Totemism

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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Totemism, to quote Frazer’s classical definition, “is an intimate relation which is supposed 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.” Totemism thus has two sides: it is a mode of socialism and as religion, it expresses primitive man’s interest in his surroundings to possess control over valued resources. Malinowski had remarked that what formed the staple food of the clan, certain plants and animals thus came to be regarded in totemic reverence. And so what we witness in ancient totemism is really a utilitarian anxiety about necessary resources. This formed the sphere of the sacred. The totemic attitude of the mind, was most near to reality and to the immediate practical life.

Do you think capitalism has rendered that totemic attitude towards things obsolete? Or does our society still have its own kind of totemisms?
If so, what forms do these take today?

How did the schism between the sacred and the profane under modern capitalism disappear, if it did?

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We witness a breakdown of our reverent attitude to necessary resources that marked Totemism.

In this sense, it strikes me that the profanity of modern capitalism can also be argued as it being so non-utilitarian, and that’s one of views I find so fresh in relation to ancient totemism, given how today, normally capitalism and exploitation is generally associated together.

We have lost that reverent attitude to the objects and resources and tools that gratify us. Proper utilitarianism of which capitalism emerged as its off-shoot has disappeared; it has become cancerous.

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Egalitarians, aware of the failure of their projects of justice and humanitarianism, paint their opponents in demonising terms. A new non-egalitarian vision of the world will have to present itself as concretely philanthropic, i.e. philos-anthropos, where egalitarianism is only ideally humanitarian…
Not to the extent Bataille went with his notion of the gift as philanthropy, an orgy of sacrificial gift-giving, but a balance and a reverence.

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“Whenever a truth threatens, man hides behind a thought.” but also: “whenever a thought threatens, man hides behind the truth.” (Canetti)

To Freud and Marx, totems and fetishes memorialize and defend against anxiety. They act as screens against memory - totems for social memories, and fetishes for the personal. In Marx’s terminology, totems and fetishes take the form of political economic institutions and commodities; they defend the status quo concealing reality.
“What is sacred is obviously something that may not be touched. A sacred prohibition has a very strong emotional tone but has in fact no rational basis.” (Freud)

Totemism and its later religious derivatives, according to Freud, carries the power of prohibition through symbolic effect — that is, it forces the ego to inhibit action toward a desired aim, through meaning. For example, to forestall continual intra-group warfare, brothers in a family took several steps. They erected a totem, a representation of the father, and accorded it a sacred character. The totem is erected to ward off anxiety about castration and deflect guilt for the imagined crime of killing the father.

Their force is represented by the totem, a kind of fetish for the inhibited drives and around which later religious embellishments build their doctrines. Through this logic, Freud built his conclusion that religion is a neurosis.

Marx elaborated on the social front, the function of the fetish, what Freud highlighed about the totem on the personal front.
Totems and fetishes represent ways people try to ward off anxiety, and they function as building blocks of illusions.

Religion ritualises re-enactments of shared oedipal experiences. The primal father, threatening, and adored plays out regularly in ordinary social life.
What is threatening is made repetitive and emptied of danger, the repetition lending an order and a sacred character.
For Freud, fetishism is a perversion that avoids neurosis of repetitive regularity. The fetish symbolizes the overthrow in the regularity.

This is how commodity fetishism goes hand in hand with the totemism of the market. The market is treated as a sui generis or an exclusive kind of thing; everyone must worship the totem of the market else they starve.
Capital is the master fetish where the chief totem is the market, the institution.
The market is the order and capital is what constantly mocks, deposes, and ruptures that order through incessant innovation…
“Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” (Marx and Engels)

Risks are no longer probabilities of dangers or losses, but narratives serving to modify human behavior, totemic like religion.
The “war against terror” is the new totemic narrative, to ward off the neurosis of sickly civilization and the primal rage against killing, and the fetish that is terrorism.
At all costs, the institution is sacred and instituionalization rendered sacred.

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It sounds like you are talking about a “needs priority” list.

And that concept got undermined through intentional chaos by those not wanting society to be structured unless they were running it.

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Correct.

The why is easy to figure out, but I want to understand more about the how. I believe it has to do with nihilism.

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  1. Obfuscation - leading your nihilism
  2. Extortion - forming the new control
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My understanding of totemism is quite different. Native Americans, and others I’m sure, who are not yet trained scientists or philosophers, see the world differently. They understand the natural world differently. For example, a skunk is playful because it can cause a stink. Porcupines are similarly playful, but obviously for a different reason. All animals are seen as having unique characters. These animals are then related to people. So, for example, if your totem is the skunk, then it means that you are playful because you do not fear other people because you know you can kick up such a stink if interfered with, that no one will bother you.

