If a fetish is a sacred object, creature, phenomenon, then fetishism is the worship of a fetish. It’s understandable, but too simplified, and therefore primitive. The average person of the early 21st century, inexperienced in this matter, who has a moderately developed cultural and historical outlook, imagines fetishism as an absolutely modern phenomenon. And for him it is expressed, at best, in the worship of idols (show stars, politicians) and material goods (product brands, luxury goods). But most likely, when asked what fetishism is, you will hear about sexual deviations, when the underwear, shoes and other things of a loved one become the object of desire, adoration, and worship.
Fetishism as a rite of service
In fact, man began to worship objects, elements, and creatures from his very appearance on earth. But despite such a long history, representatives of science have not come to a common understanding of what fetishism is. The Austrian W. Schmidt, a recognized ethnographer and theologian, is sure that early beliefs were characterized not by polytheism, as is commonly believed, but by monotheism. That is, there was one God and one religion. Fetishism was not a religion, but a magical means of its expression, along with totemism and animism. Logically, it turns out that religion appeared first, and only then fetishism - as a necessary rite of service. Most scientists do not agree with this and oppose Schmidt’s theory with a reasonable counterargument: the assumption of original monotheism automatically becomes a denial of the evolution of religions. But their history testifies precisely in favor of evolution from polytheism (polytheism) to monotheism (monotheism).
Fetishists, symptoms of strange attractions
Fetishism becomes a problem if a person’s normal sexual life is impossible without it.
People turn to a sexologist or psychotherapist if:
- Sexual arousal and sex itself are possible only if there is a fetish nearby.
- Without thinking about it, a person cannot get aroused or have an orgasm.
- Fetishism replaces real relationships.
To treat pathological desires, various psychotherapeutic practices, psychoanalysis or the aversive method are used.
In the beginning there was fetishism. Or totemism?
The Frenchman de Brosse explains differently what fetishism is. As a historian of religion who has studied this issue for a long time, Bros considers fetishism not a magical means of expressing religion, but the oldest form of religion itself. Other scientists (Fraser, Durkheim) do not consider fetishism to be the most ancient form of belief. Totemism, in their opinion, fits this definition better. There are also those who propose animism for this role. This is where we will end with scientific excursions, especially since science does not have a single point of view. Until scientists have worked it out, we will draw conclusions based on the ideas that have developed in society today about fetishes and totems.
Popular fetishes
- Masquis, figurines, and tom-toms were intended to provide a connection between the spiritual and material worlds. Today they are used by many peoples during ceremonies and rituals.
- Drums are treated with special awe and respect. They are considered spiritual beings. In order for the drum's strength to increase, new strength is poured into it by making offerings. Each sacred drum has a personal performer, who is allowed to touch it only after special dedication.
Totems live in Africa
All nations have totems. This is some kind of sacred animal, bird, tree, stone, which are considered the patrons of the clan and even its ancestors. But unlike fetishes, totems retained their meaning only in isolated tribes of Africa, Australia, and the North. Although in large African cities the belief in animal ancestors still remains. In their squares, tourists often watch ritual dances performed by aborigines wearing animal masks. As for European culture, totem animals live only in myths and in the cultural, but not the religious consciousness of people. For Italians, for example, the myth about the founders of Rome remains a myth - no one seriously considers themselves a descendant of a she-wolf.
