Фетишизм: история и значение концепции.

Human attribution of special powers or value to an object

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 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.

Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of the fetish to refer to the objects used in religious practices 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. 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). 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".

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. 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. Kato stated that leaving behind cities and going into rural areas, he could find many traces of animism, fetishism, and phallicism. Kato Genchi stated 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 of the natives of the East Indies and the Tjurunga of the Central Australians. The Kusanagi no Tsurugi was believed to provide supernatural protection (blessings) through 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. He observed that people tends to think of the mitama (spirit) of a deity first as the seat of his real presence, and second as the deity itself. Many people do not distinguish between mitama (spirit) and shintai (god body), and some even confused shintai (god body) with the god's real body.