Totemism

The word totem comes from the Ojibwa, an Algonkin language from the Great Lakes region of North America. It first appeared in ethnographical literature in 1791 in the memoirs of a fur merchant, John Long, but it remained unnoticed until John MacLennan used it as an analytical category in two papers he published in 1869 and 1870. MacLennan defined totemism as the practice, reported not only in North America but also in Australia, of naming clans and exogamous groups according to an animal or a vegetal species. He showed that this practice was accompanied by the belief in a special, intimate relationship between the members of each clan and their totem, sometimes reinforced by the idea they all descend from it. Members of each clan are thus said to treat their totem with the respect due to an ancestor: they must not kill it if it is an animal, cut it or gather it if it is a plant, and they must not eat it. Animal totems are preponderant among North American tribes. For instance, the main clans of the Ojibwa at the beginning of 20th century were named marten, loon, eagle, salmon, bear, sturgeon, bobcat, lynx, crane, and chicken. Australian totems, however, often include plant names, and also meteorological phenomena (such as wind, hail, or lightening), artifacts (such as anchor, boomerang, or pirogue), and even sometimes terms related to the human body (such as boy, bosom, clitoris, or corpse).

It might seem irrelevant in at least two ways to devote an entry to totemism in this Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience. Death has been indeed thoroughly absent from the passionate debate on the nature and origin of totemism that has agitated not only anthropology but also philosophy and psychoanalysis from the end of the [Page 965]19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, since Claude Lévi-Strauss convincingly revoked totemism as an “illusion” in his famous essay written in 1962, this idea has tended to disappear from the social sciences. However, totemism has been recently revived in anthropological analysis by Philippe Descola, and it seems that death, as a human experience, could hold a significant role in the new understanding of this problematic concept.

The Golden Age of Totemism: Australian Hopes and Disillusions

The two articles by MacLennan initiated a heated debate through which the greatest names in anthropology, among which James George Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Émile Durkheim, and Franz Boas laid the early foundations of the discipline. But the interest in totemism reached out from the limits of anthropology to the whole humanities. The debate involved not only philosophers but also psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud's celebrated essay Totem and Taboo in 1913. All these authors believed that totemism could give insight into the most “primitive” forms of religion, and they rivaled in reconstituting from what could be observed at their time a hypothetical “original” state of human thought, in which culture would hardly be separated from nature.

In 1887, it was James George Frazer who gave the first synthetic account of the available anthropological knowledge on totemism in a small book simply called Totemism. He updated this work in 1910, publishing four volumes of the most monumental compilation of data on this topic. By the beginning of 20th century, the focus of the debate had shifted from North America to Australia, thanks to the extensive description by Walter Baldwin Spencer, Francis James Gillen, and Alfred William Howitt of several Aboriginal societies, such as the Aranda of the central desert. Their description of “still active” and more “primitive” totemic systems aroused the hope they would complete the American data, which were sometimes patchy and believed to represent a more “evolved” state of totemic religion. Australian facts, nevertheless, brought more problems than solutions, and while Frazer and Durkheim kept praising the data provided by Australian ethnography as the “purest” form of totemism ever described, they strove to make it fit in a single model together with the knowledge already available.

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