Evidential Fetishism
No, no, not that kind of fetishism. But, hey, I'm not judging.
One of the most powerful images in forensic science* is the idea that physical evidence speaks. The fiber, the hair, the drop of blood, the fragment of paint, each appears to carry within it the truth of some past event. From the earliest days of the field, practitioners and commentators have relied on this metaphor. Paul Kirk famously described the evidence left by a criminal as “mute witnesses,”
All of these and more bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It cannot perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent. Only its interpretation can err.1
The metaphor has rhetorical force because it captures something real about forensic practice. Physical evidence does anchor investigations in material reality. It provides points of reference that do not depend on the fallibility of human memory, points that can be examined, analyzed, and made objective. A footprint, a fiber, or a DNA profile can constrain possible explanations of an event in ways that testimony alone cannot.
But metaphors have a way of hardening into assumptions. When the idea that evidence “speaks” stops being a figure of speech and becomes an implicit takeover of how forensic information works, problems start.
Interpretive
By making physical evidence a mute witness, however, is treating it as though it contains its meaning inherently, independent of interpretation. The interpretive work required to make that evidence meaningful becomes obscured, and the object itself appears to testify directly about the past. The trace does not merely indicate a fact but is mistaken for the fact itself. “Let the evidence speak for itself” is a phrase that refers to the legal doctrine of res ipsa loquitur2, which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.” This is not just a courtroom thing. It is baked into forensic science*. At its core, forensic science* is an interpretive discipline. The evidence examined in laboratories are not facts about crimes; they are signs3 that may indicate relationships among people, places, and events involved in the crime.
What no item of evidence can do, on its own, is narrate an event. It cannot explain when the contact occurred, how the transfer happened, or what role it played in the alleged crime. Those conclusions arise only through interpretation, through contextual reasoning, comparison, and inference.
The difficulty appears when the distinction between evidence as sign and evidence as fact collapses into a singularity. This is evidential fetishism. The result is a subtle but consequential shift in how forensic science* is understood.
Evidential Fetishism
For those of you who have not studied political science45, human sexuality6, or ethnography7, a fetish generally is a thing that takes the place of something else meaningfully8. Marx observed that commodities often appear to possess value intrinsically. The labor that produced them becomes invisible, while the object itself seems to contain value naturally. What is actually a social relationship between workers, producers, and consumers appears instead as a property of the commodity. In a sexual fetish, the shoe takes the place of a sexual relationship with a person; it stands in for that other relationship.
A similar displacement occurs in forensic science*. The interpretive labor of the analyst, the training, classification systems, reasoning strategies, methodological choices, becomes obscured. What remains visible is the object itself: the blood, the fiber, the fingerprint.
In this situation the object appears to speak. The analyst appears merely to report what the object says. This is evidential fetishism: the tendency to treat evidence as autonomous carriers of truth, rather than as signs whose meaning depends on interpretation.9 Importantly, this phenomenon is not primarily the result of incompetence or bad faith. It emerges from institutional structures that encourage evidence to be presented as clear and decisive.
From clue to certainty
Historically, forensic reasoning developed within what the historian Carlo Ginzburg called the evidential paradigm, a method of inference based on small clues. Art historians identified painters by subtle details in brushwork, physicians inferred disease from symptoms, and detectives reconstructed crimes from evidence left at scenes.
This approach never promised certainty, however. Clues required interpretation, and conclusions were provisional. Sherlock Holmes, often seen as the archetype of clue-based reasoning, was fictional precisely because real-world evidence rarely produces such clean deductions. The modern forensic system institutionalized this clue-based logic10 but also introduced pressures (that is, legal pressures) that push it toward certainty. Courts require clear narratives. Trials demand conclusions in a fixed amount of time that can support decisions about guilt or innocence. Within that framework, the tentative reasoning of the evidential paradigm often becomes compressed into categorical statements.
You testify appropriately, citing caution and using restraint11. But testimony is awkward—you can’t really communicate the way you want or need to, you can only answer the questions you are asked and are sometimes forced into “yes or no” answers12. Each attorney has a series of statements they want to get on the record to advance their argument about their case; you are just one more set of statements on that list. You want to make nuanced, limited statements with uncertainties attached; they just want you to say “match” or “no match.” Once you leave, however, the evidence becomes mediated by the legal system13. And in the jury room? Well, yeah, no14. The evidence that once prompted interpretation becomes an apparent fact.
