The Vicissitudes of Totemism : One Hundred Years after Totem and Taboo 9781782414131, 9781782202622

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CHAPTER TITLE

THE VICISSITUDES OF TOTEMISM

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THE VICISSITUDES OF TOTEMISM One Hundred Years after Totem and Taboo Gérard Lucas

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First published in 2015 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT

Copyright © 2015 to Gérard Lucas. The right of Gérard Lucas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Translated by Andrew Weller.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78220 262 2 Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk e-mail: [email protected] Printed in Great Britain

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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PREFACE

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INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER ONE An outline of the situation of totemism in anthropology in the years following the First World War

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CHAPTER TWO From the 1920s to the Second World War CHAPTER THREE Returning to the circumstances of the publication and translation of Totem and Taboo CHAPTER FOUR Totemism and anthropology after the Second World War

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE Psychoanalytic interpretation: with and without the patient

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CHAPTER SIX The misfortunes of ambition

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CHAPTER SEVEN The evolution of practices

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CHAPTER EIGHT Beyond nature and culture

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CHAPTER NINE The new possibility of discussions on the principal axes of Freud’s thought in Totem and Taboo CHAPTER TEN Totem and Taboo, politics, and law CHAPTER ELEVEN Totemic systems and totalitarianisms: the point of view of Totem and Taboo

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CHAPTER TWELVE The price of murderous consent?

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APPENDIX

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NOTES

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REFERENCES

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INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am only a psychoanalyst, without being an anthropologist or a historian, so the bibliographical references in this book may be considered as a long recognition of debts. In addition to the articles and books to which I have had access in the Library of Anthropology at the Collège de France, I am particularly indebted to the work of B. Pulman, an anthropologist specialised in the history of anthropology, who also possesses a thorough knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to an extent one rarely meets outside the professional milieu. His contributions, particularly those devoted to the first contacts between anthropology and psychoanalysis, were of great help to me, and I have cited them abundantly. I also refer to the very well documented book by F. Rosa (2003), L’Age d’or du totemisme, as well as to E. R. Wallace’s (1983) Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal. I would, therefore, like to thank Mrs Wickridge at the Collège de France Library of Social Anthropology for her help, M. F. Bresson, B. Glowczewski, and E. Todd for their reading recommendations, and Salman Akhtar for his encouragement with this project. A special thanks to Robert Michels, Dean of Cornell University, for accepting to write a preface for this book. Let me express a particular thank you to Professor P. Bidou, on the recommendation of F. Sacco, for his friendly assistance and for the information he supplied me with at the Collège de France in the domain of anthropology. This book would certainly have suffered without the friendly remarks of Ph. Blime, T. Bokanowski, F. Lamour, M. Ody, and the help of M. Papageorgiou. Marilia Aisenstein’s support was, without any question, decisive in my capacity to complete it. Finally, I would like to express particular thanks to my translator for the English version, Andrew Weller. vii

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gérard Lucas is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (honorary training member of the SPP), and former intern of the hospitals of Paris. As a hospital psychiatrist seconded to the A.S.M.13 (Mental Health Association in the 13th district of Paris), he has run different institutions there, including the Alfred Binet Centre from 1978 to 2006. He is the author in particular of three books published by Editions Sociales and Press Universitaires de France, and of sixty or more articles published in French and foreign journals. In 2014, the International Psychoanalytic Association named him vice-president for Europe of its Organizational Committee for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis.

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PREFACE

Robert Michels

Freud published Totem and Taboo (first called “Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics”) in 1912 and 1913. James Strachey, in his note in the Standard Edition (Vol. 13, p. xi) tells us, “He [Freud] told his present translator . . . that he regarded it as his best-written work”. Writing a century after Freud, Gérard Lucas reviews the (largely hostile) responses of the anthropological world to Freud’s work, tracing the history of those responses from the First World War to the present. Lucas, a distinguished French psychoanalyst, places totemism in multiple contexts—evolving anthropological thought, evolving psychoanalytic thought, the social and political events of the last century, and the particular contributions of the French psychoanalytic world. Lucas’s thinking is extraordinarily wide-ranging—his bibliography cites nineteen works by Freud, thirteen by Lévi Strauss, and five by Boas, along with many other anthropologists, philosophers, historians, and, less prominently, psychoanalysts. The reader follows Lucas, and the thinking of the academic world over the past century, as he traces the subtleties, complexities, and potentials of Freud’s arguments. Are we talking about real fathers and real sons, that is, developmental truths? Are we talking about real history and prehistory, social evolution and anthropology? Are we talking about structures of the mind, father functions and father principles, so central to French psychoanalytic thought, although less well known to the Anglophonic community; structures that exist and persist, independent of their developmental or anthropologic roots, and that may shape the Oedipal complex rather than be derived from it? Lucas is comfortable in each of these discourses, and guides us through their history, their complex relationships, their origins in Freud, and their subsequent development. The results will be richly rewarding to readers with interest in psychoanalysis, in anthropology, or in the world they both attempt to understand. ix

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Introduction

Taking advantage, on the one hand, of the anniversary of the publication of a volume one century earlier in order to take stock of the reactions in the literature that it aroused, while trying, on the other hand, to recognise the traces of its influence when they are identifiable, seem to me to be quite classical dimensions of the critical history of literature. Attempting to do this in connection with a contribution that was rejected—energetically, moreover—from the outset in all sorts of ways by the readership for which it was originally intended by its author might appear to be a major challenge if were not for my feeling that, very discreetly, the opinions of anthropologists concerning Freud’s book Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) have evolved in a significant and interesting way over the years. One of the authors cited even went as far as to write, in 1966, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, that the direction of Freud’s enquiry was “highly pertinent” (Fortès, 1966, p. 17). Freud’s book was published a few years before the introduction of the notions of the death drive and of the compulsion to repeat in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g). The Freudian version of the origin of totemism can be interpreted as anticipating this change. Indeed, it x

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INTRODUCTION

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gives the consequences of the repetition of a murder a decisive place in the possible origin of the processes of hominisation. The volume caught the notice of public opinion; for Freud, it was a question of demonstrating the worth of his conceptions in the field of anthropology and of interesting the anthropologists of his time in them. What I want to focus on, then, in this study, is the evolution of their publications on the theme of totemism and its origins, a theme to which they accorded much importance prior to the First World War. I am not, therefore, proposing a study of the text of Freud’s essay as such, even if I will sometimes be led to cite it: as dated as it might seem in certain respects, it does not require, in my view, a “corrective commentary”, and a careful reading of the texts concerned does not permit me to share the critical opinions of E. Roudinesco and M. Plon (1997), when they describe, in their Dictionnaire de la psychoanalyse, a Freud who remains “attached to the framework of evolutionism”, and who “claimed to rule over a domain in which he knew nothing, without taking modern studies into account (p. 1061). Freud had read Goldenweiser and did not share his way of thinking. Neither does the present study fall within a perspective that belongs to “ethnopsychoanalysis”. My aim, then, is not to rewrite a history of the notion of totemism, which would have required a much vaster study and knowledge concerning a subject that has already been treated, in particular by F. Rosa (2003); but rather to give the reader some significant points of reference, following up, as it were, on the contributions of B. Pulman (1984–1991). By following an essentially chronological thread, I want, furthermore, to account for the evolution of the opinions of anthropologists regarding their reading of Freud’s essay and to try to appreciate their different qualities and eventual consequences throughout the twentieth century. Their diversity is clearly noticeable: if the positions of rejection are the most frequent, their nature varies in sometimes surprising ways, not only in time, but also from one cultural space to another. It will be clear by now that my purpose is not at all to “throw light” on Freud’s formulations concerning the possible origins of totemism, but to try to understand what was at stake in the variations of the rejection of the eminent members of this profession. As brilliant as some of them seem, they are, none the less, men like us, and in this respect their positions also teach us something about ourselves.

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Thus, Freud’s suggestions relating to the taboo as the first code of law or to the place of totemism in political matters received little response. While demonstrating an exceptional degree of creativity during the interwar period, certain themes in his work strongly suggest that he was by no means indifferent to the cultural, political, and social context of the Europe of that epoch. Thus, after Totem and Taboo, he published “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (1915b), “Mourning and melancholia” (1917e), and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). And then, in 1938, he revisited the themes of Totem and Taboo in Moses and Monotheism (1939a). The practices of mass murder that were to leave their mark on the twentieth century after an exceptionally murderous First World War seem, retrospectively, to confer these writings with a sort of premonitory value. The contrast with the active disinterest shown in Freud’s essay left me pensive, but also curious to follow its course after these major events had, albeit remarkably slowly, become objects of interest for Europeans. In this respect, the history of Totem and Taboo and of its readership obviously not only concerns the professional group of anthropologists, but also all those who are led to reflect on the status and the place of the “human sciences”. *  *  * The composition of the book has obliged me to make certain choices: it was sometimes possible to translate and cite at some length certain short articles of great interest. More often, I found it was necessary to associate summaries and citations; other articles are simply cited. Those readers for whom Freud’s essay is not sufficiently accessible to memory will find, at the end of this book, in an appendix, an outline of its last chapter (Part IV).

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CHAPTER TITLE

CHAPTER ONE

An outline of the situation of totemism in anthropology in the years following the First World War

“Totemism” in an encyclopaedic article by E. S. Hartland n order to trace the broad outlines of this situation, I will refer to an article by E. S. Hartland (1921) in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. From this rather voluminous and thorough study devoted to totemism in Volume VII, I will extract only a definition of totemism, and the part devoted to its origins. I have chosen it for the chronological proximity of its publication with that of the translation of Freud’s essay, and for its encyclopaedic descriptive and neutral tone, apparently free of conflicts between persons, cultures, and schools (though the Anglo-American rivalries of the epoch led Hartland to pass over in silence the “modern” American studies to which I will be giving an important place).

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Totemism, as exemplified in North America and Australia, where it has been found in its fullest development, is a form of society distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) it is composed of clans or bands of men each united among themselves by kinship real or fictitious, a kinship frequently extending beyond the limits of the local tribe; (2) the clan is distinguished by the name of some species of animal or plant, or more rarely of some other natural phenomenon,

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such as the rain, sun, etc.; (3) the species or object which gives its name to the clan is conceived as related to the clan, and to every member of it, in some mystic way, often genetically; and in this case, every individual specimen of the object, where it is an animal or plant, is regarded as belonging to the clan; (4) such species or object is generally the subject of a religious or quasi-religious emotion, and each individual specimen of this object or animal is the subject of taboos and/or prohibitions: subject to certain limitations or ceremonies, it cannot be injured, killed or (in the case where the specimen is edible) eaten. (5) Moreover, as in every society based on kinship, the members of the clan are entitled to mutual defence, protection, and resentment of injuries. They may not marry or have sexual intercourse within the clan. These characteristics are general, but they vary to some extent, not merely from area to area, but from tribe to tribe. After detailing a few typical examples, it will be necessary to mention others where totemism seems to be decadent, and then to consider whether it has ever prevailed among peoples where it is not now to be found, and lastly to inquire into its origin. Various influences tending to modify, submerge, or destroy it will be indicated from time to time in the course of the article. (Hartland, 1921, p. 405)

Hartland thus adopts a strategy of description where the recourse to evolutionary modalities, backed up by a variety of arguments, is part of the British evolutionist tradition, which is clearly upheld here. His reservations concerning the profusion of ideas and conflicts that have long stimulated the debate on the subject serves the purpose of my introduction to some extent. In the penultimate part of this study, the author puts forward speculative discussions related to the existence of traces of totemism in non-totemic peoples. He does so on the basis of the importance and the characteristics of the depictions and narratives that give a privileged place to the links between animals and the gods in the Egyptian religion and in Greek mythology, but also in Ireland and certain Aboriginal groups in Western China. The last section, devoted to the origin of totemism, is interesting on account of its recapitulative character. I will do no more than give a summary here of its broad outlines. The origin of totemism has been the subject of many debates among anthropologists. James Frazer had initally adopted a theory according to which the aim of a totemic society was to practise magic ceremonies for the multiplication of the totem animal or vegetable, and to ensure a continuance of provision of food and prosperity for

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the community, but he was finally led to relinquish that hypothesis. Instead, he was now inclined to the opinion, suggested by observations on the part of Spencer and Gillen of the peoples of central Australia, that totemism originated in a primitive explanation of conception and childbirth. They believed they were born as a result of the impregnation of the mother’s womb by spirit animals or spirit fruits. Hence, they possessed the characteristics of the animal or fruit in question and refused to eat them. Frazer (1922) initially suggested that totemism might be linked to a theory “of the external soul”, that is, “in the belief that living people may deposit their souls for safe keeping outside of themselves in some secure place”. Andrew Lang (1903), for his part, was led to emphasise the social aspect of totemism in a theory similar to that of Herbert Spencer, according to which the origin of totemism is to be found in names. Groups of men, having been given names, either as a way of distinguishing them, or as nicknames, accepted these names and came to fancy that they themselves had a mystical connection with them. Then the normal course of social organisation led gradually to certain rules, such as preferring the wives of another band, and subsequently to an absolute prohibition against marrying a woman of the same band, in other words, to clan exogamy. The influence of names and the inveterate tendency to regard a name as proof of a strong connection with the person or thing signified by it were practically universal in primitive cultures, but why these names were appropriated by the various bands is left unexplained. Lang and Frazer agree that the institution of exogamy is distinct from totemism and that totemism, as a matter of fact, preceded exogamy. Exogamy, however, often, indeed almost always, accompanies totemism. For A. C. Haddon (1902), there was a very personal connection between a certain group of people and some animal or plant. It is obvious that the men who persistently collected or hunted a particular group of animals would understand the habits of those animals better than other people, and a personal regard for these animals would naturally arise. Once the name and the animal (or object, little matter) had been adopted, a real mystical connection was established between the object and the group members, which might have resulted in the object being subject to a taboo rather than continuing to have its common or practical use.

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Emile Durkheim (1912), chiefly based on Australian evidence, considers totemism as a religious institution. According to him, it is the religion of a sort of anonymous and impersonal force manifested in various animals, men, and emblems, but it is an impersonal god without name or history, immanent in the world, and represented in the form of different animals and objects. The totem is really only the material form in which this energy is represented to the imagination. It is the symbol, not only of the totemic god, but also of the clan. It is the standard, the emblem by virtue of which each clan distinguishes itself from the others, the visible sign of its personality, the mark borne by each member of the clan, whether human, animal, or anything else. All are sacred in varying degrees, but most sacred of all is its emblematic character for the clan. The totem is the source of the moral life of the clan, and all are morally bound together, with definite duties towards one another of help, vengeance, and so forth. The totem is, therefore, very much bound up with the organisation of society. It is considered as practically the earliest form of religion and of society. Durkheim’s theory remains a brilliant and very interesting conjecture, but, for the moment, nothing more than that, for the assumption of primitive universality of totemism has not been proved. This theory was developed shortly after the publication of an essay in 1908 by E. Reuterskiöld, who emphasised how, for primitive man, the individual is nothing while the group is everything. Man did not picture himself as lord of creation; he was only part of a great community. He felt himself closely united with an animal living in his neighbourhood. These religious, magical, and social aspects of totemism were originally undistinguished from one another. In his endeavour to explain the attitude towards nature of the tribes of Central Brazil, von den Steinen (1894) deems that they draw no strict line of demarcation between man and beast. There is, thus, no impediment to their associating themselves to animals. Indeed, the Bororo declare that they are red araras, not that they will become araras after death, nor that they were araras in a previous existence, but that they are araras here and now. We can understand, therefore, how, in their legends and stories, humans are associated with the most simple forms of animals, and it is often impossible to say whether the actors are human or animal. Totemism is founded on something deeper than names. It assumes a community of nature between men and other creatures.

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The word totemism does not signify a religion. The respect of the clan for its totem arises out of the attitude of mind just explained. The relation of the clan to its totem is mystical and generates an intense feeling of kinship. This is frequently expressed in the belief that they are descended from the totem. Although regarded with reverence and looked to for help, the totem is never, at least in regions where totemism is not in decline, identified with a god or with an all-powerful or supernatural being. On the other hand its connection with the social organisation is very intimate. Beginning with recognition of kinship, it develops the clan feeling and the clan organisation, and clan exogamy binds the whole tribe together. We are not certain whether exogamy actually precedes totemism in point of time or not, but the interaction of the two undoubtedly strengthens the notion of totemism. When, in the course of the evolution of civilisation, totemism began to decay, exogamy often continued to exist independently. Numerous cases exist where the clan system and exogamy have coexisted without the presence of any other element of totemism. The forms of totemism are so varied that it has survived in many regions. In Hartland’s article published in 1921, there is not the slightest allusion to Freud’s essay, translated into English in 1918. Indeed, it was not until several years later, as we shall see, that it would be taken into consideration.

Totem and Taboo: the publication Although he began to write Totem and Taboo in the middle of the year 1911, Freud’s work of documentation and writing continued during the years 1912 and 1913, and the last part entitled, “The return of totemism in childhood” was completed in June 1913. The volume itself, after having been published in the periodical Imago, chapter by chapter, would be translated into English in New York only after the First World War, in 1918. While he was working on this book, Freud was subject to changing states of mood, which have been commented on wisely by Gantheret (1993). In the course of writing, he consulted Jones, Abraham, and Ferenczi, being particularly concerned to have their opinion and their suggestions; however, as soon as he had finished writing it, he entered

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a period of doubt and discouragement about the quality of his work as well as the reception that it would be given. Although we lack information that would help us appreciate the reactions that the reading of these few articles provoked in Germany, except for the support received from his three pupils and friends, we are quite well informed about some of the reactions to its publication in English. They were neither numerous nor abundant, in contrast with the mass of interest, energy, and creativity present in anthropological circles during this period in relation to totemism, a period that Rosa (2003) has baptised as “the heyday of totemism”. For him, the late character of the reactions of anthropological circles to Freud’s essay, to which they only accorded interest in the early 1920s, was linked to the fact that Freud’s principal references belonged to “the oldest ranks of the debate, at the limits of the obsolete” (Rosa, 2003, p. 108, translated for this edition). Without doubt, as Rosa writes, the accounts of the principal anthropological journals of the post-war period in the USA, particularly following the First World War, criticised systematically the conjectural sources from which Freud derived his information (he forgets to mention, however, the notable presence of W. H. Rivers). It is difficult, however, to share completely his point of view, for, alongside James Frazer, William Robertson Smith, and James Atkinson, we can find in the bibliography of Totem and Taboo more than sixty anthropological references. They show that Freud was well aware of the questions raised by the discovery of the Arunta nation and the reorganisations that it brought about in anthropological theories. It is striking, moreover, that he even indicated in his essay the relatively new orientation at that time of contemporary American anthropologists on this subject, while clearly distancing himself from them. An extract from Freud’s essay will throw light on the difficulties of the exchanges between the two professional groups: The more incontestable became the conclusion that totemism constitutes a regular phase in all cultures, the more urgent became the need for arriving at an understanding of it and for throwing light upon the puzzle of its essential nature. Everything connected with totemism seems to be puzzling: the decisive problems concern the origin of the idea of descent from the totem and the reasons for exogamy (or rather for the taboo upon incest of which exogamy is the expression), as well

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as the relation between these two institutions, totemic organization and prohibition of incest. Any satisfactory explanation should be at once a historical and a psychological one. It should tell us under what conditions this particular institution developed and to what psychical needs in men it has given expression. My readers will, I am sure, be astonished to hear of the variety of angles from which attempts have been made to answer these questions, and of the wide divergences of opinion upon them put forward by the experts. Almost any generalization that could be made on the subject of totemism and exogamy seems open to question. Even the account that I have just given, derived from the book published by Frazer in 1887, is open to the criticism that it expresses the present writer’s arbitrary preferences; and indeed it would be contested today by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly changed his opinions on the subject. It is plausible to suppose that un understanding of the essential nature of totemism and exogamy would best be arrived at, if it were possible to come nearer to the origins of the two institutions. But in this connection we must bear in mind Andrew Lang’s warning that even primitive peoples have not retained the original forms of those institutions nor the conditions which gave rise to them; so that we have nothing whatever but hypotheses to fall back upon as a substitute for the observations which we are without. Some of the attempted explanations seem, in the judgement of a psychologist, inadequate at the very outset: they are too rational and take no account of the emotional character of the matters to be explained. Others are based on assumptions which are unconfirmed by observation. Yet others rely upon material which would be better interpreted in another way. There is generally little difficulty in refuting the various views put forward: the authorities are as usual more effective in their criticisms of one another’s work than in their own productions. The conclusion upon most of the points raised must be non liquet. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the most recent literature on the subject (which is for the most part passed over in the present work) an unmistakeable tendency emerges to reject any general solution of totemic problems as impracticable. (See, for instance, Goldenweiser, 1910.) In the discussion of these conflicting hypotheses which follows, I have ventured to disregard their chronological sequence. (1912–1913, pp. 108–109)

It is precisely this first contribution by Goldenweiser (a pupil of Franz Boas), cited in particular by Freud, to which I want to give some

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attention. In Freud’s text, moreover, we can find a second version of this clear disagreement: “Thus psychoanalysis, in contradiction to the more recent views of the totemic system but in agreement with the earlier ones, requires us to assume that totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a simultaneous origin” (p. 146). I shall now let Goldenweiser speak for himself, since he returned to this subject in 1918 after the publication of Freud’s essay.

Goldenweiser: an unnatainable demand for conformity? The choice of citing Goldenweiser’s (1910) article, “Totemism: an analytical study”, which appeared before the publication of Totem and Taboo, is justified, in my view, by the light it throws on the shift in the orientations of anthropology, in particular, “modern” American anthropology (this was the term that was used), shortly before Freud’s book was published. It is a methodical compilation of great richness located geographically in Australia and British Columbia. This comparative and thorough study seems quite representative of the North American “morphologist” tendency of those years. I will cite its summaries and conclusions to give intelligibility to the movements of his thought in connection with this problem of totemism: this text gives an idea of the reasons for the considerable efforts made by ethnologists; it informs us implicitly about the conditions under which this very particular profession is exercised and at the same time leads us to reflect on the conditions of gathering the material of this vast review of the literature concerning these two regions, as well as on the nature of this material. After a brief reminder of the different categories of totemism distinguished by James Frazer, Goldenweiser has, in fact, a precise, original, and highly critical aim. Frazer, Hadden, and Rivers had discussed this subject on many occasions in numerous articles. These authors consider totemism as a complete and complex phenomenon, historically and psychologically. This attitude is illustrated by the way that “the survivals” of totemism are conceived of by some authors— that is to say, in certain regions, only one or two aspects of totemism are observed, but from this they infer the definite existence of a classical and typical totemism in the past. In other words, a totemism with all its essential characteristics.

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For Goldenweiser, there is, a priori, no obvious justification for considering the different aspects of totemism as interconnected. An analysis of their characteristics, as observed in certain primitive tribes, might even prove their historical and psychological independence. His study essentially purports to offer a comparative analysis of the “symptoms of totemism” in two regions where it is evident and recognised: Australia and British Columbia. His conclusions, summarised in Table 1, reproduced below, would lead him to reconsider the conceptions of totemism at this epoch and to offer a critique of the theories put forward to explain its origins, and of the attempts to represent it as a universal stage in the evolution of religion. He writes, To summarize the results of our comparison. In two of the “symptoms”—exogamy and totemic names—there is apparently agreement between the two areas. Even here, however, a deeper analysis brings out fundamental differences. In Australia, the exogamic functions are assumed by the phratries, the totemic character of which divisions, even in the past, seems problematic; and by the classes, social divisions of a totally different order, to which there is no analogon among the tribes of the Pacific coast. The totemic groups, on the other hand, are but weakly correlated with exogamy, excepting tribes like the Arábana. In British Columbia the rule of exogamy refers to the primary divisions of the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and northern Kwakiutl (Xaisla and He’iltsuq). The smaller subdivisions, here mostly with names referring to localities . . . are no more independent exogamous units than the Australian totemic clans. However, the differences between the two areas are even more fundamental than when thus represented. In juxtaposing the Australian and Indian social divisions, we are not comparing units which are in any strict sense analogous. In British Columbia the fundamental units are the groups with local names, those bearing a common name having originally occupied common territory. The chronological relationship of the ancient local groups to the larger exogamous groupings remains an unsolved problem. It is certain, however, that the former did not originate from the latter through any process of ‘splitting-up’, although later processes which led to the subdivision and dispersion of the local groups may perhaps be characterized by that term. Intricate and in part puzzling as are the relations of the Australian totemic clans to the phratries, we must regard the latter as the older

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institution. The loss of names by many phratries (for we cannot doubt that they originally had them); the fact that the meaning of the existing names has in the majority of cases been forgotten by the natives; the dominance of the phratry over the clan in almost all ceremonies, – all these considerations force upon us the assumption of greater antiquity for the phratry. . . . In Australia all clans bear the names of their totems . . . In British Columbia, the large exogamous groups of the Tlingit and Haida, and the clans of the Xaisla and He?iltsuq, have totemic names. Of the four Tsimshian, however, only two have such names. Here again the resemblance is more superficial than fundamental. (1910, pp. 225–226) Table 1.  Totemism in British Columbia and Central Australia

Exogamy

Totemic names

Taboos Descent from the totem

Magical ceremonies Reincarnation spirits Guardian Art Rank Number of totems

British Columbia

Central Australia

Totemic phratries (Tlingit) Totemic clans (Haida, Tsimshian, Northern Kwakiutl Phratries (Tlingit) Clans (Haïda) 2 of four clans (Tsimshian) Clans (Kwakiutl du nord) Non-totemic taboo, common; totemic, absent Absent (Tlingit, Haïda, Tsimshian) Occurs (Kwakiutl and farther South) Not associated with totemism Not associated with totemism Intimately associated with totemism Actively associated with totemism Conspicuous (in individuals and groups) Small

Phratries Classes Totem clans (generally not independent exogamous units) All totem clans

Numerous totemic and non-totemic taboos Universal

Intimately associated with totemism Intimately associated with totemism Not associated with totemism Passively associated with totemism Absent Large

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. . . The above comparison of the totemism of British Columbia and of Australia brings out a rather striking contrast. Only in two points— exogamy and totemic names—does there seem to be agreement, but even here the conditions are not really analogous. A certain religious attitude, in the broadest sense, is found in both areas; but in Australia it is outside of mythology and dimly perceptible in the attitude of the natives towards the living animals, plants, etc., while in British Columbia the religious element must be sought in the ceremonies and myths. As to the two remaining “symptoms”—taboo, and descent from the totem—we find them in Australia; while in British Columbia the former is absent, and the latter occurs in somewhat veiled form in only a part of the tribes. In addition to these supposedly symptomatic traits, we find that two other factors—magical ceremonies and a belief in reincarnation—have risen to such prominence in Australian totemism as to become more characteristic of it, in a large number of tribes, than are any of the former traits. . . . In British Columbia, where the above factors, although present, have no totemic significance, two other factors—guardian spirits and art—have attained such conspicuous development as to again become more characteristic of the totemism of British Columbia than are any of the other traits. (1910, pp. 229–230)

The addition of supplementary ethnological material with which Goldenweiser concludes this very voluminous study of comparative thought does not significantly enrich the theme I am exploring; however, the author concludes by proposing a definition of totemism.

“Totemism defined” A long prologue is necessary to ensure that his definition will be serviceable: The concrete content of the phenomenon must not be expressed; for, as shown above, that concrete content varies with places and peoples. The content, then, must be expressed in the most general terms. . . . Totemism, in the current sense, is understood to have a social and a religious side . . .

but in very variable proportions: thus the religious aspect can be absent:

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The religious term must thus be eliminated. But if not religious, what? If we survey the various objects and symbols which in totemic areas sometimes assume religious significance, and then again do not, I think we shall find that, whether religious or not, these objects and symbols represent certain emotional values for the people to whom they pertain. Eliminating, then, the term ‘religious’, we find that what becomes associated with social units in totemic communities are objects and symbols of emotional value. (pp. 274–275, original emphasis)

Finally, Goldenweiser feels ready to attempt a definition: Totemism is the tendency of definite social units to become associated with objects and symbols of emotional value. The means by which the association occurs is, as indicated above, descent; and through descent the social groups which become associated with objects, etc., are constituted as definite social units. To look at the phenomenon from a somewhat different standpoint, objects and symbols which are originally of emotional value for individuals become through their totemic association transformed into social factors, referring to social units which are clearly defined. This process of transformation from individual into social values may fitly be designated by the term “socialization”. We must remember, however, that the groups within which the socialization occurs are firmly fixed social units perpetuated through descent. The process of socialization is thus not general or vague, but specific. Hence our definition may also be expressed thus: Totemism is the process of specific socialization of objects and symbols of emotional value. But the term “socialization” may in itself be taken to imply a process; while “objects and symbols of emotional value” may, for psychological purposes, be simply designated as “emotional values”. Thus, quite briefly and in most general and purely psychological terms, Totemism is the specific socialization of emotional values. (p. 275, original emphasis)

For Goldenweiser, the term “analytic study” signifies the refusal in the evolutionist perspective to make any mention of temporality that makes it possible, for example, to refer to a primitive antiquity of totemism or its deteriorating character. Quite characteristically, he rejects explanations in terms of weakening, or opinions of an “evolutionist character”: To a retort of that character, I would answer that we may safely assert that there is not one phase of human culture so far represented in an

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evolutionary series of successive stages of development, where the succession given has been so amply justified by observation of historical fact as to be safely adopted as a principle of interpretation. (p. 200)1

The reading, translation, and summary of this study have aroused remarkably contradictory feelings in me. Without being thoroughly competent in this area, I am sensitive in the first place to the scope as well as the detailed and systematic character of this comparative study, which commands respect on account of the energy that has gone into it. For Goldenweiser, it is an energetic denunciation of methodological flaws and, for example, of the subordination of present diversity to an alleged origin. It is necessary, therefore, to identify historical specificities in the different primitive populations and a methodological relationship between the attempt to understand the formation of totemism diachronically and the definitive attempt to delimit its essential characteristics. This study was carried out under stringent conditions: the search for differences, for disparities, certainly takes precedence over the search for analogies that are immediately suspected of being apparent or superficial, thereby distorting judgement and, owing to complacency, inducing the risk of committing grave misconceptions. This dimension is so prominent that very often, in situations where the author’s perspicacity and stubbornness authorise him to speak of conclusions backed up by proof, it is not uncommon to see him ready to increase them materially or to confirm them. Admittedly, on the subject of totemism, “everything connected with totemism seems to be puzzling” (Freud, 1912–1913, p. 108). Of course, a high degree of scepticism is one of the qualities expected of an investigator . . . Yet, it seems to me that Goldenweiser’s doubt is not only related to this register linked to the difficulties of the subject with which he is dealing. He seems to be attached to the methodological model that he has chosen, probably with reference to personal values which I do not feel in a position to broach here: if the notion of totemism is to be deemed admissible, feasible, and scientifically useful, it must be able, notwithstanding its plausible antiquity and its probable evolution over thousands of years, to accommodate without important variations peoples who are likely to be separated by many things, in the two cases chosen. This criterion of quite strict similarity seems

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to be requisite for the totality of the elements of the material to ensure an “integral development of the notion”: systems of kinship and nomination, types of definition of exogamy, modalities of relations of kinship with the totemic species, limits, definitions and range of totemic taboos, and so on. The lack of this criterion leads, without any possibility of distinguishing the logical implications of hierarchised levels, to a disqualification of the notion of totemism. This “unidimensional” requirement for homogeneity is difficult to understand for those who have had medical training, with its advantages as well as its disadvantages. (Perhaps a brief example will help me to make myself clearer: I trust the reader will forgive me for having recourse to elements of semiology that are no doubt outmoded, but I do not think it alters their illustrative value. Future interns in medicine were once taught that the characteristic signs of myocardial infarction were, typically, the sudden occurrence, often in a man in his forties, of a characteristic thoracic pain, and a fall in blood pressure followed by fever. No one thought that the mention, among the very first clinical symptoms that it was important to be able to recognise, of a painless symptom from which the first classical signs were missing, invalidated the typical clinical picture or the notion. We knew that there was clearly a tangible gap between the notions of physiology and what patients presented in their diversity.) Goldenweiser seems to put on one and the same level all the elements that he has derived from clearly very diverse, but necessarily oral, sources in these cultures. Perhaps this is linked to the fact that anthropology at this time was in search of an analogous system to the one which, after many centuries, physiopathology progressively would make available to medicine; however, the author’s stringent criterion of scientific certainty was not possible to satisfy at that time, and his personal models did not allow him to take a more flexible approach. However, Goldenweiser’s doubt also resides in the constructed nature of his personal positions on the subject of totemism, in a tone that is not one of the controlled exposition of the often contradictory aspects of a question in debate, in the course of scientific exchanges or personal speculations. The difficulty in organising the antithetical aspects of his subject leads him to waver, sometimes for long periods, between different possible options . . . or still more often to return, without any new elements, to subjects already dealt with, involving a

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repetition that escapes him because he is himself prey to doubt, without this being clearly related, however, to the quality of his line of argumentation. This inevitably affects the reader, who might feel he or she is plunged into some confusion, and may shed light on the such contradictory ways that this study, which is not always easy to follow, has been understood. Its “deconstructive”, “critical” approach was highlighted, in fact, from the moment it was published: In 1911, Lowie places emphasis on this presentation of a “view founded on methodological principles which are becoming the common property of all the active younger American students of ethnology” (p. 189), which clearly situates the adoption of this orientation as a group issue. We shall see that LéviStrauss would endorse this point of view. Rosa (2003), for his part, considers Goldenweiser as a defender of totemism as a “form of social organization marked by the distinction of these segments through their respectful association with certain types of objects of the same type” (p. 206). In his view, this article represents a pioneering analysis of the methodological and theoretical errors on which the construction of the concept of totemism was based, but nothing would be further from his intentions than to suggest that this notion that has been so used and misused should be definitively rejected. For Rosa, Goldenweiser was, thus, the tenacious supporter of the anthropological pertinence of totemism, and he did his utmost to underline its significance. I think that certain features of Goldenweiser’s thought might have played a role in this sort of obscurity. However, the latter is, at times, dispelled, giving way to highly rigorous and logical functioning where the problems are formulated in an extremely abstract way that is capable of stripping them of their relational and affective aspects (the relative necessity of respecting totemic prohibitions and the question of ties through descent thus disappear from his definition of totemism). This abstraction and these disappearances would seem, would they not, to be the price paid for a return to the clarity of a conclusive definition? It can leave one somewhat perplexed, bringing to mind Lichtenberg’s famous bladeless knife whose handle was missing. Where can one find tribal societies that are entirely devoid in one form or another of the socialisation of objects and symbols of emotional value?

