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This paper aims to discuss the concept of fetishism as an important but understudied kind of magical relationship to objects. Fetishism in the context of contemporary consumption is conceptualized as a multilayered construct underlining the attribution of an aura and magical power to a product to achieve personal goals.

In total, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted to highlight contextual factors influencing the emergence of fetishism in contemporary consumption, to underline the instrumental and aspirational dimensions of fetishism and to provide a definition of contemporary product fetishism.

The results show that fetishism appears as fragmented and unstable magical beliefs toward products related to a need to cope with uncertain and important aspirational situations.

The paper provides a multidisciplinary approach of fetishism to provide insights regarding this phenomenon and its manifestations in the context of contemporary consumption.

In a recent report the author wrote about a service user, the author was challenged by the service user’s advocate in respect of the author’s use of the term “sexual fetish”. The author was informed of the advocate’s fears in respect of people involved in the service user’s future care and support needs feeling uncomfortable and possibly stigmatising someone having a sexual fetish. Consequently, the author was asked to change their wording from “sexual fetish” to “sensory need”. The purpose of this study/paper aims to highlight best practice regarding the most appropriate wording for individuals with sexual fetishes.

A review of the available evidence was ascertained.

A review of British Psychological Society guidelines and recent research highlights that what were once called “perversions” must be destigmatised, which will not be achieved if people continue to sweep the term fetish under the metaphorical carpet.

It is the author’s sincere hope that use of the term “sexual fetish” embraces and normalises people’s sexual fetish and results in heightened awareness and de-stigmatisation of what is essentially a reference to an element of the wonderful and pleasurable world of sexual behaviour.

Purpose: This chapter investigates how researchers assemble market research test towns as hybrid sociotechnical arrangements. Researchers use various strategies in order to purify such hybrids into simplified representations of a fetishized imaginary, namely the average consumer.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is based on an analysis of secondary sources such as company documents. Theoretically, it draws on the concept of consumption assemblages and on anthropological theories of fetish.

Findings: Fetishization is a powerful way for both researchers and their clients to purify the hybrid assemblages they are part of into easily digestible categories such as “the real” and “the average.” In that process, the test town and its consumers emerge as a fetish that allows corporate clients to alleviate decision-making anxiety. Because of the nature of fetish, purification as a process remains incomplete.

Research Implications: These findings call for more social studies of market research as a set of practices that shape the identities of those who do the testing and forecasting. This chapter thus opens up test marketing and so-called test towns in particular as a field for consumer culture theory research.

Originality/value: This chapter provides insights into how market research creates test sites to simulate purchase behavior and pre-test consumer products. This chapter maps how different groups of actors and different technologies are enrolled in order to enact an ideal-type consumer averageness on an ongoing basis in a particular test town.

This chapter addresses the prevalence of the shiny body in the kink aesthetic. Through an exploration of Freud's ideas on fetishism and Benjamin's thoughts on the aura, the author argues that the aesthetic of the kink community is shiny and that quality is often overlooked, and also that if we do look at the shiny kink aesthetic, we find a process that leads to a fetishized subject and to us dismissing that the objectification of people is unethical. By exploring the different qualities of the shiny body as well as the relationship between subject and object and the aura – achieved in part through the author's reflections on his own experiences with the attraction to shiny objects from his early childhood and adolescence – the resulting analysis articulates the effects of donning a fetishized shiny outfit and offers a theoretical re-empowerment of the fetishized body.

Over the last four years in Spain, a strong autonomist movement (15M), based on radical democracy and mistrust of any kind of instituted politics, seems to be turning toward statist and institutionalized politics. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: Can we speak of a community fetishism, as opposed to State fetishism? Do autonomist social movements have a spatial project as opposed to a State spatial project? Why do horizontal and self-management-oriented social movements turn to the conquest of the State in the current framework?

The empirical evidence for this study stems from a qualitative methodological approach. The authors used two different types of sources. First, direct observations from the authors’ own engagement in social movements in Spain from 2011 to the present are used. Second, this work is part of a systematic research on spatial dynamics and the evolution of collective action in Spain. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists involved in social movements from 2012 to 2015, in which time informal interviews were conducted, and documents and observational notes were also collected.

Social movements have tended to develop alternatives to state spatial projects, partially as a result of an institutional setting that has been progressively closed to political alternatives to the neoliberal state. This last point leads to the posing of politics as completely independent of the political arena of the State (community fetish). From the first square occupations to the subsequent organization in local meetings, the 15M movement was the last expression of this tendency in Spain, while the turn on State political institutions responds to the obvious limitations of community fetishism in the context of the social and political tensions of the Spanish crisis.

