Noting the vagueness between highly imperfect symbol of deity and fetish worship, being worsened by the restricted uses of images (e.g., painting, sculpture), there was a strong tendency to even forget that there is a god by ascribing special virtues to certain physical objects.Roy Andrew Miller observed that the Kokutai no Hongi and the Imperial Rescript on Education were also often worshipped as fetishes, and were respectfully placed and kept in household altars (kamidana). Minkisi
Made and used by the BaKongo of western DRC, a nkisi (plural minkisi) is a sculptural object that provides a local habitation for a spiritual personality. Though some minkisi have always been anthropomorphic, they were probably much less naturalistic or "realistic" before the arrival of the Europeans in the nineteenth century; Kongo figures are more naturalistic in the coastal areas than inland. As Europeans tend to think of spirits as objects of worship, idols become the objects of idolatry when worship was addressed to false gods. In this way, Europeans regarded minkisi as idols on the basis of false assumptions. Europeans often called nkisi "fetishes" and sometimes "idols" because they are sometimes rendered in human form. Modern anthropology has generally referred to these objects either as "power objects" or as "charms".
According to Hegel, Africans were incapable of abstract thought, their ideas and actions were governed by impulse, and therefore a fetish object could be anything that then was arbitrarily imbued with imaginary powers.In the 19th and 20th centuries, Tylor and McLennan, historians of religion, held that the concept of fetishism fostered a shift of attention away from the relationship between people and God, to focus instead on a relationship between people and material objects, and that this, in turn, allowed for the establishment of false models of causality for natural events. This they saw as religious fetishism for Santa Claus on Christmas day and does not consider the birth of Jesus a central problem historically and sociologically. Practice
The use of the concept in the study of religion derives from studies of traditional West African religious beliefs, as well as from Vodun, which in turn derives from those beliefs. Fetishes were commonly used in some Native American religions and practices. For example, the bear represented the shaman, the buffalo was the provider, the mountain lion was the warrior, and the wolf was the pathfinder the cause of the war. Japan
Kato Genchi cited jewelry, swords, mirrors, and scarves as examples of fetishism in Shintoism.