Jay Geller. FETISHISM
The Oxford English Dictionary (1893-1897) defines fetishism as “a superstition whose characteristic feature” is “the veneration of inanimate objects by savages on the ground that they have magical powers or are inhabited by spirits.” A fetish differs from an idol “in that it is revered in itself, and not as an image, symbol or temporary refuge of a deity.” The only problem with this definition is that neither fetishism nor fetishes have ever existed in this form anywhere. Objects imbued (according to belief) with force or power certainly exist; their type varies depending on the specific material embodiment and its cultural context. And such objects, of course, are used based on the intention to achieve some specific goals. Let us turn to the list that Mezquitela Lima compiled: “the tools of the fortuneteller (i.e., the figurines in his basket, which are carved from any one of many materials); figurines sculpted from clay or termite secretions; small dried trees or parts thereof, for example: roots, twigs, leaves, branches or fruits; roughly processed tree trunks; small dolls wrapped in a net; miniature copies of musical instruments, agricultural or hunting equipment; many figurines carved from wood, bone or ivory, in the shape of a person, an animal or some abstract form; horns, nails or claws, pieces of human or animal skin; shells of small turtles; sacred stones and minerals; crucifixes, medallions and other images used in Christian worship; love potions and other magical substances and potions” (Lima, 1987, p. 315). All these objects in their practical application, without a doubt, can form an integral system of religious practices and beliefs in any culture. Analyzing Congolese religious practices that developed around the exemplary (as was commonly believed) fetishes - minkisi, Wyatt McGuffey demonstrated the inadequacy of any concept of fetish, which involves the personification of material religious objects. Complementing Marcel Mauss's denial of the ethnographic significance of fetishism (“fetishism” is “nothing more than an abyss of misunderstanding between two civilizations - African and European” (Mauss, 1905-1906, p. 309)), McGuffey contrasts ethnographic data with the typical characteristics of fetish as formulated by William Peetz. His analysis of the discourse on fetishism is the standard that defines the nature of contemporary debate on this issue. Pitz names four main properties of a fetish:
- Indispensable materiality; the fetish does not represent or personify an immaterial spirit located somewhere else;
- it connects previously heterogeneous elements (for example, object and space) into a new original entity,
- which embodies the problem of value relativity and, existing separately from the human body,
- sometimes functions as if it has power over him (MacGaffey 1994a; cf. Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1993).
In his research, McGuffey reveals fundamental discrepancies between minkisi and fetish as Peetz defines it.
Thus, this article will aim to establish how the term “fetishism” came to designate a discursive space in which many incompletely understood attempts were made to mediate difference through material objects (or living people). Prolonged contact with the Other gives rise to both epistemic and evaluative crises. This situation is characterized by the insufficiency of available general concepts and the disproportion of assigned assessments and is accompanied by recognition and at the same time non-recognition of the differences found. Being in a vulnerable position, people find an ever-postponed solution to this contradiction by transferring perceived differences to some object that, in its material opacity, embodies and at the same time hides the original uncertainty. Ambivalent emotions will also be directed towards an object to which a certain significance is assigned. The Other, localized and materialized in this way, can be designated and accepted; meanwhile, individual or group identity returns to normal. The seemingly incommensurable difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, colonizers and colonized, capitalists and workers, men and women was articulated in logically opposite concepts, including: religion and non-religion, science and superstition (non-science), rationality and irrationality, spirit and matter, necessity and chance, subject and object, order and chaos, culture and nature, man and animal, public and private. Since the emergence of “fetishism” in the European-African contact zone, no other term in the history of religious studies has become part of so many secular discourses. In this article we will trace how fetishism moved from the sphere of trade relations to rationalist anthropology, then to philosophy, then to positivist sociology, from there to political economy, then to sexology, then to psychoanalysis, then to aesthetics and, finally, to postcolonial research. Along the way, “fetishism” became a kind of camera obscura in which the inverted picture of European-American civilization was superimposed on stable modes of existence of the Other, including the non-European and the non-American, the woman, the Jew and the madman.
