Fetishism and Anthropological Method
Throughout much of his work our author’s object is to invalidate the anthropological method. That method sets side by side the customs, ideas, fables, myths, proverbs, riddles, rites, of different races. Of their languages it does not necessarily take account in this process. Nobody (as we shall see) knows the languages of all, or of most, of the races whose ideas he compares. Now the learned professor establishes the ‘harm done’ by our method in a given instance. He seems to think that, if a method has been misapplied, therefore the method itself is necessarily erroneous. The case stands thus: De Brosses [{117a}] first compared ‘the so-called fetishes’ of the Gold Coast with Greek and Roman amulets and other material objects of old religions. But he did this, we learn, without trying to find out why a negro made a fetish of a pebble, shell, or tiger’s tail, and without endeavouring to discover whether the negro’s motives really were the motives of his ‘postulated fetish worship’ in Greece, Rome, or Palestine.