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It seems that, later on, the author accepted this point himself. This, at any rate, in the USA at least, was one of the significant aspects of the anthropological editorial context in which Freud’s essay was to be published.

“Form and content in totemism” (Goldenweiser, 1918): a quest for definition? Goldenweiser has the feeling that while the definition of totemism given in his earlier article is “anything but illuminating”, the accent was placed on two basic elements of totemism designated there as “the specific socialization of emotional values” (1918, p. 280). The latter constitute the content of totemism, the specific socialisation its form. Thus, he returned to the subject, from a reflective point of view, without utilising new ethnological material, eight years after this first article. In his analytical study of totemism, he was concerned in his conclusion with the very important social aspect of totemism, or of any totemic complex, as a form of the specific socialisation of certain religious attitudes. On the other hand, these attitudes and the totemic content seem so variable, the religious aspects so particular, so attenuated, that it seems impossible to particularise them in a definition; hence, the introduction of the concept of “emotional values”. “As might, perhaps, have been anticipated,” he writes, “the excessive generality of this definition soon proved to mar its usefulness as a conceptualization of the totemic phenomenon” (p. 281). Goldenweiser seems to find it very difficult to reconcile productively the contradictory options that often come to his mind in the great complexity of this vast field of anthropological knowledge, with the result that his line of thinking is difficult to follow: The presence in totemism of certain special attitudes towards nature is, as such, nothing distinctive, and scarcely needs further elucidation; for some form of zoölatry, phytolotary, or nature worship in the widest sense is as universal as the domain of primitive religion. More than that, all the particular aspects of the attitudes to things in nature, such as the recognition of kinship with them, descent from them,

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community of nature, their appearance as omens, protectors, etc., all of these are also plentifully represented in other non-totemic contents. The social organization with which the totemic content is associated is also a feature not in itself totemic. While the overwhelming majority of clan systems appear as carriers of totemic complexes—of this more anon—there are exceptions which, while rare, are frequent enough not to be negligible. (pp. 284–285)

But totemism appears “as descriptively distinctive while presenting no special or unique principle in its make-up” (p. 287). Further on, he continues: The concept “totemism” is deemed artifical, not natural, for reasons partly of historical, partly of psycho-sociological order: the historic development of totemic differences was different, hence they are genetically disparate and non-comparable; the concrete content of totemic complexes is highly variable, hence, from a socio-psychological and cultural standpoint, they are also disparate and non-comparable. The logical limit of this attitude is to consider the concept and term “totemism” as an unjustifiable abstraction based on superficial knowledge of the comparative material or of disregard of significant differences in that material. When these errors are rectified, the concept ‘totemism’ may be expected to become obsolete, its place being taken by a number of less inclusive concepts which would conform more accurately with the concrete data . . . Nevertheless these processes, when viewed in the synthesizing light of historic perspective, reveal certain not unimportant parallelisms. Thus the not inconspicuous similarities in the content of totemic complexes must find their developmental counterpart in certain resemblances of the circumstances under which the different features arose in the different complexes . . . There again, the very processes of socialization and psychological assimilation of these features, with all the disparity and individuality in different instances, comprise inevitably so many common conditions of a general psycho-sociological kind, that the mechanisms at work must also have been similiar in many ways. As to the variability of features in totemic complexes, it is, of course, very considerable. And yet, if the contrasts are set aside, a very respectable nucleus remains which recurs in a large number of instances. Thus, the idea of intimate relationship with the totem, whether in the form of descent, transformation, association, physical

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or psychic resemblance, or of some other sort; the use of the totem as an eponym; the totem as a symbol, whether in art or as a property mark, or as a sign of rank; these are features of enormously wide distribution in totemic communities; and other features might be named which are only less common. (pp. 288–289)

In a way that is slightly surprising for me, before reflecting again at length on the nature of totemism, Goldenweiser remarks on the basis of certain aspects of his study: “It is considerations such as these that make totemism appear as one of the most characteristic and sharply defined institutions of primitive society, thus vindicating its claim to a separate concept and term” (p. 290). Freud’s options were obviously different—his volume, published in English the same year, is, moreover, not cited. Perhaps it was “passed over in silence”, to take up his expression with regard to Goldenweiser’s earlier article, which Freud cited, albeit without discussing it. Goldenweiser seems to struggle to organise his thinking in the context of his doubts and the contradictory complications inherent to a subject that his intelligence enables him to perceive in all its complexity, without furnishing him with other means of dealing with it than repetitive accumulation and a level of abstraction whose fruitfulness is not entirely clear. Later on, in his History, Psychology, and Culture (Goldenweiser, 1933), we will see him criticise Freud’s utilisation of Robertson Smith’s totemic meal as “a nonethnological finding”; there, he deems that the primal horde is an invention, and that the psychic continuity between the generations is a sign in Freud of the same omnipotence of thought that he highlights in “savages” and neurotics (remarks that have a certain value). Faithful to his style, he concludes, none the less, with a favourable judgement, but on a general level lacking definition: Whatever may be said in criticism of Freudian and other such mechanisms, the fact remains that we know more today about the urge of sex, repressions, conflicts, and sublimations, than we did yesterday, and we are hoping for an even richer harvest tomorrow. (p. 67)

In the course of this book, Goldenweiser refers to the Franz Boas’ (1916) article, “The origins of totemism”, in American Anthropologist, where he expresses a similar point of view to his own:

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Since the contents of totemism as found in various parts of the world show such important differences, I do not believe that all totemic phenomena can be derived from the same psychological or historical sources. Totemism is an artificial, not a natural unit. (p. 321)

Boas was, in fact, his master in this evolutionary moment of anthropology.

“The methods of ethnology” (Boas): the model of “modern scientific” rigour Probably freer in mind, more energetic and determined, Boas was, in fact, the principal figure of the American anthropology of this generation. In an article devoted to the methods of ethnology, Boas (1920) was to take up a position in relation to Freud’s volume. In the first pages of this article, Boas presents, with a certain satisfaction, the “modern” methodological orientations of anthropology. He had played a leading role in differentiating them from the evolutionist speculations that had been dominant hitherto. The notions of migration and dissemination replaced the notion of evolution to account for modes of development and similar customs in all sorts of places all over the planet. For him, the course of historical changes in the cultural life of man does not follow definite laws that are applicable everywhere, and so cultural development cannot be said to be the same among all races and all peoples: “The hypothesis of a uniform evolution has to be proved before it can be accepted . . .”. Further on he adds, “If we admit that there may be different ultimate and co-existing types of civilization, the hypothesis of one single general line of development cannot be maintained” (pp. 311–312). This hypothesis implies the thought that our modern Western European civilization represents the highest cultural development towards which all other more primitive cultural types tend, and that, therefore, retrospectively, we conduct an orthogenetic development towards our own modern civilization. (p. 312)

Referring to evolutionism and diffusionism, Boas says that he has the impression that

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if the hypothetical foundations of these two extreme forms of ethnological research are broadly stated as I have tried to do here, it is at once clear that the correctness of the assumptions has not been demonstrated but that one or the other has been arbitrarily selected for the purpose of obtaining a consistent picture of cultural development . . . However, a different method is at present pursued by the majority of American anthropologists. (pp. 313–314)

For Boas, those anthropologists are primarily interested in the dynamic phenomena of cultural change; the ultimate questions of the relative importance of the parallelism of cultural development in distant areas in comparison with worldwide diffusion, and the stability of cultural traits over long periods, are, for them, questions to be dealt with at a future date when the actual conditions of cultural changes are better known. Their methods are analogous to those of European, and particularly Scandinavian, archaeology and to the researches of the prehistoric period in the eastern Mediterranean area. American researchers are just as interested as others in resolving the ultimate problems of the philosophical history of human civilisation, but they do not hope to be capable of resolving a complicated historical problem by a formula. “First of all,” Boas writes, “the whole problem of cultural history appears to us as a historical problem.” He continues, In the domain of ethnology, where, for most parts of the world, no historical facts are available except those that may be revealed by archaeological study, all evidence of change can be inferred only by indirect methods. Their character is represented in the researches of students of comparative philology. The method is based on the comparison of static phenomena combined with the study of their distribution. What can be done by this method is well illustrated by Dr. Lowie’s investigations of the military societies of the Plain Indians, or by the modern investigation of American mythology. (p. 314)

Even if, as Boas acknowledges, there is scarcely any hope of finding incontrovertible elements relating to the chronological sequence of events, “certain broad outlines can be ascertained with a high degree of probability, even of certainty” (p. 315). Primitive society loses the appearance of absolute certainty with the application of these methods. In the natural sciences, we are

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accustomed to examining a given number of causes and to studying their results, but in historical events we are compelled to examine each phenomenon not only as a result, but also as a cause. Boas, thus, refrains from any attempt to resolve a fundamental problem of the general development of civilisation. He adds, however, First of all, the history of human civilization does not appear to us as determined entirely by psychological necessity that leads to a uniform evolution the world over . . . but it would be quite impossible to understand, on the basis of a single evolutionary scheme, what happened to any particular people. (p. 317)

Boas chooses the example of marriage as a universal institution: . . . it may be recognized that marriage is possible only between a number of men and a number of women; a number of men and one woman; a number of women and one man. As a matter of fact, all these forms are found the world over, and it is, therefore, not surprising that analogous forms should have been adopted quite independently in different parts of the world, and, considering both the general economic conditions of mankind and the character of sexual instinct in the higher animals, it also does not seem surprising that group marriage and polyandrous marriages should be comparatively speaking rare. (p. 318)2

Was it really possible, in 1920, for the author to invoke, as he does here, “the character of sexual instinct in the higher animals” without citing certain texts by Freud? (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life appeared in 1901; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905; Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis in 1916–1917. We know, moreover, that he attended the lectures given by Freud in German in September 1909 at Clark University (Worcester), Freud’s first invitation to the USA. In 1920, Boas had been in the USA for almost thirty years; he came from a liberal and cultivated family of Jewish origin, and his mother tongue was German. He had brought up his five children, who, at that time, were almost all adults. Owing to his energy, his intelligence, and his culture, he was a man of a certain stature who had become a reference in American anthropology. Although he had opposed the “evolutionists” of the preceding generation, and deemed “the whole problem of cultural history as a

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historical problem”, Boas was to interest himself in prehistoric problems that, generally speaking, were considered to constitute regular series irrespective of their local diversity. He writes, In short, if we look for laws, the laws relate to the effects of physiological, psychological, and social conditions, not to sequences of cultural achievement. In some cases a regular sequence of these may accompany the development of the psychological or social status. (p. 318)

Boas gives as an example the sequence of industrial inventions in the Old World and in America, which he regards as independent, before turning his attention to the development of rational thought: A similar consideration may be made in regard to the development of rationalism. It seems to be one of the fundamental characteristics of the development of mankind that activities which have developed unconsciously are gradually made the subject of reasoning. We may observe this process everywhere. It appears, perhaps, most clearly, in the history of science which has gradually extended the scope of its inquiry over an ever-widening field and which has raised into consciousness human activities that are automatically performed in the life of the individual and of society. (p. 319)

It seems, then, that it was the idea of the development of reason out of unconscious activities that would lead Boas to refer to Totem and Taboo, without, however, commenting on this observation concerning the evolution of thought in the light of his rich experience as an ethnologist, thereby giving the impression that he was responding, as we shall see, to an incursion into a domain in relation to which he had intuitions and ideas that he had not had occasion to formulate. He writes, I have not heretofore referred to another aspect of modern ethnology which is connected with the growth of psycho-analysis. Sigmund Freud has attempted to show that primitive thought is in many respects analogous to those forms of individual psychic activity which he has explored by his psycho-analytical methods. In many respects his attempts are similar to the interpretation of mythology by symbolists like Stucken. Rivers has taken hold of Freud’s suggestion as well as of the interpretations of Graebner and Elliot Smith, and we find,

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therefore, in his new writings a peculiar disconnected application of a psychologizing attitude and the application of the theory of ancient transmission. (p. 319)

While Boas believed that certain fundamental ideas of Freud might be applicable to ethnological problems, he did not think that the onesided usage of this method would further our understanding of the development of human society. He believed that the influence of impressions received during the first years of life had been completely underestimated and that the social behaviour of mankind depends to a large extent on early habits of life, established before coherent memory begins, and, further, that many so-called racial or hereditary traits should be considered as the result of early exposure to certain social conditions. Most of these habits do not rise into consciousness and are, therefore broken with difficulty only. Much of the difference in the behavior of adult male and female may go back to this cause. If, however, we try to apply the whole theory of the influence of suppressed desires to the activities of man living under different social forms, I think we extend beyond their legitimate limits the inferences that may be drawn from the observation of normal and abnormal individual psychology. (p. 320)

Many other elements have greater importance for him: for instance, the phenomena of language clearly show that conditions that are quite different from those with which psychoanalysts are concerned determine the mental behaviour of man. The general ideas underlying language do not enter consciousness until the scientific study of grammar begins. Nevertheless, the categories of language compel us to see the world arranged in certain definite conceptual groups, considered as objective categories, which, therefore, impose themselves on the form of our thoughts. “It is not known,” he writes, “what the origins of these categories may be, but it seems quite certain that they have nothing to do with the phenomena which are the subject of psycho-analytic study” (p. 320). At the same time, Boas has serious doubts as to whether the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism can be used: symbolic interpretation, he says, has always had a prominent place in philosophy. The primitive life of man, the history of philosophy and theology, provide

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a great abundance of examples of highly elaborate symbolism, each of which depends on the philosopher that developed it. He writes, The theologians who interpreted the Bible on the basis of religious symbolism were no less certain of the correctness of their views, than the psycho-analysts are of their interpretations of thought and conduct based on sexual symbolism. The results of a symbolic interpretation depend primarily upon the subjective attitude of the investigator who arranges phenomena according to his leading concept. (p. 321)

In his view, to prove the applicability of the symbolism of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to show that a symbolic interpretation from other entirely different points of view is not equally plausible, and that explanations that disregard symbolic significance, or reduce it to a minimum, are sufficient. While, therefore, we may welcome the application of every advance in the method of psychological investigation, we cannot accept as an advance in ethnological method the crude transfer of a novel, onesided method of psychological investigation of the individual to social phenomena the origin of which can be shown to be historically determined and to be subject to influences that are not at all comparable to those that control the psychology of the individual. (p. 321)

Boas’s first approach seems critical, and even mistrustful, towards Freud. The end of the article confirms, moreover, that the essence of the specificity of psychoanalytic interpretation, as I understand it, but in a way I believe that is perfectly faithful to Freud’s work, has not been understood. Boas seems (like Durkheim, Mauss, and, later, Radcliffe-Brown) to have become interested in psychoanalysis thanks to Rivers. Yet, should we reproach him for being superficially informed? Had this specificity of psychoanalytic interpretation been identified as clearly as it is today, when it remains, in my view, largely unknown outside the practice of analysis? We know that Freud, in his encyclopaedia article, presented (only in 1922) his method in the following terms and order. Psychoanalysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way,

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(2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline. (1923a, p. 235)

What defines the psychoanalytic character of an interpretation is its effects, in such a way that, if we are rigorous, we can only guarantee this description of it “retrospectively”, drawing principally on the subject’s free associations which “serve as a measuring rod for the validity of the interpretation” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967, p. 367, my emphasis). I shall come back to this point. We are in 1920, Freud’s work is arduous, its reading and comprehension are very time-consuming, especially for those who have not had the experience of the couch, to which it refers. What is more, he had just reshaped it profoundly, without really taking the trouble to articulate the consequences of these changes in connection with which many contributions have appeared over the last fifty years. Boas has no difficulty in organising his thought; it is clear and subtle. Starting out from a position that has a dimension of pragmatism, common sense, and genuine modesty, he announces his ambition of obtaining from these conditions results that comprise a dimension of scientific certainty, without dissimulating the difficulties involved. This dimension also comprises the formulation of a prohibition against speculation, a characteristic, in his view, of the former generation. Thus, although he declared that he considered “the problem of cultural history as a historical problem”, he knew that, in ethnology, he would often have to content himself with indirect evidence. His intelligence and his culture led him to sense the strength of the impressions of the earliest years of life, characterised by a lack of access to consciousness, the importance of which he had understood. His ignorance of the particular character of the links of psychoanalytic interpretation with language led him, it seems to me, to fail to distinguish two registers: the temporal sequence of facts, which can be objectified in certain very privileged situations, on the one hand, and the complicated problems of history, implying the existence of narrative and, thus, of access to language on the other, which, of course, are no more self-evident in “primitive” men than in children today. The historical character of cultural history certainly has social implications which Boas saw immediately, just failing, it seems to me, to grasp the

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unconscious psychic implications which, of course, are of interest to psychoanalysts. Was he familiar with the work of Saussure? (Course of General Linguistics was published in 1916; the work of Troubetskoy (1939) and Jakobson (1963) about ten years later.) These particular circumstances might help us to understand better that, notwithstanding the quality of his intuitions, his attitude shows that he had an unpleasant sense of encroachment that was unjustified in his view, given the information he had at his disposal. Eighteen years later, he would write, in the 1938 edition of his book Mind of Primitive Man: “We owe in large part to S. Freud what we understand of the forgotten incidents of childhood which remain a living force throughout life – the more potent, the more thoroughly they are forgotten . . .” (Boas, 1938b, p. 121).

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CHAPTER TWO

From the 1920s to the Second World War

y inventory of the short-term reactions to the publication of Totem and Taboo, which is a little disappointing on account of its limited character, will be enriched somewhat during this period. Rosa thinks that Freud’s volume entered the circuits of anthropological reflection too late. The bibliography on the subject of totemism was to diminish, it should be noted, from the 1920s onwards; Chuliat’s compendium, titled Bibliographie critique du totémisme, published in 1936, filled 200 pages! “Nothing any more was as it was before the First World War”, writes Rosa (2003, p. 4, translated for this edition). Curiously enough, this was also the period when the first big collections of African art were formed. (I would like to thank Ian Pont for this information.) Can these evolutionist orientations as a whole be described on the same level as those that are sometimes described as having succeeded them, whether it be the theories of animism, of diffusionism, of morphologism incarnated by Boas, or, a little later, of functionalism, with Malinowski, to which we can add the culturalists, with Kardiner and Mead? I am not sure because I have the feeling that the mobility and the number of these tendencies form part of a multiplicity of issues that

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attest to the enrichment of the anthropological discipline, but are not situated at the same level of speculative abstraction and generality as evolutionism itself. The new generations asserted, often in a very direct and critical way, what they had to say, in opposition to the previous generation, without having, it seems to me, much to nourish the debate with in the long-term. Their basic options needed to be different, manifesting a generational conflict that did not spare scientific societies, regardless of the discipline, psychoanalysis included, of course. According to Poirier (1968), Evolutionism remained, however, in a veiled form in many authors for one or the other of these aspects; it should be noted that its career was not finished, but unilinear evolutionism, the preconceptions, exaggerations, and excesses of which aroused criticisms that were perhaps sometimes themselves exaggerated, was replaced by a more balanced neo-evolutionism which sought to draw the reasonable consequences from an undeniable historical evolution of the facts and ideas without dogmatism and without blinders. (pp. 44–45, translated for this edition)

The practice of the ethnologist’s profession would also undergo changes during these periods. Even if the authors of grand and audacious, if not reckless, syntheses were not all confined to their armchairs, these ethnologists had little access to the terrain itself. W. Rivers and C. G. Seligman, both doctors by training, were the first ones in the years 1900–1910 to organise expeditions (see Pulman, 1991a, p. 503) in India, Melanesia, in New Guinea, Ceylon, and then in the Sudan, sojourning and travelling quite rapidly across a wide range of geographical zones. At that time, field expeditions were for the most part limited to a few months (Malinowski stayed only a short time in the Trobriand Islands). In fact, these investigations served here to illustrate a thesis and may be differentiated from what would be the privileged use of first-hand documents (missionaries, travellers, scholars), or acquired during great expeditions such as the one Boas made in 1887 in the Arctic, or the one made by Haddon in 1899 in Melanesia with Seligman and Rivers.

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These investigations of field researchers would only begin to “furnish a methodological apparatus a few years before the Second World War” (Poirier, 1968, p. 41, translated for this edition). It was only in the 1920s, when it became necessary for the English school to obtain intensive ethnological experience implying one or several long-term expeditions and the learning of a language, that participant observation would impose itself as a prior requisite for any legitimate effort of theorisation, thereby introducing a methodological upheaval. The evolutionist framework of thought, particularly in its unilinear version, which had prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century, was in decline, even if Frazer remained an author in vogue. The anthropological studies that would incarnate the new regime of ethnographic authority during the inter-war period were those of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and B. Malinowski, but two articles by A. Kroeber on the subject stand out by virtue of their quality. We will follow these contributions by referring to a lecture given by Ernest Jones on totemism and to the different positions of the authors of this period.

Totemism as a mode of social organisation of nature: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown In his best-known paper, “The sociological theory of totemism”, Radcliffe-Brown (1929) sees totemism as a sort of social organisation of nature, concerned with the ritual relations between social units on the one hand and natural species on the other. Thus, he dissolves the conceptual contours of totemism into a much vaster field of relations between man and nature. The most substantial question for him is to find the unity in the diversity by delimiting the contours of “true totemism” (Rosa, 2003, p. 303). Attempts to reconstitute the origins and the evolution of the phenomenon threw into relief the importance of certain manifestations to the detriment of others—in such a way as to establish the conceptual limits within a vast ethnographic universe. It was necessary, in his view, to go beyond this and “to study systematically a much wider group of phenomena, namely, the general relations between man and natural species in mythology and ritual” (Radcliffe-Brown, 1929, p. 117, my emphasis). (I know this text and

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Radcliffe-Brown’s work only through F. Rosa’s very clear study of it in his book, L’Age d’or du totemisme (2003, pp. 307–321).) Radcliffe-Brown seeks to throw light on the extreme empirical variety of totemism in Australia. His concern is to compare the different social units, the totemic character of which had been observed or suspected. He claims to be objective and free of any evolutionist a priori; thus he observes, for instance, that the totemism of matrilineal clans was normally devoid of ritual phenomena as opposed to patrilineal totemism that sometimes exists and is characterised by complex forms of organised cult. Initially, he believes in the more primitive character of matrilineal totemism. In fact, it would be found that the totemism of the Arunta type is not exceptional. There are varieties of totemism in cultural societies and not only in the Arunta, albeit with a certain overlapping of local totemisms owing to the local nature of the “Okanikilla” centres, which are held to determine the totemic identity of each individual in conceptional theories: the individual belongs to the totem of the locality in which the mother becomes aware of her state of pregnancy (each child is integrated with the totemic group through the reincarnation of the spirit of a totemic ancestor who entered the maternal womb independently of parental totems), but the woman frequently becomes aware that she is pregnant in the locality of her husband and, consequently, the child has the same totem as his or her father. Radcliffe-Brown uses the term “ritual relation” between men, animals, or any other class of natural objects, to refer to a phenomenon that is found on a much large scale than in the classical acceptation of totemism; it is clear that this designation implies a quite considerable weakening of the dimension of prescribed conduct, of restrictions, of repetition, and of formal fixedness included hitherto, regardless of the civilisations and circumstances, in the term taboo. Thus, Radcliffe-Brown does not hesitate to assert that almost all the hunter–gatherer peoples have a ritual attitude towards the wild species on which they feed, and he links this tendency to the fact that, for all these peoples, all the natural objects that contribute in a special way to their well-being constitute a potential target for what he calls the ritual attitude. He defines it as follows: There exists a ritual relation whenever a society imposes on its members a certain attitude towards an object, which attitude involves

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some measure of respect expressed in a traditional mode of traditional behaviour with reference to that object. (p. 123)

We can see here the emergence of a functionalist dimension that LéviStrauss would object to. “Here,” writes Rosa (2003),“it is as if there is a subordination of the social to the natural and thus a subversion of the most elementary rules of sociological method” (p. 310, translated for this edition).3 For Radcliffe-Brown, the parallelism between natural species and tribal subdivisions represented an ideological construction by means of which the former were integrated with human society. The totemic supra-society, which he conceived of in the context of the local horde, could have different types of social organisation (in English, contrary to French and German, the term “horde” implies a limited number of individuals). It encompassed the existing social frameworks. In this complete version of the sociological theory of totemism, the mere existence of a collectively shared ritual attitude is justification in itself for these wider social structures. It was more or less a question, in the correspondence between the natural classes of objects and the tribal subdivisions, of including nature in society. The dimension of ritual submission present in this entry, for instance, by means of restrictive taboo prohibitions, could raise questions about the price paid for an inverse submission of society towards nature. But this restrictive dimension, supra-natural, one might say, is, precisely, minimised by this author. What was important for him was the integration of the animal and vegetable world within the social order through the totemic system. This cohabitation of man and nature rather than the edible character of totems is an essential element of his sociological theory of totemism. In Religion and Society (1945), he does not hesitate to give prominence to the utilisation of categories of kinship as a preferential form of the organisation of nature acquired within the horde. Radcliffe-Brown’s style and interests clearly did not point him in the direction of the questions of the origin of totemism in Freud’s essay; at the same time, his interesting treatment of ritual attitudes toned down very severely the description of taboos employed in ethnology; his silence on Totem and Taboo, like Hartland’s, is, therefore, in my view, not surprising at all.

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Malinowski and the Oedipus complex . . . a quarrel that has become a classic It seems that it was necessary to wait until the years 1918–1920 for Malinowski, who had just finished his field study in the Trobriand Islands, to be one of the very first to propose to “test” the Freudian theory of dreams. This work would lead to the publication of a series of articles between 1923–1925 marking the beginning of a famous controversy about the universality of the Oedipus complex. I shall give only a brief summary of it here because it is very well known. In the light of his field experience in the Trobriand society, which obeys a rule of matrilinear descent, Malinowski deems, in a series of articles, that there is no repression, no censorship, and no moral repression of infantile sexuality of the genital kind when the latter appears. Moreover, there is no period corresponding to what Freud calls the pregenital period and, in particular, no anal erotic interest. The indigenous people are, he holds, totally ignorant of physiological paternity. Hostile emotions are directed against the maternal uncle possessing authority, and incestuous desires towards the sister thereby become the object of a very strict taboo. Generally speaking, then, these societies, based on mother-right, are, he claims, characterised by a nuclear complex that is, therefore, distinct from the Oedipus complex. Ernest Jones was to reply to these criticisms on several occasions, in particular in an article that appeared in 1925 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He suggests that the ignorance of physiological paternity described by Malinowski is probably not as complete and authentic as it seems, and that the system of mother-right, with its avunculate complex, represents a mode of defence among all those that are employed against the inclinations denoted by the term “Oedipus complex” (Jones, 1925, p. 130). It was in 1927 that Malinowski hardened his criticisms of psychoanalysis. He claimed that Freud had carelessly neglected sociological variations, opining, “The failure, even the explicit aversion of psychoanalysts to seriously consider social organization undermines almost the entire value of their own attempts to apply their doctrine to anthropology” (1927, pp. 325–326). It was in 1927 that Malinowski published Sex and Repression in Savage Society. I shall give extracts here from the last three chapters of the third part of this book:

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The primordial cause of culture. The consequences of parricide. The original parricide analysed.

As is customary in most of Malinowski’s publications, this text associates the adoptions of quite unexpected highly favourable positions with criticisms expressed in an acerbic tone, without it being easy to establish any continuity or compromise in the author’s oscillating positions, making it quite difficult to know what he really thinks personally. According to him, in examining “the primordial cause of culture”, Freud’s theory on totemism, taboo, exogamy, and sacrifice constitutes one of the most important contributions that psychoanalysis has made to anthropology. It is impossible to pass over it in silence, so he subjects it to a detailed critical analysis. Freud shows that the Oedipus complex furnishes an explanation both for totemism and the interdiction bearing on relations with the mother-in-law, an explanation for the ancestral cult and for the prohibition of incest, for identification of man with his totemic animal, and for the idea of God the Father. “In fact,” he writes, the Oedipus complex, as we know, has to be regarded by psychoanalysts as the source of culture, as having occurred before the beginnings of culture, and in his book Freud gives us precisely the hypothesis describing how it actually came into being. (Malinowski, 1927, p. 148)

To these hypotheses, Freud adds the identification of man with the totem as a trait that is characteristic of infantile mentality, that of primitives and neurotics. For Malinowski, this identification is based on the tendency to identify the father with some unpleasant animal. In this description, we can already note the drastic economy that he makes of the notion of ambivalence, in particular in the relationship of the child and of the primitive with the animal chosen in the place of the father. He is interested in what he calls the sociological side of the theory and quotes a long passage from Darwin on which Freud constructed his own theory, concerning the jealousy of all male quadrupeds: Promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable . . . Therefore, if we look far enough back in the stream of time, judging

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from the social habits of man as he now exists . . . the most probable view is that primaeval man originally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives “agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community” (Dr. Savage, in Boston Journal of Nat. Hist., vol. 5, 1845–7, p. 423). The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the same family. (Freud, 1912–13, p. 125 (Darwin, 1871, The Descent of Man, 2, p. 362), cited by Malinowski, 1927, p. 150)

Malinowski claims he is not at all shocked to see Darwin speaking of man and the gorilla indiscriminately, but insists that the distinction between the family as it exists in anthropoid apes and the organised human family is of great importance: “He has to discriminate clearly between animal life in the state of nature and human life under culture” (p. 151). For Malinowski, Freud had lost sight of this distinction. In support of these critical remarks, Malinowski quotes at length the creator of psychoanalysis: The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course, allow for the beginnings of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing up sons . . . indeed this crime is of the greatest importance for Psychoanalysis, if not of Humanity! For, according to Freud, it is destined to give birth to all future civilization. (p. 152)

What Freud, in fact, says is, “It is the great event with which culture began, and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest” (Freud, 1912–1913, p. 145). Rather provocatively, Malinowski then invites the reader to “hear the story of this primordial cause of all culture” by returning to Freud’s text, which the reader will find in the appendix to this volume. It seems to me that by substituting for Freud’s formulation, “It is the great event with which culture began, and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest”, terms such as “origin and primordial

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cause”, Malinowski is clearly trying to exploit the tension that exists between the idea of a murder and that of civilisation. He formulates his thinking more explicitly, moreover, a little further on: This is the original act of human culture and yet in the middle of the description the author speaks about ‘some advance in culture’, about ‘the use of a new weapon’, and thus equips his pre-cultural animals with a substantial store of cultural goods and implements. (p. 153)

Thus, Malinowski explicitly contends that the theory of Freud and Jones seeks to explain the origin of culture by a process that already implies its existence, an argument that is, therefore, circular. We would be mistaken in thinking, however, that Malinowski’s intelligence does not alert him to the fact that what is being described may be considered as a process unfolding over the course of time, a process, moreover, that is explicitly referred to by Freud; I will return to this later. In exploring “The consequences of the parricide”, Malinowski quotes copiously again from Freud’s text: “Let us patiently hear all that Freud has to say on this matter – it is always worth while listening to him” (p. 154). Through discreet shifts in meaning, he then gives prominence to the circular argument that he thinks he has identified. He describes the parricidal sons immediately after the murder engaged in laying down laws and religious taboos, instituting forms of social organisation, in short, introducing into their lives the first elements of the civilised state. Thus, he asserts, “. . . the sons could not have instituted sacraments, established laws, and handed on customs” (p. 154). Freud makes no mention of these terms at any point in his text, giving us to understand implicitly, I think, that the scale of time in which he is interested does not easily permit such abbreviations,4 the founding taboo on incest taking precedence most probably over all the others in all the senses of the term. In order to understand the question that could be asked of Freud concerning the possibilities of a lasting influence of this original crime, Malinowski turns his interest towards the postulate of the collective soul, as it appears in Freud’s text. He severely criticises the methodological necessity of the fiction of a collective soul in Freud’s thesis:

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As a point of fact no competent anthropologist now makes any such assumption of “mass psyche”, of the inheritance of acquired “psychic dispositions”, or of any “psychic continuity” transcending the limits of the individual soul. (p. 157)

