The most incisive critique of totemistic phenomena, one that denied the “reality” of totemism, was supplied by the French ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (English translation, Totemism, 1963). As a chief representative of modern structuralism, Lévi-Strauss was especially stimulated by Radcliffe-Brown, whose views he attempted to further expand. Lévi-Strauss believed that he was to approach the apparent, acknowledged difficulties in the study of totemism from the viewpoint of a study of structure. In order to study the structure of totemism, Lévi-Strauss devised a scheme to illustrate the abstract polarities that he saw in totemism as a phenomenon in human culture.

His scheme was implemented in a table of oppositions or polarities, or mutual relationships. The basic opposition, or relationship, was between nature and culture. On the one hand, there were in nature certain realities such as species of animals or plants and specific animals or plants. On the other hand, there were in culture various groups and individuals who identified themselves with particular species or with specific animals or plants. Lévi-Strauss distinguished four kinds of relationship between nature and culture within totemism: (1) a species of animal or plant identified with a particular group, (2) a species of animal or plant identified with an individual, (3) a particular animal or plant identified with an individual, and (4) a particular animal or plant identified with a group.

According to Lévi-Strauss, each of these four combinations corresponds to the phenomena that are to be observed in one people or another. The first holds good, for example, for the Australians, for whom natural things are associated with cultural groups (moieties, sections, subsections, phratries, clans, or the association of persons from the same sex). As an example of the second combination, there is the individual totemism of North American Indians, in which a person is correlated with a species of nature. For the third type of combination, the Mota people of the Banks Islands of Melanesia are cited: the individual child is thought of as the incarnation of a particular animal, plant, or natural creature that was found and consumed by the mother at the time that she was conscious of her pregnancy. For the fourth type of correlation, Lévi-Strauss cited examples from Polynesia and Africa where definite individual animals formed the object of group patronage and veneration.

Lévi-Strauss also critiqued the findings of A.P. Elkin, a specialist on Australia, where totemism had already played a special role in the formation of anthropological and sociological theories and where it exhibits an abundance of forms. Elkin had also differentiated four forms: individual totemism; social totemism—i.e., totemism that is in a family, moiety, section, subsection, patrilineal clan, or matrilineal clan; cultic totemism, with a religious content that is patrilineal and “conceptional” in form; and dream totemism—totemistic content in dreams—found in social or individual totemism. Elkin denied the unity of totemism, but (according to Lévi-Strauss) wanted to preserve its reality on the condition that he might trace it back to a multiplicity of types. For Elkin, there is no longer “one” totemism but many totemisms, each in itself a single irreducible whole.

In connection with the Australian material, Lévi-Strauss argued that matrilineal clan totemism—which was passed on through the “flesh” or “blood”—and patrilineal clan totemism—which was based on dreaming—were in no way heterogeneous but were to be thought of as being mutually complementary. These two types of totemism were different means of connecting the material and spiritual world; together, they expressed the relationship between nature and society.

From the Australian data, Lévi-Strauss concluded that “real” totemism was based not on the similarities of the matrilineal and patrilineal types but on their dissimilarities. Such a pattern was clearly expressed in the basic model of the contrasts of the natural with the cultural (that were outlined above). Building on the ideas of Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss claimed to perceive antithetical thinking as a crucial structural principle in totemism and believed that the similarity among totemistic ideas in various cultures lay in similarities between systems of differences—those documented in the natural sphere and those in the culturally defined social groups. Lévi-Strauss concluded that the distinction between the classes of man and animal serves as the conceptual basis for social differences. For Lévi-Strauss, totemism is therefore an “illusion” and a “logic that classifies”—a post hoc explanation in which the structure of social relations is projected onto the natural phenomena, not taken from it.

After Lévi-Strauss

During the later 20th century, anthropologists and sociologists became increasingly preoccupied with such issues as the construction of meaning and identity in a postcolonial world. Given that totemistic belief systems had proved to be relatively durable over the course of human history, many scholars asked whether it was useful, as Lévi-Strauss had advocated, to dispose of totemism as a “mere” social construct. As a result, investigations of totemism generally declined; those that were undertaken moved away from treatments of its universality (or lack thereof) and toward studies that considered totem systems in more specific contexts.