The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud

by Robert Alun Jones

Overview

Though it is now discredited, totemism once captured the imagination of Sigmund Freud, Émile Durgakheim, James Frazer, and other prominent Victorian thinkers. In this lively intellectual history, Robert Alun Jones considers the construction of a theory and the divergent ways religious scholars, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists drew on totemism to explore and define primitive and modern societies' religious, cultural, and sexual norms. Combining innovative readings of individual scholars' work and a rich portrait of Victorian intellectual life, Jones brilliantly traces the rise and fall of a powerful idea.

First used to describe the belief systems of Native American tribes, totemism ultimately encompassed a range of characteristics. Its features included belief in a guardian spirit that assumed the form of an a particular animal; a prohibition against marrying outside the clan combined with a powerful incest taboo; a sacrament in which members of the totemic clan slaughtered a representative of the totemic species; and the tracing of descent through the female rather than the male. These attributes struck a chord with the late Victorian mentality and its obsession with inappropriate sexual relations, evolutionary theory, and gender roles. Totemism represented a set of beliefs that, though utterly primitive and at a great evolutionary distance, reassured Victorians of their own more civilized values and practices.

Totemism's attraction to Victorian thinkers reflects the ways in which the social sciences construct their objects of study rather than discovering them. In discussing works such as Freud's Totem and Taboo or Frazer's The Golden Bough, Jones considers how theorists used the vocabulary of totemism to suit their intellectual interests and goals. Ultimately, anthropologists such as A. A. Goldenweiser, Franz Boas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that totemism was more a reflection of the concerns of Victorian theorists than of the actual practices and beliefs of "primitive" societies, and by the late twentieth century totemism seemed to have disappeared altogether.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231134385
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/07/2005
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Alun Jones is professor emeritus of religious studies, history, and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Émile Durgakheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works and The Development of Durgakheim's Social Realism.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Totemism as Animal Worship
2. Totemism as Sacrament
3. Totemism as Utility
4. Totemism as Self-Transcendence
5. Totemism as Neurosis
Conclusion. The Secret of the Totem
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Ivan Strenski

An invaluable contribution to our grasp of an infamous episode in the history of the human sciences, Jones's comprehensive survey of the major players in the totemism controversy is unparalleled.

— Ivan Strenski, Holstein Family and Community Professor, University of California, Riverside, author of Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France

Robert Ackerman

For Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, and Malinowski, totemism was central in their efforts to describe the earliest stages of humanity's religious and social evolution. Jones's beautifully written study is easily the best analysis of this important chapter in the history of anthropology.

— Robert Ackerman, author of J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work

Editorial Reviews

It is extremely unlikely that we will ever be given a more illuminating, graceful, and authoritative account of totemism's parabolic career than this one.

Victorian Studies - Andrew Von Hendy

[The Secret of the Totem] belongs in all academic libraries... Highly recommended.

Choice

This highly scholarly book is a valuable reference for people interested in either totemism or intellectual history.

Journal of the History of Sexuality - Harriet Lyons

This highly scholarly book is a valuable reference for people interested in either totemism or intellectual history.

— Harriet Lyons

Journal of the History of Sexuality

It is extremely unlikely that we will ever be given a more illuminating, graceful, and authoritative account of totemism's parabolic career than this one.

— Andrew Von Hendy, Boston College

Victorian Studies