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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 specifically, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent non-materials worth, or powers, to an object.

Historiography[edit]

The time period fetish has advanced from an idiom used to explain a kind of object created within the interplay between European travelers and Native West Africans within the early trendy interval to an analytical term that played a central position in the perception and research of non-Western artwork typically and African art in particular.

William Pietz, who, in 1994, carried out an intensive ethno-historical examine[2] of the fetish, argues that the time period originated within the coast of West Africa throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pietz distinguishes between, on the one hand, actual African objects which may be called fetishes in Europe, together with the indigenous theories of them, and however, "fetish", an idea, and an thought of a type of object, to which the time period above applies.[3]

In response to Pietz, the put up-colonial concept of "fetish" emerged from the encounter between Europeans and Africans in a really specific historical context and in response to African material culture.

He begins his thesis with an introduction to the complicated historical past of the word:

My argument, then, is that the fetish may originate solely along with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that defined itself within and towards the social values and religious ideologies of two radically various kinds of noncapitalist society, as they encountered each other in an ongoing cross-cultural state of affairs. This course of is indicated in the history of the word itself because it developed from the late medieval Portuguese feitiço, to the sixteenth-century pidgin Fetisso on the African coast, to varied northern European versions of the phrase by way of the 1602 text of the Dutchman Pieter de Marees... The fetish, then, not only originated from, but stays specific to, the issue of the social value of fabric objects as revealed in conditions formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems, and a study of the historical past of the thought of the fetish could also be guided by figuring out these 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, by the disavowal of the article."[5]

History[edit]

Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of the fetish to check with the objects utilized in religious practices by West African natives.[4] The contemporary Portuguese feitiço might discuss with extra neutral phrases equivalent to charm, enchantment, or abracadabra, or extra doubtlessly offensive terms reminiscent of juju, witchcraft, witchery, conjuration or bewitchment. The medieval Lollards issued polemics that anticipated fetishism.[6]

The idea was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when Charles de Brosses used it in evaluating West African religion to the magical features of historical Egyptian religion. Later, Auguste Comte employed the idea in his principle of the evolution of religion, whereby he posited fetishism as the earliest (most primitive) stage, followed by polytheism and monotheism. However, ethnography and anthropology would classify some artifacts of polytheistic and monotheistic religions as fetishes.

The eighteenth-century intellectuals who articulated the idea of fetishism encountered this notion in descriptions of "Guinea" contained in such in style voyage collections as Ramusio's Viaggio e Navigazioni (1550), de Bry's India Orientalis (1597), Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus (1625), Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732), Astley's A new General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1746), and Prevost's Histoire generale des voyages (1748).[7]

The idea of fetishism was articulated at the end of the eighteenth century by G. W. F. Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In response to Hegel, Africans were incapable of abstract thought, their ideas and actions were governed by impulse, and due to this fact a fetish object may very well be anything that then was arbitrarily imbued with "imaginary powers".[8]

Practice[edit]

The use of the idea within the examine of religion derives from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, in addition to from Vodun, which in turn derives from those beliefs.

Fetishes were generally utilized in some Native American religions and practices.[9] For example, the bear represented the shaman, the buffalo was the supplier, the mountain lion was the warrior, and the wolf was the pathfinder, the reason for the war.[9]

Japan[edit]

Kato Genchi cited jewelry, swords, mirrors, and scarves as examples of fetishism in Shinto.[10] Kato stated that abandoning cities and going into rural areas, he could discover many traces of animism, fetishism, and phallicism.[11]

Kato Genchi said that the Ten Sacred Treasures had been fetishes and the Imperial Regalia of Japan retained the same traits, and identified the similarities with the Pusaka of the natives of the East Indies and the Tjurunga of the Central Australians.[12] The Kusanagi no Tsurugi was believed to offer supernatural protection (blessings) via the spiritual experience of the divine sword, and the Kusanagi no Tsurugi was deified and enshrined at Atsuta in Owari Province, which is now the Atsuta Shrine.[12]

Akaruhime no Kami, the deity of Hiyurikuso Shrine, was mentioned to be a purple ball.[12] Within the Kami era, the jewel round Izanagi-no-Mikoto's neck was deified and referred to as Mikuratana-kami.[12]

