30/05/2026
The Etymological Misunderstanding
In the 15th century, Portuguese traders arriving on the West African coast encountered objects that communities lived in deep relationship with. Objects that concentrated force, that mediated between visible and invisible worlds, that operated within sophisticated systems of knowledge.
They had no framework for what they were seeing. So they reached for feitiço, sorcery, something made by hand, and called it fetisso. In that act of naming, an entire cosmology was classified as primitive superstition.
The word traveled. Marx borrowed it for his critique of capitalism, commodity fetishism, the mystification of social relations through objects. Freud took it further into the territory of sexual pathology and displaced desire. Each thinker redirected the concept, but none questioned its founding assumption: that the original relationship between humans and charged objects was a form of delusion.
What none of them considered was the possibility that these objects represented something entirely different, a material intelligence, a spiritual technology, a language in which matter and spirit were never separated to begin with.
This is not an exclusively African phenomenon. The Celtic relic. The Shinto ofuda. The Andean conopa. The Huichol nierika. The Akan gold weight, to name just a few. Across every culture and continent, humans have understood that objects can concentrate force, hold memory, mediate relationships between worlds.
It is worth noting that this is not a universal human story. Many cultures, Japanese, Mexican, West African, Andean among others, never separated spirit from matter to begin with. The division between the sacred and the material is not a human default. It is a specific Western colonial inheritance.
Decolonizing Fe**sh is an attempt to offer a different perspective. Perhaps it is worth rethinking our mindset and have a new reading on old knowledge.
From .imaginations with ❤️XK
