Old things with character: The fetishization of objects in Margate, UK

Abstract

This article explores the work of fetish in practices of consumption at a charity shop in contemporary Margate (UK). Here fetish relates to a specific semiotic ideology (described by Keane in Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, 2007) that acknowledges the personality and history of objects. More specifically, fetish appears as the material property of old objects ‘with character’ to combine different remnants of the past and allow for or resist multiple meanings and stories. To argue that objects are fetishized in Margate is to say that in this English town we encounter a semiotic ideology that challenges the ‘moral narrative of modernity’ that claims individual freedom and agency.