Karl-Heinz Kohl is Professor Emeritus of Ethnology at Frankfurt Goethe University and former director of the Frobenius institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology in Germany.

• Foreword; Chapter 1- The fetishes of the West African coast (The proselyting missions to the Congo; Cultural contact and mimesis; Ancestor figures and fetishes; Twisted images of oneself ); Chapter 2 - The prohibition of images and the Christian cult of relics (On the history of the ban on images in Christianity; The legacy of ancient hero and funerary cults; Relics and altarpieces; Different categories of relics; Effect and use of relics; Reliquaries; Trade, theft and robbery of relics; Relic collections and religious enthusiasm; Criticism by the reformers); Chapter 3 - The invention of fetishism: travelogues and early critiques of religion (Charles de Brosses' concept of fetishism; The concept of fetishism during the Enlightenment; Religious pseudo-service and fetish-making: Immanuel Kant; Fetishism and the rule of tyranny: Hegel in Africa; Le grand-fetiche: Auguste Comte; The return of fetishism in capitalism: Karl Marx; The concept of the fetish in ethnology and psychology; The genesis of sexual fetishism according to Sigmund Freud; The sexualized commodity: a possible synthesis; Chapter 4 - Object genres (On the concept of the object; Classifications of objects; Objects of everyday use; Objects of exchange; Prestige and social distinction; Forms of object exchange; Exchanging gifts; Restricted exchange and simple barter; The hierarchy of objects; Captain Porter's muskets: the history of a transformation; Sacred objects: an initial definition); Chapter 5 - The genesis of sacred objects (Sacred objects as arbitrary signs: preliminary remarks; Jacob and the holy stone of Beth-el ; Searching for visions and sacred bundles among Native Americans; Totem animals and talismans: taking stock; The Aranda's conception of totemism and the stone cult; The BaKongos' minkisi, or what actually are 'fetishes'?; Greek cult images); Chapter 6 - Museum: temple of the muses (The re-ascent of the gods; Collections of antiquities; Treasuries, cabinets of curiosities and rarities; The end of the cabinet of curiosities; The emergence of the first public museums; The object and venue of the presentation; Museum exhibits: modernity's sacred objects?) Index.

Kohl, with his historical ethnological view, succeeds in reading philosophical criticism of culture as the ethnology of his own culture. Karl-Heinz Kohl's work shows very clearly that it is very revealing not to always focus primarily on the actors in a culture, but rather to focus on things as actors: the thing - sacred or banal - is obviously more alive than we think.Dorothee Kimmich (Professor of Modern German Literature, Karl-Eberhard University), Frankfurter Rundschau;This is a highly recommended book, and although it makes good reading it is never superficial. Karl-Heinz Kohl has delivered a sound cultural-historical theory on the sacralization of object. Gebhard Fartacek (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Social Anthropology; With his presence in the established print media of the republic, (Karl-Heinz Kohl) is undisputedly one of the best-known German anthropologists and, not least as a result, one of the most sought-after interlocutors for all those who still think ethnology is a voice worth listening to. Peter Probst (Tufts University), Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie; We must be grateful to Karl-Heinz Kohl for having written a book that while dealing with 'the power of things', approaches these objects from a comparative perspective, indebted as much to ethnographic accounts, as to philosophical, economic and psychoanalytic theory.Gustavo Benavides (Villanova University), Numen.