&

Deathth Human
Encyclopedia of

Experience
the
Editorial Board

Editors
Clifton D. Bryant Dennis L. Peck
Virginia Tech University The University of Alabama

Associate Editors
Kelly A. Joyce Hikaru Suzuki
College of William & Mary Singapore Management University
Vicki L. Lamb Michael R. Taylor
North Carolina Central University Oklahoma State University
Jon K. Reid Lee Garth Vigilant
Southeastern Oklahoma State University Minnesota State University Moorhead

Advisory Board Members

Andrew Bernstein Michael C. Kearl
Lewis and Clark College Trinity University
Douglas J. Davies Michael R. Leming
Durham University St. Olaf College
Lynne Ann DeSpelder John L. McIntosh
Cabrillo College Indiana University South Bend
Kenneth J. Doka Robert A. Neimeyer
College of New Rochelle University of Memphis
J. C. Upshaw Downs John B. Williamson
Georgia State Regional Medical Examiner’s Boston College
Office
 &
Deathth Human
Encyclopedia of

Experience
the
he

edited by

Clifton D. Bryant Dennis L. Peck

Virginia Tech University The University of Alabama
Copyright © 2009 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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Encyclopedia of death and the human experience/editors, Clifton D. Bryant [and] Dennis L. Peck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4129-5178-4 (cloth)
1. Death—Encyclopedias. I. Bryant, Clifton D., 1932- II. Peck, Dennis L.

HQ1073.E544 2009
306.903—dc22 2008052884

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964 Totemism
To doom me did contrive;
Which stuck a dagger in my heart
That I could not survive.
(Vermont epitaph)
Or:
His brains were lead; and with the dead he lies;
He said but little, and that little dies.
(Epitaph of a hospital patient; 1662, England)
Historical Preservation Efforts
Tombstones represent an important cultural arti-
fact and record of the past and for this reason
organizations such as the Association for Gravestone
Studies seek to preserve and record information
from grave markers throughout the United States.
As other methods of body disposal gain popularity,
such as cremation, these efforts are increasingly
important. Although such organizations focus on
the tombstones of the past, contemporary cemetery
regulations dictate tombstones be flat and low to
the ground, primarily to facilitate the perpetual
maintenance of a cemetery. Thus, uniformity and
practical maintenance issues take precedence over
the artistic and verbose tombstones of earlier times.
The result is a silencing of a final expression of the
self through epitaph voice of the individual buried
below the tombstone.
Keith Jacobi
See also Cemeteries; Christian Beliefs and Traditions;
Memorials; Memorials, Roadside; Symbols of Death
and Memento Mori
Further Readings
Ariès, P. (1981). The hour of our death. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Deetz, J. (1977). In small things forgotten: The
archaeology of early American life. Garden City, NY:
Anchor Press.
Keister, D. (2004). Stories in stone: A field guide to
cemetery symbolism and iconography. New York:
MJF Books.
Kelly, S., & Williams, A. (1983). And the men who
made them: The signed gravestones of New England.
In D. Watters (Ed.), Markers II: The Journal of the
Association for Gravestone Studies (pp. 1–103).
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Meyer, R. E. (Ed.). (1992). Cemeteries and
gravemarkers: Voices of American culture. Logan:
Utah State University Press.
Tempel, E. (1972). Tombstone humor. New York:
Pocket Books.
TOTEMISM
The word totem comes from the Ojibwa, an
Algonkin language from the Great Lakes region of
North America. It first appeared in ethnographi-
cal literature in 1791 in the memoirs of a fur mer-
chant, John Long, but it remained unnoticed until
John MacLennan used it as an analytical category
in two papers he published in 1869 and 1870.
MacLennan defined totemism as the practice,
reported not only in North America but also in
Australia, of naming clans and exogamous groups
according to an animal or a vegetal species. He
showed that this practice was accompanied by the
belief in a special, intimate relationship between
the members of each clan and their totem, some-
times reinforced by the idea they all descend from
it. Members of each clan are thus said to treat
their totem with the respect due to an ancestor:
they must not kill it if it is an animal, cut it or
gather it if it is a plant, and they must not eat it.
Animal totems are preponderant among North
American tribes. For instance, the main clans of
the Ojibwa at the beginning of 20th century were
named marten, loon, eagle, salmon, bear, stur-
geon, bobcat, lynx, crane, and chicken. Australian
totems, however, often include plant names, and
also meteorological phenomena (such as wind,
hail, or lightening), artifacts (such as anchor, boo-
merang, or pirogue), and even sometimes terms
related to the human body (such as boy, bosom,
clitoris, or corpse).
It might seem irrelevant in at least two ways to
devote an entry to totemism in this Encyclopedia
of Death and the Human Experience. Death has
been indeed thoroughly absent from the passionate
debate on the nature and origin of totemism that
has agitated not only anthropology but also
philosophy and psychoanalysis from the end of the

