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

This is a highly erudite account of scholarship on a topic that was long a staple of the literature of numerous disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. In it Robert Alun Jones concludes, alongside Lévi-Strauss and many other contemporary authors, that the “secret of the totem” was that there was no secret, that totemism was largely a creation of the travelers and ethnographers who claimed they had observed it and the theorists who sought to explain it. On his path toward this conclusion Jones provides us with an extensive and thorough account of the intellectual genealogy of several of the key figures in Victorian and early-twentieth-century anthropology and religious studies, an account that should prove useful to readers who are interested in many aspects of these scholars’ work as well as those specifically interested in totemism.

One of the problems that many writers, including Jones, have noted about totemism is the difficulty of arriving at a definition of the term that is applicable to all of the uses that have been made of the concept. Most people who have had occasion to concern themselves with “totemism,” among them ethnographers and social theorists as well as professors and students of courses in anthropology and religious studies, construe totemic phenomena as encompassing some combination of belief in a special relationship, often one of imagined kinship, between human beings and other biological entities, especially animals but also plants, that is combined with certain diagnostic features of social structure. Jones notes as others have that “totemic” beliefs were often assumed (not always accurately) to be associated with descent in the female line. Nineteenth-century anthropologists frequently associated matrilineal descent with primitive promiscuity, since they assumed that such kinship systems implied an inability to identify the biological fathers of newborn infants. It was widely (though not universally) believed that totemism, matriarchy, and primitive promiscuity occurred together among early humans, and Australian Aboriginal groups were said to closely resemble such imagined ancestors because of the supposed prevalence of totemism in that region. Totemism in the Victorian imaginary was a moral, spiritual, and intellectual zero point at the opposite end of a continuum from the beliefs and practices that the Victorian middle class upheld as desirable. Speculations about the origin of totemism were thus speculations about the origin of society itself. Such speculations could serve as a source of reassurance that civilization had resulted in improvement, but they could also expose a shared past that, like evolutionary theory itself, had the potential to unsettle.

Jones covers in admirable detail the major attempts to explain totemism and, more extensively than most books in the history of anthropology, acquaints his readers with the scholarly lineage of each author whose work he discusses. If one is interested in a particular author or school, that information is invaluable. Inevitably, most readers will be more interested in some authors than in others, so some of these discussions may seem to digress excessively from the central subject of totemism. I was particularly impressed by the discussion of thinkers who influenced Freud. There is a tendency to think of Freud’s ideas as coming mainly from the consulting room or from the introspection of his self-analysis, and it is instructive to read more about his intellectual pedigree.

Jones provides us with a set of categories into which he groups the various theoretical approaches to totemism, each of which forms a chapter of the book, centering upon a major theorist but encompassing other thinkers as well, particularly those who have influenced the central subject. These categories provide a useful way to organize the discussion, though the reader must be alert to the influences that even the figures assigned different labels had on one another, influences that Jones documents extensively. There is occasionally a bit of fuzziness in the categories. J. F. McLennan, the author of Primitive Marriage, is included in the chapter...