This analysis contributes to the current debates on social movements in two ways. First, the authors investigate a usually neglected agent in the production of spatial political projects and strategies such as social movements. Second, the specific case of the 15M movement in Spain strongly shows the contradictions and limitations of the movements, which supposedly do not aspire to replace the State’s sovereign power through the idea of community fetishism.

The purpose of this chapter is to characterize fictitious capital and fictitious profits as extreme expressions of the fetishism of capital. Considering the incessant search for valorization and allowing for fictitious forms of capital, the subject of this study is at the center of the dynamics of recent capitalist accumulation, especially when we take into account the capitalist crises over the last four or five decades. Its mechanism of fictitious valorization (M – M′), a decisive dimension of contemporary capitalism, is contradictory, based on the growing obstacles to the extraction of surplus value on an expanded scale, and therefore the real valorization of capital. At the same time, we support the idea that this mass of overaccumulated capital produces profits unrelated to surplus value, that is fictitious profits, further intensifying the fetishistic and contradictory nature of capitalism.

This chapter looks at male-on-male sexual activity in the subaltern world of male sexual spaces. It examines the importance of such spaces regarding etiquette, negotiation, opportunities, safety, safer sex practices, status, and navigation of sexual expression including experimentation, exploration, and risk-taking through sexual activity. It also explores how these time-limited communal engagements for sexual pleasure and affirmation contrast normative societal expectations. Through hard-copy and online content analysis as well as ethnographic immersion and observations in the subaltern world of gay male sexual spaces such as bathhouses, circuit clubs, dark rooms, fetish balls, porn theaters, sex clubs, and sex shops, a self-monitored subculture that creates its own tribal rituals at various odds with both mainstream societal and LGBTQ movement norms is examined. By deviating from and resisting such norms, this tribe demonstrates how it maintains a core drive of liberated sexuality outside of mainstreamed sexual governance. Premised on spatial theory, in which space, place, and spatial practices are deconstructed with regard to the creation and preservation of male-on-male fetish activities, a link is made to queer liberation theory that supports self-defined sexual expression, including that of kink.

Fetishism has been often linked to misrecognition and false belief, to one being “ideologically duped” so to speak. But could we think that fetishism may be precisely the very opposite? The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this at first sight counterintuitive notion. It locates the problem of fetishism at the crux of the problem of disavowal and argues that one needs to distinguish between a disavowal – marked by cynical knowledge – and fetishistic disavowal, which can be understood as a subcategory of the same belief structure of ideology.

This conceptual paper is based on literature review and utilizes examples from the author’s ethnographic fieldworks in India (2008-2013) and central Europe (2015-2019).

The paper provides a new insight into the structure of fetishism, relying on the psychoanalytic structure of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, but not all disavowal is fetishistic, thereby positing a crucial, often unacknowledged distinction. Where disavowal follows the structure “I know quite well how things are, but still […],” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “I don’t only know how things are, but also how they appear to me, and nonetheless […].”

The paper develops an original conceptualization of fetishism by distinguishing ideological disavowal from fetishistic disavowal.

The overall aim of this research is to interpret Ikenga and Ofo creativity as it is revered in Igbo societies. Igbo creativity, especially interpreted through material culture, suffers the threat of extinction resulting from the forces of modernity. Forces of modernisation, which appear in the personae of Christianity, education, urbanisation and industrialisation, denigrated indigenous creativity, brandishing them as devious, fetish and primitive. Ironically, in most cases, the drivers of such narratives keep these “fetish” items in their museums and will give a lot to preserve them.

This study centred mostly on several communities in the Nsukka area of Igboland, Nigeria. It relied on both primary and secondary sources of historical enquiry. This qualitative research discussed the nuances of the subject matter as it relates to Igbo cosmos. These approaches involved visiting the study area and conducting personal interviews.

Archaeologists do often rely on material culture to study, periodise and date past human societies. In this study, it is found that material culture, an expression of indigenous creativity, best interprets how society survived or related with their environment. This paper examined two Igbo sculpted artefacts – Ikenga and Ofo – while unearthing the intricacies in Igbo cosmology as regards creativity, spirituality and society.

The shapes, motifs, patterns and designs depict an imaginary history, the intellectualism of the past and even the present. This serves as an objective alternative to the twisted colonial narrative on Igbo material culture and consequently contribute to ongoing efforts to preserve, protect and promote cultural heritage resources in this part of the world.