19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
Moreover, since Claude Lévi-Strauss convincingly
revoked totemism as an “illusion” in his famous
essay written in 1962, this idea has tended to disap-
pear from the social sciences. However, totemism
has been recently revived in anthropological analysis
by Philippe Descola, and it seems that death, as a
human experience, could hold a significant role in
the new understanding of this problematic concept.
The Golden Age of Totemism:
Australian Hopes and Disillusions
The two articles by MacLennan initiated a heated
debate through which the greatest names in anthro-
pology, among which James George Frazer,
Bronislaw Malinowski, Émile Durkheim, and
Franz Boas laid the early foundations of the disci-
pline. But the interest in totemism reached out
from the limits of anthropology to the whole
humanities. The debate involved not only philoso-
phers but also psychoanalysts after Sigmund
Freud’s celebrated essay Totem and Taboo in
1913. All these authors believed that totemism
could give insight into the most “primitive” forms
of religion, and they rivaled in reconstituting from
what could be observed at their time a hypotheti-
cal “original” state of human thought, in which
culture would hardly be separated from nature.
In 1887, it was James George Frazer who gave
the first synthetic account of the available anthro-
pological knowledge on totemism in a small book
simply called Totemism. He updated this work in
1910, publishing four volumes of the most monu-
mental compilation of data on this topic. By the
beginning of 20th century, the focus of the debate
had shifted from North America to Australia,
thanks to the extensive description by Walter
Baldwin Spencer, Francis James Gillen, and Alfred
William Howitt of several Aboriginal societies,
such as the Aranda of the central desert. Their
description of “still active” and more “primitive”
totemic systems aroused the hope they would com-
plete the American data, which were sometimes
patchy and believed to represent a more “evolved”
state of totemic religion. Australian facts, never-
theless, brought more problems than solutions,
and while Frazer and Durkheim kept praising the
data provided by Australian ethnography as the
“purest” form of totemism ever described, they
Totemism 965
strove to make it fit in a single model together with
the knowledge already available.
As was already known through North American
facts, it is not only clans and other exogamous
groups that can be named according to natural
species, but also the sexes—a different animal or
plant being attached to men and women of the
group—and individuals. Among the Kamilaroi of
the Australian east coast, for example, sorcerers
are associated with animals and most of all to rep-
tiles: They are believed to host them in their body
and sometimes produce a tamed animal to prove
their power. But more challenging for the theories
of these authors, Australian ethnography showed a
great variability in the link between the attribution
of totems and the exogamic rule. Indeed, among
several of the Aboriginal societies, such as the
Aranda described by Spencer and Gillen, totems
were not inherited, but attributed to a child
according to the place, itself, associated with a
particular animal ancestor, where the mother felt
the first signs of her pregnancy. Even more surpris-
ing, the two ethnographers reported that the inter-
diction on the killing and the consumption of the
totem animal was not an absolute one among the
central tribes of Australia. Therefore, rather than
reinforcing totemism as a category, Australian eth-
nography was undermining its two supporting
pillars: exogamy and taboo.
Several anthropologists tried to overcome these
difficulties by producing theories of origins that
would make these heterogeneous facts fit into a
single evolutionary scenario. Frazer, notably,
explained the loose link between exogamy and
totem and the moderate taboo on killing it among
the Aranda by a hypothetical original state of
totemism, characterized by endogamy and ritual
consumption of the totem species.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and
the “Totemic Illusion”
In the short pamphlet against totemism he pub-
lished in 1962, Lévi-Strauss noted that studies on
totemism had tended to conflate two different phe-
nomena: first, a general process of identification
between particular social groups or individuals and
an animal species or a variety of plant; second, a
principle of social organization consisting in distin-
guishing kinship groups with names of natural
966 Totemism
species, which is but one among many techniques
