Word: fetishizing
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...houseposts or columns -indicates a harmonious equilibrium with the world and its spirit forces. Kneeling "conveys belief that life demands the beautiful giving of the self to persons of honor." A standing posture implicitly suggests power, life, fortitude, kingliness-as in (amid a host of other examples) the sacred fetishes of Zaire, wooden figures into which tribesmen ceremonially hammer nails as a proof of moral integrity; the fetish, they believe, will kill any evil-spirited person who adds a nail...
...barbarous relic." Fort Knox and Tiffany have corrupted our responses to gold in art, but this remarkable show does at least enable one to get some sense of a culture in which the metal was not yet ruined, as a sculptural material, by its role as an economic fetish...
...were so bad that they could not have been written by Shakespeare. This was more dangerous than any of Samuel Johnson's incredibly insensitive moral judgments, because it made textual criticism the servant of literary taste instead of a neutral point of departure. The present century has made a fetish out of scholarly objectivity, with good reason; let us hope that the achievements of editors like Gwynne Evans in restoring Shakespeare is as real as it looks now, and not the kind of self-delusion we condemn in earlier ages...
...smaller characters illustrate the quality that Ricardo and Bangs lack. Paul Seltzer as the disbelieving doctor, Hope Brokman as a jilted secretary and Dorothy Meyer as a barroom pick-up all have flamboyantly intriguing people holding up their perfect faces. These personalities can support director Steven Glovsky's fetish for unneccessarily broad and stylized gestures, which hang ridiculously on most of the other characters...
...mother wasn't awfully enthused about the ditches. Or about the rocks, for that matter. In fact, she wasn't awfully enthused about this childhood football fetish of mine in any aspect. "You're going to break your teeth on those rocks," she told me. But I never did break my teeth, even in high school. I think secretly she never forgave me for that...