Fetish

Abstract

This chapter opens with an ambiguous set of objects collected by a Dutch woman named Margrieta van Varick and described as “Indian Babies,” possibly brought with her from the Dutch East Indies to New England, and relates them to the practice of iconoclastic child’s play in Malaysia. It repositions iconoclastic child’s play in a fraught colonial context and asks how the play of other cultures is to be interpreted. Beginning with ethnographic and psychoanalytic discussions of child’s play by Lévi-Strauss, Winnicott, and others, it then moves to consider the category of the fetish as one that has long been intertwined with the status of children and their playing. It uses the contested status of this category--as an object both replete with, and devoid of, meaning--to reconsider the fetish as plaything both in sixteenth-century Guinea and in Adorno’s writing on artworks and children’s games.