These reservations, which he is obviously not alone in harbouring, culminate, however, in a theory that is difficult to follow: the cultural milieu in which each generation deposits and stores up its experiences for successive generations, which we call civilisation, is supra-individual but not psychological. It is moulded by man, who moulds it in turn. This analysis permits him to show that “the complex is the natural by-product of the coming into existence of culture” (p. 158). While, in Freudian theory, and with the assent of Ernest Jones, the Oedipus complex is at the origin of everything, Malinowski holds it to be a formation that exists prior to any form of civilisation. It would seem that, in this context, the idea of origin, of anteriority, gave rise to a sort of logical condensation that it is important to elucidate. As far as “The hypothesis of primal parricide analysed” is concerned, the anthropologist has scarcely any objections to make to the hypothesis of the primal horde as such, but Darwin did not make an explicit distinction between the human state and the animal state, and the outlines of a distinction contained implicitly in his conception was totally effaced by Freud in his attempt to reconstruct the great naturalist’s hypothesis. Malinowski, thus, felt it was necessary to investigate the constitution of the family at the anthropoid pole of human evolution, and to distinguish the features of family bonds before and after humanisation. For him, the reference to nature and culture is an adequate differentiating axis. Thus, he contrasts the instinctual bonds of the Simian species, where the young offspring, male and female, naturally leave the horde as soon as they become independent (after their period of growth and maturation where there exists a biological need to maintain the family cohesion indispensable for the preservation of the species) with those of the majority of higher mammals. In the latter, we also find that the old male abandons the herd to make way for a younger guardian, which is very useful for the species. “The working of instincts in the natural condition leaves no room,” he writes, “for special complications, inner conflicts, suspended emotions or tragic events” (p. 161). The instinctive emotional attitude is linked to biological need in such a way that each of these emerging cycles of behaviour effaces

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entirely the earlier emotional attitude. “While governed by a new instinct,” he asserts, “the animal is no more in the throes of a previous one” (p. 162). Malinowski then nuances his positions, acknowledging the interest of new research into animal psychology, and asks himself why, in Freud’s account, the members of the horde would neglect to this extent the values of the independence of freedom, and why they would have so much desire to return to the family. It is clear that the incestual dimension and its links with neotony are not present in his mind. For him, the hypothesis of the original crime is an assumption that is indispensable to psychoanalytic theories: “without it all their hypotheses would collapse” (p. 162). He then returns to the persistent question of the anteriority of the complex and of the crime. The Oedipus complex is only intelligible for him when seen in relation to causes in civilised life, unlike Jones, who considers the complex as preceding civilisation: if the “totemic crime”, a term Freud, of course, never uses, is the cause of the complex, it must a fortiori be placed still further back. The whole question of the chronology of the relations of causality, of whether the cause has precedence over the effect, of critical and retrospective phenomena, as well as of the differences that separate the incestuous impulses from the developed notion of the Oedipus complex, and of the work that it implies, are disregarded here by Malinowski. In this context, he considers that Freud’s assertions are incoherent: he writes, The picture that he paints would constitute a lethal endowment for any animal species . . . It is easy to perceive that the primeval horde has been equipped with all the bias, maladjustments and ill-tempers of a middle-class European family, and then let loose in a prehistoric jungle to run riot in a most attractive but fantastic hypothesis. (pp. 164–165)5

Malinowski proposes at one point to yield to the attraction of Freud’s inspiring speculations, but concludes, none the less, that they pose insurmountable problems: if it is to have any sense at all, the “totemic crime” must be located at the very origins of civilisation, it “must be made the first cause of culture”, he writes (p. 166). This means that it must have happened in a state of nature, even though in reality no motive can be found for a parricidal crime, and, further,

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there is a complete absence of any form of cultural institution. This leads him to posit the idea of a progressive development, but still other objections come to his mind. Thus, if the real cause of the Oedipus complex and of culture into the bargain is to be sought in that traumatic act of parricide, and if the complex merely survived in the “race memory of mankind”, then the complex ought obviously to wear out with time. (p. 167)

Not without a certain irony, he proposes in response to this difficult question, one that is the source of many questions for us psychoanalysts, some remarks by Jones on the patriarchal system: The patriarchal system, as we know it, betokens acknowledging the supremacy of the father and yet the ability to accept this even with affection, without having recourse to a system either of mother-right or of complicated taboos. It means the taming of man, the gradual assimilation of the Oedipus complex. At last man could face his real father and live with him. Well might Freud say that the recognition of the father’s place in the family signified the most important progress in cultural development. (Jones, 1925, p. 130, cited by Malinowski, pp. 141–142)

How can this conclusion fit in with the general schema of psychoanalysis, and what light does it throw on anthropology and its problems? It is precisely in these societies that the existence of the Oedipus complex has been observed and where it does not seem to be as effaced as all that. For Malinowski, it is the most obvious patriarchal institutions that offer the most favourable conditions for the formation for family maladjustment. Did not the eponymous hero of the complex himself clearly live in a patriarchal society, and was not his tragedy based on the father’s jealousy and the superstitious fear he inspired, motives which, by the way, are of a sociological order? In short, the more Malinowski examines Freud’s hypotheses from a concrete point of view and develops their consequences, the more he feels inclined to see in them, to use the expression of one of his respected colleagues, Professor A. Kroeber, nothing but a “Just-So Story”. In his account, we see Malinowski addressing not only Freud, but also Ernest Jones. This is not without reason, for Jones, a cultivated man, interested by anthropology, was a privileged interlocutor. It

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seems to me, therefore, that his role in the development or the abandonment of the controversy deserves to be mentioned.

A lecture with no debate . . . E. Jones: “Psychoanalysis and anthropology” (1924) After the publication of Totem and Taboo, Freud did not intervene in the debate with the anthropologists, a debate that was brief in reality and not very encouraging from his standpoint. Jones, who described himself as having already, in adolescence, been an avid reader and precociously interested by this discipline and by prehistory, found himself in the foreground of these exchanges with them. He was an extremely active man, entrusted with important institutional responsibilities at the International Psychoanalytic Association and in the dissemination of psychoanalysis: between 1908 and 1913, he taught psychiatry at the University of Toronto; in 1911, he founded the American Psychoanalytic Association, and then, in 1913 the London Psychoanalytic Society, of which he was the president. He had a good knowledge of the anthropological literature of his time, in particular, E. B. Tylor, but also J. Spencer and F. Gillen. Thus, he advised Freud on the bibliography of his essay. His publications were numerous and he had a reputation for courting controversy (according to his son . . .) (M. Jones (1987), cited by Pulman (1991a), to whose work I am once again indebted for this information). The lecture (Jones, 1924) given by Ernest Jones on 19 February 1924, at the Royal Institute of Anthropology in London, was a moment of historic importance; it gives us an idea of the climate of this attempt to collaborate with the anthropologists and also of its limits. I will try to privilege, in this rather long, and extremely dense text, what seems to me to be most relevant to my subject. On several occasions, Jones uses the expression “roughly speaking”. It seems to me that it could be applied to the way he addresses, for the first time in history, as an analyst, this group of anthropologists in Great Britain: he is at once direct, sincere, and very frank, if not to say abrupt. His paper, which is extremely dense and thorough, even if Jones qualifies it at one point as “an absurdly imperfect sketch”, seems rather inaccessible for those who had little knowledge of Freud’s positions. As far as we know, two members of this group who

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were at the origin of Jones’ initiative had shown an interest in psychoanalytic theory, even though they had only a partial knowledge of it. These were C. G. Seligman and W. Rivers. Seligman was an anthropologist with medical training who was particularly active in disseminating psychoanalytic contributions within the academic community of anthropologists. Rivers was an ethnologist and psychiatrist. He saw himself as a moderate evolutionist and was struck by the existing similarities between the customs and institutions of distinct and geographically remote civilisations. His primary focus would be on the contacts between peoples. They could only be studied psychologically once the sociological context of their encounter had been determined. By way of example, comparisons of a linguistic nature thus suggested that the recognition of paternal ties could be related to the influence of a foreign population that had colonised the Melanesian world (Rosa, 2003, pp. 291–297). For Rivers, “kinship terminology is in every detail an unconscious mirror of the forms of social organization, particularly the rules of marriage” (cited by Rosa, p. 291). He, therefore, proposes a diffusionist sociology. On the basis of these principles, his positions would unfortunately take a “hyper-diffusionist” turn that would discredit them (by making, for instance, the Nile valley the essential crucible of the earth’s entire civilisation). Capable of making extremely laudatory remarks on the subject of psychoanalysis, Rivers insists decisively on the role of past events external to the subject, and rejects the role of sexuality (Pulman, 1986). According to G. Roheim, “what he accepts in Freudian theory represents very little compared with what he rejects” (Roheim, 1947, p. 14, cited by Pulman, 1986, p. 130). Pulman (1986) points out in passing, that it is not a matter of indifference that one of the very first attempts at dialogue between these two disciplines led to linking, in the minds of ethnologists, the works of Freud with hyper-diffusionist theories, that is to say, with theories which, in the 1930s, would prove not only to be untenable but also laughable. (pp. 135–136, translated for this edition)

In the same vein, this writer further points out that P. Radin preferred Jung to Freud. He also notes the role played by Rivers’ work

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in introducing M. Mauss, E. Sapir, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to psychoanalysis. It was in this context, on 19 February 1924, that Jones gave his lecture. After a few short conventional words of courtesy, he does not hide from his audience the difficulties of the undertaking and speaks of the conflicts that it will inevitably cause, but if he is addressing this group, it is because he feels he has some important things to say to it. The interest of co-operation between the two professions is all the greater, he says, in that the data they are dealing with are often surprisingly similar. It is connected with the archaic modes of mental functioning, covered over today by other registers, and Jones reviews the place of the unconscious in dreams, in folklore, and mythology as a representative of earlier development and the source of our thoughts on the deepest questions of birth, love, and death. In a brief and very dense introduction to analytic theory, Jones very courageously describes the Freudian notion of the unconscious in relation to the idea of unconscious conflict. Can a generalisation be made concerning the nature and the meaning of the unconscious prejudices observed during psychoanalytic treatments? The question deserves an affirmative response, even if the basic selective element is obviously the presence of neurotic disturbances described as a particular mode of expression of certain social difficulties and conflicts connected with emotional and instinctual life, one way among others of responding to the conflicts and impulses that are common to everybody. These dispositions have such a general and fundamental character that for him, “roughly speaking, they can only be true of mankind in general or else not true at all” (1924, p. 51, original emphasis). The existence of these neurotic reactions appears to be linked to an excessive attachment to primitive, that is, infantile, modes of functioning (fixations). It is principally linked to the process of repression of contents that would be intolerable for the conscious ego. The internal conflict is the mode of relation between these two systems. In this extremely dense paper, Jones tries to introduce his listeners to certain formal aspects of the nature of unconscious manifestations and to describe omnipotence of thought, which leads him to speak of death wishes that are kept repressed, constituting a source of the sense of guilt. For Jones, these notions throw light on frightening dreams and

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the visitations of hostile ghosts when someone has died, which are clearly linked to the idea of retribution after what is considered as a murder. The treatment of unconscious wishes sometimes makes use of the mechanism of projection and identification with an animal or an inanimate object or a person on to whom they are projected. These wishes are thus considered to belong to them. Anyone who observes children, and anthropologists with their experience of primitive groups, are familiar with these mechanisms. From reading their descriptions, Jones cannot avoid the impression that children and primitives sometimes have a good capacity for sensing and divining the unconscious thoughts of others and, thus, are capable of very subtle psychological judgements, even if they are objectively erroneous. This is connected with the importance of the practice of magic on which Freud insisted. It seems clear to him that primitive peoples accord a greater extension to the supernatural and mystical domains than we do, and also a large place to wizardry, the diabolic spirits that a psychoanalyst is inevitably tempted to link to the unconscious content of their particularly intense wishes towards hostile nature. After speaking about his personal theory of symbolism, which is not relevant to my own subject, Jones selects, among unconscious contents, those that are related to incest and death, respectively. He writes, Perhaps the most essential discovery made by psycho-analysts, and certainly the source of most of the hostility that it has met, was that every young child passes through a phase of incestuous attachment, mostly to the parent of the opposite sex, and that the ideas relating to this constitute throughout life a nuclear content of the unconscious. (1924, p. 54)

Psychoanalysts ascribe a large part of character formation, especially on the social and moral level, to the individual reaction to this complex and also to many of these conscious reactions to life, his interests, his conduct, and so on. “To put the matter in its crudest terms so that there can be no misapprehension,” he continues, we believe that every man cherishes in his unconscious the wish for sexual intimacy with his mother and the desire to remove by death any disturbing rival, particularly his father; the converse applies

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equally to the woman, the term “Oedipus complex” being used in both cases. Such a statement, abhorrent as it must sound, is nevertheless the core of psychoanalysis and inseparable from it. (p. 54)

His reasons for mentioning this hypothesis lie in the fact that, if true, it should throw a flood of light on some of the most obscure problems of anthropology, for instance, the universal horror of incest and the extraordinarily complicated and fierce laws that have been devised in the most varied parts of the world with the object of preventing it. Jones only mentions two examples of this theme: the ceremonies and initiation rites in both savage and civilised societies, the numerous myths and cosmogonies whose content is openly or symbolically incestuous, and the vast problems of totemism itself. He then returns to the articulation of psychoanalytic theory with anthropological problems which he simply traces in their broad outlines: “The ire of anthropologists”, he writes, is almost as readily aroused by the assertion that savages cannot be compared with children as by the opposite. Similarly, one invites contradiction by maintaining either that a vast gulf exists between savages and ourselves, or that there is no appreciable difference between us. (p. 55)

Jones proposes to adopt a diplomatic attitude on this subject and to recognise that there is, in fact, an element of truth in all these assertions. “The psychoanalytic view of both children and civilised adults,” he states, “differs in some important respects from the usual one” (p. 55). Roughly speaking, he thinks it is not a question of the difference between adults and children or civilised and uncivilised, but of that which exists between conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, which are here very approximately and rapidly reduced to infantile and adult categories. “It is possible,” he says, “that the conscious thinking of savages is more directly and extensively influenced by unconscious factors than is that of civilised peoples, just as is so with the child” (p. 56). In making this suggestion, Jones in no way wishes to underestimate the complexity of these questions. Of course, their mental evolution cannot be thought of as progressing in a uniform and orderly manner without retrogressions or complications.

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He then turns his interest to various points of convergence between psychoanalytic theories and anthropological views. The most important point of correspondence between these two groups is the tendency to interpret data in terms of purely human and self-centred motives, in a way that some might regard as materialistic. Few anthropologists today would expect primitives to be chiefly concerned with ethical abstractions or lofty philosophical speculations concerning the universe. Those who were accustomed to thinking in this way do not recognise the humble nature and origin of their own interests. The most worthwhile interests of mankind lie within its own heart, and what psychoanalysis has shown us about ourselves must also be true of savages. Jones then gives a large place to his conception of symbolism, showing the very important role played by the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb. He gives many illustrations of this in animal and human representations of the gods of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. All sorts of symbols are used to express the possibility of bisexuality and the struggle against death, one of the most powerful motives of psychic work in primitive populations and perhaps in mankind as a whole. He concludes his lecture with examples of unconscious modes of representing death, with illustrations of the role played by the sexual organs. He writes, When a patient consults us with the complaints that he has an undue dread of death (thanataphobia) or of the next world, that life feels to him so short and that youth is rapidly passing away, i.e., the two complaints which the elixir of life is designed to cure, then we know something about his inner mind with absolute certainty, for the analysis of such symptoms infallibly leads to the same conclusion. He is suffering from a (conscious or unconscious) dread of impotency, and this dread always comes from the fear of being castrated as a punishment for his incestuous wishes. (1924, p. 64)

The desire for unlimited virility, thus, probably might be said to play a greater role than the desire for infinite existence, so that, clinically, both these fears of impotency and death always indicate the action of castration fears in relation to incestuous wishes, while the man who is not troubled by either is one who has overcome his dread

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of incest. (While I completely concur with this last line of thought of my eminent colleague, I must confess that his manner of displaying such certitude in this context hardly seems adequate.) This paper was followed by vehement protests pertaining, in particular, to a refusal to include it in the official Minutes of the Royal Institute. A long controversy was then engaged in between Jones and Hocart, an eminent anthropologist, concerning the example that he gave of the use by Freud (1910a) of the work of Abel concerning the antithetical meanings of primal words. The example chosen by Jones proved to be quite inappropriate, which he accepted, without this error really justifying the tone used by his interlocutor, who was clearly determined to prove him wrong without examining on this level the example of dreams also given by Jones to illustrate this characteristic phenomenon of unconscious thought. Concerning the anthropologists’ criticisms of Totem and Taboo, Jones wrote, “I have, however, not come across any of their criticisms that contained serious arguments” (1955, p. 360). This episode was, no doubt, not the only one he had in mind; he was probably also referring to the controversy with Malinowski, which we have examined, in connection with Totem and Taboo. One would have to be particularly presumptuous, and also perhaps a little unmindful to adopt a critical tone towards Ernest Jones’ historic attempt. Whatever he may say about it, his paper is, in many respects, remarkable: it is lively, thorough, clear, and very well documented, but, knowing today, with the benefit of hindsight for which I have no merit, that it enjoyed very little positive follow-up, I am wondering what conclusions I can draw from my feeling that it was an impossible mission. Does not this paper of thirty-six pages, of which I have only given the briefest of summaries here, offer its ambivalent listeners, owing to its very dense richness and its complexity, good rational reasons, at least on the surface, to lose interest in it? Do not its very qualities work against it in certain respects if feelings of rivalry become mixed up in the conversation? Was this not foreseeable in view of the affirmative style of Ernest Jones (“. . . we know something about his inner mind, with absolute certainty, for the analysis of such symptoms infallibly leads to the same conclusion”)? Does it bear witness only to “scientific certainty”, or also to his taste for confrontation?

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The prominence given to the Oedipus complex, not only transcultural but unreservedly of a clinical order, gives scarcely any inkling of the complications we have today in recognising modes of functioning where the Oedipal organisation is barely reachable (even if it is possible to identify its traces) or without any organising functional value for long periods, and even, sometimes, profoundly disorganising because it is, in fact, much more incestuous than oedipal. Thanks to Ernest Jones’ contemporaries and to their successors, we have learnt many things, and if we no longer give grand lectures of an academic character, it is not only because the position of psychoanalysis in public opinion is different to what it was in the past century; it is also, is it not, because we know, thanks to them, that it is scarcely productive.

“Totem and Taboo: an ethnologic psychoanalysis” (Kroeber, 1920), and its aftermath In 1920, A. Kroeber, one of the most remarkable pupils of Franz Boas, reacted in the American Anthropologist to the publication of the English translation of Totem and Taboo. Restrictions of space are such that I will be focusing here, in connection with this paper of quality, only on the series of objections formulated by the author after a presentation “of this hypothesis on the origin of socio-religious civilization” (1920, p. 49). First, the Darwin–Atkinson supposition is of course only hypothetical. It is a mere guess that the earliest organization of man resembled that of the gorilla than that of trooping monkeys. Second, Roberton Smith’s allegation that blood sacrifice is central in ancient cult holds chiefly or only for the Mediterranoid cultures of a certain period—say, the last two thousand years B.C—and cultures then or subsequently influenced by them. It does not apply to regions outside the sphere of affection by these cultures. Third, it is at best problematical whether blood sacrifice goes back to a totemic observance. It is not established that totemism is an original possession of Semitic culture. Fourth, coming to the Freudian theory proper, it is only conjecture that the son would kill, let alone devour, the father.

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Fifth, the fact that a child sometimes displaces its father-hatred upon an animal—we are not told in what percentage of cases—is no proof that the sons did so. Sixth, if they “displaced,” would they retain enough of the original hate impulse to slay the father; and if so, would the slaying not resolve and evaporate the displacements? Psychoanalysts may affirm both questions; others will require more examination before they accept the affirmation. Seventh, granting the sons’ remorse and resolve no longer to kill the father-displacement-totem, it seems exceedingly dubious whether this resolve could be powerful and enduring enough to suppress permanently the gratification of the sexual impulses which was now possible. Again there may be psychoanalytic evidence sufficient to allay the doubt; but it will take a deal of evidence to convince “unanalytic” psychologists, ethnologists, and laymen. Eighth, if the band of brothers allowed strangers—perhaps expelled by their jealous fathers—to have access to the women whom they had renounced, and matrilinear or matriarchal institutions thus came into existence, what would be left for the brothers (unless they were able to be content with life-long celibacy or homosexuality), other than individual attachments to other clans; which would mean the disintegration of the very solidarity that they are pictured as so anxious to preserve, even by denying their physiological instincts? Ninth, it is far from established that exogamy and totem abstinence are the two fundamental prohibitions of totemism. Freud refers (1912–1913, p. 109) to Goldenweiser’s study of the subject, which is certainly both analytical and conducted from a psychological point of view even though not psychoanalytical; but he fails to either accept or refute this author’s carefully substantiated finding that these two features cannot be designated as primary in the totemic complex. Tenth, that these two totemic taboos are the oldest of all taboos is pure assertion. If all other taboos are derived from them by displacement or distortion, some presentation of the nature and operation and sequence of these developments is in order . . . (Kroeber, 1920, pp. 50–51)

Finally, for Kroeber, the persistence at the heart of modern societies and religions of this first “great event with which civilization began”

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remains an unexplained phenomenon. (It will be noted that many of Kroeber’s critical reservations pertain, not without reason, to the register of the evidence, behaviour, or the event, where Freud constructs metaphors for their meaning value.) For Kroeber, then, Freud multiplies into one another fractional certainties—that is, more or less remote possibilities—without recognising that the multiplicity of factors must successively diminish the probability of their product. This very old expedient of pyramiding hypotheses, was, moreover, used by the majority of the ethnologists cited by Freud. The plan of his book also presents an insidious character due, it seems to me, to the gradual elaboration of the author’s thesis during its writing. Once the parallelism of savage and neurotic thought has been established with reference to material that is largely unrelated to the specificity of the final thesis, the latter is suddenly divulged. But in the hands of those who are lacking in critical discernment, this book will carry them into illusory belief, under the influence of a man with such an illustrious name and an astonishingly prolific imagination. Yet, Kroeber writes that this book is one that “no ethnologist can afford to neglect” (p. 55, my emphasis). Freud’s contribution is an important and valuable one. The correspondence between taboo rites and obsessional neurosis, as well as the parallelism between the two aspects of taboo and the ambivalence of feelings, are undeniable examples of this. The theory of ambivalence unquestionably elucidates, or makes explicit, the strange co-existence of mourning for the dead with the fear of them, and the taboos against them. It is undeniable that there exists a remarkable similarity between magic phenomena, taboo, animism, and primitive religions on the one hand, and neurotic manifestations on the other. As anthropologists have no direct knowledge of the origins of totemism, he writes, but only information on these phenomena as they exist at present, they must in the first place seek to understand them as thoroughly as possible. He hopes that such understanding will gradually lead to a partial reconstruction of the origins of totemism without resorting to what he calls in his article “speculative anthropology”.

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Before giving Kroeber the opportunity to speak again (for, in 1939, the year of Sigmund Freud’s death, he wanted to return to the subject in The American Journal of Sociology, I would like to comment briefly on this interesting text, with the feeling that the two years that had passed since the publication of the translation of Freud’s essay in the USA had allowed him time to give shape to his objections. Initially, Kroeber reproaches Freud for advancing hypotheses without any scientific confirmation. This reproach contains implicitly, I think, the idea that scientific confirmation would be possible; after all, the supporters of “historical” ethnology believed this was so, following Franz Boas. Almost a century later, the question remains open. This also means that, for the time being, the scientific fertility of the hypotheses of historical ethnology on this question have not been confirmed decisively, at least in the sense in which he meant. For Kroeber, Freud had spared himself the painful process of investigation by replacing it with something in the order of guesswork: the laborious years of the gradual discovery of psychoanalysis were, to his mind, filled with speculations which, moreover, could be dangerous if they fell into inexperienced hands. Like some of the past masters of ethnology, Freud was a speculator, with all the polysemy attached to this term. Kroeber could say this all the more in that he felt that Freud was capable of carrying his reader along insidiously, surreptitiously. This perception of Freud’s capacity for seduction—for me, Freud was not trying to seduce but to attract—did not prevent him, and perhaps even allowed him, to understand clearly the importance and implication of ambivalence in obsessional neurosis, the taboos relating to the dead, and in mourning. Kroeber allows himself, moreover, at the end of this critical paper, to engage in interesting speculations concerning the protective role of certain cultures vis-à-vis the organisation of the neuroses and concerning the possible implications of the different social status of homosexuality from one society to another. His text concludes with a warning to analysts not to follow their master’s example of “passing over something in silence”: historical ethnology exists. An essential aspect of the disagreement resides, does it not, in the place that Freud gives to psychical production as such, given its determining unconscious role and the access that it offers to knowledge.

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“Totem and Taboo in retrospect” (Kroeber, 1939) Kroeber begins his article with these words: Nearly twenty years ago I wrote an analysis of Totem and Taboo—that brain child of Freud which was to be the precursor of a long series of psychoanalytic books and articles explaining this or that aspect of culture, or the whole of it. It seems an appropriate time to return to the subject. (1939, p. 446)

Kroeber sees no reason to go back on his critical analysis of Freud’s book. There is no indication that over the last twenty years anthropologists have come any closer to accepting Freud’s central thesis. But he had felt some remorse when, roughly ten years later, he was listening to a student’s report on Totem and Taboo during a seminar: . . . like myself, [he] first spread out its gossamer texture and then laboriously tore it to shreds. It is a procedure too suggestive of breaking a butterfly on a wheel. An iridescent fantasy deserves a more delicate touch even in the act of demonstration of its unreality. (p. 446).

Kroeber was reputed to characterise this book as a “Just-So Story”. “It is a felicitous phrase,” he writes, “many a tale by Kipling or Anderssen contains a profound psychological truth. One does not need therefore to cite and try it in the stern court of evidential confrontation” (p. 446). For him, by speaking of the “great event with which civilization began”, therewith Freud enters the domain of history. Events, like origins and civilisation, are historical. Every historical finding has to be located in chronologically in time and space, whereas Freud offers a unique finding of cardinal importance that is quite beyond the scope of history. Freud is reported subsequently to have said that this “event” is to be interpreted as “typical”, that is, from the historical point of view, as a recurrent phenomenon, but the murder of the father, the eating of the father, and the sense of guilt, do not fall within this category in Kroeber’s view. Freud’s thought, he argues, is clearly ambiguous, wavering constantly between the historical and psychological poles. Any claim to endow this “event” with historical legitimacy must be abandoned, and we must consider whether Freud’s theory offers any possibility of furnishing a generic and timeless explanation of the psychology that underlies certain recurrent historic phenomena or

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institutions like totemism and taboo. We would be on firmer ground if we discarded certain gratuitous and unfounded assumptions: in particular, the erection of a fundamental taboo after the father’s murder, a taboo from which all other taboos are derived in one form or another. In so doing, Freud’s thesis could be reduced to the proposition that, among the psychic processes that always tend to find expression in universal human institutions, may be included the kernel of the Oedipus complex. “After all,” writes Kroeber, if ten modern anthropologists were asked to designate one universal human institution, nine would be likely to name the incest prohibition; some have expressly named it as the only universal one. Anything so constant as this, at least as regards its nucleus, in the notoriously fluctuating universe of culture, can hardly be the result of a “mere” historical accident devoid of psychological significance. If there is accordingly an underlying factor which keeps reproducing the phenomenon in an unstable world, this factor must be something in the human constitution—in other words, a psychic factor. Therewith the door is open not for an acceptance in toto of Freud’s explanation but at any rate for its serious consideration as a scientific hypothesis. (pp. 447–448)

The author thinks that the incest taboo could be the joint product of the incest drive and repression process and of another, less compelling, factor. Non-sexual taboos, which take on a wide array of forms, might be due to a series of different psychic factors. Anthropologists and sociologists have long been searching for an element that would help them explain both the repetitions and the variations in the field of culture, and, with such an explanation, Freud’s hypothesis might not have been rejected or ignored as just a brilliant fantasy. For Kroeber the obstacles to such a fruitful outcome lay partly in Freud himself, in Freud and his followers, and mainly to the Freudians. The first factor was due to Freud’s ambiguity: he does not reject the historical context, but it does not have more importance than the manifest dream content mentioned in his theory. This would lead Freud to advance an atemporal psychological hypothesis as if it were a historical explanation. The second factor is the curious indifference that, according to Kroeber, Freud has always manifested towards seeing his conclusions

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integrated with the totality of science, which led him at one time to accept the idea of an inheritance of acquired characteristics as if this involved no contradiction to scientific criteria. (I think it would be more correct to say that he fully accepted that he was in contradiction with the science of his time.) The majority of his disciples as a whole followed in his footsteps. The third factor resides in the attitude of the majority of psychoanalysts. They insist on functioning within a closed system that, if it is not totally closed in on itself, only grows from within and remains impermeable to influence from the outside. Kroeber cites here the example of Jones in relation to Malinowski: “Because Freud, in the culture of Vienna, had determined that ambivalence was directed towards the father, ambivalence had to remain directed towards him universally, even where the primary authority resided in the uncle” (pp. 449–450). The same tendency is present in Roheim, whose article “Psychoanalysis of primitive culture types” (1932) contains a multitude of psychological observations that are extremely valuable for cultural anthropologists, but presented in a way that mean they are not usable. (Reservations I share . . .) Kroeber points out in conclusion that if certain fundamental concepts of Freudian theory “have seeped into general science” and constitute, in his view, a considerable contribution, another series of concepts that have not found their way into them. The different branches of science (sociology, anthropology, psychology, and medicine) still remain just as impermeable to this second series. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, attribute the same value to both these series; for them, they are part of the system and are interdependent. For Kroeber, this absence of differentiation between what scientific thought deems to belong to the world of reality as opposed to that of fantasy, between what appears as essential rather than secondary, means that The orthodox psychoanalytic movement reveals itself as partaking of the nature of a religion—a system of mysticism; it might even be said to be delusional . . . It has sought little integration with the totality of science, and only on its own terms. By contrast, science, also of course a system, has shown itself a relatively open one: it has accepted and also largely absorbed a considerable part of the concepts of psychoanalysis. (p. 451)

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The author considers, however, that in some less certain domains, Freud’s ideas allow for a large degree of tolerance and openness of mind; they remain more or less fruitful propositions, such as, for example, his theory on the foundations of civilisation, even if neither science nor history can make use of it. “I trust,” writes Kroeber, “that this clarification may be construed not only as an amende honorable, but as a tribute to one of the great minds of our day”. In a note postscriptum of 1939, he adds, Since the above was written and published, Freud has published Moses and Monotheism. The thesis of Totem and Taboo is reaffirmed: ‘To this day I hold firmly to this construction’ (1939a, 131). One concession in the direction of my argument is made.

Kroeber writes, “. . . the story [father killing] is told as though it happened on a single occasion, while in fact it covered thousands of years and was repeated countless times during that long period” (p. 82). Of his stimulator, Robertson Smith, Freud writes superbly: “I have never found myself on common ground with his opponents” (p. 132). We, on our part, if I may speak for ethnologists, though remaining unconverted, have met Freud, and recognize the encounter as memorable, and herewith resalute him. (Kroeber, 1939, p. 451)

This article by Kroeber, in which he retraces his footsteps twenty years after writing the first article, moved and interested me a good deal, so I will allow myself to comment on it at greater length. To begin with, the author speaks of his recollection of the first article and the role that it played ten years later as he was listening to a pupil in a seminar on the same theme: Sigmund Freud’s volume. This young man had proceeded as he himself had done at the time, confirming him in his position as a teacher, already indicated by the word pupil, and he had felt a certain remorse. It was the very productive outcome of this remorse that had led him to write again, ten years later, in a new way. We know that Freud had been seriously ill for several years. What is this “profound psychological truth” in the tales of Kipling or Anderssen that does not need “citing and trying in the stern court of evidential confrontation”?

