumulate capital in the Ter
ritory. Discussions of hard and efficient work as the source of an indi
vidual's wealth often merged into discussions of "community wealth":
"The wealth of any community includes the total of all the wealth
owned by individuals in the community, together with a great many
other things which are owned by the community or the country as a
whole" (RBA 1961b). Such things include schools, aid posts, roads,
airstrips, and wharfs. The acquisition of these things was beyond the
means of any one individual, and therefore required the association of
individuals each of whom would contribute a small amount of money.
Of course, the most usual way of building up community wealth was
through paying taxes to the government (or Native Local Government
Council) (1961b). But other sorts of novel voluntary associations, such
as women's clubs and cooperative societies, were also vehicles for accu
mulation. As the narrator of the film What Is Wealth? puts it: "Small
amounts of money collected together make it possible for a group of
people like yourselves to do big and important things."
My point here is that colonial education conjured not only the
singular "you" in your money, but a collective "you" as well. This col
lective "you" was imagined as a community of ownership composed
of discrete individual owners, such as "a village." But at the most
encompassing level, this community designated the country: "Be
yond the village, we think of the wealth of a countrythings which
belong to all the people of the country. They all share in the owner
ship of these things, even though they may never have seen them"
(RBA 1961b). This country is the collective "you" imagined by the
colonial state. When such imaginings become those of the colonized
themselvesa process that Anderson (1991) has deftly outlined
assertions of Your Money become nationalist counter-assertions of
Our Money. And it is in the context of such counter-assertions that
fetish discourse about money and wealth itemspigs, pearlshells,
and clay potsbecomes transformed.
In the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, Australian notes and
coins (first pounds, shillings, and pence, then dollars and cents) circu
lated in the post-WWII years, replacing the specially minted Territorial
coinage and printed currency in use in New Guinea during the inter
 Your Money, Our Money, tfie Government's Money 71

war years. After the proclamation of internal self-government in 1973,

planning began for the name and design of the future coinage and
paper currency of Papua New Guinea. The then Minister for Finance
(now Prime Minister), Mr. (now Sir) Julius Chan, announced that the
new currency would be distinctly Papua New Guinean, with designs
that reflect "the spirit and feeling of Papua New Guinea" (quoted in
Mira 1986: 139). The following year, Chan proposed to the House of
Assembly a format (denominations, size, weight, etc.) for P.N.G. coin
age and currency that was broadly similar to that of Australian cur
rency, but with significantly new names for the basic monetary units:

I therefore propose that the name of the dollar equivalent should be

Kina, and the name of the cent equivalent should be toea. The word
Kina is found in both the Pidgin and Kuanua languages. In pidgin it refers
to the valuable pearl shell used widely in the Highlands as a traditional
store of wealth. It is probably the source of one of the terms for pearl
shell in the Mount Hagen Melpa language, Kin. The fact that this shell is
traded into the Highlands from coastal areas far afield makes it an appro
priate national name for one of the basic units of our new currency.

The word toea is a Motu word meaning valuable arm-shell. The toea
has had a wide traditional use in coastal Papua for trading and bride-
price payments. One bride-price recorded about 70 years ago con
sisted of 43 toea, three pigs, and 100 dogs' teeth. I am not sure
whether there has been inflation or deflation since then. The combi
nation of these two names should help to preserve a valuable part of
our cultural traditions, drawn from as broad a spectrum as possible of
the whole of Papua New Guinea (quoted in Mira 1986: 140-41).

In April, 1975, the new currency was issued. After a year-long "dual
currency period," during which Papua New Guinea became an inde
pendent state, the new currency officially supplanted Australian dol
lars and cents.
Chan's proposal indicates two ways in which state officials con
structed the new money, and by the same token (so to speak) the new
nation itself, as a fetishthat is, a fetish in the sense of a composite
fabrication, a coming together of heterogeneous elements. First, the
money was to be understood as a synthesis of elements drawn from
different locations within the borders of the territorial state, thereby
expressing both the unity of the nation as a whole and the parity of
its constituent parts. Considerable attention appears to have been
given to devising a monetary symbolism that would mediate some of
the major cleavages emerging within the new nation, especially
72 Robert J. Foster

cleavages between the Highlands and the Islands, between Papua and
New Guinea, and between Motu speakers and Pidgin speakers. (Spe
cial mention also seems to have been given to Kuanua (the Tolai)
speakers, an important and potentially secessionist ethnic group
during the time of independence.) Not only the names of the major
monetary units, but also the iconography of the paper currency was
conceived with this mediation in mind. The back of every note of
each denomination depicts items of traditional wealthcowrie shell
necklaces, clay pots, and so forth (figures 2 and 3). Taken together, the

The front of a K2 note.

The back of a K2 note.

Figure 2. Design of P.N.G. 2 kina note. (Source: Papua New Guinea, 1987,
p. 11.)
 Your Money; Our Money; tfie Government's Money 73

notes depict items from all of the administrative districts (now prov
inces) within the nation.
The second way in which Chan's proposal indicates a familiarly
postcolonial sort of fetish discourse for the nation lies in its invocation

Figure 3. Designs of P.N.G. 5, 10, and 20 kina notes. (Source: Papua New
Guinea, 1987, p. 12.)
74 Robert /. Foster

of "cultural traditions." The following statement of Sir Henry ToRobert,

once Governor of the Bank of P.N.G. and before that a member of
Chan's 1973 Currency Working Group and Manager of the Port
Moresby Office of the Reserve Bank of Australia, makes the point con
cisely:

In preparation for political independence, currency in Papua New

Guinea on 19 April 1975 took on its own unique form and emphasis.
Physically the needs of a modern world and a desire to maintain the
country's heritage came together to give meaning to our notes and
coins (Mira 1986: ix).

The coins and currency of Papua New Guinea are, in this view, seen
as the material embodiment of an encounter between the past and
the present, tradition and modernity. But the upshot of this en
counter is not, as in the colonialist rhetoric of RBA's booklets, the re
placement of the former by the latter. There is no assumption here of
a process of total assimilation to the imported but irresistibly superior
media of modernity. Rather, what is emphasized is the continuation
of the past in the present, the resilience of tradition or heritage in the
modern world. Thus, for example, a grade six school textbook used
throughout Papua New Guinea as an introduction to the topic of
money tells its readers that:

Early Papua New Guinean money is shown on our present banknotes.

The drawings on our banknotes show valuable traditional things that
have always been used as money (P.N.G. 1987: 4).

The point I wish to make in this regard is that the threatening

fetish of colonial timesthe irreducibly material and locally re
stricted wealth itemhas been rehabilitated as an emblem of cultural
identity. But this rehabilitation (or revaluation) is also a form of do
mestication, for the wealth items now indicate not an alternative and
competing value code, but rather a nonthreatening if apparently dif
ferent mode of cultural identity. In other words, what takes the place
of assimilationthe replacement of the primitive with the modern
is juxtaposition, a complementarity of differences made viable by a
new structural equation: Modernity is to tradition as economy is to
culture. Let me illustrate how this trope of juxtaposition makes itself
present in a range of images, all of which play self-consciously on the
visual dissonance of bringing "cultural traditions" within the same
frame as the "modern economy."
 Your Money; Our Money, the Government's Money 75

The following figures are taken from a modest coffee-table book

published in 1970 by Maslyn Williams, producer of the RBA films
and numerous other documentary films for the Australian govern
ment. Pictures 1 and 2 form a pair (figure 4); they are captioned:
"Housewife 1960" and "Housewife1970," respectively. The mes
sage seems to be that a major change has taken place; an old and
primitive version of "the housewife" has been replaced by a new and
modern one in the short span of ten years. Such, I suggest, is the
colonialist reading of the trope, In One Lifetime, the title of the book
of photographs (compare the subtitle of the popular autobiography
of Sir Albert Maori Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime.) In this read
ing, what is emphasized is the process of replacement, that is, the
radical difference between the before and after pictures.
Picture number 3, however, lends itself to a different reading (fig
ure 5). It is captioned: Highlanders shopping in a self-service super
market. Here the contrast is not that of before and after, but rather
between heterogeneous elements of the same presenta contrast
within the now, as it were. It is not a process of replacement that is
emphasized, but rather an instance of juxtaposition. From one point
of view, the photo can be read as a transitional moment and thus
placed after picture 1 as a step on the way to picture 2. But from an
other point of view, the photograph can be read as depicting what
Julius Chan and Henry ToRobert were imagining, namely, the time
less coexistence of cultural tradition and modern economy. In this
latter reading, indigenous cultural practices are not replaced, but
rather repositioned, indeed, reclassified as tradition or heritageas
Culture. These repositioned cultural traditions then become the basis
for defining a unique and distinctive national-cultural identity in a
homogeneous modern world economy.
The ambiguity of picture 3its intelligibility within both colonial
ist and postcolonialist readingsdisappears in the self-consciousness of
pictures 4 and 5 (and, of course, the P.N.G. paper notes). Picture 4
forms the cover of Money, the community life pupil book for grade six
used in community schools throughout P.N.G. (figure 6). A diagonal
line bisects the cover. In one section, there is an image of a woman (as
usual) paying a cashier at the checkout counter of a supermarket; in
the other section, an arrangement of shell wealth items. The cover is a
composite, a coupling of tradition and modernitybut not a promis
cuous mixing: Tradition and modernity each occupy discrete domains.
It is juxtaposition, not blending, that organizes the image.
The same can be said for picture 5, a 1995 advertisement taken
from P.N.G.'s daily newspaper, the Post Courier (figure 7). Here the text
76 Robert J. Foster

Figure 4. "Housewife1960" and "Housewife1970." (Source: Williams,

1970, p. 53.)
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 77

Figure 5. "Highlanders shopping in a self-service supermart." (Source: Wil

liams, 1970, p. 70.)

of the ad makes explicit precisely what is at stake in the displacement

and juxtaposition o f visual markers of local and premodern life: the
construction of a new national cultural identity. Pepsi is not a threat
to Papua New Guinea national culture, but on the contrary an active
supporter of this culture in its sponsorship of the annual Port Moresby
Show, a state fair-like event highlighted by its prize com petitions in
traditional dance and self-decoration am ong emerging ethnic groups.
Indeed, the marriage of Pepsi and "cultural heritages" yields a "new
generation" for P.N.G.: not the once-feared offspring of "m ixed-race"
unions, but instead a nation of Papua New Guineans (rather than
Trobrianders or Tolai) whose identity derives from the ever present,
78 Robert J. Foster

MONEY

Figure 6. Cover of the textbook Money, produced for community schools in

Papua New Guinea. (Source: Papua New Guinea, 1987.)
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 79

rn ee rd ac ri
TH CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION.

rrstmmnpNG

Figure 7. Pepsi advertisement. (Source: Pfl/wa New Guinea Post Courier, 1995.)

infinitely repeatable encounter of tradition and modernity. The na

tional Us that crystallizes from this imagery is indeed a composite
one: not so much a composite of diverse ethnicities"unity in diver
sity/' Indonesian stylebut a composite of past and present, indige
nous and exogenous, traditional and modern (see Foster 1995). Like
its coin and currency, then, the nation of P.N.G. embodiesnow and
foreveran encounter between radically heterogeneous elements; the
nation-form here mimics the fetish-form.

T he G overn m en t ' s M on ey : S tate F etishism in P.N.G.?

The rhetoric of the Australian Reserve Bank's financial booklets insisted

that the notes and coins called "money," because "they are issued for
the Government, . . . are always good." In other words, "the Govern
ment" is the ultimate source of all the money circulating in the Terri
tory (and Australia, too). Conversely, "the Government" is responsible
for collecting a portion of all the money in circulation, through taxes
paid by individuals in money, in order to build up "community
wealth." Money, then, is the mundane instrument through which "the
80 Robert /. Foster

Government" asserts and legitimates its holistic existence and reality.

It is this entity and being"the Government"as much as it is work
or labor that is the something beyond itself to which the material
signifier of money refers. Put otherwise, money is what "the State" des
ignates as its mask, as the material form that gives shape to an insub
stantial but powerful fiction (Taussig 1992).
The grade school book Money likewise deploys a rhetoric that an
imates the matter of money with the idea of the independent state of
Papua New Guinea. In its iconography, P.N.G. currency represents
the nation-state as the totality holding together the ethnic/cultural
diversity of "the country." Thus, the national emblem, a bird of par
adise perched on an hour-glass drum, appears on the front of almost
every coin and every note (figure 2). The backs of the coins and notes
vary, however (figures 2 and 3). Coins depict various faunacroco
diles, a cuscus, and so forth; notes, as already mentioned, depict
wealth items associable with different regions of the country"dif
ferent kinds of traditional money," as the school book puts it.
The exception is the one kina coin, the largest of all the coins
and the only one with a hole in the center, enhancing its portability
by making it easy to carry on a string looped around one's neck. This
coin bears instead of the national emblem a "specially designed fig
ure of a Bird of Paradise [which] is the symbol of the Bank of Papua
New Guinea" (Papua New Guinea 1987: 13). The text book, in a sec
tion titled "The Government's Money," explains:

Every country has its own bank to look after the country's money busi
ness. The bank of Papua New Guinea does this for us. It plans how
much money people will need to carry on the country's business. . ..
All the other banks get banknotes and coins from it.

In this representation, the Bank of Papua New Guinea ("the Govern

ment's" bank?) is the ultimate source of all the money in the coun
try. The Bank is also the storehouse of "the nation's wealth" in the
form of gold (the text book thus includes a photograph of dozens of
bars of gold stacked in a vault). It is the Mother of all banks, the bank
to which not only all other banks, but all individuals who use money
are simultaneously and necessarily connected.
In other words, the coinage and currency of Papua New Guinea
like that of many other statesare inscribed with visible traces of
state. Yet, coinage and currency "work" efficaciouslyin P.N.G. as
elsewhereonly when these traces are erased from consciousness,
that is, subsumed under an implicit fiction that the coinage and cur
 Your Money, Our Money, tfie Government's Money 81

rency as signifiers depend upon nothing (whether labor or the state)

beyond themselves, upon no signified. Or as Taussig (1992: 138) puts
it, "The fetish absorbs into itself that which it represents, erasing all
traces of the represented. A clean job." Under such conditions, the
matter of moneyincluding its iconographyreally (i.e., practically)
does not matter. Under such conditions, the connection between
money and the state goes without saying and so goes unsaid.
Do such conditions prevail in Papua New Guinea? Hardly, I think.
But I don't mean to suggest that such conditions prevail elsewhere,
either. Take, for example, the recently publicized militia movement in
the United States, a complicated discursive field that engages, among
other things, attacks on the Federal Reserve Banking System. In a pam
phlet called Why a Bankrupt America? published by Project Liberty
(1993), the question of what is money is taken up as part of a critical
inquiry into the nature of the Federal Reserve. The pamphlet seeks to
establish that the Federal Reserve is a private company and not the U.S.
government. It also seeks to demonstrate that only gold and silver, not
paper, are money (thereby reviving a debate that gripped many Ameri
cans in the last century; see Michaels 1987, Shell 1982):

Precious metals such as gold and silver have been the most highly
prized means of monetary exchange for many centuries. They are
honest money. By mining the Earth, one exchanges his God-given tal
ents and resources for wealth. That wealth can, in turn, be exchanged
for the goods and services honestly produced by another's talents and
resources.

After citing the United States Code at Title 12, Sec. 152, to the effect
that lawful money of the United States shall be construed to mean
only gold and silver coin, the pamphlet draws its conclusion:

What we really see from these definitions is that paper cannot be

money. What we carry in our pocketsFederal Reserve Notesare
disqualified as money, because they are notes. A note is an IOUan
evidence of debt. It is not money! Why, then, do we call it money?
Have we been tricked?

We have been more than tricked, as it turns out; for close scrutiny of
the image of the seal on the back of every U.S. one dollar bill will re
veal the motto of the devilish conspiracy in which the Federal Re
serve participates: novus ordo seculorum, new order of the agesthe
New World Order of global government ruled by the United Nations.
82 Robert J. Foster

My point follows accordingly: if one looks hard at and takes seri

ously the material form of moneyespecially the statish iconogra
phy of coin and currencythen one can recover money's erasure and
question the connection between one's self and the state. Such in
quiry is happening in Papua New Guinea, where the idea of "the gov
ernment's money" is taken very seriously. But in P.N.G., the main
issue is not whether paper currency is somehow less real or less valid
than metal coinage. In fact, I doubt that this problem has ever been a
problem for most Papua New Guineans, mainly because most Papua
New Guineans have historically understood money (coins and paper
notes) as the material token of a social relationship, a relationship of
power between themselves and some radically alien Other. The first
of these Others were the Germans, who were compelled in 1900-01
to issue ordinances forbidding the use of shell money (diwara) in
transactions between Europeans and natives. Then came the Aus
tralians, who were also compelled in 1920 to issue the Native Cur
rency Ordinance, which stipulated that: "no European or any other
person having the status of a European and any coloured person in
the employ of such European, shall sell, exchange, give or take in
payment, or use as a means of barter or exchange any of the earthen
ware saucepans which are commonly used in currency by the Siassi
group of Islands, nor earthenware articles similar in nature to such
saucepans" (Mira 1986: 29). The Japanese imposed their money dur
ing WWII, and the Australians reimposed their money afterwards. It
is not surprising, then, that I heard men in rural New Ireland narrate
a history of colonialism in terms of currency shifts: First we had
marks, then shillings, then dollars.
During the last currency shift, around the time of Independence,
many people, especially in the Highlands, felt uneasy about convert
ing their Australian dollars and cents to Papua New Guinea kina and
toea. The P.N.G. Government was compelled to extend twice the
deadline for free conversion of Australian money due to the large
amounts being withheld in rural areas (Mira 1986: 143). This wide
spread hesitation to convert Australian currency bespoke widespread
anxiousness about political independence and the fortunes of Papua
New Guinea apart from Australia. It also bespoke the fate of the
newly independent state, namely, to be cast as the latest in a long
line of Others with whom diverse indigenous local populations en
tered into contested relations of power.
Because, then, Papua New Guineans have always understood
money as the index of both "the government's" power over them and
its ability to supply desired goods to them, criticism of the P.N.G. gov
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 83

ernment today is articulated through criticism of its money. Several

New Ireland men complained to me that their money was not as
strong as it was before independence; they equated the diminished
purchasing power of their money with the weakness and mismanage
ment of the P.N.G. government compared with that of Australia. Jef
frey Clark (1997: 81) reported a similar, but more specific complaint
from Pangia in the Southern Highlands: "It is believed in Pangia that
Australian money was made by the Queen, Papua New Guinea cur
rency made by [Sir Michael] Somare [former Prime Minister] in Port
Moresby (people prefer the K2 note because it is most like the one
pound note)." Here the invidious comparison of P.N.G. with Australia
entails a personification of the state with Somare and an identification
of Somare with P.N.G. currency. These equations are not unpersuasive,
given that the recently issued K50 note bears the images of both Sir
Michael himself and the National Parliament building. The main Par
liament building, moreover, was built in the singular shape of a "spirit
house" (haus tamberan) from the Sepik area, Somare's place of origin.
Clark's point is that Pangia people imagine the P.N.G. state as a
classic Melanesian "big man" whom they follow if and only i/thebig
man remains bound by moral obligations of reciprocity and redistribu
tion. My point is different. I want to stress that people in Papua New
Guinea can accept as eminently plausible the claim that money is the
government's money. Indeed, they verify the claim with reference to
the iconography of the money, thereby uncovering a connection that
the fetish-power of money ordinarily obscures. But having accepted the
claim, Papua New Guineans are then free to develop its implications
into a critique of the government, to apprehend the P.N.G. state as an
Other with whom nothing less than an egalitarian, reciprocal relation
ship is morally proper. Hence the consternation of one New Ireland
man at the depictions of wealth items on P.N.G. bank notes. When I
pointed out to him the image of a masked figure (dukduk) from nearby
New Britain and southern New Ireland, he immediately observed:
"that's not our kastam [tradition]." The P.N.G. state, despite its deliber
ate efforts, failed to represent (in both senses of the term) him; "the
government's money" was not, in this instance, "our money."

C o n c l u s io n : N ew M o n ey, O ld F et ish ism s

There are other ways in which to qualify or subvert the claim that
money is the government's money. I conclude by considering two of
them. Both ways recall the critical remarks made by New Irelanders
84 Robert J. Foster

and Pangia people about P.N.G. money in that they take the matter
of money seriously. That is, they reevaluate moneynotes and
coinsand/or wealth items in terms of material propertiesin aes
thetic termsand in so doing accomplish what colonial educators
sought to prevent: They create material media capable of traversing
and articulating diverse value codes.
The first way, which I will call after Nihill (1989) "the contextual
demonetization of money," is illustrated by the ceremonial uses to
which Anganen men (Southern Highlands) put twenty kina notes.
Nihill reports that Anganen liken twenty kina notes to pearlshells
(kina) and use the two interchangeably in certain exchange contexts
in which men accrue prestige. This perceived similarity does not ex
tend to all money, but rather only to the twenty kina notes. First of
all, Anganen regard paper money as "male," and coins as "female."
Moreover, they associate small denominations of paper money (two
kina and five kina notes) with mundane productive activities (wage
labor, coffee selling), on the one hand, and acts of consumption
(buying cigarettes and beer, paying taxes) in which money is "lost."
This association also metaphorically links small denomination paper
notes to women, who grow and sell coffee, and, in the eyes of men,
"eat" cash by channeling it into wasteful consumption.
By contrast, twenty kina notesnew, red notesare unequivo
cally associated with the masculine realm of exchange. They are, ac
cording to Nihill, "like male-oriented groups (clans, subclans)" in
their capacity to integrate "power and value into a single entity
which should then be directed to purposeful" and socially reproduc
tive ends (1989: 153). They are like the intact pearlshell crescents that
men esteem and care for, "applying red ochre to renew their 'skin'
(152). Men display these pearlshells in prestations made in respect of
bodiesprestations undertaken to alleviate illness, compensate
death, or combine a woman's "womb blood" with her husband's
semen and thereby create children. And herein lies the analogy that
underwrites the spectacular substitutability of pearlshells and twenty
kina notes:

The stress on presentational excellence also suggests why the Anga

nen emphasize the newness or crispness of paper money in a manner
parallel to the renewing of shells through red colouration. They may
even go so far as to swap old notes for new at savings banks in Mendi.
Like pearlshells, new notes have an aesthetic quality all their own
which gives their display a value that older notes cannot achieve. An
analogy with human bodies is not misplaced here: tight, shiny skin or
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 85

brilliant body decoration, bright red pearlshells and crisp, pristine 20-
kina notes are all of inherent merit and beauty. (Nihill 153-54).

The display of money thus has an iconic quality to it; the twenty
kina notes at once evince and ensure the ends of social reproduction:
strong and beautiful bodies. Hence, as Nihill points out, the cultural
good sense with which one Anganen man named his son and daugh
ter Kina and Toea, the basic units of P.N.G. money.
All this was probably not what the Australian Reserve Bank had
in mind when it assured the natives that soiled notes could always be
exchanged for fresh clean ones. In fact, the use of twenty kina notes
in Anganen exchanges seemingly realizes the worst fear of the Re
serve Bank: the (noncommodity) fetishization of money. The fetish-
power of twenty kina notes consists in their capacity, like that of
pearlshells, to evince the regeneration of social relations and perforce
the reproduction of healthy bodies. New money becomes fetishized
on old grounds, animated with the life-giving qualities that distin
guish pearlshells as wealth items of the highest order. But this fetish
ization is unstable; for despite their "contextual demonetization,"
twenty kina notes are always at risk of remonetization, of being frag
mented into smaller denomination notes and coins and "lost" in
un(re)productive consumption. The fetish-power of crisp red twenty
kina notes thus depends upon sustaining a separation between two
realms: the realm of socially reproductive ceremonial exchange
among male transactors, and the realm of wasteful and multiple re
tail transactions where women and lesser men circulate dirty money
(see Bloch and Parry 1989).
A similar (though ungendered) dichotomy is entailed in a second
way in which indigenous strategies have implicated state issued
money in old fetishisms. In this instance, however, old wealth items
become (re)fetishized on new grounds. I am thinking in particular
about the famous "shell money" of the people of the Gazelle Penin
sula (East New Britain), called tabu or tambu by Tolai and diwara by
Duke of York Islanders. This shell money has been the subject of dis
cussion by missionaries, government officials, and anthropologists
for over one hundred yearsmainly because it has impressed out
siders as a "true money," that is, a medium of exchange, and a mea
sure and store of value. Its material properties lent themselves well to
all these functions:

Shell money . . . consisted of small cowrie shells (nassa camelus) strung

onto strips of rattan and counted either individually or measured on
86 Robert J. Foster

the body in standard lengths. . . . Continuously spliced, these strips

could be arranged in large wrapped and sometimes decorated coils
containing hundreds of fathoms (Errington and Gewertz 1995: 54).

These same outsiders were equally impressed with the sheer perva
siveness and unambiguous centrality of shell money in the life of the
Tolai and Duke of York Islanders. Neumann (1992: 186) claims that
today not only must shell money be used to purchase magic and
commission dance performances, but also that "At the village level
nearly all other goods that can be bought with kina can also be
bought with tabuwhich makes tabu in that sense the 'truer' of the
two currencies used on the Gazelle." Errington and Gewertz (1995:
54) add that

shell money was the single standard by which not only everything but
everyone was distinguished. The differences in the amount of shell
money that an individual owned and used in public ceremonies dis
tinguished a person of importance from one of mere respectability
and the latter from one of no consequence. Shell money was funda
mental to the prestige system and to the ordering of social life.

Yet while outside commentators have sought to identify shell

money with "real" moneya curious parallel, perhaps, to the Anga
nen effort to identify twenty kina notes with pearlshellsinside com
mentators have sought to maintain a clear contrast. This contrast is
drawn in terms that recall the Anganen distinction between twenty
kina notes and other lesser forms of money:

[S]hell money was frequently described by Duke of York Islanders in

terms of an essentialized contrast to money: Shell money was extolled
as "heavy" ( mawat)as substantial and significantas capable of
generating the activities on which both male and female reputations
were built and social order rested; money was denigrated as "light"
( biaku)as flimsy and inconsequentialas incapable of creating or
sustaining personal worth or enduring social relationships (Errington
and Gewertz 1995: 58).

Here again we see the world divided into two realms, one where
money flits away in the purchase of "easily broken, imported goods"
(58), another where shell money circulates indefinitely, generating
further exchanges. But in this version of the dichotomy, the differ
ence between the two realms parallels a valenced opposition between
 Your Money, Our Money, the Government's Money 87

Them and Us in which TheyEuropeansare construed as being like

Their money: morally inferior.
This particular version of the contrast between shell money and
money emerged out of the long history of encounters between
Tolai/Duke of York Islanders and Europeans. As I have mentioned,
German colonial administrators were compelled to ban shell money
in certain transactions in order to limit their dependence on the na
tives and force the natives into the cash economy. The official annual
report for 1900-01 noted that:

It was often very difficult for the European firms to obtain the shell re
quired to purchase copra etc. In this respect they were completely de
pendent on the natives, and at times the exchange rate for shell
money was forced up absurdly high . . . (translated by Sack and Clark
1979: 220; cited in Errington and Gewertz 1995: 58).

But it is also important to note, as do Errington and Gewertz (1995),

that this history of encounters includes the exercises in colonial edu
cation exemplified by the Reserve Bank's financial booklets. These
booklets can thus be regarded as instances of what Carrier (1995) is
pleased to call "occidentalism," the self-representation of the modern
West in terms of an essentialized contrast with some nonmodern
Other ("the East," though not necessarily in a geographical sense). Ac
cordingly, contemporary Tolai/Duke of York understandings of money
as "light" and inconsequential must be themselves understood as in
dialogue with an occidentalism promulgated first by the colonial state
and then, in a revised form, by the independent P.N.G. state.
Looked at this way, local understandings of shell money on the
Gazelle can be seen, at least potentially, to do two things. First, they
designate shell money as a cultural icon. In this way, people accept
the official postcolonial evaluation of wealth items as emblems of
both "tradition" and "ethnic" identities contained within a unifying
national-cultural framework. Hence the successful effort of one
prominent Tolai government official to stop the export of shell
money on the grounds that it is (national) cultural property (see
Errington and Gewertz 1995).
Second, local understandings devalue European money as an infe
rior form of shell money, thereby inverting the moral of the Reserve
Bank's teaching. Unlike European money, shell money can be dis
played in the form of accumulated coils that are sometimes cut apart
and redistributed in mortuary exchanges that enact the reproduction
of matrilineal social relations. But the devaluation of European money
88 Robert /. Foster

is plausible precisely because shell money has become and continues to

be used everyday in all contexts as a universal currency. Indeed, Erring
ton and Gewertz (1995: 59) report that in parts of East New Britain, it is
now possible to do what the Germans and Australians explicitly out
lawed: pay taxes with shell moneya brilliant assertion of how to
build up "community wealth." The "culturalization" of shell money as
a marker of collective identity has gone hand in hand with its spread
as a medium of exchange into new transactional contexts. And it is
this dualityits suitability for both short term commercial (commod
ity) transactions and long term kinship (gift) exchangesthat makes
shell money superior to European money (as well as both P.N.G. state-
issued money and other indigenous currencies no longer in use). Thus
one of the underlying objections to the foreign export of shell money
for display in European museums and collections was that the ex
porters were "buying large amounts of shell money in order not to use
it" (Errington and Gewertz 1995: 68). That is, the exporters threatened
to fetishize shell money on the wrong cultural grounds.

The Anganen use of money and the Tolai/Duke of York use of shell
money are two versions of how to articulate different value codes
with different forms of one material medium: notes and coins, on the
one hand, coils and "loose" shells, on the other. Anganen reserve
new twenty kina notes for ceremonial exchanges and circulate coins
and soiled small denomination notes in mundane transactions. Tolai
and Duke of York Islanders reserve their precious coils of shell money
for mortuary displays and distributions while they use small strips of
cane or unstrung shells for everyday purchases. Anganen money and
Tolai/Duke of York shell money, in other words, are two versions of
the unacceptable coupling or miscegenation that inhabits the fetish.
They bring together what colonial and postcolonial administrations
hell-bent upon modernization, with or without a nod to local cul
ture, have been at pains to keep apart.
Whether one should regard this articulation of value codes as "re
sistance" is another question. After all, the Anganen use of twenty
kina notes in ceremonial exchanges puts the whole system of ex
change at risk; and the celebration of shell money as a local cultural
icon for Tolai/Duke of York Islanders masks the rapidly emerging
class lines within those "communities." What is certain, however, is
that the colonial encounter not only introduced Marx's fetishism of
commodities across the borders of Melanesia, but also cleared new
grounds and furnished new means for reenchanting home-grown
ideas about the social value of material objects.
 Your Money, Our Money, tfie Government's Money 89

A ck n o w led g m en ts

This paper was written for presentation at the international conference

on Border Fetishisms, Research Centre Religion and Society, University
of Amsterdam, Dec. 9-11, 1995. I thank the conference organizer, Dr.
Patricia Spyer, for inviting me to participate. I thank the P.N.G. Dept,
of Education, the Bank of P.N.G., and Maslyn Williams for kind per
mission to reproduce their illustrations. The research on which the
paper is based was supported by grants from the Australian-American
Educational Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies,
the University of Rochester, and the Spencer Foundation. The data pre
sented, the statements made, and the views expressed are solely the re
sponsibility of the author. This paper is dedicated to the memory of
Jeffrey Clark.

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4

The Spirit of Matter:

On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy

Peter Pels

This essay is an attempt to use the concept of fetish for an inquiry

begun elsewhere (Pels n.d.; Van Dijk and Pels 1996)into the place
of materiality in present-day cultural and social theory. 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 untran
scended materiality and beckoned its students to sojourn in the bor
der 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 "ani
mated entit[y] that can dominate persons" (Taussig 1980: 25). Fetish
ism is animism with a vengeance. Its matter strikes back.
My inquiry is divided in 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 o f matter. Next, Appadu
rai's positive evaluation of the alterity of the fetish leads to a discus
sion as to what extent the fetish is an "other thing" in cultural and
92 Peter Pels

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 ac
commodate the contradictions sketched in the preceding sections.
This theoretical part reflects the way in which the fetish functions to
question the boundaries between things and the distinctions they
are held to delineate (cf. the introduction to this volume).
Abstract theory, however, is never sufficient to counter the threat
posed by the fetish's materiality and historicity. The second part of the
paper, 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 untran
scended materiality of things is historically contingent on the emer
gence 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, the essay doesn't really have a conclusion: It disrupts and
unsettles rather than clarifies. If that lack of conclusiveness isn't caused
by my lack of mastery of these issues (and it may very well be), we can
always blame the fetish. It wouldn't be the first time in its history for it
to be declared guilty of confusion.

M e t h o d o l o g ic a l F e t ish ism

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 trans
 The Spirit o f Matter 93

actions, attributions and motivations endow them with, the anthropo

logical problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the con
crete, 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 mini
mum level of what might be called methodological fetishism. (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 method
ology 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 un
derstanding 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 trad
ing 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 trans
formed the fetissoan object functioning within African trading rela
tionshipsinto the fetishthe central feature of "African" religion.1
This essentialization of the fetish tends to obscure that it was, in a
sense, an uncontrollable object that burst the bounds of capitalist cal
culation. Even though European ethnographers try to bring its hybrid
inexplicability under control by making the fetish into something
94 Peter Pels

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 re
tained 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.
Appadurai's injunction to be methodologically fetishist, there
fore, seems to call for an "abnormal" traffic in information, in which
the norm to be deviated from is obviously given by the theorypro
viding "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 ac
cepted hierarchy of facts and values in social and cultural theory,
which says that things don't talk back. Or, better, that 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 only
understand how human traffic "enlivens" them 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 atti
tude is animist: a way of saying that things are alive because they are
animated by something foreign to them, a "soul" or, in the evolu
tionary anthropologist Edward Tyior's words, "Spiritual Being" (Tylor
1 8 73,1: 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 only possible through an attribution of a deriva
tive agency. In contrast, fetishism says things can be seen to commu
nicate 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, Appadu
rai's social life of things is more properly the life of the ventriloquist's
dummy, a "methodological animism." A call for a "methodological
 The Spirit o f Matter 95

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.
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
inscriptions on its own. In such a view, the fetish would be merely an
isolated, phenomenological moment within a culturally and histor
ically 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).2
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.

T h e F e t is h as O t h e r T h in g

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 determina
tion 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 examina
tion of Appadurai's relationship to the discourse on fetish will show.
Appadurai significantly departs from most uses of fetishism in re
fusing to deploy it simply as "a critical discourse about the false
objective values of a culture from which the speaker is personally dis
tanced" (Pietz 1985: 14, emphasis mine). His call for a useful method
ological fetishism partially reverses this negative judgment. At the
96 Peter Pels

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 valua
tion as something "false." This move can be understood as being
analogous to the ways of rationalizing difference of many anthro
pologies: "this custom may seem weird, but it is not as strange, irra
tional 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 demonstra
tion that a curious custom actually fulfilled an active function in so
cial 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;3 or by Appadurai in juxtaposing the dif
ferent commodity fetishisms arising from Chicago stock exchanges
and New Guinean cargo cults (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 im
portant 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 demystificationrationalizing fetishism by showing it
has a social functionis 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 Baudril-
lard 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 accumula
tion of realized value through capital investments. The last part of the
 The Spirit o f Matter 97

process can be interpreted as the fetishistic consumption of capital by

the capitalist, for it "becomes identified as wealth itself," "the very em
bodiment of desire" (Pietz 1993: 147). This process is, therefore, simul
taneously a fetishization of capital, and an investment of it that may
set in motion further cycles of valorization, realization, and accumula
tionthat 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 capitalism, their
demandwhich 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 "un
mask" the fetishization of commodities (Stallybrass, this volume). 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 de
parture from the traditionally derogatory notion of the fetish is sub
ordinated to a theory that proclaims the opposite: that things are
ultimately and necessarily subject to human traffic. This does not suf
ficiently 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.4 In contrast to the
98 Peter Pels

idolatrous others of Christianity, who were thought to worship mate

rial 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 fetish
ism, 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 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 pro
vided 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 signi
fication by the materiality of the object is not sufficiently recognized
by Appadurai's account of the social life of things, because he con
centrates on the spirit of the commodity, which is its exchangeabil
ity (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 transcen
dence 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 com-
mensurability of a system of human values. This capacity to singular
ize 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 qual
ity that sets it apart from both the everyday use and 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 timebe it an "other" commodity,
like velvet or fur (Freud 1950: 201), lace (Pinch, in this volume), or
blue jeans (Miller 1990). The fetish may be commoditized (in the
broad sense of being exchangeable against something else: Appadu
rai 1986: 9, 13), but even then its system of circulation is different
from the everyday: an exchange of things already used, as with shoes
 The Spirit o f Matter 99

or underlinen (Freud 1950: 201); pawning, as with Marx's overcoat

(Stallybrass, this volume); the theft of a piece of lace (Pinch, this vol
ume). Unlike souvenirs (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, becauseunlike
our everyday mattersits lack of everyday use and exchange values
makes its materiality stand out, without much clue as to whether and
how it can be controlled.

M a t e r ia l it y ?

Thus, we can see that one of the possibilities provided by the dis
course on fetish is the existence of objects"other" thingsthat dis
rupt 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 paper is to show why the discourse on fetish serves
as a continual reminder of that materialitywhy, in fact, talk of un
transcended matter has such a fetish-like attraction in Occidental dis
course. 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 nec
essarily imply that one has to affirm the eventual transcendence of the
materiality of things by human intentionality and artifice.5 Daniel
Miller has argued that there is a "physicality" which carries over certain
forms of signification from one context of human behavior to an
other.6 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 human
ity inscribes meanings differentially. But despite reinstating this pri
macy of human intentionality and artifice, this first step enables Miller
and Van Beek to arguerightlyfor a recognition of materiality in
social process, by systematically treating materiality as a quality of
100 Peter Pels

relationship rather than of things. Van Beek has recently formulated this
in terms of materiality as an "ontological commitment" of human be
ings, their acceptance of the autonomy of the things with which they
come in contact (1 9 9 6 :18ff.). Yet, Van Beek's critique that Miller's the
orizing of a dialectic of objectification addresses the theory of culture
in general rather than the specifically material (1996: 9; see also Miller
1996: 27) seems equally applicable to his own argument, for "ontolog
ical commitment" implies that human beings attribute an autonomous
materiality to a thing, not that 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 "nat
ural" about senses whose functioning is constantly changing under
the influence of developments in human technology.7 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 cer
tain training of the senses and a certain construction of material cul
ture come together to deflect, halt or change the rhythm of an
ongoing social process (Seremetakis 1996). This happens, for in
stance, when the "stillness" of a souvenir or monument suddenly
changes our everyday rhythm, to connect it with a memory or a his
tory that is commonly absent; or simply when a cup of coffee re
minds us of a necessary break in the work process (Seremetakis 1996:
12, 14-15). It also happensand this will become more important
belowwhen 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 subjectthat one should,
in fact, question the slippage from the epistemological to the ontolog
ical 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
 The Spirit o f Matter 101

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.8 It is in this way
that I understand fetishismwhich confers a measure of plastic power
to thingsas providing an argument against idealism. In a Hegelian
perspective, fetishism was associated with sensuous determination,
which could never attain categorical universality and therefore ob
structed 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 honoured with
the name of "religion," just as Africa as a whole could not be admitted
into "history" (Pietz 1993: 140; 1985: 7, note 10). Marx turned this on
its head: Although he, too, identified fetishism as the "religion of sen
suous 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 passionboth of possessing and of being possessed, of
greed and fancyemerges 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 ob
ject 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 pos

sibility brought forward by the discourse on fetish, that to be sensu
ous is "to be subjected to the actions of another thing."
The fetish, therefore, is both discursive creation and material real
ity (Pietz n.d.), 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 sub
ject and thinglike object can be reversed; in which we cannot only
think animistically, of anthropomorphized objects, of a spirit in mat
ter, but also fetishistically, of human beings objectified by the spirit o f
the matters they encounter. The greed or fancy evoked by the fetish
constitutes humans as sensuous, and therefore suffering, beings, as
102 Peter Pels

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
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.83 The fetish somehow possesses an in
tellectual force that makes one wonder whether it is sufficiently served
by a theoretical discussion like the preceding, that turns it into a gen
eral human trait (whether one calls this an aesthetic sensibility, or a
cognitive process, or something else). Such theoretical exercises, al
though 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 en
tail. 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 con
sciousness" (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 paper, I will argue that the aesthetics that produced thepredom
inantly "falsefetish was also the source ofpredominantly "func
tional"commonplaces of Western objectivity like "rarity" and
"fact," and that this gives us a reason why the fetish has so preoccu
pied European minds. So let us shift from metaphor to metonymy and
go back to the period in which the fetish first materialized.