Why the system encourages it
Evidential fetishism persists because it solves a practical problem for the legal system. Trials require decisions. Decisions require clear statements. Probabilistic reasoning, interpretive uncertainty, and methodological nuance can be difficult to convey within the constraints of courtroom testimony In this environment the evidence becomes rhetorically powerful precisely because it appears objective and concrete. The object stands in for the reasoning that produced the conclusion.
Popular culture reinforces the same perception. Crime dramas routinely depict forensic evidence as a direct pathway from trace to truth, skipping the interpretive labor that occupies most of real forensic work. The laboratory scene is followed almost immediately by the revelation of guilt15. The viewer sees the object and then the outcome. The cultural message is consistent: meaning resides in matter.
Epistemic Architecture of Power
Epistemic power is the power to determine what is known to be true. In any system, be it a government or a laboratory, power naturally clusters at the top. Unless there are strict rules to try to keep experts independent, the people with the most political or legal power will eventually capture them. If that happens, the experts stop being independent truth-seekers and instead become a tool used to justify the goals of those in charge. This creates an “information elite” where the only “facts” allowed into the system are those that serve the people running it.
Thinking about forensic science*, we see how “independent science” can become an arm of the prosecution. We trust forensic scientists* to speak for the physical evidence. However, because most laboratories are funded and housed directly within police departments, there is the danger that scientists may start seeing themselves as members of the “prosecution team” and lose some objectivity, or at least have their perceptions tinged. They define what evidence is relevant (or are told what is relevant) based on what helps the police’s theory of the case, effectively limiting the interpretive horizon of the jury.
Police and prosecutors form a tight reality-structure, and forensic scientists are often drawn into this construct, willing or no. They work together daily to secure convictions. This alliance can lead to epistemic lock-in, where scientific doubts about a specific method (like bite-mark analysis or hair microscopy) are suppressed because admitting the science* is flawed would undermine thousands of shared legal victories.
Forensic scientists* are often subordinates within a paramilitary police hierarchy. To maintain their standing, secure funding, or gain favor with their superiors, they may subconsciously/reflexively/actively adopt the frames of the investigators. They provide the results the detectives are looking for to avoid conflict16 or to seek favor17, effectively eliminating the internal challenge that is supposed to be the hallmark of the scientific method.
In this context, the legal system becomes an epistemic oligarchy. The truth of a crime isn’t discovered through neutral inquiry; it is manufactured or edited by a closed loop of police and state-funded scientists who control the information that the judge and jury are allowed to see.
Take a Breath
Now, this isn’t some Big Brother, tin-foil hat, deep-state conspiracy theory I’m spinning, here. I’m not saying all cops are bad or all prosecutors are evil or all forensic scientists* are spineless…I’m not. But these things do happen, daily, in small ways, some very slight, almost imperceptible ways. Things we may not even consider, like knowing the race of a person of interest may alter how we treat a case in ways we’re not aware of. Referring to someone as a “suspect,” instead of “a person of interest,” immediately changes their relationship in the case. Details like this can set confirmation biases in motion. All I’m saying is context can taint perception, judgment, and behavior. And the legal system owns the context, not us.
Defetishizing forensic evidence
Recognizing evidential fetishism does not mean abandoning forensic science* or distrusting physical evidence. Evidence remains one of the most powerful sources of information about past events. What the concept does highlight is the importance of restoring interpretation to the foreground. Forensic conclusions are not direct transmissions from objects. They are the result of structured reasoning: collecting evidence, comparing it with reference materials, evaluating alternative explanations, and situating them within investigative context.
When that reasoning is made visible, when analysts explain not only what they concluded but how and why they reached that conclusion, the apparent autonomy of the object disappears. The evidence becomes what it always was: an object whose mundane and forensic meanings depend on human interpretation. In that sense, confronting evidential fetishism strengthens forensic science* rather than undermines it. The credibility of the field does not rest on the illusion that objects speak for themselves; rather, it rests on the transparency and rigor of the reasoning used to interpret them. Spare us that much agency, at least.
