Fetishism - History

History

Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of fetishism to refer to the objects used in religious cults by West African natives.

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.

That said, ethnography and anthropology would nonetheless classify some artifacts of monotheistic religions as fetishes. For example, the Holy Cross and the consecrated host or tokens of communion found in some forms of Christianity (a monotheistic religion), are here regarded as examples of fetishism.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Tylor and McLennan, historians of religion, held that the concept of fetishism fostered a shift of attention away from the relationship between people and God, to focus instead on a relationship between people and material objects, and that this, in turn, allowed for the establishment of false models of causality for natural events. This they saw as a central problem historically and sociologically.

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published his essay on "Fetishism," in which he writes that the meaning and purpose of the fetish turns out, through analysis, to always be the same: "the fetish is a substitute for the penis...for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost." In refusing to see his mother's lack of penis, the boy disavows (German: Verleugnung, not repression: Verdrängung) what he sees, resulting in both a belief and a non-belief in the woman's phallus. This compromise (produced by the conflict between perception and the counter-wish) results in a substitute (the fetish). "It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it."