On June 21, 2024, from 14:00 to 16:00, the Sub-Saharan African Studies Research Group of the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University hosted the forth lecture of the 2023-2024 spring semester. The lecture, titled “The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make” was delivered by J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and of African and African American Studies. The event was moderated by Mr. Wang Shujian, a PhD Candidate in the Developing Country Studies Program at IIAS, Tsinghua University. About 70 people attended the lecture, including IIAS faculty members and doctoral students, scholars and students from both home and abroad, and others interested in the topic.

At the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Matory introduced the concept of "Fetishism", African and European belief systems, and the construction of African and Western identity. He pointed out that the concept of "Fetishism" reveals a specific social relationship between Africans and Europeans, in which Afro-Atlantic gods and European social theories are shaped by the complementary social positions of their exponents.

Then, Prof. Matory introduced Marx's theory of commodity value, Marx's critique and limitations of black slavery, and the implicit ideology of "Fetishism" behind his thoughts. In the last part of the lecture, Prof. Matory introduced Freudian psychoanalytic theories, subconscious theories, and the similarities between these theories and "Fetishism".

During the Q&A session, Prof. Matory engaged in a lively discussion with IIAS students and faculty, as well as other online and offline participants. Topics included the usage of "Negro" in different cultural contexts, medical fetishism, local religious rituals in Equatorial Guinea, and the relation between fetishism and animism.

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. From 1998 until leaving for Duke in 2009, he was a full professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Prof. Matory has conducted four decades of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic—West African Yoruba religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería/Ocha, and Haitian Vodou—as well as the university as a culture, ethnic identity, and the social context of European social theory. Over the past half-decade, he has also taken an interest in Chinese culture and is currently teaching a course in the School of Global Ethnology and Anthropology at Minzu University of China.Choice magazine named his Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Ọyọ Yoruba Religion (1994) an outstanding book of the year, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé won the 2005 Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association. Matory’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture resulted in the book Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America (2015), concerning the competitive and hierarchical nature of ethnic identity-formation. His latest, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (2018), won the AAR’s 2019 Prize for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society (2020), and the J.I. Staley Prize (2022). From 2003 to 2011, he served on the United States Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, Department of State. Prof. Matory is also a recipient of the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association (2010) and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize (2013), arguably Europe’s most prestigious scholarly award.