Summary
Totemism is the ritual and symbolic system through which a clan or social group identifies itself with a natural species or object — the totem — treating the totem as sacred, as the emblem of group identity, and as the focus of collective religious practice. Emile Durkheim’s analysis of Australian Aboriginal totemism in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) made totemism famous as the supposed elementary form of religious life — the simplest case from which all religion could be understood. Durkheim argued that the totem’s sacredness is not inherent but derived: the clan worships the totem because the totem represents the clan itself, making totemism the mechanism through which society worships a transfigured image of itself. Totemism became the central puzzle of early anthropology and, through Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), a formative category for psychoanalytic anthropology.
The Totemic Principle
Totemism is organized around the clan — the most primitive social unit — and the totem functions simultaneously as the clan’s name, its emblem, and the object of its religious life, making social and religious identity coextensive (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). The totem operates as a heraldic emblem analogous to a coat of arms: just as European noble families adopted an animal or vegetable crest as a collective identity marker, clans adopt a totemic animal or plant as the sign that represents the group to others and to itself (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). Durkheim notes that one might wonder whether European heraldry is not directly derived from totemism.
What is actually sacred in totemism is not the natural animal or plant itself but the emblematic design — the geometric marks and abstract representations applied to weapons, dwellings, and ceremonial objects. These designs are not always or even generally realistic representations of the totemic species; it is the mark alone that gives objects their sacred character, and when an object is stripped of this mark it loses its sacred quality at once (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). This means that the sacred object in totemism is a sign — the sign of the collectivity — rather than any natural being.
The most sacred objects in Australian totemism are the churinga: stone or wood objects of the Arunta, believed to house the souls of ancestors. The ertnatulunga — the subterranean storehouse where churinga are kept — functions as a sacred ark: the profane cannot approach it, especially women and the uninitiated (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). The bull-roarer is more sacred than the emu or the kangaroo it represents — demonstrating that the emblem of the collective stands higher in the hierarchy of sacredness than the natural being it depicts (Durkheim, Emile, 1912).
The totemic principle — the sacred force at the heart of totemism — is best understood as an anonymous, impersonal force that permeates all members of the clan and all totemic species simultaneously; it is not localized in any particular being but is a diffuse power that passes between persons, animals, and plants (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). Durkheim aligns this with mana, the Melanesian concept of a supernatural force distinct from physical power that acts for good and evil and can be carried by persons or objects (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). Mana, wakan (Sioux), orenda (Iroquois), and the totemic principle all point toward the same underlying religious reality: an impersonal force that is the first form under which humans represented the world of sacred things (Durkheim, Emile, 1912).
Totemism and Social Solidarity
The god of the clan — the totemic principle — is nothing other than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable that serves as totem (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). This is Durkheim’s central theorem: totemism is the mechanism through which a social group worships a transfigured image of itself. The theorem requires that totemism be explained from the structure of the clan, not from individual psychology or biological error. Durkheim dismissed Frazer’s “conceptional totemism” — the hypothesis that totemism arose from a primitive theory of conception whereby a woman became pregnant when a spirit of a particular species entered her body — on the grounds that it reduced a social institution to individual biological misunderstanding rather than locating its origin in the collective life of the group.(Durkheim, Emile, 1912) The feeling of an external, superior force that religion captures is real — society genuinely does transcend the individual, impose obligations, and inspire awe. The error of religion is not its apprehension of such a force but only its symbolic representation of that force as a supernatural being (Durkheim, Emile, 1912).
The emotional reality behind this representation is produced by collective assembly. When clan members gather for ritual activity, a kind of electricity forms from their contact, transporting participants to heightened degrees of exaltation and leading them to feel dominated by an external power (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). This collective effervescence is the experiential mechanism through which society becomes palpable as a force greater than any individual, and through which the sacredness of the totem is periodically regenerated.
The classificatory reach of totemism extends beyond persons to the natural world. Each clan’s totem organizes that clan’s relations with particular animal and plant species; the natural world is thereby divided into sacred and profane species according to clan associations. The classification of natural things reproduces the classification of men: the first systematic ordering of the natural world was modelled on social structure (Durkheim, Emile, 1912).
Totemism also generates subdivisions within the clan. Sex totemism — the practice of each sex carrying its own totem separate from clan totems — shows that totemic organization structures social categories beyond the clan, potentially representing an archaic layer of totemic religion preceding clan organization (Durkheim, Emile, 1912). Individual totemism (the personal totem or guardian spirit) is secondary to clan totemism: the personal totem is a particularization of the clan’s totemic force assigned to an individual member, not an independent phenomenon (Durkheim, Emile, 1912).
Freud’s Reception
Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), published the year after Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, appropriated totemism as the key to the origins of civilization. Freud argued that the original totemic clan had murdered and eaten the primal father, creating from that deed the twin prohibitions of totemism (do not kill the totem animal) and exogamy (do not marry within the clan). Where Durkheim saw in totemism the mechanism of social solidarity, Freud saw in it the residue of an original crime and the foundation of guilt. The two readings agree in making totemism fundamental but disagree completely about what it is fundamental to: for Durkheim, solidarity; for Freud, repression. Both interpretations have been substantially criticized by later anthropologists as reading too much into thin and disputed ethnographic evidence, and totemism as a universal category has itself been contested since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Totemism (1962).
See Also
- emile-durkheim
- sacred-profane
- collective-effervescence
- mana
- ritual-healing
- animism
- indigenous-medicine
Sources
Evidence cards: dur12-ch03-001, dur12-ch03-002, dur12-ch03-004, dur12-ch03-005, dur12-ch03-006, dur12-ch03-007, dur12-ch03-008, dur12-ch03-009, dur12-ch03-013, dur12-ch03-014, dur12-ch03-015, dur12-ch03-017, dur12-ch03-018, dur12-ch03-019, dur12-ch03-020