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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Secret of the Totem," Andrew Lang weaves a rich tapestry of folklore and mythology, drawing on his extensive knowledge of various cultures and their beliefs. The narrative unfolds in a fantastical realm where totems serve as vessels of history and magic, intricately linked to the identity of the characters who interact with them. Lang employs a vivid and lyrical literary style, skillfully blending elements of adventure, mystery, and spirituality, all set against a backdrop that reflects the stylistic influences of late Victorian literature and Romanticism, ultimately inviting readers to explore the interconnectedness of humanity and nature through the lens of mythology. Andrew Lang, a Scottish poet, novelist, and anthropologist, was a prolific figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, best known for his colored fairy books and studies of folklore. His fascination with anthropology and indigenous cultures undoubtedly influenced the themes in "The Secret of the Totem." Lang's deep appreciation for storytelling as a means of cultural preservation led him to explore the meanings behind totems, examining their significance in the societies that revere them and enriching his narrative with layered symbolism. This enchanting tale is highly recommended for readers who cherish mythology and folklore. Lang's ability to craft engaging narratives imbued with cultural significance will captivate anyone interested in the intersection of literature and anthropology. "The Secret of the Totem" not only entertains but also provokes thoughtful reflection on the traditions and beliefs that shape our understanding of the world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Secret of the Totem
Table of Contents
Introduction
Pursuing the enigma of how collective symbols command allegiance and regulate intimacy, The Secret of the Totem follows Andrew Lang’s search for the moment when imagination hardens into custom and stories crystallize as social rule, tracing how a community’s emblem can become the pivot of taboos and permissions, and how the effort to account for these processes reveals the wider human struggle to make meaning out of ritual, kinship, and belief while keeping faith with the local textures from which institutions arise and with the contested language in which scholars attempt, sometimes uneasily, to describe them.
The Secret of the Totem is a work of comparative anthropology and the study of religion, written by Andrew Lang, a Scottish author and folklorist known for his wide-ranging contributions to myth and folklore. Published in the early twentieth century, it belongs to a period when debates about social origins, ritual, and belief animated intellectual life across Britain and beyond. Rather than presenting fieldwork in the modern sense, the book reflects a scholarly synthesis aimed at understanding totemism as a key to broader questions about society. Readers encounter a study grounded in careful reading, argument, and comparison across available sources of its time.
The premise is straightforward yet inviting: totemism, often visible in emblematic animals or plants, offers a window onto how groups imagine themselves and set rules for conduct. Lang approaches this subject not as a collector of curiosities but as a disciplined inquirer, testing claims, weighing analogies, and asking what can be inferred without overreach. The voice is lucid, sometimes brisk, always attentive to distinctions that matter. The style balances accessibility with rigor, avoiding needless technicalities while keeping its arguments precise. The mood is investigative and reflective, offering readers a guided tour through a complex landscape of ideas and practices.
Several thematic threads run throughout. One concerns identity: how a shared sign can mark belonging while separating insiders from outsiders. Another concerns law and taboo: the ways symbols help anchor permissions and prohibitions. A third explores kinship and descent, asking how names, alliances, and obligations take shape around emblematic markers. Lang also treats narrative and ritual as mutually illuminating—what people tell about their emblem relates to what they do with it. Across these themes lies a persistent question about explanation itself: when do similarities point to common causes, and when are they the product of analogy or coincidence?
As a document of its era, the book shows how early twentieth-century scholarship assembled and compared reports to build arguments about custom and belief. It exemplifies a method that prizes breadth of reference, clarity of definition, and cautious inference. Lang’s approach places emphasis on sifting claims, separating what is attested from what is conjectured, and seeking explanations that fit the evidence without forcing it into a single mold. The result is neither a mere catalogue nor a sweeping manifesto; it is a sustained attempt to move from description to understanding, while acknowledging the limits of what can responsibly be concluded.
