cultural fetish

is all trade in and around cultural difference: A concept-thing arising in the gap that comes about at the moment of contact between two cultures.

William Piety has argued that the cultural fetish-we might include under the sign of 'cultural fetish' all trade in and around cultural difference-is the mark of the foreclosure that occurs in the process of radical translation. 'Fetish is not of any one of the two cultures coming into contact. It is a concept-thing (an idea and a material thing at the same time) that arises in the gap that comes about at the moment of contact between the two cultures/languages. It becomes imbued with power to carry meaning across borders' (Piety 1985, 1987, 1988... see also Taussig 1993, and for recent full-length ethnographies incorporating these critical traditions see Ivy 1995, Rabinow 1999, Rofel 1999, Monis 2000). (Povinelli 2001 : 324)

cultural fetish, n.All

cultural fetish