Totemism
Totemism is an anthropological concept describing systems in which human groups, often clans, associate themselves with animal or plant species to organize their kinship, alliances, and taboos. In Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that it is less a worship of animals than a way of thinking: species offer a grid for classifying the social world, ‘good to think with’ more than good to revere.
What Lévi-Strauss overturned
Before him, nineteenth-century anthropologists saw totemism as an archaic religion, a cult paid to animals. Lévi-Strauss flipped the perspective: clans do not venerate the eagle or the bear, they use them to think their own differences. If the Bear clan stands apart from the Eagle clan, it is the way the bear stands apart from the eagle: the species become a language. His phrase has endured, that animals are not only good to eat, they are good to think with.
What it changes for you
When you feel close to an animal, you repeat a very old gesture: thinking yourself through the living world. Totemism reminds you that this affinity is not only an intimate matter, it is also a way of placing yourself, of naming your spot within something larger. A kinship you choose with the world.
Sources
- , Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962)
- , Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912)