sort of analogic relationship (of substance, origin, identity,
or interest) between a totem and its human counterpart, and
he thus reduces totemism to a special case of denomination
or designation. This leaves unexplained (or reduces to mere
detail) perhaps the bulk of the ethnographic material to to-
temism, concerned as it is with special ties and relationships
between totem and human unit. In order to deal with this
question, Lévi-Strauss developed, in The Savage Mind
(1966), his notion of the “science of the concrete,” in which
totemic “classifications” are but a special instance of a more
widespread tradition of qualitative logic. Thus Lévi-Strauss
is able to substitute the systematic tendencies of an abstract
classifying schema for the specific relations between a totem
and its social counterpart.
What is the place of totemism in the life of an ongoing
community? Consider the Walbiri, an Aboriginal people of
the central Australian desert. Walbiri men are divided into
about forty lines of paternal descent, each associated with a
totemic lodge devoted to the lore and ritual communication
with an ancestral Dreaming totem (kangaroo, wallaby, rain,
etc.). When they enact the Dreaming rituals, the men are be-
lieved to enter the “noumenal” phase of existence (Meggitt,
1972, p. 72) and to merge with the totemic ancestors them-
selves. Here the analogies between human beings and totem-
ic creatures are sacramentally transformed into identities,
made ritually into real relationships of mutual origin and cre-
ation, so that men of the different lodges actually belong to
different totemic species. When the ritual is concluded, how-
ever, they return to everyday “phenomenal” existence and re-
assume their human character, so that the totemic designa-
tions revert to mere names, linked to respective moieties,
linked subsections, and other constituents of the complex
Walbiri social structure.
Thus the “noumenal phase” of Walbiri life, the ritual
state, is constituted by the analogies drawn between human
beings and their totems, whereas in the “phenomenal phase”
these analogies collapse into arbitrary labels. Only in the lat-
ter phase does Lévi-Strauss’s proposition about the “differ-
ences alone” being the basis for coding human groups apply,
for, as human beings, the members of these subsections and
moieties can marry one another’s sisters and daughters,
something that different species cannot do. Within the same
culture, in other words, totemic distinctions can serve either
as “labels,” to code the differences or distinctions among
human groups, or, by expanding into metaphoric analogues,
accomplish the religious differentiation of men into different
“species.”
The totemic symbolization of social units is, in many
cultures, integrated into a larger or more comprehensive
categorial or cosmological scheme, so that the totemic crea-
tures themselves may be organized into broader categories.
Among the Ojibwa of North America, totems are grouped
according to habitat (earth, air, or water). Aboriginal Austra-
lia is distinctive in carrying this tendency to the extreme of
“totem affiliation,” in which all the phenomena of experi-
ence, including colors, human implements, traits, weather
conditions, as well as plants and animals, are assigned and
grouped as totems (Brandenstein, 1982, p. 87). These uni-
versalized systems, in turn, are generally organized in terms
of an overarching duality of principles. Brandenstein identi-
fies three of these—quick/slow, warm/cold, and round/flat
(large/small)—as generating, in their various permutations
and combinations, the totemic-classificatory systems of ab-
original Australia (ibid., pp. 148–149). A similarly compre-
hensive system is found among the Zuni of the American
Southwest, for whom totemic clans are grouped in respective
association with seven directional orientations (the four di-
rections, plus zenith, nadir, and center), which are also
linked to corresponding colors, social functions, and, in
some cases, seasons.
At the other extreme is individuating, or particularizing
totemism, for the individual is also a social unit. Among the
Sauk and Osage of North America, traits, qualities, or attri-
butes of a clan totem will be assigned to clan members, as
personal names, so that members of the Black Bear clan will
be known for its tracks, its eyes, the female of the species,
and so on (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 173). Among the Kujamaat
Diola of Senegal, on the other hand, individuals are totem-
ized secretly through relationships with personalized animal
doubles, which are produced by defecation from their own
bodies, and which live in the bush near their dwellings
(Sapir, 1977). Among the Usen Barok of New Ireland, indi-
vidual names are taken from plant or animal manifestations
of the essentially formless masalai, or tutelary clan spirit.
Wherever personal names are conceived of as a relation be-
tween the bearer of the name and some phenomenal entity,
we can consider naming itself to be a form of individual to-
temism.
Totemic individuation of this sort, in which the charac-
ter of the name itself bears a specific relational significance,
occurs frequently in the naming of modern sports teams, and
in formal or informal national symbols, such as the eagle or
the bear. Totemism has been proposed as the antecedent of
the syncretistic religion of ancient Egypt, with possible indi-
rect connections to the Greco-Roman pantheon. Predynastic
Egypt was subdivided into a large number of local territorial
units called nomes, each identified through the worship of
a particular theriomorphic deity. As the unification of Egypt
involved the political joining of these nomes, so the evolu-
tion of Egyptian religion led to the combining of the totemic
creatures into compound deities such as Amun-Re (“ram-
sun”), or Re-Harakhte (“sun-hawk”). There are possible ar-
chaic connections of these theriomorphic deities, with Ho-
meric Greek divinities: for example, the cow Hathor with the
“ox-eyed Hera.” Alternatively, of course, these divinities may
have acquired such characterizations as the heritage of an in-
digenous totemism.
Totemism may not be the key to “primitive thought”
that Frazer, Durkheim, and Freud imagined it to be, but the
use of concrete phenomenal images as a means of differentia-9252 TOTEMISM