Where does totem collide?

In Durkheim's sociology of religion the totem is the emblem of the clan, a plant or animal whose image marks the group and stands for its unity. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) he argued that when people revere the totem they are, without knowing it, revering their own society: the sacred is the social, and the god of the clan is the clan itself, felt as a force greater than any single member. The totem is therefore both the sign of the group and the object of its worship, and the gathering that renews the group's feeling is organised around it. On this reading the referent is a social fact, a community representing itself to itself through a shared symbol, not a category of thought or a figure in a family drama.[1]

Unit

A clan's sacred emblem, standing for the group's own unity

Recovery means

The shared feeling ebbs between gatherings and is renewed when the clan assembles around the emblem

Measured by

Studied through ethnographic accounts of totemic clans, their emblems, and the collective states their rites produce

Lévi-Strauss's short book Totemism (1962) argued that totemism is not a real institution at all but an illusion assembled by earlier anthropologists who grouped together unrelated customs under one label. What that label had gathered up, he said, was really a mode of thought: people use the differences between natural species, one animal set against another, to picture and mark the differences between social groups. Animals are taken as clan emblems not because they are good to eat or magically potent but because, in his phrase, they are good to think with. The referent here is a classificatory logic of the human mind, and the claim deflates the very construct the other theories try to explain, treating totem worship as a category mistake rather than a form of religion.[2]

Unit

A contrast between natural species used to mark a contrast between groups

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued by comparing ethnographic cases and showing the supposed institution dissolves into ordinary classification

In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud read the totem animal as a substitute for the father. He built the reading on a speculative origin story: in the primal horde the sons band together, kill and eat the dominant father who had kept the women to himself, and then, stricken with guilt, forbid the killing of the totem animal that stands in his place and renounce the women they had desired. For Freud the two great totemic rules, not to kill the totem and not to marry within the clan, are the return of that guilt as taboo, so totemism is at root a family conflict replayed at the scale of the group. The referent is thus an unconscious drama projected onto an animal emblem, an account most anthropologists reject as history but which remains a landmark reading of the symbol.[3]

Unit

A totem animal standing in for the father in an unconscious drama

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued through psychoanalytic interpretation and a conjectural reconstruction of an original parricide

In marketing the word is borrowed as a metaphor: a brand or product can serve as the totem of a consumer tribe, the shared emblem around which a loose community gathers and recognises itself. In their account of tribal marketing, Cova and Cova (2002) argued that what many consumers value is less the object than the social link it supports, so a brand can work like a clan emblem that binds people into a group and signals a common identity. The referent is a commercial sign adopted as a rallying symbol, and the usage leans on the anthropological meaning while stripping out the sacred and the kinship rules that once defined it. It is a figure of speech about branding and belonging, not a claim about religion, classification, or the unconscious.[4]

Unit

A brand adopted as the shared emblem of a consumer tribe

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through consumer research on brand communities, tribes, and the social links they sustain