The word totem comes from Ojibwe, and anthropologists spent a century misusing it
Totem is an English spelling of the Ojibwe doodem, linked to the word for heart. Victorian scholars seized on it as a universal stage of human development and even claimed it proved some peoples misunderstood where babies come from. Later researchers dismantled nearly all of that.
Among the Anishinaabe, clans called doodeman are named mostly for animals. Since ode' means heart, the term roughly conveys what belongs to one's heart, meaning the extended family. Oral tradition tells of great Miigis beings rising from the Atlantic to teach a way of life, six of them founding the clans. The five original totems included the crane, called echo-maker, and the bear, called tender.
Similar ideas exist elsewhere under other names. On the Pacific Northwest coast, carved poles showing bears, birds, frogs and supernatural beings act much like heraldry, marking families or chiefs and telling stories read from the base upward. Among the Yuin of coastal New South Wales, one person may hold several totems at once, personal, family, gender, tribal and ceremonial. Many Aboriginal groups object to having an imported Ojibwe word applied to their own independent practice, and in some areas token has replaced it.
Nineteenth-century writers such as John Ferguson McLennan argued that all humanity had once passed through a totemic phase. James George Frazer's four-volume Totemism and Exogamy of 1910 went further, asserting that Aboriginal people did not connect sex with conception. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown attacked that thesis in the journal Nature in 1938. Émile Durkheim took another route, finding in totemism the root of religion and a form of shared worship that bound communities together.
The unified theory crumbled. Alexander Goldenweiser compared Australia with British Columbia and showed that supposedly common features, from naming and taboo to guardian spirits, looked very different in each place, while some groups shared the customs without having totems at all. Radcliffe-Brown, like Franz Boas, doubted any single definition would work. He briefly accepted the view that animals become totems because they are good to eat, then dropped it, noting that crocodiles and flies are hardly appetising.
Source: Totem
