Fetish
About “Fetish”:
Fetishism is a category of contemporary scholarly discourse first employed to describe religious and cross-cultural hierarchy. It refers to the asymmetrical attribution of values and power to material objects, particularly attributions that anticipate other, sometimes opposing, claims of value, agency, or social relationships. In this theoretical frame, a fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. According to intellectual historian William Pietz, the idea of fetishism in the study of religion traversed a diverse range of meanings and applications since its coinage in the early colonial period.
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