The invention of fetishism. When Charles de Brosse coined the term “fetishism” (fetichisme) in his book “On the Cult of the Fetish Gods” (Du culte des dieux fetiches) in 1760, the beliefs and practices designated by this term had long been known; for just as long, a group of Portuguese words relating to witchcraft (feiticaria), from which the term originates, has been widely used. The philological genealogy of “fetishism” indeed in many ways anticipates the series of opposites that this term will subsequently mediate. The roots of the Portuguese feiticaria go back to the Latin facticius (made by hand), which sometimes acquired negative connotations meaning “artificial” and even “fake” (divorced from the original). In medieval Christian discourse, such objects included hand-made amulets, images, and potions used in witchcraft (as opposed to talismans, potions, relics, and other sacramental objects that were legitimate from the point of view of the church). Medieval Portuguese referred to all this with the word feiticos. Feiticos were commonly distinguished from idols in the same way as witchcraft is from idolatry, or more generally as magic from those religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam and paganism or idolatry) which are found in more or less organized communities. An additional difference was that feiticos interacted with the material body rather than with the soul. In contrast to such magical objects, the object of idolatry was an immaterial demon or false god, acting specifically on the soul of the worshiper. The Portuguese developed a trading zone along the western coast of Africa along the Senegal-Angola line on the modern map, so the word feitico came to be used much more often than the word idolo to describe the “religious” practices of the peoples inhabiting the designated trading zone. As the trade developed, participants on both sides began to use the pidginized word fetisso to refer to the sacred objects involved in the trade of goods, political symbols, medicines, and women's jewelry common among the peoples inhabiting this area of cross-cultural exchange. The travel accounts of European traders, Dutch and English Protestants and Portuguese and French Catholics often mention objects that African peoples allegedly endowed with magical powers or believed that spirits lived in them. The attribution of religious significance to so many objects was correlated with the apparent failure of Africans to recognize the adequate value of the goods involved in trade with Europeans, as well as with the inability to make proper distinctions between public and private, male and female, animal and human. It is ironic that the same stories exemplified the moral depravity of fetishists and depicted an anarchic social order in which only the principle of profit rules - here there was a projection of the factors and values that shaped European society onto other peoples. Moreover, since Africans were written about as if they arbitrarily associated fetissos with the implementation or achievement of something desired, in the end Europeans became convinced that Africans supposedly had insufficiently developed mental abilities.
By the early 18th century, the word fetisso had been christened fetiche (fetish) as it moved from the realm of travel literature into the realm of the developing rationalist critique of clericalism and superstition. The scene has changed: from the zone of trade contacts, where Europe contrasted itself with the non-European Other, the action moves into an emerging space where the secular begins to contrast itself with the religious Other. Anecdotes from travel accounts, especially from Willem Bosman's New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1704) and the likening of fetish worship to the cult practice of Roman Catholicism, became illustrations of irrationalism and the immoral consequences of endowing various objects with supernatural and teleological qualities instead of agreeing with the mechanical and physical causation.
Almost at the very beginning of the second half of the 18th century, in Charles de Brosse’s book “On the Cult of the Fetish Gods,” a new term was introduced to describe and generalize the veneration of fetishes—“fetishism.” Fetishism became the zero point in the taxonomy of the other for the European enlightenment - religion. No longer a sui generis phenomenon, African fetish veneration became the main surviving species of a variety of practices regarding cult objects scattered throughout the world: from the biblical Urim and Thummim to ancient Egyptian obelisks and on to the manitou of the North American Indians. Fetishism was separated from polytheistic idolatry and turned into a sharp wedge with which the theological monopoly on determining the origins of religion was broken. Theistic beliefs and divine-human relations were stripped of their privileges; in the reasoning of Bernard Fontenelle and David Hume, the source of religion was now located in the false theory of knowledge, children's intellect, imagination, fear and desire. Where there should have been natural causality, gods turned out to be. Thanks to de Brosse, there was an awareness that polytheism was preceded by another stage in the development of man and religion. This development did not begin with a belief in invisible beings or due to an amorphous “nature”; The forces behind the satisfaction of desires or the awareness of fears lie in “earthly and material objects” endowed with supernatural qualities—fetishes (Brosses, 1988, p. 11).
Although after the publication of de Brosse's book the primitiveness and primal nature of fetishism was recognized by everyone, its material and magical aspects, contrasted with the spiritual and social aspects of polytheism and the three monotheistic religions, raised the question: does fetishism really represent the original form of religion or is it a stage that precedes it? Complicating theological and philosophical questions about the relationship between matter and spirit was a requirement of colonialism (and later imperialism). Aboriginal religion was the main means of maintaining order in the colonies. Thus, as David Chidester argues, “fetish worship” could be defined as a religion, not as a result of “long contact, increasing familiarity, the achievement of linguistic understanding, intercultural dialogue or participant observation”, but as a result of European political and economic achievements. control over specific regions (Chidester, 1996, pp. 16-17). The Europeans did not believe that they were destroying legitimate sovereign social institutions; on the contrary, their power, as they believed, was rising above chaos, where only arbitrariness, irrationality and passions ruled. At a more fundamental level, the difference between order and chaos is expressed in the difference between the human, who is defined as a “social animal,” and the non-human, who is depicted as a demonic or savage creature. This distinction was confirmed in the separation of religion and fetishism, for, as Ludwig Feyrbach argued at the beginning of The Essence of Christianity, drawing on René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (and before them, John Calvin): “Religion is rooted in the essential difference between man and animal.” (Feuerbach, 1989, p. 1).
