Praxis Seminar with Iracema Duley - The Fetish in Translation: Reflections from Central Angola (Oct. 14, 2025)
Praxis-CFUL
Iracema Duley, ICS/University of Lisbon
This presentation investigates the relationship between translation and fetishism, fixation and instability. Proposing that the concept of fetishism be understood beyond its formulation within so-called Western intellectual production by authors such as Marx and Freud, it considers its insertion into the history of the iterations of the concept of “fetish”. In Central Angola, the chain of substitutions related to terms such as feitiço, fetiche, fetish, Fetisch, etc., was expanded through translations of feitiço into Umbundu by Christian missionaries during the colonial period. The essay explores how, despite the missionaries’ attempt to bifurcate and fix the translation of feitiço into a positive and a negative pole — with umbanda juxtaposed with “remedy” and owanga equated with “harmful spell” — such a distinction is constantly called into question in Umbundu. Thus, if translation contains the promise of fixation and equivalence, it cannot contain displacement, manifested in Umbundu through the dissemination of terms that designate “spells”: umbanda, owanga, and the proliferation of names that express the materialization of desire in this language.
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