“Black” Magic? Rethinking Early Modern Dutch Ethnographies of “Fetish”

This essay uses a comparison of two Dutch-language sources on the concept of “fetish”—by Pieter de Marees (published 1602) and Willem Bosman (published 1704)—to suggest that, before we ask what they tell us about seventeenth-century West Africa, they show a significant historical change in how Europeans assessed their relations with people on the continent. The material engravings that introduce the books indicate that the invisible ontologies behind their understanding of fetish underwent a major change during a century in which Europeans experienced both a “scientific” revolution and the explosion of the transatlantic slave trade. They suggest a shift from Christianity to mercantilism that associated Black skin more firmly with the European denigration of magic.