For present-day readers, the book matters on two levels. Substantively, it raises enduring questions about how symbols shape behavior, affiliation, and moral boundaries—issues that still animate discussions of identity and community. Methodologically, it offers a case study in comparative reasoning, reminding us that evidence is always mediated by sources and that interpretation demands tact as well as logic. The Secret of the Totem thus serves both as an inquiry into a specific institution and as an invitation to read culture with care, asking what counts as proof, what counts as pattern, and how to keep interpretation tethered to what is known.
Approached in this spirit, The Secret of the Totem offers an intellectually bracing experience: a clear frame for a difficult subject, a steady hand through contentious debates, and a commitment to making distinctions that protect understanding from speculation. Without presuming to resolve every question it raises, the book equips readers to weigh competing explanations and to recognize the stakes of choosing among them. It rewards attentive reading with a sharpened sense of how symbols, stories, and rules turn scattered practices into social worlds. The journey it proposes is not only historical but also perennial, inviting reflection long after the closing pages.
Synopsis
Andrew Lang’s The Secret of the Totem is a comparative study of totemism and exogamy aimed at explaining their origin, connection, and historical development. Writing against a backdrop of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates, Lang assembles reports from Australian and Native American societies, alongside earlier theorists, to identify recurring features. He defines totemism as a system linking groups with animal, plant, or object emblems, surrounded by taboos and ritual. The book states its purpose clearly: to trace how such symbols became socially binding identities and how rules of marrying outside one’s group arose, while distinguishing exceptional cases from patterns he regards as widespread.
Lang opens by reviewing competing definitions and the central problem: the relationship between totem emblems, food taboos, group identity, and marriage rules. He surveys theories that treat totemism as a stage of religion, a form of primitive science, or an economic adaptation. He outlines common traits—clan names, avoidance of the totem, ritualized use of emblems—and the special case of Australian social divisions into moieties and sections. This preparatory mapping clarifies what any theory must explain: why groups adopt non-human identifiers, how those markers become sacred, and why marriage tends to be prohibited within the totemic group.
A substantial portion addresses prominent theories of the time, notably those based on Central Australian evidence. Lang argues that groups like the Arunta, often used to generalize about totemism, are exceptional in several respects, including beliefs about conception and descent. He contends that using such exceptions to explain the whole institution is misleading. He reexamines the alleged separation of totemism from exogamy, questioning whether they ever existed independently in earlier stages. By comparing regions, he emphasizes the need to distinguish local innovations from broader tendencies, thereby setting the stage for his own account of origins.
Lang’s central hypothesis links totemism to naming practices and the avoidance of personal names, especially those of the dead. He proposes that animal or plant designations originally functioned as personal nicknames or identifiers adopted when name-taboo made ordinary names unusable. Over time these labels became hereditary and grouped people into named clusters. Fear and respect surrounding the names of the dead, he argues, extended to the emblematic creatures or objects associated with those names. Thus, totemic taboos and a sense of sacredness developed not from abstract theology but from everyday naming conventions reinforced by mourning and ghost-fear.
From this naming origin, Lang derives exogamy as a practical rule: individuals sharing the same emblematic name were treated as kin and barred from intermarriage. Where descent followed the mother, totem membership likewise passed matrilineally, solidifying totemic clans and moieties. The prohibition against marrying a name-sister or name-brother, he suggests, evolved into formal exogamous regulations. This explanation ties social segmentation to ordinary customs rather than to elaborate religious doctrines. Lang traces how such rules could broaden into complex marriage systems with sections and subclasses, while retaining the original logic that name-based groups define kinship and marriage limits.
The book also outlines the ritual life that consolidated these identities. Lang describes ceremonies, initiation practices, and communal gatherings that renew ties to the emblem and to fellow clan members. Myths narrating the relationship between people and their totems serve to rationalize existing customs and taboos. He notes regulated exceptions in which controlled consumption of the totem occurs, often interpreted as a rite of communion that affirms the bond. These practices, he suggests, are later elaborations that arose once totem names had become corporate identities, providing a ritual framework that sustains solidarity, transmits tradition, and invests the emblem with heightened sanctity.
