Editing Fetishism (section)

==''Minkisi''==
Made and used by the [[Kongo people|BaKongo]] of western [[Democratic Republic of the Congo|DRC]], a ''[[nkisi]]'' (plural {{Lang|kg|minkisi}}) is a sculptural object that provides a local habitation for a spiritual personality. Though some {{Lang|kg|minkisi}} have always been anthropomorphic, they were probably much less "naturalistic" or "realistic" before the arrival of the Europeans in the nineteenth century; Kongo figures are more naturalistic in the coastal areas than inland.<ref name="MacGaffey 1994" /> As Christians tend to think of spirits as objects of worship, idols become the objects of idolatry when worship was addressed to false gods. In this way, European Christian colonialists regarded {{Lang|kg|minkisi}} as idols on the basis of religious bias.

The foreign Christians often called {{Lang|kg|nkisi}} "fetishes" and sometimes "[[Cult image|idols]]" because they are sometimes rendered in human form or semi-human form. Modern anthropology has generally referred to these objects either as "power objects" or as "charms".

In addressing the question of whether a {{Lang|kg|nkisi}} is a fetish, William McGaffey writes that the Kongo ritual system as a whole,

<blockquote>bears a relationship similar to that which Marx supposed that "political economy" bore to capitalism as its "religion", but not for the reasons advanced by Bosman, the Enlightenment thinkers, and Hegel. The irrationally "animate" character of the ritual system's symbolic apparatus, including {{Lang|kg|minkisi}}, divination devices, and witch-testing ordeals, obliquely expressed real relations of power among the participants in ritual. "Fetishism" is about relations among people, rather than the objects that mediate and disguise those relations.<ref name="MacGaffey 1994" /></blockquote>

Therefore, McGaffey concludes, to call a {{Lang|kg|nkisi}} a fetish is to translate "certain Kongo realities into the categories developed in the emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, post-enlightenment Europe."<ref name="MacGaffey 1994" />