Contact, conquest and crisis: fetishism and the human sciences. The consequence of the definition and assimilation of fetishism as a concept within the framework of French philosophy was its spread in pan-European philosophical discourse. Immanuel Kant in “Religion within the Limits of Reason Only” (1793) likens clericalism to fetishism to mark the difference between true moral religion and false religion, between autonomy and heteronomy. This move allows Kant to discredit his opponents by portraying them as “irrational” without attributing evil will to them or demonizing them. “A person who nevertheless uses actions, which in themselves do not contain anything pleasing to God (moral), as a means to acquire direct divine favor and thereby achieve the fulfillment of his desires, is in captivity of the illusion of possessing the art of producing supernatural influence through completely natural actions. Such attempts are usually called witchcraft, but we would prefer to replace this word (since it introduces the secondary concept of communication with an evil principle, while these attempts can still be thought of as being undertaken with a good moral purpose, but due to a misunderstanding) with the well-known word fetishization.” (Kant, 1960, p. 165). Fetishism, or “belief in fetishes,” transfers materiality from specific material objects to all media. Thus, fetishism transcends the realm of strictly African phenomena and embraces the entire sphere of the religious (including the Jewish religion - which is obviously a reference to “Jerusalem” (1783) by Moses Mendelssohn) with the exception of “pure moral” religion (Kant, 1960, pp. 181-182 ).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on the contrary, limited fetishism to Sub-Saharan Africa, where he makes it an example of historical development, or rather the lack thereof, on the continent and among the peoples inhabiting it. Fetishism is an emblem of the African character, which is difficult to understand because of its difference from our own culture and because of its distance and otherness from our way of thinking. We must renounce all the fundamental categories of our own spiritual life, that is, all the forms in which we usually put the facts before us; However, the main difficulty is that habitual biases will still interfere with all final conclusions (Hegel, 1975, p. 176). Peoples who worship fetishes are outside the boundaries of history and constant objectivity; they do not know God and morality; they are ruled by whim, by the arbitrary law of the individual, projected outward onto a misunderstood nature. This religion of “sensual arbitrariness” is the lowest of all forms of religion. Its essence as such is as follows: “such a fetish has neither religious, much less artistic independence; he never ceases to be merely a creature expressing the will of his creator and always remaining in his hands” (Hegel, 1975, pp. 190, 181).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge equated fetishism with vulgar empiricism, but the herald of scientific positivism, Auguste Comte, considered it the first stage in the development of reason and world history. In “The Course of Positive Philosophy” (1830-1842), Comte speaks of three universal stages of human development - theological, metaphysical and scientific (scientific-positive), while the first theological stage is divided into three substages: fetishism, polytheism and monotheism. According to Comte, at the substage of fetishism, “primitive man” endows all external bodies with the ability to act and thereby rises above the complete inertia characteristic of animals. Although Comte later revalued fetishism (or more accurately “pure fetishism”) and made it a component of his new positivist religion of humanity, it was his rigid evolutionary scheme that proved most influential. The primacy of fetishism as the earliest form of religion (developed from primitive atheism), among all others, was defended by John Lubbock in the book “The Beginning of Civilization and the Primitive State of Man” (1870) and representatives of the German school of psychology of peoples (Volkerpsychologie); its primacy was disputed by animism, animatism, totemism, urmonotheism (Urmonotheismus) and other “claimants”.
