Totemism 9780807046807, 0807046809

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Totemism

Totemism By

CLAUDE

LEVI-STR AU SS,

pr o fe sso r

OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY, COLLEGE DE FRANCE, PARIS

Translated from th e French by R o d n e y N e e d h a m , Lecturer in Social A nthropology, U niversity o f Oxford

BEACON PRESS

BOSTON

Fiist published in France in 1962 by Presses Universitaires de France, under the title,

Le totemisme aujourd'hui Copyright © 1962 by Presses Universitaires de France First English translation published in this Beacon Paperback edition in 1963 Copyright © 1963 by Beacon Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association International Standard Book Number: 0-8070-4671-X Fifth printing , September 1970

Contents T ra n s la to r’s N oth In tro d u c tio n , 1

1. T hb T o tem ic Illu s io n , 15 2 . A u stra lia n N om inalism , 33 3.

F unctionalist T heories

4.

T oward

5.

T otem ism fro m W ith in , 92 B ibliography, 105

the

N o tes, 109 Index, 111

of

I ntellect, 72

T otemism , 56

Translator's Note It is an honor to be associated with the work of Professor Levi-Strauss, and I wish to register my gratification at being in­ vited to collaborate in even so minor a role as that of translator. The translation was made during the tenure of a Fellowship (1961-1962) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Be­ havioral Sciences, Stanford, California. I should like to express my grateful appreciation to the Center for the idyllic circum­ stances and the facilities which it provided, and to the University of Oxford for generously permitting me to enjoy them. Special thanks are due to Miss Lorene Yap for typing the manuscript, and to Mrs. Jacqueline Monfort for her help in the library. R .N . Merton College, Oxford

. . The laws of logic which ultimately govern the world of the mind are, by their nature, essentially invariable; they are com­ mon not only to all periods and places but to all subjects of whatever kind, without any distinction even between those that we call the real and the chimerical; they are to be seen even in dreams. . . —Comte, Cours de Philosophic positive, 52e Le^on.

Introduction i 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 symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation. In the case of grand hysteria, the change is sometimes explained as an effect of a social evolution which has displaced the symbolic expression of mental troubles from the somatic to the psychic sphere: But the comparison with totemism suggests a relation of another order between scientific theories and culture, one in which the mind of the scholar himself plays as large a part as the minds of the people studied; it is as though he were seeking, consciously or unconsciously, and under the guise of scientific objectivity, to make the latter—whether mental patients or so-called ‘primi­ tives”—more different than they really are. The vogue of hys­ teria and that of totemism were contemporary, arising from the same cultural conditions, and their parallel misadventures may be initially explained by a tendency, common to many branches of learning toward the close of the nineteenth century, to mark off certain human phenomena—as though they constituted a natural entity—which scholars preferred to regard as alien to their own moral universe, thus protecting the attachment which they felt toward the latter. The first lesson of Freud’s critique of Charcot’s theory of hysteria lay in convincing us that there is no essential difference between states of mental health and mental illness; that the passage from one to the other involves at most a modification in certain general operations which everyone may see in himself; and that consequently the mental patient is our brother, since he is distinguished from us in nothing more than by an involu1

2

TOTEMISM

tion—minor in nature, contingent in form, arbitrary in defini­ tion, and temporary—of a historical development which is funda­ mentally that of every individual existence. It was more reassur­ ing to regard a mental patient as belonging to a rare and singular species, as the objective product of external or internal deter­ minants such as heredity, alcoholism, or mental weakness. In the same way, and so that pictorial academicism might feel secure, El Greco could not be a normahperson who was capa­ ble of rejecting certain ways of representing'the world, but he had to be afflicted by a malformation of the eyeball, and it was this alone that was responsible for his elongated figures. In this case, as in the other, cultural modes which, had they been accepted as such, would have meant ascribing a particularity to other modes to which a universal value had been attached, were as­ signed to the order of nature. By regarding the hysteric or the artistic innovator as abnormal, we accorded ourselves the luxury of believing that they did not concern us, and that they did not put in question, by the mere fact of their existence, an accepted social, moral, or intellectual order. The same motives, and signs of the same course, may be seen in the speculations which eventuated in the totemic illusion. Admittedly, it was no longer a question of a direct recourse to nature, though as we shall see there was frequent recourse to