Afetish is an object believed to havesupernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that haspower over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent non-material value, or powers, to an object.Talismans andamulets are related. Fetishes are often used in spiritual or religious context.
The wordfetish derives from theFrenchfétiche, which comes from thePortuguesefeitiço ("spell"), which in turn derives from theLatinfacticius ("artificial") andfacere ("to make").[1] The termfetish 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.
William Pietz, who, in 1994, conducted an extensive ethno-historical study[2] of the fetish, argues that the term originated in the coast ofWest 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 theindigenous 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.[3]
According to Pietz, thepost-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 Portuguesefeitiço, to the sixteenth-century pidginFetisso 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.[4]
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."[5]
Initially, thePortuguese developed the concept of the fetish to refer to the objects used in religious practices by West African natives.[4] The contemporary Portuguesefeitiço may refer to more neutral terms such ascharm,enchantment, orabracadabra, or more potentially offensive terms such asjuju,witchcraft,witchery,conjuration orbewitchment. The medievalLollards issued polemics that anticipated fetishism.[6]
The eighteenth-century intellectuals who articulated the theory of fetishism encountered this notion in descriptions of "Guinea" contained in such popular voyage collections as Ramusio'sViaggio e Navigazioni (1550), de Bry'sIndia Orientalis (1597), Purchas'sHakluytus Posthumus (1625),Churchill'sCollection of Voyages and Travels (1732),Astley'sA New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1746), and Prevost'sHistoire generale des voyages (1748).[7]
The theory of fetishism was articulated at the end of the eighteenth century byG. W. F. Hegel inLectures on the Philosophy of History. According to Hegel, Africans were incapable of abstract thought, their ideas and actions were governed by impulse, and therefore a fetish object could be anything that then was arbitrarily imbued with "imaginary powers".[8]
The use of the concept in the study of religion derives from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, as well as fromVodun, which in turn derives from those beliefs.
Katō Genchi [ja] (1873–1965), aShinto priest and scholar of comparative religion, applied the term "fetish" to the historical study of traditional Japanese religion. He cited jewelry,swords,mirrors, andscarves as examples of fetishism in Shinto.[10] In rural areas of Japan, he said he could find many traces ofanimism,totemism, fetishism, andphallicism.[11] He also maintained that theTen Sacred Treasures [ja] were fetishes and theImperial Regalia of Japan retained the same traits, and pointed out the similarities with thePusaka heirlooms of the natives of the East Indies and the sacredTjurunga of the Central Australians.[12] He noted that the divine swordKusanagi no Tsurugi, which was believed to provide supernatural protection ('blessings'), was deified and enshrined (at what is now theAtsuta Shrine).[12]Akaruhime no Kami, the female deity ofHiyurikuso Shrine [ja], was said to have originally been a red ball before transforming into a beautiful woman.[12] The jewel aroundIzanagi-no-Mikoto's neck was deified and calledMikuratana-no-kami.[12]
The Anglo-Irish diplomat and scholarWilliam George Aston (1841–1911) also maintained thatKusanagi no Tsurugi could be seen as an example of fetishism. Originally an offering, the enshrined sword became amitamashiro (lit. 'spirit representative', 'spirit-token'), more commonly known as theshintai (lit. 'god-body'; a sacred object containing thekami or 'spirit').[13] Aston observed that people tended to think of themitama ('spirit') of a deity first as the seat of his or her real presence, and secondly as the deity itself. In practice, the distinction betweenmitama andshintai was fluid, andshintai even came to be identified as the god's body.[13] For example, the cooking furnace (kamado) itself was worshiped as a deity.[13] Given the vagueness of such distinctions – further accentuated by the restricted usage of images (e.g., in painting or sculpture) – there was a tendency to ascribe special virtues to certain physical objects in place of the deity.[13]
