ABSTRACT
Eventually, African, Melanesian, and Hindu fetishes found their places in ethnological museums. In the general theory of primitive religion elaborated by Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century, these fetishes were distinguished from idols-for example, from the Greco-Roman figures with which Europeans were acquainted, and which represented visibly spiritual beings. As European trade relations with West Africa and beyond turned into colonial imperialism, African, Melanesian, and Polynesian fetishes were acquired by European colonists and collectors. Some African, Melanesian, and Polynesian fetishes came to be admired for the force of their forms; in Europe, they acquired the status of art objects. The new information technology makes available to the reader the languages and the symbolic systems in which eventually all cultures as well as all natural landscapes and species, everything that the people have perceived or can perceive, will have been identified, recorded, classified, compared, and interpreted.
