Suggestibility, Attribution Theory, & the Power of JuJu

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I've purchased a set of fetish objects from Congo.  They're carved figures of wood embedded with nails and strips of metal, stirring, provocative.  The ISD parent from whom I purchased them was storing the objects beneath a table, hidden from view.  They were just too scary.  She explained that a psychic friend had come over and determined that one in particular, the creepiest one, was radiating some big time juju.  Several friends and colleagues here, having seen the collection, have asked if I were just a little nervous having them around, the implication being that they might actually be radiating something with the potential of causing physical harm.

Now, I'm a fairly well-educated and traveled guy, with a critical mind, from the First-World, where such things as juju are generally considered nonsense, the stuff of superstition.  I was a science major, for goodness sake!  

Still, a part of me wondered.  A little part, but doesn't it only take a little part to leverage the snowball down the mountainside?  I wondered:  was that bit of cough connected to the fetish figures;  were they affecting my heath? And if they were, was it due to the emanation of physical juju, or the dynamic of suggestibility, which certainly has been demonstrated to have compelling physical consequences, indistinguishable from the external-material.

While some here would consider me cut-off from the direct experience of the world by my Western training, I consider myself fortunate to have a conceptual vocabulary, and a frame of reference, from which I may observe phenomena from a slightly displaced, less identified perspective, acting as a participant-observer.

To what do I attribute physical symptoms, and how does this vary among people and cultures?  I can imagine a Congolese villager entirely attributing that little cough to the presence of the fetish objects, identifying completely with their power and influence, reinforced through a lifetime of cultural training.

Still, I seemed to acquire this cough when . . .