Lang widens his survey beyond Australia to North America and other regions, identifying convergences in the use of animal and plant emblems, name-based groups, and taboos. He gathers examples of personal name avoidance and hereditary nicknames to support his naming thesis. At the same time, he distinguishes analogies from direct historical connections, cautioning against forcing diverse traditions into a single lineage. He occasionally points to survivals or echoes of emblematic affiliation in later societies, but treats them as illustrative parallels rather than proofs. The comparative chapters are meant to display a recurrent linkage between naming, emblematic identity, and marriage rules.
Addressing alternative explanations, Lang considers theories based on economics, group marriage, or purely religious revelation. He questions readings of ethnographic data that posit widespread group marriage, and he minimizes accounts that detach exogamy from totemic identity. He also criticizes constructions that treat totemism as a sophisticated theology at its inception. By prioritizing name-taboo and fear of the dead, he presents a simpler mechanism that could generate both sacred emblems and exogamy. Throughout, he stresses the importance of consistent comparative method, careful treatment of exceptional cases, and the need to align theoretical claims with the most common ethnographic patterns.
In conclusion, The Secret of the Totem advances a unified account: totemism begins in personal naming practices shaped by prohibitions on uttering names of the dead; these names crystallize into hereditary emblems, which acquire taboos and ritual; and exogamy emerges as a corollary of the rule that bearers of the same emblem are kin. Lang presents this as a historically plausible pathway that connects everyday customs with enduring social structures. He closes by acknowledging unresolved questions and urging further fieldwork. The overarching message is that the origins of totemism and exogamy lie in simple, widespread practices that gradually accumulated sacred and social significance.
Historical Context
Published in London in 1905 during the Edwardian era, Andrew Lang’s The Secret of the Totem is not set in a single locale but ranges across ethnographic reports from Australia, North America, Melanesia, and parts of Africa. Its historical “setting” is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moment when British and European scholars systematized data gathered through colonial administration, missions, and expeditions. The work engages materials recorded in Central Australia in the 1890s, the Torres Strait in 1898–1899, and earlier North American records from the mid-nineteenth century. It thus inhabits both metropolitan Britain’s learned societies and the frontier stations, mission towns, and Indigenous countries whose customs it analyzes.
The most decisive empirical backdrop for Lang’s thesis was the surge of Australian ethnography in the 1890s–1904. The Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia (1894), financed by William A. Horn and scientifically led by Walter Baldwin Spencer, opened sustained investigation of Arrernte (Aranda/Arunta) ritual life around Alice Springs. Spencer, collaborating with Francis J. Gillen—telegraph stationmaster and magistrate—produced The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904). They documented subsection (eight-class) marriage rules, totemic affiliations, churinga (tjuringa) sacred objects, and Intichiuma ceremonies intended to increase the totem species. Notable was the 1896–1897 Engwura cycle, which revealed complex initiation and ceremonial organization at the heart of Arrernte life. In southeastern regions, A. W. Howitt’s The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904) synthesized decades of observation on Kurnai, Wurundjeri, and other peoples, detailing moieties, phratries, and marriage prohibitions. These publications, appearing immediately before Lang’s 1905 volume, provided the granular cases he used to critique sweeping theories of “group marriage” and to refine the relationship between totemic names, exogamy, and ritual. The consolidation of Australian colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 coincided with growth in museums and universities (e.g., Baldwin Spencer at the National Museum, Melbourne), which stabilized ethnographic curation and dissemination. Lang repeatedly cites Australian data to argue that totemism is not a simple “primitive survival,” but a historically layered institution linking naming practices, ritual obligations to species, and marriage regulation. He contrasts Central Australian evidence with earlier conjecture, leveraging named ceremonies (Intichiuma), material culture (churinga), and dated field campaigns (1894–1904) to reframe debates about the origin of exogamy and the social logic of totemic affiliation.
