We both give meanings to, and derive our own meanings from, the
multitude of objects we live amongst. Trivial things remind us of
past loves; old things embody an idealized past; on other things we
believe our fate depends. In this book, Karl-Heinz Kohl describes
relationships to sacred objects from the viewpoint of anthropology
and the history of religion, showing how people of all cultures
ascribe quite immeasurable value to things and make their own
destiny dependent on these objects.During their voyages of
discovery, Portuguese seafarers came across Africans who attributed
mysterious powers to objects that became known as ‘fetishes’,
and the concept of ‘fetishism’ soon cast a spell over European
thinkers. The Church condemned it as the work of the devil, while
for the philosophers of the Enlightenment it proved that no
religion was rational at heart. But the fascination remained –
Hegel, Comte, Marx and Freud – each of them tried to solve the
riddle of fetishism in their own way. And it is fetishism that is
the starting point for this book, which offers nothing less than a
comprehensive theory of the sacred object,from the stone cult of
ancient Israel and the Bible’s prohibition on images, to the
medieval cult of reliquaries, Native American sacred bundles,
magical figures of the BaKongo, and the idols of the Ancient
Greeks. Tracing the fate of ancient cult images since their
rediscovery in the Renaissance, Kohl comes to a striking
conclusion: in the secularized societies of the Global North, it is
the museum cult that is the bastion of contemporary
fetishism.‘[Karl-Heinz Kohl] is undisputedly one of the
best-known German anthropologists and one of the most sought-after
interlocutors for all those who still think ethnology is a voice
worth listening to.’Peter Probst (Tufts University), Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie ‘Karl-Heinz Kohl’s work shows very clearly that
it is very revealing not to always focus primarily on the actors in
a culture, but rather to focus on things as actors: the thing
–sacred or banal – is obviously more alive than we
think.’Dorothee Kimmich (Karl-Eberhard University), Frankfurter
Rundschau. ‘We must be grateful to Karl-Heinz Kohl for having
written a book that while dealing with ‘the power of things’,
approaches these objects from a comparative perspective, indebted
as much to ethnographic accounts, as to philosophical, economic and
psychoanalytic theory. Gustavo Benavides (Villanova University),
Numen
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