Essentially, fetishism is the
emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.
[...]
The 19th century saw the introduction of two theories of fetishism outside what was typically considered religion. The first was
Karl Marx's idea of
commodity fetishism, in which the social relationships involved in production are experienced not as relationships among people, but as value-relationships between things (commodities - including labour - and money). The second was
Alfred Binet's term
sexual fetishism, the sexual attachment to an object in place of a person.