S in g u l a r it y , C h a n c e , a n d t h e S h u f f l e o f T h in g s

The seventeenth century, wedged in between the first (De Marees

1604), and the most widely read ethnography of the West African
fetish (Bosman 1702), was also the heyday of the curiosity cabinet and
the object displayed in it, the so-called "curiosity" or "rarity." I think it
 The Spirit o f Matter 103

can be argued that the rarityin 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 Euro
pean complexion. Since the rarity is an important source of the West
ern 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 relican object with power of its own
and the modern museum object, which represents some broader con
cept or reality other than itself. The rarity substantiates categorical
transformations, things that confuse the everyday, like natural mim
icry, 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 pres
ence of the extraordinary, out-of-place, or radically different. This
sense of wonder was an attitude as applicable to the marvels of nat
ural magic, the meditations of Protestant pietist science, or the nov
elties of exotic artifacts, flora, or fauna.
Curiosity cabinets or Wunderkammem 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 stereo
type, these "not-yet" museums were deficient in order and not as
publicly accessible as one might have wished, yet "in terms of func
tion, 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, or
ganization, 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
104 Peter Pels

private display rather than public education (Olmi 1985: 5-7).9 How
ever, 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
(Bennett 1994). It is characterized by a discourse of representation,
based on the idea that the things displayed "stand for" something
else (Mitchell 1991; cf. Stewart 1993: 152). In contrast, sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets do not display an order or sys
tem 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 taxo
nomic discourse of representation as much as possible, and look
upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Wunderkammer with a
theatrical metaphor, as a place for the production and performance
of aesthetic difference.10
This may be clarified by the relic, for despite their mutual differ
ences, both the rarity and the relic stand on one side of a divide that
separates them from the museum object. The late Medieval relic col
lections 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 correspon
dence 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 per
formance of a miracle (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 ex
plains the presence of relics in a rarity collection, although the per
formance 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 collec
tions did not represent the world because "they ignored 99.9 percent
of it in favor of the singular and anomalous" (Daston 1988: 458), and
 The Spirit o f Matter 105

this departure from the accepted categories of the everyday was an

important reason for their selection as rarities, objects meant to pro
duce 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 col
lection: They were selected so as to "defy classification in principle"
and "break the rules of the normal and predictable" (Daston 1988:
458). 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 atmo
sphere of the classics (Evans 1956); or works of art, for as long as
genres like the still lifeoften depicting raritieshad not yet secured
the nobility of painting (Foster 1993: 255); or the magic of mechan
ical 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 seventeenth-
century English curiosity cabinet and garden were private theatrum
naturae, arranged according to the conventions of the art of memory
(Laurencich-Minelli 1985: 19; also, Bostrom 1985: 100-101; Hunt
1985: 198). These conventions derived from the rhetorical practice of
memorizing speeches by furnishing an imaginary architectural trajec
tory through a "memory palace" with the symbols needed for the nar
rative sequence of the speech (see Spence 1985; 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 dis
play 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 au
dience 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
106 Peter Pels

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)." The Ark and The Globe were "theatres of the world" (Yates
1969: Fucfkova 1985) in the sense that theatre also meant "conspec
tus" or "collection" (Hunt 1985: 197).
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 Her
metic 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 aristoc
racy, or of the scientific, clerical or technical personnel they em
ployed 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 philoso
phers of "universal language" (Knowlson 1975; Slaughter 1982).12
However, until the urge towards 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 sus
picion of the leaders of the Scientific Revolution towards rarity col
lections 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: 164-165; 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:
 The Spirit o f Matter 107

89). The University of Leiden perfected a display thatthough clearly

opposite in intention to the magicians' hubris implicit in Rosicru
cianismdid not in the least undermine the power of the rarity to
arouse wonder: The anatomie moralisee 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 human insignificance (Lunsing Scheurleer
1985: 120; Schupbach 1985: 169). The display was copied widely (Ox
ford, Hunter 1985: 160; Copenhagen, Schupbach 1985: 172). As the
Dutch collector 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 Des
cartes and Spinoza: Greenblatt 1991: 24), such moralizing was al
ready an attempt at controlling wonder's potential insubordination.

W o n d er , F act , and F ancy : T he R arity as F etish

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 experi
ence that seemed "to resist recuperation, containment, ideological in
corporation," 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
108 Peter Pels

one that was also a material reality (1991: 36). Descartes' scepticism as
far as rarity collections was concerned may be explained by his suspi
cion of an excess of wonder, yet he regarded wonder as the fount of all
science (Daston 1988: 459). Francis Bacon suffered from a similar scep
ticism, 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
quandaries that bore fruit in the eighteenth-century work of Lin
naeus, 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). Rarity col
lections, 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 scepticism about the frivolity of the cu
riosities 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 artifi
cial and natural, and between natural and preternatural, and criticize
natural philosophy by asking it to also explain the "singular in
stances" that, particularly in the case of the preternatural, it had de
fined 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 conclu
sions 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" (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
 The Spirit o f Matter 109

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 piv
otal role within an aesthetics of wonder that concentrated on the sin
gular 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 be
tween magic and science or between religious denominations in the
name of knowledge and curiosity (Daston 1988: 455).13 While in the
new science, one could talk of a "new creed of particulars" that op
posed 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 aesthet
ics of the fragment and the quotation that is often subsumed under
"Mannerism" or "Baroque" (Bunn 1980; Olmi 1985: 9, 14). This aes
thetics is apparent in the "metonymic or synecdochic tabulation of
objects" of Dutch still life (Foster 1993: 259); its affinity with scien
tific 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 collec
tion 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" (Foster
1993: 255). Within this 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 domi
nated art history's major analytic strategies (Alpers 1983: xix-xx).
Mercantile aesthetics, whose "ultimate principle of order . . . may
well be the imperial market" (Foster 1993: 259) presents things with
out 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 ethnogra
phies of the fetish and depictions and collections of "rare commodi
ties," his analysis is largely metaphorical, treating the still life "as if"
it is fetishistic. It is as important, however, to emphasize the meto
nymic, historical link between fetish and rarityfor 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
110 Peter Pels

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)while 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
(Williamson 1983). Rarity and fetish are easily confused because
both are objects "close to being sui generis" (Daston 1988: 456). Rar
ity, 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 appear "not alive, not
dead, not useful, not useless," in "eerie animation" (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 trad
ing 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 artefacts. As the rarity collector John
Tradescant asked West African traders, he desired "Any Thing that is
Strang" (Macgregor 1983b: 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 collec
tion. But I am suggesting that rarity and fetish are twinsone
bright, the other of a darker hueborn on the shipping routes fre
quented by European merchants, and christened as either outland
ish fact or bizarre fancy. The rarity was "any thing that is strang";
the fetishaccording 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" be
came 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 "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. No longer serving as an es
cape from scholasticism, the rarity's singularity became suspect, and
redefined as a thing insufficiently controlled by subjective disci
pline. Already in the seventeenth century, suspicions towards the
 The Spirit o f Matter 111

"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 Enlighten
ment 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 nine
teenth century, Samuel Coleridge could describe the often riotous
category transgressions of the rarity and the curio as an "epistemol-
ogy of fancy" (Bunn 1980: 319). "Fancy" was the way in which Vic
torian 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 rigour of contemporary male collecting and its model,
the museum. This "other" kind of collecting was domesticated in
the "fancy fair" (Dolin 1993). Even Bunn, in describing the aesthet
ics of the rarity, mostly adopts a depreciative tone, the style being
one of "bric-a-brac," "randomly purchased knickknacks," a "prodi
gious yet patternless" Baroque (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 (1980: 316). Present-day mu
seologists' 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 seven
teenth and eighteenth century artists and thinkers (1980: 303), that
this disparagement of an uncontrollable aesthetics, builds on this aes
thetics itself. It does not deny its truth as much as it displaces it by
the idealism of an epistemology of classification. The threat of mer
cantile aesthetics may have had to be contained in such a way be
cause "wonder" is such an easily democratized attitude, one difficult
to discipline within any "style" or "taste." To restore hierarchy, won
der had to be domesticated as kitsch, "fancy," or "bric-a-brac," ob
jects collectedat home, by women and childrenwithout 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.
112 Peter Pels

F etish a n d t h e L im its o f R epr esen ta tio n

Thus, we see 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 paper, one might suggest that this is also a step to
wards 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 paper was meant to suggest
that the fetish is not merely a symptom of, but also a challenge 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 un
easily 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 mate
riality. 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 construc
tion. 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 repre
sentation of Africa as false, since it did not and does not accord with
West African practice (cf. MacGaffey 1994).14 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
 The Spirit o f Matter 113

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 some
thing 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 artificecommunication
on the model of human consciousnessa prerequisite of significa
tion, excluding all other forms of natural interaction (cf. Eco 1976:
14-15). Saussure rediscovered this relationship of material signifier
and ideal signified, for it was forged in the seventeenth, and became
dominant by the eighteenth century (Foucault 1973: 67). This emer
gence of the modern concept of the sign is directly related to the sys
tems 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 con
cept 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).15 The modern dis
course of representation, the modern concept of the sign, and the
systems of classification that subsumed the uncontrolled objects re
leased by market relationships, were all products of the Enlighten
ment. 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 fetish
ist 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 do
mesticated form. Yet they are necessary for the order of representa
tion 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 bi
nary model of the material signifier and the ideal signified: that our
114 Peter Pels

only way to know of a distinction between material and ideal, or ac

tual 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 sig
nals a loss or denial. Thus, the fetish shows the limits of representa
tion 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, prac
tically speaking, present. It may also be the first step that makes a
theory of signification possible.

N otes

This essay was written while I enjoyed the hospitality of the Univer
sity of Michigan's International Institute and Department of Anthro
pology 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" confer
ence for their lively reactions to the presentation of the paper, and
Patricia Spyer for her acute editorial remarks. I alone can be held re
sponsible for the result.

1. Such essentializing movements, in which a practical relationship be

tween unequal (groups of) people is translated into an "essential" difference
between subject and object, are constitutive to ethnography. In order to un
derstand its operation, however, one has to acknowledge that ethnography
was a genre of and for colonial relationships from the inception of early mod
ern colonization and trade (Pels and Salemink 1994; 1998).
2. See also Daniel Miller's account of Marx's idea of objectification as
rupture (1987: ch.3).
3. "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 ap
pear to take on a life of their own?" (Taussig 1980: 30).
 The Spirit o f Matter 115

4. "Fetish could originate only in conjunction with the emergent artic

ulation of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the so
cial values and religious ideologies of two different types of non-capitalist
society" (Pietz 1985: 7: my emphasis), that is, the Iberian, Catholic Christian,
and the West African.
5. 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.
6. "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 uncon
scious" (Miller 1987: 99). One might add that objects can also transfer form
and consequently, significationfrom one historically or culturally distinct
context to another.
7. Cf. the changes in human sensory regimes under the influence of
the technologies of the linear perspective, the lens, the camera (Jay 1993), or
the telephone (Van Beek 1996: 8).
8. "Dead" in this context, means little more than "without intention,"
but in semiotics, intention is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for signifi
cation (Eco 1976: 14-15).
8a. 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 no
bility (see Dirks 1992); totem, as a North American term domesticated by
anthropology to denote an improper understanding of the relationship be
tween the human and natural realms; and taboo, as an Oceanic term in
flected to give European languages a nonlegal and nonreligious notion of
prohibition.
9. Susan Stewart's otherwise brilliant observations on the collection
(1993: 15Iff.) 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.
10. This is a paraphrase of Steven Mullaney's description of the curio
cabinet in terms of a "rehearsal" of cultural difference (1983: 42, 48). De
spite a number of agreements in our argument, I have avoided the term "re
hearsal," 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 ab
sent original.
116 Peter Pels

11. 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).
12. Given the general association of magic with Catholicism, Rosicru
cianism might be expected to have found few adherents in Northern Europe.
However, the origin of the term Rosicrucian at least needs to be sought in Re
formation Germany (Yates 1972), and while many Northern rarity collectors
were Protestants (such as the Dutch: Lunsing Scheurleer 1985: 117; Amster-
dams Historisch Museum 1992), they were not necessarily hostile to Rosicru
cian 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).
13. See also Marie Louise Pratt on the "continental, transnational aspi
rations of European science" in the early eighteenth century (Pratt 1992: 25).
14. 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).
15. 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. Stewart 1993: 22-23).

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5

Stealing Happiness:
Shoplifting in Early
Nineteenth-Century England

Adela Pinch

Shoplifting is a fetishist's crime. When those who can afford to pay

submit to the compulsion to steal from a store, they have fallen under
the spell of the object, believing that it holds out the promise of a
happiness that is both below and beyond price. Both fetishism and
shoplifting are ways of casting value differently, as both the fetishist
and the shoplifter proclaim that the object's value is a secret known
only to themselves. Both involve a redetermination of the relations
between subjects and objects, raising questions about how a thing
comes to be legitimately one's own. Psychoanalysis conceives of klep
tomania as a form of female fetishism: The kleptomaniac pockets fas
cinating objects to compensate for a gap within herself she both
knows and doesn't know is there.1 And, as cultural critics have come
to rehabilitate "perversions" as symptoms of culture rather than of
pathology, as ways of knowing rather than as mistakes, kleptomania
has borrowed some of the glamour with which the concept of
fetishism has recently been invested. For Leslie Camhi, for example,
writing about the literature of the late nineteenth-century department
 Stealing Happiness 123

store, female kleptomania is a critical activity, stealing the cover off

the fraud of femininity itself:

It is an entire social order that the female kleptomaniac calls into ques
tion by her actions. It is, perhaps, this very gamble with an entire so
cial identity that compels her, the unconscious need to establish the
fraudulence of inherited wealth and social position. . . . Thus the dif
ference between buying and stealing, or between normal women and
thieves, becomes increasingly attenuated, because the commodities
that are bought or stolen are used to produce and maintain the per
manent fraud of feminine sexuality, the deception of the feminine
masquerade. . . . Femininity is always already stolen, a dissimulated
mask, veil, or fiction of difference that functions, like fetishism,
through the substitutional logic of the same. (1993: 38-39)

Just as some recent theorists of fetishism have revalorized practice of

fetishism not as error but as a way of reevaluating the meaning of value,
so Camhias well as other scholars of thievingredefines theft not as
a transgression against the world of consumption but as that which dis
closes its true meaning.2 Shoplifting, in this view, is shopping's logical
extension. By shopping the wrong way, the shoplifter gets it right.
This essay shares this view, and seeks to complicate further our
sense of what the transgression of shoplifting might tell us about the
happiness of things in a consumer culture. To do so, it focuses on an
earlier conversation about the meaning of genteel theft in England
from roughly 1800 to 1840. This conversation suggests that stories of
shopliftingstories of the luxury good's irregular crossing of the bor
ders between shop and street and homeevokes other borders: not
only the national borders that aided and impeded the luxury of late
Georgian England, not only the borders between genders, but also
borders between social classes. The essay will proceed by describing a
context in which the stolen goodmost prominently a piece of lace
attracted to itself and to the players in its drama a range of emotions:
sympathy, anxiety, contempt, dread. It will involve going back and
forth between things and persons, between shoplifters, shopkeepers,
and the goods themselves, and between real and fictional people. I
will begin with some information about the classification of genteel
theft in early nineteenth-century England, and end with a story by
Thomas de Quincey, romantic literature's patron saint of all forms of
excessive consumption. His wild, gothic novella, "The Household
Wreck," treats the story of a stolen piece of lace as a matter of life and
death, and wonders how we make sense of the material thing.
124 Adela Pinch

Cultural historians have written about the emergence of the klepto

mania diagnosis in the context of the rise of the fin-de-siecle depart
ment store (O'Brien 1983; Abelson 1989). However, the notion that a
propensity to shoplift amongst those who can legitimately afford to
pay might be a moral disorder rather than a crime, a compulsion
rather than a choice, goes back at least to the early nineteenth cen
tury. A stealing mania was codified by a Swiss doctor, Andre Matthey,
as klopemanie in 1816, and by 1830 the concept of kleptomania was
current enough that the British literary periodical the New Monthly
Magazine could note in passing that "instances of this cleptomania
are well known to have happened in this country, even among the
rich and noble" (1830: 15). (The term "shop-lift" itself appeared in
slang dictionaries as early as the 1670's). Early to mid-nineteenth-
century medical literature categorized such instances as species of
moral insanityperplexing cases, in that they often seemed to occur
in persons who seemed otherwise neither mad nor criminal. The sub
jects of the medical narrativesoften, though not always, women,
but always well-to-dooften lamented their unaccountable propen
sity: Things simply seemed to follow them home. For example,

A gentleman, having an independent income of 2,000 a year, was at

Scarborough. In passing through one of the streets, he saw a friend
with his daughter, in a shop; he joined them. The party then left the
shop together. In a short time the mercer waited on the father of the
lady, and regretted much to state, that his daughter had, no doubt by
mistake, taken a silk shawl from the counter of his shop. The father
contradicted the charge, and inquired who was in the shop during
the time when the shawls were exposed. The reply was "no one but
himself, the lady, and gentleman." The shopkeeper accompanied the
gentleman to his friend's residence, in the hall of which he found
the great coat worn in the morning, and in one of the pockets was the
lost shawl. . . . This theft could not have been committed for the pur
pose of gain, nor could he have stolen it for use. (Prichard 1847:
155-56; see also Prichard 1835: 28-53)

So common were tales of this kind that the Times asserted in 1855
that "everyone who is acquainted with London society could at once
furnish a dozen names of ladies who have been notorious for ab
stracting articles of trifling value from the shops where they habitu
ally dealt" (quoted in Bucknill, 1863: 264).
 Stealing Happiness 125

Such anecdotes were most often in the service of the growing

field of forensic medicine, which was charged with helping justices
determine whether these cases deserved criminal prosecutiona par
ticularly vexing issue, because the penalties for conviction for shop
lifting were severe. Until 1820, the punishment for stealing any goods
valued at five shillings or more out of a shop was execution. The
early nineteenth-century campaign to reform the Shop-lifting Act
was waged against a bitter opposition that successfully blocked at
tempts to abolish capital punishment in shoplifting cases in the
House of Lords in 1810, 1813, and 1816; and after 1820 (and after
1826, when further reforms were instituted), the penalty for shoplift
ing even goods of small value was still imprisonment or transporta
tion. The enforcement of these draconian laws was highly variable,
often tempered by the leniency or sympathy of the jury, who could,
for example, render a defendant guilty of a lesser charge by simply
declaring that the actual value of the goods stolen was in their view
less than five shillings. *
It was, predictably, the cases of genteel thieves that were most
likely to attract a diagnosis of moral mania rather than a criminal
conviction. Contemporaries murmured that the rich and feminine
got diagnosed while the poor hung. However, genteel shoplifters did
get convicted, to the pained ambivalence of middle-class onlookers.
Here is Harriet Martineau on a convict of the 1820's:

It should appear to a stranger from another hemisphere a strange

thing that we should boast of our Christian civilization, while we had
such a spectacle as was seen even at a later time than this. An el
derly lady, of good station and fortune, might be seen on the tread-
wheel in Cold Bath Fields prison, in the jail-dress, and with her hair cut
closefor the offense of shoplifting. It is difficult to write this fact; and
it must be painful to read it; but the truths of the time must be told.
(Martineau 1849-50, 2: 84)

"Justice," she moralizes, was sometimes "brought to persons of prop

erty and standing as well as the poor":

A lady was convicted for shoplifting, who actually carried on her per
son, at the moment of the theft, the sum of 8,000 in bank-notes and
India bonds. She underwent her punishment. In this case, if insanity
had existed, it must have been proved. All parties would have been
too happy to admit the plea. It was no doubt one of those cases of
strong propensity for which neither our education, law, nor justice
126 Adela Pinch

makes provision. It is a case which makes the heart bleed . . . . the

wretched woman of wealth suffered as if she had been a hungry
mother, snatching a loaf for famishing children at home. (Martineau
1849-50, 3: 136)

In Martineau's accounts of the convictions of genteel shoplifters, we

hear an uneasy assent. She is indignant when two respectable young
ladies collude with the prosecution and are acquitted (see 3: 137);
yet in the cases of successful prosecution she is mournfully at a loss:
neither education, law, nor justice makes provisions for such cases.
Genteel shoplifting posed an interpretive dilemma.
There are ways, of course, that we can interpret shoplifting in
nineteenth-century England as occupying a space somewhere outside
of crime and madness. We might begin by following the lead of
physician John Bucknill, who started to describe that space in his
own terms in an article on the abuse of the kleptomania defense. Sur
veying the literature on kleptomania, weighing it against the pur
ported frequency of shoplifting-addiction amongst English ladies,
Buchnill has difficulty consigning most cases either to crime or to in
sanity. "But there is another aspect to this matter/' he argues:

The struggle for existence in the middle, and even in the upper classes
of our complex social system, combined with the prevailing fashion of
an emulative and showy expenditure, make the sense of want felt
keenly in many an English home, where no traces of vulgar poverty
are discernable.

Shoplifting of this kind has nothing to do with vulgar poverty, but it

speaks to other kinds of felt indigence, other needs. Pinpointing the
pressures of "emulative . . . expenditure," Buchnill lays the blame at
the doorstep of a society of conspicuous consumption: Veblen avant
la lettre. He goes on with a series of rhetorical questions:

And how are they tempted? How are women, whose education has
been one system of skillful parade, who have been trained to derive a
vast proportion of their daily happiness from that most personal of the
aesthetic arts, the cultivation of dress, how are they tempted to possess
themselves of its material? Are they not stimulated to covet its posses
sion by every ingenious device which the mind of man or of woman
can devise, by streets of gorgeous shops, touted in every possible man
ner by the most pertinacious inducements, and almost persecutions to
buy, buy, buy; so that it has at last become the custom of the town-
 Stealing Happiness 127

bred Englishwoman of the present day to spend no inconsiderable por

tion of her time . . . in the new and peculiar duty of life called "shop
ping." Can we be surprised that when the means fail to gratify the
desires thus stimulated . . . that in some instances the desire of the eye
should prove too strong for the moral sense? It is painful and humiliat
ing if these things are so, but it is not wonderful that they should be so;
and on the whole we can find more pity for the poor woman who pur
loins a piece of lace, without which she thinks she will be absolutely
not fit to be seen, than for the smirking fellow who has caught her in
his haberdashery trap. (Bucknill 1863: 264)

The doctor's sympathy, his refusal to pathologize "the shop-lifting

ladies" (263), his insistence on a social context that turns all women
into thieves and fetishists are all striking; and all the more so for the
ways he anticipates the agoraphobic explanations of feminist histori
ans of shopping, who similarly point to the burdens and restrictions
consumer culture places on women. But it is precisely such echoes
that should make us pay attention to where Buchnill's sympathies
do not lie: the "smirking" figure of the shopkeeper. For it is with this
figure that some of the historical specificity of shoplifting in early
nineteenth-century England can be found.
Shoplifting wasas we shall see in the following sectionsa very
intimate crime. The image of the department store shopper who can
easily pass through the display shelves of merchandise that seduc
tively calls out to heras in Dreiser's Sister Carrieis out of place in
this period. Open shelves were unknown until the late nineteenth
century; a customer's access to all goods, in shops large and small,
was mediated by the shopkeeper behind his (and it often was, even
in women's shops, his) counter. Thus shoplifting involved not a mag
ical encounter between shopper and object of desire, but a triangle of
desire between shopper, object, and shopkeeper. Professional thieves
of Regency England such as James Hardy Vaux prided themselves on
their ingenious tricks for outwitting the shopkeeper; female shoplifts
often pretended to order goods, arranged for their delivery to a false
address, and dexterously swiped stuff off the counter as the clerk bus
ied himself or herself with the transaction. Shoplifting was an en
gagement with a shopkeeper.4
Another aspect of genteel shopping that made relations between
shopkeeper and customer particularly intimate was the credit system.
Cash rarely changed hands; the prestige of the haberdasher, draper,
dry-goods purveyor to the well-to-do depended on his willingness
to extend credit to customers. The wealthier or more prestigious the
128 Adela Pinch

customer, the longer the leash of his or her credit. According to one
historian, "a year was the normal time for high-class tradesmen or
shopkeepers to be kept waiting for the settlement of accounts. Few
indeed, if they wished to keep custom, would dare to send out their
bills inside a year" (Fraser 1981: 92). One implication of the credit
system was that in early nineteenth-century shops, walking out of
stores with merchandise one hadn't actually payed for was the norm,
rather than the exception. In this context, the difference between
shoplifting and shopping indeed appears to be a difference of degree
rather than of kind. Genteel shoppers constantly pushed at the boun
daries of the credit system. Thomas de Quincey, who will soon become
central to this paper, was caught up in a constant cycle of "buying and
yet not paying for." A familiar figure of early nineteenth-century cul
ture is that of the dandy who neglected to pay his bills, and in so
doing, expressed a complex, intimate contempt for the shopkeeper
who depended on the dandy for his status as a fashionable trades
man, and upon whom in turn the dandy himself depended for his
own prestige. The genteel lady shoplifter may thus be seen as engag
ing in an odd combination of intimacy, privilege, and resentment
similar to that of the Regency rakes and courtesans who refused to
pay their bills.5 The notorious, high-class whore Harriette Wilson
recorded in her Memoirs her pleasure in deliberately withholding her
debts owed to one "Smith, the haberdasher of Oxford Street:

Not that I was in any sort of difficulty during the whole period I re
mained with Lord Ponsonby, who always took care of me, and for me,
but Smith's scolding furnished me with so much entertainment, that I
purposely neglected his bills, knowing his high charges, and how well
he could afford to give long credit. (1909,1:142)

Why contempt for shopkeepers? While the answer to this ques

tion might seem obvious, we need to note that the shopkeeper was a
crucial figure in early nineteenth-century political discourse. Na
poleon's epithet for Englanda "nation of shopkeepers"resonated
even with his worst enemies. (Another French observer of the period,
social reformer Flora Tristan, thought the English were a nation of
shopliftersshe was astonished by the existence of an entire branch
of London commerce devoted to the sale of stolen silk handkerchiefs;
Tristan [1840] 1982: 174-77). The same political party that fought
successfully for years against Romilly's campaign to abolish capital
punishment for shoplifting by championing the shopkeepers' right
to protect their property, also demonized the shopkeeper as a figure
 Stealing Happiness 129

for democracy and revolution. Foes of the Reform Bill of 1832, which
enfranchised large and petty shopkeepers, feared that reform would
give the "shopocracy" unprecedented political power. De Quincey's
Tory diatribes in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine raged against their
ascendancy. In an article on "The Progress of Social Disorganization,"
De Quincey sought to determine who was to blame for the social ills
he itemized:

We shall give the answer in the words of our bitterest enemy; of one
who knows us in many respects better than we did ourselves___"The
English/' says Napoleon, "are a nation of SHOPKEEPERS." In this sin
gle expression is to be found the true secret of the pecuniary difficul
ties in which all classes have been involved for the last fifteen years.
(De Quincey 1834: 339)

For De Quincey, the battle against the shopocracy was the new do
mestic war that replaced the war against Napoleon. In "The Ap
proaching Revolution in Great Britain," he positioned himself as spy
on the trading classes, on their ways and their tendencies: "No symp
tom from which their predominant inclinations can be collected, has
escaped me for the last sixteen years, that is, since the general close
of the European wars has left men entirely free and undisturbed for
the consideration of domestic politics." The result of his observations
is definitive proof that "this order of men is purely Jacobinical, and
disposed to revolutionary courses, as any that existed in France at the
period of their worst convulsions." Shopkeepers, for De Quincey and
his Blackwood's colleagues, are driven by revenge, resentment, and
desperation. Close to the bottom of the social scale, they have noth
ing to fear and will take any risks: "but their prospectus in the oppo
site direction, so naturally suggested by each man's ambition and
vanity, seem altogether indefinite. The single step which they can
lose, is soon reascended; and for the many which they can gain, new
chances seem opened . . . by the confusions of revolution" (De
Quincey 1831: 323).6
In this context we can make a little bit more sense of Buchnill's
sympathy for the shoplifting ladies. The contempt for shopkeepers
that De Quincey expresses indicates how resonant this particular class
border was in early nineteenth-century England. The shopkeeper rep
resented not only a particular political force, but also a new world in
which at least the external markers of distinction were truly available
to anyone who could pay. This is the context for the bizarre con-
sumerist/anti-consumerist rituals of Regency Dandyism; and thus it is
130 Adela Pinch

my hypothesis that genteel ladies walking out of shops with stolen

goods might productively be seen as analogues to the dandies who did
not pay their tradesmen. The perception of the shoplifting lady as vic
tim masks and enables her privilege to imagine herself entitled to a
luxury beyond price. Both the temptation to shoplift and the different
languages addressing this temptationdebates about legal reform,
about forensic diagnosis, both sympathy for and outrage at the gen
teel female shoplifters, confusion over victimagecan remind of us of
the ways in which the moral disorder of Georgian and Regency cul
ture had its uses as a method of maintaining social order.

II

In August of 1799 Mrs. Jane Leigh Perrot, a fifty-three-year-old gen

tlewoman, was arrested for stealing a card of lace from a shop in
Bath. Her trial in March 1800, watched closely by her contempo
raries, is best known to us today because Mrs. Perrot happens to have
been Jane Austen's aunt.7 Here is her account of what happened:

It is now five Weeks since I went into Smith's, a Haberdasher in Bath

St; to buy some black Lace to trim a Cloak; when I had bought it the
Shopman took it into the further part of the shop to put it upthis
might have struck me as something particular had I not given the
man a 5-pound note to pay himself and bring me the difference
when he left me I turned from the Counter to the door to catch my
Goodman [i.e. her husband, who was in Bath to drink its healing wa
ters] who in going to drink his Water generally passed that way. When
the Man brought me my Change and the Parcel I left the Shop carry
ing the Parcel in my hand. I went homewards the same way that Per
rot usually came and had not gone far before I met him, we went
together to the Cross Bath, stopt to pay a tradesman's bill, and as we
had a letter to put into the Post Office were going through Bath St;
where I had an hour before bought my Lace, and when we came op
posite the Shop the Woman who had sold me the Lace came across
the Street and accosted me with these words "I beg pardon, Madam,
but was there by mistake a card of white lace put up with the black
you bought?" I answered I could not tell as I had not been home but
she might satisfye herself as the parcel had never been out of my
handon saying which I gave it to her, She open'd it, and there was a
Card of White Edging which She took out saying "Oh here it is" and
returned to the Shop. This did not surprise me as I thought it might
 Stealing Happiness 131

have proceeded from Shop hurry or Negligence, but before we had

gotten to the Abbey Church Yard the Man who had taken my Lace
away to fold up, came after us to desire my Name and place of Abode
as he never had put up that card of White Edging. This alarmed me a
good deal because I had neither asked for White Lace nor had I seen
any such thing in the Shop. . . . On Wednesday following (the 14th) I
was sitting up in my dear Perrot's Bed Chamber when my Maid came
up and said a Gentleman in the Parlour wanted to speak to me. Judge
my horror upon going down to find he was a Constable with a War
rant from the Mayor for my immediate appearance. I went up to Per-
rot... who forgetting everything but my danger got up and attended
me to the Mayor where we found these two Wretches had sworn
solemnly the One to seeing me take the Lace, the Other to finding her
Lace to the value of 20/- in my possessionthis She certainly did, but
how it came to be there they best can tell as the first I ever saw of it
was on the Woman's unfolding the paper with my Black Lace. The
Mayor and Magistrates, to whom we were well known, lamented their
being obliged to commit me to prison on the oaths of these People
they could only act in the capacity of Magistrates whatever their own
private opinions might beto prison I was sent... .8

Mrs. Perrot endured over seven months in a jailor's house, was

brought to trial, and acquitted: The jury, deliberating for only fifteen
minutes, brought back a verdict of not guilty. In doing so they
along with the crowd of onlookers both male and female who wept
openly at the spectacle of such innocence on trialaffirmed her ver
sion of the event. The Judge directed the jury to consider the charac
ter of a lady of Mrs. Perrot's social standing, and the characters of the
genteel witnesses on her behalf, and the prosecution urged that they
consider the likelihood that a weathly woman like Mrs. Perrot would
stoop to steal such a trifle. The shopman, Mr. Filby, and the shop-
woman, Mrs. Gregory, were painted by the prosecution as adulterous
lovers with shady pasts, who hoped to shore up an insolvent shop by
blackmailing the well-to-do Perrots.
Mrs. Perrot's letters are extraordinary. Those dating from her days
in custody before her trial are ladylike and long-suffering; the letters
written after her vindication bristle with an overwhelmingly unlady
like rage at her accusers. She repeatedly stresses her regret that Filby
and his associates cannot be persecuted within an inch of their lives;
not enough can be said about their villainy to satisfy her. Once free
she indulges in fantasies of Gregory and Filby's humiliation: "I own
what partly consoled me for what I had undergone was the delightful
132 Adela Pinch

Idea of the Pillory Exhibition for my pretty pair o f Loversbut my Solici

tor says," she laments, "that nothing can be done" (she was legally
prohibited from prosecuting them). Through her account of her re
sentment of the judgewhom she felt hadn't said nearly enough
about Filby's "vile" and "vicious" natureone can hear the judge's
protestations that indeed he had said enough to liberate her and thus
his alarm at her excessivenessand perhaps at least a doubt about her
innocence. She crudely expresses her wish that her accusers should be
hung: "The more I reflect on the diabolical Set that swore such abom
inable Falsehoods the less I wonder at the Numbers that swing every
Year. . . . Query did he not richly deserve the Gallows?" And she de
sires to know "how can we blacken those People more than they have
blacken'd themselvesthe Man is o ff and the Shop I hear must be ru
in'd" she reports with evident satisfaction.9 That Mrs. Perrot's evident
desire for Filby and Gregory's humilation and extermination might in
deed suggest her own guilt is for my purposes immaterial. If we
wanted to indict her, we would have to look elsewhere, but a skepti
cism about the evidence of emotion should not prevent us from hy
pothesizing about the stability of the emotional ratio of aggression to
aggrieved victimization that would seem to pertain either way. Inno
cent, that is, Mrs. Perrot mobilizes her arrest as an occasion for explor
ing the depths of contempt; if guilty, one suspects, the same balance
of aggression and victimization that her letters express might have
played some role in the deed itself.
But what about the piece of lace that sits at the center of this
episode? That crosses the borderwhether legitimately or illegiti
matelybetween shop and street? For what is at issue in Perrot's trial
is not her possession of the lace, but competing accounts of its trav
els: "how it came to be there they best can tell," as she insists. In this
regard, the trial of Jane Leigh Perrot can be seen as the story of lace
writ small, for the fetishism of lace in late eighteenth-early nine-
teenth-century England had everything to do with borders and bor
der crossings. Borders between England and France, for example: The
Napoleonic Wars suspended the importing of French lace"real"
laceduring much of the period 1799-1815, which, while aiding the
domestic lace industry, made an attachment to good lace an invoca
tion of the tensions among luxury, trade, and politics (Adburgham
1964: 1-11). Itself a border, moreover, lace is a classic fetish-object.
Mrs. Perrot bought the black lace to "trim a cloak"; the white lace
that attaches itself to her is "white edging." Diaphanous, barely there,
both concealing and revealing what lies beneath, lace unavoidably
has the erotic associations attendant upon fetish objects of all kinds.
 Stealing Happiness 133

The historical significance of Mrs. Perrot's adventure seems to have

lodged itself not only in the De Quincey novella to which I will turn
shortly, but also in another Blackwood's story, "The Lace Merchant of
Namur" (1838). There, the erotic fascinations and cultural politics of
lace come together in a silly historical romance about a desireable, se
ductive, French (of course) lace shop-man. On the eve of her trial,
Mrs. Perrot lamented the expense of her case, and professed her in
nocence once more: "This ruinous Expense is what we shall long
feelbut we are not expensive People, and believe me, Lace is not
necessary to my happiness."10 Her joking protestation"believe
me"that she needs lace neither as something to steal nor as some
thing to buy in her new, economically straighted circumstances after
her expensive trial demonstrates the moral anxiety that causes us to
banish the material good from the calculus of happiness. Rejecting
lace's necessity to her happiness seems, for Perrot, to be incontro-
vertable evidence of her innocence of the crime. In her own defense,
in other words, she places this piece of lace squarely in the context of
Enlightenment rhetoric about luxury, value, necessity, and the pur
suit of happiness. However, her declaration has the effect of both
challenging and enforcing our ideas about what a lady's needs and
desires are: Shouldn't what Mrs. Perrot says here go without saying?
Shouldn't it be a truth universally acknowledged that a lady in pos
session of a good fortune, must not be in want of lace? Thus she
expresses an uneasiness that dogs modern consumer societyan un
easiness that finds its home in the concept of fetishismthat happi
ness might in fact be found in the material thing.11

I ll

The narrator of Thomas De Quincey's extravagant and extravagantly

titled novella, "The Household Wreck," worries that happiness can
steal from itself. A suburban gentleman fondly anxious about his
too perfect, too happy young wife, he finds his own happiness a self
consuming burden. "I lived," he confides,

under the constant presence of a feeling which only that great observer
of human nature [Shakespeare] . . . has ever noticed; viz, that merely
the excess of my happiness made me jealous of its ability to last, and in
that extent less capable of enjoying it; that, in fact, the prelibation of my
tears, as a homage to its fragility, was drawn forth by my very sense that
my felicity was too exquisite; or, in the words of the great master,
134 Adela Pinch

"I wept to have (absolutely, by anticipation, shed tears in possessing)

what I so feared to lose." (De Quincey [1838] 1890, 12:176)12

The misquoted Shakespearean phrase, "weep to have," stresses the

fragility of happiness conceived of as possession. It suggests that
the objects of our affections cause us sorrow even in their presence;
the mind's wayward motions lead us indiscriminately forward to
their loss. Once you start "weeping to have," there's no end to weep
ing. Thus, while Jane Leigh Perrot's account of happiness could in
voke the rationality of needs, in De Quincey's understanding, needs
and desires eat away at themselves. The paradoxes of this kind of
having which is also a not-having are revealed by the narrator's com
parison of his "restless distrust" of happiness to that which

in ancient times often led men to throw valuable gems into the sea, in
the hope of thus propitiating the dire deity of misfortune by voluntar
ily breaking the fearful chain of prosperity, and led some of them to
weep and groan when the gems thus sacrificed were afterwards
brought back to their hand by simple fishermen, who had recovered
them in the intestines of fishes. (HW 168)

The possession of goods is terrifying; it is a fearful chain one must

break. One can see why this narrator turns out to be haunted by
shoplifting: His fear is not simply that things may be lost; rather, it is
that they may attach themselves to us in unfortunate ways. The
things of this world have a deadly force to them: In their very inno
cence the gems seem worse not when they've been gotten in worldly
ways, but when they return, purified by the sea, in the guts of fish. I
should add here that De Quincey was a writer who was haunted by
the possibility that, like the Shakespearean phrase he misquotes,
many of his own writerly "gems" were derived from other authors.
Highly self-conscious about literary possession and theft, De Quincey
solved the matter by embracingboth in his literary and in his real
lifea perpetual state of debt. At the time of the writing of "The
Household Wreck," he was hiding from his creditors, living apart
from his children, and concealing his lodgings. Happiness never got
too close; it was always on borrowed time.13
The nameless narrator's fears are realized when his angelic wife,
Agnes, is arrested for shoplifting. Agnes is falsely accused of stealing a
piece of valuable French lace: The malevolent shopkeeper, Mr. Barratt,
has slipped a piece of it into her muff, in hopes of blackmailing her into
sex. The case in "The Household Wreck" thus resembles that of Jane
 Stealing Happiness 135

Leigh Perrot, and W.J.B. Owen has convincingly demonstrated that De

Quincey would have known her story (1990). The narrator himself ac
knowledges that Agnes's story is not an unfamiliar one. At his long-
delayed first meeting with Agnes in prison, his faith in her innocence
wavers as he racks his brain with accounts of genteel shoplifting:

A horrid thought came into my mind. Could it, might it, have been
possible that my noble-minded wife . . . was open to temptations of
this nature? Could it have been that in some moment of infirmity,
when her better angel was away from her side, she had yielded to a
sudden impulse of frailty .. . ? I had heard of such things. Cases there
were in our own times . . . when irregular impulses of this sort were
known to have haunted and besieged natures not otherwise ignoble
and base. I ran over some of the names amongst those which were
taxed with this propensity. More than one were the names of people
in a technical sense held noble. (HW 210)

