ABSTRACT
In museums we see only the dead bodies of fetishes, “die toten Hülle…, ihre Kadaver.” The museum catalogue accompanying the Frankfurt 1986 exhibition on African fetishes leaves us with no illusion about the change the exhibited objects underwent before reaching their current resting place in the collections of Western museums. Gone are their spiritual inner powers—their supposed inner energies. What remains are ritual objects, composed of vegetal, mineral, and man-made elements, each with a unique form. 1 To those who made them, who lived with them, the artifact and its spiritual powers are supposed to have been one and the same. As a rule, however, the Europeans—obtaining them by accident, by force, through bargaining or theft—neither understood nor accepted the communicating powers attributed to such objects in the communities within which they functioned. 2 While crossing cultural and geographical borders on their way to Europe, they underwent complex changes in meaning. But why were these objects brought to Europe in the first place to end up in its museums? Did their fetish power indeed stop there, as the Frankfurt catalogue seems to imply, leaving us with only their dead fetish bodies, or was it in fact the museum that created their fetish identity?
