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No Envisioning Powerh, de Eric Wolf, via Rafael Evangelista:

Marx drew the concept of fetishism from studies of religion. The term came from the French scholar Charles De
Brosses, who described in his book on the Culte des Dieux fétiches (1760) the behavior of West African carvers who
supposedly first sculpted wooden images (“a thing made,” feitiço in Portuguese), to then treat them as if they were
divine beings. De Brosses, like others after him, saw in this “fetishism” evidence of primitive, nonlogical modes of
thought. Marx, however, applied it to the structural effects of a particular mode of mobilizing social labor – that of
capitalism.