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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Peter Pels is a Professor of Anthropology of Africa at the University of Leiden. He edited the journal Social Anthropology (2003-2007) and advised the Çatalhöyük excavation project led by Ian Hodder (2005-14). His most recent publication is Museum Temporalities: Time, History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (Routledge, 2023) which is co-edited with Wayne Modest.
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