Totemism is a belief system in which a totem, a spirit being, sacred object or symbol, most often an animal or plant, serves as the emblem and symbolic kin-marker of a social group such as a family, lineage, clan or tribe. The English term derives from the Ojibwe word ototeman ('one's brother-sister kin') and was first recorded in English in 1791 by trader John Long, describing practices among Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes region. Émile Durkheim treated totemism as sociologically foundational, arguing in his 1912 study of Australian Aboriginal totemic religion that it functioned as a form of collective worship reinforcing group cohesion. Claude Lévi-Strauss later challenged the category in his 1958 book Le Totémisme aujourd'hui, arguing that totemic classification reflects a general structural logic of human thought rather than a single unified institution.
Facts
Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountFirst documented among Algonquian peoples (Ojibwe) of the North American Great Lakes region; subsequently studied extensively among Australian Aboriginal peoples and documented as a broader, though not universal, pattern across parts of North America, Australia, Africa and Melanesia. 1 Documented YearSourced to the subject's own accountThe English term was first recorded by John Long in 1791, describing Ojibwe practice; Durkheim's major theoretical treatment followed in 1912, and Lévi-Strauss's critical re-theorization in 1958. Cross-Tradition Connections
Critiqued Here
Lévi-Strauss's Le Totémisme aujourd'hui (1958) critically re-theorized rather than extended Durkheim's account, arguing the category as earlier anthropologists used it was an artificial unification of distinct regional phenomena.
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