The Female and the Fetish: a Method and Theory Review

Abstract

If we follow the historical survey that opens Jacques Waardenburg's famous two-volume work, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, the scholarly study of religion begins study of the fetish. Charles de Brosses' Du Culte des dieux fetiches, ou parallele de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Mgritie, which appeared in 1760, is the first example Waardenburg cites of systematic study of religious data. In this work, Waardenburg comments, de Brosses both studies fetishism as it was found in West Africa and elsewhere, point [ing] to the parallelism between this fetishism the worship of and inanimate objects, and similar phenomena from the ancient Egyptian and Greek religions, and elaborates general theory of fetishism, declaring it to be a primordial form of religion in which man, be cause of his fear and weakness, imagines that things are animated and worships them he does animals (Waardenburg 1974: 1, 8). There at the beginning of modern discourse on method and theory,1 fetishism would then involve, from the outset, the idea of funda mental fear that man defends himself against by endowing object with life and potency that it does not have. The fetish object be longs to fantasy that makes idol out of commonplace thing. And for de Brosses, Waardenburg remarks, fetishism is typically primitive and pagan, the example of an earlier religion still