| Part of a series on |
| Anthropology of religion |
|---|
 |
| Social and cultural anthropology |
A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent non-material value, or powers, to an object. Talismans and amulets are related. Fetishes are often used in spiritual or religious context.
The word fetish derives from the French fétiche, which comes from the Portuguese feitiço ("spell"), which in turn derives from the Latin facticius ("artificial") and facere ("to make"). [2] The term fetish 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 [3] of the fetish, argues that the term originated in the coast of West 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 the indigenous 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. [4]
According to Pietz, the post-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 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. [5]
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." [6]
Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of the fetish to refer to the objects used in religious practices by West African natives. [5] The contemporary Portuguese feitiço may refer to more neutral terms such as charm, enchantment, or abracadabra , or more potentially offensive terms such as juju , witchcraft , witchery, conjuration or bewitchment. The medieval Lollards issued polemics that anticipated fetishism. [7]
The concept was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when Charles de Brosses used it in comparing West African religion to the magical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Later, Auguste Comte employed the concept in his theory of the evolution of religion, wherein 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 theory of fetishism encountered this notion in descriptions of "Guinea" contained in such popular 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). [8]
The theory of fetishism was articulated at the end of the eighteenth century by G. W. F. Hegel in Lectures 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". [9]
The use of the concept in the study of religion derives from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, as well as from Vodun, which in turn derives from those beliefs.
Fetishes were commonly used in some Native American religions and practices. [10] For example, the bear represented the shaman, the buffalo was the provider, the mountain lion was the warrior, and the wolf was the pathfinder, the cause of the war. [10]
Katō Genchi (1873–1965), a Shinto priest and scholar of comparative religion, applied the term "fetish" to the historical study of traditional Japanese religion. He cited jewelry, swords, mirrors, and scarves as examples of fetishism in Shinto. [11] In rural areas of Japan, he said he could find many traces of animism, totemism, fetishism, and phallicism. [12] He also maintained that the Ten Sacred Treasures were fetishes and the Imperial Regalia of Japan retained the same traits, and pointed out the similarities with the Pusaka heirlooms of the natives of the East Indies and the sacred Tjurunga of the Central Australians. [13] He noted that the divine sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi , which was believed to provide supernatural protection ('blessings'), was deified and enshrined (at what is now the Atsuta Shrine). [13] Akaruhime no Kami, the female deity of Hiyurikuso Shrine , was said to have originally been a red ball before transforming into a beautiful woman. [13] The jewel around Izanagi-no-Mikoto's neck was deified and called Mikuratana-no-kami . [13]
The Anglo-Irish diplomat and scholar William George Aston (1841–1911) also maintained that Kusanagi no Tsurugi could be seen as an example of fetishism. Originally an offering, the enshrined sword became a mitamashiro (lit. 'spirit representative', 'spirit-token'), more commonly known as the shintai (lit. 'god-body'; a sacred object containing the kami or 'spirit'). [14] Aston observed that people tended to think of the mitama ('spirit') of a deity first as the seat of his or her real presence, and secondly as the deity itself. In practice, the distinction between mitama and shintai was fluid, and shintai even came to be identified as the god's body. [14] For example, the cooking furnace ( kamado ) itself was worshiped as a deity. [14] 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. [14]
In modern times, the American linguist Roy Andrew Miller (1924–2014) observed that the pamphlet of the nationalistic Kokutai no Hongi proclamation (1937) and the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) were also often worshipped as "fetishes", and were respectfully placed and kept in household altars ( kamidana ). [15] [n 1]
Made and used by the BaKongo of western DRC, a nkisi (plural minkisi) is a sculptural object that provides a local habitation for a spiritual personality. Though some minkisi 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. [4] 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 regarded minkisi as idols on the basis of religious bias.
The foreign Christians often called nkisi "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 a nkisi 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, 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. [4]
Therefore, McGaffey concludes, to call a nkisi a fetish is to translate "certain Kongo realities into the categories developed in the emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, post-enlightenment Europe." [4]
Kami are the deities, divinities, spirits, mythological, spiritual, or natural phenomena that are venerated in the Shinto religion. They can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, beings and the qualities that these beings express, and/or the spirits of venerated dead people. Many kami are considered the ancient ancestors of entire clans. Traditionally, great leaders like the Emperor could be or became kami.
Shinto is a religion originating in Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes call its practitioners Shintoists, although adherents rarely use that term themselves. There is no central authority in control of Shinto, with much diversity of belief and practice evident among practitioners.
Candomblé Bantu is one of the major branches (nations) of the Candomblé religious belief system. It developed in the Portuguese Empire among Kongo and Mbundu slaves who spoke Kikongo and Kimbundu languages. The supreme and creative god is Nzambi or Nzambi a Mpungu. Below him are the Jinkisi or Minkisi, deities of Bantu mythology. These deities resemble Olorun and the other orishas of the Yoruba religion. Minkisi is a Kongo language term: it is the plural of Nkisi, meaning "receptacle". Akixi comes from the Kimbundu language term Mukixi.
