Mr. Frazer on Origin of Totemism

Mr. Frazer has introduced the term ‘sex-totems,’ in application to Australia.  This is connected with his theory of the Origin of Totemism.  I cannot quite approve of the term sex-totems.

If in Australia each sex has a protecting animal—­the men a bat, the women an owl—­if the slaying of a bat by a woman menaces the death of a man, if the slaying of an owl by a woman may cause the decease of a man, all that is very unlike totemism in other countries.  Therefore, I ask Mr. Frazer whether, in the interests of definite terminology, he had not better give some other name than ‘totem’ to his Australian sex protecting animals?  He might take for a local fact, a local name, and say ’Sex-kobong.’

Once more, for even we anthropologists have our bickerings, I would ‘hesitate dislike’ of this passage in Mr. Frazer’s work:  {88b}

’When a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem.’  Distinguo!  A savage does not name himself after his totem, any more than Mr. Frazer named himself by his clan-name, originally Norman.  It was not as when Miss Betty Amory named herself ‘Blanche,’ by her own will and fantasy.  A savage inherits his totem name, usually through the mother’s side.  The special animal which protects an individual savage (Zapotec, tona; Guatemalan, nagual; North America, Manitou, ‘medicine’) is not that savage’s totem. {89a} The nagual, tona, or manitou is selected for each particular savage, at birth or puberty, in various ways:  in America, North and Central, by a dream in a fast, or after a dream.  (’Post-hypnotic suggestion.’) But a savage is born to his kin-totem.  A man is born a wolf of the Delawares, his totem is the wolf, he cannot help himself.  But after, or in, his medicine fast and sleep, he may choose a dormouse or a squirrel for his manitou (tona, nagual) or private protecting animal.  These are quite separate from totems, as Mr. Max Muller also points out.

Of totems, I, for one, must always write in the sense of Mr. McLennan, who introduced totemism to science.  Thus, to speak of ‘sex-totems,’ or to call the protecting animal of each individual a ‘totem,’ is, I fear, to bring in confusion, and to justify Mr. Max Muller’s hard opinion that ‘totemism’ is ill-defined.  For myself, I use the term in the strict sense which I have given, and in no other.

Mr. McLennan did not profess, as we saw, to know the origin of totems.  He once made a guess in conversation with me, but he abandoned it.  Professor Robertson Smith did not know the origin of totems.  ’The origin of totems is as much a problem as the origin of local gods.’ {89b} Mr. Max Muller knows the origin:  sign-boards are the origin, or one origin.  But what was the origin of sign-boards?  ’We carry the pictures of saints on our banners because we worship them; we don’t worship them because we carry them as banners,’ says De Brosses, an acute man.  Did the Indians worship totems because they carved them on sign-boards (if they all did so), or did they carve them on sign-boards because they worshipped them?