In 1840 Brosse's book inspired not only Comte's positivist research; it drew the attention of the young Karl Marx, who at that time was captivated by the vast range of ethnographic literature, which also included reflections on the fetishism of Karl Böttiger and Benjamin Constant. The focus of the early studies of what Marx called “the religion of sensual desire” very soon shifted from the colonial periphery to the metropolis, divided into religious and secular spheres and engulfed in the confrontation between capitalist exploiters and exploited proletarians. Marx begins his analysis of value in modern capitalism with a discussion of commodity fetishism: what was previously considered as something most primitive now turns out to be the support of civilization; what was once considered the most secular of pursuits (political economy) now appears as the religion of everyday life. In the dialectical-materialist interpretation of Feuerbach's theory of religion, the value generated by the fetishized commodity becomes the culmination of alienation and objectification of human labor. In contrast to Marx’s early constructions, fetishism as commodity fetishism points to a “sensual-supersensible thing.” In the process of commodity circulation, “a certain social attitude of people themselves... takes on in their eyes the fantastic form of a relationship between things” (Marx, 1977, pp. 163, 165). Marx draws an analogy with the way fetishism was described in works he had read earlier: “The products of the human brain appear to be independent beings, endowed with a life of their own, standing in definite relations with people and with each other” (Marx, 1977, p. 165). As capital appropriates use value from the fetishized thing, it reproduces that which is no longer the thing but is attributed to it.
Since the fetish now came to be perceived as a symbol and means of maintaining social oppression (whether in the form of slavery, according to Hegel, or in the form of proletarianization according to Marx) and social morality, it came to be associated with the fear of degeneration that gripped Europeans in the last decades of the 19th century. In France, which at that time was experiencing a decline in colonial activity and a weakening of its own positions in Europe, the most understandable source for everyone was the threat of physical and moral degradation and the resulting devirilization and population decline, as well as cultural crises associated with national, sexual and gender differences, turned out to be sexual deviations. Psychiatrist Alfred Binet in 1887 gave a name to this root of individual and national decay - fetishism. Like the peoples under French colonial rule, French men began to seek the satisfaction of sensual desires not in reality (here the word means genital sexual intercourse), but in fixing their attention on objects (or individual parts of the body), the value of which comes from casual contact with them in past. Fetishism was considered a characteristic feature of a predisposition to perversion; in the same way, Hegel declared the fetishism of African peoples to be a property of their nature. Although fetishism was transferred from the religious to the sexual, Binet still felt the need to draw analogies between the different levels of fetishism and those phases of religious development to which fetishism was previously opposed - polytheism and monotheism. He compared natural attraction, consisting of a multitude of fetishistic excitations, with monotheism as the top of the pyramid of religious forms, and fetishism in its most singular and perverse form with polytheism as its foundation, which had already been done earlier. In a world that has turned upside down, people begin to descend precisely to the foundation. Four years after the publication of Binet's article “Fetishism in matters of love” (“Le fetichisme dans l'amour”) in 1887, the most authoritative compendium of sexual pathologies, Psychopathis Sexualis by Richard Krafft-Ebbing, declared fetishism the main form of sexual perversion.
Unlike totemism, fetishism interested Sigmund Freud from the point of view of the analysis of sexuality, and not the origin of religion. Far from perceiving fetishism as a sign of the crisis of difference or degradation that the French medical community so feared, Freud declared it to be the source of this crisis: the little boy is confronted with the fact of human sexual difference, which destroys his narcissistic enjoyment of an undifferentiated, autonomous world. According to Freud, the discovery that women do not have penises creates fear in the little boy for his own. Fetishistic fixation on some object - a symbolic replacement for the mother's (non-existent) penis - is one of the methods that the little boy resorts to in order to balance the desire not to recognize the fact of sexual difference (with its frightening causes and consequences) with its objective reality; castration of the mother is something that one does not want to admit and what actually exists. As he overcomes the crisis, the boy not only accepts a gendered and sexually mediated identity, but integrates into the social order.
