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Fetishism   Listen
noun
Fetishism, fetichism  n.  (Written also feticism)  
1.
The doctrine or practice of belief in fetiches.
2.
Excessive devotion to one object or one idea; abject superstition; blind adoration. "The real and absolute worship of fire falls into two great divisions, the first belonging rather to fetichism, the second to polytheism proper."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fetishism" Quotes from Famous Books



... and possessions, must give way to the world republic under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this—or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... which are the latest in yielding to the explanations of science, are those which refer to the more recondite cases of natural causation; for here it is that methodical investigation is longest in discovering the natural causes. Thus it is only by degrees that fetishism is superseded by what now appears a common-sense interpretation of physical phenomena; that exorcism gives place to medicine; alchemy to chemistry; astrology to astronomy; and so forth. Everywhere ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... they find beasts in ancient religion, myth, or art. He asks for definitions (as of totemism), but never, I think, alludes to the authoritative definitions by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails the theory of fetishism as if it stood now where De Brosses left it in a purely pioneer work—or, rather, where he understands De Brosses to have left it. One might as well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius left it, or the theory of evolution where it was left by ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... "under-Egypt"—with veneration of magic animals, such as jackals, cats, hawks, and crocodiles. On the other hand, we have a sun and sky worship of a more elevated nature, which does not seem to have amalgamated with the earlier fetishism and corpse-worship until a comparatively late period. The main seats of the sun-worship were at Heliopolis in the Delta and at Edfu in Upper Egypt. Heliopolis seems always to have been a centre of light and leading in Egypt, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... hunters, using nets and spears, and keep goats, sheep and cattle. In war they use spears and long, narrow shields of giraffe or ox hide. Their dialect is closely allied to those of the Alur, Lango and ja-Luo tribes, all four being practically pure Nilotic. Their religion is a vague fetishism. By early explorers the Acholi were called Shuli, a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... (American) Indian 'pantheism'; and Barth speaks of ritualistic 'pantheism,' meaning thereby the deification of different objects used in sacrifice (p. 37, note). But chrematheism is as distinct from pantheism as it is from fetishism.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... economics was absurd; and Marx has most clearly shown the absurdity of it. The latter speaks of the alleged dependence of value, not upon the productiveness of labour, but upon the effort put forth by the labourer, as the 'fetishism' of industry; this relation, being unnatural, contrary to the nature of things, ought therefore—and this, again, is Marx's contribution to the progress of the science—to be referred back to an unnatural ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... judge, the primitive form of fetishism left but feeble traces in the religion of civilized Chaldaea and Assyria. The signs are few of that worship of sacred stones which played such an important part among the Semites of the west, and even among the Greeks,[88] neither can ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... arrow, a "velvet-tipped" lucifer match from the primitive fire-stick, or a modern piano from the first crude, stringed, musical instrument has involved much the same intellectual processes as have been operative in transforming fetishism and magic into religion and philosophy, or scattered ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... evolutionistic postulate of a slow upward development of religions from crude original beliefs, but quite the reverse. It is true that the popular handbooks of comparative religion quite generally teach a development of religious belief through animism, fetishism, and polytheism to monotheism. But the consonant testimony of specialists in the field of historical study and of those who have had first-hand acquaintance with the aborigines of heathen lands, is a strong dissent from this ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... easy to be unsympathetic in regard to any form of fetishism which we do not share. And while the bare fact remains that we are not at all sure that the Pilgrims landed on this rock, and we are entirely sure that its present location and setting possess no romantic allurement, yet bare facts are not the whole truth, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... beautiful golden harvest ten years ago, but aftermath is better than bare stubble fields, and though you miss the song of the reapers, you escape starvation. Deny it as we may, we are hopelessly given over to fetichism, and each one of us ties around her stone image some beguiling orthodox label. Leo, yours is pride, masquerading in the dun garb of 'religious duty'. Mine is self-love, pure and simple, the worldly weal of Alma Cutting; but nominally it is dubbed 'grateful requital of a life of devotion' in my lover! ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... poured its light on his path, and he never mentioned it. The New Testament is as dead to art-beauty as though it had been written by a hermit in an Egyptian pyramid who had never seen the light of sun. Then what did he owe the Greeks? Not philosophy, not art, and certainly not religion, which was fetichism. Not a debt of literature, nor of art, nor of civil polity; not a debt of pecuniary obligation; not an ordinary debt. He had nothing from all these outside sources. The whole barbaric world was without the true knowledge of God. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... this localization of all the vital forces of France?... Do not cry out upon decentralization. This hackneyed reproach would discredit only your own intelligence and sincerity. It is not a question of decentralization; it is your political fetichism which I attack. Why should the national unity be attached to a certain place, to certain functionaries, to certain bayonets? Why should the Place Maubert and the Palace of the Tuileries be the palladium ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... inequalities of strength, she allows for the disproportion of burdens. If she finds us unequal in heart, in body, in mind, in aptitude, and value, she makes us all equal by repentance. Hence equality is no longer a vain word, for we can be, we are, all equal through feeling. From the formless fetichism of savages to the graceful inventions of Greece, or the profound and metaphysical doctrines of Egypt and India, whether taught in cheerful or in terrifying worship, there is a conviction in the soul of man—that of his fall, that of his sin—from which comes everywhere the idea of ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... itself with the passions of man, however different those passions may be. In the instances quoted above, with the Persians it was the pride of despotism; to conquer the gods of a country was the last mark of subjugation. With the Egyptians, it was the gross Fetichism of the superstitious populace, and the local jealousy of neighboring towns. In Greece, persecution was in general connected with political party; in Rome, with the stern supremacy of the law and the interests of the state. Gibbon has been mistaken ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type. Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside. But what a history lies between the Fetichism which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship of one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... only remember one mention of a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitions of all kinds. Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, for instance. But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with their poetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante, have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginative effect of their creations by an appeal to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... for similar and almost identical rude representations are attempted in the early stages of art in all countries; as the early attempts of children are nearly identical in all ages. The presence of a god was indicated in a manner akin to the Fetichism of the African, by the simplest and most shapeless objects, such as unhewn blocks of stone and by simple pillars or pieces of wood. The first attempt at representation consisted in fashioning a block of stone or wood into some semblance ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... family and social life is governed—is mainly the work of Christianity. The races which inhabit the vast Asiatic Continent are what they are chiefly from the influence of Buddhism and Mohammedanism, of the Brahminical, Confucian, and Taosean systems. In the fetichism of the rude tribes of Africa, still in the state of the childhood of humanity, we have what has been called the parler enfantin of religion:—it is that rude and unformed speech, as of spiritual ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various



Words linked to "Fetishism" :   paraphilia, fetishist, fetichism, belief



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