Fetishes: How objects become sacred

In a Yoruba village, deep in what is now Nigeria, an old man carefully carves a wooden figure, infusing it with all his knowledge and wisdom. He drives nails into it, adorns it with feathers, and adds a few drops of animal blood. This is no ordinary handicraft. This is a fetish. The old man hasn’t just made it, he’s instilled it with power. He believes in it. And so does the entire village. They speak to it, fear it, question it. It acts. It lives. It stands as a bridge between people and invisible forces.

But what exactly is a fetish? A colonial misreading? A lingering trace of magical-religious thought? Or perhaps a modern concept dressed in ancient form? From sacred statues to capitalist commodities, from protective amulets to smart devices, the fetish takes on many guises. It reflects humanity itself. This is its story.

When objects deceived: The birth of the fetish myth

The word fetish comes from the Portuguese feitiço, derived from the Latin facticius, meaning “artificial” or “man-made.” When Portuguese explorers reached the coasts of Africa in the 15th century, they were both fascinated and unsettled. The objects they witnessed being venerated, statues, stones, carved figures, seemed devoid of soul or transcendence through a Christian lens. Yet they inspired awe, offerings, even fear. To the Portuguese, these were fetiches: false idols, empty objects wrongly imbued with supernatural force.

This marked the first semantic shift: the fetish as a fabricated object irrationally attributed with power. In Europe, the term quickly took on a pejorative tone, symbolizing superstition, savagery, and a departure from Reason.

Fetishism according to Charles de Brosses

In 1760, French magistrate and thinker Charles de Brosses published On the Worship of Fetish Gods, in which he theorized fetishism as the earliest form of religion. For him, before the advent of gods, humans worshipped objects. Fetishism, he argued, was the first stage in humanity’s spiritual evolution.

This evolutionary model, grounded in a hierarchy of cultures, was later used to justify colonization. It contrasted rational European thought with so-called primitive African belief systems. Still, behind this condescending gaze lay a significant anthropological insight: objects can carry spiritual, symbolic, and political meaning.

Marx’s Fetish: The mystification of commodities

A century later, Karl Marx repurposed the term in Capital (1867), giving it an economic and critical twist. He introduced the concept of commodity fetishism, describing how objects produced through human labor, like a coat or a sack of wheat, come to possess an autonomous value, as if that value were inherent, rather than socially constructed.

According to Marx, in capitalist societies, relationships between people are masked as relationships between things. Objects become mystified and appear self-sufficient. The labor behind them is erased. They become fetishes, obscuring their origins while mesmerizing us with their exchange value.

Thus, the fetish is no longer a magical African artifact but a luxury boutique, an assembly line, an e-commerce storefront. What we worship is no longer the leather bag, but the brand. The aura. The fantasy.

Marcel Mauss and the symbolic power of objects

Sociologist Marcel Mauss, the devoted nephew of Émile Durkheim, extended this inquiry in a new direction. In The Gift (1925), he explored the hau of the Māori, a spiritual force believed to reside in given objects. For Mauss, objects are never neutral. They carry social bonds, invisible debts, unspoken rules.

A gifted necklace, a sacred stone, a banknote, these are all modern fetishes. What matters is not the object itself, but the web of meaning, obligation, and belief that surrounds it.

Bruno Latour: Objects that act

In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour turned the entire perspective on its head. He challenged the rigid division between subject and object, nature and culture, human and non-human. For Latour, objects are not passive. They participate in action. They make things happen.

A stop sign, a passport, a credit card, a smartphone, all are actants. They guide, constrain, and authorize. In Latour’s view, the fetish proves that objects have always been enmeshed in networks of agency. We should no longer scoff at those who speak to their statues. After all, we talk to Siri, to ChatGPT, to our interfaces.

From carved wood to smart devices

Today, a Wall Street trader strokes a virtual bitcoin on his screen. He doesn’t understand the intricacies of blockchain technology, but he believes in it. He invests in it. He sacrifices sleep, emotion, even health. Much like the village elder, he puts his trust in an object he doesn’t fully control. He transfers his hope, his fear, his faith.

In the same way, we entrust our memories to hard drives, our emotions to emojis, our identity to profile pictures. The fetish has changed form, but not function. It gives presence to what surpasses us. It shapes the invisible: sacredness, value, trust, exchange.

The Fetish beyond appearances

At the end of this journey through layers of history and symbolism, the fetish emerges as much more than a mere artifact. It becomes a crossroads of emotion, imagination, and cultural representation, where fear, desire, and the tension between reason and magic converge. If the fetish seems to act, it’s because certain gazes bestow it with that power. It possesses no force in itself; its energy comes from the meanings projected onto it.

Psychologically, the fetish functions as a mental construct, a human attempt to give form to the unseen, to tame the uncontrollable, to forge a connection between self and world. It often arises in moments of uncertainty, fragility, or transition: crises, rites of passage, existential anxieties. It is a symbolic response to our need for safety, coherence, and transcendence.

This dynamic appears early in life, in the form of transitional objects that children imbue with emotion and significance, the symbolic ancestors of cultural or ritual fetishes. In adulthood, these mechanisms don’t vanish; they shift, evolve, and sometimes become collective, continuing to shape our inner landscapes.

Socially, the fetish serves as a mediator. It anchors beliefs, acts as a catalyst for shared meaning, and encodes identity or collective narrative. It can unite or divide, stabilize or unsettle. In all cases, it reflects a complex relationship to representation, power, and sacralization.

Ultimately, whether or not we believe in it, the fetish is very real within the symbolic universe of human societies. It reminds us that what we call “reality” is always interwoven with representations, and that behind every fetish lies not just an object, but a need; not merely a belief, but a psychological configuration. The fetish, perhaps, is just a mirror: it speaks not of itself, but of us.