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Before following the author’s line of questioning, I recall that it is a classical procedure to summon for questioning, if not to bring before a court, ambitious young people who have treated their elders disrespectfully with the aim of obtaining the advantages linked to their position. (It is not always necessary, however, to kill them and eat them.) The spectacle of a young pupil who likes his elder teacher so much (as a model) that he behaves exactly like him, might, however, arouse uncanny feelings of a slightly disturbing nature, even if cannibalistic incorporation is not involved. Was it not a similar experience that Professor Kroeber had here with a pupil who behaved as he had in the past with Totem and Taboo? And particularly as men who are psychically alive change, and though it may be a fruitful moment, it is also rather surprising for them to get a glimpse of themselves retrospectively through contact with a young pupil whose youthful enthusiasm, as ferocious and naïve as it may be, was once their own, even if they have now forgotten that this was so. Kroeber wants to know who was “responsible for this error” and was the first, I think, to engage in a debate of great interest that illustrates what analysts could expect from the work of anthropologists. It is true that Freud speaks of “the great event with which civilization began”, and it is equally true that in this text written in 1913, he wavers “between historical truth and psychological truth, between reality and fantasy, between what is essential and what is secondary”. I do not think it is unfair to Kroeber to suggest that the very order of the terms that he employs implies a valorisation of historical truth compared with psychological truth. In this context, fantasy, the religious nature attributed to psychoanalysis as a mystical or delusional system, are used in contrast with the scientific character of history, rather than to appreciate what the creation of these types of mystical or delusional systems signifies for the human species. In 1913, it is possible that Freud did not have a satisfying answer to the question Kroeber asked in 1939. Yet, the situation seems different to me from the moment Freud had undertaken his revision of 1920, for, by recognising the existence of repetition “beyond the pleasure principle”, analysts were faced with problems of a new order. His response, which gave intelligibility to some of their difficulties and failures of the method, made a place for trauma, thereby opening up

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issues of representability, of figurability, and of the forces of binding necessary for psychic elaboration. In a way that is closer to my subject, it introduced between the “event” of which Freud speaks, and the “act” with which he concludes his article, a space that distinguishes them. *  *  * An analogical example will, perhaps, help us to make a preliminary approach to this question: since celebrating, in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, we know that on 14 July of that year, Louis XVI, who was accustomed to keeping a record of his activities, wrote “nothing” in the space attributed to this date. In Paris, in the old fortress of the Bastille, there was only a very limited number of prisoners: in fact, seven, of whom there were two madmen, sent to Charenton, four forgers, and an aristocrat by a lettre de cachet at the request of his family. The governor was an elderly man, surrounded by a handful of guards (eighty-two invalids and thirty-two Swiss guards), and he saw no reason to resist very steadfastly the more numerous assailants (700–1000 and sixty-one French guards). In short, though the deed unquestionably took place on that day, and was heard of in Versailles at the end of the afternoon, the “event”, in the historical sense in which we understand it, probably took place later. In spite of the meaning conferred retrospectively to the word attributed to La Roche Foucauld Liancourt the same day, it is probable that in his response to the king he was designating by the term “revolution” a phenomenon comparable to incorruptible celestial phenomena, and that the term only took on a new sense in collective awareness, that of signalling the beginning of “the Revolution”, later on. (This is somewhat paradoxical since the word designates both a radical process of change and a movement of a circular character that is regularly repetitive and easily observable in nature. It is certainly possible, as F. Furet (1978) has shown so skilfully after Tocqueville and Cochin, to discuss the dates of the conditions under which this process appeared as early as 1788.) The subsequent consequences of this day, regicide followed by collective massacres, complicated by an exportation of carnage and of many regime changes for almost a century, are obviously not intelligible without taking into consideration the different socio-economic

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and political balances in the country. The factual character of this event, proudly commemorated on the 14 July, and its considerable political effects, including those well beyond European frontiers, were created “retrospectively” in this context. *  *  * Freud, writes Kroeber, added later that this “event” should be interpreted as something “typical” and he understands this repetition, not unjustifiably, as a sign of the wavering of his thought between what he calls the historical pole and the psychological pole. This wavering is also a conscious hesitation that Kroeber could have followed in Freud’s writings in a similar form, concerning a clinical case that was as difficult as it is famous, namely, the “Wolf Man” (1918b). In this long drawn out debate, Freud did not feel able to decide between the two possible options. This was not the case for Totem and Taboo and it was probably not the case later on for Moses and Monotheism either. This was perhaps because, as Gantheret (1993) points out, if Kroeber could, for reasons of conceptual clarity, legitimately assert that the event entered history in Freudian theory after 1920, he had much less justification for doing so when it concerned an act, and even more so if this act proved to be repetitive. In fact, this repetition is a sign of the difficulty this act has of representing itself, of finding the links necessary for its access to consciousness (which, for Freud, signified chiefly links with wordpresentations), thereby authenticating the persistent traumatic character of this act, its incompletion as a psychic event. Finally, Kroeber points up the open and difficult problem of the heredity of acquired characteristics. He deserves to be congratulated for this, for twenty years after the translation of Freud’s essay, he was the first anthropologist to venture to contradict him on this point, with arguments, moreover, that were shared by analysts who were mobilised, not against Freud’s independence vis-à-vis scientific opinion, but against this persistent choice of the creator of psychoanalysis. His final objection concerning the “minor modification in the orientation of the complex” (my emphasis) contained in Malinowski’s reflections on the Oedipus complex is somewhat surprising. I have found in the writings of an anthropologist, Françoise Héritier, a thoroughly

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Freudian formula that makes it possible to set aside, for reasons of great clarity, Malinowski’s criticisms (as Pulman (1991b) has pointed out, their fortune in anthropology does not seem justified). Héritier writes, That said, Freud introduces the notions of wish and complex, namely, the Oedipus complex which is born of the impossibility of fulfilling a wish: the wish to kill the father and to appropriate the mother sexually. This analysis of the human unconscious is justified, even from the perspective of the examination of populations in which the real power over the child is exercised by the maternal uncle and not by the father. The latter is always the one who had sexual access to the mother, and the Oedipus complex has ample time to develop itself. (1994, p. 20, translated for this edition)

This formula is almost identical to the one Freud used to oppose Jung, who also contested this theme in Totem and Taboo. Freud replied, “It seems likely that there have been father’s sons at all times. A father is one who possesses a mother sexually (and the children concerning property)” (Letter dated 14 May 1912, McGuire, 1974, p. 504). Finally, I am unaware of the reasons why, in his often remarkable preface, Gantheret attributes remarks to Kroeber which are clearly the contrary of those he actually made. For example, when he writes, “. . . and Kroeber adds, what I have just said should not be taken as an ‘amende honorable’! But who ever thought that?” Let us now compare this with Kroeber’s unambiguous text where he writes, “I trust that this clarification may be construed not only as an amende honorable, but as a tribute to one of the great minds of our day.” Was this mutual incomprehension between the two professions concerned not a source of quite tangible benefits to both, so that it seemed advantageous to invent invoke it when necessary? Is conflict more exciting than areas of agreement, even if limited? Yes, of course . . . Thus, in 1929, Radin would write, “For so keen a thinker as Freud, his Totem and Taboo is really a woeful performance . . . the psychoanalysts’ use of ethnographical data is still so slovenly and unintelligent that all the inferences they have so far made are of comparatively little value” (1929, pp. 24–25).6 We will see that the evolution of ideas in anthropology during the post-war period might well suggest this, at least in France.

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The first “anthropologist–psychoanalyst”: G. Roheim It is not possible to continue this review of the writings in anthropology before the Second World War without mentioning the name of Roheim. He was, in fact, the first qualified psychoanalyst to study peoples without writing directly and, in this respect, has a historic importance. From the angle that I am proposing in this book, his ontogenetic theory of culture is interesting for the well-argued divergence that it offers with Freud’s Lamarckian reference that is absolutely explicit in Totem and Taboo. Drawing on a rich corpus of anthropological studies relating to psychoanalysis, “The psychoanalytic interpretation of culture”, first published in its complete form in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Roheim, 1941), subsequently appeared in a slightly abridged version in Man and his Culture; Psychoanalytic Anthropology After “Totem and Taboo” (Muensterberger, 1970). For Roheim, the theory of a collective unconscious is a hypothesis which, in the absence of other ways of explaining the phenomenon of human culture, we can certainly go along with, but he has more confidence in what he calls the ontogenetic theory of culture: the specific traits of humanity were developed as a sublimation of infantile conflicts, as with each human individual today. All the interpretations of individual evolution also imply for him that the interpretation of human culture is founded on the situation of childhood; but the notion of infantile experience also introduces, in turn, that of the cultural models of the parents as they interpret them. “If we can find a distinctive feature in the biological make-up of mankind which is also a variation in the infantile situation and does not depend on cultural tradition, we are likely to have found the key that will unlock many locks,” writes Roheim (1941, p. 151). He believed he would find it in the notion of the prolonged childhood of the human species, in which the development of the capacities of learning and adaptation seem to be linked to the remarkable prolongation of the immaturity of the human infant, and the capacity to tolerate the delay of instinctual satisfaction based on the pleasure value acquired by play. His argument, which I will not go into in detail here, is based in an intelligible way on Bolk’s (1926) theory of human genesis, and Freud’s work with its prolongations by the Kleinian school.

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Roheim formulates explicitly in his paper his hope that the difficulty of articulating a type of cultural practice, touching, for instance, on weaning, or the manifest aspects of sexual life, will not be interpreted rigidly without referring to individual infantile situations and to questions of personality. This, I think, is really the minimum one can ask for, particularly where the study of early object relations is concerned. It is possible that he himself was not always faithful to this rejection of rudimentary simplifications, and on this point, I share Kroeber’s reservations.

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CHAPTER THREE

Returning to the circumstances of the publication and translation of Totem and Taboo

aving said that, in order to understand the reactions to the publication of Totem and Taboo, it will be profitable, I think, to take a fresh look at its circumstances. Freud was at first considered as a conqueror who had an excessive interest in totemism, in spite of the precautions taken in his text to avoid mobilising the anthropologists against him from the outset. Let me begin by recalling the four passages in the book in which he seeks to present his project:

H

The four essays that follow . . . represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology. (1912–1913, p. xiii) The analysis of taboos is put forward as an assured and exhaustive attempt at the solution of the problem. The investigation of totemism does no more than declare that “here is what psycho-analysis can at the moment contribute towards elucidating the problem of the totem”. (pp. xiii–xiv) There are no grounds for fearing that psycho-analysis, which first discovered that psychical acts and structures are invariably overdetermined, will be tempted to trace the origin of anything so complicated as religion to a single source. If psycho-analysis is compelled –

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and is, indeed, in duty bound – to lay all the emphasis upon one particular source, that does not mean it is claiming either that the source is the only one or that it occupies first place among the numerous contributory factors. Only when we can synthesize the findings in the different fields of research will it become possible to arrive at the relative importance of the part played in the genesis of religion by the mechanism discussed in these pages. Such a task lies beyond the means as well as beyond the purposes of a psycho-analyst. (p. 100)

Finally, the rather well-known footnote in Totem and Taboo certainly deserves to be reproduced here in its entirety: Since I am used to being misunderstood, I think it worth while to insist explicitly that the derivations which I have proposed in these pages do not in the least overlook the complexity of the phenomena under review. All that they claim is to have added a new factor to the sources, known or still unknown, of religion, morality and society – a factor based on a consideration of the implications of psycho-analysis. I must leave to others the task of synthesizing the explanation into a unity. It does, however, follow, from the nature of the new contribution that it could not play any other than a central part in such a synthesis, even though powerful emotional resistances might have to be overcome before its great importance was recognized. (p. 157, fn. 2)

This footnote has, naturally, been commented upon at length, in particular owing to the invocation of emotional resistances. The recognition of complexity is explicitly mentioned, as well as the project to add to the already known, or still unknown, sources, a new factor from the perspective of “evolutionist” anthropology; this added factor is obviously modified, if not contradicted, by the “central part” it could play in a “such a synthesis”. I see it as being linked to the generally unconscious character of Freud’s contribution and to the important consequences of taking this into consideration. It cannot be reduced to a cognitive operation of learning, but implies a personal work of elaboration and thought. It is true that for Freud it was not just a matter of a mere addition to anthropological knowledge concerning the possible origin of totemism, but of quite a radical change of perspective, reflecting the unconscious nature of the notions that he was proposing to adopt. Freud was certainly an ambitious character, conscious of the value of his intelligence and of his discovery; but it seems quite clear to me

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that he was not formulating any claims to exclusivity or totalising exhaustiveness on the subject of such an old and complex institution as totemism. The subsequent existence of competing claims concerning a single aetiological hypothesis reveals, does it not, motives of an entirely personal nature in those making such claims. Nevertheless, it is clear that as soon as it was published, and for a long time thereafter, the work chiefly aroused hostile reactions, so I propose now to return to the circumstances surrounding this publication. It seems to me that after a period of silence that was courageously broken by Boas and Kroeber, the dominant feeling was one of an intrusion that was sufficiently hurtful to compromise the production of objections relevant to the heart of the debate. It is as if several decades had been necessary to reveal the zones where Freud’s thesis, notwithstanding its interest, reveals his uncertainties, and also makes it possible to question them in a productive and personal way. Would it be fair to speak of a traumatic dimension to this publication?

Sigmund Freud, a “savage”? The different chapters of Totem and Taboo appeared in German, separately at first, in the journal Imago, and later the entire essay was published in 1912–1913. The book was translated into English in New York by A. Brill in 1918 (Moffat Yard) and in 1919 in London (Routledge).7 In 1920, in his first study devoted to Totem and Taboo, Kroeber says he is taking advantage of its recent translation into English, while at the same time mentioning, chapter by chapter, the publication in German which preceded it; it is probable that in the cultivated milieu of the American anthropologists of that time (where it was by no means exceptional for German to be the maternal language), these articles could be read. The nature of the 1914–1918 war was such that it perhaps made exchanges difficult, even if the USA entered it only in 1917, albeit with the rationale of defending their neutrality, which was different from that of Europeans. However, as Kroeber (1920) writes, “. . . little as this particular book has been noticed by anthropologists, the vogue of the psychoanalytic

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movement founded by him is now so strong that the book is certain to make an impression in many intelligent circles” (p. 48). The situation was somewhat paradoxical, and, in certain respects, disagreeable for the group of anthropologists, who might well have felt obliged to break with what certainly seems, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been a disapproving silence. By addressing his book on totemism to a group of professionals, a subject of decisive importance for their practice at this time, Freud was, in a way, privileging a certain readership. How are we to understand the collective and frequently silent rejection of what were central notions for this group of high ranking and cultivated professionals, who often had diverse training backgrounds but were clearly motivated by common interests? Can it be justified by an attempt to reappropriate the “exotic” or “primitive” framework of their privileged areas of research and of the boundaries of their fields of interest? In that case it would be akin to the “disciplinary blindness” described rather felicitously by E. Enriquez (1983). It is certain, in any case, that they would not be able to monopolise it. (This was also the situation, was it not, of many psychiatrists in relation to Freud’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century.) In their long-standing elective interest for civilisations without writing, formerly described as primitive, ethnologists are attracted, naturally in a way that differs from one individual to another, by the remote past of our species and by that which distinguishes this past from contemporary socio-cultural phenomena in space and time. (These considerations related to the possible attraction of the past might also have their role to play in the choice of becoming a psychoanalyst, as in that of becoming a historian, prehistorian, or archaeologist, etc.). By proposing to the specialists of “primitive” cultures possible models of a remote past, essential analogies, albeit ones that were, for him, entirely relevant in the present, and which participate without our realising it in the contemporary social and cultural world, Freud was behaving, in fact, was he not, like an authentic “savage”, particularly as the works of Darwin, Atkinson, and Robertson Smith form part of the anthropological patrimony—a patrimony, moreover, that is Anglo-Saxon. The English translation was published in 1918 at a time when a dreadful massacre had just unfolded in Europe, with far-reaching

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consequences. One may wonder if some of them were not initially upset at being confronted with a potential ex-belligerent who was the author of such a crude version of the beginnings of civilisation. In any case, it seems plausible that, for a certain number of ethnologists, the choice of interesting themselves in little known peoples, often considered summarily as savages, also implied a certain critical distance vis-à-vis the behaviour of so-called civilised nations, in particular after the 1914–1918 war. Anthropologists were working with interest, then, on the study of customs, on the mythical narratives of remote “primitive” peoples who, in any case, did not possess the industrial means of destruction that were to appear in the course of this First World War. With Freud’s text, they found themselves, did they not, confronted once again with a “violence” that took them back to a level of savagery that was manifest in the profoundly disappointing contemporary version of civilisation in the twentieth century. Had it not just shown its limits, its fragility, its lack of authenticity? Would we be right in thinking that war did not exist in the populations classically studied by anthropologists? Would this suffice to explain that its customary, cultural, and practical aspects have also rarely been objects of study in anthropology, at least during this period? In any case, this is what an examination of the summary of certain reviews of the quality of American Anthropologist between 1916 and 1940 tends to suggest. Each annual issue comprises twenty or so articles and 20–70 book reading notes (their number increases as time progresses), none of them concerns war, its happenings, customs, or rules, or struggles for power or prestige. (At the most, out of these 2,500 international contributions, I have seen one article on the sites of pilgrimage of the Zuni gods of war in 1918, one remarkably well-illustrated article on the morphology of African bow weapons in 1932, and, in 1940, an article titled “Crime and the anthropologist” (Merton & Ashley Montagu, 1940) concerning the work of a contemporary American criminologist.) An inventory of the titles of articles from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland obtained via the Internet (I was unable to consult the articles themselves), between 1920 and 1940, seems to give similar results: out of approximately 600 titles, two are devoted to Indian weapons (blowguns, boomerangs,

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and crossbows), 1924, and African throwing knives, 1925; one article in 1928 treats of the “Significance of head-hunting in Assam” (Hutton, 1928); several articles are devoted to hunting or to funeral rites, and to the relations between death and social status, 1922 and 1937. In 1938, an article appeared with the title “Social reaction to crime: laws and morals in the Schouten Islands, New Guinea” (Hogbin, 1938), and, in 1939, another with the title “Charity and the struggle for existence: racial theories and international relations” (Marett, 1939). With the exception of these two last titles (out of 600), the rest are descriptive contributions pertaining to objects which derive their decisive interest from their “exotic” character, eliciting scarcely any movements of identification. It is hardly surprising if, after all, for this group of professionals, war, power struggles, and violent and aggressive forms of expression appear to have been subjects of little interest, or, more probably, were even the object of a sort of collective avoidance, particularly during this period. But this does not mean we should give up on our efforts to apprehend its consequences. In short, given that he had no particular knowledge of the group context other than that he had obtained from reading, Freud’s intervention disturbed the equilibrium of this professional group, confronting it with a dimension that the latter, at this moment in the history of this discipline, had serious reasons for preferring to ignore. From certain points of view, these subjects might have been considered as being much closer to them than to him, even if he reserved the right to choose his texts of reference as he saw fit from an abundant available literature on the subject. It is probable that his intervention not only acutely irritated these professionals who had gathered knowledge of a certain interest, drawing on what seemed to them to distinguish these primitives from themselves. It was also, was it not, implicitly loaded with significations that were likely to result in “wild interpretations”, for example, by showing them very directly things that they themselves were unable to see. I wonder if the silent rejection, the great difficulty in organising the discussion, not on rather incidental questions of detail, but on the heart of the debate, were not, for a while in this situation, the only means of recourse available. (Is it necessary to add the rarity of studies on this subject, studies that became much less interesting after 1918?)

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This proposition is limited for me to the links between totemism and exogamy and the oedipal complex (without concerning myself necessarily with the question of the reality of the murder of the father of the horde, which raises, in addition, epistemological questions of a different nature). It would be quite favourable to Freud’s conception of psychic life after 1920, on account of the place that it accords to trauma: the state of “unreadiness” is a key factor in it. The outbreak of the Second World War was obviously not of a nature to modify this situation favourably; a collapse of European civilisation had become manifest, terrifying anti-Semitism was unleashed, and colonial wars followed. More than in its ethnographical work proper, the charm of Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1955a) does not reside so much in the literary talent of the author, in the quality of his vast culture, as in its character of a travel diary with the whole dimension of philosophical meditation that can be found in this literary genre, after these terrible political events.8

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CHAPTER FOUR

Totemism and anthropology after the Second World War

he further we move away from the dates of the publication and translation of Totem and Taboo, the more the limits of my project can be seen: the reception that was given to this book in anthropological circles, from the 1920s up to the Second World War, could no longer be conceived according to the same parameters: anthropology had developed considerably and the whole of Freud’s work had essentially become accessible. Before envisaging in a distinct way its fate in both English and French anthropological literature, it is worth recalling the important and surprising modification observable in public opinion in the interwar period: after the First World War, the subject of totemism ceased to give rise to so many publications. Thus, Poirier (1968) points out, after evoking the work of Radcliffe-Brown and his definition of totemism, that this problem “no longer receives the passionate attention that the first anthropologists accorded it” (p. 984). He added, moreover, and I will come back to this later, that “the recent work of C. Lévi-Strauss is the only general work that has been devoted to it” (p. 984). According to Rosa (2003):“After the First World War nothing was the same again; the debate with the second and third generations no

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longer existed as such after each new school had said what it had to say essentially about the evolutionist tradition” (p. 1, translated for this edition). Yet, in spite of the intense and very determined critical pressure from some quarters, totemism remained a subject of study; Freud’s book was still given a mention from time to time.

French-speaking anthropologists In the French-language literature, the majority of the anthropological contributions of the post-war period, following Durkheim, who considered totemism as an elementary form of religion, and Mauss, who was interested in symbolic mediations, psychology, and linguistics, found their place within the structuralist movement, under the very dominant influence of Lévi-Strauss, to whom I will be according a large amount of space in my study. The anthropology of kinship took a new share in it by becoming a strictly specialised discipline.

Lévi-Strauss and the totem: a really particular case Throughout his work, Lévi-Strauss on several occasions took up a position towards psychoanalysis in accordance with his increasing knowledge of Freud’s work. It would seem that his particular investment in the question of totemism contributed to his maintaining a very critical interest on his part in Totem and Taboo, unless it was the contrary that was true. This, at least, is what the publication in 1962 of a volume of 150 pages entitled Totemism (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a) has led me to think after making an inventory of this theme in his work as a whole. In the very first lines, the author announces his project of drawing a comparison between totemism and hysteria, viewed as “contemporary notional constructions, arising in the same milieu of civilization”, and exposed to the same “misadventures”. He explains this proximity initially by the tendency common to many branches of learning towards the end of the nineteenth century, to mark off certain human phenomena – as though they constituted a natural entity – which scholars preferred to regard as alien to their own moral universe thus protecting the attachment which they felt towards the latter. (p. 1)

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Thus, he stipulates, totemism is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation. (1962a, p. 1)

Attentive as I am to Lévi-Strauss’s thesis concerning totemism, I am surprised by the parallel he establishes with hysteria, and above all uncertain as to the meaning of his remarks. The terms “isolating” and “grouping together” describe two complementary and contradictory facets at once of every movement of thought, and are used, for example, to these two “notional constructions”, but the evocation of two contrary solutions to “symptoms” (either they vanish or are refractory to any unifying interpretation) constitutes, if I may say so, a totalising alternative and takes us beyond any simple considerations of a notional order. It is only significant in so far as it shows the existence of a link between these two modalities and the role of doubt in the appearance of these two contrary solutions (“once we are persuaded to doubt”) certainly calls for some clarification. The term “arbitrarily”(“arbitrarily to isolate”) is scarcely justified and disregards at least a part of Charcot’s work. Although he initially considered hysteria as just “one illness among others” (freeing it from its “lubricity” of earlier centuries), Charcot undertook a descriptive and ordered clinical inventory of hysteria in order to distinguish it from multiple sclerosis, from tabes. Next, he studied the influence of magnetism (cf. Messmer), and then that of hypnosis and suggestion. He thought initially that hysteria was linked to functional dynamic disturbances of the nervous system, but then went on to individualise traumatic hysteria (1885–1888). This clinical description is the part of his work that would survive him within the slightly larger context of the notion of traumatic neurosis (Trillat, 1986, pp. 138–155). As Lévi-Strauss concedes, the disappearance of Charcot’s grand hysteria is also sometimes explained “as an effect of social evolution”, a notion that would deserve a long study all to itself, for, in this context, the text deals with hysteria in a general rather than a specific manner. If the disappearance of the particular type of somatic expression constituted by the grand attacks with their successive phases

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attests to the implicit and unconscious participation of the illustrious professor in this mode of expression which vanished with his own demise, and if the theatrical, academic, livresque existence of “Charcot’s grand hysteria” was interrupted, it is far from being the only representation of hysteria, even in the eyes of the neurologists of the nineteenth century. Neither the eventual doubts of physicians, nor their certitudes or quarrels, sufficed, as far as I know, to make the symptoms and hysteria vanish from the clinical field, any more than the existence of somatic conversions waited for their convictions and the organisation of the famous lessons to manifest themselves at the Salpêtrière hospital, at Bicêtre, and in other places, well before the nineteenth century. In the register of Charcot’s hysteria, I do not feel any more capable of saying what Lévi-Strauss means when he speaks of symptoms that (instead of vanishing) “proved refractory to unifying interpretations”. Between 1896 and 1900, hysteria would be the object of intense and lasting conflicts between Charcot’s school and Bernheim, whose knowledge of hysteria was limited to Charcot’s descriptions. He was highly critical, deeming that “this very precise description was often artificial, [that] this systemization was due in large part to imitation and suggestion, [and that] grand hysteria with its evolution of phases which unfolded in succession, was a hysteria of culture . . .” (Trillat, 1986, pp. 167–179, translated for this edition). This vigorous line of argument does not leave one indifferent, but neither does it suffice to elucidate the intelligibility of hysterical phenomena. P. Janet saw clearly the role of a certain factor of “training” in the grand hysterias of the Salpêtrière, but he also thought of hysteria as an illness in a completely different sense from the one that was given to it in organic neurological clinical descriptions: critical phenomena and permanent symptoms are associated with a restriction of the field of consciousness, as he described in 1899 (Trillat, 1986, pp. 181–195). In “The neuroses” (1910), Janet evokes the role “of the subconscious ideas which provoke manifest mental accidents” (p. 339), and is interested in the biographical history of the patient. Babinski’s approach was completely different: considering that hysterical phenomena are of the same order as “artificial hypnotic phenomena”, he opposes suggestion and “persuasion, the introduction into another person’s mind of a sensible idea”. Thus, hysterical disorders are those that can be reproduced by means of suggestion

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and made to disappear under the exclusive influence of persuasion. Even though clinical findings did not always conform to this robust simplicity, Babinski maintained his positions, preferring the term pithiatism, and then simulation, to that of hysteria (Trillat, 1986, p. 201). The institutional conflict was settled thanks to, and to the benefit of, Déjerine, an eminent neurologist who had become a self-taught psychotherapist. Freud’s (1893c) paper “Some points for a comparative study of organic and hysterical motor paralyses” appeared in 1893 in the Archives of Neurology. Lévi-Strauss seems unaware that Freud’s conception of hysteria is very different from Charcot’s. I am, none the less, left with many questions regarding the evocation of unifying interpretations in such a conflictual climate. What precisely do vanishing or refractory symptoms signify in relation to doubt? Can the alternative formulated by Lévi-Strauss (vanishing or refractory symptoms) be linked up with an implicit reference to Freud’s conception of hysteria referred to in the following sentence of the introduction of Totemism? To move beyond this notional vagueness, should we, on the one hand, attribute the quasi-disappearance of the clinical picture to Charcot’s grand hysteria, a symptomatic expression valorised in the French cultural context of the period, and, on the other, apply the notion of resistance to unifying interpretations to the psychic life of Freud’s hysterics, who are still present in contemporary clinical experience? Such an articulation would be highly questionable, especially in that it was precisely in observing that certain symptoms vanished in hysterical patients and that others could be suggested that Freud became interested in free associations. What are we to make of the parallel with totemism considered as an illusion? Should it be seen as a hysterical manifestation of the generation of anthropologists that preceded Lévi-Strauss? Does the picture we have of totemism depend on the arbitrary isolation of phenomena? Moreover, would calling it into question lead to its disappearance or to its rebellion? We shall see that anthropologists are divided on this subject. On the other hand, Lévi-Strauss is surely right, for, in connection with these poorly defined manifestations, he speaks either of their disappearance or of their refractory character. Under these conditions,

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it is difficult to be mistaken, but equally difficult to grasp the meaning of his remarks.

More Freudian than Freud: a difficult game to follow The rest of the text makes it even more difficult to know, in that the terms in which Freud’s work is invoked, under the guise of conventional conformity, seem to me to be questionable in respect of certain essential and precise points. He writes, The first lesson of Freud’s critique of Charcot’s theory lay in convincing us that there “is no essential difference between” states of mental health and mental illness; that the passage from one to the other involves, at most, a modification in certain general operations which everyone may see in himself, and that consequently the mental patient is our brother, since he is distinguished from us in nothing more than by an involution – minor in nature, contingent in form, arbitrary in definition, and temporary, – of a historical development which is fundamentally that of every individual existence. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, pp. 3–4)

In certain respects, more Freudian than Freud himself, LéviStrauss depicts, in a remarkably similar fashion, the mental patient as a brother, but it is not clear to me what the semantic content of the term mental patient was for him. It is chiefly applied today, and has been for several decades now, to a group of subjects that Freud had few direct dealings with in his time; his interest in their mental life was matched by his reservations concerning their capacities for investment and his possibilities to treat them. Freud, who became increasingly aware during the course of his work of the difficulties they presented, did not often, it seems to me, attain a degree of benevolence that was as generous, courageous, and worthy as that demonstrated by Lévi-Strauss. Between the states of health and mental illness there occurs, he writes, “at most, a modification in certain general operations which everyone may see in himself” (p. 5). This remark gives us a better insight, perhaps, into Lévi-Strauss’s mischievous sense of humour; drawing on the teaching, very much in vogue at the time, of the man who invented psychoanalysis and a method for exploring the unconscious, he is capable of describing the passage

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from health to mental illness as “at most, a modification in certain general operations which everyone may see in himself”. What, indeed, could be easier, one might ask? All those who, in one way or another, have been faced with this “modification” will agree that the soundness of this statement is tenuous. But beyond the stylistically seductive effects, what exactly does he mean when he speaks of an “involution of a historical development” that is not so much “minor in nature” as “contingent in its form”, and “arbitrary in definition”? While the first term is intelligible from the perspective of LéviStrauss with its somewhat ideological dimension, one might say (was it not essentially in the field of polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality that Freud highlighted the absence of a solution of continuity between the latter and adult sexuality, rather than speaking in terms of an involution of a (historical?) development of the diverse agencies of the personality?), the two other terms are utterly astonishing: what meaning could the psychoanalytic investigation of an involution that is contingent in form and arbitrary in definition have? Already, in this introduction, where Freud is presented as a master(?), it is worth asking ourselves the question: what is the meaning of all this? What is there here to be taken seriously beyond the eminent academician’s eventual humoristic provocations? For Lévi-Strauss, the same motives may be seen in “the totemic illusion”, where it was a question of relegating certain societies into nature at least by classing them according to their attitude toward nature, as expressed by the place assigned to man in the animal kingdom and by their supposed understanding or ignorance of the mechanism of procreation. Thus, totemism assimilates men to animals and the alleged ignorance of the role of the father in conception results in the replacement of the human genitor by spirits closer still to natural forms. This naturalist view offered a touchstone which allowed the savage, within culture itself, to be isolated from civilized man. (1962a, p. 2)

I wanted to show from these somewhat lengthy citations the formidable difficulties I am faced with in my project: the unfounded attack here, in 1965, on both the ethnologists and psychiatrists of the previous generation in the name of a “Freudian” lesson, completely leaves in the shadows one of the most original contributions of Totem and

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Taboo, because this contribution, in fact, removes the reason for LéviStrauss’s attempt to discredit it. In 1913, Freud makes an institution of totemism in respect of primitive peoples, certainly, but also of contemporary man, as is suggested already by the subtitle of his essay in Imago, “Some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics”, and as is illustrated in a detailed manner in the last section of the essay. None of this was discussed by Lévi-Strauss, except, as we shall see, in connection with jokes and hoaxes. Lévi-Strauss was to pursue his trial of totemism in ethnology: totemism is an illusion . . . As I am not an ethnologist, I consider that I am not in a position to judge, but will follow the main lines of his argument, as I have followed those of his predecessors in their reactions to reading Freud’s essay.

The decline of an “illusion”? Lévi-Strauss thus gives a brief introductory summary of the history of totemism in anthropology. For him, it is the history of the justified decline of a notion born of an illusion; the author’s critical interest is not directed at the illusions of primitive peoples, but, rather, at those that temporarily took hold of anthropologists: “The signs presaging its downfall,” he writes, “were almost contemporary with its period of triumph; it was already collapsing at the very moment when it seemed most secure” (1962a, p. 4). He considers that the first critique of totemism was penned by Goldenweiser, after which the place assigned to totemism gradually diminished in American textbooks. “Thereafter, the liquidation accelerated,” he writes, while noting the reduction of the volume of references to the subject in Boas’s General Anthropology (1938a), written in collaboration with his pupils. We will see him employing successively in connection with the subject of totemism the expressions disintegration (p. 4), liquidation (p. 5), and destruction of the hydra (p. 26). But Lévi-Strauss also knows that eight years later, Goldenweiser (1918), who was often prey to doubts and reversals, would also refer to totemism as “one of the most characteristic and sharply defined institutions of primitive society” (p. 290). In his Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture (Goldenweiser, 1937), he devotes a

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specific section to totemism in which he affirms its reality (p. 328). So, what should be taken seriously and considered as credible in LéviStrauss’s book, as soon as it is a question of totemism and of Freud, is called into question again. Lévi-Strauss cites, as a conclusion to what bears a passing resemblance to a joyful obituary section, a paper by R. Linton, and the way he does so seems to me sufficiently elucidating to justify its textual reproduction (this observation would be commented on later by M. Fortès in a completely different tone). Lévi-Strauss refers, in effect to “a curious study . . . [which] certainly contributed to the increasing indifference of American scholars toward a problem which had hitherto been so much debated” (p. 7). He continues, During the First World War, Linton belonged to the 42nd or “Rainbow” division, a name arbitrarily chosen by a staff officer because the division was composed of units from so many states that their regimental colours were as varied as those of the rainbow. But as soon as this division arrived in France its name became common usage: when soldiers were asked to which unit they belonged they would answer, “I am a rainbow.” [Linton recounts how] five or six months after the division had been given this name, it was generally agreed that the appearance of a rainbow was a happy omen for it. Three months later it was said that a rainbow was seen – even in spite of incompatible meterological conditions – every time the division went into action. In May 1918, the division found itself deployed near the 77th, which painted its vehicles with its own particular emblem, the Statue of Liberty. The Rainbow Division adopted this custom, which it thus imitated from its neighbour, but with the intention also of distinguishing itself from it. By August or September, wearing a badge in the form of a rainbow had become general, in spite of the belief that the wearing of distinctive insignia had its origin in a punishment inflicted on a defeated unit. This went on until at the end of the war the American Expeditionary Force was organised into “a series of well-defined and often mutually jealous groups, each of which had its individual complex of ideas and observances.” These the author enumerates as: (1) segmentation into groups conscious of their identity; (2) the bearing by each group of the name of an animal, thing, or natural phenomenon; (3) the use of this name as a term of address conversation with strangers; (4) the use of an emblem, drawn on divisional weapons or vehicles, or as a personal ornament, with a corresponding tabu on the use of the emblem by other groups; (5) respect for the “patron” and the design representing it; (6) a vague belief in its protective role and its value as augury.

