Totemism

I had no intention of reading this book. The book I wanted to read was Levi-Strauss’s THE SAVAGE MIND. However, that book begins with “This book is complete in itself, but the problems it discusses are closely linked to those which I surveyed more hastily in a recent work entitled TOTEMISM (trans. Rodney Needham, London, 1964). Without wishing to oblige the reader to refer to it, it is proper to draw his attention to the connection between the two: the first forms a kind of historical and critical introduction to the second.” So I put down the book and ordered TOTEMISM. I do not have a strong background in anthropology. My reason for reading the book is to research another project.“Totemism” was the most difficult thing for me to understand in Durkheim’s THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. But I just decided that it wasn’t important for me to understand for my particular project. However, I was obviously not the only one who didn’t understand “Totemism.” On reading this book, I now understood why: because there’s no such thing! (Levi-Strauss compares it to writing about “Hysteria.”) Levi-Strauss carefully lays out all the reasons that such eminent and respected minds as Boas, Malinowsky, and Durkheim (among others) were mistaken. Most of the time, I had no difficulty following Levi-Strauss’s arguments, but I occasionally found it helpful to read some brief encyclopedic entries about some of the people and things he mentions. But those with a better background should have no problem. This was, for me at least, a fascinating book and I was awed by the solution that Levi-Strauss comes up with. According to him, the anthropologists had got it all wrong! For the correct answer, look all the way back to Rousseau (!) and then hear what the 20th Century philosopher Henri Bergson has to say. And Levi-Strauss makes it seem perfectly obvious. I can’t wait to start THE SAVAGE MIND. Five stars.

I loved this book, even did a painting on it. I can't imagine not having read it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French social anthropologist and ethnologist who was an important figure in the development of Structuralism.He wrote in the Introduction to this 1962 book, “Totemism is like hysteria, in that 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 of an objective institution, the systems themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation.” (Pg. 1)He states in the first chapter, “It should be emphasized that we employ the term totemism, skeptical though we are as to the reality of what it denotes, as it has been understood by the authors whose theories we are about to discuss. It would be inconvenient to put it always in quotation marks, or to prefix it with the word ‘so-called.’ … The method we adopt, in this case as in others, consists in the following operations: (1) define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed; (2) construct a table of possible permutations between these terms; (3) take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can yield necessary connections, the empirical phenomenon considered at the beginning being only one possible combination among others, the complete system of which must reconstructed beforehand.’ (Pg. 16)He says of the kinship system and that or marital exchange, “They must often have been adopted, for their own sake, by neighboring peoples who understood their function imperfectly… Their mode of existence remains ideological, and the natives ‘play’ at knowing how to use them. In other words.. it is not because they are totemic that such systems must be regarded as irregular; it is because they are irregular that they can only be totemic, totemism---instead of the social organization---then supplying, by reason of its speculative and gratuitous character, the only level on which it is possible for them to function.” (Pg. 53)He observes, “We may certainly imagine that in the beginning of social life and today still, individuals who were prey to anxiety should have originated, and still originate, compulsive modes of behavior such as ore observed among psychopaths; and that a kind of social selection should have operated on this multitude of individual variations in such a way, like natural selection by means of mutations, as to preserve and generalize those that were useful to the perpetuation of the group and the maintenance of order, and to eliminate the others. But this hypothesis, which is difficult to verify for the present, and impossible for the distant past, would add nothing to the simple statement that rites are born and disappear irregularly.” (Pg. 68)He argues, “Contrary to what Freud maintained, social constraints, whether positive or negative, cannot be explained, either in their origin or in their persistence, as the effects of impulses or emotions which appear again and again, with the same characteristics and during the course of centuries and millennia, in different individuals. For if the recurrence of the sentiments explained the persistence of customs, the origin of the customs ought to coincide with the origin of the appearance of the sentiments, and Freud’s thesis would be unchanged even if the parricidal impulse corresponded to a typica situation instead of a historical event.” (Pg. 69-70)Discussing the principle of the “union of opposites,” he comments, “The most general model of this, and the most systematic application, is to be found perhaps in China, in the opposition of the principles of Yang and Yin, as male and female, day and night, summer and winter, the union of which results in an organized totality (tao) such as the conjugal pair, the day, or the year. Totemism is this reduced to a particular fashion of formulating a general problem, viz., how to make opposition, instead of being an obstacle to integration, serve rather to produce it.” (Pg. 88-89)He notes, “It is certainly the case that one consequence of modern structuralism (not, however, clearly enunciated) ought to be to rescue associational psychology from the discredit into which it has fallen. Associationism had the great merit of sketching the contours of the elementary logic, which is like the least common denominator of all thought, and its only failure was not to recognize that it was an original logic, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, of the brain), and not an inert product of the action of the environment on an amorphous consciousness.” (Pg. 90)This book will be of keen interest to those studying Lévi-Strauss.

A classic of 20th Century intellectual creativity, that has been recognized as such, but that has not yet received the full attention it deserves. It has momentarelly be dispensed of as "old fashioned", when social sciences based on neuro-sciences has clearly not yet integrated the vast webb of implications the formulations of this volume generate.An absolute must, even - or because - many formulations are arguable. It is not a book that proposes conclusions, but awakens our intelligence.

Don't read this book for pleasure. Only read it if you have to. It's useful if you have a good reason to read it.

I wanted to read more from this author after reading this book.

Excellent book in excellent condition. Delivered as promised.Thank you!