I won't lay claim to below being enlightening but...
reification: literally, making things...
For Hegel, 'things' (plants, humans, cultures, whatever) don't have fixed properties: changing, coming into being, being renewed, degenerating, etc. Human thought takes a picture (freezes things) and thereby makes a world of fixity out of that which is always 'in process.'
Lukacs used term/concept to identify/describe process Marx identified whereby worker becomes separated from product of own labor. Confronting work as 'thing apart,' worker is subordinated to 'reified' product of labor. Michael Hoover