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Almost any investigator who found such a condition existing among an uncivilized people would class these associated beliefs and practices as a totemic complex. (pp. 7–8)

The author knows, of course, that it shows a poverty of content when contrasted with the highly developed totemism of the Australians or the Melanesians but it is fully as rich as the totemic complexes of some of the North American tribes. The main points in which it differs from true totemism are the absence of marriage regulations, or in beliefs of descent from, or blood relationship with, the totem. However, remarks Linton in conclusion, these regulations are a function of clan organization, rather than of totemism properly speaking, so they do not always accompany it. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 80)

The end of the introduction to Totemism attempts to show that the work of disintegration of the notion initiated in the USA and “pursued tenaciously” was not just a local development. The definitions of totemism given by W. H. R. Rivers are compared with those of a current textbook of anthropology and the consensual definitions of the Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1951), produced by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Of course, there are differences: Rivers proposed in 1914 to define totemism by the coalescence of three elements, social, psychological, and ritual, which Lévi-Strauss cites in detail (p. 8): in the definition of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which is more complex and nuanced than that of Rivers’, belief in kinship with the totem has disappeared, the points of connection between natural classes and typically exogamous groups, and the food prohibitions as a typical form of respect, are relegated with other eventualities among the subsidiary conditions. In their place, the Notes and Queries enumerate the existence in indigenous thought of two series, one natural, the other social: “The homology of relations between the terms of the two series, and the constancy of these relations. In other words, nothing remains of totemism to which Rivers wished to give a content, other than a form” (p. 10). Between very specific, but too exclusive definitions, and very general, but too inclusive definitions, it is easy for Lévi-Strauss to point up the responsibility of the semantic contents of the notion of totemism and to stress his preferences for the form, drawing on Boas’s

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considerations concerning the artificial character of totemism which exists only in the ethnologist’s mind and to which nothing specific corresponds outside. He suggests that the formation of a system on the social plane is the necessary condition of totemism. This, at any rate, is his version of the theses put forward by Boas. Totemism in anthropology, he contends, is no more than a production of the collective psychology of anthropologists (p. 14). Citing Lowie (1912, p. 41), he adds, “We must first inquire whether we are comparing cultural realities or merely figments of our logical modes of communication” (p. 11). This massive reduction of the field of observation of the facts, to use equally reductive language, is, in my view, consistent with the desire to see the notion itself disappear. Notwithstanding the fallacious formula of his “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss” where he writes, It is not surprising that Marcel Mauss has constantly appealed to the unconscious as furnishing the common and specific character of social facts; an operation of the same type in psychoanalysis allows us to reconquer that part of our ego that is most foreign to us, and, in ethnological inquiry, gives us access to what is most alien in others as if it was another part of ourselves. (Mauss, 1950, p. 32, translated for this edition)

thereby revealing his lack of interest in the notion of psychic reality, Lévi-Strauss gives us to understand that he places little value on the notion of fantasy activity. Despite his exceptional qualities, he scarcely seems, in this book, to have been in a state of mind to be able to take account of Totem and Taboo. (We shall see that, for him, the question of totemism is “one way of posing the problem of the logical power of systems of denotation borrowed from the realm of nature” (p. 14).)

Doubts . . . jokes and hoaxes . . . The first chapter of Totemism, entitled “The totemic illusion”, opens with a brief enquiry which it will be useful to reproduce: To accept as a theme for discussion a category that one believes to be false always entails the risk, simply by the attention that is paid to it,

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of entertaining some illusion about its reality . . . The phantom which is imprudently summoned up in the hope of exorcising it for good, vanishes only to reappear, and closer than one imagines to the place where it was at first . . . Perhaps it would be wiser to let obsolete theories fall into oblivion and not to awake the dead . . . If great minds were fascinated for years by a problem which today seems unreal, it is because they vaguely perceived that certain phenomena, arbitrarily grouped and ill-analysed though they may have been, were nevertheless worthy of interest . . . How could we hope to tackle them for ourselves, in order to propose a different interpretation, without agreeing first to retrace pace by pace an itinerary which, even if it led nowhere, induces us to look for another route and may help us to find it? (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 15)

In these remarkably well-written lines, Lévi-Strauss expresses a certain doubt as to the possible ambiguity of the effects of his critique: is the distinction between evoking the ghost and resurrecting it through invocation really valid? All the equally remarkable efforts that have been furnished to characterise the “savage mind” show that it is at work in the passing doubt of the “scholar”, especially as this invocation, which I think is provocative, is repetitive. In his writings, the great founding minds of earlier generations have been subjected to severe criticism. Does their ghost-like return, evoked in passing, not also assume a totemic dimension in the Freudian sense? Is this a dimension Lévi-Strauss does not want to hear about (is there a risk of it becoming nightmarish?), to the point that he finds it necessary, as far as it is possible, to eliminate this illusion, without altogether being successful in doing so? Throughout his entire work, Lévi-Strauss would continue to attack Totem and Taboo and psychoanalysis. He quickly and explicitly shows what appears to have been his dislike for it, so that his rejection of a book in which he is not interested, other than to turn it into an object of comic irony, derisive farce, or provocative nonsense, becomes quite intelligible. The essential level is that of a rivalrous confrontation with anthropology, in which psychoanalysis is charged with having constructed a mythology (see “Magic and religion” in Structural Anthropology, 1958, pp. 167–241). In “A Jivaro version of Totem et Tabou” (The Jealous Potter, 1985, p. 185), he points out that Freud’s subtitle to Totem and Taboo reads “Some points of agreement between the mental life of savages and that of neurotics”. How can one possibly fail to agree?

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And, in Conversations with Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 1988), he writes, The myths analyzed in The Jealous Potter, especially those of the Jivaro, have the peculiar quality that they foreshadow psychoanalytic theories. It was necessary to keep the psychoanalysts from absconding with them, and claiming them as a legitimation of their theories. (p. 107)

Sophocles’ tragedy, King Oedipus, and Labiche’s (1851) comedy, Un chapeau de paille d’Italie, “are one and the same” (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 1988, p. 198) but . . . “this playful exercise of structural analysis should not be taken too seriously . . .” (“A Jivaro version of ‘Totem et Tabou’”, The Jealous Potter, 1985, p. 201). This, indeed, is the serious question that Lévi-Strauss’s work poses for me whenever psychoanalysis is concerned, notwithstanding the extraordinarily brilliant character of his career and the reputation of his work in France. In Boas’s General Anthropology (1938), which Lévi-Strauss cites, the few pages of discussion on totemism contain this conclusion: Too much has been written on totemism . . . for one to remain completely indifferent to it . . . but since the manifestations are so varied in different parts of the world, since their resemblances are only apparent, and since they are phenomena which may occur in many settings not related to a real or supposed consanguinity, they can by no means be fitted within a single category. (p. 430)

Lévi-Strauss is obviously satisfied to see totemism, an artificial entity that exists only in the ethnologist’s mind, considered as something that does not correspond specifically with anything outside it.9 The reductive character of the Lévi-Strauss’ positions inevitably suggests a possible inversion of totemism which has, thus, become a product of the collective psychology of anthropologists; at this level, I do not see any problem in giving them credit. But why would it be only that? I do not understand very well his amused derision of R. Linton’s anthropological observation (Totemism, pp. 7–8).

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The structuralist choice In his attempt to give a formal definition, he cites Boas, in particular, who limits himself to a restrictive and strict definition of totemism which only includes cases where the following coincide: n

n

on the one hand, a frequent identification of human beings with plants or with animals, which involves general considerations on the relations between man and nature, concerning art and magic as much as society and religion; on the other, a second order of questions concerning the denomination of groups founded on kinship with the help of the names of animals or vegetables, but also in many other ways.

This invites Lévi-Strauss to suggest that for such a coincidence to occur in a distinct and lasting form, the societies in question must have stable marriage regulations, which leads him to assert that “the alleged totemism” always supposes certain forms of exogamy. He proposes to consider the term totemism as the relations ideally existing between two series, one natural, the other cultural. The natural series comprises categories, on the one hand, and particulars, on the other; the cultural series on the same model comprises groups and persons. There are four ways of associating the terms, two by two, belonging to the different series, but this is only accessible to thought with the help of a figure (Lévi-Strauss obligingly provides it in his book, but his use of it in order to give intelligibility to the functioning of societies without writing is questionable . . . I shall come back to this point later). The first category corresponds to that of Australian totemism, the second to individual combinatory totemism, but Lévi-Strauss sees a distortion of the semantic field in the fact that only the first two were included in the first era of totemism, whereas the two others were attached to it only indirectly, one possibly as an outline, the other as a residue. It is this distortion that he seeks to demonstrate in the following pages, showing, through the analysis of a myth of the Ojibwa society, that the relationship between man and the totem must be metaphorical (attested in Australia and America by the fact that the totemic animal is sometimes designated by another name than that applied to a real animal). He devotes several pages to the distinction

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between the totemic relationship and the guardian spirit of North American Indians; as an example of the third, one can take Mota, in the Banks Islands, and certain tribes of the Algonquin group. The fourth is attested in Polynesia and in Africa. Logically, these four combinations are equivalent since they are the result of the same operation. As a typical example of his way of dealing with the question of totemism, I shall take the belief that the members of the clan originated from a totemic animal, a belief he says is absent in the Ojibwa Indians. In their case, the animal was not the object of a cult. Thus Landes remarks that although the caribou has completely disappeared from southern Canada, this fact did not at all worry the members of the clan named after it. “It’s only a name,” they say to the investigator. The totem was freely killed and eaten, with certain ritual precautions, viz., that permission has first to be asked of the animal, and apologies made to it afterwards. The Ojibwa even said that the animal offered itself more willingly to the arrows of hunters from its own clan and that it paid to call out the name of the totem before shooting at it. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 21)

I know next to nothing about the Ojibwa and the caribou; in spite of this considerable disadvantage in the situation that I have just been referring to, I am somewhat perplexed by the author’s utilisation, without further enquiry, of statements relating to them such as “the totem was freely killed and eaten, with certain ritual precautions”.10 The following chapter is enriched by a third part that draws on the work of R. Firth, who writes, It is essential to know whether on the human side the relation [with the species or natural object] is one in which people are involved as a group or only as individuals, and, as regards the animal or plant, whether each species is concerned as a whole or single members of it alone are considered; whether the natural object is regarded as a representative or emblem of the human group; whether there is any idea of identity between a person and the creature or object and of descent of one from the other; and whether the interest of the people is focused on the animal or the plant per se or is of importance primarily through a belief in its association with ancestral spirits or other deities. (Firth, 1930, p. 292, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 196a, p. 24)

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Having cited this remarkable text, Lévi-Strauss considers it necessary to add to his bi-axial system, described above, a third axis on which should be arranged the different conceivable types of relations between the extreme terms of the first two axes: “emblematic, relations of identity, descent, interest, direct or indirect, etc.” The Tikopia system, chosen here as a type of description, is of a certain complexity. In any case, he shows that there exists a very close link between edible things and inedible things, and that each species that is eaten has a particular affinity with one of four patrilinear groups, which are not necessarily exogamous. The differential behaviours of the different groups lead Firth to think that in Tikopia, as with the Ojibwa, myths have the function of unifying the sociological and religious aspects in which the relations between man and certain vegetable species are expressed: “A long time ago, the Gods were not different from men and the Gods on earth were the direct representatives of the clans” (p. 24). In these myths we find individual and collective, negative and positive behaviours, numerous general prohibitions, or prohibitions limited to a clan, and an abundance of extremely diverse and contradictory details. An example of a practice not considered as totemic is the prohibition against eating pigeon in the Taumako clan; they have no scruples about killing them because they pillage gardens, and because this prohibition is reserved for elders. Thus, Lévi-Strauss writes, “We must conclude with Firth that in Tikopia the animal is conceived neither as an emblem nor as an ancestor nor as a relative” (1962a, p. 29). I am intrigued once again here by the particular nature of the author’s line of reasoning, which is presented without any commentary: is his logic here not similar to that which Freud describes as “kettle” logic?11 I will give two examples: The respect and the prohibitions connected with animals are explained, in a complex fashion, by the triad of ideas that the group is descended from an ancestor, that the god is incarnated in an animal, and that in mythical times there was a relation of alliance between ancestor and god. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 29) Firth, in a brief comparison of Tikopian facts with the generality of Polynesian reports, expresses almost word for word the formula of Boas, drawing the lesson that totemism does not constitute a

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phenomenon sui generis but a specific case in the general field of relations between man and the natural environment. (Firth, 1930, p. 398, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 29)

I once again find it difficult to grasp the logical nuance capable of giving meaning to this conclusion, which I shall reproduce: “totemism does not constitute a phenomenon sui generis but a specific case in the general field of relations between man and the natural environment.” These two propositions are certainly not synonymous, but what is the point of reproducing this text here without adding any further commentary? At the least, it may be described as provocatively casual, unless it is just a joke, probably Polynesian this time.

The specificity of Australian totemism In his second chapter, Lévi-Strauss deals with Australian nominalism with reference to the work of A. P. Elkin. Between 1933 and 1954, this eminent specialist attempted to “describe and rescue the notion of totemism” with reference to Australian societies which generally evolved in a vacuum to a much greater degree than others elsewhere in the world. (Without entering into the description of an extremely complex theory, I propose to cite A. van Gennep, who, in 1920, had already listed forty-one different theories of totemism, the most important of which were certainly, for Lévi-Strauss, built on the basis of Australian facts.) According to Van Gennep, the result, and probably the aim, of exogamy is to link together certain societies which, without it, would no more come into contact than the masons of Rouen and the hairdressers of Marseille. If we examine the marriage diagrams from this point of view . . . we see that the positive element in exogamy is quite as powerful as the negative, but that, as in all codes, only what is forbidden is specified. (Van Gennep, 1920, p. 351, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 35)

For van Gennep, these two indissoluble aspects of the institution serve to reinforce the cohesion of the diverse clans towards society in general: It establishes a matrimonial interchange through the generations which is the more complicated in proportion with the age of the

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society and the increasing number of its segments, an interchange and alternating mingling in which exogamy ensures regularity and periodical return. (Van Gennep, 1920, p. 351, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, pp. 35–36)

Lévi-Strauss shares this interpretation and goes on to describe the diverse forms of totemism chosen by Elkin, while taking into account not only the rules of marriage and descent, but also the rules of residence whose dialectic with descent has “the immense advantage of permitting the integration of the classical systems into a general typology” (p. 36). Elkin thus distinguishes the form of totemism, that is to say, the way in which totems are distributed between individuals and groups (depending on the clan, the sex, a moiety, and so on) from the significance of totemism, according to the role played by the totem for the individual (as assistant, guardian, companion, symbol of the social or cultural group). Finally, he considers the role played by the system in the regulation of marriages, social action, philosophy, and so on. For Lévi-Strauss, Elkin’s approach begins as a healthy reaction against the amalgams to which the theoreticians of totemism have had recourse in order to establish it as a unique and recurrent form of institution in a large number of societies. But Elkin then takes a different direction: the diversity of the Australian forms of totemism does not lead him to conclude that the notion of totemism is inconsistent; he simply contests its unity. And Lévi-Strauss thinks that he saves it, as it were, by reducing totemism to a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, moreover, accumulative forms. For him, there is no longer one totemism, but, rather, totemisms, in the plural, each of which exists as an irreducible entity. “But it is the very notion of totemism that is illusory, not just its unity”, writes Lévi-Strauss (1962a, p. 45), who henceforth draws on his work The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). “On the condition that we change the generally held conception of the rules of marriage and kinship systems”, he hopes to be able to widen the field of interpretation of these phenomena, and then to add supplementary dimensions, in the hope of setting up an overall system, but bringing together this time both social and religious phenomena, even if the synthetic notion of totemism has to give way before this treatment. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 47)

—(a formula a minima, it seems to me).

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His line of thinking, which, I must confess, I find rather difficult to follow, starts out from the arithmetical progression of the classes in the section systems and sub-section systems which are supported, it seems, by a dualistic schema, since their mode of production always utilises multiples of two without this mode necessarily revealing a genetic series between these different subdivisions. For him, these arrangements probably constitute a sort of abridged method for classing individuals, a simplified code that is easier to use in inter-tribal ceremonies involving, for example, several languages, and implicated in the regulation of marriages. The author thinks that the sections and sub-sections “were invented, copied or intelligently borrowed” (p. 52). Their function was first and foremost sociological, serving to encode the kinship system and that of marital exchanges, while having to adjust, on many occasions, to pre-existing social rules, not without an element of play. I shall cite in full, for its illustrative value, the quite characteristic exercise of the author’s style of thinking: Behind the empirical categories of Elkin, moreover, can one not divine the outline of a system? He opposes the totemism of matrilineal clans to that of patrilineal clans, and with good reason. In the former case, the totem is “flesh”, in the latter it is “dream”; organic and material in one case, therefore, spiritual and incorporeal in the other. Moreover, matrilinear totemism attests to the biological and diachronic continuity of the clan, it is the flesh and blood perpetuated from generation to generation by the women of the lineage, while patrilineal totemism expresses the “local solidarity of the horde”, i.e. an external link, no longer an internal one, territorial, no longer biological, which synchronically – no longer diachronically – unites the members of the clan. All this is true, but must we therefore conclude that we are dealing with different sociological species? (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 54)

And the author continues, This is so little certain that the opposition may even be reversed: matrilineal totemism also has a synchronic function, which is to express, in each patrilocal territory where spouses come to reside from different clans, the differential structure of the tribal group. Patrilinear totemism, in its turn, has a diachronic function: it expresses the temporal continuity of the horde, commemorating periodically, through the

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ministrations of cult groups, the installation of mythical ancestors in a certain territory. (p. 54)

Far from being heterogeneous, the two forms of totemism seem to him to be in a relation of complementarity: There is a passage from one to the other by way of transformations. Although the means are different, they both establish a connection between the material and spiritual world, between diachronic and synchronic, between structure and event, these are two different but correlative ways of displaying parallel attributes of nature and society. (p. 54)

And, somewhat amusingly, he concludes, by briefly criticising Elkin for the very general character of his conclusions on the subject.

A critique of these functionalists Lévi-Strauss now proposes a critique of “functionalist” totemisms. He begins with Malinowski, who admits the reality of totemism but “adopts a perspective that is more biological and psychological than anthropological” (p. 56): first, totemism is concerned with animals and plants because they supply man with food. The affinity between man and animals is easily verifiable: like man, animals move, emit sounds, express emotions; between man and nature animals occupy an intermediate position inspiring mixed feelings which are the ingredients of totemism. The cult corresponds to the desire to control the species, whether the latter is edible or dangerous, and to the concomitance in totemism of both a sociological and a religious aspect, all ritual leading towards magic, and magic to individual or family specialisation. As the family tends to transform itself into a clan, the attribution to each clan of a different totem poses no problem; totemism seems quite natural and appears “as a blessing bestowed by religion on primitive man’s effort’s in dealing with his useful surroundings, upon his ‘struggle for existence’ ” (Malinowski, 1948, p. 28, cited by LéviStrauss, 1962a, p. 58). Lévi-Strauss has little difficulty in criticising Malinowski’s utilitarianism, showing that the animals chosen are far from having equal importance from the point of view of their utility in the different indigenous cultures. We should not imagine, as in the “fairy wand” construction of Malinowski, as he calls it, that

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“totemism has vanished like a cloud”. In fact, “the problem has simply been turned round. It is only anthropology, with all its methods, its conquests, and its knowledge, that might well have disappeared from the scene” (1962a, p. 58). Radcliffe-Brown would invert the relations between these two phenomena in the following terms: It is a universally attested fact that every thing and every event which exercises an important influence on the spiritual or material well-being of society tends to become the object of a ritual attitude. If totemism chose natural species to serve as social emblems for segments of the society, this is quite simply because these species were already objects of ritual attitudes before totemisms. [This is not because] totems are objects of ritual attitudes (“sacred” in Durkheim’s terminology), but because they were first called upon to serve as social emblems. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 61)

This is “on the dual condition”, writes Lévi-Strauss, of conceding – what observation suggests everywhere and at all periods – that natural interests give rise to ritual conduct, and that ritual segmentation follows social, the problem of totemism disappears and gives way to a different problem, but one that has the advantage of being far more general. (1962a, p. 61)

This trial of utilitarian interpretations leads him to develop, following Radcliffe-Brown, a theory of ritual very much at odds with Freudian positions. Radcliffe-Brown (1939) writes, “Thus, while one theory of anthropology is that magic and religion give man confidence, comfort and a sense of security, it could equally well be argued that they give men fears and anxieties from which they would otherwise be free” (pp. 148–149, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 67).

Lévi-Strauss’s personal conceptualisation of the origin of anxiety Lévi-Strauss writes, Thus it is certainly not because men feel anxiety in certain situations that they turn to magic, but it is because they have recourse to magic

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that these situations engender anxiety in them. . . . We may certainly imagine that in the beginning of social life, and today still, individuals who were prey to anxiety should have originated, and still originate, compulsive modes of behaviour such as are observed among psychopaths; and that a kind of social selection should have operated on this multitude of individual variations in such a way, like natural selection by means of mutations, as to preserve and generalize those that were useful to the perpetuation of the group and the maintenance of order, and to eliminate the others. Before a recourse to anxiety could supply even the outlines of an explanation, we should have to know what anxiety actually is, and then what relations exist between, on the one hand, a confused and disordered emotion, and, on the other, acts marked by the most rigorous precision and which are divided into a number of distinct categories. By what mechanism might the former give rise to the latter? [Lévi-Strauss refrains from making any allusion to available knowledge in this domain, before continuing] Anxiety is not a cause: it is the way in which man perceives, subjectively and obscurely, an internal disorder such that he does not even know whether it is physical or mental. If an intelligible connection exists, it has to be sought between articulated modes of behaviour and structures of disorder of which the theory has yet to be worked out, not between behaviour and the reflection of unknown phenomena on the screen of sensation. This behaviour may be accompanied by anxiety, but it is not anxiety that produces it. . . . As affectivity is the most obscure side of man, there has been the constant temptation to resort to it, forgetting that what is refractory to explanation is ipso facto unsuitable for use in explanation. A datum is not primary because it is incomprehensible: this characteristic indicates solely that an explanation, if it exists, must be sought on another level. . . . The first stage of Radcliffe-Brown’s thought is sufficient to demonstrate that this illusion has vitiated reflections on totemism. It is this, also, which ruins Freud’s attempt in Totem and Taboo. (1962a, pp. 68–69)

And, evoking Kroeber in 1939, he adds, If Freud gave up the idea, as he seemed to have done, that the act of parricide was a historical event, it could be viewed as the symbolic expression of a recurrent virtuality, a generic and non-temporal model of psychological attitudes entailed by repetitive phenomena or institutions such as totemism and tabus.

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But this is not the real question. Contrary to what Freud maintained, social constraints, whether positive or negative, cannot be explained, either in their origin or in their persistence, as the effects of impulses or emotions which appear again and again with the same characteristics and during the course of centuries and millennia, in different individuals. For if the recurrence of the sentiments explained the persistence of customs, the origin of the customs ought to coincide with the origin of the appearance of the sentiments, [and the author adds in this connection in a way that I am not sure I understand] and Freud’s thesis would be unchanged even if the parricidal impulse corresponded to a typical situation instead of to a historical event. (pp. 69–70)

In a footnote, Lévi-Strauss adds that “unlike Kroeber, my attitude toward Totem and Taboo has hardened over the years” (p. 70). He continues, further on, Men do not act, as members of a group, in accordance with what each feels as an individual; each man feels as a function of the way in which he is permitted or obliged to act. Customs are given as external norms before giving rise to internal sentiments, and these non sentiment norms determine the sentiments of individuals, as well as the circumstances in which they may, or must, be displayed. . . . Actually, impulses and emotions explain nothing: they are always results, either of the power of the body or of the impotence of the mind. (p. 70)

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that Lévi-Strauss concludes, In both cases they are consequences, never causes. The latter can be sought only in the organism, which is the exclusive concern of biology, or in the intellect which is the sole way offered to psychology, and to anthropology as well. (p. 70)

It seems to me that the personal character of the relations between anxiety and magic, as conceived here by Lévi-Strauss in a thoroughly univocal way, leaves very little room indeed for a dialectic with the possibility of recourse. His poorly argued assertions, of a rather tragic character, such as “each man feels as a function of the way in which he is permitted or obliged to act. Customs are given as external norms before giving rise to internal sentiments” (p. 70), relate in their own manner a restricted history in which humour, even offhand, derisive,

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and provocative, would have been a useful recourse. (Does not all this relegate the rest into the background? The way in which man perceives inner disorder subjectively is not a cause; the theory of the structures of disorder remains to be elaborated, etc.) Shortly after Lévi-Strauss had read his 1952 booklet, Race and History at the request of UNESCO, in the context of decolonisation, three years before the conference of Bandang, a booklet that swiftly became “a sort of breviary of anti-racist thought”, according to F. Dosse (1991–1992, translated for this edition), this same work was critiqued by R. Caillois (1954), who remarks that Lévi-Strauss very skilfully differentiates in it the cumulative history of the great civilisations from the will to suppress any innovation perceived as a danger for the primitive equilibrium of so-called “cold” societies. This cumulative history is not the privilege of the Western world: it was present in other parts of the world, in particular, in Asia, which, he says, is several thousand years in advance of us from the point of view of spiritual phenomena. Western civilisation is indisputably in advance on the technical level, but on others, if we take into account other criteria, the results are totally different: in matters of spiritual exercise, of relations between the body and the mind, the Orient is several thousand years in advance. Caillois establishes a parallel between the emergence of certain philosophies and the epoch in which they emerged, and further remarks that they are not merely a reflection of the period but, on the contrary, a compensation for a deficiency. Up until Hegel, he writes, Western philosophy thought essentially in linear terms, the doctrines in vogue emphasising a unique chain between the causes and effects of human evolution, whereas the latter still covered a disparate reality. Caillois (1954) writes, However, it was when history became effectively global, with the onset of the first worldwide conflict, that collective sensibility began to place value on plurality, on the irreducibility of differences, albeit just at the moment when this same plurality was disappearing. (p. 110, translated for this edition)

Caillois sees Race and History as the scientific condensed form of this attitude, and reproaches Lévi-Strauss for attributing disproportionate virtues to peoples that were neglected in the past.

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According to Lévi-Strauss, the progress of one culture cannot be measured in the system of reference utilised by another, an attitude that Caillois deems tenable; but Lévi-Strauss considers that all cultures are equivalent and incomparable, while at the same time claiming that the Orient has an advance of several thousand years over the Western world at the level of the relations between body and mind: his attitude is noble, but is it scientific? His relativism surely takes him too far. Many authors have reproached Lévi-Strauss for the minimal place he accords in his theory, at the manifest level, to affective manifestations (“sentiments . . . but in a subsidiary fashion, as responses to the gaps and lesions of a body of ideas which never succeeds in closing . . .” (1962a, p. 104), and so on). However, his response to Caillois, in Les Temps Modernes (LéviStrauss, 1955b), seems to me to be essentially emotional, and even passionate: “Diogenes proved movement by walking. Monsieur Roger Caillois lies down so as not see this”. To the allusion made by the latter to cannibalism, he replies, I do not bring morals into the kitchen; just as I do not believe in bodily resurrection, nor do I attach any metaphysical meaning to the fate reserved for a few corpses in this or that society; whether it is autopsy or consumption as food . . . What interests me rather is to know who kills men and in what quantity. In this respect we do better than the Papuans . . . Monsieur Caillous indulges in an exercise that begins with the buffooneries of table d’hôtes, continues with the declarations of a preacher, and finishes with the lamentations of a penitent. This, moreover, was the style of the cynics to whom he claims allegiance. I do not know if they have had a good reputation in the eyes of history. America has had its McCarthy: we will have our McCaillois . . . he is free to resort to public confession to assuage his complexes. Let us only hope that the progression of his self-analysis leads him quickly to a tête à tête with his past . . . (pp. 1212–1220, translated for this edition)

As an adept of the anthropological conceptions of the author, should one try to find, in a complex system of biochemical, neuronal, or even, at bottom, numerical oppositions, the possibility of understanding the genesis and the organisation of the determining elements of this article in the Temps Modernes? I do not doubt, obviously, that this somewhat sharp response, which endears us to this eminent man, gave birth to various biological

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manifestations in the diverse organs of the illustrious author, but should he not also have given an account, in a decisive manner, biologically, of how he also preferred not to let this reply be published in the authorised volume of his works in the Pleiade, which includes unpublished texts, bibliographical notes, please insert(s), and so on? Perhaps he gives us here one of the possible keys to the excess of emotional reserve for which he is sometimes reproached: the fear of an “excessive” passionate sensibility, an excess of emotion leading to excessive reserve. Lying naked on the ashes, surrounded by his women like a Nambikwara chief, and advancing the same critical arguments, would R. Caillois, an illustrious specialist of the sacred, have been received differently, considered moving, and been less easily confused with all the Professor Charcots of the previous generation?

