Fetishism

Please give us a THUMBS UP if you like our videos!!! Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetishism The term "fetish" has evolved from an idiom used to describe a type of objects created in the interaction between European travelers and Africans in the early modern period to an analytical term that played a central role in the perception and study of non-Western art in general and African art in particular. William Pietz, who conducted an extensive ethno-historical study of the fetish, argues that the term originated in the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pietz distinguishes between, on the one hand, actual African objects that may be called fetishes in Europe, together with the indigenous theories of them, and on the other hand, "fetish," an idea, and an idea of a kind of object, to which the term above applies. According to Pietz, the post-colonial concept of "fetish" emerged out of the encounter between Europeans, a feudalistic society with a Catholic theological tradition, and Africans in a very specific historical context and in response to African material culture.