Shoplifting is a violation so troubling, for this narrator, that it can

only be spoken of in the most euphemistic language: it is an "infir
mity," a "frailty," an "irregular impulse." It is an alien thing that
haunts and besieges its hapless victims. So awful is it that to have
committed a bloody or murderous act would have been better, "be
cause more compatible with elevation of mind" (HW 210). Though
Agnes ultimately vindicates herself before her husband (who is
stricken ill and unconscious throughout her trial, during which time
their infant son also dies of the same infection), the incontrovertable
evidence of the lace "secreted in her muff" convicts and sentences
her to hard labor (HW 188). Her husband and friends liberate her
from prison and take her into hiding, but just as the police come to
take her back, she dies.
As this plot-summary, together with the overwrought, emotional
rhetoric of the passages I've quoted might suggest, "The Household
Wreck" is characterized by striking disproportions both stylistic and
thematic: disproportions between the story's "source" in the real life of
Jane Leigh Perrot and its fictionalized tragic weightiness; between the
story's suburban, domestic theme and its doomed, gothic tone; be
tween the slimness of its narrative incidentone shopping trip, one
piece of laceand its awkward length. Incurably digressive, it is too
long to be called a short story, too thin to be a novella. The slimness of
its incident seems barely able to bear the weight of its baroque prose,
just as the narrator can scarcely bear his own happiness: It is, in one
critic's words, an "elephantine dilation" (Sedgwick 1980: 78).14 We
136 Adela Pinch

might see these disjunctions as De Quincey's way of articulating the re

lationship between modes of representation and the problem of the
meaning of the stolen luxury good. That is, "The Household Wreck"
testifies to the power of the "low plane reality" of things to disturb our
sense of time and proportion, and discloses a formal, narratological
analogue to modern commodity culture's crisis concerning the under
standing of things, a crisis that speaks in the overlapping languages of
luxury, necessity, overproduction, impoverishment, and entitlement.15
This is a project that the narrator ponders at the beginning to the
novella when he muses on how one might fit ordinary, modern
crimes of propertysuch as an allegation of shop-theftinto a sense
of the tragic. His meditations on the fragility of human happiness re
volve around this question. He notes that the "class of hasty tragedies
and sudden desolations" of a commercial society seem to fall with a
sudden, unprecedented speed ("often indeed it happens that the des
olation is accomplished within the course of one revolving sun; often
the whole dire catastrophe . . . is accomplished and made known .. .
within one and the same hour"): If we don't slow things down, we
will miss them (HW 159). Contemplating the effects of this new kind
of calamity both requires and defies calculations of probability; re
quires a consideration of the stage on which we see them, for mod
ern society in its enormity conceals the very tragedies it produces:

The increasing grandeur and magnitude of the social system, the

more it multiplies and extends its victims, the more it conceals them,
and for the very same reason; just as in the Roman ampitheatres,
when they grew to the magnitude of mighty cities (in some instances
accomodating four hundred thousand spectators . . .), births and
death became ordinary events, which in a small modern theatre are
rare and memorable; and, exactly as these prodigious accidents multi
plied, pari passu they were disregarded and easily concealed; for cu
riosity was no longer excited; the sensation attached to them was little
or none. (HW160)

Like an optical effect, the lens of modernity exponentially multiplies

and diminishes its calamities. What the writer has to do, this passage
suggests, is focus an inverted lens on the incident, one that will
blow it up out of all proportion and make it stand alone. That is the
only way to reattach "sensation" to such tales. In order to become
visible and meaningful, what the story of the piece of lace requires
is neither the scale of a normative realism, nor Mrs. Perrot's normal
izing invocations of necessity and non-necessity, nor Harriet Mar-
 Stealing Happiness 137

tineau's pained moralizingsbut a mode of representation that de

fies all proportion.
It may seem perverse to insist on "The Household Wreck" as a
story of a piece of lace. The incriminating frill barely appears; the en
counter in the store, plus the trial itself, take place offstage. Though
only minimally "represented" (in the sense of being named, de
scribed, kept before the reader's eyes), it is the center of the text, serv
ing as the point from which it spins out centrifugally. In this respect
"The Household Wreck" is typical of De Quincey's prose, which usu
ally leaves hard facts behind. J. Hillis Miller's phenomenological de
scriptions of the disorienting, infinitely expanding inner space of De
Quincey's sentences, his preference for a thickening spiral over a nar
rative line, stands up especially well with regard to "The Household
Wreck." Speaking of De Quincey's aversion to discontinuity, Miller
likens the imperative embodied in his prose to the making of lace:

Each man must go, like the lace-maker, with the utmost care over
every bit of the space between "here" and "there," connecting every
point with every other point, and never for a moment allowing the
thread to break. If necessary he must go over the same area repeat
edly, recapitulating it, seeing it from slightly different angles, making
sure he has not missed anything. He must be certain he is "filling up
all those chasms which else are likely to remain as permanent disfigu
rations of [the] work." (Miller 1963: 38-39)

Describing an endless covering over and filling in of gaps, Miller's di

agnosis of De Quincey's lace-like prose evokes the substitutive,
apotropaic logic of fetishism. His assessment allows us to hypothesize
that for De Quincey, the sheer verbal excessiveness of the novella is
in a sense a substitute for the thing itself. Just as the wealth of the
rich men is most reassuring when buried under the oceanand most
terrifying when it returns to the surfacethe valuable piece of lace
that sticks too close to Agnes makes its sense when sunk in an ocean
of words. Wealth and representation do not only function as cognate
terms; the latter can stand in for and stabilize anxieties attendant
upon the former.16
Let me return from the style of "The Household Wreck" to its plot.
Suffering perhaps from my own form of methodological fetishism, I
have allowed myself to construe the piece of lace as the prime mover
of the text. The lace is merely, one might object, a pawn in a human
conspiracy: The evil shopkeeper plants the lace in Agnes's muff, and
the muff is procured by a corrupt housemaid (HW 214). It goes with
138 Adela Pinch

out saying that in its human drama "The Household Wreck" exhibits
some of the attitudes towards the players in the shoplifting scenario
that have appeared in the writings examined earlier in this essay. De
Quincey's treatment of Agnes embodies intense ambivalence about
the shopping/shoplifting lady. She is a wavering figure: In spite of his
great love for her, the narrator literally can't see her straight (see HW
165-67, 173-74, 176-78); and though the story insists on her inno
cence, everything about this creepy narration conspires to make her
seem guilty. Agnes, the suburban shopping lady (the narrator dwells
on her fashionable yet transcendent perfection as she sets off on the
shopping trip to the metropolis where she meets her demise), is con
nected to at least one other lady in De Quincey's writings. She is a dis
tant cousin of the title figure in his armchair-archaelogy piece, "The
Toilette of the Hebrew Lady." There, the Hebrew lady, increasingly
decked out with luxury ornaments, represents "ages of excessive lux
ury," both cultural advance and cultural decline (De Quincey [1828]
1890, 6: 164). And De Quincey's treatment of the lecherous shop
keeper, Barratt, violently dramatizes the venemous attacks of his polit
ical journalism. Discovered to be setting the same trap for another
innocent woman, Barratt ultimately receives at the hands of a popu
lar uprising what the law could not do. He is dragged into the street,
and, as the police stand by, beaten to a pulp: "the mob had so used or
so abused the opportunity they had long wished for that he remained
the mere disfigured wreck of what had once been a man, rather than a
creature with any resemblance to humanity" (HW 232). Barratt lives
just long enough to confess his crime against Agnes. "My revenge was
perfect," are the novella's last words (HW: 233).
But there is a sense in which Barratt's guilt seems strangely be
sides the point, and not simply because he is so obviously being
scapegoated according to the political program described in the pre
vious sections of this essay. Rather, his criminality is rendered a non
issue by the way in which De Quincey distributes guilt across all of
the principle characters. As I've noted, the weirdly morphing Agnes
(now she looks like a child, now like a woman; now she looks very
tall, but really she's of average height; now she is utterly distinctive-
looking, now she could be confused with anyone you see in the
street) seems guilty of some complicity in her own demise. Her hus
band disingenuously refers to her as a "double character" (HW 173).
And he is constantly indicting himself in our eyes, not only in his
own self-incriminations and protestations (162), but more and more
covertly. His relationship to Agnes comes to seem simultaneously sin-
isterly overprotective, domineering, and irresponsible, but it is largely
 Stealing Happiness 139

in his absolute paralysis throughout most of the story that his moral
turpitude seems to lie. He gets fixed to spots (185); frozen by icy ter
rors (179); struck speechless (179); blanks out (190). He shrinks from
sight like a guilty man when the policeman first bearing news of
Agnes's arrest comes to his door (185); immures himself in the house
while a faithful servant looks into Agnes's case; decides both his and
her life are over before he even knows what's happened, and of
course becomes sick and unconscious throughout her trial. This is an
unreliable narrator who is truly unreliable.
In making everyone guilty in "The Household Wreck," De
Quincey has made everyone the same. The characters bleed into each
other, and one slight hint of these floating identifications can be
found in the way the word "wreck" circulates throughout. Does the
title phrase "household wreck" refer to Agnes herself? Or does it come
to attach itself to the narrator (HW 164, 200)? In the last pages, the
shopkeeper Barratt becomes the wreck: "he remained the mere disfig
ured wreck of what had once been a man" (HW 232). At the end of her
life, Agnes and her husband turn out to be actually having each other's
dreams at night (HW 228). Elsewhere in this essay I've noted ways in
which the stolen luxury goodthe transgressive piece of laceserves
to police borders, enforcing the differences (of class, gender, privilege)
among the several actors in the shoplifting drama. But in "The House
hold Wreck," it is as if the consumable, stealeable thing makes every
one the same. As its human partners become more and more corrupt
in relation to it, the piece of lace at the center is rendered more and
more innocent, like the gems washed up on the rich men's shores. Like
those rich men who dread the very purity of the gems to which they're
in thrall, it seems that literature's perception of things' social density,
their ability to explain a social world, is inseparable from a perception
of their asocial purity and deadliness. De Quincey's gothic shoplifting
tale discovers the uncanniness of things in a society that is simultane
ously consumerist and fundamentally antimaterialist, afraid of locat
ing happiness in things: The more happiness one invests in them, the
more they resist the human, sucking the life out of their human part
ners and enduring with an innocent, inhuman persistence.

IV

At the beginning of this essay I alluded to shoplifting's canonization

as a form of fetishism in the psychoanalytic concept of kleptomania.
I'd like at this point to cross out of the world of nineteenth-century
140 Adela Pinch

shoplifting and back into the world of twentieth-century theory in

order to conclude, briefly, with another perversion that can be seen
as expressing a fear that the happiness of things can get too close: a
pathological dread of shopping.
My text is a case study by the existential-phenomenological psy
choanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, about a schizophrenic, Lola Voss.
Among her many miseries and terrors, Lola has a phobia of clothes.
She refuses to board a ship that is to take her from South America to
Europe until a certain dress is removed; she frequently cuts up her
own clothes; and, Binswanger continues, she "continuously wore the
same old dress, hated her underwear, and used all possible means to
resist the purchase and wearing of new clothes" (Binswanger [1949]
1968: 300).17 A chief instance of the latter happens on a trip to Zurich
that Lola is persuaded to go on, accompanied by a nurse from Bin-
swanger's sanitorium, in order to replenish her wardrobe. Upon her
arrival, "she felt happy and at ease as long as nobody spoke to her
about shopping, or pointed out stores where she should shop tomor
row" (LV 275). She is finally persuaded to go into a cheap department
storeand actualy purchases a dressbut only with her eyes closed,
guided by the nurse.
In Binswanger's analysis, Lola's existenceher Daseinis threat
ened by her having become overwhelmed by a particular, damaged,
ideal: that of being perfectly alone. Under the sway of this ideal, Lola
has rendered the world as something that is always threatening to
take her over: " 'world' no longer means a totality of conditions that
the existence has taken in its stride, but a condition definitely deter
mined by the being as something frightful, a condition of hostility,
of something that is, once and for all, hostile or threatening" (LV
337). She therefore must devote her life to fending off the incursions
of this worldliness, and in her fear of being in the world in this par
ticular way has opened herself up to a sense of the Dreadfula fun
damental, existential dread of being at all.18
Binswanger treats Lola's dread of shopping not from a psy-
chopathological point of view which would seek to understand its bi
ographical genesis, but rather from a phenomenological one. He
seeks to describe the "world design" of such a phobia, asking not why
garments play such a role in her phobias, but rather "how it is possi
ble that garments can play so prominent a part" (LV 300, his empha
sis).19 Lola has ritualized all objects around her, turning them into
potential embodiments of the world she fears, and this is especially
true of clothes, because of their nearness. For Binswanger, a disorder
ing of the Dasein has both spatial and temporal components; Lola
 Stealing Happiness 141

seeks to keep the world at a distance, and what is closer to us than

our clothes? Clothes are a worldly shell: They embody "the transfor
mation of existential anxiety into the horrible fear of a 'worldly'
shell" (LV 301). Clothing, the worldly things closest to her, becomes
"actual carriers of the Dreadful" (LV 302).
There are two further points to add here that might make the dis
tinctiveness of Binswanger's analysis clearer. First it is worth noting
that in this analysis, clothing becomes terrifying not simply be
causeaccording to a more familiar associationist logicit comes to
bear memories, though in his analysis this is sometimes the case. It
can be an old dress (such as the dress that has to be removed from
the ship) or the prospect of getting a new dress that can seem too
close: hence having to shop with one's eyes closed. Lola's way of
going into stores declares not simply an agoraphobic asceticism, a re
fusal to know pleasure or to engage in the marketplace. Rather, eyes
closed, she acknowledges things' power. A refusal of intimacy and of
exposure, her way of shopping is the inverse of shoplifting: Closing
her eyes, she suffers herself to assume the status of the object, blind
and unknowing, not only so that she won't see the things for sale,
but also so that they won't see her. She may not wish to take or buy
them, but she knows they may be wishing to steal her.
Second, the specificity of the clothing phobia has not only to do
with its spatial dimensionclothing's proximitybut like many of
Lola's phobias it has a linguistic dimension as well. In German, Bin
swanger's translator points out, " 'unbearable' and 'unwearable' are
the same word" (LV 312). The unwearable is exactly the name of the
Dreadful in this case. Thus Lola tries to get rid of the unbearableness
of the world by declaring clothes unwearable: cutting them up, refus
ing underwear, refusing to shop.
But if the unwearable, unshoppable clothes embody the unbear
able Dreadful, Lola also weaves out of her clothing taboos a kind of de
fense against its incursions. Garments are a shell that both infects and
protects: She "wears the same dress for a long time, enters the sanato
rium without underwear, and surrounds the buying and wearing of a
new dress with a network of safeguards against the breakthrough of
the Dreadful." What all of her safeguards and rituals mean is that "she
succeeds in wresting from the intangible, uncanny Dreadful a person
like character, a personification of a fate that proceeds according to
predictable intentions, that warns or encourages her and thus saves
her from being totally delivered to the Dreadful in its naked uncanni
ness" (LV 303, 302). Lola is able to transform an existential anxiety
into a battle with clothes, making it more bearable, or wearable.
142 Adela Pinch

It might be difficult to bring some of the terms that surrounded

the luxury good earlier in this papernecessity, happiness, valueto
bear on the case of Lola Voss: If it is clear that things could not have
brought happiness to such a person, it's clear that they sometimes
brought her terror, or respite. Further, it may seem completely strange
to try to think together a historical person speaking for herself (Mrs.
Jane Leigh Perrot), a figure in a gothic tale (Agnes from "The House
hold Wreck"), and a person described in a psychoanalytic case study.
But "The Case of Lola Voss" could be seen as confirming the point De
Quincey was in effect making about Mrs. Perrot: that in a modern, af
fluent society, the differences between luxury and necessity become
blurry, and other senses of impoverishment or need besides that of
real material want come to play in our relationships to things. It
might suggest to us that when a Mrs. Perrot says that lace is not nec
essary to her happiness, her statement is, as I also tried to suggest ear
lier, neither mere antimaterialism, nor simple agoraphobia. Against
the background of Binswanger's description of Lola Voss's existence,
the thematics of things getting too closelace that winds up, to ones
horror, unaccountably on one's person, gems that return in the guts
of fishthat we've seen in the shoplifting stories might appear as in
cursions of the Dreadful, of the worldliness of things taking over.
While I wouldn't want to push these analogies very far at all, I do
want to suggest that we need not banish from our efforts at a histori
cal understanding of the emotions elicited by things, a phenomeno
logical or psychoanalytic understanding of their powers. Refusing to
do so might help us to explain the power of things without explain
ing it away.

N otes

My thanks to Austin Booth for her assistance with the research for
this paper; to the Program in Women's Studies, University of Michi
gan, for funding this research; and to William Galperin, Don Herzog,
Deidre Lynch, and Patricia Spyer for their comments.

1. See Karl Abraham: "So-called kleptomania is often traceable to the

fact that a child feels injured or neglected in respect to proofs of love. . . . It
procures a substitute pleasure for the lost pleasure, and at the same time takes
revenge on those who have caused the supposed injustice. Psycho-analysis
shows that in the unconscious of our patients there exist the same impulses
to take forcible possession of the 'gift' which has not been received" ([1920]
1949: 355). See also Zavitzianos 1971; Kohon 1987. Louise Kaplan revises the
 Stealing Happiness 143

kleptomania/penis envy thesis, arguing that kleptomania and fetishism in

women can be responses to a whole variety of absences and losses (1991:
284-320).
2. On the revalorization of fetishism, see for example, Kofman 1981;
Schor 1986; Apter 1991; Cvetkovich 1992; and Pinch 1998. Historical studies
of theft as a means of exploring the culture of consumerism include O'Brien
1983; Abelson 1989; and Lemire 1990.
3. See, for example, the Newgate Calendar's account of the conviction
in 1810 of Mary Jones and Elizabeth Paine, who appeared to be career
shoplifters, of stealing twelve pairs of stockings worth four pounds, eight
shillings, which concludes by reporting the officer's comment that "it was a
great stretch of the jury's humanity that they were not capitally convicted."
They were transported (1824-28: 5: 71-72). On shoplifting law, see Radzi-
nowicz 1948; MacKinnon 1937: 32-50. The leading figure in the campaign to
reform the Shop-Lifting Act was Sir Samuel Romilly (Romilly 1810; 1840).
4. On women shopkeepers in early nineteenth-century England, see
Adburgham 1964: 25-32; for the tricks of the professional shoplifter, see Vaux
1819. The nature of shops and shopkeeping in England during the period
covered by this paper is subject to some historical debate. While some histo
rians of consumption have argued that modern innovations in retailwin
dow display, advertising, fixed prices on merchandise tickets, a preference for
"ready money" over creditwere not significantly put into place until the
mid-nineteenth century (or at least after 1815), others have argued that
many if not most of these changes had already begun in metropolitan, high-
class shops in the eighteenth century. See, in addition to Adburgham, Davis
1966; McKendrick et al. 1982; Chung & Mui 1989; Alexander 1970; Winstan-
ley 1983.
5. On the "system of credit" and its susceptibility to corruption, see
Wade 1829: 125-27. On De Quincey and debt, see Lindop 1981: 380. On the
cultural politics of Regency Dandyism, see Moers 1960; Low 1977. Running
up debt could be a woman's weapon in her intimate war with a cheap hus
band, because until the Married Women's Property Act of 1870, married
women could not be sued for delinquent debts.
6. On the political influence and interests of urban shopkeepers, Win-
stanley 1983. My argument about shopkeepers is indebted to Don Herzog's
study of the politics of contempt in England, 1789-1832 (Herzog 1996; 1998).
7. An extensive modern account of Jane Leigh Perrot's trial can be
found in MacKinnon 1937, which reprints one of several contemporary ac
counts, The Trial o f fane Leigh Perrot. . . Charged With Stealing a Card o f Lace
(Taunton, 1800). Copeland (1995) discusses the case briefly. Armed with the
most revelatory investigation of the episode to date, Galperin (n.d.) uses Jane
Austen's non-response to her aunt's trial as a starting point for an analysis of
the politics of Austen's representational practices.
144 Adela Pinch

8. Jane Leigh Perrot to Montague Cholmeley, September 11, 1799, in

Austen-Leigh 1942: 183-85.
9. Jane Leigh Perrot to Montague Cholmeley, April 1, 1800; April 8,
1800; April 14; 1800; in Austen-Leigh 1942: 207, 208, 214, 218-19. Mrs. Per-
rot's counsel, Joseph Jekyll, confided later that he suspected that she was like
other genteel women "who frequent bazaars and mistake other people's prop
erty for their own." For this and other evidence that Perrot may have been
guilty, see Galperin (n.d.).
10. Jane Leigh Perrot to Montague Cholmeley, September 11, 1799, in
Austen-Leigh 1942: 183. Contemporary accounts of her trial, however, do
suggest that she was a woman who cared about dress, describing in approv
ing detail her elegant attire in the courtroom, including (of course) the "black
lace veil, which was thrown up over her head" ("Account of the Trial of Mrs.
Leigh Perrot": 171).
11. The literature on the politics of "luxury" in the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries is extensive; see Sekora 1977. The word "fetish" had come to
be used to refer to ordinary household luxuries at least by the 1850%* see
Hollingshead 1858.
12. In subsequent references, this text will be indicated by the abbrevia
tion HW and page number.
13. The passage De Quincey quotes is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 64:
"Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my
love away. / This thought is as a death, which cannot choose / But weep to
have that which it fears to lose." On De Quincey and debt, see Lindop 1981;
Hubbard 1993; McDonagh 1994: 42-65. On De Quincey as a kind of literary
pick-pocket, see Clej 1995: 233.
14. While "The Household Wreck" has received some passing attention
from De Quincey's excellent recent critics, none have treated it as a story
about what it is about: an accusation of shoplifting. Sedgwick (1980) treats
the shopping episode merely as a way to get to the story's final scenes of im
prisonment and violence. McDonagh (1995) focuses on the story's exposition
of the structural vulnerability of the domestic sphere and the anxieties that
attend woman's entry into the marketplace, as does Leighton (1992). Lindop
(1981) attributes the affects of the story to De Quincey's feelings of guilt after
the death of his wife, Margaret, in 1837. A number of readings, most bril
liantly and complexly Barrell (1991), have linked some motifs from the story
to the scene of De Quincey's sister Elizabeth's childhood death, which rever
berates throughout his writing.
15. "Low plane reality": Bryson 1990: 14 and ff. I am indebted to
Bryson's use of this phrase by which he designates the material, "authenti
cally self-determining" (13) nature and slowness of the forms of everyday life
and in particular the pressures these things put on modes of representation.
 Stealing Happiness 145

16. See Bryson (1990: 52). My point in this paragraph could be con
firmed by studying the place of De Quincey's favorite object of luxury con
sumption: the supplemental relation, that is, between language and opium.
On lace as a figure for language and on both as luxuries that can be hoarded
or amassed, compare Samuel Johnson: "Greek, Sir . . . is like lace; every man
gets as much of it as he can" (Boswell 1980: 1081).
17. In subsequent references this text will be indicated by the abbrevia
tion LV and page number.
18. Binswanger tends to use "the Dreadful" and "the Uncanny" almost
synonymously, but he distinguishes his use of "Uncanny" from that of Freud,
for whom the uncanny came specifically to refer to feelings arising from rep
etition and the return of the repressed. Binswanger preferred to return to
Schelling's definition"anything which ought to remain in secrecy and ob
scurity and has become manifest is known as uncanny"and believed that
the uncanny pointed to an originary, existential dread (LV 306-7).
19. In contrast see Freud's approach, in his early Project for a Scientific
Psychology, to a shopping phobia in his patient Emma Eckstein, for whom a
fear of going into a shop alone is ultimately connected to an experience or
fantasy of having been sexually molested by a shopkeeper as a child (Freud
[1895] 1966: 353-56). Thanks to Professor H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen for
bringing this case to my attention.

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6

The Tooth of Time, or Taking a Look

at the "Look" of Clothing in
Late Nineteenth-Century Aru

Patricia Spyer

At the height of its power and imperial glory1a moment that some
in Holland still like to recall as a time in which "something great was
done" (er werd watgroots vericht)2the former Netherlands East Indies
came to be refered to with increasing familiarity by the Dutch as an
"emerald girdle" (gordel van smaragd). Although the immediate refer
ent of this precious chain was the glittering band of glassy green is
lands that trace out an arch(ipelago) across the great Malay Sea, a
more fitting description could hardly have been found for the close
link between conquest, clothing, and booty, or between the fashion
ing of gendered subjects and imperial design. In studies of colonial
ism, sexuality, and subject formation, much has been made of the
capacity of cloth to embrace, shape, and subjugate persons and pop
ulationswith special attention usually paid to the so-called "civiliz
ing" import of European forms of dress and comportment (Cohn
1989; Murra 1989).
If cloth had a particular role to fulfill abroad in the elevation of
colonial subjects to the heights of European civilization, at home and
 The Tooth o f Time 151

especially as the nineteenth century progressed, it had also come into

its own. Draperies, carpets, and fabrics with heavy folds and multiple
accoutrements wrapped and sheltered an increasingly private and
prosperous bourgeois world. In France, as most elsewhere, this was
"the age of the tapissier," "the heyday of trimming," and the day that
the tassel can be said to have "arrived" (Corbin 1990: 369). In the Aru
Islands on the fringes of the fashionable world in what is today east
ern Indonesia, this was also the time when feathers of the famed and
Greater Bird of Paradise were exportedespecially to Francein un
precedented numbers. It was simultaneously the highpoint of Euro
pean travel to these far-flung parts. What such meant in Aru was that
in addition to the regular coterie of colonial officialsincluding what
the Dutch in their usual no-nonsense manner termed "controlers"
(controleur)especially naturalists of different breeds and persuasions
flocked to the islands to take in and as often as not take out Aru's un
usual, hybrid fauna and, to a much lesser extent, flora.
Reigning supreme among Aru's natural attractions was that Greater
Birdonce known simply among Malays as God's Bird (manuk dewata)
and subsequently among Europeans as the Legless Paradise (Paradis-
aea apoda)which increasingly was relinquishing its feathers to fash
ion and whose very habits and habitat already seemed to prefigure
such a fate (cf. Savage 1984: 35-38). It is, importantly, as I will argue,
the male bird that is by far the most splendid. He lives permanently
in towering "display" trees1 wherewhen the season for such shows
comes aroundhe puts on a magnificent production for the females
of his species displaying thereby what is only one of many strategies
through which a bird can market his reproductive charms (Purcell &
Gould 1992: 76). In the late nineteenth-century sources on Aru, de
scriptions in naturalists' accounts of Aruese in various modes of dress
are almost on a par with those of birds and their plummage, in terms
of the regularity with which they appear and the extraordinary detail
of their documentation. More than a curious parallelism, this twofold
preoccupation with the appearance of Aru's birds and that of its
human inhabitants points, I argue, to a conundrum whereby colonial
authority was caught in a double bind: On the one hand, its repro
duction demanded the preservation of a strict demarcation between
colonizers and colonized; on the other, the very dynamics of colonial
rule constantly threatened to blur such divide as it also presumed the
fabrication of colonized others in its own imperial image. Although,
of course, such a conundrum was intractable in actuality, it nonethe
less offered many possibilities to the imagination. I suggest here that
while testifying in its very instability to the power of the dilemma,
152 Patricia Spyer

the alternation in colonial accounts between Paradise's birds and its

all too human inhabitants was also one way of playing out this prob
lem in the imaginary register with results that, if nothing else, were
both emotionally and aesthetically satisfying. Rather than a focus
here on any single fetish, the shifting zone described in the gap that
opens up between birds and men is a space of border fetishisms
where the fetishization of nature enables the naturalization of colo
nial authority while hinting along the way at some high imperial
imaginings of class, gender, and race.
Especially the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s witnessed the elaboration
by the different European powers of a " 'theology' of an omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnipresent [Imperial] monarchy" (Ranger 1983:
212) for their colonial possessions, which went together with a hy
pertrophy of the aristocratic and seignorial trappings of command
and rule. This was a time when antique conceptions of patrimony
and privilege were resurrected in remote corners of the European em
pires, when the full-blown capitalism of the metropole flaunted itself
abroad (but not at home) in "feudal-aristocratic drag" (Anderson
1991: 150)," when following a code of courtliness and glory, colonial
officers "dressed [themselves] to kill in bed- or ballroom" and "armed
[themselves] with swords and obselete industrial weapons" (Ander
son: 151), and when the dominant authorial position of European
travel writing was the decisively gendered "monarch-of-all-I-survey"
mode (Pratt 1992: 213). Beyond the golden feathers of the Greater
Bird of Paradise or the birds that between the 1880s and 1920s nested
in their entirety on European women's hats4either in themselves
sufficient to tickle the stereotypical fetishist's fancy5it is especially
the fetishism on the part of the colonizers of their own imperial
forms of power and privilege that emerges out of the juxtaposition of
the late nineteenth-century descriptions of Aru's birds and those of
its human inhabitants.
There are a number of good historical reasons having to do, among
other things, with the fault lines of class, race, and gender as these both
conjoined and divided European metropoles and their colonies, that
help to explain what Anderson has aptly termed this "Tropical Gothic"
imaginaire at the apex of European imperialism (Anderson: 151). One
such reason was already implied above, namely, the enormous power
that high capitalism had given the metropole and the concomitant
surplus of neo-traditional capital that became available for investment
in the colonies. Another reason is the rising numbers of bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois men in the colonial service who were encouraged
to "lord" it over the subjugated peoples, following a principle of colo
 The Tooth o f Time 153

nial racism according to which class difference at home became sub

sumedthough by no means effacedwithin the idea of an all-around
European racial superiority; "the idea that if, say, English lords were
naturally superior to other Englishmen, no matter: these other En
glishmen were no less superior to the subjected natives" (Anderson:
150).6 At the same time, the last decades of the nineteenth-century
were also the moment when many European powers were pressed to
make their colonies look more legitimate, respectable, and even benev
olent. In so doing, they often bolstered their claims with quasi-aristo-
cratic, regal expressions of patrimony, according to the same kind of
attitude that the imagining of the Indies as an emerald girdle so thor
oughly captures. In the Netherlands East Indies, 1900, the same year
that saw Princess Wilhelmina's coronation as Queen celebrated amidst
much feudal fanfare in the colonies, also witnessed the enunciation of
the so-called Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek); while the following year
the Queen herself in her annual oration before the Dutch parliament
spoke of the "debt of honor" that the Netherlands in something quite
like a gesture of noblesse oblige wished to repay for what by then
amounted to three hundred years of colonial exploitation.
In the Netherlands East Indies, as elsewhere, this was then the
moment when the objects, rituals, and routines that articulated, le
gitimated, and produced the colonizer's position vis-a-vis their colo
nized subjects became matters of a heightened and even "Tropical
Gothic" obsession.7 By the second half of the nineteenth century in
Aru, along with all the attention bestowed on the archipelago's birds,
lengthy descriptions of Aruese in "native," "national" or "European"
styles of dress are a regular feature of both travelers and official ac
counts of the islands. For the most part, the kinds of clothing en
countered in Aru could be cast comfortably within the increasingly
standardized genres of customary and folkloric Otherness available at
the time. Yet what seems to have made for a somewhat distinct and
at times unsettling experience for visiting Europeans were those mo
ments when they felt their own gaze turned back upon themselves,
when the gaze, as it were, became a "look" as Aruese appeared before
them in European guise.

C l o t h in g in P a ra d ise

As in other colonial places, the mission civilisatrice involving in Aru

especially naturalists, colonial administrators, members of the Indische
(Protestant and State) church, and self-styled "wanderers," always
154 Patricia Spyer

entailed gestures of a practical and more often than not godly kind.
Nomination was, of course, the christening act par excellence (Green
blatt 1991: 52-85; Pratt 1992). If it was especially in naming that the
religious and territorial projects of Europe initially tended to come to
gether, it was from the eighteenth century on nature itselfas reveal
ing through study and knowledge the handiwork of Godthat
increasingly became the object of attention. A century later, following
the publication of Darwin's The Origin o f Species (1859) andmore rele
vant hereWallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869),8 evolutionists and
creationists would wage battle over the source of the excessive beauty
of creatures like Aru's Paradise Birdshow could such extravagance be
earthly was the challenge posed by the latter, how could their showy
garishness or that of say peacocks, hummingbirds, or orchids exist in
the world other than as part of a divine plan to edify humanity (Quam-
men 1996: 610)?
Another prevalent gesture with which divinity had long been
though much less contestedlyinterwoven was the colonial practice
of giving cloth or clothes to local rulers and the more extended, open-
ended effort to encloth persons and even entire populations. More ex
plicitly borne out in the association between the robe and the
priesthood, between "men of the cloth" and the service of God,9 the
primacy of clothing in the often godlike authorizing actions of Euro
peans was rooted not simply or always in moral or chaste ideas about
personhood and propriety but, equally importantly, in the fact that
"God Himself 'clothed' the earth in the process of Creation and that
He manifests Himself 'clothed' with honor and majesty, who coverest
thyself with light as with a garment" (Psalm 104.1-2 in Perniola 1989:
238). More than the familiar story of Creation and its aftermath in
which the substitution of clothing for nudity discloses the original sin,
at issue here is the important relationship between Christian thought
and certain notions of European statecraft and political theory which
from the Late Middle Ages on posited a close connection between di
vine or divinized kingship and the mantles of authority and rule
(Kantorowicz 1957; Marin 1988; Wilentz 1985). It is especially this
genealogy that accounts for the long tradition in the Indies of handing
out cloth or clothing to subjugated peoples in order to consecrate and
give substance to the officializing gestures of colonial politics.
One of the most common acts of rule in the former Netherlands
East Indies upon the installment of a headman was the bestowal of
cloth (sometimes but not always in the form of a flag) and/or cloth
ing, which commonly accompanied an act of appointment, and often
a silver or gold-knobbed staff of office. As a practice dating from the
 The Tooth o f Time 155

time of the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindischen Compagnie) or Dutch

East India Company and continued throughout the colonial period,
such ceremonies of investiture displayed not only a remarkable persis
tence over time but also a certain uniformity across the archipelago.
To give an example, the objects presented by colonial administrators
in the 1890s to Aru chiefs upon their official installments were virtu
ally the same as those given in 1623 by Jan Carstensz., the comman
der of the Pera, when he was dispatched from the Moluccan capital
Ambon to Aru with the mission of establishing ties of "friendship"
with "all kings" (alle connighen) (F.W. Stapel 1943: 32-40; Corpus
Diplomaticum III, 1943, v. 91: 180). Nor were such gestures limited to
the Dutch alone. A good century later, de Bougainville interrupted his
circumnavigation with a stopover on the island of Buton just south of
Celebes where he left some gifts of cloth (and accepted a deer), made
certain that another cut of cloththe flag of the French nationwas
displayed and made "known," and commented as well on local attire
(de Bougainville 1982 [1771]: 377). Such scenes of encounter and ex
change were often the stuff of serious competition between European
nations, although there was, not surprisingly, considerable divergence
both among individuals and at different historical junctures in the
scrupulousness with which these ceremonies were carried out.

Figure 8. Regent in Official Costume (1919)

156 Patricia Spyer

Besides the trail of cloth left behind after such official moments
in the Moluccas whereas in other parts of the Indiesthe cos
tumes, flags, and gifts of fabric tended to be "preserved with the
greatest of care as heirlooms, and used only on official occasions"
(Kolff 1840: 229-39; cf. Merton 1910: 119), a formal decision to im
port cloth into Aru was taken in 1761 for reasons that do not concern
us here. By the mid-nineteenth century cloth and clothing were
being imported to the islands in impressive number and variety.
In an article on the "State of Imports and Exports to the Aru Is
lands, during the Year 1849," cloth heads a double list of imports that
was compiled by the commissioned official for the archipelago and
that is subdivided into "Goods of European Origin" and "Goods of
Asian Origin" (Bosscher 1853: 327-31). Some ten years later cloth
continues to prevail in a detailed list drawn up by another colonial
official and, again subdivided into "European cloth" comprising:
"unbleached cottonMadapolam, the brand NHM [Nederlandsche
Handels Maatschappij] is carefully watched out for, the Belgian and
English Madapolams have less value, chintzes of various sorts, blue
cotton of various sorts, red Adrianopol cotton, slendangs, abdominal
belts and the like, headcloths of various sorts, sarongs of English and
Dutch imitation, kodie, thread and unspun cotton" (van der Crab
1862: 87-88). Under the heading "Cloth from elsewhere, outside of
Europe" we find "sarongs: Java, Buginese [South Celebes], Gorontalo
[North Celebes], and Bengal, kodies, Tjindees, gingans, and other fab
rics" (van der Crab 1862: 88). During the latter half of the nine-
teenth-century, only alcohol occasionally rivaled cloth's precedence
on the list of imports to Aru.
Notwithstanding the insistence on keeping goods of European
versus those of Asian or "Elsewhere" provenance apart, the above tes
tifies not only to the complex circuits traveled by cloth as it made its
way from diverse sites of "origin" to Aru, but even more to the pro
lific hybridizations that characterized colonial cloth production itself.
"Chintz," from the Hindi chint is, of course, a famous example. Look
ing over the lists, however, others appear. What is one to make, for
instance, of European batiks, or NHM, Belgian, or English Madapol-
lams, sarongs of English and Dutch imitation, or gingans "from else
where, outside of Europe?" Such examples underscore the import of
attending to the complicated criss-crossings and crossovers character
istic of cloth production within the larger colonial situation that
comprised not only "Elsewhere" or Europeans in "Elsewhere" but al
ways and inevitably Europe or the metropole itself. It is important to
recall, for instance, that the intensive dissemination of cloth in a
 The Tooth o f Time 15 7

place like Aru was only possible as a consequence of the revolution in

cloth production that was occasioned as much by the colonial enter
prise itself as it was by an "industrial revolution" that traditional his
toriography records as exclusively European in origin (McKendrick
1982; Mukerji 1983). Along these same lines, it is probably not for
nothing that Adam Smith's famous example of the division of labor
was none other than a pin factory (Smith 1976 [1776]: 8-9), or that a
coat makes such an early appearance in Marx's Capital (in addition to
the other reasons that Peter Stallybrass gives in his contribution to
this volume) (Marx 1967 [1867]: 41). Likewise, it is crucial to recog
nize that at the same time that Aruese ornamented and outfitted
themselves in the garb of European and Eurasian civilization, their
own islands were being stripped of the luxury articles of fleeting Eu
ropean and Asian fashions.
One account has it that during the fin de siecle feather craze that
overtook Europe, 3000 Bird of Paradise skins were being exported
from Aru's capital Dobo annually (Quammen 1993: 38). In the 1880s
a self-styled "naturalist's wife" writes of her distress upon seeing in
the port of Makassar a cargo from these same parts comprising "2000
skins of the orange-feathered bird of paradise, 800 of the kingbird,
and a various lot of others" (Forbes 1987 [1887]: 36). In New Guinea,
no less than three European nationsthe Netherlands, England, and
Germanyvied for the privilege and profit that would come from
the plumes destined for European women's hats. At the height of this
trade, between the 1880s and World War I, up to 80,000 birds were
killed and exported per year from Dutch New Guinea alone, while
the ban on hunting in 1924 together with the change in fashion left
behind a ghostly landscape of abandoned settlements that had arisen
or boomed during the great feather hunt (Purcell & Gould 1992:
76).10 Nor, incidentally, were the naturalists themselves always cir
cumspect in their own collecting, and for some like Alfred Russel
Wallace this was a primary source of income. Thus, Wallace financed
his expedition to the Malay archipelago with collecting for museums
and private individuals with a passion for natural history. Seen in this
light, Aru was not only a crucial case for the formulation of his the
ory of nature but also the place where he accumulated the most lu
crative collections of his eight-year travels (Quammen 1993: 38).
Rather than insisting on what risks becoming a fairly seamless
story of imports and exports, or of commodities and their conspicu
ous collection, I focus in what follows on one of this story's most
striking denouements: the dressed aspect of Aruese as such appeared
to visiting Europeans. A look at some of the descriptions left by
158 Patricia Spyer

nineteenth-century travelers to Aru of "native," "national, and "Eu

ropean" attire suggests that appearance was, indeed, all important.
In focusing on this dressed aspect of Aruese, the accent here is on
the embodiment and fit of costume understood as embracing not
only cloth but anything else that either accompanied its transmis
sion or became part of its trappings in Aru.
Following the contours of cloth on Aruese bodies compels at the
same time several critical moves. It means, first, leaving behind the
museumizing that all too long has hung up the history of cloth, mak
ing of it an endless train of death-dealing descriptions of disembod
ied dress and technologies of production. For if, following Barthes, "it
is impossible to conceive of a dress without a body. . . the empty gar
ment, without head and limbs . . . is death, not the neutral absence
of the body, but the body mutilated, decapitated" (Barthes in Gaines
1990: 3), it is also true that after a death, clothhaving once received
a bodycan never be neutral again (Stallybrass 1993). Indeed, it may
be more saturated with life than ever before. The point being that, as
the next best thing to bodies, cloth tends to commingle in itself life
and death in an often uncanny fashion. One guiding assumption
here is that this uncanniness is itself a product of modernity insofar
as the latter introduces a novel sense of timing in which "old" and
"new," "traditional" and "modern," and perhaps even the living and
the dead become clearcut alternatives as they are made to jostle for
places in the positioning of things. Another assumption is that his
torically the perceived relations between human bodies and clothing
has been highly variable. The fact that in the language of nineteenth-
century English tailors clothing retained the "memories" of the bod
ies it had once containedmost obviously in the creases left behind
by them in sleeves (Stallybrass in this volume)suggests a deeper
connection or more intimate embeddedness of human bodies in the
clothes they wore than is possible in our own fast-paced times. Today,
perhaps more than at any other moment, only death seems to stay
the frenetic donning and discarding of clothing that both materially
and socially registers fashion's compulsive swings. Another example
of a marked difference in the historic relations between bodies and
clothes would be the moment when modern medicine begins to
emerge and some of the first anatomical drawings depict human skin
as itself a kind of bloodless, luxurious fabric that can be folded back
to reveal the wondrous secrets lying within (Perniola 1989: 250; 258-
59). It follows from the above that the approach taken here also de
parts from the kind of perspective that sees cloth as always already
more than skin-deep, embedded as it is held to be in underlying
 The Tooth o f Time 159

meanings that model and color the more superficial phenomena of

the sloppy and slipshod everyday. Let us turn then now to engage the
"look" of Aru as it was received and recorded by nineteenth-century
visitors to the islands.

