Tools for relatedness: “Fetishes” in Burkina Faso and the work of enacted metaphors

Summary

In West Africa, certain objects act as subjects with agency, historically labeled 'fetishes' by Europeans. Through participant fieldwork as a student in initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso, the author argues that fetish agency arises not from materiality or human ascription but from mediating a three-way identification between user and spirit. Enacted metaphors and metonymies in sacrifice, embodiment, and substance sharing allow fetishes to serve as a spirit's body. The article rejects symbolic readings, proposing metaphors as tools for practicing relatedness and expanding one's life-world.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract In West Africa, certain objects can act in the world and interact with people as subjects. Labeled “fetishes” by Europeans, these material things have generated centuries of debates on the nature of their agency. In this article, I rely on participant fieldwork as a student in a group of initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso, which involved using my own fetishes as operator and other people's as client. Starting from this ethnography, I suggest that the agency of fetishes is neither primary to their materiality nor ascribed by humans. Instead, it arises by mediating a three‐way identification between the person who uses them and a spirit. Despite recent anthropological critiques of their use to explain away practices and beliefs, I propose using metaphors to make sense of the practical ways people enact such identification with powerful domains of being. Often found alongside metonymies, these enacted metaphors are at work in sacrifice, in embodiment, and in the sharing of substances, where a fetish acts as the body of a normally intangible spirit. While rejecting a symbolic reading of fetishes, I propose reevaluating metaphors as tools to practice relatedness and expand the limits of one's life‐world.

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