of group naming. Yet, while these phenomena exist
independently in many places, cases where they
organically coexist in a single society are more sel-
dom, and it is sometimes doubtful that institutions
described as “totemic” really concern both these
aspects. Even the Ojibwa case, from which the term
originally came, is uncertain, as ethnographers later
suggested that in his use of the term totem, John
Long confused the practice of clan naming with the
belief in animal guardian spirits that were called by
something completely different. Could totemism be
nothing but a mere misunderstanding?
Lévi-Strauss goes further into denouncing what
he calls a “totemic illusion.” In his view, totemism is
an illusion because it particularizes as a distinct and
“primitive” institution what is in fact one of the
multiple manifestations of a universal intellectual
faculty of world ordering. Lévi-Strauss shows
through a convincing demonstration that what has
been called totemism is a classificatory device that
uses contrasts in the natural world to think and
organize significant differences within society. In
other words, what matters is not so much the simi-
larity postulated between the group a and the species
x, but the correlated differences between a series of
contrasted natural species (x, y, z) and a series of
contrasted social groups (a, b, c). What so-called
totemic systems postulate is that there is as much
difference between the group a and group b as
between the species x and the species y; between the
group b and the group c as between the species y and
z; and so forth. Under structuralist analysis, totemism
thus evaporates, revealing itself as a mere instance of
the universal ability of the human mind to think
about the world through contrastive oppositions.
Totemism Resuscitated:
Descola and the Ontological Way
Revoking totemism on the basis of its “social orga-
nization” dimension, specifically the naming of
distinct groups, leaves unresolved the problem of
the identification of groups and individuals with
animal or vegetal species. Philippe Descola recently
proposed to reconsider the problem in an “onto-
logical” perspective. Totemism, as an ontology, is
characterized by the idea that humans and nonhu-
mans share what he calls “aggregates of similari-
ties.” He grounds this reappraisal of the notion on
a comparative account of the terms by which
Australian societies describe their own totems. He
shows that this totemic terminology describes a
series of physical and moral qualities shared by the
members of a group and their totem. Thus, among
the Australian Kariera, the sections “fast” and
“warm-blooded,” and the sections “slow” and
“cold-blooded” are each associated to a species of
kangaroo, one moving quicker than the other; the
sections “fast” and “warm-blooded” and “slow”
and “cold-blooded” are each associated to a spe-
cies of goanna, one being more “massive” (and
supposedly slower) than the other.
This enables Descola to study in a single per-
spective many different practices of physical and
moral identification between humans and nonhu-
mans. Ethnographers, for instance, have given
evocative descriptions of the different hair arrange-
ments by which the Plain Indians of the clans of
the Crow, of the Buffalo, and others imitate their
totem. To avoid the dissolution of the concept into
too vast a category, Descola defines totemism as
an ontology that postulates a continuity between
humans and nonhumans, both on the plane of
physicality (which designate not only the aspect of
a given being, but also its characteristic behavior)
and on the plane of interiority (mostly the attribu-
tion of moral qualities). Totemism thus supposes a
close relationship between humans and nonhu-
mans, inasmuch as a human’s life can be equated
to a plant’s or to an animal’s life: “The life of a bat
is a man’s life” is a saying by the Wotjobaluk of
Australia, where the bat was the totem for the
male class. Furthermore, in many societies, injur-
ing a totem animal was believed to have a direct
effect on the very body of the members of the asso-
ciated group. Also in many cases, the killing of a
totem animal was avenged by the members of a
clan, and it could be punished by death.
Experiencing Nonhuman
Death as a Human One
One of the best illustrations of the quasi-equivalence
postulated between the life of the totem and a
human life may be that when a totem animal or
plant is involuntarily killed or found dead, it is
cared for and buried as a clansman. Frazer reported
that among the Samoan, when a man of the Owl
totem found a dead owl, he would weep over it,

