Totems - Evolutionary Theories, Durkheim And Freud, Totem And Taboo., Critique And Elaboration, The Structural Study Of Totemism
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The word totem is an anglicized rendering of the Ojibwa word ninto:tem. It refers to an animal or plant species emblematic of a specific group, notably a clan. While the term was originally applied only to practices of natives of northeastern North America, it was soon extended to refer to superficially similar phenomena around the globe, whose observances came to be known as "totemism."
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The concept of totemism as a form of religion was first formulated by John McLennan, one of the most prominent Victorian anthropologists, in an article entitled "The Worship of Animals and Plants" (1869–1870). McLennan based his concept on similarities between the beliefs and practices of native Australians on one hand, and native North Americans, especially from the northeast…
Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), emphatically rejected Frazer's claim that totemism did not constitute a religion. On the contrary, he used totemism as a case of "the simplest and most primitive religion that observation can make known to us" (1995 ed., p. 21), basing his assertion on Australian ethnography (especially Spencer and Gillen) …
A year later, Sigmund Freud was to suggest in Totem and Taboo (1913) that totemism was the expression of a psychological, rather than social, reality. His theory was predicated on the link between totemism and exogamy, which Freud took to be a manifestation of the horror of incest. He was also profoundly inspired by Robertson Smith's hypothesis of the ritual sacrifice and consumption of the…
By the time Durkheim and Freud were writing, the very concept of totemism had already come under attack in a long article by American anthropologist A. A. Goldenweiser, "Totemism: An Analytical Study" (1910). Goldenweiser began by listing the main features believed to be symptomatic of totemism: In a comparison of cases from around the world, he arrived at the devastating conclusion …
Paradoxically, Claude Lévi-Strauss began his short book Totemism (1962) with the contention that totemism as such did not really exist, comparing it to the concept of hysteria that emerged in psychology at about the same period: "once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness, or o…
Bulmer, Ralph. "Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands." Man, n.s., 2 (1967): 5–25. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York:…
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