“The intellect” Lévi-Strauss would draw on the work of M. Fortès on the totemic prohibitions of the Tallensi of the Northern territories of the Gold Coast. Taking this example as his starting point, he investigated the birth of animal totemism. In these very diverse examples, we are not dealing with totemism in the usual sense of the term, because among them we find “taboos of the Earth”, an intermediate category between these animals or sacred species and the totems; thus, large reptiles cannot be killed near an Earth shrine: they are “people of the Earth” in the same sense that men are said to be people from such and such a village; they symbolise the beneficent or maleficent power of the Earth. The question arises as to why certain animals have been chosen: Moreover, the animal is more than a simple object of prohibition: it is an ancestor and to kill it would be almost as bad as murder. This is not because the Tallensi believe in metempsychosis, but because their ancestors, their human descendants, and the resident animals are all united by a territorial link: . . . ‘The ancestors are spiritually present in the social life of their descendants in the same way as the sacred animals are present in sacred pools or in the locality with which the group is identified’. (Fortès, 1945, p. 143, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 74)

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“Totemic and other ritual symbols,” Fortès writes, “are ideological landmarks that keep an individual on his course” (p. 144, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 74). For Fortès, the common psychological theme to all these forms of animal symbolism is the following: The relations between men and their ancestors among the Tallensi are a never-ceasing struggle. Men try to coerce and placate their ancestors by means of sacrifices. But the ancestors are unpredictable. It is their power to injure and their sudden attacks on routine well-being that make men aware of them rather than their benificent guardianship. It is by their aggressive intervention in human affairs that they control the social order. Do what they will men can never control the ancestors. Like the animals of the bush and the river, they are restless, elusive, ubiquitous, unpredictable, aggressive. The relations of men with animals in the world of common-sense are an apt symbolism of the relations of men with their ancestors in the sphere of mystical causation. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, pp. 74–75)

Lévi-Strauss finds the interpretations of Firth and Fortès much more satisfying than those of the classical adherents of totemism or of its first adversaries: It is clear that in so-called totemic systems the natural species do not serve as any old names for social units which might just as well have been designated in another way; and it is no less clear that in adopting a plant or an animal eponym a social unit does not make an explicit affirmation of an affinity of substance between it and itself, e.g. that the group is descended from it, that it participates in its nature, or that it is sustained by it. The connection is not arbitrary, nor is it a relation of contiguity. (pp. 75–76)

I am citing this passage, on the one hand, for the extensive usage of negation that is employed and, on the other, for the exiguity of the space of meaning that remains free within the successive series of tight restrictions of the text—an exiguity that makes it difficult for me to fathom the meaning. The author none the less expands on his point of view: There remains the possibility, which Firth and Fortès have glimpsed, that the relation is based on the perception of a resemblance. We then have to find out in what this resemblance consists, and on what level

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it is apprehended. Can we say, with the authors whom we have just quoted, that it is of a physical or moral order, thus transposing Malinowski’s empiricism from the organic and affective plane to that of perception and judgement? . . . The connection between ancestors and animals is external and historical, they have come to be known, encountered, fought against, or associated with. The same is related in many African myths. (p. 76)

Thus, he looks for a connection on a much more general level because, for all sorts of reasons, Fortès’s interpretation seems too narrow. This level must be sufficiently general for all the cases observed to figure in it as particular modes: We shall never get to the bottom of the alleged problem of totemism by thinking up a solution having only a limited field of application . . . It is possible that the animals, from a certain point of view, are roughly comparable to the ancestors [M. Fortès obviously did not express himself in this manner . . . the somewhat surprising expression “roughly” seems to indicate, does it not, a reduction of the value of the links between totem and ancestor as well as the remarks of a colleague], but this is not a necessary condition, nor is it a sufficient condition . . . It is not the resemblances, but the differences, which resemble each other. (p. 77)

Lévi-Strauss wanted to say by this, I think, that there are not, first, animals that resemble each other (because they all share animal behaviour), then ancestors that resemble each other (because they share ancestral behaviour), and last, a global resemblance between the two groups, but, rather, that there are animals that differ from each other (in that they belong to distinct species) on the one hand and that there are men (whose ancestors constitute for him a particular case) who also differ from each other on the other hand. These men, he claims, differ in that they are distributed among different segments of society. The resemblance presupposed by totemic systems is “between these two systems of differences” (original emphasis). Fortès and Firth have taken, he grants, “a great step by passing from a point of view centred on subjective utility to one of objective analogy” (p. 77). A close reading of this text evokes more for me differences that scarcely resemble each other, in as much as it is difficult to consider ancestors alone as a particular category of man without amputating

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this description from the relation of descent that contributes to specifying them. The invention of segments of society defining for each person a particular position in the social structure seems to me to be an ad hoc invention that privileges the register of the differences to the detriment of that of the similarities and continuities that, for instance, the notion of ancestor contains just as well, if not in a decisive way. The balance of these two aspects reflects, in fact, the subjective state of our imaginary relations with them, privileging, according to the situations and moments, the sense of continuity and discontinuity with them. Our death wishes towards earlier generations have their part to play in the solution that will prove dominant. The theoretical option chosen explores, of course, the nature of the affects that we feel on evoking our relations with them and the capacities for identification that we have been able to develop in this area. I will not insist here on the quasi-obvious link between this brief speculation and the question of totemism itself, from a psychoanalytic point of view. What we learn generally from ethnologists about their “primitive” partners’ ways of dealing with death does not necessarily, it seems to me, put the emphasis on the rupture that it initiates with the ancestors who are so present in their writings. This style of thought is evocative for me of Lévi-Strauss’s extreme scepticism at the end of The Jealous Potter (1985), where he is convinced of the existence in the human species of the absence of communication with Being of which Montaigne speaks. He cites the latter, moreover, in his The Story of Lynx (1991), in connection with the study of mythologies: “We do not even know if this knowledge that denies itself is knowledge” (p. 217), adding further on, One does not know what one seeks: a community of origin, unprovable because of the tenuousness of the traces that might bear witness to its existence? Or a structure, reduced through successive generalizations to such evanescent contours that one dspairs of ever to grasping it. (pp. 241–242)12

A savage mind? Lévi-Strauss finds what, for him, is an eloquent illustration of how certain types of men are united in their thoughts with certain species

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of animals in Evans-Pritchard (1956): “The Nuer employ expressions which at first sight seem contradictory. On the one hand, they say that twins are ‘one person’; on the other, they state that twins are not ‘persons’, but birds” (p. 79). To interpret these formulations correctly, it is necessary, writes Lévi-Strauss, to consider, step by step, the reasoning that they imply. Twins are, first, children of God, and since the sky is the divine abode, they may also be called persons of the above. In this way they are opposed to ordinary human beings who are persons of the below. As birds are themselves of the above, twins are assimilated to them. However, twins remain human beings: although they are of the above, they are relatively of below. The same distinction applies to birds, for there are certain species that fly less high and less well than others. We can understand, then, why twins are called by the names of terrestrial birds such as guinea fowl, francolins, etc. For Lévi-Strauss, we are dealing with a series of logical connections uniting mental relations. Twins are “birds”, not because they are confused with them or because they look like them, but because twins, in relation to other men, are as persons of the above to persons of the below, and, in relation to birds, as birds of the below are to birds of the above. They thus occupy, as do birds, an intermediary position between the supreme spirit and human beings. (1962a, pp. 80–81)

This reasoning leads, in his view, to an important conclusion. This kind of inference is applicable to other analogous theories, for example, that linking twins and salmon; as Evans-Pritchard states, “this relation is metaphorical” (1956, p. 81). The animal world is, thus, thought of in terms of the social world. There is the community of carnivorous animals, graminivorous animals, feetless people (snakes), and river people (crocodiles, lizards), as well as Anuak and Balak Dinca peoples who do not raise cattle and are fishermen and cultivators. These theoretical classifications are at the basis of totemic ideas; as a result, Evans-Pritchard writes, “an interpretation of the totemic relationship is here, then, not to be sought in the nature of the totem itself, but in an association it brings to the mind’” (p. 82, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 82). This seems to be an apt formulation, for the mental work undertaken by Lévi-Strauss in clarifying the idea that the Nuer have of twins is one of decondensing a mode of thought that allows networks

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of contradictory classifications to subsist without being disturbed in its progression. Freud’s understanding of the dynamics and the economy of dreams from 1900 onwards enabled him to show the role of primary processes in this type of psychic life and their interaction with secondary processes in logical thought. Evans-Pritchard was not familiar with the Freudian associative method, but he employs this term in his preface to Hertz’s (1960) Death and the Right Hand. It is there that he also employs a formula that Lévi-Strauss considers more rigorous: “On to the creatures are deposited notions and sentiments derived from elsewhere than from them” (cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 82). This way of thinking differs radically from the second theory of Radcliffe-Brown: to his mind it not only completes the liquidation of totemism [?], but it brings out the real problem, one that is posed at another level and in different terms, and which until then had not been clearly perceived, though in the final analysis its presence may be taken to be the fundamental cause of the intense eddies produced by totemism in anthropological thought. (p. 83)

(To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time in his book that the author refers to the intensity, the diversity, and the violence of this anthropological debate which was the object of F. Rosa’s remarkably well-documented study L’Age d’or du Totemisme (2003): “It is most unlikely,” concedes Lévi-Strauss, “that many great minds invested their efforts on this subject without good reason, even if the state of knowledge and tenacious prejudices prevented them from taking cognizance of totemism or only revealed to them a distorted appearance of it”.)

Eaglehawks and crows Lévi-Strauss now turns his attention to Radcliffe-Brown’s second theory: the exogamous moieties of the Australian tribes of the Darling River are designated by the names of birds. Bird totems are very widespread in Africa; generally speaking, the utilisation of birds as totems may be compared with facts related to sexual totemism, and further which are characteristic of bird or similar animals, whether they are couples eaglehawks–crows, eagles–ravens, bats–tree creepers.

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Radcliffe-Brown’s comparative method “consists in integrating a particular phenomenon into a larger whole, which the progress of the comparison makes more and more general” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 85). For Lévi-Strauss, the question is: Why is any particular species selected rather than another? . . . Why eaglehawks and crows rather than any other pair? . . . It brings about a reintegration of content with form, and thus opens the way to a genuine structural analysis, equally far removed from formalism and functionalism. (p. 86)

We shall see that this reintegration of the content is only valid where its formal aspects are concerned. Lévi-Strauss proposes, following Radcliffe-Brown’s use of an Australian myth, that the choice of the two birds, here, both carnivorous birds, the eaglehawk and the crow, resides in the fact that one is a predator and the other a scavenger. The Australian aborigine thinks of himself as a “meat-eater”, and the eaglehawk and the crow, carnivorous birds, are his main rivals. “When the natives go hunting by lighting bush fires, the eaglehawks quickly appear and join in the hunt; they are also hunters. Perching not far from the camp fires the crows await their chance to steal from the feast” (p. 87). Myths of this type may be compared with others, whose structure is analagous: “In other words the world of animal life is represented in social relations similar to those of human society” (p. 87). How, for instance, are we to interpret the animal pair bats–tree creepers, which leaves Radcliffe-Brown perplexed? A native, surprised by his ignorance, leads him to comment: “But of course both live in holes in trees!” For Lévi-Strauss, this warrants a footnote about the case of the night owl and the nightjar, where he indicates that eating meat and living in the shelter of trees is a common feature of the pair under consideration, and offers a point of comparison with the human condition. His footnote assumes that the reader might ask himself how the life of birds that nest in the cavities of tree trunks may be compared with the human condition. We know, as a matter of fact, of at least one Australian tribe where the moieties were named after parts of trees: thus, with some N’Geumbas, the moieties are named after parts of trees: a moiety is divided into “butt” and “middle”, whereas the other moiety is identified with the “top”. These names are connected with the different portions of the shadow cast by a tree and refer to the positions taken up in camping.

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Finding the fly in the ointment . . . The reader that I am did not, of course, have access to this type of question. But he was astonished by the lack of precision and even the credibility of the author’s comment after the native’s reply: the latter indicates that the two animals in question do not live as he writes: “in the shelter of trees” but more precisely, “in holes in trees”. I cannot resist the temptation to point out in passing that this particularity of living in holes is equally a characteristic of small animals, a frequent object of phobias in children during the latency period in our cultures, phobias that not infrequently persist in women (mice, rats, snakes, birds, etc.). The similarity between totemic animals and animal phobias is one of the clinical observations of Totem and Taboo and seems, does it not, to be disregarded here in the approximate listening to the remarks of a native. It is replaced by the recourse to “at least one Australian tribe” . . . “with some N’Geumbas, the moities are named after parts of a tree” with reference to the different portions of the shadow, an allusion to the positions of camping. It is this very constructed, quite scientific associative chain, attesting to the ethnological culture of its author, which does not distinguish between “living in the holes of trees” and “camping in the different portions of their shadow”; it permits recourse to the general structural theoretical model without offering any other concrete details concerning these two groups. The creation of this model constitutes, in a way, the proof of its existence, even if, for example, it is not at all evident that it necessarily exists in indigenous societies. This divergence in our modes of thought would certainly imply, if it is to be discussed seriously, an in-depth knowledge of the semantic aspects of the indigenous language and of the associative context of the remarks of Radcliffe-Brown’s anonymous interloctor. This native’s astonishment at the surprising ignorance of this eminent scientist matches my own at the confusion between the holes of trees and the shadows cast by their leafage present in Lévi-Strauss (structural ethnography and psychoanalysis, both respectable disciplines, obviously have their own conditions of exercise, tools, and aims). These remarks could also lead to a discussion of what certainly distinguishes the respective situations and modalities of attention to

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the situations encountered in these two professions, in particular where interpretations are concerned. I shall come back to this. For Radcliffe-Brown, the opposition eaglehawks–crows is simply “a generalized type of the application of a certain structural principle”, a principle consisting, for Lévi-Strauss “in the union of opposites”: he adds, The alleged totemism is no more than the particular expression, by means of a special nomenclature formed of animal and plant names, which is its sole distinctive characteristic, of correlations and oppositions which may be formalized in other ways. Examples may be found in certain American tribes by oppositions of the type, sky/earth, war/ peace, upstream/downstream, red/white, etc. The most general model of this, and the most systematic application, is to be found perhaps in China, in the opposition of the two principles of Yang and Yin, as male and female, day and night, summer and winter, the union of which results in an organized totality, such as the conjugal pair, the day, or the year. Totemism is thus reduced to a particular fashion of formulating a particular problem, viz. How to make opposition, instead of being an obstacle to integration, serve rather to produce it. (1962a, p. 89)

Lévi-Strauss concedes, however, that Radcliffe-Brown does not explain why certain Australian tribes conceptualize the affinity between animal life and the human condition by analogy with carnivorous tastes, while other tribes frame it in terms of habitat. But his analysis implicitly presupposes that this difference itself is also meaningful, and that if we were better informed we should be able to correlate it with other differences, to be discovered between the respective beliefs of two groups, between their techniques, or between the relations of each to its environment. (p. 91)

I do not doubt this, but I am sceptical about the significance of this correlation for understanding the eventual existence of totemic functioning, if anything subsists of it, as, for example, in R. Linton’s “curious observation”.

Discovering the laws of language and thought A little earlier, in relation to this turning towards the intellect, Lévi-Strauss invokes the influence of anthropology and structural

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linguistics, which had drawn closer to anthropology at the time of the lectures of Radcliffe-Brown.13 He mentions, moreover, in passing, that one consequence of modern structuralism ought to be to rescue associationism from the discredit into which it had fallen. Associationism had the great merit of sketching the contours of this elementary logic, which is like the least common denominator of all thought, and its only failure was not to recognize that it was an original logic, a direct expression of the structure of the mind [and behind the mind, no doubt the brain] . . . and not an inert product of the environment on an amorphous consciousness. (p. 90)

A few lines further on, Lévi-Strauss notes that “a renovated associationism would have to be based on a system of operations which would not be without similarity to Boole’s algebra” without, however, mentioning the role of this algebra in the development of binary calculations and computers. “As Radcliffe-Brown’s very conclusions demonstrate, his analysis of Australian facts guides him beyond a simple ethno-graphic generalization – to the laws of language, and even of thought” (p. 91). Here, we are in a register that goes well beyond my initial project of studying the reception of Totem and Taboo in anthropology. It is, of course, an original and vigorous exercise in refutation, and, at the same time, somewhat passionately interminable. It seems to me that a certain number of questions impose themselves. Not wishing to emulate the somewhat indelicate pragmatic positivity of the anthropologists of the 1930s, who repeatedly asked Freud to supply evidence for his hypotheses, I shall put them off until later, and let Lévi-Strauss conclude his exposition. The last chapter of the book, titled “Totemism from within”, portrays in an original and interesting way Bergson, and even Rousseau, as non-ethnological precursors of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. He concludes this book, which, in French, is titled Totemisme aujourd’hui, in a rather paradoxical fashion: in this somewhat pontificatory conclusion, neither of the two terms of his title (in French, Totemisme aujourd’hui) subsist. He then makes some remarks that, one cannot help feeling, stand in a certain contradictory tension with the work as a whole: But what matters to us, for the lesson we wish to draw from it, is that Bergson and Rouuseau should have succeeded in getting right to the

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psychological foundations of exotic institutions . . . by a process of internalization, i.e. by trying on themselves modes of thought taken from elsewhere or simply imagined. They thus demonstrate that every human mind is a locus of virtual experience where what goes on in the minds of men, however remote they may be, can be investigated. (p. 103)

The “virtual” character of a “locus of experience” and the “investigation of what goes on” might perhaps be considered as two really personal observations of the author concerning emotions which “explain nothing” and “are never causes”, after invoking Rousseau as his predecessor. Further on, he writes, This is what we have seen happen in the case of totemism, the realty of which is reduced to that of the particular illustration of certain modes of thought. Sentiments are also involved, admittedly, but in a subsidiary fashion, as responses of a body of ideas to gaps and lesions which it can never succeed in closing. The alleged totemism pertains to the understanding, and the demands to which it responds and the way in which it tries to meet them are primarily of an intellectual kind. In this sense there is nothing archaic or remote about it. Its image is projected, not received; it does not derive its substance from without. If the illusion contains a particle of truth, it is not outside us but within us. (p. 104)

Totemism, understood as primarily an intellectual attempt to satisfy subsidiary sentiments is, in the end, an illusion covering over conditionally a particle of internal truth: such is the rather unexpected conclusion of a book often devoted to upholding the opposite thesis with virtuosity. But this intellectual virtuosity also raises a number of questions.

An ethnography of peoples without writing? First, how is it possible to imagine a body of knowledge that is not only functional but also structural, related to the conduct and institutions of cultures without writing? This is not conceivable in the absence of an apparatus of written notation—an apparatus, in fact, that is often likened to mathematics, without referring narrowly to a

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model of unconscious cerebral functioning (in one sense quite different to that of Freudian theory) and of a computational type. Furthermore, what can the nature of a science of non-written cultures, which is necessarily written, be? This is the question, I think, that Lévi-Strauss’s book poses in an almost caricaturist form. To examine this question, I will draw on a text by an eminent anthropologist, J. Goody, a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge and known for his ethnological studies on the Lodagaa of Africa, but also for an anthropological reflection bearing on numerous historical and contemporary aspects of civilisation. The volume in question is The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). Initially, there is a certain difficulty in forming an adequate picture of what the production of statements in a purely oral world might be; all reproduction can be a form of re-creation in a major way. Constant innovation is possible without it necessarily being noticed, thus posing the question of the nature of what is transmitted. The example of the Bagre in LoDagaa societies, studied at length by Goody, is very eloquent on this point. The importance of classification into organised files, indexes, and tables is especially striking as we enter the context of “modern” ethnology. These instruments give ethnography, in cultures without writing, a sort of privilege of totalisation, of extracting data and organising the diversity and contradictions observed. In their erudite preface to the French version of Goody’s book, the translators, J. Bazin and A. Bensa, note that the practical conditions of the enunciation of findings in ethnology, as well as the context, often disappear, along with the identity of the authors. The primacy of collectivity in these cultures may certainly tend in this direction, but it is not uncommon for professionals to seek out good informers, even though their request is often deliberately neglected. Yet, they are bound to have an effect on the nature of the message received. The message can certainly not be reduced to the material means of transmission, but any change in the system of communication necessarily has effects on the contents transmitted. At the same time, I do not want to fall into the Manichean sentiment of LéviStrauss in Tristes tropiques, for whom the primary function of written communication is to facilitate enslavement (1955a, p. 344). This proposition disculpates, as it were, those societies that do not have access to writing. Even if there is certainly a tendency to reduce notation to that

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by which it began, and by which it will finish, backed up by a sort of tyranny of the letter over the confinement of exegesis, we cannot leave aside the path it opens up for critical development, to the accumulation of the knowledge that constitutes science and philosophy at the same time as the construction of a critical tradition. The Savage Mind (1962b), which extends in certain respects Totemism, but with moments of poetry that recall Tristes Tropiques, gives a good illustration of this line of questioning: does the ideal engagement of Lévi-Strauss in favour of these “savages” allow him to answer it? (pp. 131–133). Thus, in Yoruba societies, table companionship is entirely meaningful, since “marrying and eating are one and the same thing” (p. 131). In the beginning, as it was reported to the author, all unions were incestuous: if A and B represent the brother and sister of the first group, C and D the brother and sister of the second group, the initial incestuous situation can be summarised in the table: 1 2 3 4 AB CD  EF  GH but, “soon tired of this monotonous diet”, the son of the incestuous couple AB would take the female product of CD and so on: ADB CDB, and so on for EF and GH, but even then they were not satisfied and the fisherman made war on the hunter, the hunter on the farmer, with the result that, from then on, the fisherman was led to eat flesh and the hunter products of the soil. All this took place in relation to six groups of distribution of the population, which presumably extended the prohibition along the lines of ADBF CDBH EFHJ; new struggles and reprisals and palavers could give rise to new complications of three or four additional degrees. Their decoding with the help of written notes requires a considerable amount of work: they are of particular delight to the scientific ethnologist in that they also bring into play an Orisha (similar to an individual totem): consequently, the son, the descendant of the individual in question, will receive as a second ewaw (a reference akin to the totem, if I have understood correctly) that of an animal, from his father’s wife, and his grandson the vegetable ewaw of this same woman. These arrangements entail marriage interdictions and give rise to new prohibitions. All these arrangements might exist, even if Lévi-Strauss reports, a few lines further on, that the author who recorded this theory,

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summarised very briefly here, “mentions various facts which seem, if not to contradict it, at least to suggest that things did not function with this perfect regularity in his day”. In short, he says, it is “a theory in the form of a fable” (p. 133), but the author does not specify which lessons are to be drawn from this literary form of narrative. Should this series of mathematically sophisticated permutations be taken literally as operational? As they were apparently not regularly used, even in the past of the person who related them, are they, in the conformity of their exposition, unrelated to the interests of the illustrious scientist? It is difficult for me to go further than this in view of the anonymity (as is often the case in anthropology) that covers not only the informer, but also the ethnologist to whom this narrative was reported. Would I be invoking improperly here the manes of Charcot, if I posed the question of hysteria, not as an illusion, but as an unconscious human dimension of the wish to please? The limited extent of my information on these questions of kinship undoubtedly plays a role in my feeling that certain very concrete aspects of the matrimonial strategies of Australian natives and of the discussions to which they give rise in their societies have appeared very little in the course of interdisciplinary exchanges on the subject of exogamy. I have had access to them only through an article by R. H. Mathews at the beginning of the past century, which I came across in the work of Rosa (2003, p. 262). Mathews had a reputation, it seems, as a pariah in his professional milieu owing to his arrogance; he is, none the less, the only one, it seems, to have informed us that, in Australia, marriages were regulated by a system of engagement ceremonies shortly after the birth, or before it, which “facilitated” the direct intervention of the grandparents of the “future spouses”. Shortly after birth, there are agreements that determine the future marriage of the child with a given individual. Let us suppose that the mother is sixteen or eighteen years old at this moment. That would make the mother’s mother, that is, the child’s grandmother, about thirty-five or forty years old; the grandparents of the children whose engagement arrangements are being discussed would thus be in their prime, at least as far as the first children of a woman are concerned (Matthews, 1906, p. 141). The question arises, then, of knowing if the points of view of structural anthropology pertain to the combinatory possibilities of union, the projects for union ten years later, or to unions that have actually

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been consummated. Does this distinction have a meaning in these societies without writing? Perhaps these considerations play a role in the goodbye to “structuralism” formulated by E. Todd in his recent book, L’Origine des systèmes familiaux: The alliance, in particular the restricted exchange, the asymmetrical marriage with the daughter of the mother’s brother, was at the heart of the reflection of C. Lévi-Strauss. Starting from a global analysis of the family, we must treat the question of marriage in its generality and not, as Lévi-Strauss does, from the point of view of a marginal variant. (2011, p. 4)

In the course of this commented reading of Totemism, I have shown sufficiently, I think, that I am in the position—one that is difficult to uphold—of a reader who is critical of part of the work of a man celebrated in my country as an outstanding figure. It is not very difficult to see that throughout his work, the positions and procedures that he adopted, each time he considered it useful to speak about psychoanalysis, varied very little. This seems to take me beyond my subject, even if the ambitions of Lévi-Strauss led him, quite wrongly, in my view, to think of himself as an inevitable interlocutor in many fields. Hence, like certain contemporary Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, I will be led once again to devote space to him in order to contest the considerable credit his work enjoys in certain fields, the almost taboo nature of the slightest critical reservation concerning him, and the almost totemic status that is paradoxically attached to him.

Lévi-Strauss and the structuralist movement It would be difficult to conceive of evoking Lévi-Strauss’s positions regarding Totem and Taboo without recalling the really decisive place that he occupied in the French “structuralist movement” in the years 1955–1980, without necessarily having sought the endorsement which, for example, on several occasions, Lacan obligingly offered him. Notwithstanding Lévi-Strauss’s strong personality, the style of his work clearly cannot be judged independently of the very particular collective climate within which he obtained unquestionable success, making him, as sceptical as he was of totemism, at least a leading figure of contemporary culture.

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Remarkable for its intensity and its productivity in reviews and books, structuralism was also remarkable, it seems, both for its dazzling success in public opinion—linked, I should add, to a few highly illuminating pages of M. Foucault—and for its astonishingly rapid decline. This success was probably not independent of the prodigious orchestration furnished by the media for this movement, even though such support was, in my view, rather discordant with the fragile nature of his basic postulates, as far as I have understood them at least . . . How can one confuse the unconscious (the descriptive, “unknown” unconscious), of the remarkably robust and coherent phonology of Troubetskoy with the Freudian unconscious born of an unconscious conflictual operation of repression owing to the emergence of disagreable affects? The unconscious of Lévi-Strauss has little or nothing to do with it: “The unconscious,” he contends, is reducible to a function, the symbolic function. Contrary to the preconscious, a reservoir of recollections and images . . . the unconscious is always empty, or more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it. (1958, p. 203)

(Apart from this specific function, he confines himself to imposing structural laws.) The unconscious in this context is, thus, foreign to affects, to content, to the history of the individual; it is an empty place where the symbolic function is accomplished. But “the access to the unconscious passes through the mediation of language”, Dosse (1991–1992, p. 45) points out in respect of this mobilisation, crowned with success, in favour of linguistics. The formulation is perhaps a little too short to be quite exact: it is the access to consciousness that passes through the mediation of language; the access to the Freudian unconscious still poses unresolved questions of theoretical formulation, and practice clearly shows that the efficacy of the mediation of language requires particular conditions. This fine example of an operation of “communication” rests no less on a massive confusion of notions that are quite different at the level of their contents and their consequences; it would also be a source of collective fascination and of great benefit for media coverage. As Dosse, with his vast culture, sets out to do in his remarkable Histoire du structuralisme, one may question the role of the European

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and French decline in the post-war period in this exceptional success at the level of public opinion. The revelation of the extent of the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century probably had its role to play in the eclipse of ideologies. After the events of 1956 (in Eastern Europe), structuralism appeared to some as a way out of the crisis of Marxism. Althusser’s reply to John Lewis concerning Stalin’s crimes, which he links to the continuing ravages of humanism, gave J. P. Vernant much cause for laughter, Dosse reports. As brilliant as the high-wire exercises of the eagles of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève were in their fine usage of the very beautiful French language, confering on “French criticism” its exotic export value, the intensity of the fascinated interest they aroused for a while was at least even more remarkable, was it not? This fascination, moreover, had a protective role, did it not, in relation to our dishonour in the course of the Second World War and also to our national compulsion to throw ourselves into post-colonial adventures that were as cruel as they were doomed to failure. By sheltering us from politics, structuralism also constructed itself in a milieu sheltered from politics. Having pointed out in his Structural Anthropology that ethnology is pushing humanism into its third stage, but also that ethnologists have more to exchange with the specialist of cerebral neurology or of animal ethology than with jurists, Lévi-Strauss came to think, in 1979, that all the tragedies we have been through, first with colonization, then with fascism, and finally with the concentration camps, do not stand in opposition or contradiction to the alleged humanism in the form that we have been practising it for several centuries but, I would say, are almost its natural extension. (Lévi-Strauss, 1979, p. 14)

The choice of language over speech, the dominant place accorded summarily to the “spoken” subject over the “speaking” subject, the refrain of the disappearance of man, the critique of humanism as responsible for totalitarianism are, in their univocal linearality, some of the worrying aspects of the consequences of this movement. Of course, the author’s “disappearance of the subject” does not impede, at the institutional level, the pursuit of the traditional struggle of the generations (of former and modern generations) and the growing rivalries in theoretical radicalism. There still remained, however, at

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this time, a serious interest in the text itself among authors of the first rank, among whom Lévi-Strauss undeniably occupied a privileged place, without, however, always being delighted by it. Why, then, are we so certain of the fecundity of this choice of the linguistic model, if it was not in the hope of gaining prestige in the image of the scientific disciplines? During this period, epistemological reflection in the domain of the human sciences was dependent on the mutations under way in the hard sciences, where the same formalist orientation is noticeable. This movement was also influential with the logicians within the Vienna circles and at Cambridge, thus becoming a horizon common to all the sciences, with ambiguous, and sometimes catastrophic, consequences: for example, with the attempt to export modern mathematics into all the fields of knowledge. “The growth of mathematical explanation in econometry developed to everyone’s misfortune,” writes H. Bartoli (1977). Not only did mathematization push the intellectual process to free itself from reality and to rely on a sort of intoxication with deduction, full of disdain for patient observation of the facts and enthusiasm for analysis, but in addition, it imposed on it very severe syntaxical limits. (p. 345)

The human sciences, too, would nourish themselves on a logicomathematical discourse, in the hope to operate generalisations and to explain processes of self-regulation. The risk, from the epistemological point of view, had, in fact, already been detected by G. G. Granger (1960), who wrote, It results from the illusion that is derived from formalism and that comes from the wish to confer on the theme, once it has been identified through axiomatic abstraction, an ontological privilege over these operations which none the less engenders it. (p. 53).

The origin of exogamy and totemism, R. and L. Makarius After the Second World War, the anthropological studies devoted to totemism were dominated in France first by those of Lévi-Strauss, without having many followers in this area: it is difficult to see

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what they would have had left to say about an “illusion”, though the ambiguity attached to this notion, for example, in connection with art, love, or religion, was not given much attention by the author. One publication (Makarius & Makarius, 1961) from this period, however, is distinguished by its lack of any reference to Lévi-Strauss and also, unfortunately, by its erroneous interpretation of Totem and Taboo. After an introduction in which they claim to be following in the path of the “founding fathers” (J. Frazer, E. Durkheim, L. H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor, L. Lévy-Bruhl), the authors take into consideration the problems of the transformation of structures. It is within this context that they set out to defend the origins of exogamy and of taboos, paying particular attention to the social and psychological consequences of the association between gathering and hunting in “primitive” societies. They do so by drawing on the findings of Durkheim on the blood taboo, in particular in its consanguinal and feminine context: blood intervenes all the more in these societies, in as much as they have learnt to hunt and so it plays a role in providing food, in the pact of blood, and in commensality as well as the exchange of women. Exogamy is primitive; it is a means of the struggle for survival in societies where it is necessary either to marry outside them or disappear, in a context where the appearance of hunting requires a change in the level of the achievements of social organisation: the primitive idea of kinship is that of table companionship, which throws particular light on the importance of all the taboos concerning food supply and hospitality. Thus, classifications are constituted in these hunting societies corresponding to the actual sharing of the available animal and vegetable species, distributed between the two moieties in keeping with the prescription of rules of exogamy in relation to food: those who intermarry are differentiated by their eating habits. Totem and Taboo has quite a singular place in the work of R. and L. Makarius, for they only cite it twice and, in so doing, misinterpret it on both occasions. The first time is in the chapter on the origins of exogamy, as follows: Later, Freudian interpretation, with its richness of dramatic motifs, convinced many psychoanalysts, without, however, winning the adhesion of ethnologists; but its author was more reserved than his disciples as to the real significance of the theory of the “murder of the father”. (Makarius & Makarius, 1961).

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In Totem and Taboo, the text reads as follows: “Nevertheless, at the end of our inquiry, we can only subscribe to Frazer’s resigned conclusion. We are ignorant of the origin of the horror of incest and cannot even tell in what direction to look for it” (Freud, 1912–1913, pp. 124–125). This passage comes in the last part of Freud’s essay, in a long paragraph devoted to the origins of exogamy and totemism. Comparing the opinions of L. H. Morgan, J. Frazer, Howett, and Baldwin Spencer with those of Havelock-Ellis and Westermarck, Freud is uncertain, in the final analysis, on the basis of these readings, about the origin of the fear of incest as well as about the roots of exogamy. It was at the end of this “inquiry” that he observed: “We are ignorant of the origin of the horror of incest . . .”. Three pages further on, he writes, “Into this obscurity one single ray of light is thrown by psycho-analytic observation” (p. 126); we know that he would take up this position again in an enriched but essentially unchanged form twenty-five years later in Moses and Monotheism (1939a). The above clarifications remove all ambiguity from the situation. A second citation reproduces a passage that attests to the difficulties of studying totemism: “It is not surprising to see that in the most recent publications on the subject . . . we find an ever-greater tendency to declare that a general solution to totemic problems is impossible”. It is also taken out of context in the same way, with the same result. The passage is found at the beginning of section four, “The return of totemism in childhood”. Freud speaks of the wide divergences of opinion among experts, the difficulties in identifying the origin of totemism and exogamy: he writes, It is not surprising, therefore, that in the most recent literature on the subject (which is for the most part passed over in the present work), an unmistakable tendency emerges to reject any general solution of totemic problems as impracticable. (See for instance, Goldenweiser . . .). (p. 109)

These two misinterpretations are most unfortunate and it is difficult for me to regard them as innocent. Should we see this perhaps as the result of a lack of direct access to Freud’s book, as a lack of curiosity, or as conformity to the culturally dominant critical positions in the professional group at that time?

