THE SECRET OF THE TOTEM.*
To read a book by Dr. Frazer is more than a mental treat, it is a moral tonic. The spirit that burns within him is an ardour for truth as real as it is rare. If reader or reviewer suffer a mom-ntary chill and depression at the sight of four bulky
olumes, he will not go far before he warms with a sympa- thetic glow. Here is a man ready to burn at the stake for an idea, if stakes were to be had for the asking, and, stranger still, ready to add his own old books and theories to the pile if only truth may blaze the brighter. The present writer does not, as the sequel will show, wholly adopt Dr. Frazer's conclusions, but wholly reverences the spirit which inspires them.
The foul volumes fall into three divisions. First, a series of reprints, chief among which is the small handbook Totemism, issued in 1887, and now out of print. Second, an ethnographic survey of totemism. Third, a summary and conclusions as to the " Origin of Totemism and Exogamy." This last section contains of course Dr. Frazer's own theory, a theory not necessarily final. "I have changed my views repeatedly, and am resolved to change them with every change of the evidence." Brave words which we would commend to all who flatter themselves that to be stationary is to be strong.
It may be that the second part of Dr. Frazer's treatise, the " Ethnographic Survey," will live when the third part, his theories and those of his opponents, is dust ; but, for the present, interest and keen controversy will centre round the theories. Briefly the case stands thus. Most anthropologists, and very emphatically the French school of sociologists headed by Professor Emile Durkheim, hold that totemism and exogamy are inextricably intertwined; that the one cannot exist, save as an unmeaning survival, without the other. Dr. Frazer holds that totemism is the earlier of the two, and that exogamy arose independently of totemism. Professor Durkheim further believes that through the understanding of totemism he has solved the secret of exogamy ; Dr. Frazer gives up the hope of discovering the origin of exogamy, and believes he has caught the secret of totemism. The lists are, then, clearly set, and the space between the combatants is wide,—so wide, indeed, that in a brief review we cannot attempt to span it. Privately, the present writer believes Professor Emile Durkheim to be in the main right,—totemism and exogamy are interdependent ; but the problem of how exogamy arose—of why men chose to marry out of their clan instead of, as was obviously more convenient, marrying in it— is as complex as it is fascinating. Very reluctantly we renounce its discussion, and address ourselves only to the problem which Dr. Frazer believes he has solved, the origin of totemism.
What is totemism ? As to this we must be clear before we ask the question of origins. " Totemism." Dr. Frazer (Vol. IV., p. 1) says, " is an intimate relation which is sup- posed to exist between a group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial objects on the other side, which objects are called the totems of the human group." So intimate is the relation that it is figured by kinship, and is, indeed, as Professor Levy-Bruhl puts it, a relation not of similarity but of identity. " That one," says a Central Australian pointing to a photograph of himself just taken, "is just the same as me; so is a kangaroo" (his totem). Totemism, then, is an assumed substantial identity of a group of human beings with a species of things, usually animals, plants, or natural, very rarely artificial, objects. It should be carefully noted—for it will be later seen that the fact is of vital importance—that the present definition is different from that adopted in the Totemism of 1887. There a totem is defined as "a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation" (the italics are our own). In this earlier definition a class of objects is in relation with an individual man ; in the later with a group of men. In this distinction, trivial though it may seem, and half unconsciously though it may have been made, lies an immense advance, lies, indeed, to our mind, the secret and origin of the totem.
