Fetishism

A fetish (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 human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.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.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, including minkisi, 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. A fetish (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 human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.