Totemism

Totemism refers to a specific set of practices within mainly indigenous religions and spiritualities where an object, animal, or plant is idolized as the protector and watcher of a clan or individual. Whereas some earlier theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, claim that totems served as the foundations for religion, others, such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, contend that totems are social instruments that govern moral boundaries based on the Oedipus complex. Claude Lévi-Strauss offers a different interpretation, suggesting that totems of clans or tribes are actually outward signs or symbols of the group's uniqueness to others. Within contemporary consumer culture, these theoretical insights, grounded in anthropological research, are significant in understanding the consumption and use of material objects.

The word totem is derived from the Ojibway, or Chippewa, tribes of North America, who utilized the term to identify the specific species of animals that the clans were named after. They also serve as a spiritual tool for both the clan and the individual. Within this culture and others, such as the indigenous culture of Australia, totems are protectors and guides and as such are considered sacred. Due to the value of these, taboos often are placed on the killing and consuming of the animals that are represented as the clan's totem. Furthermore, totems are often the object of worship and ascend to the status of deity. The word totem, however, was not extensively used across native cultures. Rather, it began to be used by Western disciplines to describe the connection of the clan spiritually to the natural world.

The problem of totemism as Lévi-Strauss describes, begins with English anthropologists J. F. McLennan, W. Robertson Smith, and Sir James Frazer when they began to compare primitive cultures against more supposedly advanced Western cultures. These early thinkers attempted to establish the origins of totemism by seeking to reveal a theoretical reasoning to what appeared to be an abnormal practice to the Westerner (Poole 1973). Yet, it was this need to explain the practices of the primitive cultures that led to the invention of the term totemism. As a result of this, a substantial range of analytical work on the subject emerged, particularly in the early 1900s.

French sociologist Durkheim provided, for instance, one of the most informative discussions on the use of totems in his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Using Robertson Smith's earlier ethnography on the spirituality of Aboriginal Australians, Durkheim sought for a sociological explanation for religion. He believed that using these primitive cultures as an empirical guide would allow the theorist to come closer to the origins of religious thought. From here, Durkheim argued a now famous distinction, that of the sacred and the profane. The sacred was not, however, just gods and spirits; rather, it could be seen in the way cultures worshipped animals, objects, and people. Durkheim believed that these things had no “inherently sacred” (1912/1995, 84) value but rather acquired their higher status through cultural expression. Sacred objects, for instance, sustain sacredness only through rituals and rites that bring the collective together in large groups and generate positive feelings that are attributed to the sacred object. Thus, for Durkheim, the sacred object requires continual ritual activity and separation from the profane world to maintain its high value.

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