Totemism
The totemism is an organization Clan ic or tribal founded on the principle of the totem.
According to a theory, supported by Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud in particular, the worship of the totem is the “primitive” form of the Religion, and prohibitions of which it is the object the “primitive” form of the Morale. This design is disputed by several authors, of which Claude Lévi-Strauss, which questions the existence of the totemism like autonomous and distinct institution and which denounces it like an illusion of the sociologists of the end of the 19th century: “ the totemism is initially projection, out of our universe, and as by an exorcism, mental attitudes incompatible with the requirement of discontinuity between the man and nature, that the Christian thought held for essential ”.
History of the totemism, like anthropological category
It is starting from a term ojibway , that the " is constituted; totémisme". The word returns to English, John Long, who used it in 1791 to indicate a benevolent spirit which protects the men. A group of men is thus under the protection of a totem. It is James George Frazer which introduces the debate on the totemism in 1887 and which proposes the following definition: “a totem is a class of material objects that the savage considers with a superstitious respect, believer who there exists between him and each member of the class a close and completely special relation”. For the Americans, who revise the British theories (theories British made up starting from the Australian ethnography) in the light of the Amerindian facts, the totem indicates the name of a group. One privileges the relation between the group or the individual with the natural object of which it bears the name. Boas specifies that he does not seek to extend this analysis because he does not intend to make totemism a general theory, contrary to Frazer, which seeks a unit in the totemism.
Thus, if the word totem come from the ojibway (Amerindian language of North America), Frazer (and the British evolutionary school) made of Australia the privileged ground of the totemism, that he wants to constitute in general theory.
Boas (and American anthropologists) proposes another definition of the totemism starting from the Amerindian facts, but it specifies that what it advances concerns only the Kwakiutl Indians. He more regards the totemism as an analytical tool being used to describe particular ethnographic situations. For the Americans, the totemism “in general” does not exist.
The question of the totemism was revisited by Lévi-Strauss in the Wild Thought , then by Philippe Descola, by proposing the totemism as the mode of identification which characterizes the companies for which discontinuities between not-human make it possible to think those enter the human ones.
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