The word fetish was born in trade talk between Portuguese sailors and West Africans
Long before it meant an obsession, a fetish was a label Portuguese traders pinned on the sacred objects they saw along the West African coast in the 1500s. European thinkers later turned it into a theory of so-called primitive religion, and modern scholars read that theory mostly as a story about colonial prejudice.
The term runs from French fétiche back to Portuguese feitiço, a spell or charm, and ultimately to Latin, though scholars disagree about which root. The historian William Pietz, who published a long study of the idea in 1994, argues that fetisso took shape as a pidgin word on the West African coast in the 16th and 17th centuries, then travelled into northern European languages through a 1602 account by the Dutch writer Pieter de Marees. Because Europeans applied it to almost any object that fitted none of their own categories, the word quickly lost precision.
Around 1760 Charles de Brosses popularised fetishism in Europe by comparing West African religion with the magic of ancient Egypt. Auguste Comte then placed it at the bottom of a ladder of religious development, below polytheism and monotheism, and Hegel claimed Africans lacked abstract thought and endowed arbitrary objects with imaginary powers. Current scholarship treats this lineage as a way for Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers to cast their own thinking as rational against supposed superstition.
The label never stayed in Africa. The Shinto priest and scholar Katō Genchi described jewels, swords, mirrors and scarves in Japanese worship as fetishes, pointing to the sacred sword Kusanagi, which was enshrined and worshipped as a deity, and William George Aston saw the same pattern in objects that came to be treated as a god's very body. The linguist Roy Andrew Miller noted that copies of the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 were kept on household altars and venerated in a similar way.
Among the BaKongo of the western Congo, carved figures called minkisi house spiritual personalities. Christian missionaries called them fetishes or idols; anthropologists now tend to say power objects or charms. The scholar William McGaffey argues that calling a nkisi a fetish simply forces Kongo realities into the categories of 19th-century European social science.
Source: Fetishism