Psychoanalytic and materialistic methods of analysis turned out to be interconnected. It is largely due to Walter Benjamin's critique of the work of art and the political symbol (for whose "aura" and "authenticity" the relationship that retains "something of the fetishist" has a certain meaning) that fetishistic discourse becomes a major weapon in the research arsenal of cultural studies (Benjamin, 1969 , p. 244). When postcolonial studies were added to the phantasmagoric structure of fetishism studies, it was time to reap what had been sown earlier. Discourses about the colonized and dominant Other, including the religion (or non-religion) of fetishism, have come to be recognized as essentially fetishistic attempts to mediate possibly incompatible differences in social and cultural forms. Cultural theorist Homi Bhabha has interpreted the racial stereotypes of colonial discourse in its many forms in terms of fetishism. This idea was developed by Jay Geller and others (for example, Anne McClintock): the colonial stereotype often presupposes a discursive fixation characteristic of Europeans and Americans on some part of the body of the Other. The part of the body on which the fixation is carried out is often subject to some discipline, practice or technique: a circumcised penis, bandaged legs, tattooed skin. Such a part of the body and the sign applied to it strangely combines the natural and the cultural. This combination of two different (from a cultural point of view) modes of being, in turn, evokes both admiration and horror of such bodily practices. Further, through such bodily metonymies, discourses in which historical differences between peoples are naturalized in the concept of “tribe”, and natural differences are defined by the concept of “sex”, are combined and create the ethnic, gender and sexual identities of the Other. Such fetishistic constructs generate symbolic substitutes and objectify representations of otherness—both the heterogeneous peoples of the Euro-American community and those peoples they encountered during the period of colonial expansion—that undermine the narcissistic fantasy of Euro-American integrity, self-sufficiency, and superiority.
As a result, we can say that fetishism has come to designate apotropaic agreements on the internal and external borders of culture. That is, it denotes means that help to comprehend (or, more precisely, misrecognize) the alienation, ambiguities and contradictions that make up everyday life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, pp. 217-251. New York, 1969.
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism.” In The Location of Culture, pp. 66-84. New York, 1994.
Binet, Alfred. “Le fetichisme dans l'amour.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l'etranger 24 (1887): 143-167, 252-274.
Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1704). London, 1967.
Brosses, Charles de. De culte des dieux fetiches (1760). Paris, 1988.
Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville, Va., 1996.
Comte, Auguste. The Positive Philosophy (1830). New York, 1974.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity (1843), translated by George Eliot. Buffalo, NY, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, translated by James Strachey, pp. 123-243. London, 1953-1972.
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism" (1927). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, translated by James Strachey, pp. 149-157. London, 1953-1972.
Geller, Jay. “Judenzopf/Chinesenzopf: Of Jews and Queues.” Positions 2 (1994): 500-537.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. In Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction, Reason in History (1830). Translated by HB Nisbet. Cambridge, UK, 1975.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1824-1831). Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley, Calif., 1988.
Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1973). New York, 1960.
Lima, Mesquitela. “Fetishism.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 5, edited by Mircea Eliade, pp. 314-317. New York, 1987.
Lubbock, John. The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. London, 1870.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. “African Objects and the Idea of Fetish.” RES 25 (1994a): 123-131.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. “Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa.” In Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, pp. 249-267. Cambridge, UK, 1994b.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1: The Process of Capitalist Production (1867). New York, 1977.
Mauss, Marcel. Review of R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind. L'annee sociologique 10 (1905-1906): 305-311.
Mauss, Marcel. “L'art et le myth d'apres M. Wundt.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l'entranger 66 (1908): 47-78.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, 1995.
Nye, Robert A. “The Medical Origins of Sexual Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, pp. 13-30. Ithaca, NY, 1993.
Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, I-IIIa.” RES 9, 13, 16 (1985, 1987, 1988): 5-17, 23-46, 105-124.
Pietz, William. “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, pp. 119-151. Ithaca, NY, 1993.
Jay Geller. Fetishism. Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 5, pp.3042-3047. Translation from English by I.S. _ Anofriev .
Fetishism, fanaticism and lust
But fetishes in the modern world have become almost more widespread than in ancient times. And it’s not even a matter of passion for all sorts of miraculous talismans, amulet and amulets, which are offered for a decent price by prolific magicians, healers and astrologers. Modern society personifies and endows things it has produced with supernatural properties. A new “religion of sensual desires” (K. Marx) arose, the main feature of which was enslavement to objects. Perhaps this will be the most correct definition of what fetishism is today. People almost pray for prestigious cars, jewelry, and the mediocre daub of some fashionable “genius.” But the most striking manifestation of modern fetishism is the worship of idols. Fans are real fetishists.
