Factiche, fetichismo El fetichismo es una acusación realizada por un denunciante. Implica que los creyentes no han hecho más que proyectar sus propias creencias y deseos sobre un objeto carente de significado. Por el contrario, los factiches son tipos de acción que no forman parte del juicio conminatorio entre el hecho y la creencia. Este neologísmo combina las palabras «hechos" y «fetiches" y deja patente que ambas comparten la característica de denotar un elemento de fabricación. En vez de oponer los hechos a los fetiches, y en vez de denunciar que los hechos son en realidad fetiches, lo que se intenta es tomar en serio el papel de los actores' en todos los tipos de actividades y, de este modo, terminar con la noción de creencia*.

Latour, B., 2001 (1999). La esperanza de Pandora. Ensayos sobre la realidad de los estudios de la ciencia. Barcelona: Gedisa, 365.

ARTE Y CULTURA MATERIAL

Las Cosas, Georges Perec

Culture is probably the broadest concept of all those used in the historical social sciences. It embraces a very large range of connotations, and thereby it is the cause perhaps of the most difficulty. There is, however, one fundamental confusion in our usage which I shall address.

One the one hand, one of the basic building stones of social science's view of the world, most explicitly emphasized by the anthropologists, is the conviction that, while all persons share some traits with all others, all persons also share other traits with only some others, and all persons have still other traits which they share with no one else. That is to say, the basic model is that each person may be described in three ways: the universal characteristics of the specie, the sets of characteristics that define that person as a member of a series of groups, that person's diosyncratic characteristics. When we talk of traits which are neither universal nor idiosyncratic we often use the term "culture" to describe the collection of such traits, or of such behaviors, or of such values, or of such beliefs. In short, in this usage, each "group" has its specific "culture." To be sure, each individual is a member of many groups, and indeed of groups of very different kinds-groups, classified by gender, by race, by language, by class, by nationality, etc. Therefore, each person participates in many "cultures."

In this usage, culture is a way of summar ing the ways in which groups distinguish themselves from other groups. It represents what is shared within the group, and presumably simultaneously not shared (or not entirely shared) outside it. This is a quite clear and quite useful concept.

On the other hand, culture is also used to signify not the totality of the specificity of one group against another but instead certain characteristics within the group, as opposed to other characteristics within the same group. We use culture to refer to the "higher" arts as opposed to popular or everyday practice. We use culture to signify that which is "super-structural" as opposed to that which is the "base." We use culture to signify that which is "symbolic" as
opposed to that which is "material." These various binary distinctions are not identical, although they all seem to go in the direction of the ancient philosophical distinctions between the "ideal" and the "real," or between the "mind" and the "body."

Wallerstein, I. 2000. "Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System". En: The Essential Wallerstein. Nueva York: The New Press, 264-265.