T he S tandard A dult M ale S pecimen

Not unlike the pursuit of Birds of Paradise in their customary habitat,

Wallace opinedexpressing a view that was increasingly shared by
others in an age that witnessed the beginnings of ethnologizing if not
anthropology properthat "one must see the savage at home to know
what he really is" (Wallace 1962 [1869]: 332). If the two forms of de
scription privileged in late nineteenth-century writings on Aru
namely, those of birds and their plumage, especially Birds of Paradise,
and those of Aruese in different kinds of dressare set side by side,
then a funny thing happens. What this juxtaposition makes clear is
that the "savage at home" in his natural setting, as it were, bears a
marked resemblance to the Bird of Paradise as he is also captured in
his characteristic surroundings. This striking overlap becomes even
more blatant when we consider the gendered dimension of these de
scriptions. Thus, writers often insisted on the dramatic difference in
appearance between men and women or, likewise, between the male
and the female of a given bird species. In what was presumably a more
widely reiterated theme, the former's flamboyance, exuberance, and
bejeweled beauty contrasted sharply with the aspect of the latterin
evitably drab, less decorated, and easily overlooked. This was almost a
golden rule in the creation of natural collections where the unmarked
and prize specimen was always the adult male while the female some
times did not even warrant a description (Pratt 1992: 64).n
After a lavish passage devoted to the "King Bird of Paradise" Wal
lace begins his short aside on what I would call the Queen by observ
ing that, "the female of this little gem is such a plainly coloured bird,
that it can at first sight hardly be believed to belong to the same
species" (Wallace 1962 [1869]: 427). Regarding another "rare and ele
gant little bird" found in neighboring New Guinea, Wallace writes
that the female of this variety much resembles that of the King and
"we may therefore conclude that its near ally, the 'Magnificent,' is at
least equally plain in this sex" (ibid: 428; emphasis added.).
A similar sexual dimorphism in decoration was extended to so-
called savages as these were observed "at home."12 Again Wallace,
with characteristic confidence notes that "the men, as usual among
160 Patricia Spyer

savages, adorn themselves more than the women" (ibid: 355) while
another visitor frequenting Aru at the absolute fin de siecle notes that
"the Aru women wear a considerable number of ornaments, but the
men, like all true Papuans, wear by far the greater number" (Cayley-
Webster 1898: 207). Likewise in Tanimbar southwest of Aru, the
aforementioned "naturalist's wife" noted that if the women "do not
dye their hair as the men do, and give little time to its arrangement"
(Forbes 1987 [1887]: 169),

the gay young beaux [in these islands] spend much time in arranging
the hair; those to whom nature has given only straight locks use a
crimping instrument. Just behind the postholder's house stood a long
unused prahu, in which rain-water collected, and this was the village
mirror. It was an unfailing amusement to me to watch the row of
youths standing there in the morning, tying with utmost nicety, and
apparently with great vanity, the different coloured bandages, one
just edging over the other to see that the well-combed locks were
properly confined (ibid: 160).13

At a time when in Europe men, at least of the "better classes," went

about only in black and gray, thereby displaying "a drabness that
caused Baudelaire to exclaim that the male sex looked as if it were al
ways in mourning"14 and women, as we have already seen, bedecked
themselves with plumes and could also claim "perfume, makeup, col
oring, silk and lace" as their "exclusive province," at such a time Na
ture as Aru and Culture asof courseFrance seemed to stand each
other off in customary fashion (Corbin 1990: 488).
But unlike the changing fashions of the metropole, whatever the
peoples of Aru or their neighbors chose to wear is either inscribed in
essentialized gendered differences analogous to those that in nature
distinguish male and female bird species, in the unchanging rules of
custom, or in another timeless primordialismthe nation. As so
often in colonial and subsequently some anthropological accounts,
native custom appears carved in stone, as a kind of idol that the sav
ages bow before in fear and unwavering submission. One Dutch offi
cial writes, for instance, that some traders claimed that they had
suggested to the men of Aru's Backshore or eastern side of the islands
that these should make their women wear sarongs. The men, how
ever, had rejected this proposal on the grounds that their mothers
had not worn sarongs either and furthermore that they feared a di
vergence from custom would elicit punishment and cause their vil
lages to die out (Brumond 1853: 291).
 The Tooth o f Time 161

The following suggests, however, that the stubbornness with

which Backshore Aruese allegedly held to their own ways was prob
ably at least as much a pervasive reluctance to accept those of the Eu
ropeans and the traders as their own.

Although the inhabitants of the backshore possess enough means in

their pearl banks to supply themselves with better clothing, they re
main stubbornly attached to their national costume. They seem to
have a distinct prejudice against clothing, and only the heads dress
themselves, for better or for worse, upon visits of officials (Baron van
Hoevell 1890: 22-23).

Whatever their own reasons might have been, it is clear that the
inhabitants of Aru's Backshore, at least in part and at certain histori
cal moments, resisted some of the things that the colonials would
put upon them. At the same time it is also clear that they busied
themselves refashioning cloth into those cuts that most pleased
themselves. A brand consciousness of sorts was already in place such
that, as we have already seen, NHM Madapollam was prefered over
Belgian and English variants. Predilections for particular colors or
cloth patterns observed among the Frontshore Aruese were duly
noted while more dramatic alterations documented in descriptions of
what in the late nineteenth century came to be called "the national
costume" (nationale kleederdracht) testify as well to the creativity on
which cloth could count in Aru (Baron van Hoevell 1890: 22-23).
Reading through the nineteenth-century sources on Aru it is often
hard to be certain what "nation" was in fact conveyed by the local
costume. If Backshore Aruese were at times not overly eager to accept
the staffs of office offered to them by the colonial government and
persisted as well in adhering to their own styles of dress, the Dutch
flag nonetheless provided the design for men's loinclothsand one, I
was told, that remained popular until the Japanese occupation of the
islands during World War II. Then, for obvious reasons, the so-called
"flag loincloth" boasting the red, white, and blue stripes of the Dutch
national banner was rapidly abandoned. Striped tails, however, con
tinue to decorate the loincloths worn by men during adat or cus
tomary feasts.15 Nor should it surprise us that in a place soon to be
designated the "Tropical Netherlands,"reiterating the Dutch Islami-
cist Snouk Hurgronje's famous vision that foresaw "only Oriental and
Occidental Netherlanders,"the colonizer nation increasingly if not
consistently assumed the place of an original, with the colony defined
as its copy (Snouck Hurgronje in van Doorn 1994: 60).
162 Patricia Spyer

This kind of imaginary goes at least some way toward explaining

the workings of a prevalent process of recall in which, for instance, a
colonial visitor was struck by the "costume of a Dutch fisherman" (het
costuum eenen Hollandschen visscher) unwittingly reproduced, as it
were, in the clothing worn by an Aru chief (Brumond 1853: 252-53).
Similarly, a fleeting sense of a familiar fashion might also be felt in the
"look" left by an Aruese. Anna Forbes, the naturalist's wife, mistook at
one point a group of Aruese pearldivers for womena mistake, she ex
plained, "due to the arrangement of the hair; for their immense mops
of frizzy locks were gathered behind in a large chignon or knot, while
the short escaped hair formed a fringe, the whole coiffure being an
untidy copy of the fashionable style I had left behind in England"
(Forbes 1987 [1887]: 129). In the latter half of the nineteenth century
fashion reigned supreme in metropolitan capitals while the rural
countrysides of European nations became the site for a nostalgic folk-
lorization of, among other things, costume.16 Abroad, however, iden
tifications of fashion and folklore remained limited to such ephemeral
feelings of deja-vu, both generally giving way in the colonies to more
timeless readings of local custom or of native life lived out in more
positively or negatively valued states of nature.17

I maginary H eads and M o ck C hiefs

Like some other colonials, the Dutch made much of mimicry. At the
same time they also often feared it as something that could easily get
out of hand and, drifting from the original, take on, as it were, a life
of its own. A clear instance of this can be traced in the concerns and
correspondence about the circulation of the staffs of office topped by
the silver or golden "apples" already admired by de Bougainville at the
end of the eighteenth century. Tokens like these together with acts of
appointment and flags assumed an almost talismanic importance for
the Dutch around the turn of the century or that time that, across the
Malay archipelago, witnessed the transformation of a colonial project
into a properly imperial one. In Aru, the location of staffs of office
within different settlements pinpointed for the Dutch their influence
in the islands and formed part of a wider process through which dif
ferent "landscapes" (landschappen) were mapped together as a whole.18
The importance of disseminating such tokens of Dutch rule in mar
ginal places was repeatedly reiterated by the colonial authorities (Mail-
rapport 1885: 6448, #342+, Afschrift #1002, ARA). By the same token,
the Netherlands East Indies government confiscated all flags, acts of
 The Tooth o f Time 163

appointment, and staffs of office when it chastised a rebellious village

(Mailrapport 1887: 6460, #342+, Afschrift #1002, ARA).
As in the capital Ambon where the staff of office was always re
turned to the colonial government upon the death of the office holder
thereby assuring the authorities the opportunity to give it out again,
so too should have been the arrangement in Aru. Here, however, the
staff together with the office it embodied, appears to have been passed
on from father to son, causing the Dutch to bemoan their inability to
control the excessive circulation of the staffs. Through a kind of crazy
mathematics, the prolific passings-on hadfor them at leastthe un
fortunate consequence of multiplying the number of native chiefs
(Mailrapport 1880: 6392, ARA). One might suggest, drawing on Marc
Shell's insights regarding tromp-l'oeil and fake money, that the coun
terfeit, having an inflationary value, always robs its subjects of their
originality (Shell 1992: 23)19 Indeed, from the perspective of colonial
bureaucrats, the unauthorized multiplication of chiefs produced an
untidy and troubling situation in which, "one finds in addition to the
true heads, a multitude of imaginary heads, still armed with the staffs
of office of their forefathers, even though [their] family has not exer
cised authority for a long time" (Mailrapport 1876: 6042, Afschrift
#486+, ARA). Presumably this depends on whose authority one is talk
ing about. In New Guinea as well the presence of "mock chiefs" was
reported, and described by one Dutchman as "founded on the idea
that any foreign strand dweller would think himself the lord and mas
ter of every living thing in the interior"unlike, of course, the Euro
peans.20 Although the latter represents a different possibility built
around the coastal/hinterland or, if you like, Frontshore/Backshore
distinction that was prevalent throughout the Malay world, the lin
gering sense left by the specter of a multitude of imaginary heads and
mock chiefs is that of a landscape drifting from the intended Dutch
one, an alternative administrative vision disruptive of their own map
pings, and, importantly something much closer to a mockery than a
mimicry of themselves.
Indeed, the fine line between mimicry and mockery runs like a red
thread through the descriptions of Aruese as they appeared before
nineteenth-century visitors in quasi-European dress.21 One of the prob
lems must have been that the islandersmade over in something akin
to metropole modeseemed to stand before the Europeans as an un
settling, slightly skewed copy of themselves as well as of the "civiliza
tion" they had come to convey through clothes.221 suspect that the
sheer materiality of this "meeting ground"the mere physical fact of
being confronted with native bodies contained in one's own colonizer
164 Patricia Spyer

clothesis one aspect of the discomfort that seems to filter through

the writings of these Europeans. Given that their visits coincided with
the high point of colonial racism when the divide between the colo
nizers and the colonized became increasingly construed as founded in
the physiognomic, material differences between the races, this particu
lar form of "contact" may have had profound unsettling effects.23 Fol
lowing this line of argument, savage bodies in civilized clothes would
defy the distinction that, in part, determined the double list of Euro
pean cloth and clothing versus the same kind of thing imported from
"Elsewhere," that underwrote the constant concern on the part of colo
nials with categories like metis, ittdo, "Brown Gentlemen" (Stoler 1992)
and so on, and that caused, more diffusely, an "invisible line" to be ob
sessively imagined as cropping up wherever and whenever the twain
would meet (Pemberton 1994: 96-101). A major conundrum faced by
colonials in the Indies lay, for instance, in what the authorities called
"artificially fabricated Europeans" (kunstmatig gefabriceerde Europeanen)
or persons who condensed the fear that a copy could be taken for the
Real Thing, that more concretely "children were being raised in cul
tural fashions that blurred the distinction between ruler and ruled"
(Stoler 1992: 531). Clothing was, indeed, as Stoler suggests, critical in
all of this as borne out by the notion in French Indochina, for exam
ple, of "an indigene in disguise," or the accusations of Annamite
women who had lived in concubinage of clothing their metisse daugh
ters in European attire, "while ensuring them that their souls and sen
timents remained deeply native" (Stoler ibid). Such, indeed, are some
of the colonial contradictions that help to reveal the cracks in moder
nity's mirror (Dirks 1990: 29). Was it then not only in the moves of
mimicry but perhaps even more in the close physical containment of
native bodies by European clothing that the contamination of the col
onizer by the colonized could most concretely be felt? Taussig's insis
tence on the necessary collaboration between copy and contact, on
"the magical power of replication" whereby the image affectsor even
contaminateswhat it is an image of, is, I believe, also relevant here
(Taussig 1993: 2). Let us consider then some of these contaminations
and the ways in which Europeans, in turn, attempted to contain them.

T he T ooth o f T ime

Like Macaulay's translator and other mimic-men, Aru chiefsand

more those of the Frontshore than the Backcould in Horni Bhabha's
words be called "the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of com
 The Tooth o f Time 165

mand, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also . . . the fig
ures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire
which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant dis
courses in which they emerge as " 'inappropriate' subjects" (Bhabha
1994: 88). This kind of doubleness can be discerned in the colonial at
titude toward Aru chiefs in quasi-European clothes as perhaps the
privileged site where copy and contact, containment and contamina
tion accompany each other and ambivalently collide. In ceremonies
of investiture, Aru "savages" were turned into "true heads" as the ap
propriate objects of a colonial chainor even girdleas well as the
concrete investments of a "civilization" that was held to emanate out
wards from Europe to the farthest corners of the globe. By extension,
the chiefs were also those persons who most often faced the Euro
peans in their old hand-me-down clothes, motivating thereby and
once again, colonial gestures of containment.
In their writings, European visitors to Aru deployed a number of
strategies that were aimed, I suggest, at displacing and disarming the
apparition of Aruese as quasi-metropolitans, an apparition that proved
disorienting to their own imperial pretensionsif perhaps only in
passing. Thus, one move made repeatedly by the colonizers when de
scribing Aruese in European-style clothes was to highlight the discom
fort with which such dress was worn, in an effort, I suspect, to disguise
from themselves their own sense of being unsettled by the clothing's
off-centered "look." As Freud would long have us know, what we tend
to see as other and outside of ourselves more often than not dwells
within, while what appears most uncanny or unheimlich is commonly
quite familiar and close to home (Freud 1955 [1919]). It follows from
this that some of the late nineteenth-century writings deploying
strategies of displacement and containment probably say more about
a sense of out-of-placeness experienced by visiting Europeans than
about the islanders themselves. Beyond the colonial racism that un
derwrote the rift running between native bodies and civilized clothes,
what I believe the Europeans may also have faced in the distorted
"look" reflected back to them by Aruese was, among other things,
their own "off-center" subject positionsas colonials far removed in
every possible respect from the fashionable, tone-setting, and policy
making metropolitan centers of Europe, as persons who could pretend
to aristocratic privilege when abroad but could never escape from
their class origins at home, and perhaps as other things as well. All
this and more may have been brought home to themif only fleet-
inglyin the unheimlich apparition of Aruese in cast-off, quasi-metro
politan clothes.
166 Patricia Spyer

Especially shoes, as perhaps the quintessential marker of the shod

and unsavage Western world were often marshalled forth in colonial
writings to make a comforting point (cf. Schulte Nordholt 1997).
"The Orang Kaya [or headman]/' writes one European visitor, "paid
me a visit directly I let go the anchor. He was dressed in a black coat
and hat with white trousers and boots, which kept him in a constant
state of unrest the whole time he was on board" (Cayley-Webster
1898: 203). At other times, a rejection or absence of shoes was simply
noted (Brumond 1853: 252-53; Riedel 1886: 258).
Another sort of strategy that seems to have been prevalent among
Europeans when sizing up Aruese outfitted as their quasi-metropolitan
selves was to stress that the "savages," in multiple ways, fell shortor
big or loose or long or simply sillyof that which they were (al
legedly) trying to imitate.

Already from afar, several cannon shots rang out toward us; when we
arrived, the Orang kaya awaited us with his following on the bank.. . .
A small, puny little man with a dried out and sallow face, he was
decked out in a red general's uniform. The tails of the much too wide
frock coat hung to his heels, while the broad golden collar enclosed
his head far above the ears, leaving scarcely an opening through
which one could discover his insignificant little face. The with braid
richly decorated pants hung with many pleats on his boots, which
surely each could have accommodated two of his feet. . . in one hand
his staff of rank with the golden knob held by its middle stiffly against
his nose, in the other a red handkerchief [this] completed the highly
remarkable portrait of the great man. Immobile, he awaited us in this
pose and received all greetings: his face remained entirely unaltered; a
hand and stiff bow, worthy of the greatest monarch, was his response
to all (Brumond 1853: 81).

Described in the fullest of detail, every aspect of the "great man's" at

tire as well as the stiff embodiment with which he wore it is, to para
phrase Bhabha, "not quite, not right."24
Ever both amused and scrupulously observant, Anna Forbes, the
naturalist's wife, writes of her encounter with some Aruese who
stopped by her ship to report the murder of the son of "the Rajah of
some place in the neighborhood."

I could not refrain from laughing aloud at the ludicrous appearance of

the group before us, but was soon checked when I saw their really sor
rowful countenances. . . . The old chief wore bright green trousers, a
 The Tooth o f Time 167

long black coat, and over this a kabia [her emphasis, this was obvi
ously not done] or native jacket of bright purple satin with inch-wide
gold-thread stripes, and a very dirty and starchless collar lay untidily
on his neck. Another had trousers of bright scarlet, with large butterfly
pattern, a faded green silk coat brocaded with large gold flowers, and
a shabby grey felt hat; and another a long surtout coat, with a much
worn black satin vest, wrong side out, over it. Two others were not so
abundantly clothed, for one suit served them both. It had evidently
descended to the present wearers from some passing vessel where the
theatrical entertainments had been whiling the tedium of a voyage,
for the coat had a blue tail and a red, and the trousers one leg of
green and the other of yellow. Somehow the man with the trousers
looked much better clad than the man with the coat. These garments
formed doubtless the entire wardrobe of the village, accumulated dur
ing who knows how many generations (Forbes 1987 [1887]: 134-35).

More than the fit or the embodiment of the clothing, Forbes fo

cuses repeatedly in on the real wrongness with which the tenue is put
togethera vest worn "the wrong side out," a kabia (sic) pulled on
oh my goodness!over a long black coat, or a costume, already the
atrical in design, harlequin-like, and split, again split to be shared
between two "savages" just as, she speculates, the entire wardrobe
seems itself to have been pieced together from the scraps of clothing
accumulated through the ages in one Aru village.
One of the concrete effects of the writing strategies that I have so
far consideredthe lack of a "fit" between Aruese and European
clothing or the real wrongness with which it was wornwas to im
pose a distance between "savage" bodies and "civilized" clothes. Or,
put otherwise, everything in these late nineteenth-century descrip
tions happens as if a very visible line had been drawn between Aruese
and the kinds of figures they cut in European clothes. The distance
thus effected highlights the difference between Europeans who wore
their clothesand especially when abroadnot simply as a sort of
social skin but even more as a "civilized" one (Turner 1980), and
Aruese concerning whom and quite concretely, a slippage served to
separate them almost physically from the costumes that they created
with the colonizer's clothesat least that is if one takes the Euro
peans at their word.
Nor is it surprising that in the context of the thoroughly "mod
ern" endeavor constituting late nineteenth-century colonialism, fash
ion figured as another prevalent mode invoked by the Europeans
to make more or less the same important statement. Following this
168 Patricia Spyer

fashion statement, time served as the raw material with which dis
tinctions of dress were marked and made, and thereby, as a way of
denying the coevalness between colonizers and colonized through
the medium of their very clothes (Fabian 1983). Note, however, that
if the Europeans always ascribed one or another "traditional" outfit
to the natives, the move that would deny coevalness through con
trasts in European costume was maybe even more effective or, at any
rate, differently so than when the natives appeared in their own al
leged timeless attire. The crucial difference between customary native
garb and a costume configured after the colonizer is that the latter
whatever else one might saywas always anachronistically at a once
or twice remove from the latest colonial, not to mention metropoli
tan look. And this, of course, was not that different from the colo
nizer's own sartorial position vis-a-vis the European metropole.
A particularly telling passage from one Dutchman's piece on the
"Religious Practices in the Residence of Amboina" provides the title
of this essay and informs us that:

The Christian natives in Ambon are now wild about these high silk
hats. They show off with them on Sundays, when they go to Church,
to funerals and on festive occasions. They are usually overly old exam
ples that have suffered from the tooth of time, so that like shoes they
are sometimes shined with polish, but it does look distinguished, and
the man who can get hold of such a gem is more than a little proud of
it! (de Vries 1921 - 22 : 112).25

Sometimes insisting on a separation between colonized bodies and

civilized clothes gets the better of European writers, as here where the
Sunday bests worn by Ambonese Christians truly separate from their
bodies in a fetishistic turn in which clothing and church-going come
entirely apart thereby allowing a hat to wander off by itself. Follow
ing a slippage that betrays how the author may himself have lost a
stable position from which to speakand which ensues from the rec
ollection of the shining sometimes given to high silk hatsthe hat
takes on a life of its own"but it does [apart from Ambonese bodies]
look distinguished." Not unlike Paradise's birds, the antique silk hat,
transfigured into a precious "gem," becomes both elusive and some
thing to be eagerly pursued and taken hold of.
Taking a look now at the time that the Europeans threaded
through clothes it is important to realize that Aruese like the Am
bonese Christians captured in the above quote, were regarded as al
ways already out of date andwhat is moredoubly so. Both overly
 The Tooth o f Time 169

old and out of fashion, their costumes were literally and metaphori
cally gnawed by the aforementioned "tooth of time." Besides the
issue of time itself, one crucial, material consequence of the quick
turnover characteristic of what Barthes called "the fashion system"
(1967) is that "a disproportionate volume of cloth ends up in the rag
bag or as hand-me-downs"or, indeed, I would add, as something to
be given away in the colonies (Schneider & Weiner 1989: 11). Even in
this century and culminating in the conversion offensive launched in
Aru by Dutch missionaries in the 1960s and especially mid-1970s
(Spyer 1996), boxes of clothing containing the cast-offs of Catholic
families in the southern Netherlands were shipped in to be distrib
uted in the islands. Another consequence of "the cult of the transi
tory"the essence of fashion and, more generally, "[capitalist]
modernity"is that its built-in momentum for making things obse-
lete simultaneously promotes both desire and a disdain for material
goods (Lefebvre in Lears 1994: 385). And if the fluctuations of desire
that make up fashion were felt over and over again in Aru, fashion's
flipsidedisdain, derision, or a more mild ironic amusementtends
to describe the tone of the Europeans as they took in the look of the
Aruese. The thing about fashion, as we all know, is that once passe, it
very rapidly looks ridiculous. In colonial accounts therefore, fashion
could readily be called upon to make precisely those kinds of state
ments that many scholars of colonialism today regard as typifying
the colonial attitude towards colonized peoples. For like history and
like time, fashion belonged to the colonizers and never the colo
nized, and, consequently, just as Aruese and other others were by de
finition always out of history and out of time, so too, and even more
concretely, were they always out of fashion (cf. Dirks 1990: 28). At
the same time, of course, it is possible to suggest that through their
own creative configurations of costume and their refashionings of a
retro colonial or even company "look," Aruese and others in con
fronting the Europeans with their own cast-off and hand-me-down
clothes turned, in a fashion, the clock back at them.

T h e L eg less P a ra d ise

The overinvestment in vestment characteristic of these late nine-

teenth-century colonial accountsagain, and crucially, only rivaled
by the drawn-out descriptions of the splendid, be jeweled birds that
made of this place a kind of Paradiseand the compulsion on the
part of visiting Europeans to embellish their writings continually
170 Patricia Spyer

with descriptions of dress describes the kind of obsessive desire that

both makes for and repeatedly motivates the fetishistic focus on a
given thing. But only rarely in the colonizers' accounts did clothing
truly take on a life of its own to become a full-fledged fetish on a par
with Paradise's birds. Thus, whether for Europeans Paradise was
linked to cloth or, inversely, lay in the romantic desire of keeping
such "civilization" afar, in the various colonial readings of the rela
tion between "civilization" and cloth, cloth repeatedly served as a
kind of border, a "civilizing" skin which, depending upon one's incli
nations, could be filled in favorably or not. In clothing Paradise, and
in playing God going about the important business of Creation, the
Europeans also created a conundrum for themselves. The act of cloth
ing their colonized subjects in the garb of quasi-metropolitan "civi
lization" somehow seemed to imply for the colonials that they
themselves might not be fully installed in their own clothes. Yet not
doing so seemed to suggest much the same thing. In other words,
given the close creative fit between colonial authority and "civilized"
clothes, there was simply no way for the Europeans to retain full au
thority over their colonized subjects and simultaneously carry out
their "civilizing" mission to its logical implicationsthat is, the mak
ing over of these same subjects into a mirror, albeit tropical reflection
of themselves. Although offering in its materiality the promise of ful
fillment, clothing always pointed beyond itself to a "civilization"
that could never be fully attained.
Yet if Aruese in quasi-metropolitan clothes might be seen in some
sense as a concretization of the colonizers' "civilization" as well as
in being unfinished and fragmentaryits negation, so, too, though
somewhat differently, might those birds who from the beginning
provoked the association between this place and Paradise. If, we con
sider, for instance, the names that the Europeans bestowed on the
most flamboyant of Aru's birds then the utopics of an imperial design
begins to emerge. Because the first of such birds arrived in Spain from
the Moluccas leglessas purely a splendid and preserved skinthe
belief spread that lacking apparently any means to alight on earth
such beings could only originate in Paradise. Hence also Linnaeus's
commemoration of this old legend in the name the "Legless Par
adise." Later nomenclature continued the paradise theme while at
the same time providing it with somewhat more earthly dimensions.
Following this vision, paradise was a place presided over by kings
wielding an authority that was immediately manifest and provided
with substance in the resplendant showiness, Gothic theatricality,
and glittering presence of their royal highness. As Purcell and Gould
 The Tooth o f Time 171

write about the birds named for kings: "The names chosen for Birds
of Paradise reinforce their gaudy majesty. Most were given monikers
to honor various European monarchs" (Purcell & Gould 1992: 69). In
addition to the lofty leglessness of "Paradise" himself, we find the
somewhat Lesser though equally regal King Bird of Paradise, the
King-of-Saxony Bird of Paradise, and the Blue Bird of Paradise or Par-
adisaea rudolphi, named after the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph,
the Archduke Rudolph of Austria (ibid.) as well as others whose
names reflect a more generic royal splendor like the "Magnificent."
Some names simply invoke the patrimony of kings. Thus, if the de
scriptions of Birds of Paradise left by nineteenth-century travelers to
Aru and neighboring New Guinea commonly rely on a language of
opulence and treasure to convey the breathtaking beauty of these
creatures, at least one species was actually named after a jewel:
Among French authors, the so called Lesser Bird of Paradise is known
as "Le petit Emeraude" (Wallace 1962 [1869]: 423). As the classic ex
ception that proves the rule, perhaps the best example of the kind of
royalty repeatedly assigned to Paradise's birds is the Diphyllodes res-
publica, named by the French ornithologist Charles Louis Bonaparte
who also happened to have been a nephew of the lesser, more farcical
emperor, Napoleon III. In his own words, the French ornithologist
chose this name because, "I have not the slightest regard for the sov
ereignty of all the princes in the world." As Purcell and Gould ex
plain, however, "he also thumbed his nose at earthly governments,
selecting his label in mock honor of 'that Republic which might have
been a Paradise had not the ambitions of Republicans, unworthy of
the name they were using, made it by their evil actions more like a
Hell'" (Purcell & Gould 1992: 69-70).
On either side of the turning of the present century, and at the
height of its power and glory, a certain telos underwrote the imagin
ing of the Netherlands East Indies as an archipelago of imperial pro
portions and design. Traced out in the glassy brilliance of the Indies as
an "emerald girdle"as simultaneously a possession and a prizethis
kind of imaginary had its refractions even in Aru, located, as it were,
at one far end of the imperial chain. If, for Europeans, the Legless Par
adise embodied in its disembodied skin the ethereal heights of a fully
dressed beyond, the men and, even less, the women of Aru, could
never approximate the exalted "civilization" that the Europeans hid
in their clothes. Indeed, one might say that the repeated distancing of
natives from their "civilized" clothes had as its counterpart a colonial
reverie of a legless Paradise from which all Aruese had been excluded.
More specifically, a fetishized and thoroughly "Tropical Gothic" vision
172 Patricia Spyer

of civilization in which obsessions about endlessly proliferating heads

thought to make a mockery of colonial rule, could be momentarily
displaced by those splendid birds that as surrogates for European
monarchs displayed civilization in its most exuberant, exalted, and
authoritative excess. It is through this particular fetishization of
nature as a displaced thoroughly "Tropical Gothic" civilization that
colonial authority came to be naturalized in many of the late nine
teenth-century writings on Aru. This naturalization of the guise and
trappings of rule took place, moreover, with reference to monarchy or
that form of government which by drawing all power to a single cen
ter and demanding the abdication of all self-dependant power before
itself, has been characterized as the most fetishistic form of govern
ment (Godwin in Simpson 1982: 24). Monarchy, following Godwin,
was also one big fakery with therefore "the most fatal opinion that
could lay hold upon the minds" of a king's subjects being that "kings
are but men" (ibid.). Much the same could I think be said regarding
the Dutch colonizers at that high Imperial moment immediately pre
ceding the onset of the nationalist movement, at least regarding the
fatal consequences for them that this kind of revelation on the part of
their colonized subjects would eventually lead to.
In the gap, then, between birds and men lies a certain nostalgia,
and one that like the emerald girdle itself is best imagined as an im
possible conjunction between the pure nature of glassy-green islands
and the authority of kings as concretely reflected in the unchallenged
possession of their patrimonial treasures. As a constitutive moment
of the modern, this nostalgia motivated not only the museumizing
and racist insistence on separating over and over again and in differ
ing fashions, "savage" bodies from "civilized" clothes, but that also
harkened back to an imagined time when kings were true kings and
every emperor was well-installed in his own clothes. In short, as with
other jewels and other crowns, there was to the Dutch emerald gir
dle26 considerably more than met the eye.

N otes

1. Twenty-four months of fieldwork in Aru, Southeast Moluccas (1984,

1986-88, 1994) were funded by a Department of Education Fulbright-Hays
Dissertation Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re
search, the Institute for Intercultural Studies, the Southeast Asian Council for
the Association for Asian Studies with funds from the Luce Foundation, the
Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO),
 The Tooth o f Time 173

and was conducted under the sponsorship of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan
Indonesia and Universitas Pattimura. I am grateful to these institutions for
their generous support of my work. Versions of this article were presented at
an informal seminar at the University of Amsterdam Research Centre Religion
& Society and at the "Border Fetishisms" conference organized by the same, at
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Center for Literary
and Cultural Studies at Harvard University (CLCS), and the 1996 Association
for Asian Studies meetings. I have been helped by the discussions on those oc
casions especially by Inge Boer, Johannes Fabian, John Pemberton, Adela
Pinch, Peter Stallybrass, Mary Steedly, and Hent de Vries. I would also like to
thank my colleagues Gerd Baumann, Birgit Meyer, Prahbu Mohapatra, Peter
Pels, and Peter van Rooden for their comments on an early draft of the paper,
James Scott for his on a somewhat later version, and Rafael Sanchez for his in
cisive reading of the penultimate version. I am especially grateful to the many
Aruese women and men who talked to me about their clothes and inadvert-
edly encouraged me to investigate their history.
2. This expression, especially prevalent in the 1930s and 40s in the de
bates between Dutch conservatives and progressives concerning the signifi
cance of three hundred years of Dutch rule in the Indies, was also the title of
a 1941 volume edited by W.H. van Helsdingen en H. Hoogenberk. Today in
the Netherlands, a similar celebratory tone pervades the nostalgia-industry
oriented advertising of such former colonial products as tobacco.
3. Ornithologists refer to such trees as "leks," while the dancing back
and forth by males on a lek's branches is termed "lekking behavior." A tree
with the right shapea sparse crown and horizontal limbs that can easily ac
commodate the displaysmight serve many consecutive generations of P.
apoda (Quammen 1996: 620).
4. The book Women's Hats contains many pictures of hats adorned
with feathers from different bird species as well as several topped by a whole
bird. Page 111 shows a "pagoda of black draped silk velvet" crowned by a bird
of paradise "complete with its two lateral tufts of magnificent feathers"
(Campione 1989). The same book points out that the nineteenth-century
craze for birds and feathers on European womens' hats went together with
the perfection of taxidermy (ibid. 26-27). From the metropole the feathers
and birds from the Indies sometimes made their wayrefashionedback to
the colony. See Nieuwenhuys (1988: 44) for a photo from the early 1880s of
the favorite concubine of the Javanese ruler Mangkunegoro V in full riding
gear and sporting an "amazon" hat decorated with a paradise bird.
5. For the same reasons as velvet or fur which, following Freud, "repro
duce [for a fetishist] the sight of the pubic hair which ought to have revealed
the longed-for penis"(Freud 1950 [1927]: 201). This is presumably why the po
sition of the decorative feather(s) in relation to the wearer is so crucial and why
the further down the body it gravitates, the more erotically charged and so
cially suspect it becomes (like the cotton-"tails" on Playboy bunnies).
174 Patricia Spyer

6. The role played by European women in this colonial racism was

both crucial and highly complex. See Stoler 1992; 1995.
7. There were, of course, considerable differences among the European
colonial powers regarding the kinds of relations they constructed with their
various colonies, as, indeed, there were often important differences in the re
lations that any single colonizing nation might maintain with its different
colonies. Furthermore, although usually in many respects differently than at
home in the metropole, differences of class, gender, race, occupation, the mo
ment of arrival to the colony, and so on distinguished the various sectors
making up the colonizing population itself at any given historical moment.
Nonetheless, for this article I have chosen to largely gloss over these differ
ences in order to focus on the "tropical gothic" imagination that in certain
important respects seems to have been shared by the major European colo
nial powers at this time. I believe that this approach is not entirely unjusti
fied given that the various colonizing powers carefully watched and learned
from each otherthe 1857 Mutiny in India contained, for instance, a lesson
that none could ignore. Furthermore, the texts I draw upon here are not ex
clusively those written by Dutch colonial officials, but also include the writ
ings of French and especially English travelers to Aru.
8. There is considerable scholarly debate about how much influence
Wallace's own ideas may have had on Darwin especially regarding the theory
of natural selection. For a recent evaluation, see Quammen 1996: 102-14.
9. For a detailed discussion of such "religious habits," see Garber 1992:
210-33.
10. And they left behind more than that. Besides the "considerable sup
ply" of dead birds left in the traders' hands and the scores of dry-docked mo
torboats that had once served the feather-hunters, the Dutch colonial officer
who in 1937 encountered all of this in New Guinea writes that the hunters
also spread venereal disease to the island's interior (van Baal 1985: 101). I
would like to thank Bonno Thoden van Velzen for bringing this source to my
attention.
11. In the case of cultural "specimens" this worked somewhat differ
ently. For sure, as Pratt observes, it was often and indeed until quite recently
the case that "the initial ethnographic gesture" was one of total homogeniza
tion, "a collective they, which distills down further into an iconic he" or,
again, "the standard adult male specimen" (Pratt 1992: 64). At the same time
it should not be forgotten that descriptions of native women in the down
trodden and exploitative conditions in which they were allegedly found by
Europeans and kept by their own men also became an elaborated genre of
colonial literature. Whether one wants to call this kind of description ethno
graphic or not, it meant that women could not always be so easily over
looked as the "female of the species." Importantly, the genre also served the
purpose of setting up European men as the liberators of local women while
 The Tooth o f Time 175

simultaneously displacing along with the agency of colonized women and

men, their own exploitative interventions (Mani 1992).
12. Sometimes the fusion between man and bird has been even more
complete as, for instance, in those cases when an Aruese dons a headdress
fashioned out of Bird of Paradise plumes (Brumond 1853: 273). Today the so-
called Bird of Paradise dance in which Aruese sport such headdresses is this
archipelago's contribution to the regional dance competitions held annually
in the south Moluccas. For an extended reflection on similar headdresses in
neighboring West Irian, see Rutherford 1996.
13. Aesthetic-psychological notions of caprice, foolish vanity, and of
being swayed by the superficial appearance of things as opposed to their real
value has long been a part of fetish discourse (Pietz 1988: 111).
14. This kind of sobriety in male dress was in fact quite recent and en
sued from what one historian describes as "a shift in style from peacock male
to sombre man of action." She explains: "every European elite had taken
note of the sartorial and political disaster represented by the first procession
of the Estates General in Paris in 1789, the prelude to the French Revolution.
On that occasion, the representatives of the Third Estate, dressed in sombre
black, had been cheered; but the traditionally lavish costumes of the nobility
and clergy had met with jeers or silent disgust. The magic of ostentation,' as
Jean Starobinski puts it, had 'stopped having an effect on spectators who had
learned to add up the cost.' From now on, the habit a la francaise, the wigs,
powdered hair, brocades, silks, lace, and parrot colours, which had been fash
ionable from Boston to Berlin, and Moscow to Manchester, was increasingly
abandoned in favour of far more subdued and functional male dress" (Colley
1992: 187).
15. A remarkable black rock with bold white stripes located in one of the
broad channels that cuts across Aru and known locally as "Flag Rock" is said
to have been formed from the loincloth of the mythical ancestor Urlima. For
a photo, see Merton 1910: 151. Baron van Hoevell mentions men's striped
loincloths but fails to note whether they were fabricated from Dutch flags
(Baron van Hoevell 1890: 29). I believe it is safe to assume that had Aruese at
the time been wearing Dutch flags this would have been deemed worth not
ing (at the very least). I conclude therefore that the loincloths seen by Baron
van Hoevell were not made from Dutch flags and, that probably this fashion
is of a later, albeit pre-World War II, date.
16. According to Corbin, the period between 1840 and 1860 in France, a
kind of golden age for traditional regional costume, was followed by "a pe
riod of mimicry" in which "peasant traditions were lost, and regional cos
tumes, no longer worn, were piously collected by folklorists." Even though
such a trajectory may seem to record a dislocation of the "past" by the "pres
ent," the emergence of "fashion"in the form of prints and plates that cir
culate even in rural areas, mail order purchases, provincial branches of the
176 Patricia Spyer

Printemps department store and so onas a "modern" phenomenon went,

of course, hand in hand with the finding of folklore as an item that became
defined as a collectible (Corbin 1990: 490).
17. This is, of course, not an absolute contrast. An overlap in this respect
between colony and metropole can, for instance, be found in the idea of a
"national costume." In late nineteenth-century writings about Aru, however,
this category fulfills the role of yet another reading of allegedly timeless na
tive dress with the "national costume" none other than "the well-known Tji-
dako" or man's loincloth familiar to Europeans as standard male "savage"
garb throughout the Moluccas and different from the "aprons" worn by
women (van Doren 1854: 396). Notwithstanding the replacement of the
prior bark and "leaf" loincloths with ones made of cloth for men, or the hy
brid cloth and mat coverings worn by women, the "national costume" of Aru
in the eyes of Europeans remained, it appeared, unchanged (Baron van
Hoevell 1890: 22-23; de Hollander 1898: 522).
18. This meaning of the Dutch word landschap refers to a portion of
land or a region that may or may not have clearly defined borders. The term
was common throughout the Netherlands East Indies where it came to desig
nate administrative territories, a usage that historically predates the more fa
miliar meaning the term "landscape" enjoys in art history. It is from the
latter that the English word "landscape" derives.
19. On Africa's Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, the so-
called "Fetiche Gold" designating the religious objects made by Africans out
of an admixture of gold and other substances captured for Europeans the
fear of betrayal and counterfeit accompanying cross-cultural trade. As Pietz
observes; "the falsity of 'sophisticated' gold in economic transactions in
evitably echoed the religious falsity embodied by the gold fetish figures"
(Pietz 1988: 110).
20. In actuality, Europeans themselves often had a hand in the produc
tion of "mock chiefs," as when "the wife of a celebrated trader"who seems
to have been quite a tradeswomen herselfraised several persons in New
Guinea to the rank of Majoor and Kapitein (Ellen 1986: 60).
21. Bhabha in his "Of Mimicry and Man" hones in on "the area be
tween mimicry and mockery" as that space "where the reforming, civilizing
mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double . . . so
that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace" (Bhabha 1994: 86).
22. Of course, the colonizers were out of step with metropolitan mode
as well. One colonial author writes that the fashions worn by the colonizer
women in the Netherlands East Indies were "a full year" behind those of Eu
rope (Victor Ido in Bronkhorst & Wils 1996: 50). This statement presumably
applies to the colonial capital of Batavia where women would have more eas
ily been able to keep abreast of the fashions in Europe and would have had
 The Tooth o f Time 177

more means available to them to do soeither ordering the popular styles

from the metropole directly or having local dressmakers imitate and adapt
them to life in the Indiesthan in the more remote outposts of the empire.
Beyond the time lag, there were other important differences between what a
recent book on Indies dress refers to as the "Tropical Authentic" (tropen echt)
style of the colonies and those at home, although the gap between the two
narrowed with time (Bronkhorst & Wils 1996).
23. This proposition is supported by the evidence of similar reactions on
the part of colonials elsewhere. "Writing about British attitudes toward Indi
ans wearing European clothes, N.C. Chaudhuri trenchantly sums up the situ
ation: They, the British, were violently repelled by English in our mouths
and even more violently by English clothes on our backs.' " (Chaudhuri in
Cohn 1989). It is my belief that generally the British were even more strin
gent in the policing of difference between colonizers and colonizedespe
cially after 1857than the Dutch. This view resonates with Jean Gelman
Taylor's claim that the brief British interregnum of the Dutch East Indies be
tween 1815 and 1819 was an important factor that led the Dutch to draw
harder boundaries between themselves and those over whom they ruled in
the latter half of the nineteenth century (Taylor 1983).
24. This is, of course, a take-off of Bhabha's "not quite, not white" (Bha-
bha 1994: 89).
25. In a similar fashion, Cohn notes the impression made on Europeans
upon the occasion of a visit to India of the Prince of Wales in 1876 of the "mil
itary fossils" that were paraded out before them. Due to the ancient (and het
erogeneous) style of the uniforms and arms of the troops, an artist who
recorded the scene remarked that the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries (the
latter being, of course, the British) stood face to face (Cohn 1989: 326-27).
26. The expression "the emerald girdle" derives from the concluding para
graph of Multatuli's Max Havelaar (1860). After detailing the abuses of the
Dutch colonial regime in Java, Multatuli dedicates his book to William III: "for
I dedicate my book to you, William the third, King, Grand Duke, Prince . . .
EMPEROR of this splendid realm of INSULINDE, which garlands itself around
the equator, like an emerald girdle!. . . And I ask you in confidence if it is your
Imperial will that:. . . that over yonder your more than Thirty million subjects
are mistreated and exploited in your name? (Multatuli 1860: 185).

