IS FETISH THE NEW RELIGION?

This article explores the multiple definitions of fetish from Marx to media to Castro.  Based on these definitions, fetish is examined in the cultural context of post-industrial American society, and explores the possible future of fetish in mainstream America.

Is religion still the opiate of the masses as Karl Marx stated?  If he were alive today, what in contemporary American society would he find as our opiate?  I propose that fetishism is becoming the new opiate of the masses.  It is an opiate to the degree that it can be a stress reliever and/or a recreational diversion in post industrial society.  Although regarded as a subculture, fetishism loosely defined as giving power to an object or thing, has become more mainstream in American culture specifically through television, commercials, music videos, and the printed media. 

Fetishism pushes the envelope of what is moral and immoral in contemporary American culture. “Television is pervasive in American households and functions to define what is moral and immoral in society.”  The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society by Sut Jhally 1990.  Today would Marx agree that television defines our morality now in lieu of religion?

Surprising little literature is available in mainstream anthropological studies about American fetishism.  Somewhat ironically there are many more studies in Native American fetishes.   This shortfall caused me to do research on my own as a proto-anthropologist, as it were. 

In Hollywood California is a fetish art gallery called Antebellum.  It purports to be the only fetish art gallery in North America and perhaps the world.  Its curator-owner is Rick Castro.  Mr. Castro has been a guest lecturer in Human Sexuality courses at the U C Santa Barbara and UCLA campuses.  

Rick was also in the forefront of bringing the Plushies and Furries fetish phenomenon into mainstream media in his MTV-produced documentary a few years ago   They are archived and can be seen here on his blog: antebellumgallery.blogspot.com

“Artists and directors are presenting fetish more and more in the mainstream.  It is subliminally injected into our culture.  Once you are aware of it, there is no way not to notice it anymore.  When you know your fetish, you are closer to understanding yourself. It defines a person in an intimate way.  It is important to the psyche.”  (Rick Castro, 2012)  Castro disagrees that fetish is an opiate because an opiate is a distraction. A fetish can relieve stress and release endorphins. 

Although Castro does not agree that fetishes are the new opiate, he does define the term fetish as an object that is empowered by the person.  The power can be both spiritual and sexual, but the feeling outcome is euphoria.  In a spiritual way, there is a connection that it could replace or sublimate religion.

Religious beliefs and practices, like every other aspect of culture, are responsive to

changes in society. Social, economic, political, and historical developments have an impact

on religions. Changes in other areas of their lives may cause people to think about

their relationship with the spirit world in different ways, altering some practices or even

abandoning them altogether. People may begin to rethink the roles of religious practitioners,

possibly changing the criteria for choosing them or how they are trained. Ritual

practice may change as people adopt new ceremonies and modify or discard older ones.

Although religion seems like a timeless tradition, it is subject to transformation like any

other system of ideology and practice.   (Text P. 373)

The above quotation indirectly asserts the possibility that in the future as social norms change, fetish could replace religion for some. 

The potentiality of fetishism in the mainstream is furthered by the American media and the need for expanding markets in a consumer-driven society.

“In his important book, Captains of Consciousness (1976), Stuart Ewen argues that in the early years of this century, the need to create desires in the newly enfranchised consuming public necessitated a shift away from a stress solely on products, to a context where it was the relationship between people and products that was important.” (Jhally Page 3).   The relationship mentioned in this quotation comes close to defining fetishism.  The consuming public is made aware of a product’s usefulness beyond its utility and to how it relationally interacts with a person.

“The relationship between people and their things should not be considered a superficial or optional feature of life. It is in fact a definitional component of human existence.  This relationship between people and objects has been described as ‘objectification’ – we objectify ourselves and our lives in the materiality of the concrete world.” (Jhally Page 1)

Human needs are fulfilled through objects.

 “Peter Pels elegantly situates the Marxian idea of commodity fetishism in broader historical context. He argues that anthropological material culture studies have increasingly downplayed the importance of fetishism. Anthropocentric models of the material culture of consumerism have not allowed for the more radical attribution of agency to commodities. Through a series of case studies about twentieth-century and contemporary advertising, Pels builds an argument that bears some similarities to the ‘enchanted materialism’ of modern life evoked by Jane Bennett (2001), but is more explicit in how Western capitalism employs ‘magic’ and enchantment to construct and capture its markets. Pels sees these elements as bound up with technologies, with the prime example of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries being that of computer technophilia…” (Oxford Handbook of Material Cultural Studies: a reactionary view by Dan Hicks, 2010)

I assert that this “technophilia” is a form of obsession that Americans have for technology. A spiritual fetish.  At the other end of the spectrum, Rick Castro defines sexual fetish as coming about during one’s puberty. Erotic Crystalization inertia (ECI) is the first fetish: the one that titillates.  Castro believes the fetish is both spiritual and physical (sexual).  He believes Americans want to separate the two. 

The literature seems to agree with this assertion.

“The core of the Marxian definition is understood to be the mystification of unequal relations of social exchange through the attribution of autonomous agency or productivity to certain kinds of material objects.”  (Symbolic technologies: Machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism Alf Hornborg Lund University, Sweden)

In summary, in our post-industrial American society, we can define fetish in several ways. Marxist fetishism is spiritual.  The media’s presentation of fetish is that of a physical relationship. Castro’s definition is both spiritual and physical.  The significance of these is the level to which we can be manipulated as a society in terms of its use in the media to define us, our morality and the promotion of consumerism.


researched & written by betty fenar

reposted courtesy~ betty fenar~ palm desert/antebellum correspondent