feitiço

Fetish comes from Portuguese feitiço (charm, sorcery, witchcraft, an object of magical power), from feitiço as an adjective meaning 'artificial, made by craft, factitious' — from feito (made), the past participle of fazer (to make), from Latin facere (to make, to do). The same Latin facere gives English an enormous family: fact, factory, fashion, feature, affect, effect, defect, perfect, fiction, and dozens more. The Portuguese adjective feitiço originally described something made by human craft rather than naturally occurring — an artificial thing. In the context of West African religious practices, Portuguese traders from the fifteenth century onward applied the term to the physical objects — carved figures, natural objects, assemblages of materials — that local practitioners used in religious ceremonies and believed to possess spiritual power. The word carried a dismissive colonial charge: to call something feitiço was to call it a made thing, a manufactured superstition, rather than a genuine sacred object.

The Portuguese encounter with West African religious objects through the feitiço concept was one of the first systematic European attempts to describe non-Christian religious practice in Africa, and the category it created was immediately problematic. Portuguese traders and missionaries encountered extraordinary diversity in the objects and practices they lumped together under feitiço — ancestral figures, power objects (minkisi in Kongo tradition), diviners' implements, protective amulets — and the single Portuguese term flattened this diversity into a single supposed category of false belief. The word entered English as fetish in the mid-seventeenth century through Dutch fetisso, which the Dutch had adopted from Portuguese during their own West African trading operations. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fetish had become the standard English term for any object believed to possess supernatural power, and the concept of 'fetishism' was established as a quasi-religious category defining a supposed primitive stage of religious development.

The word underwent a radical transformation in the nineteenth century when two very different thinkers — Karl Marx and later Sigmund Freud — adapted it for their own purposes in ways that permanently altered its meanings. Marx, in Capital (1867), coined the term 'commodity fetishism' to describe the way commodities appear to have an inherent, natural value independent of the human labor that produced them. The commodity, like the West African feitiço, seems to possess a power that actually derives from the social relationships concealed within it. The fetish — the made thing whose origins in human craft are forgotten and whose power appears intrinsic — became Marx's central metaphor for the mystification that capitalism performs. Marx's usage of the term carried an implicit analogy between colonial condescension toward African religion and the ideological mystification of capitalist economics.

Freud's introduction of 'fetishism' into psychoanalytic vocabulary in 1927 added a third layer to the word's meaning. For Freud, a sexual fetish was an object — typically associated with the body but not itself a primary sexual organ — on which sexual interest becomes focused in a way that displaces or replaces the primary object. Freud's theory was tied to his account of castration anxiety and the male infant's encounter with sexual difference, a framework that is now widely disputed. But the term entered popular usage and became the general word for any object that receives displaced sexual attention or any element in sexual desire that seems disproportionately focused on a specific thing. By the end of the twentieth century, 'fetish' had accumulated at least three distinct meanings — the sacred power object of colonial anthropology, the mystified commodity of Marxist analysis, and the sexual displacement object of psychoanalytic theory — all derived from the Portuguese term for an artificial charm.