practice came to be called totemism. By the time the origin,
significance, and definition of totemism became a major
topic of controversy among theorists of tribal religion, the
area of ethnographic exemplification had shifted from the
Americas to central Australia. This shift was in part a conse-
quence of the splendid ethnography of Baldwin Spencer and
Francis James Gillen, but it also coincided with the wide-
spread adoption of the evolutionist notion of the “psychic
unity of mankind.” According to this idea, human culture
was essentially unitary and universal, having arisen every-
where through the same stages, so that if we could identify
a people who were “frozen” into an earlier stage, we would
observe modes of thought and action that were directly an-
cestral to our own. Australia, a continent populated original-
ly by hunting and gathering peoples alone, seemed to furnish
examples of the most primitive stages available.
Together with the concept of taboo, and perhaps also
that of mana, totemism became, for the later cultural evolu-
tionists, the emblem (or perhaps the “totem”) of primitive
thought or religion—its hallmark, and therefore also the key
to its suspected irrationality. The origin and significance of
totemism became the subject of widespread theoretical spec-
ulation during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Much of the early theorization developed along the lines of
E. B. Tylor’s conception of the evolution of the soul (for ex-
ample, totemic species as representations or repositories of
the soul), or as literalizations of names (as in Herbert Spen-
cer’s hypothesis that totems arose from an aberration in nick-
naming).
The controversy over totemism reached its peak after
the publication of Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910).
In that work, Frazer distinguished totemism, as implying a
relationship of equality or kinship with the totem, from reli-
gion, as a relationship with higher powers. He emphasized
the solidarity function of totemism, which knits people into
social groups, as a contribution to the “cause of civilization.”
Frazer’s speculation concerning the origin of totemism, how-
ever, came more and more to reflect the particulars of his
Australian exemplars. From an initial theory identifying the
totem as a repository for a soul entrusted to it for safekeep-
ing, Frazer turned to an explanation based on the Intichiuma
rites of central desert Aborigines, in which each subgroup is
responsible for the ritual replenishment of some (economi-
cally significant) natural species. The idea of the economic
basis of totemism was later revived, in simplified form, by
Bronislaw Malinowski. Finally, Frazer developed the “con-
ception theory” of totemism, on the model of the Aranda
people of central Australia, according to which a personal
totem is identified for a child by its mother on the basis of
experiences or encounters at the moment she becomes aware
that she is pregnant. A creature or feature of the land thus
“signified” becomes the child’s totem.
In 1910, Goldenweiser, who had studied under Boas,
published “Totemism: An Analytical Study,” an essay that
became the definitive critique of “evolutionary” totemism.
Goldenweiser called into question the unitary nature of the
phenomenon, pointing out that there was no necessary con-
nection between the existence of clans, the use of totemic
designations for them, and the ideology of a relationship be-
tween human beings and totemic beings. Each of these phe-
nomena, he argued, could in many cases be shown to exist
independently of the others, so that totemism appeared less
an institution or religion than an adventitious combination
of simpler and more widespread usages.
Despite the acuity and ultimate persuasiveness of Gol-
denweiser’s arguments, the more creative “evolutionary” the-
ories appeared in the years after the publication of his cri-
tique. Like Frazer’s theory, Durkheim’s conception of
totemism is exemplified primarily through Australian eth-
nography. Durkheim viewed totemism as dominated by
what he called a quasi-divine principle (Durkheim, 1915,
p. 235), one that turned out to be none other than the repre-
sentation of the social group or clan itself, presented to the
collective imagination in the symbolic form of the creature
that serves as the totem. Totemism, then, was a special case
of the argument of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a
work stating that religion is the form in which society takes
account of (reveres, worships, fears) its own collective force.
Sigmund Freud included the concept of totemism, as
an exemplar (like the notion of taboo) of contemporary ideas
of primitive thought, in his psychodynamic reassessment of
cultural and religious forms. Freud’s Totem and Taboo
(1918) projected human culture as the creative result of a pri-
mal oedipal guilt. The totem was selected and revered as a
substitute for the murdered father, and totemic exogamy
functioned as an expiatory resignation on the part of the sons
of claims to the women freed by the murder of the father.
In the last major theoretical treatment of “evolutionary”
totemism, Arnold van Gennep argued, against Goldenwei-
ser, that its status as a particular combination of three ele-
ments did not disqualify totemism’s integrity as a phenome-
non. Yet Gennep rejected the views of Durkheim and other
social determinists to the effect that totemic categorization
was based on social interests. Anticipating Lévi-Strauss, who
based his later views on this position (Lévi-Strauss, 1966,
p. 162), Gennep saw totemism as a special case of the more
general cultural phenomenon of classification, although he
did not pursue the implications of this position to the degree
that Lévi-Strauss did.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s modern critique effectively con-
cludes the attack on evolutionary totemism begun by Gol-
denweiser, although it aims at the term totemism itself. In To-
temism (1963), Lévi-Strauss critically reviews the history of
the subject and reaches the conclusion that totemism is the
illusory construct of an earlier period in anthropological the-
ory. Reviewing the more recent ethnographic findings of
writers like Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth, he arrives at
the proposition that it is the differences alone, among a series
of totemic creatures, that serve to distinguish the correspond-
ing human social units. He disavows, in other words, anyTOTEMISM 9251