Nemi in the Modern World: Return of the Exotic?

Abstract

The ritual murder of the priest-king at Nemi and his personal identification with, and marriage to, the sacred oak, as described in Frazer's The golden bough, exemplifies the 'old' exotic as a literary device which objectifies and distances the 'other' from the Western enquirer. A 'new' exotic specifies the constantly transforming relationships between, and co-identification with, persons and things across all societies and times. As a form of animated materiality in which objects and humans give life to each other, 'fetishism' is not the preserve only of other cultures, for it also participates in the ideas and practices associated with modem consumerism. In the re-casting of the anthropological concept of culture as, for instance, creolization, anthropologists need to avoid representing other peoples' creative encounters with new objects only or mainly as adaptations to metropolitan hegemony. A re-reading of the claim that peoples of the world are becoming more and more culturally creolized, is that they constantly create new and overlapping, but in pan mutually strange, relationships between persons and things, including both modem commodities and what have been called fetishes. The cultivation of the bizarre in people's theories of themselves among objects is thus as much a feature of so-called Western as non-Western society, a distinction that evaporates once we note this similarity in peoples' propensity continually to make themselves different through objects.