Totemism is the institution by which a clan identifies itself with a totem — usually a species of animal or plant, sometimes a natural object or phenomenon — which serves at once as the group's name, its emblem and its sacred thing. Members believe themselves kin to the totem and to one another, they are forbidden to kill or eat it except on ritual occasions, they may not marry within the totemic group, and they reproduce its design on shields, bodies and cult objects.

For Émile Durkheim, this apparently exotic arrangement was the key to religion in general. Working from ethnographies of central Australian peoples — chiefly the reports of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, supplemented by North American material — he argued in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) that totemism is the simplest religion known, found in the simplest societies, and that studying it strips away later complications to reveal what religion essentially is: a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, binding adherents into a moral community or church.

Why the elementary form matters

Durkheim's method was deliberate. If religion could be shown to be social in its simplest and earliest form, then the accretions of the great religions could be read as elaborations of the same fact rather than as its refutation. He therefore rejected the two dominant explanations of his day. Animism, in Edward Tylor's version, derived religion from dreams and the idea of the soul; naturism, associated with Max Müller, derived it from awe at natural forces. Both, Durkheim objected, make religion an illusion founded on error, and an illusion cannot have sustained societies for millennia. A collective representation held with such force must correspond to something real — and the reality behind it is the group.

The totem as society symbolised

The decisive observation is that the sacredness attaching to the totem is not proportionate to the creature's power or usefulness: caterpillars, grubs and lizards serve as well as eagles. What is venerated is therefore not the animal but what it stands for. Moreover, the emblem is more sacred than the animal itself. The churinga — the carved or painted wooden and stone objects bearing the totemic design, kept hidden in a sacred store and handled with elaborate precaution — are the most sacred things the clan possesses, though they are merely inscribed wood and stone. Sacredness, Durkheim concluded, is conferred, not discovered.

Behind the conferral lies a diffuse force. Australian belief in an impersonal totemic principle, akin to the Melanesian mana or the Iroquois orenda, is for Durkheim the germ of every later idea of divinity — and it is society's own moral authority, experienced as external, compelling and greater than the individual, then misrecognised as a power residing in things. Hence his formula that religious force is the collective force of the group projected outward and fixed upon an object. The soul, the ancestor and eventually the god are successive translations of the same social fact.

Ritual and the mechanics of the sacred

The projection happens in assembly. Australian bands, Durkheim noted, alternate between a dispersed profane life of foraging and periods of concentration for the corroboree, when dance, chant, rhythm and shared attention generate an extraordinary excitement — collective effervescence — in which participants feel themselves lifted beyond ordinary existence. That energy requires an object, and the emblem already before their eyes receives it. Rites then maintain what assembly created: negative rites of taboo and abstinence separate sacred from profane, while positive rites, including sacrificial communion and the ritual eating of the totem, renew the bond between the group, its emblem and its members. Piacular rites of mourning reconstitute the group when death has torn it. Ritual, on this account, does not serve the gods; it reproduces society.

Lévi-Strauss and the dissolution of the category

The most influential attack came from Claude Lévi-Strauss in Totemism Today (1962), which argued that totemism is not an institution at all but an artefact of Western classification — a heap of unlike customs assembled because they looked primitive, an illusion sustained by the wish to keep a boundary between our religion and theirs. What actually exists is a mode of thought: societies use the perceived differences between natural species as a code for expressing the differences between social groups. The relation that matters is not clan-to-animal but the correspondence between two systems of contrasts. Earlier and later objections converge: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown first read totemism functionally, as ritual attention to species of social importance, then reconsidered it in structural terms; critics also noted that Durkheim generalised from a narrow and second-hand Australian sample, that Australian societies are not in fact the simplest, and that his argument slides from the social function of religion to a claim about its object.

Indian relevance

Indian tribal ethnography supplies abundant totemic material. Many Gond, Santal, Munda, Oraon and Bhil clans bear the names of animals, plants or objects, observe avoidances towards them and practise clan exogamy, and Verrier Elwin's studies of central and eastern Indian tribes documented sacred groves, clan emblems and the ritual specialists who tend them. Two cautions follow for the examination. First, these systems coexist with village deities, ancestor cults and shamanic healing, so labelling them simply totemic obscures more than it reveals. Second, tribal religion in India has long interpenetrated with Hindu practice, so contemporary cases are better read as living syntheses than as survivals of an elementary stage.

For the UPSC answer

Present totemism as Durkheim's strategic case rather than as a curiosity: the simplest religion, chosen to isolate the essential elements, yielding the definition of religion as beliefs and rites concerning the sacred that unite a moral community. The evidence to name is the arbitrariness of the species, the superior sacredness of the churinga, the totemic principle, and the corroboree as the site of effervescence. Then close the loop with Lévi-Strauss's charge that totemism is a category constructed by observers, and add Indian clan totems with the warning against reading them as survivals.

References & further reading

  1. Durkheim, É. (1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
  2. Spencer, B. and Gillen, F. J. (1899). The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Macmillan.
  3. Frazer, J. G. (1910). Totemism and Exogamy. Macmillan.
  4. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1929). The Sociological Theory of Totemism.
  5. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). Totemism Today.
  6. Elwin, V. (1955). The Religion of an Indian Tribe. Oxford University Press.