The Kongo people are a Bantu ethnic group primarily defined as the speakers of Kikongo. Subgroups include the Beembe, Bwende, Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Dondo, Lari, and others.
A Shinto shrine is a structure whose main purpose is to house ("enshrine") one or more kami, the deities of the Shinto religion.
Ōyama-tsumi or Ohoyama-tsumi, also Ōyama-tsumi-mi'oya-no-mikoto (大山祇御祖命), is a god of mountains, sea, and war in Japanese mythology. He is an elder brother of Amaterasu and Susanoo. His other names are Watashi-no-Ōkami (和多志大神) and Sakatoke (酒解神).
Nature worship, also called naturism or physiolatry, is any of a variety of religious, spiritual and devotional practices that focus on the worship of the nature spirits considered to be behind the natural phenomena visible throughout nature. A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in pantheism, panentheism, deism, polytheism, animism, Taoism, totemism, Hinduism, shamanism, some theism and paganism including Wicca. Common to most forms of nature worship is a spiritual focus on the individual's connection and influence on some aspects of the natural world and reverence towards it. Due to their admiration of nature, the works of Edmund Spenser, Anthony Ashley-Cooper and Carl Linnaeus were viewed as nature worship.
Nkisi or Nkishi are spirits or an object that a spirit inhabits. It is frequently applied to a variety of objects used throughout the Congo Basin in Central Africa, especially in the Territory of Cabinda that are believed to contain spiritual powers or spirits. The term and its concept have passed with the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas.
The Japanese word mitama refers to the spirit of a kami or the soul of a dead person. It is composed of two characters, the first of which, mi, is simply an honorific. The second, tama (魂・霊) means "spirit". The character pair 神霊, also read mitama, is used exclusively to refer to a kami's spirit. Significantly, the term mitamashiro is a synonym of shintai, the object which in a Shinto shrine houses the enshrined kami.
Ukanomitama is a kami in classical Japanese mythology, associated with food and agriculture, often identified with Inari, the deity of rice.
A nganga is a spiritual healer, diviner, and ritual specialist in traditional Kongo religion. These experts also exist across the African diaspora in countries where Kongo and Mbundu people were transported during the Atlantic slave trade, such as Brazil, the southern United States, Haiti and Cuba.
Kamidana are miniature household altars provided to enshrine a Shinto kami. They are most commonly found in Japan, the home of kami worship.
A gongen (権現), literally "incarnation", was believed to be the manifestation of a buddha in the form of an indigenous kami, an entity who had come to guide the people to salvation, during the era of shinbutsu-shūgō in premodern Japan. The words gonge (権化) and kegen (化現) are synonyms for gongen. Gongen shinkō (権現信仰) is the term for belief in the existence of gongen.
A yorishiro (依り代/依代/憑り代/憑代) in Shinto terminology is an object capable of attracting spirits called kami, thus giving them a physical space to occupy during religious ceremonies. Yorishiro are used during ceremonies to call the kami for worship. The word itself literally means "approach substitute". Once a yorishiro actually houses a kami, it is called a shintai. Ropes called shimenawa decorated with paper streamers called shide often surround yorishiro to make their sacredness manifest. Persons can play the same role as a yorishiro, and in that case are called yorimashi or kamigakari.
This is the glossary of Shinto, including major terms on the subject. Words followed by an asterisk (*) are illustrated by an image in one of the photo galleries.
In Shinto, shintai, or go-shintai when the honorific prefix go- is used, are physical objects worshipped at or near Shinto shrines as repositories in which spirits or kami reside. Shintai used in Shrine Shinto can be also called mitamashiro.
Nkondi are mystical statuettes made by the Kongo people of the Congo region. Nkondi are a subclass of minkisi that are considered aggressive. The name nkondi derives from the verb -konda, meaning "to hunt" and thus nkondi means "hunter" because they can hunt down and attack wrong-doers, witches, or enemies.
William Pietz is an intellectual historian and political activist. He is known for his scholarship related to the concept of fetishism.
Myōjin or Daimyōjin was a title historically applied to Japanese (Shinto) deities (kami) and, by metonymy, their shrines.
Kongo religion encompasses the traditional beliefs of the Bakongo people. Due to the highly centralized position of the Kingdom of Kongo, its leaders were able to influence much of the traditional religious practices across the Congo Basin. As a result, many other ethnic groups and kingdoms in West-Central Africa, like the Chokwe and Mbundu, adopted elements of Bakongo spirituality.
The dictionary definition of fetish at Wiktionary
Media related to Category:Religious fetishism at Wikimedia Commons