ABSTRACT

The distancing from the veneration of relics in Europe can be seen by examining the confrontation with a non-European form of worship: fetishism. A genealogy of the body honored as a salvific good and as a distributed commodity has to begin with the concept of the fetish, precisely because it is connected with the history of the European veneration of objects pursued here and reaches down into the present. The determination of the relationship to the body, which has remained relevant right down to modern medicine, can be grasped in an exemplary way through the conceptual history at whose end fetishism stands. The fetish and fetishism became central concepts of the "long nineteenth century" as Pietz write, quoting Eric Hobsbawm. Their path leads from the origins of the European Enlightenment down to the modern period. Through the Enlightenment, fetishism achieved wide currency in the language first of the sciences and then everyday life.