Debates on exogamy and “group marriage” formed a crucial intellectual context. John Ferguson McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865) introduced exogamy as an evolutionary stage, linking it to totemism. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871) and Ancient Society (1877) advanced classificatory kinship and stadial evolution. By the 1890s, arguments polarized over whether early societies practiced “group marriage.” J. J. Atkinson’s Primal Law (1903) posited incest-avoidance rules arising from intra-horde tensions and senior-male dominance. Lang enters this controversy in 1905, challenging extreme group-marriage claims and proposing that exogamy, naming, and ritual could co-evolve without presuming undemonstrated marital forms.
The work is situated within Darwinian and evolutionist currents that reshaped social thought. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) encouraged comparative reconstructions of human customs. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary sociology and the era’s “Social Darwinism” promoted stage-sequence narratives of institutions. These frameworks informed anthropology’s search for origins of religion, law, and family. Lang adopts the comparative, historical method but resists deterministic ladders, using dated case material to test conjecture. He critiques the uncritical transfer of biological evolution’s logic to social facts, arguing that totemism’s functions—in taboo, solidarity, and marriage rules—reflect contingent historical developments rather than a single universal stage.
The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (1898–1899), directed by Alfred Cort Haddon, offered methodologically influential field research. Its Reports (vols. published 1901–1903 and later) by Haddon, W. H. R. Rivers, C. G. Seligman, C. S. Myers, and others documented kinship, ritual, and psychology among Islanders and adjacent New Guinea groups. Rivers’s innovations in genealogical method and kinship analysis clarified how marriage rules operated in practice. Although Lang focused heavily on Australia, he used Torres Straits materials to compare ritual specialization, clan organization, and animal symbolism, demonstrating that “totemic” logics varied regionally and warning against compressing diverse practices into a single model.
Comparative religion supplied another decisive stream. E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) framed animism as the earliest religion. W. Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (1889) treated sacrifice and communal meals as foundational to social cohesion. James G. Frazer’s Totemism (1887) and The Golden Bough (1890; expanded later) popularized the linkage of totemism, taboo, and sacrificial ritual. By 1905, Lang engages these authorities critically, accepting comparative breadth while disputing monocausal origin stories. He leverages dated ceremonies and named tribes to argue that totemism need not be the primordial religion; instead, ritual, naming, and kinship prohibitions interact historically, complicating Frazer’s linear sequence and modifying Tylor’s animist framework.
Comparative cases beyond Australia anchored Lang’s synthesis. In North America, Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches (1839) and reports on Ojibwe doodem (clan) systems, along with data on Tlingit and Tsimshian crest-bearing lineages, supplied clan-totem analogues. Franz Boas’s late-1880s–1900s fieldwork on the Northwest Coast furnished precise kinship and ceremonial descriptions. In Melanesia, R. H. Codrington’s The Melanesians (1891) detailed mana, taboo, and clan relations. African notes on Zulu and other Bantu-speaking groups recorded animal avoidances and lineage cults. Lang uses these dated, named sources comparatively to show convergences (clan symbols, exogamy) and divergences (inheritance, ritual intensity), emphasizing that “totemism” encompasses multiple historical trajectories.
The Secret of the Totem functions as a critique of the period’s overconfident evolutionary schemas and of imperial habits of generalization. By confronting celebrated authorities with dated field findings from named places and peoples, Lang exposes how metropolitan theories often outran evidence, thereby misrepresenting Indigenous institutions. His analysis underscores social injustices embedded in knowledge production—reliance on colonial intermediaries, selective reporting, and moralizing judgments about sexuality and marriage. In disputing simplistic hierarchies of “primitive” and “civilized,” the book implicitly challenges class-bound and ethnocentric readings of custom, arguing for methodological restraint, historical specificity, and recognition of the complexity of non-European social orders.
