Fetishism

A fetish (also spelled fetich) is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent non-material value, or powers, to an object. Talismans and amulets are related. Fetishes are often used in spiritual or religious context.

The word fetish derives from the French fétiche, which comes from the Portuguese feitiço or fetisso ("spell"), which in turn derives from a Latin root. However, there is some disagreement regarding which Latin root. William Pietz points to facere ("to make"). On the other hand, philosopher Charles De Brosses, who is cited as the source of the term "fetishism," traces the etymology to the various Latin roots fatum, fanum, and fari. Some scholars suggest that "the instability in its linguistic origins is symptomatic of the concept's ambivalence, its lack of distinction between that which is enchanted and that which is fabricated or artificial."

William Pietz, who, in 1994, 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. Pietz distinguishes between, on the one hand, actual African objects that may be called fetishes in Europe, together with the indigenous theories of them, and on the other hand, "fetish", an idea, and an idea of a kind of object, to which the term above applies.

Thus, the term fetish has evolved from an idiom used to describe a type of object created in the interaction between European travelers and Native West Africans in the early modern period to an analytical term that played a central role in the perception and study of non-Western art in general and African art in particular.

Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of the fetish to refer to the objects used in religious practices by West African natives. The contemporary Portuguese feitiço may refer to more neutral terms such as charm, enchantment, or abracadabra, or more potentially offensive terms such as juju, witchcraft, witchery, conjuration or bewitchment. The wide range of objects referred to as fetishes led to a dilution of the term’s meaning. Often, objects were classified as fetishes indiscriminately because, from a European perspective, they did not fit into any other category.

According to Pietz, the post-colonial concept of "fetish" emerged from the encounter between Europeans and Africans in a very specific historical context and in response to African material culture.

He begins his thesis with an introduction to the complex history of the word:

My argument, then, is that the fetish could originate only 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 feitiço, 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 problem of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous 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.