SOME COMMENTS ON THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF fetishism IN ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Following an interdisciplinary approach going through the grounds of psychological anthropology, symbolic anthropology, sociology and ethnography, pursued with an historical methodology, in this paper we wish to argue about the role played by fetishism in economic anthropology and its possible applications. Anyway, what emerges is the primary importance of the occurrence of fetishism in the rising of human symbolic function, explained through a psychoanalytical model based on disavowal mechanism, with a view towards applications in marketing.