wordsfetish

William Pietz, whose 1994 ethno-historical study is the standard account, argues the term originated on the coast of West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the encounter itself. He keeps two things apart: actual African objects that Europeans called fetishes, together with the local theories of those objects, and 'fetish' as an idea about a kind of object. The second is European property.

He traces the chain in one sentence: from the late medieval Portuguese feitiço, to the sixteenth-century pidgin Fetisso on the African coast, to various northern European versions of the word by way of the 1602 text of the Dutchman Pieter de Marees. The Portuguese developed the concept for objects used in West African religious practice. What went into the category was then decided by exclusion: objects were classed as fetishes indiscriminately because, from a European standpoint, they did not fit anywhere else.

The travel literature spread it. Ramusio's Viaggio e Navigazioni of 1550, de Bry's India Orientalis of 1597, Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus of 1625, Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels of 1732, Astley's A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels of 1746, Prevost's Histoire générale des voyages of 1748: these are the books the eighteenth-century theorists read.

Then it became a theory. Charles de Brosses popularised the term around 1760, in Du culte des dieux fétiches, comparing West African religion with the magical side of ancient Egyptian religion. Auguste Comte put fetishism first in his sequence of religious development, ahead of polytheism and monotheism. G. W. F. Hegel, in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, held that Africans were incapable of abstract thought and that a fetish object could therefore be anything arbitrarily given 'imaginary powers'. Modern scholarship reads the whole sequence as colonial: the Portuguese, Dutch and British deployed the category to criticise how colonised people dealt with material objects, and built European rationality by contrast.

The word then kept moving away from the coast. Around 1837 it meant an object of blind devotion among the New England Transcendentalists. In 1897 Havelock Ellis fixed the psycho-sexual sense, which is the sense most English speakers now hear first.

And it did not stay only in European mouths. The market at Akodessawa, a district of Lomé in Togo, carries the word in its own French name: Marché des Féticheurs. Wikipedia's account of it says the market sells fetishes used in vodún religious practice. Inference — a word coined about people can be taken up by them, for trade, for tourism, or because it is the word the customer knows. That does not undo the coinage, and this atlas still does not use it to describe an object.

Tradition holds — the objects themselves have their own names in their own languages — nkisi among Kikongo speakers is the clearest case — and those names are what this project files them under.