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A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their ‘life’. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of ‘mind over matter’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.
“I consider this to be a brilliant piece of research creating a highly original intervention in material culture studies. In particular the debates on materiality and matter and the intellectual history of the concept of fetishism and its transformation of meaning in Europe from the 16th century to the present.” • Michael Rowlands, University College London
“[A book] with considerable value. It is a compelling read, that has some important interventions to make concerning the nature of the material within modernity.” • Jon Mitchell, University of Sussex
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1. The Auto-Icon, or: What a Secularist Relic Says about Modern Dematerializations
Chapter 2. Towards a Methodology of the Concrete
Part II: Fetish and the Fear of Matter
Chapter 3. The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact and Fancy
Chapter 4. The Modern Fear of Matter: Reflections on the Protestantism of Victorian Science
Part III: Do Catholics See Things Differently?
Chapter 5. Trophy and Wonder, or: Bodies at the Exhibition
Chapter 6. Africa Christo! The Materiality of Photographs in Dutch Catholic Mission Propaganda, 1946-1960
Chapter 7. “I am Black, but Comely”: Mission, Modernity and the Power of Objects in the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal
Chapter 8. Conclusion: The Powers of Miming “Africa”
Part IV: The Time of Things
Chapter 9. Things in Time: Commodity Fetishism before Advertising
Chapter 10. False Consciousness? The Rise of Advertising
In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Future of Things
References
Index