Knowra Totemism Totemism Totemism is the association of social groups or individuals with animals, plants, or other natural beings. These associations can organize identity, kinship, ritual obligations, and relations with the nonhuman world.
Clan : A social group whose members recognize common descent or shared identity. Totemic affiliations often identify clans and distinguish them from other groups.
John Ferguson McLennan : A Scottish lawyer and ethnologist who wrote influential nineteenth-century theories of kinship and social development. He helped bring totemism into comparative anthropology in the 1860s.
Arrernte : An Aboriginal Australian people whose homelands lie in and around Mparntwe, known in English as Alice Springs. Early anthropologists used Arrernte materials to formulate influential theories of totemism.
Totem pole : A carved monumental post made by some Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, often displaying figures and crests. A visible carved crest is not itself the full social relationship described by totemism.
Kinship : Social relationships formed through descent, marriage, adoption, or culturally recognized ties. Totemic identities can shape descent, marriage rules, and relations among groups.
James George Frazer : A Scottish anthropologist best known for the comparative study of myth and religion in The Golden Bough. His 1887 book Totemism assembled examples and theories that shaped the subject.
Warlpiri : An Aboriginal Australian people whose traditional country lies in the Tanami Desert region of the Northern Territory. Warlpiri traditions illustrate how ancestral beings, places, and social identity can be connected.
Shamanism : A set of practices in which ritual specialists interact with spirits or other nonhuman powers. It concerns ritual specialists and spirit relations, not necessarily group-to-being affiliation.
Ritual : A patterned symbolic action performed according to social or religious conventions. Ceremonies may express obligations between a group and its totem.
Émile Durkheim : A French sociologist whose work established sociology as a distinct academic discipline. He treated Australian totemic religion as a key case in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
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