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Baron van Hoevell, G.W.W.C. (1890) "De Aroe-Eilanden, Geographisch, Ethno-

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Cohn, Bernard S. (1989) "Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the
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Marx, Karl (1967 [1867]) Capital, Vol. I, New York: International Publishers.
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7

Marx's Coat

Peter Stallybrass

1. F et is h iz in g C o m m o d it ie s , F et is h iz in g T h in g s

Marx defines capitalism as the universalizing of the production of com

modities. He writes in the Preface to the first edition of Capital that
"the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of
the commodity" is "the economic cell-form" (Marx 1976 [1867]: 90).1
The "economic cell-form" that occupies the first chapter of Capital
takes the form of a coat. The coat makes its appearance not as the ob
ject that is made and worn but as the commodity that is exchanged.
And what defines the coat as a commodity, for Marx, is that you can
not wear it and it cannot keep you warm. But while the commodity is
a cold abstraction, it feeds, vampire-like, on human labour. The con
tradictory moods of Marx's Capital are an attempt to capture the con-
tradictoriness of capitalism itself: the most abstract society that has
ever existed; a society that consumes ever more concrete human bod
ies. The abstraction of this society is represented by the commodity-
form itself. For the commodity becomes a commodity not as a thing
but as an exchange value. It achieves its purest form, in fact, when
most emptied out of particularity and thingliness. As a commodity, the
coat achieves its destiny as an equivalence: as 20 yards of linen, 10 lb.
184 Peter Stallybrass

of tea, 40 lb. of coffee, 1 quarter of wheat, 2 ounces of gold, half a ton

of iron (Marx 1976 [1867]: 157). To fetishize the commodity is to
fetishize abstract exchange-valueto worship, that is, at the altar of
the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal which trace the number
of paper cups that will buy you an academic book, the number of aca
demic books that will buy you a Cuisinart, the number of Cuisinarts
that will buy you a snowmobile. In Capital, Marx's coat appears only
immediately to disappear again, because the nature of capitalism is to
produce a coat not as a material particularity but as a "supra-sensible
value (Marx 1976 [1867]: 165). The work of Marx's Capital is to trace
that value back through all its detours to the human labor whose
appropriation produces capital (see Scarry 1985). This leads Marx the
oretically to the labor theory of value and to an analysis of surplus-
value. It leads him politically to the factories, the working conditions,
the living spaces, the food, and the clothing of those who produce a
wealth that is expropriated from them.
The coatthe commodity with which Marx begins Capitalhas
only the most tenuous relation to the coat that Marx himself wore on
his way to the British Museum to research Capital. The coat that
Marx wore went in and out of the pawnshop. It had very specific
uses: to keep Marx warm in winter; to situate him as a suitable citizen
to be admitted to the Reading Room. But the coat, any coat, as an
exchange-value is emptied out of any useful function. Its physical
existence is, as Marx puts it, "phantom-like":

If we make abstraction from [the commodity's] use-value, we abstract

also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-
value. . . . All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished (Marx 1976
[1867]: 128).

Although the commodity takes the shape of a physical thing, the

"commodity-form" has "absolutely no connection with the physical
nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising
out of this" (Marx 1976 [1867]: 165). To fetishize commodities is, in
one of Marx's least-understood jokes, to reverse the whole history of
fetishism.2 For it is to fetishize the invisible, the immaterial, the
supra-sensible. The fetishism of the commodity inscribes immaterial
ity as the defining feature of capitalism.
Thus, for Marx, fetishism is not the problem; the problem is the
fetishism of commodities. So what does it mean that the concept of
"fetishism" continues to be used primarily in a negative way, often
with the explicit invocation of Marx's use of the term? This is the ges
 Marx's Coat 185

ture of exploitation that established the term in the first place. As

William Pietz has brilliantly argued, the "fetish" emerges through the
trading relations of the Portuguese in West Africa in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (Pitez 1985, 1987). Pietz shows that the fetish as
a concept was elaborated to demonize the supposedly arbitrary at
tachment of West Africans to material objects. The European subject
was constituted in opposition to a demonized fetishism, through the
disavowal of the object. It is profoundly paradoxical that widely an
tagonistic ideological critiques of European modernity share the as
sumption that that modernity is characterized by a thoroughgoing
materialism. The force of that denunciation depends upon the as
sumption of a place before the fall into materialism, a society where
people are spiritually pure, uncontaminated by the objects around
them.3 But to oppose the materialism of modern life to a nonmaterial
ist past is not just wrong; it actually inverts the relation of capitalism
to prior and alternative modes of production. As Marcel Mauss puts it
in The Gift, his founding book on precapitalist exchange, objects in
such exchanges can be "personified beings that talk and take part in
the contract. They state their desire to be given away." Things-as-gifts
are not "indifferent things"; they have "a name, a personality, a past"
(Mauss 1967 [1925]: 55).4 The radically dematerialized opposition be
tween the "individual" and his or her "possessions" (between subject
and object) is one of the central ideological oppostions of capitalist so
cieties. As Igor Kopytoff notes, "this conceptual polarity of individual
ized persons and commoditized things is recent and, culturally
speaking, exceptional" (Kopytoff 1986: 64).
One aspect of this dematerializating polarity was the develop
ment of the concept of the "fetish." The fetisso marks, as Pietz shows,
less the ancient distrust of false manufactures (as opposed to the
"true" manufactured wafers and images of the Catholic Church) than
a suspicion both of material embodiment itself and of "the subjec
tion of the human body . . . to the influence of certain significant
material objects that, although cut off from the body, function as its
controlling organs at certain moments" (Pietz 1985: 10). The fetisso
thus represents "a subversion of the ideal of the autonomously deter
mined self" (Pietz 1987: 23). Moreover, the fetish (in contrast to the
free-standing idol) was from the first associated with objects worn on
the bodyleather pouches, for instance, worn round the neck con
taining passages from the Koran (Pietz 1987: 37). The concept of the
"fetish" was developed literally to demonize the power of "alien"
worn objects (through the association of feitigo with witchcraft). And
it emerged as the European subject simultaneously subjugated and
186 Peter Stallybrass

enslaved other subjects and proclaimed its own freedom from mater
ial objects.
This disavowal of the object has often been read as merely a ruse.
In this view, European entrepreneurs proclaimed their detachment
from objects, while "fetishistically" collecting them. But this constant
repetition of "fetishism" as a category of abuse repeats rather than il
luminates the problem. For European entrepreneurs did not, at least
after the early trading stages, fetishize objects; on the contrary, they
were interested in objects only to the extent that they could be trans
formed into commodities and exchanged for profit on the market. As
a term of economic abuse, the concept of the fetish defined those
with whom the Europeans traded in Africa and in the Americas as
people who worshipped "trifles" ("mere" fetishes) and "valuable"
things (i.e. gold and silver) alike. This meant that they could be
"duped" (i.e. what the Europeans considered valuelessbeads, for in
stancecould be exchanged for "valuable" goods). But it also implied
a new definition of what it meant to be European: that is, a subject
unhampered by fixation upon objects, a subject who, having recog
nized the true (i.e. market) value of the object-as-commodity, fixated
instead upon the transcendental values that transformed gold into
ships, ships into guns, guns into tobacco, tobacco into sugar, sugar
into gold, and all into an accountable profit. What was demonized in
the concept of the fetish was the possibility that history, memory,
and desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and
loved and worn.
A by-product of this demonization was the impossible project of
the transcendental subject, a subject constituted by no place, no ob
jectby nothing worn. "The Word Fetish, John Atkins wrote in
1737, "is used in a double signification among the Negroes: It is ap
plied to dress and ornament, and to something reverenced as a
Deity" (quoted in Pietz 1988: 110). The European subject, on the
other hand, "knew the value of things"that is, disavowed any but
a financial investment in objects. Clothes could be "fashion"de
tachable and discardable goodsbut they were less and less likely to
be fashionings, the materializations of memory, objects that worked
upon and transformed the body of the wearer. In attributing the no
tion of the fetish to the commodity, Marx ridiculed a society that
thought it had surpassed the "mere" worship of objects supposedly
characteristic of "primitive religions." For Marx, the fetishism of the
commodity was a regression from the materialism (however dis
torted) that fetishized the object. The problem for Marx was thus not
with fetishism as such but rather with a specific form of fetishism that
 Marx's Coat 187

took as its object not the animized object of human labor and love
but the evacuated nonobject that was the site of exchange. In the
place of a coat, there was a transcendental value that erased both the
making and the wearing of the coat. Capital was Marx's attempt to
give back the coat to its owner.

2. M a r x ' s C oat

1852 was another catastrophic year for the Marx household.5 In the
early months of the year, Marx was writing The Eighteenth Brumaire,
itself an attempt to come to terms with the failures of the 1848 revo
lutions and the triumph of reaction. From January 2nd to the 24th,
he was ill in bed, writing with the greatest difficulty. But he had to
write, since that, along with gifts from Engels and what they could
pawn, was the source of the household's income, a household con
sisting of four children and three adults. In fact, not only did Marx
have to write; he had to write journalism. In June 1850, Marx had ob
tained a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum, and he
had begun to do the research that would be the basis for Capital. But
to finance that research, he needed to write for money.6 Moreover,
during his illness, he couldn't get to the Museum anyway. But when
he recovered, he wanted to put in at least some time at the library. He
couldn't do it. So desperate had the financial situation become that
not only had his credit with the butcher and the greengrocer dried
up, but he had been forced to pawn his overcoat.7 On the 27th Feb
ruary, he wrote to Engels: "A week ago I reached the pleasant point
where I was unable to go out for want of the coats I have in pawn"
(Marx 1983a [1852-55]: 50). Without his overcoat, he could not go to
the British Museum (see Draper 1985: 61). I do not think there is a
simple answer to why he could not go. No doubt, it was not advisable
for a sick man to face an English winter without an overcoat. But so
cial and ideological factors were probably equally significant. The
Reading Room did not accept just anyone from off the streets, and a
man without an overcoat, even if he had a ticket, was just anyone.
Without his overcoat, Marx was, in an expression whose force it is
hard to recapture, "not fit to be seen."
Marx's overcoat was to go in and out of the pawnshop through
out the 1850s and early 1860s. And his overcoat directly determined
what work he could or could not do. If his overcoat was at the pawn
shop during the winter, he could not go to the British Museum. If he
could not go to the British Museum, he could not undertake the
188 Peter Stallybrass

research for Capital What clothes Marx wore thus shaped what he
wrote. There is a level of vulgar material determination here that is
hard even to contemplate. And yet vulgar material determinations
were precisely what Marx contemplated, and the whole first chapter
of Capital traces the migrations of a coat as a commodity within the
capitalist marketplace. Of course, if he had pawned his coat, there
was a simple sense in which Marx needed to stop his researches and
get back to journalism. His researches brought in no money; his jour
nalism brought in a little. Only through his journalism (and through
the support of Engels and of relations) could he raise the money not
only to eat and pay the rent but also to get his overcoat out of pawn,
and only with his overcoat was he fit to return to the British Mu
seum. But there was a further direct connection between the pawn
shop and the materials of Marx's writing. Even journalism, and
particularly the journalism which Marx undertook, required materi
als: newspapers, books, pen and ink, paper. In September of the same
year, he was unable to write his articles for the New York Daily Times
because he couldn't afford the newspapers that he needed to read for
his articles. In October, Marx had to pawn "a coat dating back to my
Liverpool days in order to buy writing paper" (Marx 1983a [1852-55]:
21; see Draper 1985: 64-65).
A sense of just how precarious the Marxes' economic life was dur
ing this period is captured by the report of a Prussian spy, probably
from the fall of 1852:

Marx lives in one of the worsttherefore, one of the cheapestquar

ters of London. He occupies two rooms. The one looking out on the
street is the living room, and the bedroom is at the back. In the whole
apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Every
thing is broken down, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over
everything and there is a large old-fashioned table covered with an
oilcloth, and on it there lie his manuscripts, books and newspapers, as
well as the children's toys, and rags and tatters of his wife's sewing
basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot,
tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ashin a word, everything topsy
turvy, and all on the same table. A seller of second-hand goods would
be ashamed to give away such a remarkable collection of odds and
ends (McLellan 1981: 35).

A second-hand dealer might have been ashamed but the Marxes

could not afford to be. Their broken-down furniture, their pots and
pans, their cutlery, their own clothes had exchange value. And they
 Marx's Coat 189

knew just what that value was, since item after item of their belong
ings travelled to and from the pawnbroker.
What the family had acquired from the von Westphalens, Jenny's
aristocratic family, was turned into liquid assets. In 1850, Jenny
pawned the family silver. According to the recollections of Henry
Hyndman, Marx's own attempts to pawn more silver had met with
disaster:

On one occasion Marx himself being in great need went out to pawn
some household silver. He was not particularly well dressed and his
knowledge of English was not so good as it became later. The silver,
unfortunately, as it turned out, bore the crest of the Duke of Argyll's
family, the Campbells, with which house Mrs. Marx was directly con
nected. Marx arrived at the Bank of the Three Balls and produced his
spoons and forks. Saturday night, foreign Jew, dress untidy, hair and
beard roughly combed, handsome silver, noble crestevidently a
very suspicious transaction indeed. So thought the pawnbroker to
whom Marx applied. He therefore detained Marx, on some pretext,
while he sent for the police. The policeman took the same view as the
pawnbroker and also took poor Marx to the police station. There
again appearances were strongly against him. . . . So Marx received
the unpleasant hospitality of a police cell, while his anxious family
mourned his disappearance . . . (McLellan 1981:149).

This was a story that Mrs. Marx told late in her life, and it may be
that she condensed many tribulations into one vivid story. But what
ever the literal truth of the account, it captures the contradictory life
of the Marxes in the 1850s, defined now not by their aristocratic and
middle-class connections in Germany but by their poor clothes, their
foreignness, and, in Marx's case, by his being Jewish.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx analysed the power and instabil
ity of clothes. The text is actually suspended between two different
accounts of the appropriation of clothes. The first account is an al
most exact inversion of Marx's own situation. That is, his own proj
ect was constantly threatened by the dispersal of his clothes and the
pawning of his overcoat, with the constant diminishment of his au
thority even to enter the British Museum. But The Eighteenth Brumaire
begins with the attempts of others to assume the authoritative
clothes of the past so as to create authority in the present. If "the tra
dition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living," it is only by the reawakening of the dead that
previous revolutions have legitimated themselves. Revolution has
190 Peter Stallybrass

previously appeared in borrowed "names" and borrowed "costumes":

Luther put on the "mask" of St. Paul; the Revolution of 1789 to 1814
"draped" itself successively as the Roman republic and the Roman
empire; Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon "performed the task of their
time in Roman costume" (Marx 1963 [1852]: 16). These are, of
course, metaphors. But they are metaphors that have been histori
cally literalized. That is, the dress codes and the iconography of both
the French revolution and the French empire drew upon the dress
codes and iconography of the Roman republic and the Roman em
pire. "Unheroic as bourgeois society is," Marx writes, in its first revo
lutionary moments it clothes itself in the past so as to imagine itself
in terms of "the great historical tragedy" (Marx 1963 [1852]: 16).
Ironically, Marx finds his own historical purpose in the grotesque
image of Louis Bonaparte's reclothing of the present in the splendid
robes of the past, a reclothing that discredits past and present alike.
Although Marx begins his polemic against Louis Bonaparte's rise by
representing it as a grotesque farce (or "second edition" [Marx 1963
(1852): 15]) of the "tragedy" of the eighteenth Brumaire, when
Napoleon I came to power, Marx concludes by asserting that Louis's
parody strips bare the past. The present is less a story of decline (the
decline from tragedy to farce) than an unmasking of the past as itself
farce. At the very conclusion of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx writes
that Louis has revived "the cult of the Napoleonic mantle." "But
when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis
Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of
the Vendome Column" (Marx 1963 [1852]: 135). Louis Bonaparte
thus achieves by accident precisely what Marx himself tries to
achieve: the dismantling of the triumphalist forms of the State.
Yet the concept of ideological or political dismantling was, as
Marx's work increasingly argued, inadequate to address the economic
forces which quite literally dismantled the proletariat and the lump-
enproletariat while dressing the bourgeoisie in the borrowed robes
of emergent capitalismthe robes that the bourgeoisie acquired
through the appropriated labor of those who worked above all in the
textile industries. England, where Marx now lived, was the heartland
of capitalism because it was the heartland of the textile industries. Its
wealth had been founded first on wool and then on cotton. Engels
was himself sent to England to work in and then manage a Manches
ter cotton mill in which his family held a partnership. To the extent
that the Marxes survived on Engels's generosity, they lived on the
profits of the cotton industry. But they survived through the 1850s
and early 60s only marginally. Engels's father insisted that he learn
 Marx's Coat 191

the industry from the bottom up, and, particularly in the early part
of this period, he did not have much money to spare. Even to earn
the little he did, he had to sacrifice his own ambitions as a journalist
in London and follow a trade that repelled him (see McLellan 1978:
21-29). We confront here a curious paradox in Marx's life. That is,
while he undertook in a way that had never been done before an
analysis of the systematic workings of capitalism, he himself de
pended mainly upon precapitalist or marginally capitalist practices:
small inheritances; gifts; the writing of tracts that often had to be
subsidized. But while he worked mainly outside the capitalist market
place, he still lived during the period of which I write what can only
be called a proletarian and at times subproletarian life.
Marx learned about the workings of capitalism mainly from po
litical work and conversation and from his massive reading in the
British Museum, but he learned about the kind of domestic life that
the working classes lived first-hand. It was a life lived in crowded
rooms (for the Marxes between six and eight people in two and then
three rooms in the 1850s) (see Padover 1978: 23); a life in debt to
bakers and grocers and butchers8; a life in which a purchase often had
to be balanced out by the selling or pawning of some previous pur
chase. Like any working class household, the hopes and despairs of
the Marxes could be traced by their journeys to the pawnbrokers. Let
me give just a very selective account of the Marx household's deal
ings with the pawnbrokers. In 1850, Jenny Marx pawned silver in
Frankfurt and sold furniture in Cologne (Marx 1982 [1844-51]: 38).
In 1852, Marx pawned his overcoat to buy paper on which to con
tinue to write (Draper 1985: 65). In 1853, "so many of our absolute
essentials ha[ve] found their way to the pawnbroker's and the family
ha[s] grown so shabby, that for the past ten days there hasn't been a
sou in the house" (Marx 1983a [1852-55]: 385). In 1856, to finance
the move to a new house, they needed not only all of Engels's help
but also to pawn household possessions (Marx 1983b [1856-59: 70).
In 1858, at another time of drastic financial crisis, Jenny Marx
pawned her shawl, and, at the end of the year, she was beset with
dunning letters from her creditors and was forced "to run errands to
the pawnshops in town" (Marx 1983b [1856-59]: 255, 360). In April
1862, they owed 20 for the rent and had pawned their own, their
children's, and Helene Demuth's clothes (Marx 1985 [1860-64]: 380).
They redeemed them later in the spring but had to put them back
in pawn in June. In January of the next year, not only were they in
need of food and coal, but the children's clothes were again pawned
and they couldn't go to school. In 1866, the household was again in
192 Peter Stallybrass

distress, everything possible was pawned, and Marx could not afford
to buy writing paper (Draper 1985: 133).
The most complete account of their accounts during this period
are in a letter from Marx to Engels in July 1858 (Marx 1983b
[1856-59]: 329-30). He writes that the situation is "absolutely unten
able" and that he is "completely disabled [in English] from doing any
work" because of his domestic miseries. On top of debts to the baker,
the butcher, the cheesemonger, the greengrocer, and 3 10s. for
chemises, dresses, shoes, and hats for the children, he payed 3 in in
terest to the pawnshop, and another 3 10s. for redeeming linen and
other things from the pawnshop. On top of that, he was paying
weekly money to the tallyman for a coat and trousers for himself. A
tallyman was someone who supplied goods on credit, to be payed for
by installments. They were, as a dictionary of canting terms put it in
1700, "Brokers that let out Clothes at moderate Rates to wear per
Week, Month, or Year." An earlier pamphlet more harshly asserted
that "The unconscionable Tally-man . . . lets them have ten-shillings-
worth of sorry commodities,. . . on security given to pay him twenty
shillings by twelve-pence a week."9 In other words, the poorer you
were, the more expensive it was to live. Pawn-tickets had to be regu
larly payed, if the pledge was not to be lost. And if you couldn't af
ford to buy clothes outright, you had to pay much more to buy them
over an extended period.
Marx's domestic life, then, depended upon the "petty calcula
tions" that characterized working class life. Any pleasure or luxury
had to be priced in relation to the sacrifice of another pleasure or
even necessity. "Respectability," that central nineteenth-century
virtue, was something to be bought and, in times of need, pawned. In
The Condition o f the Working Class in England, written in 1844, Engels
had described both the materiality and the fragility of that respect
ability. He recorded a thousand small stories, as of the woman prose
cuted for her children's thefts. She had sold her bedstead and pawned
the bedding to buy food (Engels 1987 [1845]: 74). Respectability was
a bed, bedding, kitchenware, but, above all, suitable clothes. Clothes,
Engels wrote, were the visible markers of class:

The clothing of the working people, in the majority of cases, is in a

very bad condition. The material used for it is not of the best adapted.
Wool and linen have almost vanished from the wardrobe of both
sexes, and cotton has taken their place. Shirts are made of bleached
or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the women are chiefly of cot
ton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely seen on the wash-
 Marx's Coat 193

line. The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton
goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has become the
proverbial costume of the working men, who are called "fustian jack
ets," and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear
broad cloth. When Fergus O'Connor, the Chartist leader, came to
Manchester during the insurrection of 1842, he appeared, amidst the
deafening applause of the working men, in a fustian suit of clothing
(Engels 1987 [1845]: 102-3).

If the clothes of the poor were haunted by the spectre of disposses

sion (their transformation into cash at the pawnbrokers), they could
also become the materialization of class resistance. Engels' account of
Fergus O'Connor's fustian points to the construction of a symbolic
discourse of class through the very materials of class oppression.
"Fustian" was a coarse cloth made of thick, twilled cotton with a
short pile or nap. It was usually dyed an olive, leaden, or other dark
color. By the nineteenth century, fustian had become exclusively as
sociated with the working classes. In 1861, Digby wrote of "the fus
tian rascal and his lack-linen mate" and Hardy wrote in 1883 of the
"hob-nailed and fustianed peasantry."10 What is striking about Fergus
O'Connor's performance as a Chartist is that, despite his pretensions
to Irish royal ancestry and his financial independence, he self-con
sciously adopted the dress of his followers. When he was released
from prison in 1841, he was, the Northern Star records,

habited, as he had promised, in fustian. He wore a full suit made out

of one piece which had been manufactured expressly for the occa
sion, and was presented by those who had not only his welfare at
heart but were imbued with his principles and with his spiritthe blis
tered hands and fustian jackets of Manchester (quoted in Pickering
1986: 157).

On his release, O'Connor explicated the class significance of the

clothes he was wearing: "I have appeared Brother Chartists and work
ing men amongst you in fustian, the emblem of your order, in order
to convince you, at a single glance, that what I was when I left you,
the same I do return to you." In fact, O'Connor's identification with
fustian preceded his release; his contributions to the Northern Star had
been consistently addressed to the "fustian jackets" and "blistered
hands." And O'Connor's assumption of fustian transformed a cheap
material into the badge of radical class consciousness. In August
1841, a Preston Chartist wrote to O'Connor:
194 Peter Stallybrass

the greatest object of my writing to you [is] to know what colour of

fustian or moleskin you would come out of prison in . . . [I]f we poor
devils are ever permitted to have another new jacket, we would like
the same colour (quoted in Pickering 1986: 161).

Fustian thus became a material memorial, an embodiment of a class

politics that preceded a political language of class.
But the day to day experience of working people reveals that
even the poorest of clothesincluding fustianwere not the stable
markers of social identity. The clothes constantly migrated. Working
men might buy a woollen coat for Sunday, but it would be made of
the cheapest wool, so-called "Devil's dust" cloth that tore easily and
was soon threadbare, or it would come from a second-hand dealer.
Engels wrote that "the working man's clothing is, in most cases, in
bad condition, and there is the oft-recurring necessity for placing the
best pieces in the pawnbroker's shop" (Engels 1987 [1845]: 103).
"Furniture, Sunday clothes where such exist, kitchen utensils in
masses are fetched from the pawnbrokers on Saturday night only to
wander back, almost without fail, before the next Wednesday . . . "
(Engels 1987 [1845]: 152). Clothes, in fact, rather than kitchen uten
sils, were the usual pledge. In a survey of pawnbrokers in 1836, cloth
ing accounted for more than 75 percent of the total, with metal
goods (including watches, rings, and medals) a mere 7.4 percent, and
Bibles accounting for 1.6 percent (Tebbutt 1983: 33).
The usual pattern of pawnshop trade, as Melanie Tebbutt has
finely shown, was for wages received on Friday or Saturday to be used
to get one's best clothes out of pawn. The clothes were worn on Sun
day and then pawned again on Monday (a day in which one pawn
shop received three times as many pledges as on any other day)
(Tebbutt 1983: 6). And the cycle was a rapid one, the majority of
items being pawned and redeemed again on a weekly or monthly
basis. The rate of pawning and redemption was itself an indicator of
wealth and poverty. At two pawnbrokers in Liverpool in the 1860s, at
the poorest 66 percent of the pledges were redeemed within the week
and 82 percent within the month, while at the more upscale pawn
broker there was a slower turnover, 33 percent of the pledges being
redeemed weekly and 62 percent monthly (Tebbutt 1983: 9). A car
penter who had pawned his tools for 15 shillings during a strike
pawned his best clothes to redeem them when the strike ended.
When he returned to work, he took his tools back to the pawnshop
every Saturday to redeem his best clothes, which he repawned every
Monday in exchange for his tools. For the 15 shillings he got in ex-
 Marx's Coat 195

change for his pledges, he had to pay 8d. a week (an interest rate of
about 4.5 percent weekly, 19 percent monthly, and 235 percent
yearly) (Tebbutt 1983: 32-33). The extent to which many families'
best clothes inhabited the pawnshop for the majority of the year is
suggested by the sudden increases in their redemption at major festi
vals, such as Whit Week, when people dressed up as best they could
for the celebration of Spring (Tebbutt 1983: 33)
For the Marxes, the pawning of their clothes sharply delimited
their social possibilities. In the winter of 1866, Jenny Marx could not
go out because all her respectable clothes were pawned (Marx 1987
[1864-68]: 331). The following year, their three daughters were in
vited for a holiday in Bordeaux: not only did they have to calculate
all the expenses of the journey but they also had to redeem their chil
dren's clothes from the pawnshop to make them presentable (Marx
1987 [1864-68]: 397). Happiness was often measured in the buying of
new clothes or the redemption of things from the pawnshop. When
Wilhelm Wolff died in 1864, leaving Marx a sizeable legacy, Marx
wrote: "I should very much like to buy Manchester silk for the whole
family" (Marx 1985 [1860-64]: 527). Death, in fact, produced the
most contradictory of emotions. If it was one of the family, a coffin
had to be bought, funeral expenses to be met, and the Marxes fre
quently did not have the money to meet those expenses (see McLel-
lan 1981: 25). But if a relative with money died, it was a cause for
celebration.11 Naked commercial transactions and the most intimate
of family ties are framed in the same language: "uncle" or "pop" are
the names for both relatives and pawnbrokers. Both "uncle" and
"pop" suggest not only the familiarity of the repeatedly visited pawn
broker but also the conception of a relative as someone one hopes to
get some cash out of, as from a pawnbroker. For the Marxes, uncles
and "uncles" were often equivalent and alternative sources for their
financial survival.
But relations with the pawnbroker were structurally antagonis
tic.12 For it was at the pawnshop that the double life of things ap
peared 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 ob
ject 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. From the perspective of the pawnshop, any value
other than exchange-value is sentimental value, a value of which the
object must be stripped if it is to be "freely" exchanged on the mar
ket. It was thus in the pawnshop, not in the factories that were
196 Peter Stallybrass

increasingly the motor of capitalist production, that the opposition

between the particularity of a thing and the abstract exchange-value
of a commodity was most visible. If you had as privileged a past as
Jenny Marx, you might take to "uncle" table napkins of old Scottish
descent (Marx 1985 [1860-64]: 570-71). But that family history,
which was of undoubted significance to Jenny Marx, would be of no
significance to the pawnbroker unless it added to the objects' ex
change value. The pawnbroker did not pay for personal or family
memories. To the contrary. In the language of nineteenth century
clothes-makers and repairers, the wrinkles in the elbows of a jacket or
a sleeve were called "memories." Those wrinkles recorded the body
that had inhabited the garment. They memorized the interaction, the
mutual constitution, of person and thing.13 But from the perspective
of commercial exchange, every wrinkle or "memory" was a devalu
ation of the commodity.
Memories were thus inscribed for the poor within objects that
were haunted by loss. For the objects were in a constant state of
being-about-to-disappear. The calculation of the likely future jour
neys of clothes and other objects to the pawnshop was inscribed
within their purchase.14 As Ellen Ross notes, "the 'bank' of ornaments"
on a working class mantle was indeed a bank, since it represented the
scarce resources which could nevertheless be pawned and turned into
cash in times of need (Ross 1993: 46). Objects, and the memories at
tached to them, did not stay in place for the poor. They could rarely
become heirlooms. And the objects used as pledges could be any
thing that still had exchange value. In the 1820s, Charles Dickens
while still a boy went to the pawnshop with the family's valued
books: Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker
(Johnson 1952: I, 31). Worse was to come. After his father's release
after being imprisoned for a debt of 40, insolvency proceedings were
brought against him. "The law provided that the clothing and per
sonal effects of the debtor and his dependents must not exceed 20
in value" (Johnson 1 9 5 2 :1, 37). Charles was consequently sent to an
official appraiser to have his clothes valued. He was wearing a boy's
white hat, a jacket, and corduroy trousers, nothing of much value,
but he was painfully aware of his grandfather's silver watch ticking
away in his pocket.
Dickens's painful awareness of the relations between memory,
exchange-value, and the pawnshop shape his later account of "The
Pawnbroker's Shop" in Sketches by Boz. A young woman and her
mother bring in "a small gold chain and a 'Forget-me-not' ring,"
given "in better times" and "prized, perhaps, once, for the giver's
 Marx's Coat 197

sake" (Dickens 1994 [1833-39]: 192). Now, the two women argue
with the broker over how much the objects are worth. This account
of the pawnshop, though, not only establishes a distance from Dick
ens's own experiences but also violently regenders it so as to associ
ate commodity exchange with being female. For the women are
depicted as on their ways to becoming commodities. This is already
figured in the fact that they part with their memorials "without a
struggle" (Dickens 1994 [1833-39]: 192). In fact, Dickens's account
simultaneously sentimentalizes and demonizes the transaction.
As he himself noted, costermongers and fishwomen showed what
he elsewhere called "strange forethought," buying "great squab
brooches" and "massive silver rings" as "convenient pledges" (quoted
in Tebbutt 1983: 17). In contrast, memorial jewelry tended to be
pawned in exceptional circumstances. In 1884, it was a sign of how
bad the depression was that a single Sunderland pawnbroker re
ceived 1,500 wedding rings as pledges and 3,000 watches (Tebbutt
1983: 26). One woman recollected women crying as they looked at
"the wedding rings in the window, their own wedding rings," which
"they'd no way of redeeming at all" (Tebbutt 1983: 26). Never
theless, the future possibility of pawning could enter into the buy
ing of a memorial ring:

A young war bride who grew up in jarrow during the 1930s and had
stark memories of how her mother had pledged her own ring during
the depression made her fiance buy the most expensive one he could
afford as similar insurance against the future (Tebbutt 1983: 26).15

This endemic tension between forms of memorialization and self

constitution and forms of commodity exchange is treated by Dickens
in "The Pawnbroker's Shop" only in terms of female corruption.
Cruikshank's accompanying illustration shows the mother and her
daughter framed by, on one side, a "young female, whose attire, mis
erably poor but extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold but extravagantly
fine, too plainly bespeaks her station" and, on the other, a woman
who is "the lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting, and
slovenly" (Dickens 1994 [1833-39]: 192). Dickens displaces onto
women the relation between the particularity of the object-as-memory
and the generality of the object-as-commodity, the former figured as
"true love," the latter as prostitution.
Dickens and Cruikshank represent in demonized form the actual
gendering of the pawnshop, where, as Ellen Ross has shown, the
transactions were largely conducted by women.16 Ross writes:
198 Peter Stallybrass

That pawning was so heavily a female domain in Victorian and Edwar

dian London tells us something about the sorts of things commonly
pawnedclothing and household goodsand also that pawning was
often a stage of meal preparation (Ross 1993: 47).

The pawnings of Marx's household were no different in this respect.

If Marx wrote about the workings of money, it was his wife, Jenny,
and their servant, Helene Demuth, who organized the household's fi
nances and made the trips to the pawnbroker. Wihelm Liebknecht, a
German exile who visited the Marxes almost daily in the 1850s,
noted "all the work" that Helene Demuth did: "I will only remind
you of the many trips to that mysterious, deeply hated and still assid
uously courted, all-benevolent relative: the 'uncle' with the three
globes" (McLellan 1981: 59). And Jenny Marx was also back and forth
to the pawnshop throughout the 1850s. Looking back at this period,
she wrote in a letter to Liebknecht that

In all these struggles, the harder because the pettier part falls to us
women. While the men are invigorated by the fight in the world out
side, strengthened by coming face to face with the enemy, be its
number legion, we sit at home darning stockings (Padover 1978: 42).

She might have added, providing the material forms of survival from
the pawnshop.
Yet Marx himself was never isolated from the crisis of the house
hold's finances, as his endless begging letters to Engels witness. And
even his stories to his children are shadowed by the migration of ob
jects under the pressure of debt. When, in 1895, Eleanor Marx re
called her life with her father, she wrote:

of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the
most delightful one, was "Hans Rockle." It went on for months; it was
a whole series of stories... . Hans Rockle himself was a Hoffmann-like
magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always "hard up." His
shop was full of the most wonderful thingsof wooden men and
women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters,
animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Ark, tables and
chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a ma
gician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or to
the butcher, and was thereforemuch against the grainconstantly
obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonder
ful adventuresalways ending in a return to Hans Rockle's shop
(McLellan 1981: 100- 101).
 Marx's Coat 199

Hans Rockle's toyshop seems to incorporate the plenitude of the

world of made things. And those things, like their owner, have magi
cal powers. But, because Rockle is constantly in debt, he is forever
obliged to sell his toys to the devil. The moment of sale is the mo
ment of alienation, of the stripping of the magic of the toys as they
are transformed into exchange-values. But Marx's story refuses the
transformation of the toys into commodities. Although they are sold
to the devil, he never becomes their possessor, for they have a life of
their own, a life which finally leads them back to their point of ori
gin, Hans Rockle. The stories that Marx told to his young daughter
surely allegorize both the moments of absolute dispossession and the
trips to the pawnbroker's shop. Before Eleanor was born, her parents
had watched the bailiffs enter their lodgings and take away every
thing, including "the best of the toys belonging to the girls"; they
had watched Jenny and Laura weeping for the loss. But in the stories,
as in the trips to the pawnbroker's shop when they were in cash, the
moment of loss is undone: the toys come back.
It was to the systematic undoing of loss that Marx dedicated his
entire life. The loss, of course, was not his own; it was the loss of the
entire working class, alienated from the means of production. That
alienation meant that they, the producers of the greatest multiplic
ity of things that the world had ever known, were forever on the
outside of that material plenitude, their faces peering in through the
toyshop window at the toys that they had made but that now had
been possessed as "private property." The private property of the
bourgeoisie was bought at the price of the dispossession of the work
ing classes from the things of this world. In so far as they had pos
sessions, they held them precariously. If their things were sometimes
animated by their loves, their histories, their handlings, they were
often animated by the workings of a marketplace that took back
those things and stripped them of their loves and their histories, de
valued them because they had been handled. But, for Marx, the
pawnshop could not be the starting point for an analysis of the rela
tion between object and commodity. There are, I think, two reasons
for this. The first is that the pawnbroker is, from Marx's perspective,
an agent in the consumption and recirculation of goods rather than
in their production. The second is that, although at the pawnshop
one sees the transformation of object into commodity, this particu
lar transformation is as much a feature of precapitalist as of capitalist
formations. There is nothing specifically new about exchange value
or, for that matter, about pawnbrokers. And to figure the pawnbro
ker as the capitalist leads into all the most predictable forms of reac
tionary ideology: the middle man as exploiter; the Jew or Korean as
200 Peter Stallybrass

the origin of oppression.17 The pawnbroker both precedes capitalism

and is marginal to it, at least in its later manifestations.
There was, as Marx knew, a form of magic in the material trans
formations that capitalism performed. It is a magic that Hans Chris
tian Andersen captures in his story, "The Shirt Collar." The collar
wants to get married, and proposes in the wash to a garter. But she
won't tell him her name, so he proposes to the iron, who burns a
hole in him, and addresses him disdainfully as "You rag." Finally, at
the papermill, the collar says

it's high time I changed into white paper. And that's what happened.
All the rags were turned into white paper; but the collar became this
very bit of paper we have before us, on which the story has been
printed (Andersen 1982 [1849]: 231).