beat his forehead with stones, and then wrap up the
bird and bury it as if it had been a human being.
Surprisingly, although similar facts have been
reported by several authors, death has remained,
until now, peripheral to the debate. Yet, following
this new understanding of the notion, totemism
could eventually be characterized as an ontology in
which the death of a natural species, animal or
plant, is avenged like a human death, ritually
treated like a human death, and thus somehow
experienced like the death of one of our own kind.
Grégory Delaplace
See also American Indian Beliefs and Traditions;
Animism; Australian Aboriginal Beliefs and Traditions;
Death, Anthropological Perspectives; Freudian Theory
Further Readings
Descola, P. (2005). Par-delà nature et culture [Beyond
nature and culture]. Paris: NRF Gallimard.
Frazer, J. G. (1910). Totemism and exogamy. A treatise
on certain early forms of superstition and society.
London: Macmillan.
Freud, S. (2005). Totem and taboo. In S. Whiteside
(Trans.), On murder, mourning and melancholia.
London: Penguin Classics. (Original work
published 1913)
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1964). Totemism (R. Needham,
Trans.). London: Merlin Press. (Original work
published 1962)
Rosa, F. (2003). L’âge d’or du totémisme. Histoire d’un
débat anthropologique (1887–1929) [The golden age
of totemism. Story of an anthropological debate
(1887–1929)]. Paris: CNRS Éditions, Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme.
TRANSCENDING DEATH
One remarkable paradox of existence is that the
obvious decay of human bodies after death has
frequently been countered by beliefs in immortal-
ity. Myths, religious doctrines, and philosophical
ideas explaining this possibility reveal the power
of meaning making as an integrated process of
human thought and feeling. Such afterlife desti-
nies are often shaped by basic ideas of reciprocity
fundamental to ordinary social organization but
Transcending Death 967
now elaborated into doctrines of merit associated
with divine judgment or processes of karma.
Rituals regularly frame these ideas and help man-
age human emotions surrounding them, especially
that of hope.
Meaning Making and Survival
Death transcending beliefs, originating in this
characteristic drive for meaning, have survival as
their goal and express a wish for a better life,
unconstrained by the limitation of death.
Religiously, they reveal a longing for some para-
dise or heaven in which evil is overcome and a
union with the divine is achieved. The key emo-
tional basis for pursuing such transcendence is that
of hope, with acceptance of the beliefs that make it
possible lying in the nature of faith and in belief in
an ultimate embodied state or in a deity transcen-
dent over all things.
Hope
Hope is as integral to death transcendence as to
survival in life itself. It affirms the worthwhileness
of existence and looks to future goals that may not
be apparent in the present. Hope generates the
ongoing success of community life and, in the con-
text of death, depends on being widely shared by a
group that is able to sustain individual members
who may have, temporarily, lost hope and are in
despair. Hope infuses the human imagination
when it constructs myths, and religious, philo-
sophical, and political theories about existence and
the nature of death. While such a picture of the
meaning of life can assume an order of reality that
denies the validity of the schemes of other groups,
its success depends upon the affinity individuals
feel toward them, and this may change over time.
As emotional beings, we are encouraged to pattern
our feelings in particular ways and to share expres-
sions of our moods. This management of human
emotion is a fundamental task of society and has
traditionally been undertaken by what we call reli-
gion, especially as far as death is concerned. An
allied issue is that of morality, the sense of values
a society prizes and applauds in its members. This
moral aspect is of profound importance for death
transcendence because hope is not simply an opti-
mistic energy but is grounded in this moral domain