Conférence | Anne Lafont

This conference will be an opportunity to revisit the definition of fetishism throughout different periods of history, and to examine what these charged objects, these powerful objects, these god-things, these object-gods... to use the anthropological terms that have attempted to define their nature outside the colonial lexicon, call upon theory to understand their social functioning from the West African coast around 1500 to their Marxist appropriation in the mid-19th century.

Anne Lafont

Anne Lafont is an art historian and director of studies at EHESS at the Center for Research on the Arts and Language (Cral - EHESS/CNRS). She is interested in art, images, and material culture of the Black Atlantic, as well as historiographical issues related to the notion of African art. She is the author of L'art et la Race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'oeil des Lumières (Art and Race: The African (All) Against the Eye of the Enlightenment) and her latest work, co-edited with François-Xavier Fauvelle, is entitled L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXI^e siècle (Africa and the World: Renewed Histories from Prehistory to the 21st Century), Paris, La découverte, 2022.

Discover our 2025-26 lecture series

This lecture series is a co-production of the Musées nationaux du XX^e siècle des Alpes-Maritimes and the Direction de la Culture de Université Côte d’Azur, in partnership with the CRHI - Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Idées, and with the support of the association des amis du musée national Marc Chagall.
 

Photo : © DR, 2025