Andersen restores to the notion of the book, which had become in

creasingly the "invisible" medium joining the immaterial ideas of the
writer to the immaterial mind of the reader, the literal matter of the
book and the participation of "literature" in the life-cycle of cloth.
What Marx restores to the notion of the book, as to every other com
modity, is the human labors that have been appropriated in the mak
ing of it, the work that produced the linen of shirts and petticoats and
bedsheets, the work that transformed bedsheets into sheets of paper.
Marx, in fact, wrote at the moment of crisis in that very process.
The massive developments of the paper industry (for the production
of newspapers, bureaucratic paperwork, novels, wrapping-paper and
so on) had led to an ever greater demand for rags, a demand that
could no longer be met. In 1851, the year in which Marx began writ
ing The Eighteenth Brumaire, Hugh Burgess and Charles Watt made the
first commercially useful paper from ground-wood pulp (Hunter
1978: 555). From 1857-60, in the desperate search for replacements
for rags, esparto grass was imported from Algeria and it was upon
paper made from this grass that the Illustrated London News, the
Graphic, and the Sphere were printed. The first newspaper printed en
tirely on paper from wood pulp was probably the Boston Weekly Jour
nal, and that was not until 1863 (Hunter 1978: 565). As late as 1860,
rags still formed 88 percent of the total papermaking material
(Hunter 1978: 564). Yet by 1868, a year after the publication of the
first volume of Capital, paper was being used for almost every con
ceivable use: for boxes, cups, plates, wash-bowls, barrels, table tops,
window blinds, roofing, towels, napkins, curtains, carpets, machine
belts. And in 1869, paper coffins began to be manufactured in the
 Marx's Coat 201

United States (Hunter 1978: 568). But nowhere were the revolution
ary inversions of capitalism more apparent than in the fact that
paper, previously made out of the residue of cloth and clothing, now
became the material out of which collars, vests, cuffs, aprons, but
tons, hats, handkerchiefs, raincoats, corsets, slippers, and petticoats
were made. Men's paper collars were given such resounding names as
"Lord Byron," "Longfellow," "Shakespeare," and "Dante." In 1869, a
paper collar was named after Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, Henry
Ward Beecher, who promoted anti-slavery and women's suffrage. The
collar was popularly known as the "Beecher garotte" (Hunter 1978:
385). In 1860, a song called "The Age of Paper" was popular in Lon
don music halls; it was sung by Howard Paul "attired in a suit of
paper" (Hunter 1978: 386, 388).
But if there was, indeed, a magic to these transformations, there
was also a devastating appropriation of the bodies of the living and
even of the clothing of the dead. In 1855, Dr. Isaiah Deck, a New York
scientist, suggested that paper could be made out of the wrappings of
Egyptian mummies. "At this period of sepulture," he wrote, "it is by
no means rare to find above 30 pounds weight of linen wrappings in
individual mummies." He continued:

The supply of linen rags would not be limited to the mummies of the
human species alone; independent of that obtainable from this
source, a more than equal amount of cloth could be depended on
from the mummies of the sacred bulls, crocodiles, ibides, and cats as
all of these animals were embalmed and swathed in a superior quality
of linen. . . . [S]ome bandages, from 5 inches to 5 feet wide and 9
yards long, have been stripped from mummies their entire length
without tearing.. . .

The question, Will it pay? may be readily answered by assuming the

value of rags to be from 4 to 6 cents per pound; in the United States
this is considered to be under the market estimate of fine linen rags . . .
(Hunter 1978: 384).

A Dr. Waite recalled that when he was a young man, he had indeed
made paper out of mummies: he noted that "the rolled-up vestments
retained the shape of the mummy, so that when the workmen tried
to straighten or unroll the 'cocoon,' as it might be called, it sprang
back at once into the shape of the mummy it had encased so long"
(Hunter 1978: 383). It is in such surreally grotesque transformations
that one can trace the emergence of the commodity from the death
202 Peter Stallybrass

of a material memory. In Capital, Marx tried to restore that material

memory, a memory literally embodied in the commodity although
suppressed as memory.
In Capital, Marx wrote about a coat as a commodityas the ab
stract "cell-form" of capitalism. He traced the value of that cell-form
to the appropriated body of alienated labor. In the process of produc
tion, he argued, the commodity takes on an exotic life, even as the
body of the worker is reduced to an abstraction. But the actual coats
of workers, as of Marx himself, were anything but abstractions. What
little wealth they had was stored not as money in banks but as things
in the house. Well-being could be measured by the coming and going
of those things. To be out of pocket was to be forced to strip the body.
To be in pocket was to reclothe the body. The extraordinary intimacy
of the pawnbroker's stock, and the massive preponderance of clothes,
can be guaged from the accounts of a large Glasgow pawnbroker in
1836. He had taken as pledges:

539 men's coats; 355 vests; 288 pairs of trousers; 84 pairs of stockings;
1980 women's gowns; 540 petticoats; 132 wrappers [women's loose
outer garment]; 123 duffles [thick flannel shawl or coat]; 90 pelisses
[women's long coat]; 240 silk handkerchiefs; 294 shirts and shifts; 60
hats; 84 bed ticks; 108 pillows; 206 pairs of blankets; 300 pairs of
sheets; 162 bedcovers; 36 tablecloths; 48 umbrellas; 102 Bibles; 204
watches; 216 rings; 48 Waterloo medals (Hudson 1982: 44).

To keep a roof over one's head and food on the table, the intimate
materials of the body had to be pawned. And sometimes, one had to
choose between house and body. In July 1867, Marx decided to use
the 45 set aside for the rent to get back the clothes and watches of his
three daughters, so that they could go to stay with Paul Lafargue in
France (Marx 1987 [1864-68]: 397). To take one's clothes to the pawn
broker meant to teeter on the edge of social survival. Without "suit
able" clothes, Jenny Marx wouldn't go out on the street; without
"suitable" clothes, Marx would not work at the British Museum; with
out "suitable" clothes, the unemployed worker was in no state to look
for new employment. To have one's own coat, to wear it on one's
back, was to hold on to oneself, even as one held on to one's past and
one's future. But it was also to hold onto a memory system that at a
moment of crisis could be transformed back into money:

Yesterday I pawned a coat dating back to my Liverpool days in order

to buy writing paper (Marx 1983a [1852-55]: 221).
 Marx's Coat 203

For Marx, as for the workers of whom he wrote, there were no "mere"
things. Things were the materialsthe clothes, the bedding, the fur
niturefrom which one constructed a life; they were the supple
ments the undoing of which was the annihilation of the self.
It has become a cliche to say that we should not treat people like
things. But it is a cliche that misses the point. What have we done to
things to have such contempt for them? And who can afford to have
such contempt? Why are prisoners stripped of their clothes, if not to
strip them of themselves? Marx, having a precarious hold upon the
materials of self-construction, knew the value of his own coat.

N otes

1. I am indebted to the Society for the Humanities at Cornell Univer

sity for a fellowship that allowed me to begin work on this project, and for
the support and criticisms of the fellows at the Society. Since then, I have
benefited from criticisms and suggestions from Crystal Bartolovich, Robert
Foster, Webb Keane, Ann Rosalind Jones, Annelies Moors, Adela Pinch, Marc
Shell, and Patricia Spyer. Above all, I am indebted to the work of Bill Pietz
(cited below) and to conversations with Margreta de Grazia and Matthew
Rowlinson. See also Matthew Rowlinson's fine meditation on the relation be
tween money, commodities, and things in "Reading Capital with Little Nell."
2. For Marx and commodity fetishism, see Marx 1976 [1867], pp.
163-77. For Marx's assertion of the necessity of "alienation" in the positive
form of the imbuing of objects with subjectivity through our work upon
them and of the imbuing of the subject with objectivity through our materi
alizations, see his "On James Mill," in Marx 1977, pp. 114-23.
3. For an analysis of the history of the changing relations between sub
ject and object in early modern Europe, see de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stally
brass (1995).
4. For development and critiques of Mauss's theory, see Gregory 1983;
Weiner 1985 and 1992; Appadurai 1986; Strathern 1988; Thomas 1991; Der
rida 1992.
5. My account of the day to day life of the Marx household draws
above all on Marx's constant stream of letters to Engels, published in Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (1975- ). I have also found partic
ularly useful Draper 1985; McLellan 1981; Marx 1973; Seigel 1978; Padover
1978; Kapp 1972.
6. On the 20th February, Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer: "I have
been so beset by money troubles that I have not been able to pursue my stud
ies at the Library" (Marx and Engels 1983a [185255[: 40).
204 Peter Stallybrass

7. On the Marxes, their debts, and their visits to the pawnshop during
the 1850s and 1860s, see, for instance, Marx 1982 [1844-51], pp. 224, 402,
556-57; Marx 1983a [1852-55], pp. 181-82, 216, 385; Marx 1983b [1856-59],
pp. 70, 255, 328-30, 360; Marx 1985 [1860-64[, pp. 380, 399, 433, 442, 445,
570-71, 577; McLellan (1981), pp. 22-29, 35-36, 149.
8. For Marx's own detailed account of his debts in 1858, see Marx
(1983b [1856-59]), pp. 329-30.
9. Both quotes are taken from the OED under "tallyman."
10. Both quotations are taken from the OED under "fustian."
11. See, for example, Marx's description of the death of his wife's uncle
as "a very happy event [in English]," Marx 1983a [1852-55]: 526.
12. I would emphasize that I am analysing here the structural relation
between the object and the commodity. The actual relations between pawn
brokers and their customers were highly variable. As Tebbutt notes, "the
pledge shop was firmly rooted in the community and trusted in a way which
external organizations [like banks] were not" (Tebbutt 1983: 17). And there
was sometimes an air of carnival at the Saturday gatherings at the pawnshop
(see Ross 1993: 47).
13. On clothes and memory, see Stallybrass 1993: 35-50.
14. The inscription of loss within the act of purchase was a feature of
everyday life for those who regularly used the pawnbroker. Melanie Tebbutt
notes that the poor "had, in fact, a qualitatively different view of material re
sources, which they regarded as a tangible asset to be drawn on in periods of
financial difficulty. When buying sales goods the poor habitually asked what
they would fetch if offered in pawn, and frequently confessed they were in
fluenced in their choice by the articles' potential pledge value" (Tebbutt
1983: 16). See also Annelies Moors's essay in this collection. She notes that
richer Palestinian women tend to buy jewelry made of gold of relatively low
value but that has been highly worked. Poorer women, on the other hand,
tend to buy jewelry made of unworked gold of higher value, since they need
to get the highest possible value for it if and when they pawn it.
15. For a fascinating analogy, see again Annelies Moors's essay.
16. Not only did women do most of the pawning; it was their own
clothes that they most commonly pawned to raise money for the household.
In a breakdown of the clothes pawned in 1836, 58 percent of garments
clearly gender-identified were women's, while a significant percentage of the
rest could have been either men's or women's. See Tebbutt 1983: 33.
17. In fact, despite the ideological association of Jews and pawnbroking,
pawnbrokers were not mainly Jewish in nineteenth-century England (see
Hudson 1982: 39).
 Marx's Coat 205

R eferences

Andersen, Hans Christian (1982 [1849]) Eighty Fairy Tales, trans. R. P. Keig-
win, New York: Pantheon.
Appadurai, Arjun (1986) "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of
Value" in Arjun Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life o f Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-63.
Derrida, Jacques (1992) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf,
Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, pp. 34-70.
Dickens, Charles (1994 [1833-39]) Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers,
1833-39, ed. Michael Slater, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Draper, Hal (1985) The Marx-Engels Chronicle, vol. 1 of the Marx-Engels Cy
clopedia, New York: Schocken.
Engels, Friedrich (1987 [1845]) The Condition o f the Working Class in England,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Grazia, Margreta de, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (1995) "Intro
duction," Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, pp. 1-13.
Gregory, Chris (1983) "Kula Gift Exchange and Capitalist Commodity Ex
change: A Comparison," in The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Ex
change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103-17.
Hudson, Kenneth (1982) Pawnbroking: An Aspect o f British Social History, Lon
don: The Bodley Head.
Hunter, Dard (1978) Papermaking: The History and Technique o f an Ancient
Craft, New York: Dover.
Johnson, Edgar (1952) Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, vol. 1, New
York: Simon and Schuster.
Kapp, Yvonne (1972) Eleanor Marx, New York: Pantheon.
Kopytoff, Igor (1986) "The Cultural Biography of Things," in Arjun Appadu
rai (ed.) The Social Life o f Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64-91.
Marx, Karl (1963 [1852]) The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte New York:
International Publishers.
Marx, Karl (1976 [1867]) Capital: A Critique o f Political Economy, vol. 1, trans.
Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage.
Marx, Karl (1977) Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
206 Peter Stallybrass

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1982 [1844-51]) Collected Works, vol. 38,
New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1983a [1852-55]) Collected Works, vol. 39,
New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1983b [1856-59]) Collected Works, vol. 40,
New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1985 [1860-64]) Collected Works, vol. 41,
New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1987 [1864-68]) Collected Works, vol. 42,
New York: International Publishers.
Mauss, Marcel (1967 [1925]) The Gift: Forms and Functions o f Exchange in Ar
chaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, New York: Norton.
McLellan, David (1973) Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York: Harper
and Row.
McLellan, David (1978) Friedrich Engels, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McLellan, David (ed.) (1981) Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections, London:
Macmillan.
Padover, Saul K. (1978) Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Pickering, Paul A. (1986) "Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in
the Chartist Movement," Past and Present 112: 144-62
Pietz, William (1985) "The Problem of the Fetish, I," Res 9: 5-17.
Pietz, William (1987) "The Problem of the Fetish, II," Res 13: 23-45.
Pietz, William (1988) "The Problem of the Fetish, Ilia," Res 16: 105-23.
Pietz, William (1993) "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in
Marx," in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds.) Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 119-51.
Ross, Ellen (1993) Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking o f the World,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Stallybrass, Peter (1993) "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of
Things," Yale Review 81: 35-50.
Strathem, Marilyn (1988) The Gender o f the Gift: Problems with Women and
Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
 Marx's Coat 207

Tebbutt, Melanie (1983) Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class

Credit, Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Thomas, Nicholas (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and
Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Weiner, Annette (1985) "Inalienable Wealth," American Ethnologist 12: 52-65.
Weiner, Annette (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox o f Keeping-While-
Giving, Berkeley: University of California Press.
8

Wearing Gold

Annelies Moors

I n t r o d u c t io n

Palestinian women in various positions hold divergent views on wear

ing gold. When I did fieldwork in Jabal Nablus (West Bank, Palestine)
in the 1980s, older rural women showed me with pride the gold coins
sewn on pieces of cloth that they wore as necklaces inside their
dresses. Younger rural women pointed to the heavy gold bracelets
they were wearing, the necklaces with large pendants, their earrings
and so on. Most of this jewelry was at least 21-carat gold. Higher class
urban women, on the other hand, especially the well-educated and
professionally employed, would wear different types of gold, usually
finer-worked, smaller items of a much greater variety. This was 18-
carat gold, often imported from Italy. These women considered the
heavier bracelets, which were also commonly worn by the less well-off
urbanites, and may well have been part of their own mothers' gold as
sets, as traditional and old-fashioned, and therefore as not suitable for
modern women to wear. Younger rural women, on the other hand,
and the poorer urbanites liked to have some small items of Italian
gold, yet would still hold most of their gold in the form of 21-carat
bracelets. In their eyes, 18-carat gold is not really gold.
 Wearing Gold 209

"Wearing gold" is the literal translation of the Arabic labsa dha-

hab, a standard expression used to inquire or make a statement about
the jewelry a woman is wearing. It brings together two different, yet
connected aspects of gold jewelry: on the one hand, holding gold as
an economic resource, and on the other, displaying it as jewelry.
Ownership of gold as a material asset invites a discussion about the
place gold occupies in the world economy (its status as a "supercur
rency"), as well as about local manifestations of the property-power
nexus. Wearing jewelry brings to the fore how bodily adornments are
employed in processes of identity formation and in negotiations of
status. Gold jewelry then connects what is otherwise often seen as
separate: the monetary system and notions of personhood, economy
and emotions, investments and adornments.
In Jabal Nablus women received and continue to receive most of
their gold jewelry as gifts at marriage. Gold, however, is not only part
and parcel of a "gift economy," expressing elements of the "fetishism
of the gift," that is the lack of separation between persons and things.
It is also a commodity (or rather, with its specific money-gold nexus,
a supercommodity), created by people, yet holding a certain power
over them. Valuations of (different types of) gold jewelry depend in
part on the ways in which the "gift" and "commodity" elements are
brought together, and the various ways in which processes of person
ification (gold acquiring attributes of persons) and objectification
(with its owners being defined as thing-like) are intertwined.1
In this paper I focus on the distinct valuations of "wearing gold,"
or rather, of wearing specific (carat) types of gold, and the ways in
which these tie in with, produce, and subvert differences and hierar
chies. Before addressing the various positions Palestinian women
have taken up with regard to gold, I turn first to another way in
which "wearing gold" can be seen as a "border fetish," that is with re
spect to the very different economies of value Western observers and
Palestinians attach to "wearing gold."

W ea r in g t h e V eil V ersus W ea r in g G o l d

The preoccupation of Westerners with "the veil" has a long history.

As Ahmed (1992) has convincingly argued for Egypt, Western au
thors and policy makers, at least from the late nineteenth century
on, have paid excessive attention to women wearing veils. Within
the context of colonial politics, women's veiling practices were seen
as the most visible sign of the backwardness of Muslim societies,
210 Annelies Moors

and, as such, became a convenient legitimization of the Western civ

ilizing mission. Westerners (and in their wake sections of the local
elite) came to consider the veil as instrumental to women's objecti
fication in a double and connected sense. Wearing a veil was taken
as the material expression of the particular subordination Muslim
women had to suffer at the hands of their own men, and veiled wo
men were seen as bereft of any trace of individuality, as exchange
able one for the other. This focus on veiling also set the stage for
those expressing their resistance against the European colonial pres
ence. In an inversion of the colonial discourse, they considered veil
ing as central to Muslim women's cultural authenticity; as such,
they reproduced the fixation on the veil. Up till the present, debates
on veiling continue to be framed by different evaluations of pro
cesses of modernization and westernization, and quests for cultural
authenticity.
In contrast to the focus on women wearing veils, little notice has
been taken of "women wearing gold." In two major anthropological
introductory texts on the Middle East, for instance, the meaning of
gold jewelry to the women concerned is virtually ignored. In The
Middle East: An Anthropological Approach, Eickelman (1989), provides
an extensive description of various types of marriage arrangements in
the region, listing all sorts of gifts women receive as dower. Only in
the briefest way possible, however, does he refer to the jewelry also
received in these settings and then only to immediately downplay it
by noting how the jewels are often rented (1989: 174). While jewelry
may indeed, on some occasions, be rented, the widespread practice of
women (even those from lower class households) obtaining at least
some gold at marriage is completely overlooked. Bates and Rassam
(1983) in their Peoples and Cultures o f the Middle East Only discuss gold
when arguing that the daughters of the better off families receive the
dower themselves "in the form of jewelry, furniture, property, and so
on" (1983: 202). While their book includes an illustration of three
women wearing what appear to be necklaces with a substantial num
ber of gold coins, the reader is left in the dark as to the nature of the
jewelry involved, with the caption only stating, "Three Yoriik brides
from one household" (1983: 205).
Discussions about jewelry in the Middle East are, by and large,
limited to books on "material culture." Such books tend to focus on
what has been defined as "customary jewelry," and then mainly to sil
ver items. It is true that at least until the 1920s wearing silver jewelry
was, indeed, a more widespread practice in Palestine than wearing
gold, especially in the rural areas (Weir 1989: 194). Still, in more re
 Wearing Gold 211

cent times as well, gold has largely been neglected, with publications
focusing on the considerably larger and more spectacular silver items,
such as Bedouin women's facial jewelry and head dresses. As a result,
Palestinian jewelry is mainly represented as customary and exotic.2
The issue here is, however, not simply that women's veils rather
than their gold has caught the eye of Western observers. The main
point is that there are major differences in the ways in which the re
lation of women to these two material objects is defined and ana
lyzed. While veils and women tend to be fused, with the veil almost
taking on a life of its own and speaking for the women concerned,
jewelry tends to be discussed as artifacts separated from their female
owners. Whereas veiling is usually, at least in the more traditional
Orientalist approaches, analyzed in terms of relations of male domi
nance and female subordination, in descriptions of "women wearing
gold" the issue of power relations tends to be absent.3 This absence
then is a strong indication of very different economies of value at
tached to "wearing gold." Whereas Western observers choose to ne
glect women's gold, to many women in Jabal Nablus the gold jewelry
they receive as part of their dower has been an important economic
resource. If veils have by and large been discussed in terms of wo
men's subordination and an essentialized Oriental difference, a focus
on gold as a major economic asset may reveal the possibilities for
women to act as an economic agent of sorts, and in doing so point to
potential similarities with Western notions of personhood.

B alad! G old : A W oman' s A ffair

The Middle East is not only a large consumer of gold, but most of this
gold, delivered in the form of kilo bars, is used locally to manufacture
jewelry.4 As many other cities in the Middle East, Nablus has a sizable
gold market, which is regularly frequented by groups of women, with
or without their male relatives, actively involved in the buying and
selling of gold. For not only wearing, but also owning gold is, to a
considerable extent, a woman's affair. While the size of their posses
sions may vary greatly, the large majority of married women in Jabal
Nablus were and are owners of gold jewelry.
Jabal Nablus is part of an area in which wearing gold jewelry has
a long history.5 In rural Jabal Nablus, up till the 1960s most women
acquired their gold largely in the form of Ottoman, and to a lesser ex
tent, British gold coins (Urat dhahab). These they wore, sewn together
on a cloth ribbon, as necklaces inside their dresses (qilada dhahab).
212 Annelies Moors

The value of such coins, which are facsimiles of official coins ("fake
coins"), is determined by their gold content (usually 22-carat) and
their weight. As such they can be seen as "bullion" coins, as a way of
holding gold bullion in "small denominations."6
In Nablus city gold jewelry was also worn in other shapes and
sizes. Rather then wearing a coin necklace, or in addition to wearing
such and other necklaces, urban women wore their gold in the form
of many different types of gold bracelets, such as the heavy "twisted
wire" (mabruma), "pear" (injasa) or "snakes" (hayaya) bracelets, and
the lighter sahab. Beginning in the late 1960s these gold bracelets
also became more popular in the rural areas. Also the value of these
bracelets, which were quite standardized, but with small variations in
style, was determined largely by weight; the gold content was invari
ably 21-carat. At times combinations of bracelets and bullion were
also popular. Some bracelets mainly consist of gold coins, while off
and on bracelets with small gold bars between two gold chains were
available in the gold market.
This type of gold, both the 21-carat bracelets and the 22-carat
coins, is called baladi, a complex notion referring to the local, indige
nous, and authentic. The main characteristic of such baladi gold is
that the option of selling it is never far away. As jewelers pointed out,
the main question women have when they come to buy gold is how
much they will lose when selling it again. While what they will even
tually receive is, of course, partly determined by the price of gold on
the international market, losses due to labor and other additional
costs are limited; labor costs are often less than 5 percent.
The economic value of gold depends on the relation between
the local currency and internationally determined gold prices. In
Palestine holding baladi gold was usually seen as a sound invest
ment, and as a more secure way of keeping one's wealth than would
be the case with cash money or bank accounts. Cash holdings were
considered risky because of theft, inflation, and the possibility of
currency depreciation, while international acceptability is less than
with gold. A banking system has been largely absent in Jabal Nablus.
Under the Israeli occupation, bank deposits with Israeli banks were
unattractive because of fear of confiscation for political reasons,
while bank deposits in Jordanian banks were relatively unaccessible
(Harris 1988: 215-16). And gold has not only been a relatively se
cure, but also, at times, highly profitable way of investing money.
Especially when the international gold standard collapsed and the
link between currency and gold was broken, prices of gold have risen
phenomenally.7
 Wearing Gold 213

W o m e n A c q u ir in g G o l d :
T h e D o w e r as G e n d e r e d P r o per t y

As I have already suggested, for Western authors, at least for those

taking Muslim women's subordination as their point of departure,
women owning gold is a difficult issue to deal with. This matter is fur
ther complicated because the main mechanism for women to acquire
gold was and is through dower payments (the mahr, which is to be
paid by the groom to the bride). Both in popular fiction and in aca
demic work there is a tradition which equates dower payments with
the sale of women, which is then commonly taken as yet another in
dication of women's alleged subordination. Hilma Granqvist, a
Finnish anthropologist who, in the 1920s, did extensive fieldwork on
marriage conditions in a village near Bethlehem, found it necessary
to elaborate at length against these assumptions. As she points out,
the village women themselves do not consider the mahr a form of
sale and purchase:

If one directly questions the fellahin women about this and says: "Is it
not the custom among you for a man to buy his wife?" or if one sug
gests that a father sells his daughter as a bride to a manwhich is the
same thingthey deny it with as much indignation as the educated
Arabs in the town. The bride money does not appear to them to be
payment for a purchase; it is only Westerns who unhesitatingly called
the giving of a bride price in Palestine a purchase ( ...) (1931:143).

Interestingly, educated urban men, well aware of such Western per

ceptions of the mahr, reformulated the issue of marriage payments in
European terms and turned the tables when comparing the Arab
mahr with the European dowry. Granqvist again:

In Jerusalem I once discussed this matter with an educated Arab and

he said: The Arabs again say that European women buy themselves
husbands, and only if the Westerns agree to call the dowry a form of
bridegroom purchase can the Arabs agree to see bride purchase in the
giving of a bride price. (1931: 134).

Not only does the local population reject a conceptualization of the

mahr as a form of "bride purchase," Islamic legal thought also firmly
rejects such a point of view. According to both classical Islamic law
and later legal reforms, the mahr is supposed to be the property of the
bride herself over which neither her husband nor her father or other
214 Annettes Moors

kin would have any control. Social practice may, of course, diverge
from legal doctrine, but as Granqvist has argued, even if the bride
does not receive the full amount registered as her dower, she does ob
tain part of the mahr as property which she can deal with in whatever
way she likes (1931: 132, 145).
In my own work on women's access to property in Jabal Nablus I
also argue that the dower was and is a major mechanism for women
to acquire property (Moors 1994; 1995). Women commonly received
at least part of their mahr in the form of gold jewelry at marriage. The
ways in which women deploy their gold in economic transactions,
has, however, been affected by major shifts in the political-economic
structure of the region. From the 1960s on, male migration wage-
labor has rapidly gained the upper hand over agriculture as the major
source of livelihood in the rural areas. Up till then rural women had
commonly sold their gold and bought goats, cows, and occasionally a
piece of land. Such options became increasingly less attractive in the
context of the general marginalization of agriculture. Women subse
quently began to invest their gold in their husband instead of in ani
mals or land, for instance, in order to enable him to migrate or to
build a house, as well as in their children's education. In line with the
greater centrality of husbands as providers, not only womens ability
to act with their gold, but also the meaning and nature of the gold it
self, has been affected.8 One visible sign, for instance, has been the
appearance of 18-carat Italian gold in the Nablus markets and on
women's bodies. These shifts tie in with changes in dower registra
tions and marriage arrangements, some of which can be read from
the marriage contracts, while others are presented in women's narra
tives on the dower and gold.

I ta lia n G o l d a n d t h e T o k e n D o w e r

Gold jewelry is not only an economic resource. For elite women,

wearing gold had always been more a statement of their status and
marital or kin relations than a means of gaining some sort of finan
cial security or safeguarding against its absence. As one of them told
me, she never had any reason to sell her gold; her husband always
bought her more whenever there was a new model on the market,
and she liked to keep the older items as they reminded her of the
occasions when she had received them. In addition, amongst the
wealthy jewelry did not only consist of gold, but also diamond-set
items were included. With the diamond trade of a different nature
 Wearing Gold 215

than that of gold, risks of losing money when selling such items were
considerably greater.
Beginning in the 1960s a new trend in wearing jewelry devel
oped. Those who could afford to do so began to wear smaller but
more exclusive pieces of jewelry, commonly imported from Italy.
They often referred to this gold as "small pieces," or mddelat (that is,
gold which, because of its greater hardness, could be made in a much
wider variety of models and fashions). As this Italian gold was only
18-carat and a substantially larger part of the price was made up of
labor costs and import duties, it was less valuable as an investment.
Selling this gold, women would incur a considerable loss. Even so,
wearing Italian gold rapidly became also more popular amongst the
less well-off in the city and in the rural areas, even if for these women
the 21-carat bracelets remained the central items in their dower gold.
Younger brides liked the large variety of nicely made Italian neck
laces, bracelets, pendants, rings, earrings and so on. Yet, at the same
time, they (and their family) were also intent on acquiring baladi
gold as a means of economic security.
Around the same time a major innovation in registering the
dower also started to become a trend. Rather than registering a high
amount of money as prompt dower, in some marriage contracts only
a token amount was written down, such as one JD (Jordanian dinar)
or one gold coin. Registering such a dower did, however, not result in
brides' exclusion from gold and other items. Often they received gifts
similar in value to what they would have obtained, had a set high
dower been recorded in the marriage contract. The crucial difference,
however, was that women no longer received these things as their
legal right, but rather as a gift, voluntarily provided by the groom. As
such, the token dower indicated above all that the bride and her fam
ily could afford to fully trust the groom and forego legal guarantees,
while the jewelry she received displayed the groom's ability and will
ingness to give.
Registering the dower in this novel way was "invented" by the
urban modernizing elite, and rapidly became the common practice in
families where women themselves were well educated and at times
professionally employed. Gradually also some families from the mid
dle and lower classes, and from the rural areas started to participate
in this trend. For them, however, this could be a risky thing to do, for
if the groom's gifts did not live up to expectations no legal redress
would subsequently be possible. Especially amongst the less well-off,
ambivalences about registering a token dower can be read in the mar
riage contracts. In a considerable number of contracts with a token
216 Annettes Moors

dower, the value, and sometimes the nature of the household goods
to be provided by the groom were registered, and, less often, also
gold of a specific carat content and weight. In this way the uncertain
ties of the token dower were somewhat hedged insofar as at least
some financial guarantees were written into the contract.
Women's arguments in favor of registering a token dower are simi-.
lar to their statements about why they only desire simple gold or
"smaller pieces." Self-conciously "modem women" consider both reg
istering a high dower and wearing a large number of heavy gold
bracelets as old fashioned. Some of these women themselves compared
registering such a dower with "the sale of women. One of them, for
instance, told me how, when her brother had asked her whether she
wanted a dower, she had indignantly responded with the query: "Am I
a donkey that he has to pay for me?" These women would still receive
gold jewelry at their weddings, but, especially amongst the better-off,
this would consist of expensive, finely worked pieces of "Italian gold,"
and also may include diamond-set rings with a large solitaire, and so
on. To them both registering a token dower and wearing Italian gold
was a means of affirming their modernity, an announcement that they
did not need financial guarantees upon marriage. Their husbands, or,
if need be, their own families, could be fully trusted to provide them
with anything they might need. And for those employed in the profes
sions, it was a statement on their own earning capacities. They did not
need the dower (or, for that matter, marriage) to gain access to prop
erty, as their own professional labor provided them with the means to
do so. While women from the lower classes may register a token dower
in order to claim higher status, and also liked to have some smaller, but
less expensive items of Italian gold, they often did not want to take the
risk of foregoing baladi gold altogether.
Wearing Italian gold and registering a token dower also coincide
with another trend, that is women's increased say in their choice of a
marriage partner. Actually, women sometimes attempted to down
play the economic side of marriage (a high dower and heavy gold
bracelets) in order to facilitate arranging a marriage with someone
they themselves preferred to marry. Within such a context Italian
gold has become associated with love marriages in which women see
their husbands as a partner and companion, rather than with strictly
arranged marriages with stronger gender hierarchies. Still, whereas
many younger women point out that the older system objectified
women as it linked them to the dower, others, in particular those
feeling excluded from this process of "modernization," argue that it
is the very emphasis on the "person" of the bride which may lead to
 Wearing Gold 217

her objectification. As a peasant woman in her early thirties com

mented about a man who had demanded to see his future bride be
fore the marriage contract was concluded: "Is she a cow that he needs
to see her?"

T h e " N e w " Q il Ad a a n d E m o t io n a l I n v es t m en t s
in B alad ! G o ld

The shift to Italian gold, as well as to registering a token dower, is far

from complete.9 In fact, there are indications that, by the later 1980s,
Italian gold had already lost some of its popularity. Young rural
women showed me with pride the qilada dhahab they had received
upon marriage, consisting of thirteen gold coins, with a larger one in
the middle, contained within a heavy frame; these coins were not
sewn on a ribbon, as had been common in their grandmother's day,
but were attached to a heavy gold chain. And amongst the urban
lower middle classes, the "Indian set" (taqm hindT) was becoming
popular, a set of 21-carat gold, either brought from the Gulf region or
locally made, consisting of at least a necklace and earrings, elabo
rately decorated with many small pendants and other attachments.
Even if the labor costs involved in these were higher than for the tra
ditional bracelets, they were less than in the case of Italian gold.
While brides still liked fashionable jewelry, they seemed to be turn
ing again to more secure types of gold. In a similar vein the rapid in
crease of token dower registrations has also halted. Guaranteeing
some form of economic security apparently has become once again
more important.
Yet, there is more to baladi gold than its monetary value. Women
actually wear this "investment" gold on their bodies. Even if they do
not necessarily do so all the time, at festive occasions they bring out
their gold. And while they may wear their qilada inside their dress,
enough of it is visible for people "in the know," as it were, to know
what is there. Wearing such gold coins and bracelets involves the
public display of specific social relations, because in doing so, women
make statements on their bodies about the various meanings of
"being given" valuable gold. When a woman wears baladi gold it is
evident that the groom's side has been willing to spend a consider
able sum of money; it entails not only a claim about the groom's
financial status, but also about his respect for and high evaluation
of the bride's own family. Displaying baladi gold may, at the same
time, also be read as a statement about the relation of a woman to
218 Annelies Moors

her father. The baladi gold on the woman's body proves that her fa
ther did not pocket the dower himself, but instead has spent it gen
erously on his daughter. As such, many read it as a sign of fatherly
love and protection of her. Baladi gold is then more than "simply" an
economic resource, it presents emotions to the world at large.

D isc u ssio n

Gold is a fetish par excellence. As Pietz has pointed out, the term
"guinea" came to designate the West African gold and slave coast as
well as an important gold coin (1988: 105). Gold, which people
themselves have created as "valuable," has gained tremendous power
over people's lives. Gold discoveries have both led to concentrations
of tremendous wealth and to ethnocide. Through the gold standard
different parts of the world have become part of an international
monetary system. Rather than representing value, as money does,
gold is value. Still, the value of gold depends on trust. At the same
time, gold is surrounded by much mystery. Major transactions of
gold are conducted secretly, some countries do not disclose informa
tion about their gold reserves, and others have forbidden their citi
zens to hold bullion gold. Trading and smuggling gold have been
highly lucrative, while gold has also been a convenient way of laun
dering money from dubious sources.
Discussing "women wearing gold," I have addressed fetishism in
a more specific sense. In dealing with gold jewelry as a border fetish,
my focus has been on the various ways in which women through
their use of different types of gold jewelry mark off and negotiate
such distinctions as locality, class, and gender. The strategies women
themselves pursue in regard to gold jewelry indicate the ways in
which wearing gold produces, transgresses, and undermines such cru
cial differences and hierarchies.
The great paradox of dower gold is that women acquire it by en
tering into marriage. Women generally are less able to act in respect
to arranging their marriages than men, and have a more limited con
trol over their own person after marriage. Yet, it is exactly through
entering such a relation that they gain considerable access to prop
erty (in particular in the form of gold), a potential source of eco
nomic power, with which they can act in whatever way they wish.
The very same dower that in some senses may be seen as objectifying
women also turns them into owners of, at times considerable, mov
able property.
 Wearing Gold 219

Dower gold does not only link person and property, it also con
nects gift and commodity. In legal terms the dower has been defined
as a set amount of money, registered in a marriage contract, which
the groom is obliged to pay the bride. In social practice, the dower is
also a gift, as the bride's father, to whom the dower is usually paid,
turns it over to his daughter in the form of "gifts" of gold jewelry,
with some fathers keeping part of it for themselves, while others add
to it. In the case of the token dower the gift element has become cen
tral, with the groom himself providing his wife with gifts of gold.
What women claim about their relations with their kin and hus
band ties in with the nature of the gold involved in sedimenting
these social ties. Baladi gold is closely associated with a marriage sys
tem based on arranged marriages and high registered dowers. This
gold points to the groom's respect for the family of the bride, and to
her father's willingness and ability to transfer at least a considerable
part of the dower to his daughter. As a result the daughter enters mar
riage endowed with considerable movable property. Italian gold and
registering a token dower belong to a different, more "modern" life
style, with marriage arrangements leaving some space for a more in
dividualized choice of marital partner, and the groom providing the
bride with gifts, rather than fulfilling dower obligations. Whereas bal
adi gold provided women with some economic autonomy, but within
a marriage system in which women were less able to act indepen
dently in other ways, Italian gold works in somewhat the opposite
fashion. Women claim more personalized marital arrangements and
relations, yet they lose out in terms of the economic security they
formerly enjoyed through their ownership of and rights over gold.
Not only has the dower increasingly turned into a gift, also the gold
given is of lesser value in economic exchange.
Through wearing different types of gold women make a state
ment both about their property holdings and about their kin and
marital relations. Wearing baladi gold can be seen as negotiating gen
der and class borders by claiming economic autonomy and kin pro
tection. Wearing Italian gold does so in a different way, as a token of
a "modern" marriage and by concretizing status claims. But this dis
tinction is not fixed, and ambiguities abound. Quite some marriage
contracts with a token dower negate women's need for economic se
curity, yet reaffirm it at the same time through the registrations of
household goods and occasionally gold. In a similar vein, women
may well employ multiple strategies with respect to their jewelry.
Whereas the wealthy refrain from wearing baladi gold, but do obtain
rings with a large solitaire, women from lower class households not
220 Annettes Moors

only acquire baladi gold, but also some small pieces of fashionable
Italian gold. Not only through wearing different types of gold, but
also by combining these in various ways, women in different posi
tions negotiate and revalue the differences and hierarchies of their
gendered, class, and geographical subject positions.

Finally, a short note on the importance of the mechanisms through

which women gain access to gold. In this paper dower gold has been
central, which ties the ownership of gold directly to marriage. Such
an emphasis fits well with local notions. When younger women wear
lots of gold jewelry it often is assumed that they have recently mar
ried. There are, however, also other ways for women to acquire gold,
such as through inheritance or through paid labor.
Acquiring gold through inheritance brings a very different rela
tion to the fore. Whereas in Jabal Nablus women often forego claim
ing the share in the inheritance they are legally entitled to, it seems
more difficult to disinherit women from gold than from any other
type of property (Moors 1995; see also Mundy 1979; Pastner 1980).
Yet, investigating the woman-inherited gold relation, it become evi
dent that it is not so much the nature of the property that counts,
but rather the fact that gold is mostly inherited from mothers. Inher
ited gold, then, can be seen as expressive of the strong emotional
bond between a mother and her daughter (in fact, a woman may well
give some of her gold pre-mortem to a daughter she feels particularly
close to and responsible for, such as a daughter who herself has post
poned marriage in order to support her mother in old age). In the
case of such inherited gold, the emotional and "personalized" side of
it is more central than was the case with dower gold. Even if mothers
give their gold to their daughters as a guarantee of economic security,
to the daughters the person of the mother is present in the gold con
cerned. Their gold speaks to them.
Buying gold from one's own income may in the first instance be
seen as a mirror image of the inheritance story, as such gold clearly is
a commodity and not a gift. Yet, also in this case wearing gold carries
with it a highly specific message about kin relations. Being able to
buy gold with income from one's own work indicates the freedom
such girls are allowed by their families to spend their income. While
legally women are under no obligation to support their families from
their income, a notion which is also socially current, many girls go
and work to assist their families when these are in financial need.
Through wearing some gold, they undermine the idea that their
 Wearing Gold 221

fathers and brothers would not live up to their obligations as pro

viders, and thereby show that their families are not stingy. Their gold
speaks for itself.

