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

This is an elegantly shaped and beautifully written account of the rise and fall of the concept of "totemism." Europeans in the New World must have encountered for centuries the congeries of phenomena that was labelled "totemism" only after the Chippewa word "totem" reached print in 1791. The most common feature of totemism may be the naming of a social group after a plant or animal with whom the group is believed to have a special bond. Other recurrent attributes include: matrilineal descent (the child belongs to the mother's totem), the interdiction of intra-totemic marriage, and taboos banning, or otherwise regulating, the killing or eating of the group's totem.

The mid-nineteenth-century rise of evolutionary theorizing in the social sciences prompted the notion that extant "primitive" cultures were, in E. B. Tylor's sense, "survivals," fossils of cultural conditions that "advanced" societies had outgrown. Hence, when westerners discovered during the 1840s that totemism was also widespread among the Australian aborigines, theorists seized upon it as a possibly universal institution in "primitive" societies. It thus became a prominent topic within the broader outburst of speculation about the origins of religion and society that marks the decades from the 1860s to the Great War.

Students of this outburst usually notice that it mirrors the theorists' contemporary anxieties, but the many competent surveys of totemism's course by anthropologists tend to discount this personal dimension. Robert Alun Jones's book towers over such treatments precisely in its rich intellectual biographies that demonstrate concretely the links between ostensible theory and subliminal motive. A historian of social thought who was deeply influenced by Thomas Kuhn, Jones has long advocated for sociologists a method that will "understand theories as historically relative constellations of questions and answers" (4). This position entails the sympathetic, or at least neutral, reconstruction of particular thinkers' interpretive horizons. Jones concentrates in The Secret of the Totem upon five savants whose work most conspicuously marks the arc of totemism's career: William McLennan, Robertson Smith, James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. To situate the work of the starring five, however, he amasses an equally glittering supporting cast, a virtual "who's who" of theorists of "primitive" religion from Auguste Comte to Claude Lévi-Strauss, from Tylor to E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Jones's first chapter, "Totemism As Animal Worship," traces the history of this worship, and of non-evolutionary conceptions of "primitive" religion, through Henry Maine's patriarchal account of the ancient family and the legal codes that enshrined it. Jones presents an eye-opening account of how expanding estimates of the earth's age inspired McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), to transform his critique of Maine into "the first genuinely evolutionary theory of social organization"(7). This enabled him in turn to set the terms of debate for many of the key phenomena of totemism in his subsequent essay, "The Worship of Animals and Plants" (1869–70).

McLennan's work most crucially affected his fellow Scot, Smith, who is the subject of Jones's second chapter, "Totemism As Sacrament." McLennan was a rationalist, more interested in social structure than in religion, but Smith began as a minister and theologian. Jones is at his scholarly best in tracing how Smith's emotivist conception of liberal Christianity colors his subsequent work at Cambridge on totemism. Smith's masterpiece, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), radically alters our view of ancient religion by the cogency of its arguments that religion was in general a matter of ritual rather than doctrine, and that among the Semites the central ritual was the sacrifice and subsequent communal consumption of the totem as scapegoat.

Frazer, another Scot and Smith's younger colleague in Cambridge, obviously found in his friend's ritualism the inspiration for stringing his massive (and hugely popular) compendium of ancient religion and magic, The Golden Bough (1890, 1900, [End Page 521...