Chapter 3 - The illusion of totemism

Summary

Natural species are chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism)

Implicated from the very beginning in early anthropological thinking about on the one hand incest, exogamy and the origins of society and on the other, fetishism, magic and the origins of religion, was the category “totemism.” In this chapter we will begin by tracing the formation of the category through the writings of Frazer and Malinowski, Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown and Freud. This survey, for the sake of brevity, will not be exhaustive. These thinkers were chosen because of the importance of their contributions not merely to the analysis of totemism but to the anthropology of religion generally, and it should be noted that these scholars do not neatly correspond to those discussed by Lévi-Strauss in either Totemism or The Savage Mind. Nevertheless, drawing from Lévi-Strauss’ Totemism (1991) and The Savage Mind (1966), we will suggest that Lévi-Strauss’ dramatic re-formulation of the question of totemism formed the opening of a “second front” in Lévi-Strauss’ assault on that evolutionary line of thinking that had defined the emergence of social anthropology as a discipline and marked totemism's liquidation as a discrete category of anthropological analysis.