William Pietz (born 1951) is an intellectual historian and political activist. He is known for his scholarship related to the concept of fetishism.
Pietz completed an interdisciplinary Masters in Philosophy and Political Theory from the New School for Social Research, [1] and his PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1988. [2] He taught at Pitzer College, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Georgetown University. [3]
Pietz is best known for his account of the colonial origins of the concept of fetishism. It was the subject of his dissertation [2] as well as a series of articles for the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, entitled "The Problem of the Fetish." [4] [5] [6] A collection of Pietz's fetishism essays, including previously unavailable material, was published under that title by University of Chicago Press in 2022. [7]
His work in this area has been characterized as "brilliant" [8] and "fundamental". [9] Referring to his trilogy, David Graeber has characterised Pietz as "one of those rarest of people – an independent scholar whose ideas have had a profound effect on the academy". [10]
Joseph Harold Greenberg was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent value, or powers, to an object.
Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has a fetish for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regarded as a non-pathological aid to sexual excitement, or as a mental disorder if it causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life. Sexual arousal from a particular body part can be further classified as partialism.
Shoe fetishism is the attribution of attractive sexual qualities to shoes or other footwear as a matter of sexual preference, or an alternative or complement to a relationship with a partner. It has also been known as retifism, after the French novelist Nicolas-Edme Rétif (1734–1806), also known as Rétif de la Bretonne, who wrote a novel about it called Fanchette's Foot, which preference or penchant seems to have been if not "all the rage" at the time at least known to have been practiced or suffered by more than handsful of somewhat important individuals of that period.
Foot fetishism, also known as foot partialism or podophilia, is a pronounced sexual interest in feet. It is the most common form of sexual fetishism for otherwise non-sexual objects or body parts.
In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.
Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange.
As a paraphilia, breast fetishism is a highly atypical sexual interest consisting of an exclusive focus on female breasts, which is a type of partialism. The term breast fetishism is also used in the non-paraphilic sense, to refer to cultural attention to female breasts and the sexuality they represent.
David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The text, published in 1947, is a revised version of what the authors originally had circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title of Philosophical Fragments.
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is one of a series of pamphlets published by Prickly Paradigm Press in 2004. With the essay, anthropologist David Graeber attempts to outline areas of research that intellectuals might explore in creating a cohesive body of anarchist social theory.
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and served as Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA from 2009 to 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1980s.
Marilyn Ivy is an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University, an M.A. in history from the University of Hawaiʻi, and a B.A. in Asian studies from the University of Oklahoma. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Ivy taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington.
Jack L. Amariglio is a North American heterodox economist. He is well known for his work on economic history, class analysis, and on economic methodology and postmodernism in economics.
This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.
Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept, that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.
Concepts of race and sexuality have interacted in various ways in different historical contexts. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is understood by scientists to be a social construct rather than a biological reality. Human sexuality involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors.
Robert Edward Norton is an American cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in European, and especially German, history and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.
Emily Susan Apter is an American academic, translator, editor and professor. Her areas of research are translation theory, language philosophy, political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, history and theory of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, and political fiction. She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University.