N otes

1. The discussion on gifts and commodities is informed by both Ap-

padurai (1986) and Bloch and Parry (1989). In taking issue with the distinc
tion between things that are commodities and those that are not, Appadurai
(1986: 13) emphasizes that things may be one and/or the other at various
moments during their life-cycle. Bloch and Parry (1989: 10-12) argue that
differences in processes of fetishizing cannot simply be explained by the eco
nomic system involved and the use of money. The gendered nature of discus
sions on things and people, and on power and property is informed by
Strathern (1984) and Whitehead (1984).
2. Whereas elsewhere in the Middle East wearing jewelry (and wearing
the veil) could also be part of a discourse on the eroticin which case
women's undressed bodies were central in the display of such jewelrythe
erotic has not been popular in Western discourse on Palestine, as Palestine
has first and foremost been defined as the Holy Land.
3. Weir (1989: 174 ff) is an exception to this trend. While she also fo
cuses on silver jewelry, her analysis does take into account the economic im
portance of such jewelry to its female owners.
4. At times 25 percent of all gold coming on the market was destined for
the Middle East (Green 1980: 191).
5. The extent to which gold jewelry was in use before the twentieth cen
tury is not easy to judge. Various authors employing archival material in writ
ing on property relations in Ottoman times mention gold jewelry (e.g. Tucker
1988 for Jabal Nablus).
6. Countries such as Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia produce large
amounts of such coins. The great increase in gold coin production in Saudi
Arabia in the late 1970s is explained in part by the fact that migrant laborers
(and pilgrims) bought such coins as a secure way to take their savings back
home (Weston 1983: 58).
7. After the gold price peaked during the 1930s and the 1970s consider
able amounts of gold were sold by the private sector, also in the Middle East
(Weston 1983: 70).
8. The shift in conceptualizing women from "productive daughters" to
"consuming wives" has in itself stimulated women's investments in their
husbands rather than their independent ownership of, and active dealing
222 Annelies Moors

with, productive property. And women are less able to buy productive prop
erty, as the value of the dower has declined relatively, especially in compari
son to land and real estate prices.
9. Whereas during the 1970s the percentage of contracts with a token
dower increased rapidly and, by the mid-1980s, a token dower was registered
in almost half the urban contracts, thereafter there was no further increase.

R eferences

Ahmed, Leila (1992) Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1986) "Introduction. Commodities and the Politics of
Value," in Arjun Appadurai, ed. (1986) The Social Life o f Things: Com
modities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pp. 3-64.
Bates, Daniel and Amal Rassam (1983) Peoples and Cultures o f the Middle East.
Englewood Cliffs, (N.J.): Prentice-Hall.
Eickelman, Dale (1989) The Middle East: An anthropological approach. Engle
wood Cliffs (N.J.): Prentice Hall.
Granqvist, Hilma (1931) Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village I. Helsing
fors: Akademische Buchhandlung.
Green, Timothy (1980) "Changing Patterns in the Middle East Gold Market,"
Journal o f Social and Political Studies 5, 4: 191-199.
Harris, Laurence (1988) "Money and Finance with Undeveloped Banking in
the Occupied Territories," in George Abed, ed., The Palestinian Econ
omy: Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation. London and
New York: Routledge. Pp. 191-223.
Moors, Annelies (1994) "Women and Dower Property in Twentieth-Century
Palestine: The Case of Jabal Nablus," Islamic Law and Society 1, 3:
301-331.
Moors, Annelies (1995) Women, Property; and Islam: Palestinian Experiences,
1920-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mundy, Martha (1979) "Women's Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen,"
Arabian Studies 5: 161-187.
Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch (1989) "Introduction: Money and the
Morality of Exchange," in Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, eds.,
Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Pp. 1-33.
 Wearing Gold 223

Pastner, Caroll (1980) "Access to Property and the Status of Women in Islam,"
in J. Smith, (ed.), Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies. Lewisbury:
Bucknell University Press. Pp. 146-186.
Pietz, William (1988) "The Problem of the Fetish, Ilia," Res 16: 105-123.
Strathern, Marilyn (1984) "Subject or Object? Women and the Circulation of
Valuables in Highlands New Guinea," in Renee Hirshon, ed., Women
and Property, Women as Property. London and Canberra: Croom Helm.
Pp. 158-176.
Tucker, Judith (1988) "Marriage and Family in Nablus, 1720-1856: Towards a
History of Arab marriage," Journal o f Family History 13, 2: 165-179.
Weir, Shelagh (1989) Palestinian Costume. London: British Museum.
Weston, Ray (1983) Gold: A World Survey. London: Croom Helm.
Whitehead, Ann (1984) "Men and Women, Kinship and Property: Some Gen
eral Issues," in Renee Hirshon, ed., Women and Property, Women as Prop
erty. London and Canberra: Croom Helm. Pp. 176-191.
9

Crossing the Face

Michael Taussig

Transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up

behind it in a wave of extremely short duration.
Michel Foucault

The problem set forth by the editor of this book concerns fetish-effects
of crossings,1 of culture-crossings, such that a word like fetish can
emerge as a pidgin word from its Portuguese mouthings dislocated
and punched up in a cross-cultural trading language along the West
African coast from the fifteenth century onwards, the trade eventually
being so many African slaves for so much European cloth and guns
and . . .2 And if words are unstable "at the best of times/' so full of
promise, at the best of times, how much more might this be the case
with pidgin words born of trading and misunderstandings concerning
matters spiritual where thought and matter by definition cohabit un
finished philosophies? Indeed it is to this sense of instability and more
emphatically unfinishedness and permanent incompleteness that the
word fetish has, I think, directed us at least since Enlightenment by
promising in the excitement it provokes no less than its disappointing
consequence more than it can deliver, an "always-beyond" bound to a
 Crossing the Face 225

sense of of richness and mystery in elusive word-magic, the fetish of

the fetish, we might say, testimony to etymolgies and histories cosmic
and violentno less than to the promises proffered by trade itself.
It is to this promise, to infinitude and its associated sense of frus
tration, that I want to raise the facespecifically the face as a fetish-
crossing forever crossed, the ur-border zone, the mother of all
borderlands. One does not look at the face, says Emanuel Levinas,
but is granted access to it as an ethical act. Why this might be is
surely beyond our knowledge, just as it is the basis of knowledge, be
ginning with sociology, but what we can do is constellate this not-
looked-at site with the Infinite. At least this is what Levinas does
where he recalls the Cartesian idea of the Infinite as an idea aimed at
something "infinitely greater than the very act through which one
thinks it. There is a disproportion between the act and that to which
the act gives access."3
This is one way of thinking the fetish.

T h e Secret

In pursuing this disproportion in terms of crossing the border that is

the face, I want to suggeststrange as it may seemthat what's cru
cial here is secrecy, and not just secrecy but more particuarly what I
call the "public secret."
First let us note with what remarkable ease secrecy conjures fetish
powersas in Elias Canetti's remarkable chapter on secrecy in his
book Crowds and Power, a book preeminently concerned with masking
and transformation. "Secrecy lies at the very core of power," he be
gins, plunging us into an animal world despite the fact that the se
crecy that concerns him is urgently human and social. "The act of
lying in wait for prey is essentially secret," he writes. "Hiding or tak
ing on the color of its surroundings and betraying itself by no move
ment, the lurking creature disappears entirely, covering itself with
secrecy as with a second skin."4 Total annihilation of the prey is the
aim of this activity, yet patience, infinite patience, is an outstanding
prerequisite for the hunter. There is something human in the restraint
required here; not just human but superhuman. The animal and the
superhuman seem to complement one another. They form a unity.
Then the aesthetic radically changes. Speed intervenes in the mo
ment of seizure, flashing out "like lightining illuminating its own
brief passage." Secrecy is abandoned for it is no longer necessary, at
least for the moment. Annihilation takes its place. "The final seizing
226 Michael Taussig

of the prey is open," says Canetti, "for terror is part of its intended ef
fect, but from the moment of incorporation onwards, everything
happens in the dark again."5
This second darkness is not hiding or waiting in order to kill, but
secrecy in the image of a profound innnerness. Its scene is that of the
moving yet lightless mucoid membranous interior of the gastro-
intesinal tract, rippling in peristaltic good health. "The mouth is dark
and the stomach and bowels still darker. No one knows and no one
thinks about what goes on inside him. Of this fundamental process
of incorporation by far the larger part remains secret. It begins with
the active and deliberate secrecy of lying in wait and ends as some
thing unknown and involuntary in the secret recesses of the body."6
Fetishism is what also lies in wait for us in this stepwise revela
tion of the character of secrecyfrom its lying at the core of power,
to lying in wait, to killing, and to the incorporation via the mouth
into the intestinesfor now the secret acquires a life of its own. The
term itselfthe secretprovides terse testimony to the ease with
which secrecy becomes fetishized as self-activating transcendance
with a destiny of its own, in everyday life let alone with the paranoic
whom, like the despot, says Canetti, has many secrets and "he orga
nises these secrets so that they guard one another." We slip easily
from the person keeping a secret to an understanding in which the
secret keeps the person and organizes the social world of persons.
What is more, like the fetish, it becomes godlike"everything is sub
ordinated" writes Canetti of the secret, "to its apotheosis. It is hard
to resist the notion that this apotheosis is a consequence of an apoca
lyptic telos, the eventual self-destruction of the secret, shattering in
its consequences. "Every secret is explosive," warns Canetti, "expand
ing with its own inner heat."7

T h e P u b l ic S e c r e t

This is a frightened and frightening view of secrecy in which the

secret as fetish, like paranoia, swarms across the emotional range,
contaminating all in its swirling path, your fear frightening others.
But if secrecy is fascinating, still more interesting is "the public se
cret," by which I mean that which is generally known but cannot be
acknowledged. Much social knowledge is of this sort and perhaps
most of most important knowledge is too. Like families and universi
ties, all institutions breed such secrecy and would die without it. Truer
to life and more complex and mischievous than the old stalwarts of
 Crossing the Face 227

"discourse" and "ideology/' public secrecy is a mobile, evanescent,

power-laden knowing of unknowing, a perpetually renewed social
contract as to knowing what not to know. This is equally true of the
modern state, and the implications for democracy are profound.
So where does the face fit in? As both mask and window to the
soul, the face can be considered the "bench-mark" of the public se
cretthat which is known but cannot be acknowledgedand now,
like the public secret of sex in Michel Foucault's rendering, its turn
has come to be turned inside out as the secret about which we can
not stop talking.8 After all, the face and the genitalia are not only
poles apart, but intimately connected, the one covered, the other ex
posed, such that inappropriate exposure of the one leads to a thor
oughly appropriate surge of shame, the blush, across the other.
(Indeed, might it not be a form of blushing in which I write here,
about that form of inappropriate exposure known as defacement?)9

C r o ssin g t h e B o r d e r

This coexistence in faciality of both mask and window to the soul is

more than contradiction. Crossing back and forth across the face as
mask and window to the soul is our necessary task and it is due to
such "disproportion" that we discern the "always beyond" that spills
out from the fetish. Such a formulation leads us away from cogni
tionas I think is implied in Levinas' notion that one does not
"look" at the faceand directs us towards ethics, surely the begin
ning and end of all inquiry, just as it skips playfully past the rigid cat
egories that are paraded as the mark of "rigorous thought," that
harbinger of rigor mortis. Seismology, not semiology, obscene rather
than upright, and above all pronenessa nervous proneness to the
disturbing effects of its presenceis what faciality as both masking
and windowing the soul entails. Either of these functions is a won
der; together, an orgy of disproportionateness.
If such disproportion is akin to an "always beyond" that is the
face, how are we to resolve the difficulty that the face never exists
alone; that it is fated in its very being to become only when faced by
another face. Here is where the impossible but true coexistence of the
mask and the window flares in recognition of a certain tenderness, a
shyness, before the gaze of the other with a studied incapacity to
"recognise" either the masking or the windowing capacity and cer
tainly not their coexistence. All this happens "under the table," se
cretly, as it were, as necessary to social life as it is forever bound to the
228 Michael Taussig

unsayable. Thus to the need to deny the mask when looking through
the window, and to the need to deny the window when espying the
mask, try computing the added complexity when it is (and has to be)
not one but at least two faces facing these reciprocating denials.
Truly, an orgy of disproportionateness and one of the seven wonders
of the world; all the more so on account of us pulling this off un
thinkingly most every moment of the day, the bench-mark, the bot
tom line, of being a social being. Of language itself and signifying,
says Levinas.10

T h e A n im a l W it h in

Canetti's fear of the secret has already alerted us to the always-

beyond of "withinness," to what is more than a fact of space or of
anatomy, but a fact of metaphysics, religion, and ontology. What is
revelatoryif one can trade in language like thisis the connection
of "innerness" to both the fetish power of the secret and animality.
Why animality? Why is it second nature for Canetti, with his obses
sive interest in the mask and transformation, to dovetail secrecy with
the animal and thence with the intestines, with the insides of the in
testines, these insides that we never seem to get inside of, rippling in
peristaltic good health, each inside harbinger to another, still further
and deeper innerness (the secret of the secret, we might say)? It is trite
to say that a profound addiction to innerness is here at work. We are
talking of a whole situation of being in the world, an all-consuming
practice dedicated to behindedness in a world replete with screens.
Physiognomy, that ancient science of reading the face, of reading
insides from outsides, often connected the human face to the animal
so as to perform its reading. In fact the connection seems absolute.
Used as a mechanism for defining the human form, zoomorphism ap
pears to be indispensable to physiognomists, notes a student of such
arcane yet everyday concerns.11 And this despite the fact that such
reading indulges in astonishing disproportionateness, astonishing
paradoxicality in which mirror is held to mirrorthe animality dis
cerned by the physiognomist in the face of a particular human being
an animality which only means something because it is endowed with
a human quality . . . the hook nose of a vulture as the sign of cruelty,
the cunning of the fox, the sharp-toothed muzzle of the rat.
Yet disproportionateness works! And how! Perversity recruited for
the ever keener study of reality, beginningas alwayswith faciality.
Sergei Eisenstein pointed outconfessed might be more appropri
 Crossing the Face 229

atethat far from dying out as Lavater's and Aristotle's defunct sci
ence, physiognomy was boosted by modernity thanks to the inven
tion of the camera and the moving pictures, as in the famous
"soliloquy of the silent language of the face" discovered by the close-
up.12 Eisenstein's point was that a defunct science was not necessarily
a bad art, and in any event physiognomy was the natural practice of
the filmmaker. I would say further that the everyday arts of physiog
nomyhoned to ever greater skills by the arts of cinema making and
viewingare precisely the everyday arts of reading the disproportion
that is the face, of defining the human, the inner being, not to men
tion the insalubrious arts of making through such reading racial and
gendered types and sub-types, in short the great cast of characters
stalking the human stage in modern times.13
As if by magic in Eisenstein's first film, The Strike (1924), the
human faces of the police spies are transformed one by one in front
of our eyes into animal faces and back again into human ones. It is
the power and magic of film that is proudly and lovingly displayed
here, no less than the power of the state and the spies. (Which is
greater? you ask.) Most of these spies have animal nicknames and
this is how they are introduced as the first line of attack against the
strikers when the police chief pulls out from his right hand desk
drawer his spy-file consisting of photographs of the faces of his
agents. As their animals names are revealed, the photographic por
traits become animated, leaping ecstatically out of the frames of the
portraits in the police file, ready for action. Animalization and trans
formation is essential to their secretive being and to their heightened
capacity to observe as through a one-way mirror.
Central to the action here in startling opposition to the offices of
the police precinct and the bureaucratic spaces of the state is a species
of pet-shop, a mysterious alchemical laboratory of zoomorphosis in
whose shadowy debris of animal figures and junk predominates a live
monkey encircled by a hoop suspended from the ceiling. The mon
key plays in the hoop. The hoop rotates slowly, back and forth.
Whenever there is a human facial transformation into an animal,
thanks to the montaging capacity of film, the hoop and the monkey
swim briefly into focus as if to tell us something.
This hoop is the magical circle of transformation, of secrecy and
fetish powers as released by the physiognomies of film.
This hoop is the human face.
It is the face of transformationnot of men into animals but of
Double-Men, transforming men whose metamorphosing capacities
are established through face-animal physiognomies.
230 Michael Taussig

T he "O rganization of M imesis"

Why Double-Men? What is the significance of this? Double-Men

are figures who can change back and forth from animals into men,
and from men into animals. This is the mark of the ancestors no
less than of spies working for the modern stateas if the state is the
select social organ for appropriating those ancient powers, and cin
ema is the select instrument for revelation of this mighty appropri
ation that Horkheimer and Adorno termed "the organiziation of
mimesis."14
Let us return to Canetti, for he loves human-animal transforma
tion. He is in thrall to it. This is more than an intellectual thing, but
we shall concentrate on it as intellection for the moment. He sees
what few of us see. He writes:

The talent for transformation which has given man so much power
over all other creatures has as yet scarcely been considered or begun
to be understood. Though everyone possesses it, uses it, and takes it
for granted, yet it is one of the great mysteries and few are aware that
to it they owe what is best in themselves.'s

" . . . that to it they owe what is best in themselves."

What is more important here, the being into which one is trans
formed, or the sheer fact of transformation itself? It is hard to tell.
And probably unimportant except too often we focus on the end-
result and not the magical capacity itself, the capacity to "which we
owe what is best in ourselves," a certain quality of "mimetic excess"
lack of which may lead to profound melancholia as when one cannot
escape; one cannot find fresh metamorphoses . .. ,16

D e t er r it o r ia liz in g t h e F a c e

Writing in exile in Hollywood in the wake of the Holocaust, Max

Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno built (together with Gretel Adorno) an
argument to the effect that this sort of mimetic prowess was not so
much sundered by Enlightenment as reconfigured. The massive
deterritorializing power of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-
american capitalism had dislodged, so to speak, the mimetic faculty
from its magical and primitivist moorings in myth and ritual, only to
relocate and reterritorialise those powers, perhaps more metaphorical
than literal, in the state itself.17
 Crossing the Face 231

"A very special mechanism" is how Giles Deleuze and Felix Guat-
tari denote the faceor not so much the face, as "faciality"the
mechanism of the intersection of the two great axes, the wall of
the broad plane of the face as screen, and the black holes of the eyes;
the axis of signifiance and the axis of subjectification, respectively.
Already here, as with Levinas, we can discern not merely the fun
damental role of signification being granted the face alongside the
interiority of the autonomous subject, but the public secret of the co
existence of the face as mask and the face as window to the soul, har
binger to the "always beyond," to the ineffability and fetish quality
of the face.
But like Horkheimer and Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari have a de
cisive historicist bent and, furthermore, in keeping with the "always
beyond," a utopic one as well, as when they write that "if human be
ings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face
and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine,
not by returning to animality, nor even returning to the head, but by
quite spiritual and special becomings-animal. . ."18
Once again, this unexpected confluence of animality and the
face in the shaping of the world's signifiance.
To escape the face! Impossible! you say. Terrifying! they say. And
not by returning to the animal but to the "becomings-intense, be-
comings-animal" in the volatility of modernityas with Kafka's tic
moving across the face of the actor acting the state official in the Yid
dish theater in Prague, spasms contracting across the face with mer
ciful quickness. "I mean the haste but also the regularity, of a second
hand," he wrote in his diary. "When it reaches the left eye it almost
obliterates it. For this contraction new, small, fresh muscles have de
veloped in the otherwise quite wasted face."19

D efa cem en t

Can the fetish "pass"? Can it lurk undetected in the everyday? Am I

that fetish? asks the face. Can this sensate and mobile tissue evoking
an obscure innerness be truly the zone of the fetish? And all along we
thought that it was just our familiar friend, old face, far from the
traders on the West coast of Africa and Christian fantasies concerning
pagan ritual objects.
But then the fetishas we use the term, and as the term uses us
does have this remarkable twofold property of being either in-your-face
exotic or hidden in the everyday. Just think of those familiar icons of
232 Michael Taussig

fetishism, black raincoats, sex-bespattered leather and shoes, on the

one hand, and Marx's capital, on the other; goose-bumped spectacular-
ity to one side, the everyday mundane self-nourishing life-and-death
force, on the other. And if the whole point of leather's goose-bumps
isas we read Freud especially his essay on the uncannyto arouse-
through-concealment by means of elaborate games of castrating peek-
a-boo, now you see it, now you don't, then the fetish power of
capitalas we read Marxlies in its quiet invisibility as a Deus Ex
Machina, the ghost in the machine, its virtual camoflage passing into
the genetic structure of normality, we might say, in a quite other di
alectic of revelation and concealment. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand,
no less. And it is precisely in this invisibility rendered by ordinariness
as we read Marxthat there lies the source of fetish power.
Here is where the negative strikes with unparalleled force and con
sequence, as with defacement, drawing on the invisible account and
rendering it holy in an act of sacrilege. Strange powers erupt as mean
ing hemorrages in active, abject, force, as in the defacement of flags
and statues whereby the baseness within the sacred billows forth.

D e m a sk in g

In some and perhaps many rituals of initiation it is the reality of de

masking and not the illusions of masking that is crucialas when, at
the culminating point, the men masked as spirits are stripped of their
disguise. It is precisely at this point of revelation of artifice and make-
believe that the reality of the spirit world, far from being destroyed,
is deepened and achieves full force. This apparent paradox serves
many useful functions, not least for unmasking our own masking of
the question as to what we might mean by the power of the mask, let
alone masking of the difficulties we have had selecting certain words
such as "disguise," "acting," and "demystification" . . . words that
seem so powerful and no less dramatic than the drama they point to,
yet so provisional and empty as well.
It is a curious thing, this, that far from demystifying, demasking
can heighten the masking power of the mask. This is more than curi
ous; it is the begining of philosophy, of knowing, and of being, for
demasking is a peculiar form of defacement, a sort of double or meta
defacement returning the face to its home in facialityonly to dis
cover, but not accept, that once left, home changes.
Martin Gusinde, an ethnograper of the Yamana as they lived in
the early 1920s in Tierra del Fuego, has a good deal to tell us about
 Crossing the Face 233

one particular unmasking. It is an account of the initiation of young

people, especially young men, into what are called the secrets. He
tells us about the unmasking of Yetaita, the underground spirit, and
his encounter with an initiate.
The young man who shall personify Yetaita has taken off his
clothing and smeared his whole body with white paint, on which he
evenly arranges short vertical lines five centimeters long and as wide
as a finger.
His face is covered with thick red paint, and many delicate white
lines, like rays, extending in all directions from the corners of his
mouth.
Feathers hang from shoulder to shoulder. His hair stands on end.
Imi powder has been rubbed into it.
When the initiate has been shoved into his place, the men in the
Great Hut motion to the man who represents Yetaita.
The moment a leather blindfold is removed from the initiate,
Yetaita leaps in front of him. Because the fire has been stirred up, it
looks as though he has emerged from the flames. He keeps his face
averted so as not to be identified and attacks the initiate cruelly for
some ten minutes to the accompaniment of drumming and stamping
on the ground by the other men. The initiate is greatly distressed,
sweating, and has become limp like a dummy.
Suddenly everything stops, and Yetaita crouches motionless in
front of the initiate who is forced, now, to look his tormenter full in
the face and recognize him. A counsellor says, "Look closely, that is
your kinsman, not Yetaita! (He specifically says "That is your uncle,
that is your father . . .") The true Yetaita looks like your kinsman
here who is painted like Yetaita. Watch out for Yetaita!. . . Keep strict
silence among other people about what you will experience here.
Now you know that Yetaita is much rougher than your kinsman.
This man is not Yetaita himself, but you should know now to watch
out for him."20
It's the revelation as to the hoax that perfects the illusion; the di
vulgation of the deception that makes for supernatural power . . .
"But beware of Watauineiwa, that is the real Yetaita," advises an older
man who warns the initiate to keep absolutely silent about the im
personation. "This means," says Gusinde, "that Watauineiwa threat
ens and punishes as a truly living spirit, in the way that this is
maintained of Yetaita who, however, is only an invention."21
No sooner is one figure's reality dissolved as mere invention,
than a more powerful figure appears behind it as real . . . and here
amid the swirling currents we have to choose or at least acknowledge
234 Michael Taussig

the fork in the epistemic path; one way to the flickering reality be
hind the illusion, or, the Other way wherein the reality is that there is
none, other than brilliant attempts at its staging.
Analyzing Gusinde's copious Tierra del Fuego ethnography some
fifty years after its publication, and having spent almost five years be
tween 1966 and 1976 with the handful of Selk'nam survivors in
Tierra del Fuego, Anne Chapman is perturbed by what she sees as his
tendency to define the Selk'nam men's elaborate initiation ritual as
an elaborate hoax aimed at striking fear among the women and
uninitiated in order to control them. She notes for instance that his
own work reveals that the masks used by Selk'nam men were treated
by them with a degree of veneration that would not be accorded an
actor's prop or disguise. Great care was taken that they were carefully
stored and did not fall. If a mask was damaged, it was thought that its
user would fall and injure or even kill himself in the next perfor
mance. Gusinde had difficulty obtaining masks for museums.22 The
older men refused to give or sell any.
Thus she cannot bring herself to agree with the concept of a hoax
and tries to resolve the issue by calling the participants not actors but
"actors," noting that they "are somehow imbued with the supernat
ural personality of their prototypes" (the term prototype being a sig
nificant choice of words here).
Yet there is something deeply unsatisfying in proposing this ei-
ther-or dilemna between hoax and sincerity, deception, and heartfelt
religious expression, theater and ritual, and the attempt to then force
a resolution through the use of the ambivalence achieved by quota
tion marks around the word "actors" seems more like an elegant eva
sion of the disturbing possibility that the sacred at stake here, if not
most elsewhere, is in some profound sense precisely a massive hoax
in which truth is teased and the arts of representation deployed so as
to represent representation itself. Here, we might say, quotation
marks are equivalent to both masking and demaskingie. to crossing
the face and escaping faciality.
Summarizing Gusinde's account of the climactic moment in the
initiation of young men among the Selk'nam (who had a more rigid
division between male and female than the neighboring Yamana
who feature in my first account of unmasking), Chapman describes
how the Selk'nam initiate is ushered into the hut to find a circle of
men standing in a tight circle against the inner wall staring at the
fire. His clothes are stripped off and the spirit Shoort squats hidden
behind the men, pounding the floor. The very earth seems to trem
ble. The initiate's head is held so he is forced to look upwards as
 Crossing the Face 235

Shoort springs into the center of the hut as if emerging from the fire
to pace around the initiate, sexually excited, body swaying, breathing
hard. Suddenly he grasps the initiate's genitals, pressing them hard,
panting with agitation. The initiate suffers acute pain without resis
tance, being told he has to keep his hands folded on his head and
being held by a supervisor. Shoort pulls the initiate's genitals vio
lently with both hands, giving out a shrill yell before releasing them,
and the initiate is then ordered to fight the spirit.
They circle one another. Shoort threatens to bite his penis. The
initiate lunges at Shoort but is strictly forbidden to touch his mask.
He has been warned that Shoort would ram him with his head of
rock if he so much as brushes against it. If Shoort loses control he
may burn the initiate with a firebrand or actually bite his genitals.
The initiate has little chance of dominating his opponent because he
is held back by the supervisor. When he is in a state of frantic despair
the contest is suddenly stopped and and the supervisor, pointing to
Shoort's head, gives the starling command (to quote the dialog di
rectly from Chapman's account).
"Grasp it!"
Another man shouts, "Is he rock or is he flesh?"
Encouraged, the initiate passes his fingers over Shoort's head and
neck. With further urging he he finally grasps the head, feels the
mask, and starts to pull it off as Shoort covers his face with his hands.
A counseller orders the initiate to pull Shoort's hands away from
his face.
He stares with amazement at the unmasked face.
"Who is he? Could he be an ancestor?" shouts an elder.
"Who could he be? Maybe an Airu? Or a Woo?" (These are the
names of neighboring people.) "Perhaps a Joshe?" (This is the name
of a killer spirit.)
Others break in with their questions.
"Don't you know him?"
"Name him!"
"Don't you recognize the face?"
Minutes usually pass before the young man identifies the face
in part because it is is blackened and the muscles are contracted and
the eyes tightly closed.
He calls out the man's name.
"Push him!," someone yells, and the spirit tumbles to the
ground. The men roar with laughter.23
At which point, Gusinde notes, the initiate relaxes, but in E. Lucas
Bridges' account of the ceremony to which he was invited at the turn
236 Michael Taussig

of the century, something different occured. "He attacked him with

such fury," said Bridges of the initiate, "that he had to be dragged off,
to the accompaniment of roars of laughter in which Shoort joined
heartily."24

Is S a c r ile g e th e In v erse o f S a c rif ic e ?

Claude Levi-Strauss has suggested that sacrilege can be thought of as

the inverse of sacrifice, as when extremes are brought too close to
getheras in incest and bestialitycompared with sacrifice in which
an item of mediation ambiguously attached to both extremes is se
lected, destroyed, and in its thus manufactured absence is made a
space for a "compensatory continuity" and hence communication
with the divine.25
I want to reconsider this strange space achieved though killing or
destroying the object ambiguously attached to extremesand the first
thing to notice is that sacrilege is itself a type of sacred act and that this
is both obvious and surprising.26 Thus problematized, we are encour
aged to further scrutinze the type of "space" created by destruction of
the victim, as in sacrifice, orand this is the decisive issueby too
close an abutment of extremes, as in sacrilege. For this abutment, too,
can be thought of as a space, albeit an explosive spaceperhaps a
"space in time" might be a way to grasp it, the space of imploding
timean outstanding result of which is not the satisfying clasp of the
harmoniously frozen universe envisaged in Levi-Strauss's vision but, to
the contrary, a bounteous spilling over and proliferation of inconstant
meanings and identities released by the way that defacement acts upon
the fetish of inferiority bound to the public secret of faciality.

S u b c o m a n d a n te M a r c o s U n m ask ed 1 . T h e Unm asking

On Saturday, February 11th of this year, 1995, the New York Times
reported on page one "Mexico's New Offensive: Erasing Rebel's
Mystique."
The continuation on page six was headlined "Offensive To Erase
a Rebel's Mystique," and the window inserted into article read

UNMASKED HE'S A FURNITURE SALESMAN'S SON

 Crossing the Face 237

"Yuck!" exclaimed a young acquaintance of Alma Guillermopri-

eto's in Mexico City on seeing the unmasked face. Before that she'd
swoon at mere mention of his name.27 "Stripped of the myth that
went with his ever-present mask . . . government officials said today
that they hoped the disclosure of his identity would by itself help to
break a rebel movement that has never been militarily strong/' began
the New York Times. "The moment that Marcos was identified and his
photo shown and everyone saw who he was, much of his importance
as a symbol vanished," one official said. "Whether he is captured or
not is incidental."28
"It was like a game of peekaboo," wrote Alma Guillermoprieto,
who as a journalist was invited to the demasking and hence was able
to describe how an official took an oversized slide of a ski mask with
a pair of large dark eyes, in one hand, and a black and white photo of
a "milk toast" looking young man with a beard and large dark eyes,
in the other. He then then slipped the slide of the mask and eyes over
the photo of the unmasked face.
" Voilal Subcomandante Marcos! The idol is a Clark Kent!" noted

Guillermoprieto.
He kept superimposing and separating the two images, now you
see it, now you don't, until the storm of camera flashes subsided. .. .
Other things are going on here alongside demasking, more "ab
stract" things, perhaps, more fundamental and philosophical things,
perhaps, of which this new form of guerrilla warfare is partas amid
the flashing cameras the state attempts to restore faciality to its
proper functionas Deleuze and Giattari see it; namely the

almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject.

You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This
machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social produc
tion of face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body
and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all
words and milieus.29

Faciality: the white wall/black hole system o f signification and subjectifi-

cation, semiosis and interiority.
But then
Others break in with their questions.
"Don't you know him?"
"Name him!"
"Don't you recognize the face?"
238 Michael Taussig

Minutes usually pass before the young man identifies the facein part
because it is is blackened and the muscles are contracted and the eyes tightly
closed.
He calls out the man's name.
'Tush him!/' someone yells, and the spirit tumbles to the ground. The
men roar with laughter.

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS UNMASKED 2 . THE R e -M a SKING

That was Wednesday. By Sunday demonstrations had occurred with

thousands of people wearing the same masks as Subcomandante Mar
cos, and the Mexican press had received and published the first co-
munique from Marcos since the unmasking. It bore three of his
trademarks; the postcripts he attaches to his letters to the press.

PS. that rapidly applauds this new *success" o f the government police:

I've heard they've found another "Marcos/' and that he's from
Tampico. That doesn't sound bad, the port is nice. I remember when I
used to work as a bouncer in a brothel in Ciudad Madero [near
Tampico], in the days when [a corrupt oilworkers'-union leader] used
to do the same thing to the regional economy that Salinas [the re
cently retired President of Mexico] did with the stock market; inject
money into it to hide poverty.. . .

P.S. that despite the circumstances does not abandon its narcissism;

So . . . Is this this new Subcomandante Marcos good-looking? Because

lately they've been assigning me really ugly ones and my feminine
correspondence gets ruined.

P.S. that counts time and ammunition:

I have 300 bullets, so try to bring 299 soldiers and police to get me.
Legend has it that I don"t miss a shot; would you like to find out if it's
true?) Why 299, if there's 300 bullets? Well, because the last one is for
yours truly. It tjurns out that one gets fond of things like this, and a
bullet seems the only consolation for this solitary heart.

Vale again, and Salud, and can it be that there will be a little spot for
me in her heart?
 Crossing the Face 23 9

Signed, the Sup [Subcom andante], rearranging his ski mask with
m acabre flirtatiousness.

"In five short paragraphs," concludes Alma Guillermoprieto, "the

Sup reestablished his credentials as an outlaw hero, brought sex into
the issue, and, yanking back the mask his pursuers had torn off,
donned it once more."10
But we must ask here whether remasking the unmasked face re
turns us to the status quo ante, or whether, as seems more likely,
some quite other force, a proliferating magical force amounting to
a sort of hypermasking, consequent to and created by unmasking,
takes over? For in Marcos's case, unmasking by the state through
the deployment of the photo on a driver's license or similar docu
ment to dramatically reveal the real Marcos to the flashing lights of
the photographic equipment of the media seems to have totally
backfireda result anticipated by no onewhich is to say that a cer
tain deterritorializing potential in masking was thus brought to full
flower because the state itself is seen as the most masked entity of all
possible masked beings to have ever crossed the threshold of the
human imagination.
It was common knowledge that around the conference table up
there in San Cristobal in Chiapas that the representatives of the state
were distinctly uncomfortable having to negotiate with masked be
ings. "It's impossible!" they said.
"But the state is always masked," was the Zapatista response.
So the negotiations proceeded between the masked rebels
whom Alma G. sees as facelessand the faceless bureaucrats of the
statewhom the Zapatistas see as masked.
And what seems to me crucial to the backfiring-effect of unmask
ing was the role played by refacement as a result of the the state at
tempting to exercise its prohibition on transformation.

U nmasking and P roliferation

Prohibitions on transformation are a social and religious phenomenon

which have never properly been understood.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Alma G. has characterised the postscript as "the Subcomandante's

contribution to epistolary art. Now swaggering, now full of righteous
fury, now impudent and hip, the Marcos of the postscripts is at all
240 Michael Taussig

times both elusive and intimate, and this seductive knack has al
lowed him to become a faceless stand-in for all the oppressed.. . ."31
What is so wonderful here is that being "faceless" in this way is
not so much being without a face as it is a reorganization of faciality
creating a new type of facea deterritorializing face that both Brecht,
with his demand to show the actor acting, and Nietzsche, with his
search for a Dionysian triumph over the mask of of power, would,
each in their own way, have recognized as part of their own carniva-
lesque efforts at entering into the masquerade that is history. This
type of face reconfigures the public secretthat which is known but
cannot be stated, of the face as both mask and window to the soul
such that there is a type of "release" of the fetish powers of the face
in a wild proliferation of identities no less than of the very notion of
identity itself, a discharge of the powers of representation. Now you
see it. Now you don't.
A reporter asked if Marcos is gay.
"Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian
in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestin
ian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the Streets of San Cristobal, a gang
member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Ger
many, an Ombundsman in the Defense Ministry, a Communist in
the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio, a paci
fist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on a Saturday night in any neigh
bourhood in any city in Mexico, a reporter filing stories for the back
pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 P.M., a peasant without
land, an unemployed worker, a dissident amid free-market econom
ics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in
the moutains of southern Mexico." 32

P o st sc r ipt

And we . . . mere writers performing, at best, without masks and

nothing but (faceless) words, cannot we take heart here and rework
the figure of the double, the figure of the totem, in a new under
standing of the art of criticism as an art of defacementso long and
only so long as we feel confident in our ability to direct the surge of
fetish power issuing forth when that skin we call "face" stretched
across the "always beyond" is thus crossed? Here enters writing
as a permanent suplement, the postscript as unmasking splatter
ing meaning no less than identity in a perpetually penultimate
movement called forth not only by the conflicts and instabilities
 Crossing the Face 241

the text conceals, but most decisively by the masks it uses to dis
guise its masking.

N otes

1. Epigraph is from M. Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression," in Lan

guage, Counter-Memory; Practice. (Cornell University Press: Ithaca) 1977, 34.
2. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, 1." RES 9 Spring, 1985:
5-17.
3. Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority trans
lated by Alphonso Lingis (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague), 1990, and Face to
Face With Levinas edited by Richard A. Cohen (State Unversity of New York
Press: Albany), 1986.
4. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power ( Farrar, Strauss, Giroux: New York),
p. 290.
5. Canetti, p. 290.
6. Canetti, p. 290.
7. Canetti, p. 296.
8. "What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they con
signed sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to
speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. " Michel Foucault
The History o f Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (Vintage, New York), p. 35.
9. I am tempted to think of the blush as an exemplary "crossing" the
face and "revelation" of fetish-power. More than a covering, as a substitute
for covering the exposed genitalia, the blush serves as a signal of the impossi
bility of innerness, of the "always-beyond" that access to the face initiates. (A
blush, physiologicallly, in the first instance, is a rapid expansion of facial vas
culature.) Dark hued faces escape this.
10. In Totality and Infinity Levinas says, "Meaning is the face of the
Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial
face to face of language. . . . And the epiphany that is produced as a face is
not constituted as as are all other beings, precisely because it 'reveals' infin
ity" (pp. 206-207). "The face is the evidence that makes evidence possible,"
he says, "like the divine veracity that sustains Cartesian rationality" (p. 204).
11. See Patrizia Magli, "The Face and the Soul," pp. 87-127 in Fragments
for a History o f the Human Body Part 2 (Zone Books: New York) 1989, p. 100.
12. See for instance Chapter 7, "The Close-Up," and Chapter 8 "The
Face of Man," in Bela Balazs, Theory o f the Film (Arno Press and The New York
Times: New York) 1972, pp. 52-89.
242 Michael Taussig

13. "Exploring the inner man through the outer man [in Euroamerica
from the late 18th century on] sets the foundations for a sort of physiology,
whose parameters do not significiantly differ from those once adopted by an
cient people. Animality emerges again in an unsettling way in those beings
which are at once man and beast: lunatics, women, primates, children."
Magli, p. 124.
14. Max Horkhermer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic o f Enlightenment (Con
tinuum: New York), 1987. In following this line of thought I am also of
course indebted to the aspirations of the members of the College of Sociology
(Bataille, Caillois, et al.) with the attempt to re-cycle into the study of mod
ern politics the anthropology of so-called primitive societies, notably the
lessons to be learnt therefrom regarding mimesis and sympathetic magic.
15. Canetti, p. 337.
16. Canetti, p. 347.
17. Cf. Nietzsche's sense of mimesis and the Dionysian impulse in Twi
light o f the Idols and Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno's Dialectic o f Enlight
enment with its argument about magic as the first step of Enlightenment.
18. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis), 1987, p. 171.
19. Franz Kafka, The Diaries o f Franz Kafka: 1910-1913, edited by Max
Brod, (Schocken: New York), 1965, p. 81.
20. Martin Gusinde, The Yamana: The Life and Thought o f the Water No
mads o f Cape Horn, translated from the German by Frieda Schutze (Human
Relations Area Files: New Haven), 1961, vol 3, pp. 699-700.
21. Gusinde, p. 746.
22. Anne Chapman, Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk'nam
ofTierra del Fuego (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge), 1982, pp. 86-87.
I move between Gusinde's ethnography of the Yamana and the Selk'nam,
both of which contain fascinating and extraordinarily lengthy descriptions of
the masking and un-masking rites of the public secret of male initiation. Like
Chapman, Irving Goldman is also perturbed by the notion of a hoax and
spends much time anxiously disclaiming his own analysis of Kwakiutal Win
ter ceremonial and shamanic ritual which with absolute unambiguity is di
rected by the notion that such ritual is guided by simulation or mimesis.
What is crucial is his (curious and to me totally unwarranted) assumption
that if one imitates one is therefore inauthentic and has abandoned all claim
on the sacred. See Irving Goldman, The Mouth o f Heaven, (John Wiley: New
York), 1975, pp. 102-104.
23. Chapman, pp. 106-06. Note that some crucial parts of this un-mask
ing material comes directly from Chapman's ethnographic diary compiled
between 1966-76 and is not only a digest of Gusinde. It should also be
 Crossing the Face 243

notedand this is a major pointthat Chapman understands Gusinde to be

claiming that the Selk'nam men do not believe in the spirits they are imper
sonating, which would throw my argument about the power on un-masking
off course. But (1) un-masking certainly increases the power of the secret, and
(2) "belief" (in the spirits) is too elusive a thing to be easily or decisively set
tled on the evidence to hand.
24. E. Lucas Bridges, Uttermost Part o f the Earth (Hodder and Stoughton:
London), p. 421.
25. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago) 1966, pp. 225-26. This reference was brought to myattention by
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., in their chapter "Becoming-Animal,Becom-
ing-Intense.
26. A field explored earlier and in considerable depth by Georges Bataille
coming out of Surrealism, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, medieval texts, and early
twentieth century ethnography.
27. Alma Guillermoprieto, "Letter From Mexico: The Unmasking," pp.
40-48, The New Yorker, March 13, 1995, p. 44.
28. The New York Times, Ibid.
29. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., pp. 181.
30. Guillermo Prieto, op. cit., p. 44.
31. Guillermoprieto, op. cit., p. 42.
32. This was taken off the Internet and forwarded to me in Sydney, Aus
tralia, April 1995, by my urban anthropologist friend, Kostas Gounis, Depart
ment of Anthropology, Teachers' College, New York City.

