What is a Totem?

 

Totems are emblems of identity in human groups that bring together narratives of economic and primitive determination and interact in a hierarchical way to form mythical-ritual structures. Most of the totems have names of animals or plants, the rest being climatological, or the seasons, orography, or celestial names. In addition to the identity function, the totem system allows a fairly complex ordering of social relationships that avoids, through a system of membership rules, perfectly intuitively understandable, incest and systems of links that are too genetically close. The totem system can be understood as an extension of general social persons (i.e. social masks) to larger communities, a system that ab initio incorporates the concept of the Anima mask as a link with the rest of living beings and ancestors, which supposes that it is a further development of a simpler form of organization. A society governed by this system makes explicit a range of masks that the same individual can act according to the occasion. Thus, for example, among totemic Australians, to the male mask is added that of old man, but also that of the kangaroo clan (which belongs to a phratry with another totem), and to that the mask of the married class X of that phratry. The continuity of human masks and animal masks is not yet, as it may be in later more elaborate mythological forms, a relative zoolatry, but rather ties of the same level, a brotherhood that allows the concept of Anima. The most relevant thing about the totemic system, as Durkheim understood, is that it allows a systematic classification of all nature, and it has been done in cultures as distant as the Port-Mackey tribe in Queensland, or the Zuñi of New Mexico, or the Omaha from Nebraska. Totems are founded on the Anima mask and organize the Anima Mundi narratives.

The totem and its generalization, the Anima Mundi, have produced the first general epistemological system based on the evolution of the structures fostered by basic emotions, kinship, and group membership. The belonging relationship, made dynamic by the passage of time, in conjunction with the persistence in memory of the ancestors, reified (objectified) the concept of the Anima as a superclass under which the set of living beings was subsumed. From the totem come the first classifying actions that allowed the conceptual synthesis of the experience from which we obtained our first representation of the world. Moreover, the “magical” or “formal causality” that operates on this mythical plane is made possible by the Anima mask who, as an all-embracing referent, gives the link between the different scenarios of experience required by magical thinking, in a way pretty much analogous to the “formal causality” concept constructed by science.