Humans and Things: Mande “Fetishes” as Subjects

The West African Mande use a wide variety of material artifacts (“fetishes”) to influence their lives. They conceive of such artifacts as partners with whom their users actively engage in genuine relationship. Thus, they treat these objects as subjects. Yet anthropologists have typically interpreted such objects, and similar magical artifacts worldwide, as symbols, that is, material representations reifying social and power structures. This article re-examines the traditional anthropological binary and indexical view of the objects in question while exploring these objects’ agency, which I consider as the foundation of their efficacy.