Why does a man say and think that he is a kangaroo, or a bear, or an opossum, or a witchety grub ? There is no • retention and Exogamy. By J. G. Fraser. 4 vols. London : Macmillan and Co. [50s. net.]
similarity of gait or gesture adequate to suggest identity. Dr. Frazer's first key to the problem was in the theory of the external soul. To deposit your soul with a kangaroo may seem to us precarious; but it is after all less precarious than keeping it in your own body where an enemy can find and kilt it. If your soul is deposited with a kangaroo, you are in a. sense a kangaroo. Totemism and the doctrine of the external soul do undoubtedly appear together, but the key did not fit all local locks; anyhow Dr. Frazer renounced this theory for another which based totemism on economic principles, a sort of crude division of labour. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen had shown the rational and practical side of totemism, had shown how each totemistic clan performed magical ceremonies to increase the supply of its totem-animal. Was the whole system only an organised co-operation of this industry ? Dr. Frazer now rejects this theory as over-rational. He might have added, since you never, or very seldom, eat your own totem, over-altruistic.
The latest, though, as before said, not necessarily the last, solution of the problem is that totemism is in its origin "conceptual." When a woman of Central Australia is about, to bear a child she is ignorant of the true cause, and believes that a spirit child has entered her from a neighbouring tree or rock or pool, or any place where the spirits of the dead wait their chance of reincarnation. If when she first knew her fate she was near a tree haunted by kangaroo-spirits, then her child will be a "kangaroo " ; if she was near a rock where the emu-spirits dwell, her child will be an "emu." Here the woman does not believe that an actual emu or kangaroo enters her, but only a human child-spirit having an emu or a kangaroo for its totem. In the Banks Islands, however, the more primitive belief is found, and has been reported by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. Here many of the people identify them- selves with certain fruits and animals, and these fruits and animals they refuse to eat ; it would be, they feel, like eating themselves. The reason they give is that before their birth they, as spirit animals or fruits of these particular kinds, entered the body of their mother. Though they are themselves human, yet they are also plants and animals. "Haziness is characteristic of the mental vision of the savage. Like the blind man of Bethsaida, he sees men like trees and animals walking in a thick intellectual fog."
We have pointed out that Dr. Frazer's economic theory of totemism, now discarded, was not only over-rational but over- altruistic. We believe that his present conceptual theory errs because it is over-individualistic. With the utmost diffidence in addressing so great an authority, we would suggest that the secret of the totem will be found not in any individual error, however natural and widespread, but in some collective representation, however partial, of a fact, and this for the simplest of reasons. The word totem means, not plant or animal, but simply tribe. Various forms of the word are given by various authorities. The Rev. Peter Jones, himself an Ojibway, gives toodai•m. Francis Assikinack, an Ottawa Indian, gives ododam. The Abbe Thavenel says that the word is properly ote in the sense of "family or tribe," the possessive of which is otem. He adds that the Indians use ote in the sense of " mark " (limited, Dr. Frazer says, apparently to a family mark), but argues that the word must mean family or tribe.
This simple, familiar, and undisputed fact that totem means tribe, with the added sense of tribe or family mark, has not, we think, had sufficient stress laid upon it. The totem-animal, it has long been admitted, is not an individual animal, it is the whole species ; but the correlative truth that it is the human group, not the human individual, that is related to the totem has been left vague. _ Hence all the controversy as to whether the individual totem is prior to the group totem or vice-versd, whether or not the guardian animal or spirit precedes the totem-animal. Hence also the significance, to which we called attention at the outset, of Dr. Frazer's modification of his original definition, his substitution of the words " group of kindred people" for " a savage." Facts have forced upon him this substitution—and to facts he always yields ungrudging obedience—but the full significance of these facts still escapes him, or he would not base his new theory of totemism on the chance error of individual women. The gist of the new "collective" view of the French school' headed by Professor Durkheim is not easy to condense into a few words, but we will make the attempt. The issue between the English school of anthropology and the French sociologists lies deep down. It dates, perhaps, from Auguste Comte's famous formulary, "II ne faut pas definer l'humanite par l'homme, mail an contraire l'homme par l'humanite." True even to-day—when the long discipline of civilisation has allowed the individual a, liberty bordering on license—this is doubly true of primitive days when the individual, save as a member of the tribe, was almost a negligible factor. Not only the acts of the savage, but his thoughts, and above all his emotions, are conditioned by the community; they are collective more than personal and individual; he obeys suggestion rather than reason. Professor Levy-Bruhl in his remarkable book, Les Emotions Mentales dens les SociJUs Inferieures, has shown that this primitive collective mentality is not merely a bad copy or embryonic form of our own forms of reasoning, but has certain positive characteristics of its own, characteristics ascertained by a study of the beliefs and institutions of savages,—e.g., mana, totemism, magic. First, its representations are emotional rather than intellectual, concerned, that is, rather with the emotional reactions caused by an object than with the clear conception and definition of the object itself. Next, and again because the mentality is collective, it is governed by a "law of participation." Identity is easily suggested, because attention is not focussed on difference. Starting with the unity of his own social group, of which he is intensely conscious, the savage extends that unity to the plants and animals about him. The identity of man with plant and animal, to us unthinkable, presents to him no difficulty ; with his collective and emotional outlook all things, and especially all fusions, are possible. Hence his belief in an all-pervading =no, hence his practice of an all-commanding magic.
