Pervasive Fetishism
We all have the propensity to materialize our elusive sense of belonging to others. We are pervasive social fetishists, creating placeholders of our social alliances by making them more tangible for self and for others. In all social groups, there is indeed a pervasive propensity to objectify alliances, transforming them into something more fathomable and collectively shared, something that has visibility like a flag, a totem, a genealogical tree, a uniform, or etiquette or mannerisms like gang idiosyncratic tags or gestures. It is the transformative process of alliances into something physical that everybody can refer to in an animist and fetishist way. “Thinging” and associated fetishisms are major reinforcing mechanisms of social clustering, stereotyping, and other social categorizing processes. At a social and, ultimately, ethical level, it also pertains to how we tend to construe others as groups. It captures the way we perceive elusive essence as tangible characteristics, justifying the clustering of individuals into groups, a process that reinforces and is the source of stereotypes and shortcut moral reasoning.