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Penser l’imaginaire, B. Juillerat Among the French-speaking anthropologists, I think I am justified in the area of totemism in according particular importance to B. Juillerat for his curiosity and freedom of mind in the critique of the Freudian theory of totemism. Without having chosen specifically to publish anything on the subject of Totem and Taboo, he has touched on a certain number of questions in relation to which Freud’s positions in this book seem to him to be debatable (Juillerat, 2001): for instance, Freud’s fidelity to the ontogenetic recapitulation of Haeckel’s phylogenesis in biology— a fidelity that has been criticised in the domain of analysis by many authors, among whom a certain number of analysts (including Roheim and Anzieu, though more out of conviction than with really specific arguments). He also questions new ethological findings linked to a somewhat better knowledge of the life of the different species of primates, in particular, thanks to the work of L. M. Ferdigan (1982). Freud’s discretion regarding the place of mothers is also subjected to criticism by Juillerat; they are certainly of capital importance in the drama, but only figure in the narrative in an anonymous form. Among them, “each brother” no longer seems able to identify his own mother. “Exaggerating things slightly,” he writes, we could say that the situation imagined by Freud is equivalent to a mater incerta, pater certissimus. . . . Once society is established, we no longer find the horror of incest of the first essay, but rather a longing for endogamy, a potential vehicle of incest” (Juillerat, 2001, p. 94, translated for this edition)

For him, Freud “forgot the mother”, a point he had in common with Lévi-Strauss in his studies of the atom of kinship. Juillerat (2001, p. 125) points out, moreover, that, for Freud, in the horde, the family did not yet exist, and the dominant male monopolised all the females. But if the family does not exist as yet, he writes, then the father himself cannot be recognized as such: the father–son relation does not exist; it is thus curious to imagine that the father was recognized without or before the mother, for if one can imagine a little horde in which the male keeps all the females to himself, it seems impossible not to situate, on the basis of the children, singular maternal links. (2001, p. 125, translated for this edition)

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The question definitely merits attention. Further on, moreover, he makes the hypothesis that the murder of the father permitted the mother to be recognised, first without an official companion, then in marriage. Freud thus integrated, in a relationship of masculine fidelity, what, in non-human mammals, is a rivalry between males for the control of the females. Juillerat writes, To explain the emergence of man beyond the state of animality and the formation of primitive social institutions, the “evolutionist-orientated” anthropologists of the end of the nineteenth century had the tendency to put the actors implicated in the social transformations that they were trying to clarify at the centre of the investigation. (p. 94, translated for this edition)

In this connection, he recalls J. Bachofen’s Mutterrecht (1861), inspired by the mythologies of antiquity, and the different stages of civilisation described by McLennan (1866) in his Studies in Ancient History, sexual promiscuity, infanticide of girls, polyandry, exogamy, marriage by abduction, etc.). Even if we confer these transformations with a certain progressive dimension as L. H. Morgan did, for Juillerat, they risk being thought of as passages represented dramatically with events, effects, and causes which do not seem to him to be in agreement with his conception of evolution as being slow and ramified. “The rational invention of a fiction,” Juillerat writes, thus projected into a “historic” past is simply a prosthesis, an implant integrated at the heart of the duration of evolution, whose undeclared aim is to stop it on an event, an object that is more accessible to thought and that purports to be evidence; the terrible father of the horde is a deus ex machina. (2001, p. 95, translated for this edition)

According to Juillerat, the Freudian foundational act divides the duration of evolution into a pre-cultural immobility upstream and a cultural era that is just as unchangeable downstream, where the transmission of acquired (psychosocial) characteristics belongs to social Lamarckism. Likewise, in space, the primitive horde is a model so that “the original totemism and exogamy are also modelised and not historicised” (p. 95, translated for this edition)

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With his own personal way of thinking, which is not always easy to grasp, Juillerat discusses shrewdly the “mythical” character of Totem and Taboo. He follows the manifestations of Freud’s interest in this theme throughout his work and allows for the differences of practices between analysts and anthropologists. For him, a society, and even a civilisation, are the result of historical episodes: As for humanity and its cradle, it certainly had its period of childhood, but if we want to relocate this in evolution rather than in an atemporal unconscious, then we must give way to the prehistorians, to the paleontologists, to the primatologists and to the biologists. The ontogenetic recapitulation in Haeckel’s phylogenesis in biology has no application either in anthropology or in psychoanalysis. (p. 53, translated for this edition)

Unless I am mistaken, it would seem that the interest of the thesis of primal parricide is to try to imagine a moment of entry into history; in this respect, it may be situated at the junction of prehistory and history. The questions of its links with the awareness of death, the appearance of guilt and of moral conscience, the first inhibitions of instinctual discharge necessary for the establishment of the particular psychic register and language of the species, and the accesses to social and cultural areas, all remain questions in suspense. I must also mention the quality of Juillerat’s objections to Gantheret’s thesis in his preface to the French translation of Totem and Taboo (1993). The latter, he says, attributes the significance of an act to the enunciation of the myth of Totem and Taboo by Freud; the variations of Freud’s mood observed by Freud himself and by his close colleagues during his work of writing and its aftermath could confirm this thesis from an individual clinical point of view; one can see easily that they have little probing significance for those who have no direct experience of analysis. Juillerat sees in this “a clever trick by Gantheret designed to save the father of psychoanalysis (and of psychoanalysts), but one the anthropologist cannot fail to stumble on (and please don’t tell him that it is a result of his resistances!)” (Juillerat, 2001, p. 96, translated for this edition). “Saving the father of psychoanalysis” is a project that I cannot disapprove of essentially, but I did not think that Freud was in such a delicate situation.

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Quite curiously, after expressing these entirely understandable reservations, Juillerat credits Freud, slightly unexpectedly, I have to say, with a certain “modesty” by writing, in connection with the return of totemism in childhood, that “it suffices, in fact, to re-read the very first lines of “The return of totemism in childhood’,” in which he recognises the reductionist character of psychoanalysis, “‘tempted to trace the origin of anything so complicated as religion to a single source’”, whereas Freud writes, “There are no grounds for fearing that psychoanalysis, which first discovered that psychical acts and structures are invariably overdetermined, will be tempted to trace the origin of anything so complicated as religion to a single source”. Is it necessary to point out that Freud seems to be entirely aware of the reductionist character of analysis and tries to elucidate it when he writes, If psychoanalysis is compelled – and is, indeed, duty bound – to lay all the emphasis upon one particular source, that does not mean it is claiming either that that source is the only one or that it occupies first place among the numerous contributory factors. (1912–1913, p. 100)?

In spite of certain misunderstandings, and once the Levi-Straussian episode has been set aside, the quality of the exchanges is marked, as can be seen, by a scientific climate of debate capable of stimulating reflection in the light of new knowledge and of a deeper critical understanding of the anthropological aspects of Freud’s work. The debate is no longer so easily structured by the professional affiliations of those involved and is sustained by efforts of reflection that can scarcely be purely individual. This said, my review of the anthropological literature in the French language concerning Totem and Taboo certainly contains gaps. Without having taken any particular interest in Totem and Taboo, Françoise Héritier, who succeeded Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, shows in her original contributions on incest that she possesses a knowledge and an openness of mind towards psychoanalysis which is worthy of mention. While recognising very warmly her debt to Lévi-Strauss, she traces her own trajectory: “A certain number of things,” she writes, that Lévi-Strauss knew about, and clearly saw himself, and which concern in particular the difference of the sexes, did not seem to him

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to be essential. Likewise, everything that concerns the body and affects did not seem to him essential for building the logical network of the systems of opposition that permitted him to account for the framework of mythical corpuses and of the elementary systems of kinship . . . C. Lévi-Strauss did not introduce elements which for me seem essential and which can either be the object of, or participate in, a structural analysis – that is, which can be conceptualised by human beings –, namely, sexual difference and the thought of the body. (Héritier, 2008, p. 55, translated for this edition)

Furthermore, in an earlier book, she wrote, The Lévi-Straussian theory of exchange does not account for incest of the second type . . . By attracting attention to this forgotten aspect of the prohibition on incest, that is, the prohibition of the two sisters, the primacy of the symbolic is affirmed. The symbolic is anchored in the most physical dimension of humanity, that is to say the anatomical difference of the sexes, seen by the eyes, worked over by the minds of men in all the little primitive groups which gained access to humanity, as well as in the physiological dimension, perceived by the senses, of the difference or similarities of the liquors that seep out of bodies. (Héritier, 1994, pp. 22–23, translated for this edition)

This proposition reminds us of the importance of the Freudian “inverted” Oedipus complex and its narcissistic and homosexual implications. This hypothesis “unformulated as such, but expressed by other rules and behaviours, is backed up by the existence of total conceptual sets of representations touching on identity and the body” (Héritier, 1994, p. 197). This leads her, after a description of sophisticated matrimonial practices in the Samo country, to “denounce the alleged unconscious character of them: the locals, the Samo in this case, are perfectly aware of the obligation to effect exchanges between lineages, which is implied logically by their set of rules or, if one prefers, by the effects this set of rules induces” (Héritier, 1994, p. 210, translated for this edition). As can be seen, Héritier thinks freely and clearly, without yielding to the grey areas that were so “à la mode” in the structuralist period. In a recent study, Godelier et al. (1998), an anthropologist of Marxist training, without being specifically interested in Freud’s book, has made a contribution to our understanding of the processes of hominisation. He draws on the work of ethological field workers with

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different groups of large apes as well as on the work of paleoanthropologists, and points up the existence of “a vast number of performative behaviours” ranging from the avoidance of incest to the fabrication of secondary tools and to forms of co-operation in hunting, the sharing of food, and the defence of territory. For him, the processes of hominisation must take into account the fact of a proto-humanity, already living in territorialised bands, strongly hierarchised by sex and generation, harbouring “social units specialised in procreation and education” (translated for this edition). This process (cerebralisation, emancipation of human sexuality from its biological rhythms) threatened the stability of the hierarchies and favoured both bipedality, the freedom of the hands, linguistic communication, and the possibilities of co-operation in activities of subsistence. The growing contradiction between sexual rivalry and co-operation in work led, in order to avoid endangering the development of the division of work, to a ban on sexual competition within these social units in order to allow for the reproduction of society. Many other names undoubtedly deserve to be mentioned, for instance, that of Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher and author of respected publications on psychoanalysis. For him, Freud not only attempts, in Totem and Taboo, to articulate ontogenesis and phylogenesis, but also furnishes an interpretative instrument aimed at .

subordinating each history—customs, beliefs, institutions—to the history of desire in its great debate with authority. The explanation for exogamy is a psychoanalytic explanation of the horror of incest more than a sociological explanation of institutions. The theme of parricide seeks to elucidate the question of the institution of the prohibition of incest, and the truth is that primitive parricide is essentially an event constructed out of ethnological debris on the basis of a fantasy decoded by analysis. Taken as a scientific document, Totem and Taboo is simply a huge vicious circle in which the analyst’s fantasy responds to the analysand’s. Consequently, one does psychoanalysis a service, not by defending its scientific myth as scientific, but by interpreting it as myth (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 208).

In Violence of the Sacred, Réné Girard (1972) acknowledges his debt to Freud’s essay. What he calls “religious totemism” should be recognised as the inversion of a truly collective murderous act illustrated by his theory of the scapegoat who is chosen outside the community to

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avoid getting involved in an interminable spiral of vengeance. But for Girard the hypothesis of parricide seems only to confuse the situation, for he did not interest himself at all in the unconscious dimension of psychic life in Freud’s work.

The English School of Anthropology The position of anthropologists towards psychoanalysis seems to have pursued its movement of diversification described by W. Labarre in the 1930s, in particular at Yale, where the practice of didactic analysis was in vogue for a while (Labarre, 1978). Some of them, though, remained hostile. For instance, F. Steiner (1956, pp. 17–18, cited by Wallace, 1983, p. 153), who denies that there is any coherence in the ethnological notion of taboo and in its resemblance with obsessional neurosis, or G. Vetter, cited by Ernest Jones (1955) in volume three of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: the preposterous guess under the name of Totem and Taboo in which he postulates enough clever nonsense to make the reader finish it as a fairy tale for its sheer paltry and imagination. But even a gullible sophomore used to believing outright his textbooks and the editorials in the Times baulks at this account. (p. 355)

Others are reticent, with specific disagreements, in a reading that is often more thorough than in the past, such as Hallowell (1934), Murdock (1949), or Kluckohn (1944, 1951). L. White (1959), a neo-evolutionist who also has his areas of agreement and disagreement with Freud, may also be mentioned in this connection; take, for instance, his interpretation of language as a collective tool of communication suitable for carrying out an attack (Freud speaks of the discovery by the brothers of a new weapon). Others (e.g., Harris, 1968) see affinities developing between anthropology and psychoanalysis. In the Anglo-Saxon literature, R. Bénédict, M. Mead, and A. Kardiner were interested, in the USA in the 1950s, in the relationship between psychology and culture, but in a tradition that is much more culturalist than redolent of Freudian psychoanalysis. I will do no more than cite this “culturalist” school, not only because its members did not, to the best of my knowledge, take up a very significant position in

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relation to Freud’s essay, but in particular because their manifest and explicit “psychoanalytic” orientation seems to me extremely partial and incomplete. Indeed, it is dominated by an almost systematic attempt to establish a relationship between behavioural facts observed in a linear and objective manner in their socio-cultural context. The accent is very energetically placed on what are considered as the socio-cultural sources of behaviour as opposed to the instinctual drive sources, for instance, in connection with the universal dimension of the Oedipus complex. There is almost a complete impasse with regard to the internal, unconscious, and conflictual psychic world. All this seems far removed from what the practice and theory of psychoanalysis suggest with regard to the organisation of the personality. Moreover, M. Mead wrote in 1961, “Instead of making the laborious and often painful effort to understand psychoanalysis, we have been content to use some of the products, particularly, projective tests” (p. 480).14 I am indebted here to E. R. Wallace’s book, Freud and Anthropology (1983), which I am going to cite, along with some of the contributions that he points to in this review of recent Anglo-Saxon literature, classified more by headings than by a chronological list of authors, for the improvement of the quality of debate encourages this. Wallace shares, moreover, my feeling that there has been a movement since the 1930s towards recognising and appreciating Freud’s work. I conclude this chapter by referring to two relatively recent articles by M. Fortès and L. Hiatt, directly and precisely devoted to totemism on the basis of their fieldwork and their teaching as eminent members of the Anglo-Saxon school of Social Anthropology. Fortès held the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge from 1950–1973, before J. Goody. He is particularly well known for his contributions on lineage organisation and the systems of kinship and power.

“Totem and Taboo” (M. Fortès, 1967) This text was the Presidential address of the South African anthropologist, M. Fortès, at the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University in 1966. The subject, writes the author, imposed itself on him as it had done in the past on A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, as a subject of enquiry that is

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distinctive of the data, methods, and theories of social anthropology and characteristic also of its historical development. We will understand further his reasons for borrowing his title from Freud’s “epoch-making treatise” concerning a subject that cannot be discussed without paying tribute to Lévi-Strauss. It is a general term, given to many diverse institutions that have, or seem to have, something in common. “The important decision to take,” he writes, “is in what frame of theory to examine our specimens”. And he continues, Instead of typologies we need a series of relevant elements like descent, classification, exchange, residence, filiation, marriage, and so on; these need to be rigorously defined as analytic categories and then combined and recombined into various combinations and permutations, in different sizes, shapes, and constellations. (p. 6)

—and this without the kind of intellectualisation employed by LéviStrauss or the kind of positivism to which M. Fortès is partial. I shall not dwell here on the description given by Fortès of the Tallensi, a tribe in the Voltaic region where he stayed for several years before discovering, not totemic phenomena associated with exogamy, with beliefs in descent from a taboo clan animal, but other organisations, such as the avoidance of animal characteristics, observances associated with places (lakes, sacred rivers, etc.), and only indirectly with groups of descent by virtue of their residential proximity, and their ritual responsibility toward these places. Furthermore, responsibilities of the same order could fall to individuals irrespective of their clan and also to others owing to their politico-ritual function. The theoretical framework that seemed to fit these field data best, in Fortès’ view, was the “neo-Durkheimian” analysis as proposed by Radcliffe-Brown in 1929. Its central point resides, for Lévi-Strauss, in the argument that what are conventionally called totemic institutions can only be understood as part of a much larger class of phenomena which includes all sorts of ritual relations “between human beings and natural species” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 9). For Radcliffe-Brown, it represents “the incorporation of nature in the social order”; this ritual attitude towards natural species, objects, or events, has important effects on the well-being of society. Contrary to the critical arguments put forward by Lévi-Strauss later (an animal does not become totemic because it is “good to eat” . . .), Radcliffe-Brown does not take

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this utilitarian value for the core of totemism any more than Elkin, Firth, and Fortès do. The idea of a structural principle “has here been spoken of by the term of opposition . . . which separates and also unites . . . and therefore gives us a rather special kind of social integration” (p. 7). This formulation, approved by Lévi-Strauss when he drew attention to the importance of Radcliffe-Brown’s second theory in 1951), is, for Fortès, “a commonplace of British anthropology” (1967, p. 7).15 In a compact formulation, Fortès sets out what he considers to be “the basic premiss of the whole complex”: Portions of nature serve as material objects by reference to which segments of society express their respective unity and individuality, on the one hand, and their interdependence in a wider structure on the other, in terms of ritual attitudes, observances and myths. These have a moral value exhibited in the associated taboos and a symbolic significance reflecting the notion of the incorporation of nature in society by the creative acts of primordial ancestors that are reaffirmed periodically in totemic ritual. (p. 7)

Totemism does not belong, for Lévi-Strauss, to the domain of ritual beliefs or to that of practices or moral relations between society and nature: their existence is a particular case of a large and complex set of rules that link individuals or social groups to objects, actions, natural phenomena, and so on (as well as to plants and animals). The prohibitions of certain species are, for Lévi-Strauss, simply one way among others of affirming their significance. Without taking up in detail here what Fortès calls “the dissection of totemism under Lévi-Strauss’s ruthless scalpel”, he points out that, for the latter, the natural species are utilised neither for their qualities nor for their characteristics, but because they are “adapted for ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations” (p. 7). For Lévi-Strauss, the fact that these prohibitions and prescriptions are taboos, ritual and moral injunctions, is apparently irrelevant, remarks Fortès. For him, this shows how totemic ideology is applied, but not why animal species are used in general, and why those particular ones (one example is well known, that of “meat-eaters” separating and uniting aborigines and birds). Differentiated social groups, exogamic groups, for example, need an objective model to express their social diversity. The only possible

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objective model has to be sought in the “natural diversity of biological species”, since the only alternative “objectively given model of concrete diversity”, the cultural one, “made up by the social system of trades and occupations” is not available to them (Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 9). This theme is an iterated hypothesis in Lévi-Strauss’s work. It seems that, for Lévi-Strauss, the existence of social division is the necessary condition for establishing totemic codes but whereas, for Radcliffe-Brown, totemism meets the need for a mechanism establishing a system of social solidarity between man and nature, for LéviStrauss, this need is of an intellectual order expressed in a propensity for classifying. For Fortès, totemic objects have a sacred connotation and often serve as a focal point for the feelings of attachment of individuals to their group. Lévi-Strauss, on the other hand, seees totemism as an inevitable objective gambit in a mode of classification, from the point of view of a detached observer who sets out to grasp the code by means of a rigorous examination of the messages. From Fortès’s “functionalist” point of view, the actor, the individual, or the moral person (group of descent, for example) implicated in the roles conferred on him, with their rights, their capacities, and their duties within the social matrix, and without which he would have no existence, is at the centre of the investigation. This is irrelevant for Lévi-Strauss, for whom everything passes through the universal code; the values of cultural items can be coded without regard for their content. This throws light on the fundamental aspect of things, but at the price of neutralising the actor. Fortès’s functional analysis “is centred on the actor”, and the notion of structural opposition current at that time among English anthropologists has an important place. For him, it is not a principle of logical thought, but a social structure that includes a set of regularities expressed in customs and institutions that are noticeable in real family, political, legal, ritual, and economic relationships between persons and groups; one cannot fail to see them in the Tallensi. For Fortès, citing Hallowell and Durkheim, order is not only social, it is also moral. He contends that this “implies self-awareness”, that is, the realisation of one’s statuses and roles as belonging to oneself in an environment that involves not only man and nature, but also spatial, temporal, and cultural frames of reference; these guarantee the

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continuity of experience in all the domains of social life (names, titles, costumes, bodily markings, moral obligation, ritual observances, distinctive and specific rights and duties). The Tallensi totemic institutions fall into this category of cultural device. All these discriminative customs comprise a logic of opposition (Lévi-Strauss), but, for Fortès, its systematic exploitation in the social structure has its roots . . . in the constellation of parents and children in which the complementarity of the sexes and the polarity of successive generations are the critical factors. Here, and not in the structure of the human brain, lies the . . . model. (p. 10)

This polarity and this structure cannot be reduced to instances of simple logical opposition. Is it necessary to underline the importance of this way of emphasising the organising value of the difference of the sexes and of the generations? It is not possible here to give a complete idea of the eighteen pages of Fortès’s lecture. The depth and the range of his knowledge of the populations studied, and his familiarity with them over several years, are, I think, very tangible. He compares his studies with those of Lienhardt on the Dinka, and gives examples of taboos relating to the construction of houses that make it possible to identify the lineage from the outside. He then stresses the difference between questions of propriety and the embarrassment that results, on the one hand, from the transgression of a ritual custom and, on the other, from the fear of the high probability of punishment of a mystical order in the case of the transgression of a taboo among the Tallensi. In extreme cases, the punishment can even involve the extinction of the whole line of descent, of which he gives various examples, while insisting on life commitments, in a form that Radcliffe-Brown would no doubt have considered to be a form of subjection. For Fortès, Patrilineal descent is the crucial determinant of normal personhood. Without legitimate patrilineal descent or assimilation thereto by a fiction, a Tallensi is a politico-jural non-entity, a non-person devoid of the rights and duties of kinship and citizenship and consequently (which is more serious) of ritual status in relation to the ancestors. The closest parallel, with us, would be a person without a recognized legal nationality. (p. 12)

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The recognised connection of a person by legitimate paternity and a known agnatic pedigree, with a unique founding ancestor, entail political and legal ties and ritual commitments. This is projected into the animal taboo. To that will be added a group of co-agnates which constitutes the lineage and clan to which the subject is linked by rules of descent; the oath and the locality of domicile linked to the chthonic taboo can also be significant. “But what specifically characterizes the lineage is its unity as a corporate person presumed to have existed from time immemorial as an autonomous and perpetual politico-jural and ritual entity” (p. 12). In addition to this, there are a set of complementary filiations, a matrilineal system of taboos and particular relations between nephews and nieces, but which do not have authority with the ancestors and the same importance from the standpoint of status. What is most important is legitimate paternity, which is an irrevocable assignation. This genealogical assignation only has external validity and Fortès emphasises the functions of the Tallensi totemic organisation: Totemic taboos crystallize these abstract norms in concrete objects and precise rules of conduct which are the more effective because they are of no utilitarian or rational value . . . It is this unequivocal and concrete objectification of the moral imperative that enables the actor to apprehend the principles it stands for and appropriate them to himself – enables him to visualize his social identity and “identify himself” in thought and feeling with his clan and his ancestors. (p. 12)

The observance of the rules laid down by the ancestors “affirm their authority and perpetuity”. The results of the studies of Lienhardt on the Dinka are, as a whole, convergent with his own. For many Tallensi, their totemic taboos are latent under normal circumstances, which does not render them insignificant. They are anchor points, “basic orientations” for the attachment of the “awareness of his statuses in the social structure” (Hallowell, 1976), which, by focusing commitment to “moral responsibility for his conduct” is a necessary condition for being a normal person. It could be argued that any symbol whatsoever (for example, name or coat of arms) could fulfil this rudder function, but the selection of animal species and objects fabricated in certain places in the Volta region cannot be justified in this way: are these species

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symbolic? are they merely declarative and indicative emblems? or are they ideological counters in an exercise of classification? Fortès thus describes animal taboos of a large variety in the customs of the Tallensi and not only in their totemic observances, sometimes with a particular relationship between an individual and an animal. In the case of totemic animals and chthonic sacred animals, the connection is between the lineage, the clan, and a species. The Tallensi have an abundant body of folklore concerning animals, but little taste for classifications. This is also true for trees and stones, which, like animals, serve as a vehicle for the living presence of ancestors; an entire part of the environment can, thus, be incorporated into the commitments with lineage through the ancestor cult and quasitotemic observances. “The idea that these species could constitute a single type or class,” he says, “is foreign to the Tallensi; the association of a clan or lineage with a species is for them the result of a unique, accidental even quasi-miraculous, historical event” (p. 14). Certain oppositions between forms of taboos concerning domestic animals or, on the contrary, chthonic animals, where certain forms of institutional responsibility towards sacred places have—without, it seems, the knowledge of those concerned—distinctive roles which contribute to underpinning the importance of the filio–parental relationship of agnation. These oppositions are often declared en bloc without falling into an ordered arrangement of differentiated units homologous with totemic arrangements that correspond to them, as described by Lévi-Strauss. On the subject of totemic observance among the Tallensi and the Dinka, the accent is placed on the internal significance of the observance for the actor: it is uniform, like the species, beyond distinctions of age, sex, or individual characteristics. Animals are alive, like men, and have a potentiality for a quasi-human personality; consequently they can be killed (J. Goody) and eaten, which distinguishes them from men for the Tallensi. The proscription of murder implies treating these animals, plants, and objects as if they were men: killing, except for food or sacrifice, is considered as a sin. Killing certain big animals can be considered as a murder. A python or a crocodile totem which kills cattle for no reason can be killed, but they must be given a burial place. In fact, killing a totem animal is the greatest abomination; its status is quasi-human and some of them, including chthonian animals, are the refuge of ancestors.

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The act of murder is always considered as individual, even if it has been committed with others. It needs little imagination to understand how the prohibition on killing the benefactor animal . . . which is quasi-human but not yet human, cognate by origin, not yet kin capable of altruism, but normally a-moral, can serve as a surrogate or neutral focus, as it were, for the ban on homicide which epitomises the binding force of kinship . . . This contrasts with the outward-oriented norms of incest and exogamy, both observance and breach of which require the concurrence of persons with other persons defined as jurally or morally forbidden or allowed. (Fortès, 1967, p. 15)

Fortès, then, describes in great detail the taboo relating to the prohibition against feeding on the totem animal; food lends itself to the imposition of rules in an exceptional way. Unlike the taboo against killing the totem animal, which counts as a remote moral eventuality, the food taboo reminds the subject day after day of his identity in relation to others and to society. “To eat or not to eat is optional for him”, Fortès writes (p. 17) in this paper that one would like to cite in full for the richness of the capacities for identification that he deploys in it. For him, the taboo is the form commonly taken by totemistic rules, and not only in Africa; it may be thought of as an authoritative commandment that is internalised. After recalling the role in Genesis of the ban on eating a fruit in acquiring awareness and the powers of adult sexuality, Fortès evokes the theoretical thread that runs from Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski towards Frazer, Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Freud: As regards Freud, the inspiration such studies as mine owes to his famous work goes back not of course to his fantastic reconstruction of the supposed prehistory of the Oedipus complex. Nor are the direct parallels he drew between totemic taboos and obsessional neuroses now acceptable. But the direction of enquiry he adumbrated is highly pertinent. The view he espoused was that totemism could not be understood without reference to its taboo components. (pp. 17–18)

He showed that these could not be explained by their instrumental use. They represent tendencies generated in the actor by cultural pressures in conflict with his personal or organic urges. The crux of

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the problem of taboo is, thus, the “nature and emergence of conscience”. Fortès cites the case of Little Hans. Freud writes that The animal species upon which totemic taboos are projected are “father surrogates”, to which ambivalent attitudes towards the real father are deflected in obedience to the behests of conscience. I follow him only in so far as to see in Tallensi totem animals a symbolic representation of paternity perpetuated in the lineage, conscientious identification with which is crystallised in the taboo. At the same time there is no denying that these taboos stand for unquestioning submission to ancestral, that is, magnified paternal, authority which, as the ancestral cult shows, is very ambivalently regarded. (p. 18)

After expressing his feeling that for anyone adhering to a scripture-based religion nothing should seem odd or primitive in totemism, Fortès returns one last time to Lévi-Strauss’s hypothesis that natural species are “good to think”. For him, there are multiple reasons for the choice of the species, but if they lend themselves particularly to the symbolisation of the typical structures of kinship ties as conceived by the actors, by picturing the perpetuity of descent, they also lend themselves particularly to moral constraints and rules because they are “good to kill and, above all, good to eat”.

“Totemism tomorrow: the future of an illusion”, L. Hiatt An Australian anthropologist, who died in 2008, L. Hiatt worked for several decades with the Australian Aborigines of Maningrida, whose languages he spoke. This article was published in the review Mankind (Hiatt, 1969). For Hiatt, Lévi-Strauss’s writings on totemism can be separated into two parts: in the first, he wishes to show that his predecessors have missed the point and then to show what the point is. The first chapter of his book on totemism could lead one to think that totemism does not exist and that those who have spoken about it were entertaining the same kind of illusion as those who allege the existence of flying saucers. The totemic illusion consists in the supposition that the phenomena customarily described as totemic all share a common quality, whereas an examination of them shows that this is not the case. Such a situation makes their definition impossible; it also excludes the possibility of a universal explanation because one of the

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phenomena considered as central in this hypothesis is absent in some of these examples. The fact that this is true for the term of totemism can hardly come as a surprise, and Hiatt cites Wittgenstein, who, in 1930, indicated that this argument is true for all the general terms of everyday language. For those who think that the referents of general terms have something in common, Wittgenstein, in 1958, proposed to examine them and saw that there is nothing common to all, but only similarities, relationships. These similarities are like the resemblances between consanguineous kin, where each person seems similar to all the others in some respect, but where no single feature is necessarily present in all. Wittgenstein uses the expression “family resemblances” to characterise the overlapping of the network of similarities at the heart of the referents of any particular general term. Hiatt suggests that this is clearly very much the case in anthropology; he supposes that we would all agree with the opinion of Campbell (1965) to the effect that “we should not rest content until family resemblance predicates, admittedly intelligible, have been banished from our sciences. The question is how” (Hiatt, 1969, p. 84). For Hiatt, Lévi-Strauss’ technique is more radical. He recommends that we get rid of the word altogether. But in that event the immediate problem is to decide how to refer to the phenomena previously denoted by the term. [The method chosen by Lévi-Strauss is to place] the word “totemism” between quotation marks or to preface it with the expression “so-called”; and he says both that he is using “totemism” merely as it has been generally understood and that, in his opinion, it is a null category. (p. 84)

The author is surprised by the results obtained: in the preface to The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss (1966) writes that having shown in Totemism that anthropologists in former times were prey to an illusion, it was now the moment for him to explore the positive side of totemism, which obviously raises the question of the meaning of the expressions that he is using. There is indeed a difficulty in understanding the meaning of the formulation “positive side of totemism”. According to his instructions, it might be said to signify the positive side of a null category, but this would not appear to mean anything. In the same way, we may wonder how a null category could possess a “fundamental feature”; for Hiatt, “these statements are meaningless” (p. 85).

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He notes that, in The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss writes that he is establishing, as he has shown in one of his previous books, that “socalled totemism is in fact only a particular case of the general problem of classification . . .” (p. 62). Drawing on personal examples which are related, first, to the differences between the sexes, and then to the house colours of the boys’ shirts in an English school during sports activities, Hiatt uses the example of four clans of a primitive tribe each bearing the name of an animal to clarify his ideas on the question: the first case is a natural classification based on the qualitative differences between males and females; the second and the third are cultural classifications in which groups that lack qualitative difference are differentiated thanks to symbolic qualities, or their symbolic association with varieties in nature. In trying to evaluate the cash value of the expression “totemic illusion”, Hiatt sets out to examine the notion that the term totemism unites things that do not belong together, but also arbitrarily separates things that do belong together. One definition seems to him to be ambiguous: it excludes some elements which in the past were referred to on certain occasions as totemic, and it includes certain elements which have perhaps not been considered as true totemism (for example, the bird insignia of the component states of the USA), but this is a sort of standard price that is paid for renewing any “family resemblance” term. Totemism, thus defined, is no longer an artificial unit to which nothing specific corresponds in reality; all the circumstances described legitimately by this term share the fact of being a classification and, what is more, they are united by their quality of possessing a special type of relationship that distinguishes them from other classifications. So, henceforth, he uses the term totemism in this sense; the expression “so-called totemism” is reserved for the description of ambiguous family resemblances. Hiatt then points out that LéviStrauss postulates, drawing on Radcliffe-Brown (1951), “the fundamental structure of totemism as a homology between two systems of differences, one occurring in nature and the other in culture”: the examples of the eaglehawk and the crow described by RadcliffeBrown, one as a hunter, and the other as a carrion-eater, are well known as totems symbolising the opposition of the two “moieties” and their unity as parts of a single system. In this connection, Hiatt cites an Australian ornithological treatise indicating that the opposition on this level of these two animals is not

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so clear-cut (since whistling eagles are also scavengers that rid the countryside of a large number of dead creatures, large or small; but perhaps it should be added that, to do them justice, this treatise indicates that when they have the choice, they prefer fresh food). The question is whether moiety symbolism of this kind exemplifies a general feature of totemism or whether it is merely a rare, imaginative adaptation of totemic symbolism to the special circumstances of individual division. Taken at face value, the ethnographic record supports the latter view; in other words, it points strongly to the conclusion that totemic symbolism is typically unsystematic. (p. 87)

To indicate the scale of the problem to those who hoped to establish homologies between two systems of difference, Hiatt reproduces, in Table 2 below, part of the list of the clan totems of the Karadjeri published by Elkin in 1933 (pp. 272–273). To this he adds the opinions of two ethnographers who have studied Australian totemism. Worsley, in a paper entitled “Emile Durkheim’s theory of knowledge” (1956), was the first to describe how certain aborigines classify the things of their environment on the basis of similar and differentiating qualities (a simple example is their division of food into flesh and vegetable, which he refers to as proto-scientific), and he then compares this kind of classification with totemic classifications: Whereas the proto-scientific type of classification relies on a rational, ordered, consistent and systematic approach, with objective analysis of natural phenomena, the type of classification which we find in totemism is of quite another kind. Though it does not exclude rational thought, it is marked by agglomerative, arbitrary and fortuitous accretions, which are often individual and subjective in their provenance. Far from assisting the development of the categories of human understanding, the totemic mode of classification would encourage free association and not logical thought. Scientific modes of thought, therefore, have not emerged as a result of the development of such primitive religious philosophies as totemism, but in spite of them. (p. 87)

Hiatt also cites Stanner (1965) who maintains that “the rationale of any tribal selection is not really clear; probably it is irreducibly arbitrary” (p. 227). To these two opinions concerning the Aborigines, Hiatt adds numerous citations from Fortès’s paper on the Tallensi, which also

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Table 2.  Karadjeri clan totems (Elkin, 1933, pp. 272–273), remaining twenty clans not shown. C1 jewfish fish goanna stingaree

C5 wattle dog

C9 eagle hawk C12 sea fruit tree (?) cockle dog crab C6 fish (?) bird (?) stingaree cockle porpoise eel diver C2 starfish C7 diver eaglehawk rockfish stingaree C10 water snake dog saltwater kangaroo cockle lice stingaree C3 oppossum C13 sea C8 fire C11 crow cockle C4 eaglehawk honey sea hermit crab wattle kangaroo cockle lark marsupial wattle hermit crab corkwood tree ground lark eaglehawk corkwood tree ground nut

C14 wattle eaglehawk rainbow yam C15 wattle C16 fruit salmon

C17 thunder C18 opposum stone

C19 stone for axes dog

figures in his text. Then he explains how, in his view, Lévi-Strauss attempts to save his theory of totemism in the face of a multitude of falsifying instances. He thinks that it is better to consider a rival hypothesis that has the merit of according with the known facts; and so he appeals to Linton’s (1924) contribution on the “Rainbow Division” (see p. 77 in this text), in that it describes for him an example of an incipient form of totemism. It seems clear to Hiatt that, in these cases, the choice of symbols pertained to unrelated sources of inspiration and was made irregularly and unsystematically (To explain this, he wonders in what sense the homology between two systems of differences might account for the oppositions 42nd division: 77th division vs. Rainbow/Statue of Liberty.) He cites, by way of contrast, the house names of the school of his childhood relating to the important figures of Australian exploration and colonisation, a choice imposed at a given moment by a headmaster who had sufficient authority to do it. In contrast, the

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symbols of the expeditionary force of the Rainbow Division were, for Hiatt, the results of the choices made separately by the members of various groups, without any interest in the formation of a global system of significations. The system of designation of the Aborigines seems to him to be closer to the second than to the first, given the autonomous character of their clans and the importance of dreams in the formation of totemic beliefs. It is at least as plausible to suppose that their system has always had this unsystematic character as to suppose that it began rationally and ended in ruins. This does not exclude the possibility that, from time to time, there was a tendency to introduce a semblance of logical order into this mess, attempts that were rarely successful. Hiatt then turns his attention to the treatment of sentiments in Lévi-Strauss’ theory of totemism. His opinion is based on citations from The Savage Mind, in particular, footnotes related to the descriptions by T. G. H. Strehlow of the love of the Aranda people for their native land and the mythological significations attached to this theme. It will be useful, I think, to give here—which Hiatt does not do—an example of the citations from Strehlow, as Lévi-Strauss uses them in his book: The septentrional [of the North] Aranda is attached to his native land with all the fibres of his being. He always speaks of his “place of birth” with love and respect. And today, tears come to his eyes when he evokes an ancestral site which the white man has sometimes involuntarily desecrated . . . Love of the country, nostalgia for the homeland also appear constantly in the myths related to totemic ancestors . . . The mountains, the streams, the sources and ponds are not only for him (the native) beautiful aspects of the country and worthy of attention . . . Each was the work of one of the ancestors of whom he is a descendant. In the landscape surrounding him he reads the history of the deeds and gestures of the immortal beings he venerates; beings who, for a brief instant, can still assume human form; beings, many of whom are known to him through direct experience as fathers, grandfathers, brothers, mothers, and sisters. The whole country is for him like an old genealogical tree that is still alive. (Strehlow, 1947, pp. 30–31, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1962a, p. 243)

Hiatt notes that Lévi-Strauss comments on this passage in the following way:

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When it is noted that these events and sites are the same as those which furnished the materials of the symbolic systems to which the previous chapters were devoted, it must be acknowledged that socalled primitive peoples have managed to evolve not unreasonable methods for inserting irrationality, in its dual aspect of logical contingence and emotional turbulence, into rationality . . . [I must confess I only half understand the sense of these remarks] classificatory systems thus allow the incorporation of history, even and particularly that which might be thought to defy the system. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962b, p. 243, cited by Hiatt, 1969, p. 91)

Hiatt comments on these remarks thus: Rationality and affectivity are opposed. Marriage systems, for instance, are regularly threatened not only by demographic accidents but also by disorderly liaisons. In the domain of totemic systems, however, Aboriginal philosophers have been able to devise ritual and mythological techniques for allowing people to sentimentalize over the raw ingredients of the symbolic system without disrupting it. (Hiatt, p. 91)

It is clear for him that while Lévi-Strauss “admires the Australian Aborigines as systematizers, he finds their emotions unbecoming. If this were merely a matter of personal taste, one would pay it no attention” (p. 91). Following Rousseau’s intuition, Lévi-Strauss sees totemism as a conceptual creation which, in agreement with Fortès, Hiatt contests: The picture of clan totemism as an exercise in cultural classification is a caricature. Sentiment, as Durkheim correctly saw, is the fuel of totemism, and not, as Lévi-Strauss believes, a waste-product that threatens to clog an alleged rationally conceived global system. (p. 92)

It is at the end of this essay of a dozen or so pages that, having proposed to define totemism as a particular type, not of classification but of symbolisation, Hiatt proposes to add to Fortès’s discussion of the sentiments involved in totemism a number of particular observations linked to the fact that in Australia, in many tribes, there is no taboo on killing or eating one’s totem animal, but rather a duty to express formally one’s sorrow for having killed a clansman.

