addressing the question of whether a is a fetish, William McGaffey writes that the Kongo ritual system as a whole, 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 , 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. Therefore, McGaffey concludes, to call a a fetish is to translate "certain Kongo realities into the categories developed in the emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, post-enlightenment Europe." See also Boli References External links The Catholic Encyclopaedia: Fetishism pp. 147–159. Anthropology of religion Religious objects Amulets Talismans Cult images