Cumberpatch Fetishism: here is the desire to hold, look, touch; captivation by the consecrated object. The antiquary's vase is past frozen, a fixed moment. The wholeness of the past is lost in the melancholic holding of the vase; the past, longed for, is missing. The vase fills the gap. Touching, viewing what once was there, part of what is desired.
But the fixation on the vase, the antiquary's contact is the condition of the past being absent. The vase commemorates the past, which is missing, but denies this. The fetish object combines gratification and distress: being sometimes the presence and sometimes the absence of that which is desired. The archaeological suspicion is that antiquarian desire effaces the past.
The object merely mirrors the antiquary's impoverished world in which knowledge There is morbidity about the antiquary too: images of skulls, dusty gloom, yellow parchment of decay. The antiquary is dead to all sensuality save the body of the past. The past is dead and gone; but here is a beautiful and fascinating vase. Perhaps though we should remember the sensuality present through its absence in the antiquary's desire to hold the past Shanks, : The fetish quality of an object is the reverence or the fascination for it that arises out of its capacities but is expressed over and beyond its simple consumption.
This fetish quality is attested through ritualistic practices that celebrate or revere the object, a class of objects, items from a 'known' producer or even the brand name of a range of products Dant, : In this article I shall address the issue of fetishism and assess its value as a way of understanding attitudes to archaeology and some of its objects of study, the material traces of human action in the past. I shall try to show how the use of the concept of fetishism opens up the possibility of an internal critique of archaeological practice from positions other than those predicated on an assumption of the existence of privileged, objectivist or foundationalist perspectives.
In doing this I will use two case studies to suggest that archaeological knowledge, as well as archaeological objects of the type described by Shanks above , can be fetishised with particular consequences for the discipline as a cultural practice characterised by a degree of self-awareness and self-interrogation.