In the film Missing, one of the characters is a white man who has adopted an Apache way of life. Another Indian refers to him as having “two dogs fighting” inside him. What he meant was that the white man turned Apache had divided loyalties. This way of describing the white man’s psychological state is extremely accurate, much more so than a description that might be given by a western psychologist. It describes EXACTLY how the man feels and one can understand the consequences for him and understand how to deal with it — you deal with it exactly as if you were dealing with 2 dogs fighting!

In the west, we still have remnants of this sort of understanding, though we do not really know or use it. For example, one might refer to someone as being ratty. If a person is ratty then the consequences can be severe for the person. The fact is that rattiness can get out of hand (rats can breed to plague proportions) such that it turns on the person himself and subconsciously attacks his own thinking. There are other consequences also which can be understood by observing the nature of rats.

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Reminds me of this piece of Western psychology, though:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiCrniLQGYc[/youtube]

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Curiosity killed the cat? (Satisfaction brought it back.) I wonder how many people really understand what this means. It refers to the well known ability of cats to relax. Nothing can relax quite like a cat. So curiosity once aroused causes a restlessness, a need to be satisfied, and until it is one is unable to relax properly.

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  1. Doesn’t overt rationality lead to nihilism as well?
  2. Extortion doesn’t explain how something comes to become so sacred, untouchable. Say race-reality today, and you are marked for sacrifice. The myth of equality or racial-equality is sacrosanct. Incontestable.
    It doesn’t do any good to simply pull away the carpet beneath such feet; they have to topple.
    But before that, we need to trace the aura.
    How does a crown sit so tight?
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yea, I understand that, and I am seeing it like that too, except sociologically.

The animals being totemized today are those that guard the herd. One ecology prospering at the near destruction of another. The native americans would have spoken out. They knew what balance was.

By the way, you should watch the film Le Jaguar. Best movie ever on totems, and Reno is so hot. drool

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This is an interesting subject, but I don’t entirely understand what it is that makes something a totem.

Referring to your original questions:

Would a car have the potential to be a totem?

In a sense one would think that the practical side of buying and owning a car is about transportation, efficiency, safety. And the impractical side, which leads so many people to undermine the practical, is about exhibiting social status, whether actual or a pretense, and forms of compensation for personal failings. But perhaps some factors in the supposed practical sides could also contribute to the supposed impracticality of the cars so many people buy.

Safety, for example. Logically, one would get the car with objective safety features such as airbags, etc., but as a totem to the general idea of safe travel one may perhaps actually buy an extravagant car, with little regard for those objective features.

Then the idea of travel in itself, which in primal cultures is so often made a part of intricate rituals and myths, may now be substituted for simple extravagance in a car.

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Totems had value in themselves. Were considered peers in a sense, certainly animal ones.
Totems today, like cars, fake tits, the right house, suit, tie, aftershave, daycare, hairstyle, jeans, Nails
and so on, all just reflect back on the self. The meaning does or is intended to though it often fails.

No mystery, nothing outside of what can immediately be counted and measured. Physicalism cannot really have totemism.

You can certainly overvalue objects and hallucinate meanings and have something like a religion in reverse and all that.

But even as a kid I knew a lego set castle was not a real castle and I was not suddenly king and that that Crow was looking at me and waiting for me to leave that part of the forest so he could go back to where he had been searching for something just Before I arrived.

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That was my question. How does a thing come to be so sacralized, it becomes a totem?

What would render the totem so respected?

If I go with Foucault, I would have to ask, contra freud, do fetishes reinstate the totem?

For eg., does the slander through humour sacralize the object mocked?

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It’s not just a capitalistic phenomena. Not sure where you got that from. It’s more of a modernism or transhumanist phenomena.

Capitalism is merely an expression of natural competition. You can find expressions of capitalism within nature.

There is however a difference between state governed capitalism and a more anarchist one. Unfortunately state sponsored capitalism is a disaster.

I myself am a supporter of the notion anarchist capitalism.

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Totemism is the result of a regulation, a taboo, on resources valuable to self-preservation, the control of which inevitable invites a capitalistic approach.

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Freedom is self regulation and capitalists aren’t opposed to that. :slight_smile:

You speak of central regulation regarding the interventions of the state. An entirely different beast.

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It is the result of trying to grasp what is out of reach, to dominate more than reality allows.
It is Presumption and a desperate desire to control.

Capitalism is merely that same thing dispersed. The current regime isn’t Capitalism, but Controlled/Regulated Monopolies (strictly forbidden under capitalism).

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Totemism was a necessary thing to disband in the early formations of the ancient state.

Totemism was all about individuals being independent living within the greater symbiosis of the land. It had to be destroyed in order for the state to enslave the masses of people into its civilization centers. The ancient priesthoods made sure of it.