In thepre-colonial Philippine context,Anito fetishes were central to the animistic beliefs of the early Filipinos. These objects, often human-made, served as physical representations of spiritual entities or ancestral spirits. Their role in rituals, worship, and daily life illustrates the rich spiritual tradition of the early Austronesian peoples who inhabited the Philippine archipelago. Anito fetishes refer to objects imbued with spiritual significance, often crafted to house or represent spirits collectively known asAnito. These were usuallyAncestor Spirits also called Anito The souls of deceased relatives who provided guidance, protection, or blessings to their descendants. Anito fetishes were typically carved from wood, stone, or bone, and they served as both a focus of worship and a conduit for spiritual energy. Anito fetishes were placed in shrines or sacred areas where offerings such as food, drinks, or animal sacrifices were made. These offerings were meant to appease or gain favours from the ancestor spirits and spirits of the dead and deities and celestial beings calledDiwata. The term Anito is deeply rooted in Austronesian linguistic heritage, with similar terms found across related culture Proto-Malayo-Polynesian: qanitu (spirit of the dead) Proto-Austronesian: qaNiCu (ancestor spirit) Indonesian and Malaysian: Hantu or Antu (spirit or ghost) Polynesian: Atua or Aitu (ancestral ghost or spirit)[16][17][18][19] Anito—widely understood today byFilipinos in thePhilippines in contemporary as referring to ancestor spirits or spirits of the dead, evil spirits and the wooden idols and fetish that represent them.[20][21][22][23]Anito InPhilippine mythology, refers toancestor spirits,spirits of the dead,evil spirits and the wooden idols that represent or house them. In contrast, within the context offolk religion[24][25][26]
Made and used by theBaKongo of westernDRC, ankisi (pluralminkisi) is a sculptural object that provides a local habitation for a spiritual personality. Though someminkisi have always been anthropomorphic, they were probably much less "naturalistic" or "realistic" before the arrival of the Europeans in the nineteenth century; Kongo figures are more naturalistic in the coastal areas than inland.[3] As Christians tend to think of spirits as objects of worship, idols become the objects of idolatry when worship was addressed to false gods. In this way, European Christian colonialists regardedminkisi as idols on the basis of religious bias.
The foreign Christians often callednkisi "fetishes" and sometimes "idols" because they are sometimes rendered in human form or semi-human form. Modern anthropology has generally referred to these objects either as "power objects" or as "charms".
In addressing the question of whether ankisi is a fetish, William McGaffey writes that the Kongo ritual system as a whole,
bears a relationship similar to that which Marx supposed that "political economy" bore to capitalism as its "religion", but not for the reasons advanced by Bosman, the Enlightenment thinkers, and Hegel. The irrationally "animate" character of the ritual system's symbolic apparatus, includingminkisi, divination devices, and witch-testing ordeals, obliquely expressed real relations of power among the participants in ritual. "Fetishism" is about relations among people, rather than the objects that mediate and disguise those relations.[3]
Therefore, McGaffey concludes, to call ankisi a fetish is to translate "certain Kongo realities into the categories developed in the emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, post-enlightenment Europe."[3]
^In his discussion of theJapanese identity myth surrounding the national language (Nihongo), Miller describedkotodama (the 'spirit' of the language) as "the single most important fetish term in the entire modern myth of Nihongo."[15]
^Stallybrass, Peter (2001). Daniel Miller (ed.).Consumption : critical concepts in the social sciences (1. publ. ed.). London: Routledge.ISBN0415242673.
^Dr. Genchi Kato's monumental work on Shinto, Daniel C. Holtom. 明治聖徳記念学会第47巻、昭和12年1937/04/ p7-14
^abcdA Study of Shinto: The Religion of the Japanese Nation, By Genchi Katu, Copyright Year 2011, ISBN 9780415845762, Published February 27, 2013 by Routledge, Chapter III Fetishism and Phallicism
^abcdSHINTO (THE WAY OF THE GODS) BY W. G. ASTON, C.M.G, D.Lit., LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY, 1905, p.65-75, p.73, p.159
^KOKUTAI - POLITICAL SHINTÔ FROM EARLY-MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY JAPAN, Klaus Antoni, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen: Tobias-lib Tübingen 2016, p259
^Apostol, Virgil Mayor (2012).Way of the Ancient Healer: Sacred Teachings from the Philippine Ancestral Traditions. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.ISBN978-1-58394-597-1.
^Baldick, Julian (2013).Ancient religions of the Austronesian world: from Australasia to Taiwan. International library of ethnicity, identity and culture. London New York: I.B. Tauris.ISBN978-0-85773-357-3.