P. L. Kirk, Crime Investigation: Physical Evidence and the Police Laboratory (New York, NY: John Wiley, 1953).
Res ipsa loquitur is a tort law doctrine allowing plaintiffs to use circumstantial evidence to establish a rebuttable presumption of negligence when direct proof is lacking. It applies if the incident typically implies negligence, is caused by an instrumentality under the defendant’s exclusive control, and the plaintiff did not contribute to the harm. If you’re into torts (I’m not, but this one is cray-cray), the MOAT is Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) and involves a snail in a bottle of ginger beer (no, really) and is the origin point for many modern cases about negligence worldwide. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane said, “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
I really, really, really don’t want to get into semiotics (5-year-old explanation: the study of things that stand in for something else) here. It’s important and is a big chunk of what our epistemology actually is, but we’d have to get all Saussure and Peirce and maybe deonotation (blood is a body fluid) and connotation (blood means somebody was hurt) and, frankly, it’s too late on a Thursday to do that to you. See? I’ve already gone too far. Sorry.
Commodity fetishism, a concept developed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, describes how social relations in capitalist economies are obscured, making products seem to possess inherent magical value rather than representing human labor (“My new iPhone!”). It causes people to focus on exchange values (prices, “It was on sale!) and brand names, masking the labor and social relationships behind production.
Why doesn’t political science get an *? Why is it a “science”? Well, political science is considered a science because it uses systematic, empirical methods, like quantitative data analysis, polling, and comparative case studies, to analyze political behavior, institutions, and power dynamics. It aims to identify patterns, test hypotheses, and build theories about governance, rather than relying on purely speculative analysis. I guess so, this time, anyway. But watch yourself.
A sexual fetish is most commonly defined as a sexual interest or fixation on a specific non-living object (like a shoe or something made of vinyl) or a non-genital body part (like a foot or hair). In psychology and medicine, a true fetish is often considered a requirement for a person to achieve sexual arousal or gratification.
Fetishism in ethnography (and religion) refers to the belief that natural or artificial objects (fetishes) possess inherent supernatural powers, spirits, or divine authority, making them worthy of veneration, protection, or worship. Common in early anthropological studies of Sub-Saharan African traditions, fetishes serve as intermediaries between the physical and spiritual worlds, often used to secure health, prosperity, or safety.
Or anthropology, because we had to read about all three versions of fetish, which makes the major sound far more tantalizing than it actually is.
You could argue that the entire evidence chain does this as well, from how the evidence was collected to what methods and instrumentation was available for analysis to the training of the analyst.
Edmund Locard famously said, “I love detective stories. I would like to see Sherlock Holmes’ methods of reasoning adopted by all professional police.”
If you testify as an expert, always request a transcript. You’ll be amazed at the characterization of your testimony during the closing arguments. “When that FBI expert found the defendant’s hairs and fibers on the decedant’s clothing…” Wait, what? No! That’s not what I…but I’m miles and months away by then. I’ve been deposed about statements that attorneys have made about my testimony in an attempt to purjure me. “Didn’t you testify…?”
Actually, it starts before this: If the evidence is excluded for some reason, so is any testimony about it, your lovely, nuanced interpretation be damned. Legal pressures and all, darling, so sorry.
Deadpool: LOOK! I’m a teenage girl, I’d rather be anywhere than here! I’m all about long sullen silences, followed by mean comments, followed by more silence! So what’s it gonna be: long sullen silence or mean comment? Go on, take your pick.
Negasonic Teenage Warhead: ...You got me in a box here.
Deadpool: AH-HAA!
Jurors generally perceive forensic science* as highly reliable, often viewing it as infallible due to a “science halo effect,” which can lead to overestimating its accuracy. They often base credibility on the expert’s experience, demeanor, and use of visual aids rather than the underlying scientific validation, and they are heavily influenced by the “CSI effect,” expecting forensic evidence in every case.
When, in reality, we, as forensic scientists*, have nothing at all to do with guilt or innocence; honestly, neither do the attorneys. That’s for the jury or judge to decide.
If you never make an association, you never have to testify.
See Fred Zain, Annie Dookhan, Joyce Gilchrist, and on and on and on.