Hence, too, the first dawn of a primitive "natural" religion. Natural religion arises not merely or chiefly from awe or fear in the individual, though that is in part its material, but from the collective representation of emotions socially felt from collective dance and song. Primitive man practises few private rites, and these tend to die down into black magic instead of blossoming into religion. Hence— though, as Dr. Frazer justly observes, "totems are not worshipped, they are not definite deities propitiated with prayer and sacrifice "—they are the stuff of which pagan divinity is made, they are the collective symbol, the badge, the representation of the tribal or group unity. The process can be seen at work in Greek religion : the chorus chants a magical hymn of healing, a paean, and by and by from that collective utterance emerges a god, Paean the Healer; the young men armed, the Kouroi or Kouretes, dance together a sacred magical dance ; their leader is a kouros, and by and by we have dedicatory inscriptions to a god, " Young Man" Kouros. Whether the Greeks ever took plants and animals as their tribe-symbols is uncertain, and indeed unimportant. A characteristic, easily differentiated symbol, a special plant Dr animal, a bear, a kangaroo, &c., only becomes important when one group seeks to differentiate itself from another,— when, as Empedocles would say, we have relicos (strife) as well as oak (friendship). But this segmentation of the tribe into clans would lead us to the discussion of exogamy, and that allurement we have foresworn. Moreover, this subject of the relation of exogamy and totemism to the segmentation of the clan will, it is hoped, be fully discussed in Mr. A. R. Brown's forthcoming book on the Andamanese Islands, and for that discussion we wait.
Totemism, then, is to our mind mainly and primarily an affirmation of group-unity. Primitive man thinks, or rather feels, in terms of his group ; the group is his universe. So much our latter-day parochialism or patriotism, as the case may be, helps us to realise. It is the extension of the group to include those strange tribesmen, plants and animals, stones and stars, that puzzles us. Yet nothing is more certain than that whatever affects a savage, be it the plant or animal that is his food, or the animal or stone or monsoon he fears, pro- vided the emotion be preserved and emphasised as collective by the group, that object is taken into the group, is felt as related. This is the stage of epistemology that is marked by totemism. It is ante-religious because religion supposes a "power not ourselves." To us a totem seems, like a King, to be but a symbol, a badge, a flag, as it were, round which emotion rallies. That is because we think, and to think is to distinguish. But the savage, with his emotional outlook, his sense of " participation," of " symbiosis," does not take a kangaroo for his symbol or his crest. He, or rather his group, is kangaroo. He does not, cannot, think it; be feels it.
The French sociologists gratefully acknowledge their debt to English anthropology, and especially to Dr. Frazer. We trust that in his turn he will give full consideration to their views. We shall await with interest Professor Durkheim's pronouncements on Dr. Frazer's new theory. it is possible that in the exaltation of a new and fertile conception the French school over-emphasises the "collective" element; but we record our conviction that it is only in the light of their investigations that we may hope to read the "secret of the totem."
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