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Afetish (derived from the French fétiche; which comes from the Portuguese feitiço; and this in turn from Latin facticius, "artificial" and facere, "to make") is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.
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William Pietz, who conducted an extensive ethno-historical study of the fetish, argues that the term originated in the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Therefore, the post-colonial concept of "fetish" emerged out of the encounter between Europeans and Africans: in a very specific historical context (Christian feudal, merchant capitalist) and in response to African material culture.
He begins his polemic with an introduction to the complex history of the word:
"The fetish [originated] in conjunction with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies of two radically different types of noncapitalist society, as they encountered each other in an ongoing cross-cultural situation. This process is indicated in the history of the word itself as it developed from the late medieval Portuguese feitico, to the sixteenth-century pidgin Fetisso on the African coast, to various northern European versions of the word via the 1602 text of the Dutchman Pieter de Marees... The fetish, then, not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogenous social systems, and a study of the history of the idea of the fetish may be guided by identifying those themes that persist throughout the various discourses and disciplines that have appropriated the term."[1]
Stallybrass concludes that "Pietz shows that the fetish as a concept was elaborated to demonize the supposedly arbitrary attachment of West Africans to material objects. The European subject was constituted in opposition to a demonized fetishism, through the disavowal of the object."[2]
Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of fetishism to refer to the objects used in religious cults by West African natives.{The Open University} Contemporary Portuguese feitiço translates as more neutral charm, enchantment, juju or abracadabra, or more potentially offensive witchcraft, witchery, conjuration or bewitchment.
The concept was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when Charles de Brosses used it in comparing West African religion to the magical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Later, Auguste Comte employed the concept in his theory of the evolutionofreligion, wherein he posited fetishism as the earliest (most primitive) stage, followed by polytheism and monotheism.
That said, ethnography and anthropology would nonetheless classify some artifacts of monotheistic religions as fetishes. For example, the Holy Cross and the consecrated host or tokens of communion found in some forms of Christianity (a monotheistic religion), are here regarded as examples of fetishism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Tylor and McLennan, historians of religion, held that the concept of fetishism fostered a shift of attention away from the relationship between people and God, to focus instead on a relationship between people and material objects, and that this, in turn, allowed for the establishment of false models of causality for natural events. This they saw as a central problem historically and sociologically.
In 1927, Sigmund Freud published his essay on "Fetishism," in which he writes that the meaning and purpose of the fetish turns out, through analysis, to always be the same: "the fetish is a substitute for the penis...for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost." In refusing to see his mother's lack of penis, the boy disavows (German: Verleugnung, not repression: Verdrängung) what he sees, resulting in both a belief and a non-belief in the woman's phallus. This compromise (produced by the conflict between perception and the counter-wish) results in a substitute (the fetish). "It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it."
Theoretically, fetishism is present in all religions,[citation needed] but the use of the concept in the study of religion derives from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, as well as from Voodoo, which in turn derives from those beliefs.
Blood is often included[according to whom?] as a particularly powerful fetish or ingredient in fetishes. In addition to blood, other objects and substances, such as bones, fur, claws, feathers, gemstones and crystals, water from certain places, certain types of plants and wood are common fetishes in the traditions of cultures worldwide.[citation needed]
Fetishes were commonly used in Native American religion and practices.[3] The bear represented the shaman, the buffalo was the provider, the mountain lion was the warrior, and the wolf was the pathfinder[disambiguation needed].[3]
The 19th century saw the introduction of two theories of fetishism outside what was typically considered religion. The first was Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, in which objects are imagined to dictate the social activities that produce them. The second was Alfred Binet's term sexual fetishism, the sexual attachment to an object in place of a person. Scholars have continued to develop these theories ever since, and they have influenced anthropologists' understanding of fetishism in general.
