What Is Totemism? How Anthropologists Explained It

The Italian encyclopedia Treccani describes totemism as the customs, beliefs and prohibitions that follow from one idea: a person or a group and its totem are supposed to be bound by kinship and to protect each other. The totem is most often an animal species and only occasionally a plant or a natural phenomenon.

What totemism describes

Treccani separates individual totemism from group or social totemism. In the individual kind an animal protects a person, who in return neither kills nor eats its species. In the group kind the totem can belong to families, local groups, clans, phratries or tribes; a tribal totem is fairly rare. Frazer, in his 1887 book, counted at least three kinds. The clan totem belongs to the whole clan and passes down the generations; the sex totem is shared by all the men or all the women of a tribe; the individual totem belongs to one person and is not inherited. When he speaks of totemism without qualification, he says, he means the clan totem.

For Frazer a fetish is a single object, while a totem is always a class, generally an animal or plant species.

Esempio pratico: in Frazer’s description, the members of a totemic clan believe they share the same blood, descend from a common ancestor and owe each other obligations. The totem protects the person; in return the person spares the animal and leaves the plant alone, neither cutting nor gathering it. Lang adds that the totem is almost always tied to marriage rules (people with the same totem may not marry one another, except in central Australia), and that as a rule an individual may not kill or eat the object that gives his group its name, except in extreme necessity.

The ban on marriage inside the totemic group is, for Treccani, a taboo as important as the one against killing the totem, and many scholars have treated exogamy (the rule of marrying outside one’s own group) and totemism as two faces of one phenomenon.

Totem meaning and where the word comes from

The word comes from the language of the Ojibwe, also called Chippewa, of North America. Treccani credits the interpreter J. Long with bringing it into English in 1791; Hecht gives the same year. According to Frazer, Long was an interpreter for Native peoples and wrote the word “totam” in a travel book published in London; the exact spelling of the Ojibwe word, he adds, is uncertain.

According to Lang, Long used it for the personal protector, usually an animal, that each person chose for himself. In the narrower usage, Lang writes in 1911, “totem” means instead an object, usually an animal or plant species, that gives its name to a group of real or supposed kin. Lang himself noted that scholars used the word in too many different senses.

The first theories: a religion of the beginning?

For Treccani, totemism counted for a long time in the study of religion because of two readings: McLennan, Robertson Smith and Tylor saw in it one of the oldest religions, Durkheim the symbolic foundation that holds the group together. The first systematic theories date from the last third of the 19th century.

Scholar	How he explained totemism	Source
McLennan	Animal worship (zoolatry); animal, plant and bird gods would precede gods in human form	Treccani, Hecht
Spencer	Ancestor worship: the animal aspect of the ancestor would arise from nicknames	Treccani
Tylor	Belief in the transmigration of souls, from animals to humans	Treccani
Frazer	The idea of the “external soul”, kept outside the body; later, with Spencer and Gillen, rites to multiply the totem species	Treccani
Durkheim	Humanity’s original religion, in which the unity of the group is expressed in the cult of the shared totem	Treccani
Freud	The Oedipus complex, with the totem animal symbolizing the father	Treccani

Durkheim wrote about it in 1912, and according to Hecht he rejected in that year the evolutionary thinking of his predecessors: in his vocabulary “elementary” means the simplest and most exemplary form of religion. The full argument is in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and his intellectual biography is in Émile Durkheim: thought and works. As early as 1902, the Catholic Encyclopedia reports, he had written that the totem is first of all a religious principle.

Freud (on him, see Sigmund Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis) saw in totemism, Hecht summarizes, an expression of guilt toward an offended father, appeased by total obedience.

The explanations did not converge. Lang judged all theories of the origin of totemic exogamy to be conjecture, and on the Arunta of Australia he noted that the theories of the origin of totemism diverge beyond reconciliation. Frazer himself proposed several explanations (economic and magical, external soul, conception) and abandoned more than one, the Catholic Encyclopedia reports.

The doubt: a category built by scholars

In the early 20th century, with the evolutionist schemes gone, the facts were looked at again with a more critical eye. With E. Reuterskiöld came the doubt that the phenomena called totemism had a single origin, and the most contested point became their universality. Alexander Goldenweiser had already pointed out in 1910, according to Treccani, how elusive the phenomenon was to any definition.

Esempio pratico: Lang observed in 1911 that the “religious” status of the totem is lowest exactly where its influence on social rules is greatest, and the other way round.

In 1916 Franz Boas concluded that totemism is an artificial unit, not a natural one, and that the unity of the concept is subjective. Boas agreed with Goldenweiser that the concrete content varies widely from one area to another. What got grouped under “totemism” from case to case were religious practices of various kinds, taboos, names and symbols, and for Boas there was no proof that they formed a necessary whole, what Goldenweiser called the “totemic complex”.

Boas also criticized the method of Frazer and Durkheim, who explained ethnic phenomena as the effect of one psychological process. He noted as well that Wundt and Durkheim put the identification of humans with animals at the center, a different problem from totemism as a social institution. His own proposal: since the kinship group and exogamy are universal and totemism is not, totemism arose where exogamy already existed.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Boas’s research in northwestern Canada and that of Spencer and Gillen in Australia dealt the decisive blow to the evolutionary theory.

Lévi-Strauss: totemism as a way of classifying

In 1962, according to Treccani, Lévi-Strauss showed that scholars had projected the very category of totemism onto non-European material. What his predecessors had missed, for him, was that totemic operations are systematic and serve to classify. Read this way, totemism becomes one of many ways of ordering the world with symbols and logic, part of what Lévi-Strauss calls “the savage mind”.

Hecht presents Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist study as a broad critique of the evolutionary thinking that preceded it. In his judgment Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that totemic relations run through the whole history of religious traditions, including outside tribal societies, and that they are tied to the binary oppositions of thought. Hecht concludes that totemism, understood as a distinct starting stage of religious evolution, does not exist. What remains are deities and totemic relations that help explain kinship and how authority is legitimized in some traditions.