Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives

Examines the importance of fetishism in nineteenth-century cultural theory.

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all "primitive" cultures with "Primitive Fetishism," a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world-thunderstorms, trees, stones-is alive. Placi...