B ib l io g r a p h y

Balazs, B. (1972) Theory o f the Film (Arno Press and The New York Times: New
York).
Bridges, E.L. (1951) Uttermost Part o f the Earth (Hodder and Stoughton: London).
Canetti, E. (1984) Crowds and Power (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux: New York).
Chapman, A. (1982) Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk'nam o f
Tierra del Fuego (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo
phrenia (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis).
Foucault, M. (1977) "A Preface to Transgression," in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Cornell University Press: Ithaca).
244 Michael Taussig

Foucault, M. (1980) The History o f Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (Vintage,

New York).
Gusinde, M. (1961) The Yamana: The Life and Thought o f the Water Nomads o f
Cape Horn,, vol 3., translated from the German by Frieda Schutze
(Human Relations Area Files: New Haven).
Goldman, I. (1975) The Mouth o f Heaven (John Wiley: New York).
Guillermoprieto, A. (1995) "Letter From Mexico: The Unmasking," pp. 40-48,
The New Yorker, March 13.
Horkhermer, M. and T. W. Adorno (1987) Dialectic o f Enlightenment (Contin
uum: New York).
Kafka, F. (1965) The Diaries o f Franz Kafka: 1910-1913, edited by Max Brod
(Schocken: New York).
Levinas, E. (1979) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by
Alphonso Lingis (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague).
Levinas, E. (1986) Face to Face With Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen (State
University of New York Press: Albany).
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago).
Magli, P. (1989) "The Face and the Soul," pp. 86-127 in Fragments for a His
tory o f the Human Body Part 2 (Zone Books: New York).
Pietz, W. (1985) "The Problem of the Fetish, 1." RES 9 Spring, pp. 5-17.
Afterword

How to Grow Oranges in Norway

William Pietz

Unlike introductions, afterwords to books are in the pleasant position

of addressing those who have already read the text and who, presum
ably, have found the material interesting enough to finish. But to
find something interesting does not necessarily mean one finds it se
rious or useful, something that might productively alter one's own
way of thinking. Perhaps the value offered is merely that of enter
tainment: The book might have been worth reading as a pleasant but
trifling diversion, as a sort of postmodern Wunderkammer, a cabinet
of curiosities taken from exotic but unimportant places like Sumba
and Surinam that has been assembled during the decade of post-Cold
War globalization for the amusement of intellectuals who have a
taste for such things. Or is there something of real substance to be
gained by reading the nine essays of this collection and thinking
one's way into the notion of "border fetishisms" that they develop?
This is the question I would like to consider in this afterword.
Since I wish to argue that there is something of real value to be
gotten from this book, let me speak in what counts as the most seri
ous of contemporary languages, the discourse of international eco
nomics. This is not to say that I think it likely an international
economist would ever read this book. Indeed, I assume that, were
246 William Pietz

such an improbable thing to happen, the economist would likely re

gard the authors' arguments in the manner that the naturalist's wife,
Anna Forbes, in the anecdote cited by Spyer, regarded a group of
Aruese villagers who attempted to communicate the murder of their
local political authority to the passing representatives of the global
economy. To read about the outlandish uses to which commodities
and currencies have been put, as in Foster's discussion of the non
commercial uses of 20 kina banknotes in Papua New Guinea, might
be as amusing to an international economist as, for Anna Forbes, was
the look of Aruese costumes, whose crosscultural appropriation of
Western fashions appeared to be nothing more than a travesty. The
villagers' attempt to communicate the serious news of a murder was
rendered impossible by the most trivial of things: The truth of their
words was erased by their taste in clothes. As Stallybrass discussed,
Karl Marx, for one, knew all too well that a respectable look is re
quired for admission into the space of truth: He needed a gentle
men's overcoat to get into the British Museum Reading Room, and he
needed the overcoat's literary equivalent, the philosophical form of
critique, to demonstrate in an authoritative fashion that societies
structured by the categories and logic of political economics are not
merely unjust but inherently unsustainable. So while I assume I am
not addressing real international economists in this afterword, it is
their authoritative discourse that functions as the mantle of re
spectability required for thought to be taken seriously beyond the
confines of particular academic disciplines such as anthropology and
art history. There is at least one perfectly good reason for this: Who
ever actually reads this text will have done so only after purchasing it
(or by having access to a library that decided to buy it). While one
wishes to think that the value of a scholarly book exceeds its mere
commodity value, its value as an economic object is a necessary
modality of its existence. For this reason, the question I wish to raise
about this book concerns what economists call the "gains of trade."
What may be gained by trading one's (or someone's) hard-earned
money for this book? And what has this to do with price of oranges
in Norway?
The problem of growing oranges in Norway is a favorite illustra
tion used by international economists wishing to bring home the
point that in global free trade everybody gains, even those who are
exploited in the Marxian sense that the goods they receive "contain"
less labor time than the goods they sell (Krugman and Obstfeld 1994:
3-4). Norway (standing for the technologically advanced North)
could conceivably grow its own oranges in expensive hot houses, but
 Afterword 247

Norwegians can get more oranges for the same amount of labor by
making some other commodity (refrigerators, say) in which their nat
ural resources and technology give them a comparative advantage,
and then trading these for foreign oranges grown in some underde
veloped nation in the tropical South (Indonesia, say) whose natural
climate and cheaper labor gives it a comparative advantage in orange
production. The latter will also gain since it will get more refrigera
tors through trading oranges than it could by diverting its own cheap
labor and poor technology from orange growing to the domestic
manufacture of refrigerators. And this is so despite the truth of the
Marxist complaint that the labor value of the Indonesian oranges
exchanged for Norwegian refrigerators is unequal. Because exploita
tion (for lack of a better word) is good for everyone. Properly under
stood, international exchange is simply another way of producing
the goods demanded by nations that happen to have different "tastes
and technology" (Krugman 1990: 100). This is the happy lesson of
the parable: The best way to produce oranges in Norway is to build
refrigerators and trade them for fruit from the tropics. International
trade itself is what provides the gains, the surplus value, and it does
this for both Norway and Indonesia, for the advanced North and the
underdeveloped South alike.
Here, then, is the Disneyfied world picture of simple commodities
circulating across cleanly drawn national borders as it is rendered by
the secular clerics of the latterday House of Orange. As Taussig might
put it, to introduce the notion of border fetishisms into this happiest
of global images is one way of defacing it, of reminding us that it is
nothing more than a lie made plausible not by the methodology of a
scientific discipline but by the desire of political powers who wish to
remain concealed, revealing themselves only in rare moments that
can be dismissed as singular and non-normative: Soeharto's "stabiliza
tion" of Indonesia in 1965-66 and its counterparts in Mexico City in
1968, Chile in 1972, Kwangju in 1979one could go on assembling
the list, but however many nation-stabilizing massacres one might
add up, for economists there will never be enough to aggregate them
into any sort of norm. What have they to do with the problem of
where "added value" comes from? Or even with the economic de
mand for exotic luxury goods like hats made from beaver fur or bird-
of-paradise feathers? Surely the demand for such passing fashions
follows a logic of sheer caprice and has nothing to do with extermina
tions that, surely, are merely an unintended consequence . . .
Let me suggest that it was to mark this embarrassing point of sci
entific unthinkabilityof a factual relation that must at all costs imply
248 William Pietz

nothingthat the discourse about fetishism first entered European in

tellectual culture. It did so in the literary figure of a mutilated, fetish-
worshipping slave who had escaped from a plantation in Surinam. In
a scene belatedly added by Voltaire to his popular novel Candide, the
fetish-worshipper, displaying to Candide his own concrete condition of
misery, destroys that innocent's faith in the Enlightenment by inform
ing him, "It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe" (Voltaire 1981:
60). Fifty years later a neologism would be invented to name the idea
being expressed in this scene: "exploitation." A couple of decades after
this, Marx in Capital would try to explain what exploitation looked like
and how it was conceived within the perverse social logic of political
economics. But to show that the categories of Ricardian economics
work out rationally only by calculating the surplus exchange value re
alized in capitalized commodities as uncompensated labor time is only
to show how things must appear from the perspective of capital. As
Stallybrass argues in his essay for this collection, for Marx the point was
not to advance the science of economics by correcting its errors, but to
render implausible its false pretensions as a social science. Capitalism,
the generalized principles of international trade, has never been able to
organize a healthy or even viable society. This is the point of character
izing capitalism as a form of fetishism, in the sense of a historical mode
for endowing material objects and people with the objective values
necessary to build a sustainable social world. To repeat Stallybrass's
point, for Marx the problem was not that capital was a fetish, it is that
capital is such a poor fetish. Of course, such a statement could no more
be taken seriously by international economists than Calvinist mission
aries in Sumba can take seriously the claim of the marupu followers dis
cussed by Keane that a bit of sacrificial meat or a gold ornament can be
a material form of "the ancestral body." The sort of social materiality
that realizes the transgenerational solidarity of a people is something
as much outside the conceptual horizon of social science as it is outside
that of Christian ontotheology. And as long as the transcendentalist
premises of such worldviews hold swayas long as the leading Amer
ican ideologue of the coming "Information Age" can begin his book of
scientific prophecy with the statement, "The central event of the twen
tieth century is the overthrow of matter" (Gilder 1989: 17)then the
materialist discourse about fetishism will retain its viability.
To appreciate why this is so it might be useful to return to prob
lem of the orange as fetish, that is, to the "use values" at stake in in
ternational commerce and to the logic of destruction this seems to
entail despite itself. A classicist could, of course, genealogize the prob
lem of the destruction entailed in the demand for luxury goods, for
 Afterword 249

spices and relishes, for oranges and sugar, within the Western tradi
tion itself, perhaps tracing it back to Plato's Republic. It was Socrates'
young admirers, after all, who insisted that he include luxuries in his
verbal construction of the ideal city; this requirement to build "the
feverish city" rather than "the healthy city" assured that all possible
forms of the state would be temporally unstable and impermanent
(Plato 1968: 49 [372 c-e]). For Plato, the problem was simply a given
of what might be termed political consumer demand. A world histo
rian like William McNeill might even attempt to relate the themati-
zation of this problem to the ascetic premises of the discourse of
ontotheology that emerged, rather suddenly, a bit before Plato's day
across the band of civilized countries stretching from the Mediter
ranean Sea to the Ganges Riverthe intellectual movement that
achieved its institutional actualization in the great cosmopolitan reli
gions. However, the peculiar discourse about "fetishes" is not really a
part of "the Western tradition," nor even of the broader intellectual
tradition of the so-called great religions. It developed in an early
modern border zone of crosscultural trade between Africans and Eu
ropeans, an interstitial "world" where the presumptions of ontothe-
ological religion and mercantile economics alike broke down; and it
entered high European intellectual culture (by way of published
"travelogues") during the period of the Seven Years War, the first war
waged between European states primarily for control of overseas pos
sessions. The methodological force of the theory of fetishism formu
lated at this time by the Burgundian aristocrat Charles de Brosses is
found in his insistence that philosophy and social theory could no
longer be based upon the unexamined presuppositions of the intel
lectual tradition of Western Christendom, but must more radically
derive its authority from what might be called a method of "ethno
graphic materialism," of cultural interpretation based on the "direct
observation" of contemporary peoples, including those outside Eu
rope and its traditions. De Brosses was framing this novel project on
the basis of his own direct experience. His own world had been
changed in its substance by the new global economy: the monetary
value of the landed estates that were his ancestral inheritance, and
that he rented out (among others, to Voltaire) to support himself,
had plummeted as the overseas war went badly for France. He in
vested his remaining cash in a Paris-based overseas company, where
he lost most of it. For de Brosses there could be no doubt that the
non-European world was part of his world. No more than there could
be any doubt for Voltaire, who, at the same time he was writing his
heart-wringing scene of the fetish-worshipping slave, was penning
250 William Pietz

desperate letters about the fate of a Spanish fleet of slave traders in

whom he had invested much of his money. The appearance of the
discourse about fetishism in learned European culture was less an ex
pression of "the Enlightenment mentality" than it was a symptom of
the effects of the Seven Years War. Indeed, while Voltaire's literary vi
gnette, along with the argument of Helvetius (from whom Voltaire
stole the conceit) that the sweetness of sugar was mixed with the
blood of slaves, was an early expression of a moral sensibility that
would crystallize in the call for universal human rights and the aboli
tion of the slave trade, the irony that Voltaire's own capital was so
heavily invested in the very business he condemned testifies to the
role the displaced discourse about fetishism played in suturing a frac
ture point in the ideology of scientific enlightenment.
It is inside this fracture, in the "heterospaces" where capitalism
and noncapitalism coexist (Gibson-Graham 1996: 5), that the idea of
border fetishism operates. In this volume, Moors's study of the gold
jewelry worn by Palestinian women in Jabal Nablus perhaps best ex
emplifies the usefulness of the idea of border fetishisms. We do not
see a local or "indigenous" people merely adapting their cultural
forms to a "hegemonic" global economy or "resisting" it. They have
their own good reasons for sometimes preferring the more fashion
able Italian jewelry, despite its inferiority to the old 21-carat jewelry
as an effective popular form of offshore banking. (One can imagine
what laughter would be evoked if some banker-evangelist tried to
show them a Palestinian version of The Luluai's Dreaml) Where inter
national economists may see only local fetishes that must be turned
into global commodities, in these essays we see that the process also
runs in the other direction, a direction that might be termed the so
cial appropriation of capitalism.
But the notion of border fetishisms proposed in this collection
can provide a useful framework for thought, it seems to me, only if
one comes to terms with another issue raised in these essays: the
value of shoplifting. Pinch's essay on "Stealing Happiness" might be
read in the light of one of the more common claims in the air today:
the claim that Marxism failedor, in any event, the Soviet empire
collapsedbecause people wanted to shop. Socialist societies have
proved as unsuccessful at producing satisfactory consumer goods as
socialist theories have always been at finding any sort of positive
value in luxury goods. The ascetic morality of socialist ethics could
find no legitimate necessity in the desire for sumptuary excess. The
outcome of the Cold War indicates otherwise, and the question
Pinch's essay raises is whether consumer desire is simply a utilitarian
 Afterword 251

desire for more things or whether there is a deeper truth about the
gratifications enjoyed in shopping that is revealed in the compulsion
to shoplift. Is some secular version of the sacred in play within the
complusive pleasures of shoplifting? While not overtly destructive of
objects in the way one finds in sacrifice, a transgressive violence is
being enacted in some way analogous to the antisocial performances
found at the center of sacramental practices that, by some seemingly
perverse logic, function to renew the social. If there is an important
truth here, it is one I cannot yet articulate. But I do hear whispering
in my ear the ghost of a surgically altered man I once met in
Nicaragua during its brief attempt to hold back the capitalist tide. He
is telling me that if I want to understand the real "surplus values"
represented in the gains of trade now being reaped in the real Nor
way (whose national income derives primarily from its legal control
over rapidly depleting North Sea oil reserves) and in the real Indone
sia (where multinational mining firms like Freeport McMoRan and
Barrick Gold are chewing up "resources" to the local benefit of no
one outside Indonesia's corrupt national government), then I should
end this afterword with an unconscionable recommendation.
STEAL THIS BOOK!

R eferences

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End o f Capitalism (as we knew it). Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell.
Gilder, George. (1989) Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and
Technology. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Krugman, Paul R. (1990) "Trade, Accumulation, and Uneven Development."
In Rethinking International Trade. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pp. 93-
105.
Krugman, Paul R., and Maurice Obstfeld. (1994) International Economics: Theory
and Policy. Third edition. New York: HarperCollins College Publishers.
Plato. The Republic o f Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (1968). New York: Basic Books.
Voltaire. (1981) Candide, in Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, trans. Donald
M. Frame. New York: New American Library. Pp. 15-101.
This page intentionally left blank
Contributors

Robert J. Foster teaches anthropology at the University of Rochester,

Rochester, N.Y. He is the author of Social Reproduction and History in
Melanesia (Cambridge 1995) and editor of Nation Making: Emergent
Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia (Michigan 1995). His current re
search interests include globalization, mass consumption, and com
parative modernities.

Webb Keane is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropol

ogy at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and the author of
Signs and Recognition: Powers and Hazards o f Representation in an In
donesian Society (1997). His current project is about language, material
objects, money, and modernity in Indonesia.

Susan Legene is a historian, since 1985 publisher at the Royal Tropical

Institute (KIT), and as of 1997 Head Curator at the Tropenmuseum. She
is completing a dissertation on representations of non-Western culture
in early nineteenth-century Holland.

Annelies Moors, teaches anthropology at the University of Amsterdam

and Leiden University. She is the author of Women, Property, and Islam:
Palestinian Experiences 1920-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1995),
coeditor of Discourse and Palestine: Power, Text, and Context (Het Spin-
huis, 1995), and has published articles on the biographical method, on
women and Islamic law, and on Orientalism. She is presently writing
on photographs of women in Palestine, and involved in a research proj
ect on women wearing gold.

Peter Pels is Lecturer at the Research Centre Religion and Society, Uni
versity of Amsterdam, and research fellow of the Netherlands Foun
dation for the Advancement of Tropical Research. He is author of The
Microphysics o f Colonial Contact, Interactions between Missionaries and
254 Contributors

Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (Harwoord Academic Publishers, in

press) and edited, with Lorraine Nencel, Constructing Knowledge: Author
ity and Critique in Social Science (Sage, 1991) and with Oscar Salemink,
Colonial Ethnographies (special issue of History and Anthropology).

William Pietz is Director of the Asymmetrical Research Foundation

in Los Angeles. He coedited with Emily Apter Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse (Cornell University Press) and has written essays on the his
tory of the idea of fetishism. He lives in Los Angeles.

Adela Pinch is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Michigan (Ann Arbor). She is the author of Strange Fits o f Passion: Epis-
temologies o f Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, 1996), and articles on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. The
essay in this volume is part of a book in progress called Fetishes at
Home: How English Literature Construed Its Objects, 1750-1850.

Patricia Spyer is Lecturer at the Research Centre Religion and Soci

ety, University of Amsterdam. She is presently completing a book en
titled The Memory o f Trade (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and
has published articles on ritual, conversion, and trade.

Peter Stallybrass is Professor of English and of Comparative Litera

ture and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the
coauthor with Allon White of the Politics and Poetics o f Transgressions
and he has just completed a book with Ann Rosalind Jones entitled
Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity in Early Modem England and Europe.

Michael Taussig is a precocious fetishist, having virtually begun his

writerly life expounding upon the (marxist) fetish, as in The Devil and
Commodity Fetishism (1980), the fetish of the Other, as in Shamanism,
Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. (1987),
and the fetish of the system as in The Nervous System (1992), and of
course the fetish of the fetish as in his article in the present volume.
He teaches fetish anthropology in New York.
Index

abolitionists, Dutch, 39 Barrick Gold, 251

Adorno, Gretel, 230-31 Barthes, Roland, 158, 169
Adorno, T.W., 230-31 Bates, Daniel, 210
Africa, Western perceptions of, 1-2, Baudrillard, Jean, 96
35, 51, 93-94, 96, 97, 101, 110, Bedouin, the, 211
185-87, 218, 224, 231, 248-50 Beecher, Henry Ward, 201
agency: and animism, 94-95; cross- Bhabha, Homi, 164-65, 166
cultural views of, 27-28; and Bible, the, 24, 27, 47
invisibility, 17; and production, Binswanger, Ludwig, 140-42
102; and verbal formulae, 28 Bird, Norris Mervyn, 62
"Age of Paper, The," 201 Bird of Paradise feathers, 5, 151-52,
Andersen, Hans Christian, 200 154, 157, 159, 169-72
Anganen, the, 84, 88 Blackwood's Magazine, 129, 133
agriculture vs. wage labor, 214 blush, the, 9-10
animacy, 18-19 body, the, fetishes and, 8, 158-59,
animality, 228-29 167, 185-86
animism, 51, 91-92, 94-95 Bonaparte, Charles Louis, 171
antiquities, 105 Bonaparte, Louis, 190
Appadurai, Arjun, 91-99, 113 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 190
"Approaching Revolution in Great Bosman, Willem, 93
Britain, The" (De Quincey), 129 Boston Weekly Journal, 200
Aru, nineteenth-century, 5, 9, Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 155,
150-72 162
Asad, Talal, 46 Brecht, Bertolt, 240
Atkins, John, 186 Breugel, Gaspar van, 37-50
Austen, Jane, 130 Bridges, E. Lucas, 235-36
Australian Territories, 64 British Museum, 184, 187-88, 189,
191, 202, 246
Bacon, Francis, 103, 108-109 brooms: in Dutch folklore, 43; obeah
baladi gold, 212-13, 217-19 misconstrued as, 2, 8-9, 35-37,
Bank of Papua New Guinea, 80 41-43, 45-53
banks, 7, 64, 67-69, 79-83, 202, 212 Bryson, Norman, 6
baptism, 49 Buchnill, John, 126, 129
Baroque, the, 109, 111 Bunn, James, 109, 110
256 Index

Burgess, Hugh, 200 "collection," and collecting,

"bush Negroes," 41, 51 103-104, 110-11, 157-58, 186
College of Revels, the, 106
calabash, 44-45, 51 colonialism: and capitalism, 152,'
Calvinists, Dutch, 7, 13-29 clothing under, 150-72; Dutch,
Camhi, Leslie, 122-123 13-53, 150-72; and the
Candide (Voltaire), 248 imagination, 171; mimicry of
Canetti, Elias, 225-26, 228, 230, Europeans in, 162-64; and
239, 240 modernism, 167-68; money
Capital (Marx), 7-8, 157, 183-88, under, 62-88; and mercantile
200, 202, 248 aesthetic, 109-11; off-centered
capital investments, 96-97 subject position in, 5, 165-66;
capitalism: and character of things, racism in, 9; resistance to, 161; to
7-8; and colonialism, 152; fetish kens of rule under, 162-63
and, 10, 96-97, 245-51; and Colonial Museum, Haarlem, 36, 37,
magic, 8, 200, 230-31; Marx on, 42, 48
183-84, 248 Columbus, Christopher, 105
"cargo cult," 2, 6, 60-62, 96 Comaroff, J. andj., 47
Carrier, J., 87 "Condition of the Working Class in
Carstensz, Jan, 155 England, The" (England), 192-93
caste, 102 consumer culture, 123-42, 250-51
Catholicism, 16, 26-27, 51, 185 consumption, 102
Caus, Salomon de, 105 conversion, 45-50
Chan, Julius, 71-72, 74, 75 cowrie shells, 42-43, 64, 85-86
Chapman, Anne, 234-35 credit system, 127-28, 134, 187-201
Chartist movement, 193-94 Creoles, 52-53
"chintz," 156 Crowds and Power (Canetti), 225-26
cinema, the, 228-30 Cruikshank (illustrator), 197
"civilization," 5, 150, 165, 170, curiosity cabinet, the, 102-109, 111
172
Clark, Jeffrey, 83 dance, 46
Clifford, James, 109-10 Darwin, Charles, 154
Clifford Kocqshove plantation, Dasein, 140-42
37-50 de Brosses, Charles, 249-50
cloth: bestowal of, 154-56; and the debt, imprisonment for, 196
body, 158-59; as commodity, Deck, Dr. Isaiah, 201-202
183-84; production, 157, 190; defacement, 231-32
trade in, 150-51, 156-57, 161, Deleuze, Giles, 231, 237
190-91 De Marees (writer on fetish), 109
clothes: and the body, 8, 158-59, Demuth, Helene, 191, 198
167; and class, 187-89, 192-95; de Quincey, Thomas, 123, 128,
under colonialism, 150-72; pawn 129-33, 139, 142
ing of, 191-203; phobia of, Descartes, 107-108, 111
140-42; and time, 168-69 "Devil's dust" cloth, 194
Coleridge, Samuel, 111 Dickens, Charles, 196-98
collars, paper, 201 dower payments, 213-15
 Index 257

Dreadful, the, 141-42 feathers, 2, 5, 151-52, 154, 157,

Dreiser, Theodore, 127 159, 169-72; gold, 4, 208-21, 248;
Dutch East India Company, 155 lace, 3, 4, 98, 99, 130-39; money,
Dutch flag as Aru men's loincloth, 7, 68-88; obeah, 2, 8-9, 35-37,
161 41-43, 45-53; sexual, 232; shells,
42-43, 72-73, 75; silk hats, 168;
economics: boundaries in, 2, velvet or fur, 98
245-51; and cultural traditions, fetishism: and aggressive matter,
74-75; gift in, 209, 218-21; 5-6; vs. animism, 91-92; and the
Ricardian, 248 body, 61, 185-86; and border
Eickelman, Dale, 210 spaces, 1-2, 35-37, 52-53, 112-14,
Eighteenth Brumaire, The (Marx), 187, 123, 132, 139, 245-46, 250-51;
189-90, 200 Christian views of, 13-29, 47-52;
Eisenstein, Sergei, 228-30 as concept, 13; discourse on,
Engels, Friedrich, 187, 188, 190-91, 92-95, 248; Enlightenment views
192-93, 194 of, 1-2, 92, 98; fear of, 62-88; of
England: Georgian, 3, 4-5, 122-42; gifts, 209; and historical
Victorian, 183-203 encounter, 14-18; and language,
Enlightenment thought, 92, 98, 23-28; methodological, 92-98,
110-11, 224-25, 230, 248 137; in the museum, 50-53; and
Errington, F., 86-88 secrets, 225-28; and the state,
esparto grass, 200 79-83
Ethical Policy, the, 153 fetisso, the 1, 2, 93, 185
exchange: ceremonial, 18-23; Financial Times, the, 184
gendered realms of, 84-88; and folklorization of costume, 162
mercantile aesthetic, 109; precapi Forbes, Anna, 162, 166-67, 246
talist, 199-200; vs. production, Foster, Hal, 109-10
102; value, 8, 184, 187, 195-96, Foster, Robert, 2-10, 60-90, 246
199-200 Foucault, Michel, 224, 227
exploitation, idea of, 248 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 171
Freeport McMoRan, 251
face, the, 3, 9-10, 224-41 French Revolution, 189-90
"fact" and "fancy," 92, 98, 109-14 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 14, 165, 232
fashion, 168-69, 186 Frontshore/Backshore distinction,
feathers, 2, 5, 151-52, 154, 157, 159, Malay, 163-65
169-72 fustian cloth, 193-95
Federal Reserve Banking System, 81
femininity, 122-23 gendered realms of economic
fetish, the: and commodity, 7-8, 10, activity, 84-88, 111, 122-42,
95-96, 184-203; genealogy of, 195-99, 208-21
93-94; as "other thing," 91-92, Gewertz, D., 86-88
97-98; rarity as, 107-14; and Gift, The (Mauss), 185
representation, 112-14 gift vs. commodity, 209, 221
fetishes: brooms, 1-2, 8-9; capital, globalization, 245
248; face as, 3, 9-10, 224-41; gold: baladi, 212-21; mining of, 251;
clothes, 150-72, 183-201; value of, 186, 212, 218; wearing
258 Index

of, 4, 208-12, 218-21, 250; kwedjoe (bead aprons), 43-45, 51, 52

women acquiring, 213-18
goods, recirculation of, 199-200 labor: and price of gold, 215, 217;
Gould, Stephen Jay, 170-71 and value, 66-67, 96, 184, 202,
Granqvist, Hilma, 213-14 246-47; for wages, 214, 220
Guattari, Felix, 231, 237 lace, 3, 4, 98, 99, 130-39
Guillermoprieto, Alma, 237-39 "Lace Merchant of Namur, The" (De
"guinea" coin, 218 Quincey), 133
Gusinde, Martin, 232-35 Lafargue, Paul, 202
language, 24-28, 141-42
Helvetius, 250 liturgical speech, 25-27
Hernhutters, the, 47-52 Legene, Susan, 1-10, 35-59
Holocaust, the, 230 Leiden, University of, 106-107
Holy Communion, 21 Levinas, Emanuel, 225, 226, 231
Horkheimer, Max, 230-31 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 236
"Household Wreck, The" (De Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 198
Quincey), 123, 133-39 Linde, J.M. Van der, 51
House of Orange, the, 247 Lindstrom, L., 60-61
Hurgronje, Snouk, 161 Linneaeus, Carolus, 170
Hyndman, Henry, 189 London Illustrated News, 200
Lulai's Dream, The (RBA), 68-69, 250
idolatry, 19, 26, 43, 98, 112
Indische church, 153-54 McNeill, William, 249
inheritance, 195, 220 magic, 8, 200, 230-31
In One Lifetime (Williams), 75 mahr (dower payments), 213-18
invisibility, 16-17 Malay Archipelago, The (Wallace),
Islamic law, 213-14 154, 157, 159-60
marapu followers, 15-29, 248
Jesus Christ, 17 Marcos, Subcommandante, 3,
jewelry: gold as, 208-21; in Middle 236-41
East, 210-11; pawned, 196-97 maroons, the, 8-9, 41-42, 51, 52
Jones, Inigo, 105 marriage gifts, 209-21
Journal (Breugel), 38-50 Martineau, Harriet, 125-26, 136-37
juxtaposition, trope of, 74-75, 77, 79 Marx, Eleanor, 198-99
Marx, Jenny, 189, 191, 196, 198, 202
Kadiwangu, BapakU.S., 16-17 Marx, Karl: on clothes, 189-90; coat
Kafka, Franz, 231 of, 183-203, 246; on commodity
kakantri tree, 43-44, 45, 47 form, 7, 10, 13, 88, 183-87,
Keane, Webb, 2-10, 13-34 201-203; on fetishism, 101, 232,
Kiki, Sir Albert Maori, 75 248; life of, 7-8, 97, 99, 187-201;
kleptomania, 122-23, 124-26, on production, 96-97, 157, 202
139-42 masking and unmasking, 9-10,
Kocqswoud plantation, 37, 40 225-28, 232-41
Kopytoff, Igor, 98, 185 materialism, 185-87
Koran (Qur'an), the, 24, 185 materiality: and capitalism, 7-8; vs.
Kuanua, the, 72 commodity, 92, 95-96, 98-99; def-
 Index 259

inition of, 99-102; of fetish, 13; mummy wrappings, paper from,

and immateriality, 5; and lan 201-202
guage, 28-29; and money, 6-7; of museums, Western: classification of
objects, 61; and spirit, 91-114 objects in, 35-53, 103-104, 109-
Matthey, Andre, 124 10; and naturalists, 157; and
Mauss, Marcel, 185 nostalgia, 172; roots in curiosity
meat, ritual consumption of, 7, cabinet, 102-11; shell money in,
19-23, 248 88
Medicis, the, 105
Memoirs (Wilson), 128 Napoleonic Wars, 132, 190
memory, objects in, 195-97, Napoleon III, 171
201-202 nation-building, 70
"memory palace," the, 105-106 Native Currency Ordinance, P.N.G.,
merchant ethnographers, 93-94, 82
102-103 Native Local Government Council,
"Mexico's New Offensive: Erasing P.N.G., 70
Rebel's Mystique" (New York naturalists, 151-72
Times), 236-37 Neumann, K., 86
Middle East, The: An Anthropological New York Times, 236-37
Approach (Eickelman), 210 NHM brand cloth, 156, 161
Miller, Daniel, 99-101 Nietszche, Friedrich, 240
Miller, J. Hillis, 137 Nihill, M., 84-85
mimesis, 230-31 Northern Star, the, 193
mimicry of Europeans, 162-64 nostalgia, 172
miscegenation, 62-63, 88
missionaries: vs. administrators, 50; obeah, 2, 8-9, 35-37, 41-43, 45-53
and clothing, 169; in Melanesia, objects: animized, 186-87; classifica
62-63; and Sumba religion, 2, 7, tion of, 103-104, 110; global trade
14-29; and winti religion, 47-52 in, 92; immanence of, 102; and
"mock chiefs," 163 invisibility, 17; materiality of, 61,
modernism, 167-68, 185, 231 97-102; and memory, 195-97,
monarchy, 172 201-202; particularity of, 195-96;
money: as fetish, 68-88; gold as, and sacrilege, 236; semiotic
208-21; iconography of, 80, function of, 23-24; ritual vs.
82-83; as jewelry, 211-12, 217-18; utilitarian, 43; transcendence of,
materiality of, 4, 6-7, 65-68, 75, 99-100; worship of, 185-87
84; in Melanesia, 60-88; pigs as, 2, "occidentalism," 87-88
64-65, 82; shells as, 2, 64, 84-88; O'Connor, Fergus, 193-94
space-time and, 65; the state and, offerings, 18-23
65, 69-83; in Victorian England, Onvlee, Lois, 22, 27
202 Orientalism, 208-11
Money (Granta), 6-7 Origin o f Species, The, (Darwin), 154
Money (RBA), 75, 78, 80-81 Owen, W.J.B., 135
Moors, Annelies, 3-10, 208-23, 250
Moravian church, 47-52 Pacific Islands Monthly, 62
Motu speakers, 72 Paji, Umbu, 23
260 Index

Palestine, 3, 4, 208-21 Rassam, Amal, 210

paper, 200-202 ratu (ritual specialist), 16, 19
Papua and New Guinea (P.N.G.), 2, reciprocity, 83
6, 60-88 representation, 112-14
Papua and New Guinea Villager, the, Reform Bill of 1832, 129
63-64 Reformed Church, 15-29
Paul, Saint, 22, 49 Regency Dandyism, 129-30
"Pawnbroker's Shop, The" (Dickens), relic, the, 103, 104
196-98 "Religious Practices in the Residence
pawnshop, the, 7-8, 184, 187-88, of Amboina" (de Vries), 168
191-201 Reports from the Heathen World, 47,
Pels, Peter, 2-10, 91-121 48, 50, 52
pemba doti (kaolin chalk), 42 Reserve Bank of Australia, 64-69, 74,
Pentecostals, 25, 28 79, 85, 87
People and Customs o f the Middle East "respectability," 192
(Bates/Rassam), 210 revolutions: of 1848, 187; French,
Pepsi, 77, 79 189-90
Perrot, Jane Leigh, 130-35, 136, 142 Romilly, Samuel, 128
phobias, 139-42 Rosicrucianism, 106-107
physiognomy, 229-30 Ross, Ellen, 196-98
Pidgin speakers, 72 Royal Society, the, 106-107
Pietz, William, 1-10, 13, 52, 60-61,
93, 97, 112, 185, 218, 245-51 sacralia, 18-23
Pinch, Adela, 3-1, 122-49, 250-51 sacrifices, distribution of, 18-23
Pitt Rivers Museum, 110 sacrilege, 236
plantation system, 37-50 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 113
Plato, 249 Scientific Revolution, 106, 108
Port Moresby Show, 77 secrecy as power, 225-28
Post Courier, P.N.G., 75-76, 79 Selk'nam, the, 234-35
"Progress of Social Disorganization, semiotics, 23-28
The" (De Quincey), 129 senses, role of in social knowledge,
Project Liberty, 89-81 100-102
Protestantism, 9, 14, 16, 97-98, Seven Years War, 249
153-54 Shakespeare, 106
psychoanalysis, 122, 139-42 shells, 42-43, 72-73, 75
Purcell, Rosamund Wolff, 170-71 "Shirt Collar, the" (Andersen), 200
shoes, 166
qilada coins, 217-18 Shoort (spirit), 234-35
Quakers, 25, 28 shoplifting, 4-5, 123-42, 250-51
Qur'an (Koran), the, 24, 185 Shop-lifting Act, 125
shopping: contemporary, 250-51; in
racial categories, 164 Georgian England, 4-5, 123-42; in
racism, 9, 165-66, 172 P.N.G., 75-77
rag trade, 3, 200-202 signification, theory of, 92, 98-99,
Ramus, Petrus, 106 113-14
rarities, 92, 102-114 silk, 168, 195
 Index 261

Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 124 textile industries, 190-91

Sketches by Boz (Dickens), 196-97 theatrum naturae, 105
slave community, identity creation time and dress, 168-69
in, 36 53 "Toilette of the Hebrew Lady, The"
Slave owners and Slave friends . . . (De Quincey), 138
(abolitionist pamphlet), 39 tokens of rule, 162-63
slave trade, 1-2, 35-36, 218, 224, Tolai, the, 72, 77-78, 85, 87-88
248, 249-50 ToMata, Ismael, 66-67
Smith, Adam, 65, 66, 157 ToRobert, Sir Henry, 74, 75
Smith, William, 110 totem, 102
social life of things, 5, 88, 91-96, 98 trade treaties sworn on fetissos, 2
Socrates, 248 Tradescant, John, 105-106, 110
Soeharto (Indonesian ruler), 247 translation, problem of, 24, 27-28
Somare, Sir Michael, 83 Travel Account (Breugel), 43, 45, 49
souvenirs, 99 travel writing, 43-49, 152
speech events, ritual, 20, 23-28 Treasure o f the Sierra Madre, 68
Spinoza, 107 Tristan, Flora, 128
spirit, and matter, 5, 112-14 Trobianders, the, 77-78
Spyer, Patricia, 1-11, 150-82 Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 36,
Stallybrass, Peter, 3-10, 157, 41
183-207, 246 "Tropical Gothic," 152-53, 171-72
state, the: as "big man," 83; Marx
on, 190; as masked entity, 239; value: and capital, 96-97, 186;
and money, 65, 69-83 codes, 84-88; gold as, 218; labor
stock exchanges, 96 theory of, 66-67, 96, 184, 202,
Stoler, Ann Laura, 164 246-47; surplus, 184, 251;
Strike, The (Eisenstein), 229 sentimental, 197-98; system of,
subject, the: autonomy of, 14; and 98; transcendental, 187; vs.
language, 24; off-centered, 5; tran "trifles," 186; and use, 248-49
scendental, 8, 186-87 Van Beek, Goswijn, 99-100
sugar, 250 Vaux, James Hardy, 124
Sumba, Eastern Indonesia, 2, 7, veil, the, 4, 209-10
14-29 velvet, 98
Sumbanese Christian Church, 15 Virgin, the, 26
Suriname: 248; nineteenth-century, Voltaire, 248, 249-50
8-9, 35-53 von Westphalens, the (Marx in
Suriname Moravian Church, 50 laws), 189
Swammerdam (Dutch collector), 107 Voss, Lola, 9, 140-42

taboo, 102 Waite, Dr. (papermaker), 201-202

Tank, Nils Otto, 50 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 154, 157,
Taussig, Michael, 3-11, 96, 164, 159-60
224-44, 247 Wall Street Journal, 184
taxonomy, 103, 106-108, 110, Watt, Charles, 200
170-71 wealth: capital as, 97; community,
Tebbutt, Melanie, 194-95 70-71, 79-80; personal, 64-67; in
262 Index

things, 202; traditional items of, Wolff, Wilhelm, 195

64-83 wonder, sense of, 106-11
Wealth o f Nations, The (Smith), 66 Wunderkammern (curiosity cabinets),
weaverbird, the, 43 103-109, 245
Weber, Max, 14
What Is Wealth? (RBA), 64-67, 69, 70 Yamana, the, 232
Why a Bankrupt America? (Project Yates, Frances, 106
Liberty), 80-81 Yetaita (spirit), 233-34
Wielenga, D.K., 14, 15-17, 28 Your Money (RBA), 64-66, 69
Wilhelmina, Princess, 153
Wilson, Harriette, 128 Zapatistas, the, 3, 236-40
w/ntf-religion, Afroamerican, 36-53 Zeefuik (minister), 49
witchcraft, 185-86