prompts the recurrent emergence in human doings of “phantasmagoric forms.” Since Marx and Engels both saw human consciousness as determined primarily by the historically installed mode of production, they would have been loath to trace fetishism to any proclivities of human minds or to the neuropsychological architecture of the human organism. Yet it has been plausibly argued that humans share general tendencies to engage objects in the world as if they were human and to endow them with human desires, will, and capacities (Godelier 1977, 169–85; Guthrie 1993). These tendencies were abetted by the human possession of language, which postulates abstractions that can then be treated as animate beings and analogically endowed with humanlike capabilities. From this perspective, fetishism represents an escalation of animism, in which entities are treated as animate and superior to humans yet amenable to human entreaties to engage in transactions (Ellen 1988). Therefore, one might rephrase the issue of fetishism in cultural terms and ask which entities come to be selected for this process, under what circumstances, and why. Of special interest would be to ascertain how fetishes, already raised to a position of superiority, model relations of asymmetrical power in society. It may be possible, therefore, to combine Marx’s suggestion that the crucial nexus of structural power governing social labor will produce characteristic representations or misrepresentations in thought with an anthropological analysis of ideational complexes such as fetishism.
Reactions against Metaphysics and Teleology
While the opposing parties of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment disputed the political and intellectual terrain between them under the flags of Reason, Revolution, and Science against Faith, Tradition, and Poetic Subjectivity, a cohort of new protagonists, pursuing a different interest, would alter the terms of the debate. One way they did so was by attacking as “metaphysics” all efforts to subsume human behavior under general laws. Metaphysics was said to pile abstract theory upon abstract theory, until theorizing itself seemed to impede any connections with “real life.” These critics were especially opposed to “grand” theories that they accused—sometimes mistakenly—of trying to tie human fate to a central teleological dynamic. Among the teleologies thus denounced, favorite targets were Hegel’s unfolding of the workings of a world spirit; Marxism, treated as a form of economic determinism; and Darwinism, interpreted as an evolutionary teleology that favored the victors in the “struggle for existence.” The antidote to such universal scenarios was thought to lie in sound, practical, and down-to-earth methodology, without recourse to metaphysics of any kind.
This apotheosis of methodology above theory first took the name of “pragmatism” (Charles Peirce, William James), although a proliferation of intellectual currents added “empirio-criticism” (Ernst Mach) and “logical positivism” (G. E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper) to the antimetaphysical repertoire. The search for a more immediate contact with “real life” caused some of these critics to associate their perspectives with Darwinism and thus reintroduce biological theorizing through a back door, but all embraced the notion that ideas were usable only if grounded in acceptable methods. When it entered anthropology in the early twentieth century, this “pragmatic turn” prompted a decisive move toward fieldwork as the central methodology capable of yielding adequate knowledge about human doings.
REAFFIRMING “MIND”
Another critical response to “metaphysics” did not reject it entirely but opposed efforts to apply the methods of natural science to the study of history and the human sciences. The “subjectivists” thought it was necessary to “declare war on science” (Wilhelm Windelband), since approaches drawn from the natural sciences could not do justice to human vitality in passion, imagination, energy, and will. Science, it was argued, was unsuited to the study of human minds, subjective and autonomous entities that operated through language and culture. Minds had to be studied in the plural, and not as instances of a universal human mind. Therefore, it was also necessary to abandon evolutionary attempts to trace the development of humankind as a whole and to end efforts to define a “psychic unity of man.” Above all, these critics hoped to specify the varied forms through which the mind “apprehended” the world and imposed order upon it. In anthropology, beginning with Bastian and Boas, such attitudes underwrote a “mentalist turn” that emphasized the diversity of culturally constituted “minds.” This programmatic shift focused on language as the major vehicle for human communication, seeing language not as unitary but as manifesting itself in a plurality of languages.
This shift drew in large part on the German reaction against the reign of universal reason preached by the Enlightenment, but it was reinforced as well by political and economic motivations. Early in the nineteenth century, the advent of capitalism had been hailed by many as a breakthrough to a new freedom. Markets were increasingly freed from monopolistic governmental controls and interference, and industrial development promised liberation from tributary dependence and toil; the diffusion of “free” thought held out prospects of delivering the multitudes from the fetters of absolutism and religious orthodoxy. By the end of the century, however, intensifying capitalism had revealed a darker side. Increasingly social critics, both socialist and conservative, pointed to the numbers of people who had been stripped of rights to the resources of field and forest upon which they had once relied for a livelihood, to the uncertainties in industrial employment associated with the business cycle, and to the frequently exploitative character of industrial employment itself. At the same time, increasing numbers of people became aware of the terror and brutality associated with imperialist expansion abroad.
The entrepreneurial class and its supporters came under attack from both the Left and Right, as much for its dedication to Mammon as for its acceptance of the status quo now that its own privileges had been assured. There were reactions against “materialism,” understood as a growing proclivity to luxuriate in material wellbeing. Other critics feared the spread of equality, which they associated with a loss of recognition for individual capacity and achievement. Still others bemoaned the weakening of the sense of heroism and sacrifice once associated with the military aristocracy, the rationalization of social life through the growth of bureaucracy, and the dismantling of comforting traditions.
These various changes made the future seem less promising, sometimes positively threatening. There was widespread concern among the literate about biological and psychological “degeneration,” issuing in Germany in lamentations about “cultural pessimism.” Increasingly this mood called into question the promises held out by the advocates of Reason. The Romantics had already challenged Enlightenment values by questioning the claims of Reason, and these claims had been shaken further from within the camp of Reason itself. The early Enlightenment understood Reason as the strategic cognitive faculty that would reveal the truth of Nature kept hidden by error and superstition; thus stripped bare, Nature would show itself as an orderly system of prudent imperatives. As “the great infidel” Scotsman David Hume pointed out, however, we lack a convincing basis for testing what goes on in our minds against an orderly and causally determined sequence of facts in Nature: all our thinking is “derived either from our outward or inward sentiment.” As a result, Hume asserted, Reason could not guarantee a reliable picture of Nature, and hence one could not derive any rules of ethics from the workings of Nature: “It is not irrational for me to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my finger” (in Solomon 1979, 73, 76). The Romantic Johann Georg Hamann used Hume to argue that, in the absence of certain and reliable knowledge, any correspondence between Reason and Nature had to be based on “faith.” Thus, as Ernest Gellner put it, Reason “cut its own throat” (1988, 135).
Hume had argued that all our ideas and memories are not “truths of reason” but merely matters of “habit.” As the universal values of the Enlightenment were increasingly challenged by defenders of local and national traditions, such habits came to be understood as variable both in the course of history and among different groups around the globe. This stripped “habits of the mind” of any claim to universal dominion or validity, rendering them instead historically and ethnologically particular and relative. As cultural groups began to look inward and to ask what made them distinctive, furthermore, they began to stress differences in the qualities of their minds, the nature of their special
