The contemporary Portuguese feitiço may refer to more neutral terms such as charm, enchantment, or abracadabra, or more potentially offensive terms such as juju, witchcraft, witchery, conjuration or bewitchment. The concept was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when Charles de Brosses used it in comparing West African religion to the magical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Later, Auguste Comte employed the concept in his theory of the evolution of religion, wherein he posited fetishism as the earliest (most primitive) stage, followed by polytheism and monotheism. However, ethnography and anthropology would classify some artifacts of monotheistic religions as fetishes. The eighteenth-century intellectuals who articulated the theory of fetishism encountered this notion in descriptions of "Guinea" contained in such popular voyage collections as Ramusios Viaggio e Navigazioni (1550), de Brys India Orientalis (1597), Purchass Hakluytus Posthumus (1625), Churchills Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732), Astleys A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1746), and Prevosts Histoire generale des voyages (1748).The theory of fetishism was articulated at the end of the eighteenth century by G. W. F. Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
In addressing the question of whether a nkisi 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 systems symbolic apparatus, including minkisi, 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 nkisi 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
Andrew Lang, Fetishism and Spiritualism, The Making of Religion, (Chapter VIII), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 147–159.