Perhaps nothing would appear so to exemplify the inappropriateness of coupling post-structuralism with religious studies as the conjoining of the three texts under review. Their attitudes toward the dual rubrics differ, as do their genres, periodizations, approaches and objects of study. Halbertal and Margalit combine foundationalist philosophy with history of ideas to examine the different conceptualizations of idolatry in principally Jewish but also Christian and Enlightenment discourses. They demonstrate that the conventional view of idolatry, which opposes monotheism to polytheism and spirituality to materiality, is but one understanding of the notion. Employing the rabbinic term for idolatry, avodah zarah ('strange worship'), as a heuristic algorithm, they delineate four different modes by which the nonidolatrous define their 'enemy': first, bad belief, exemplified by the biblical portrayal of the community's betraying its own god for an alien one; second, wrong belief, exemplified by Maimonides' notion of the imagination mistaking a false god for the true one; third, bad worship, exemplified by Nachmanidean and Kabbalistic concerns about worshipping only an aspect or an intermediary of God; and fourth, wrong worship, exemplified by Halevi's emphasis upon the revealed way to worship God.
Like Halbertal and Margalit's volume, the Apter and Pietz collection addresses a keyword by which a particular society has sought self-identity through its characterizations of its other. But unlike ldolatry's conceptual analysis, Fetishism as a Cultural Practice brings together a variety of disciplines -psychoanalysis, political economy, literature, film, art, anthropology, but not religious studies or a variety of 'post' discourses (post-colonial, -foundationalist, -Freudian, -Marxist, -modern, -structuralist) -to explore the flights of the term 'fetishism' as it has broken free from its moorings in the history of religions. Distributed among three sections, 'Engendering Fetishism', 'Magic Capital' and 'Scopic Fixations', the essays interrogate texts by Freud and Marx, among others, as well as visual productions, including those of the Countess de Castiglione, Robert Mapplethorpe and Mary Kelly. The contributors analyse how the sixteenth-century European gloss on their commercial encounter with African societies as one mediated by the native belief in a supernatural character to material objects and the later Enlightenment determination of this belief as the originary moment of religion came to be ascribed to the inhabitants of modern developed societies. These essays examine the overvaluation of objects like the commodity, the body part and the nation state that arises from the simultaneous disavowal and affirmation of difference -