Modern manifestations of fetishism
Fetishism is divided into the following types:
- Commodity . Implies the reification of production relations between members of society. As a result, a person depends on goods.
- Legal . The fetishist brings his faith in legal norms to the absolute; only with the help of them is he able to resolve any issues.
- Sexy . A person experiences sexual arousal at the sight of certain things or appearance. This includes lace lingerie, stiletto heels, a schoolgirl uniform, or any other item, including jewelry. Often, without a fetish, a person cannot achieve sexual release.
One of the most popular types of fetish involves feet.
There are separate types of sexual fetishism: hand and foot fetish. Hand fetishism is a sexual attraction to hands. A person experiences excitement at the sight of a wrist or fingers, palms, or nails with a certain manicure. He is excited by non-sexual activities, such as washing dishes. Foot fetishism is a sexual attraction to feet.
Complications
Severe forms of fetishism disrupt the normal sexual activity of patients - the role of the partner during sexual intercourse is simplified, and satisfaction is most often one-sided. Some forms of the disorder can be dangerous to the psyche, life and health of the patient and others. This can happen, for example, when there is a compulsion for children's clothes, toys, and the child may behave in a fetishistic manner in the presence of children. In another case, a child may be attracted to disabled people and forced to have sexual relations with them. In these cases, fetishism can lead to social disapproval, social maladjustment and prosecution.
Where did fetishism come from?
This term was first introduced by the French explorer Charles de Brosses in the 18th century. He described religious evolution with this concept. Then researchers in other fields of science drew attention to this interesting phenomenon.
Later, the phenomenon of “anti-fetishism” was discovered. It means certain objects (clothing, the smell of a sexual partner) that block sexual arousal.
Fetishism is a sexual perversion. Most often found in men.
Many fetishes arise from random associations between an object (situation) and sexual gratification. It is impossible to say unambiguously when and under what circumstances this relationship will arise.
Minkisi [edit]
Created and used by the Bakongo of western Zaire, nkisi
(plural
minkisi
) is a sculptural object that provides a local dwelling for a spiritual person.
Although some minkisi
have always been anthropomorphic, they were probably much less naturalistic or "realistic" before the arrival of Europeans in the nineteenth century;
Congo figures are more naturalistic in coastal areas than in inland areas. [3] Because Europeans tend to think of spirits as objects of worship, idols become objects of idolatry when worship is directed to false gods. Thus, Europeans considered minkisi
to be idols based on false assumptions.
Europeans often called nkisi
"fetishes" and sometimes "idols" because they are sometimes represented in human form. Modern anthropology usually refers to these objects as either "objects of power" or "enchantments".
Answering the question whether nkisi
fetish, William McGuffey writes that the Congo ritual system as a whole,
has a similar relationship to that which Marx assumed that "political economy" had towards capitalism as its "religion", but not for the reasons put forward by Boseman, the Enlightenment thinkers and Hegel. Irrational “animate” nature of the symbolic apparatus of the ritual system, including minkisi
, fortune-telling devices and witch trials, indirectly expressed the real power relations between the participants in the ritual. "Fetishism" concerns relationships between people, rather than the objects that mediate and conceal these relationships. [3]
Thus, McGuffey concludes, calling nkisi
fetish means to translate "certain realities of the Congo into categories developed in the emerging social sciences of nineteenth-century, post-Enlightenment Europe." [3]
Links[edit]
- T. J. Alldridge, Sherbro and Suburbs
(1901) - Pietz, William (1988). The Origins of Fetishism: A Contribution to the History of Theory (Ph.D.). University of California at Santa Cruz.
- ^ abcd MacGaffey, Wyatt (Spring 1994). "African objects and the idea of fetish." RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
.
25
: 123–131. DOI: 10.1086/RESv25n1ms20166895. - ^ ab Pietz, William (Spring 1985). "Fetish problem, me." RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
.
