#Totems
A Glimpse of Totemic Illusion
A totem is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate ; and altogether special relation.James G. Frazer, Totemism, 1887.
Even if the notion of totem refers inevitably to cultural anthropology, its legacy in this field is quite paradoxical. The first official statement mentionning its existence dates back to 1791. John Long, an english interpreter working with the Indian community of Ojibwa, noticed a belief associated to what he spelled as ototemam. In 1869, an ethnographer called John MacLennan mentionned it in his works. However, it is following James Frazer’s seminal book that totem became an inconvertible milestone in the discipline.
Through a vast reportorial procedure he specified 41 classes of objects found amongst species of animals or plants that, in various primitive societies, implied reciprocity and mutual protection between men and their environement. According to him, “the totem protects the man, and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant”. From the begininning, totemism is both a religious and a social system that allow to position primitive societies outside rational patterns of thought.
Frazer distinguished three main categories containing this fundamental dualism. The “clan totem” was the more important of theses categories. It particularises a group of men and women who call themselves from generation to generation by the name of the totem. The “sex totem” contrasted distinctions between gender and the “individual totem” belongs to a single individual without involving any filiations. The mutual respect between human beings and the vegetal or animal kingdom provided the base of a religion of egality and fraternity.
Thanks to an inadvertently utopian approach, James Frazer introduced pioneering issues to the emerging Social sciences and totemism became a pivotal problem in various disciplines at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, a long tradition of emininent scholars, like Franz Boas, Malinowski, van Gennep, Radcliffe Brown, Emile Durkheim or Freud, rearranged theories in their respective disciplines for questionning the relevency of Darwinian evolution as a social paradigm.
These debates and controversies participated worldwide in the constitution of modern ethnology and prepared the ground for structuralism. However, despite this effervescence, the concept of totemism lead rapidly to an heuristic dead-end. In 1962, Levi-Strauss struck the coup de grace for dismantling this concept with his book “Le Totémisme aujourd’hui”. In the introductive chapter called “The Totemic Illusion”, he argues that totemism is a phantom that is definitely obsolete. According to him, the sole interest to “awake the dead” was to understand why so many “great minds were fascinated for years by a problem which today seems unreal”.
In brief, totemism quickly became a historical tote ball that seemed to have lost its methodological and theoretical relevance in the Social sciences. Today, totemism conserves more than ever utopian features and its inherent illusionism could open compelling queries about contemporary occidental cultures. Beyond controversies and methological debates, this notion still escaped any process of objectivation or rationale unification.
The logo of the electric company Westinghouse, the organic label, the picture of Tom in MySpace, a dress by Victor & Rolf, the year 1989 : the same feeling of luxuriance is provided by this collection of witty statuettes. There are 49 topics amongst people, objects, animals or events that act as leitmotivs for an alleged totemic system. These secular symbols evoke only a tiny assortment of the range of boundless and discrete entities that cross our mind every day. Removed from glossy magazines or luminous displays, they act as an arbitrary selection of various glimpses of popular culture. If the social and aesthetic dimension is obvious, their religiosity would depend on the context of their utilization.
After leaving a significant impact on personal trajectories or acting as emblems in collective memories, some of them could become ceremonial objects destined to serve as a cult in particular clans. They are a collection of parts that represent a totality and, consequently, provide a separate system of divinized species that subsumed a cosmogony inside our own universe. Furthermore, by justifying a continuity between human beings and its environement, the totemic illusion transcends the foundational nature/culture dichotomy.
The last sentences of Frazer’s book bring up a suprising comment: “It appears probable that the tendency of totemism to preserve certain species of plants and animals must have largely influenced the organic life of the countries where it has prevailed. But this question, with the kindred question of the bearing of totemism on the original domestication of animals and plants, is beyond the scope of the present article”. Regarding actual ecological adversities, it seems that the problem has not come into question since the industrial revolution. It is maybe never too late to “awake the dead”.
Joël Vacheron