William George Aston remarked that the sword at Atsuta Shrine was originally an offering and later turned a sacred object, for example of Fetishism. Sword was certainly one of mitama-shiro (spirit representative, spirit-token), or more commonly known because the shintai (god-body).[13] He observed that folks tends to think about the mitama (spirit) of a deity first as the seat of his real presence, and second as the deity itself. Many people don't distinguish between mitama (spirit) and shintai (god-body), and a few even confused shintai (god-physique) with the god's real body.[13] For instance, cooking furnace (kamado) itself was worshiped as god.[13] Noting the vagueness between extremely imperfect image of deity and fetish worship, being worsened by the restricted makes use of of pictures (e.g., painting, sculpture), there was a powerful tendency to even neglect that there is a god by ascribing special virtues to sure physical objects.[13]

Roy Andrew Miller observed that the Kokutai no Hongi and the Imperial Rescript on Education were additionally typically worshipped as fetishes, and were respectfully placed and saved in family altars (kamidana).[14]

Minkisi[edit]

Made and used by the BaKongo of western DRC, a nkisi (plural minkisi) is a sculptural object that provides an area habitation for a spiritual personality. Though some minkisi have always been anthropomorphic, they were probably much much less "naturalistic" or "real looking" before the arrival of the Europeans within the nineteenth century; Kongo figures are extra naturalistic within the coastal areas than inland.[3] As Christians tend to think about spirits as objects of worship, idols develop into the objects of idolatry when worship was addressed to false gods. In this way, European Christian colonialists regarded minkisi as idols on the idea of religious bias.

The overseas Christians usually known as nkisi "fetishes" and generally "idols" because they're generally rendered in human type or semi-human kind. Modern anthropology has typically referred to these objects both as "power objects" or as "charms".

In addressing the query of whether or not a nkisi is a fetish, William McGaffey writes that the Kongo ritual system as a complete,

bears a relationship much like that which Marx supposed that "political economic system" 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, together with minkisi, divination devices, and witch-testing ordeals, obliquely expressed real relations of power among the contributors in ritual. "Fetishism" is about relations amongst folks, slightly than the objects that mediate and disguise those relations.[3]

Therefore, McGaffey concludes, to call a nkisi a fetish is to translate "certain Kongo realities into the classes developed in the emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, submit-enlightenment Europe."[3]

See additionally[edit]

Boli
References[edit]

^ T. J. Alldridge, The Sherbro and its Hinterland, (1901)^ Pietz, William (1988). The origin of fetishism: A contribution to the history of theory (Ph.D. diss.). University of California, Santa Cruz. ProQuest 303717649.^ a b c d MacGaffey, Wyatt (Spring 1994). "African objects and the concept of fetish". RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. 25: 123-131. doi:10.1086/RESv25n1ms20166895. S2CID 191127564.^ a b Pietz, William (Spring 1985). "The issue of the Fetish, I". RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting by way of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. 9 (9): 5-17. doi:10.1086/RESv9n1ms20166719. JSTOR 20166719. S2CID 164933628.^ Stallybrass, Peter (2001). Daniel Miller (ed.). Consumption : important ideas in the social sciences (1. publ. ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 0415242673.^ Stanbury, S. (2015). The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. The Middle Ages Series. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. p. 31. ISBN 978-1-5128-0829-2. Retrieved 2023-06-14.^ Pietz, William (Spring 1987). "The problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish". RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. 13 (13): 23-45. doi:10.1086/RESv13n1ms20166762. JSTOR 20166762. S2CID 151350653.^ MacGaffey, Wyatt (1993). Astonishment & Power, The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi. National Museum of African Art.^ a b "Animals: truth and folklore". New Mexico Magazine. August 2008. pp. 56-63.^ Kato Genchi- A Neglected Pioneer in Comparative Religion -Naomi Hylkema-Vos, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 1990 17/4. p384^ 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^ a b c d A 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^ a b c d SHINTO (The way in which OF THE GODS) BY W. G. ASTON, C.M.G, D.Lit., LONGMANS, Green, AND CO.

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