President and Fellows of Harvard College through the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. 9
(9): 5–17. DOI: 10.1086/RESv9n1ms20166719. JSTOR 20166719. - Stallybrass, Peter (2001). Daniel Miller (ed.). Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences
(1st ed. Ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 0415242673. - Pietz, William (Spring 1987). "The Fetish Problem, II: The Origin of the Fetish." RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
.
13
(13): 23–45. DOI: 10.1086/RESv13n1ms20166762. JSTOR 20166762. - MacGaffey, Wyatt (1993). Surprise and Power, Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi
. National Museum of African Art. - ^ ab "Animals: Facts and Folklore", New Mexico Magazine
, August 2008, pp. 56-63, see New Mexico Magazine website.
Is this pathology and are fetishists dangerous?
From a medical point of view, fetishism is considered a pathology (what is it?) if it interferes with normal sexual relationships.
If a person is able to live and receive pleasure without the participation of the object of desire, then in this case this is not considered as any deviation.
Often, fetishists do not pose a danger to the people around them, but there are exceptions to every rule. of such people when :
- fetishism has become a form of mental disorder;
- At the same time, the person suffers from other forms of deviations: split personality or sadism.
To get the object of desire, sometimes such people can do the most unthinkable things, but in such cases they do not pose a danger to society.
Practice[edit]
Voodoo fetish market in Lomé, Togo, 2008
The use of this concept in the study of religion comes from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, as well as from voodoo, which in turn is derived from these beliefs.
Fetishes were commonly used in some Native American religions and practices. [8] For example, the bear represented the shaman, the buffalo was the provider, the mountain lion was the warrior, and the wolf was the ranger. [8] [ clarification required
]
Purpose
Why did ancient people need to endow inanimate objects with power? There are several reasons for this:
- The desire to enlist the support of higher powers and visualize the object of one’s veneration. It is much easier to sacrifice to a specific boulder than to some intangible invisible entity.
- The object was endowed with the ability not only to help, but also to protect, for example, from attacks of other tribes, that is, its action took place not only as a result of direct appeal, but also as constant support.
- Fetish helped ancient man indirectly exercise power over nature.
The significance of this religious idea is evidenced by the fact that until now world religions have retained some features of fetishism: worship of holy places, icons, veneration of relics.
Further development
It is interesting to trace the path that animism, fetishism and magic have taken, and to find out how significant they are for modern man:
- Fetishism became the fundamental basis of idolatry. After polytheism lost its prevalence, remnants of the belief were preserved in the use of amulets, talismans, and amulets.
- The remains of fetishism are religious paraphernalia: rosaries, relics of saints, and other relics.
- Animism became the basis of the doctrine of the immortal soul, which is one way or another present in all world religions.
- Magic is popular to this day, divided into black and white, and is actively practiced in many cultures. Many quite modern people believe in its power.
Thus, each of the most ancient beliefs has not completely lost its meaning.
Classification
Fetishism can be pathological (deviant) and tolerant sexual behavior, depending on its manifestations and nature. The classification based on objects of desire is broad, since any object, body part, or behavioral trait can take on fetishistic characteristics. The most common, well-known forms of this disorder include:
1. Fetishism of underwear. Excitement and pleasure are associated with clothing and shoes.
- Fetishism of transvestites. Dressing in items of clothing (shoes, clothes, accessories) of the opposite sex.
- Cisvestism. Fetish clothing to denote another age group, social class, profession.
- Homelessness. Using clothing of the same gender as an object of desire.
2. Physical fetishism. Attractiveness is related to the external characteristics of a partner.
- Narcissism. One’s own body or its individual parts act as a fetish.
- Auto-monosexuality. Excitement from one's own body and identification with the body of another person.
- Heterochromophily. A fetish partner who has a different skin tone or color.
- Apotemnophilia. The presence of a partner with a physical deformity, an amputated limb, or a prosthesis is a condition for arousal.
3. Object fetishism. It is associated with everyday objects, art, tools.
- Zealousness. Leather goods become a fetish.
- Pygmalionism. Satisfaction is associated with the possession of art objects.
- Pornography mania. Sexual sensations are caused by watching pornography (films, photographs, drawings).
4. Excrementophilia. Human excretions (urine, feces, sweat, menstrual blood, saliva) serve as a fetish.
Fetishism is divided into separate groups and types