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The totemic phenomenon does not seem to him to be less acceptable than many others, and its study does not pose particular methodological problems. Researchers could try to establish the eventual circumstances in which the functions of symbols can be reduced to a small number of types, and attempt to study their adoption in function of the societies or irregularities of totemism (for example, magic procreation); finally the myths in which totemic ancestors commit prohibited acts might be of interest to psychoanalysts. Hiatt’s concern is “to maintain a realistic and pluralist position against a form of intellectual monism that seeks to reduce cognitive, conative, and affective complexes to modes of thought” (p. 93) *  *  * The titles of the last two texts, borrowed from Freud, certainly inclined me to translate them, even though they clearly do not resume the Anglo-Saxon literature on totemism over the past thirty years in anthropology and psychoanalysis. In both these eminent professionals of anthropology, the very energetic affirmation of their divergence with Lévi-Strauss is quite clear. I must confess that, apart from these two authors, my knowledge of this literature is sometimes only second-hand, relying on the review made by E. R. Wallace of Freud’s relations with anthropology in 1983. I am often indebted to him with regard to the Anglo-Saxon literature of this period, for the American literature is much less accessible in libraries than Internet sites suggest. Passing from one author to another chronologically has become less significant owing to the period of time that separates us today from the publication of Totem and Taboo. I have, therefore, preferred to gather together under headings these relatively recent studies while privileging those that have a new or original perspective from the Freudian point of view on the relations of totemism. Before presenting what will increasingly take on the appearance of a debate, it might be helpful to characterise more precisely psychoanalytic interpretation in relation to other heumeneutics present in anthropology.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Psychoanalytic interpretation: with and without the patient

his brings us to the choice of the methods and aims of the two disciplines (if, indeed, it is possible to describe them both today), each considered as homogenous branches of knowledge. As I currently have some doubts about this, I will try to own my own choices, while attributing to past and contemporary authors what belongs to them. I will focus first on the specific aspects—underestimated, in my view—of psychoanalytic interpretation, which will allow me to situate it more clearly within the vast field of hermeneutics. In 1922, Freud (1923a, p. 235) had the opportunity of writing an encyclopaedia article on psychoanalysis and I will begin by referring to this text. He writes,

T

Psychoanalysis is the name: (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way; (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and; (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.

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In their volume The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) distinguish with Freud three levels: (a). As a method of investigation which consists essentially in bringing out the unconscious meaning of the words, the actions, and the products of the imagination (dreams, phantasies, delusions) of a particular subject. The method is founded mainly on the subject’s free associations, which serve as the of the validity of the interpretation. Psychoanalytic interpretation can, however, be extended to human productions where no free associations are available. (b). As a psychotherapeutic method based on this type of investigation and characterized by the controlled interpretation of resistance, transference, and desire . . . (c). As a group of psychological and psychopathological theories which are the systematic expression of the data provided by the psycho-analytic method of investigation and treatment. (1967, p. 367)

I would like to compare this text with what Freud was to write in his article “Constructions in analysis” (1937d). I will refer here only to the passage in which he clarifies precisely what constitutes the specificity of psychoanalytic interpretation and distinguishes it from all the other types of interpretation, whether in the scientific field or in the artistic register, domains recognised for their great value at the heart of different human activities. In the first part of his paper, he recalls the derogatory and unjust remarks of a worthy man of science on the subject of analytic technique: In giving your interpretations to a patient we treat him upon the famous principle of “Heads I win, tails you lose”. That is to say, if the patient agrees with us, then the interpretation is right; but if he contradicts us, that is only a sign of his resistance, which again shows that we are right. (p. 257)

Freud then studies in detail the significance of the patient’s reactions to the analyst’s interpretations and constructions: “It is true,” he writes, “that we do not accept the ‘No’ of a person under analysis at its face value; but neither do we allow his ‘Yes’ to pass” (p. 262). For Freud, a direct “Yes” is equivocal, a sign of both sincere or hypocritical agreement or denial, “which has no value unless it is followed by

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indirect confirmations”. Freud is referring here to the production “of new memories which complete and extend the construction”. The patient’s “No” is equally ambiguous and only rarely expresses legitimate dissent: Far more frequently it expresses a resistance which may have been evoked by the subject-matter of the construction that has been put forward but which may just as easily have arisen from some other factor in the complex analytic situation. Thus a patient’s “No” is no evidence of the correctness of a construction, though it is perfectly compatible with it. (pp. 262–263)

A bit further on, Freud gives an example of indirect modes of confirmation that are absolutely trustworthy, unlike the patient’s direct declarations. Hence, the use of formulas like “I didn’t ever think” (or “I shouldn’t ever have thought”) “that” (or “of that”). When the patient responds with an association that contains something similar or analogous to the content of the construction, for Freud it is a valuable confirmation. He writes, We pay attention to them and often derive valuable information from them. But these reactions on the part of the patient are rarely unambiguous and give no opportunity for a final judgement. Only the further course of the analysis enables us to decide whether our constructions are correct or unserviceable. We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection. We claim no authority for it, we require no direct agreement from the patient, nor do we argue with him if at first he denies it. (p. 265)

The fact that Freud utilises in this text the term construction, rather than that of interpretation, does not interfere, I think, with the point of view I am adopting: it seems to me that in this text a certain number of notions are clarified, while some misunderstandings are also removed. The interpreter’s subjectivity is certainly present in his interventions, as Boas has pointed out: The theologians who interpreted the Bible on the basis of religious symbolism were no less certain of the correctness of their views than the psycho-analysts are of their interpretations of thought and conduct

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based on sexual symbolism The results of a symbolic interpretation depend primarily upon the subjective attitude of the investigator who arranges phenomena according to his leading concept. (Boas, 1920, p. 321)

But psychoanalytic interpretation or construction is validated or not by its specific effects. Psychoanalytic interpretation aims to uncover and give access to a latent unconscious meaning. It certainly may be inventive, ingenious, coherent, etc., somewhat as J. P. Vernant would like it to be in historical anthropology, but, in psychoanalysis, the crux of the matter does not lie there, but in the patient’s associative process which occurs after the interpretation. Consequently, its validity depends on this condition and can only be validated retrospectively by what the patient says; very often, he remains unaware of it for a long time. The reproach made of psychoanalysis more than thirty years ago by Karl Popper that its interpretations are not refutable (and consequently are not scientific, which is indeed possible) seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding. A certain number of interpretations are refuted by the patient in the sense that, whether he has said “Yes” or “No”, these associations do not contain an indirect confirmation; they give the analyst food for thought with regard to their context, their formulation, their content, and what he or she is feeling, etc. The truth of the analyst’s interpretation or construction is not all that is involved in its success or failure to be psychoanalytically productive; the moment and the mode of its formulation also have their part to play. If it is true that “psychoanalytic interpretation can be extended to human productions where no free associations are available”, it would, none the less, be deprived of means of confirmation if the productions of a child’s drawings or play, in particular, were not, for example, capable of giving expression in their associations to the same eventual significations of confirmation. In recalling the Freudian definition of psychoanalysis, and in emphasising the order in which Freud chose to articulate the different elements of his definition, it may be objected that I am advocating a re-centring on the classical treatment, the disadvantages of which André Green (1995) once brought to our attention. It would have had, he writes,

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a reductive effect on the theory. It led to a psychoanalysis conceived entirely from an ontogenetic direction, the principles of which are debatable . . . everything remains confined within the limits of an individual history inspired by a psychologism confused with the knowledge of the psychic. (p. 269)

It does not seem today that recalling the specificity of psychoanalytic interpretation and its link with the setting of analysis necessarily entails these risks. Of course, others, before me, have defended this restrictive position; let me cite here R. LeVine (1973) and W. N. Stephens (1962). These authors seem to have studied the individual and group determination of certain totemic symptoms or observances, of avoidance, for example. They seem to have clearly grasped the difference between what is deeply determined individually by an unconscious psychic economy and what is accepted as a symbol of integration and identification in a group: in their understanding of this dynamic, both these registers can exist together in the same person. The question of the suffering engendered or not by these symptoms or by these observances is obviously an important element of evaluation in the clinical situations. The necessity of moving beyond the confidential setting of analysis, the utility of making oneself known, even at the price of severe misunderstandings, and of having to face exaggerated hostility, are not so obvious today as they may have been in 1918. Perhaps this reminder is scarcely meaningful today in a culture that places excessive value on visibility while refusing to see the risks involved, even though they have been easy to observe over the past fifty years in France.

Interpretation without the patient “The patient’s free associations serve as a measuring-rod for the validity of the interpretation.” This formulation, explained fully in “Constructions in analysis” (1937d,) obviously implies the uncertainty attached to interpretations when they are given in the patient’s absence, for example, in connection with a work of art or a text. Many people have used analysis to enrich their understanding of art and history,

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including Freud himself, with contested and debatable results in certain respects. As Y. H. Yerushalmi (1993) writes (and I am paraphrasing him here) in connection with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism—a text, he contends, in which Freud’s exceptional qualities are the only arguments in favour of his contested thesis, even though it draws on his long clinical experience—psychoanalytic interpretations are necessarily linked to the transference relationship in this context. Totem and Taboo clearly falls into this category. Freud does not carry out any interpretative work in it in the sense of analytic interpretation in the treatment. He establishes a link on the one hand between the Oedipus complex—an unconscious dynamic configuration whose quasi-general presence is not very personal, even if its manifest modes of presentation show very considerable variations from one individual to another—and, on the other, two hypotheses that are, in fact, present in different anthropological studies related to the origins of the species and of totemism: the primitive horde in Darwin (1871) and J. Atkinson (1903) (these authors considered that its conditions of life made exogamy a necessity for young subjects), and the totemic meal in W. R. Smith (1899). In establishing links between these three notions, Freud was unaware of an important part of the different contexts of the situations evoked in these studies. He contents himself with saying what he thinks,16 rarely referring explicitly to precise clinical situations, but rather to twenty years of psychoanalytic experience with his patients. Without being present, the latter are, none the less, very much there, and seen from the angle of what appeared to be their similarities, beyond their individual particularities, for he is more interested in what happened to them than their individual particularities. The utilisation of broad outlines as necessary complementary propositions to certain existing evolutionist theories of totemism invites him to make connections between totemism, exogamy, and the Oedipus complex. Gantheret (1993) is surely right when he considers that Totem and Taboo attests to Freud’s ongoing self-analysis and to what he calls “a transference on to the work”: Freud’s changes of mood, his euphoric exaltation and his depression, his fears that the reader’s most likely response would be one of rejection, tend to confirm this, I would say. But for some readers this is simply an argument in favour of the subjective veracity of his final thesis on the murder of the father, of its soundness from the point of view of the psychic reality of the man

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Sigmund Freud and, if the truth be told, of a good number of other human beings. But these are not the criteria of historical veracity. The readers of Totem and Taboo, moreover, are also appealed to, are they not, very personally, in some respects like the anthropologists of the 1930s, that is to say, as virtual patients, without having been informed. The opinion that they form in the course of their reading also comes, does it not, from the orientation of their association of ideas. As F. Villa (2012) points out very aptly in “Le père, un héritage archaïque?”, Freud’s text is “for his readers a construction, a ‘theoretical fiction’ which aims to make up for the amnesia of the beginnings of humanisation” (p. 139, translated for this edition). The fact that the Bastille, a fortress almost empty of prisoners, was taken with little fighting dwindles in importance in the face of the historical significations with which this fact has become loaded. Kroeber’s “Just-SoStory” rests on a divergence of appreciation of the respective values in this field of the modalities of the fact itself and of what history has done with it after the event. But the effects of reading Freud’s psychoanalytic works would need to be seen in another light and, frankly, would require another study. We have seen Lévi-Strauss discuss Elkin’s categories and the significations of patrilineal and matrilineal totemisms in a way that seemed to me to be as brilliant as it is gratuitous, without any other noticeable purpose than his own pleasure. He grants himself “the right to choose our myths left and right, to elucidate a myth of the Chaco culture by a Guyanese variant, a Gaia myth by its Columbian homologue” (1964, p. 16, translated for this edition), but these choices are not justified by any reference to a third party on which there is consensus; they merely derive from the very vast scope of the author’s knowledge and from his wish to present them for the purposes of demonstration. At no moment does he interest himself in the effects of their comprehension by the subject who produced this material, for it is clear that interpretation is conceived of here without reference to his own thought, but in relation to a structure the anthropologist has at his disposal. The very superficial descriptive analogy with the Freudian rule of free association and interpretation must not lead us astray; the Freudian rule is of quite a different nature: in the analytic situation, it is a question for the patient of associating without omitting anything that comes to his or her mind, a demanding rule that is difficult to follow.

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The analyst makes use of the patient’s associations, but for him or her it is not a question of convincing. Moreover, it is the patient who holds, without always realising it, the keys for validating the analyst’s interpretation. This we have already seen. Just as there are treatments where a process is established that is a source of change, so Freud’s writings have different effects on us depending on the moment in our life when we read them. It could be said that there exists a sort of correspondence between the ethnography of peoples without writing and the publications of psychoanalysts without a patient. When they write, psychoanalysts often know very little about their readers; they are unaware of the context of this relationship with the reader through writing, the consequences of which are scarcely foreseeable, with all the risks and charms entailed by uncertainty. We have seen this here with the directions taken by the thinking of different anthropologists about Totem and Taboo. The evolution of opinion on infantile autism in France is another instructive and worrying example of this kind of failure.

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CHAPTER SIX

The misfortunes of ambition

e have seen the energies that mobilised the question of the universal validity of the notion of totemism and the solutions proposed for understanding its origins and evolutions. It seems to me that the claim to possess a “total” or “exclusive” knowledge was no less important in the different ways in which Totem and Taboo was received.17 In his introduction to Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss (1958) defines the relations between ethnology and history: they are related by their alterity in space and time, by their aim to pass from the singular to the general, by their requirements concerning the critique of sources: “History organizes its data,” he writes, “in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations” (p. 18). Anthropology, he states, has access to them via the linguistic, and particularly the phonological, model. (This model seems to rest on the approximate and highly debatable analogy drawn between the unconscious nature of the procedures of speech, highlighted by Troubetskoy’s phonology, and taken up in the source notes of the publication of Saussure’s (1916) Course of General Linguistics, with the Freudian conception of the unconscious.) Lévi-Strauss cites Boas in this connection:

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The essential difference between linguistic phenomena and other ethnological phenomena is that the linguistic classifications never rise to consciousness, while in other ethnological phenomena, although the same unconscious origin prevails, these often rise into consciousness, and thus give rise to secondary reasoning and to reinterpretations. (Boas, 1911, p. 67, cited by Lévi-Strauss, 1958, p. 19)

But he then deepens the confusion promised to the temporary fortune (as sudden as it was surprising) of structuralism, adding, “But this difference, which is one of degree, does not lessen their basic identity; or the high value of the linguistic method when it is used in ethnological research” (p. 19). Ethnology is, in effect, considered by Lévi-Strauss as a first stage towards an ultimate synthesis that can only be achieved by social or cultural anthropology, which aims at a global knowledge of man from the hominids up to the modern era. In this version, he announces a hegemonic ambition in the field of knowledge about man and gives a broad enough definition of it to cover all the levels of social reality: “Anthropology”, he opines, “will become a general theory of relationships” (p. 95). His aim, not only with regard to totemism, but to anthropology as well, seems to be a universally valid model of explanation involving a reduction to schemas of increasingly general and abstract import, privileging the complementarity obtained by the interplay of oppositions and permutations through dualistic schemas and symmetry, aiming for what is often a mathematical expression of the cultural relations of invariants. This ambition is worth formulating explicitly: “The task of ethnology is to furnish a total explanation of man in space and time,” writes Poirier (1968, p. 142, translated for this edition); yet, at the same time, it leaves no place for temporality, placing itself, for example, in relation to totemism, on a strictly synchronic plane. To those who would see this radical treatment of such a central factor as time as a costly theoretical artifice, he reaffirms very clearly in The Savage Mind (1962) the necessity of maintaining this position in his severe critique of totemism (which is probably linked for him with the facilities, deemed to be excessive, that had been granted to the “Evolutionists”). Lévi-Strauss obviously realised that as it is accompanied by “rules of action”, the “so-called totemism” goes beyond the framework of a simple language; it founds an ethic by prescribing or

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prohibiting certain forms of behaviour. Thus, on this subject, he writes, The first answer is that this supposed association is the result of a petitio principi. If totemism is defined as the joint presence of animal and plant names, prohibitions apply to the corresponding species and the forbidding of marriage between people of the same name and subject to the same prohibition, then clearly a problem arises about the connection of these customs. It has, however, long been known that any one of these features can be found without the others and any two of them without the third. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962b, p. 97)

As Lévi-Strauss notes, “clearly a problem arises about the connection of these customs”. The strictly synchronic point of view is, by his own admission, indispensable to the dismemberment of totemism and the maintenance of his thesis; his very stringent demands in this area, accompanied by the suppression of every factor of relative diversity in relation to temporality is, in my view, as surprising as it is indispensable, given that we are dealing here with such an old institution. This ambition, not only of universality, but also of exhaustivity, may be placed on a comparable level to that of the “Evolutionists” of the pre-First World War period. They believed they could attain a register of functioning valid for the human species across time and space that would be capable of neglecting all historical, social, and cultural differences, in what was quite a linear version of the human phenomenon, the heir of a scientism that wanted to integrate man into the logical chain of evolution. (This version of “integrated” humanity, within which diverse ethnic groups competed to various degrees, but for the same civilisation, was anti-racist, albeit in its own way.) The “morphologist”, “functionalist”, and “diffusionist” field workers of the following generation, in the inter-war period, who were very reserved about the universality and evolutionist linearity of totemism, considered the evolutionist perspective excessive, dogmatic, and grandiose. These latter tendencies would, in turn, be criticised by the supporters of structural anthropology in France during the following generation. One is struck here by the theoretical shift in direction of one hundred and eighty degrees in relation to Boas’s morphologism: with structuralism, what seemed unacceptable for “scientific” reasons, in particular for the modern Anglo-Saxon anthropologists of the 1920s,

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became, for a time in France, in the 1960s, the required label of the intelligentsia. We may wonder if the factors leading Lévi-Strauss towards this ambition of universality were not linked to his sense of discovering, creating, and coming to an understanding of, organisations that were so general that their biological neuronal “numerical” character corresponded to the determinism or the meaning of the phenomena observed, without any specific psychological or socio-cultural level of reference being necessary, and without receiving any endorsement in this domain from neuro-physiology or neurobiology. Nothing, for instance, in the work of Edelman, and nothing either in the work of a cognitivist interested by these questions such as J. Fodor.18 In his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France in January 1960, Lévi-Strauss writes, “The emergence of culture will remain a mystery for man for as long as he is unable to determine at a biological level the modifications of the structure and functioning of the brain”. What we are dealing with, writes Dosse (1991–1992), “is an anthropology that claims to have access at the end of its long path to mental regions, to their internal structures, and this in the name of a method which has the advantage of presenting itself as scientific” (p. 214, translated for this edition). The theoretical horizon, Lévi-Strauss writes in his Structural Anthropology, ought to enable it to “decrypt the internal structures of the brain”. “For Lévi-Strauss,” Pouillon (1965) states, it is a question of discovering “mental regions”, the universal laws of mental functioning which, in the last analysis, depend on certain cerebral mechanisms; in short, it is a question of finding what lies behind man and not a liberty within him. (p. 59, translated for this edition)

These very ambitious positions would, none the less, be nuanced with time: in 1988, in the course of his interviews with D. Eribon in Conversations with Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 1988), and sensitive perhaps to the reproaches of Lefort and Needham, LéviStrauss explained that The Elementary Structures of Kinship was a “much too ambitious book” (p. 143), and that what it contains is “not what people do, but what they believe or say should be done” (p. 147). The volume planned on the complex structures of kinship, which are

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much more frequent than “elementary structures”, never saw the light of day. “I do not think,” he writes, “that our human and social sciences can ever lay claim to the status of true sciences; at the most, I have tried to take a small step in this direction” (p. 146). If, for Lévi-Strauss, ethnology indeed had the aim of providing a “total explanation of man in space and time”, there can be little doubt that this programme is not that of psychoanalysis, and, further, that there exist very clear differences between his interpretative system and psychoanalytic interpretation, notwithstanding the tactical politenesses of the 1950s (see his Introduction à l’œuvre de M. Mauss (1950), see p. 79 in this text). The claim that there is a sole, and even exclusive, causality in the field of totemism remains for me a very surprising enigma. This inevitably makes one think of the numerous criticisms addressed to Freud almost forty years before for having proposed a notion that concerned the human species without being decisively influenced by the great historical, social, and cultural diversity of human groups. The universality of the Oedipus complex was, for him, an inevitable consequence of the fact that, wherever they are born, all human beings come from the body of a woman with whom, given their very particular state in relation to other animal species of being unadapted for survival, they have a close and prolonged relationship. They then discover, generally after a few months, that this woman has relations with another person, the nature of which is generally the object of acute interest, especially as certain concrete and symbolic differences seem to distinguish them from each other and to concern the child. (In short, the fact that the majority of early infantile situations are more or less different from this model remained at that time in the shadows and was a source of many additional complications.) Part of the anthropologists’ criticism of Freud concerned his ignorance of the history and environment of the institutions whose meaning he was trying to interpret (a situation that is not, if truth be told, specific to him). Thus, Wallace (1983) writes, For example, the incest theory of in-law avoidance does not explain why in some societies men avoid the mother-in-law, while in others they do not . . . psychological factors, while certainly present, are not the sole and sufficient explanation for the customs observed. (p. 182)

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The extrapolation from the anthropological field of a strategy of analytic work with a patient arouses the suspicion of the existence in Freud of a “psychological monocausality”. In his view, he had a tendency to give way to it in the anthropological part of his work. Another criticism frequently directed at Freud is that he privileged an “ahistorical”, univocal causality in his writings with an anthropological dimension, and particularly in Totem and Taboo. This criticism is voiced in particular by P. Rieff (1959), Ricoeur (1970), and Weinstein and Platt (1973); in citing them, Wallace makes them his own. The coincidence in Freud of data of clearly very different origins (his selfanalysis, his practice going back twenty-five years, and his readings of anthropological works) does not have the same value for everyone: in general the very dominant utilisation of “evolutionist” references is felt to be a serious drawback. This was due, in the inter-war period, to a certain progress that the “moderns” felt in a position to incarnate . . . to the point that the issue of quite a deliberate choice by Freud in respect of his anthropological references is often masked and considered to be the consequence of a lack of information. This criticism remains very common today and is probably linked to aspirations to the “scientific quality” that remains desirable, in spite of the quite widespread feeling that it is unattainable in most of the “human sciences”. In Wallace, it contrasts starkly with his appreciation of Freud’s clinical work, which he cites abundantly and is very familiar with, in particular his use of over-determination. He cites, for example, The Interpretation of Dreams: “. . . the same piece of dream content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts” (1900a, p. 105), and also the Dora case, where Freud writes, “In the course of years a symptom can change its meaning or its chief meaning, or the leading role can pass from one meaning to another” (1905e, p. 53). In fact, it does not seem exaggerated to me to say that a large part of Freud’s clinical writings could be cited on this subject, and it is worth remembering, unless I am mistaken, that he actually invented the notion of over-determination. For Wallace, Freud none the less failed to keep in mind what his clinical experience had taught him when he approached the “cultural sphere”. Where the methodological rigour of the clinical validation of interpretation is inapplicable directly, Freud, in fact, utilises a methodology

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in which his clinical experience takes the place that is occupied, for example, in Vernant’s work (e.g., 2004), by the latter’s knowledge of Greek society and culture. Given the personal qualities of both of them, the confidence with which they are credited, or the rejection that they meet with in these areas, they are more or less often regarded as convincing, without it being possible to go further than that. Interviewed in La traversée des frontières, Vernant expresses his views on the problems of interpreting myths as follows: Admittedly, I cannot prove irrefutably the exactness of my readings . . . but that does not mean that all the interpretations are false. As a matter of fact, if one cannot prove that an interpretation is true, one can show that it accounts for most of the elements of the narrative and that when it establishes an opposition between two terms, this opposition does not only exist in the interpreter’s head, but can indeed be found in the text. This amounts to saying that some interpretations are false, that is to say, they are incapable of accounting for certain elements of the narrative; they leave them to one side, efface them, or, on the contrary, distort them. This can be clearly demonstrated . . . (2004, p. 118, translated for this edition)

I am entirely convinced of this in anthropology, as well as in many other domains of the human sciences, but the criteria of the validity of psychoanalytic interpretation and of its capacity to favour the establishment of a psychoanalytic process with the changes that it entails in psychic life, are also of a different nature. It is appreciated for being sensitive and reasonable, but that is not what is essential: what matters is the associative direction taken by the patient after the intervention. In this critical context, Wallace also wrote, in 1983, “Most social scientists now believe that today’s complex social systems can hardly be explained simply by reference to their earliest history (even if this initial condition is known)” (p. 189). Rather than attempting to follow his lengthy commentary on a large number of Freud’s texts of which he has a good knowledge, I would like to point up my disagreement with the terms that he uses, suggesting that Freud had the ambition of “explaining simply” the complex social systems of today in the light of “their earliest history”. As he says explicitly, Freud’s intervention aims to complete the aspects already known about one, or rather two, of the oldest and most

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widespread institutions of social life; to this criticism of Freud’s formulation, I would add that the interest of this type of “explanation” and the repercussions that they may have from a Freudian perspective derive their efficacy from the fact that some of the “initial conditions” prove, in fact, to be “unknown” to the subject (in this sense, the use of interpretation is not intelligible without a theory of misunderstanding, of forgetting, and, thus, of recollection and of memories). When I say that Freud proposed a notion that concerned the human species without being decisively influenced and modified by the great historical, cultural, and social diversity of human groups, the risks of misunderstandings are tangible, and the sense of “decisively” needs to be explored further: the unconscious character of those representations most directly organised by the Oedipus complex confers a status of extra-territoriality on them which preserves their novelty for the conscious ego. It removes them to a large extent from the general movement of conscious psychic life. But the treatment of all their offshoots in most of the forms taken by the sublimation of drive activity is obviously influenced and given shape, in all human groups and in all individuals, by historical, cultural, and social diversity. Citing W. Wundt (1912, p. 116), Freud writes, moreover, in Totem and Taboo, These various ideas, however, [of totem] interplay in numerous ways. Some of the meanings may recede, so that totems have frequently become a mere nomenclature of tribal divisions, while at other times the idea of ancestry, or, perhaps also, the cult significance predominates . . . The concept of the totem has a decisive influence upon tribal division and tribal organization. (p. 106)

This citation shows, does it not, that depending on the modes of expression observed and the vicissitudes of human groups and their history, totemism is capable of assuming diverse significations and “uses”. This is a point of view about which Freud shows no critical reservations, and which appears to him as an observable fact. Moreover, it is carefully reported in the first three chapters of his book. The absence of any mention in Totem and Taboo of the material difficulties of primitive cultures, of the need of communities to help one another, of the demands of technical development, domains in which ethnological contributions are irreplaceable, obviously does not mean that he was unaware of their existence and importance for these groups of men.

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Fragments of Freud’s thesis relating to the origins of totemism are present in the work of certain anthropologists. A brief comparison of them with the results of the practice of analytic treatments introduces an element of originality, and possibly great significance, into the ideas that one may have of the process of hominisation. In what sense would it have been necessary for Freud to think of it as the vehicle of an exclusive truth? Does the original notion not implicitly entail an aetiological theory informed by a univocal linear logic? If so, it condenses into a single point on the scale of time the beginning of a process and its essential determinant, eliminating all the unconscious effects of the reorganisation of meaning retroactively with which psychoanalysts are, in principle, familiar. Totem and Taboo does not give us any particular indication as to why Freud might have experienced feelings of rivalry or the need to assert his own ideas, for example, in connection with RadcliffeBrown’s subsequent conceptions of a social and classificatory character or with Lévi-Strauss’s hypotheses concerning the role of the social prohibition of incest and the anthropology of kinship! It is obvious, in fact, that if their ambitions, their levels of description, are in contradiction with each other and with his own, they are not necessarily incompatible with the complexity of institutions whose past extends over what are considered to be increasingly long periods, and whose conditions of development are different. For some, the polemical character of their work erases the concern to distinguish between affects arising from the prohibition of incestuous desires and the secondary elaboration of the effects of these determinations in the register of the social classifications and strategies of matrimonial alliances. Freud speaks of the horror of incest and of the taboo organised around this horror; exogamy, for him, is logically its secondary social expression. Lévi-Strauss, on the other hand, is concerned with the modalities of marriage in societies governed by law. The taboo on incest plays a central role in them; marriage and ties of kinship are determinant for social relations. Freud focuses on the subjective individual pole, whereas LéviStrauss is concerned with the social pole of the circulation of women that is controlled by the group to such an extent that, if the subjective unconscious exists, it has scarcely any space for private expression. But, at the same time, he claims to believe that the oedipal drama is

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explained by a socio-historical event, contrary to Freud’s thesis, as A. Delrieu (1999, p. 57) has pointed out. The psychoanalytic point of view derives its force from its relation to the unconscious and from the effects linked to its unveiling, when this proves possible. I have tried to show that the notion of the unconscious had been the object of a sort of process of mystification, whereas it is clear that Freud explained himself at length with regard to the term “psychoanalysis”. Perhaps he has paid very dearly in anthropology for evoking “the task of synthesizing the explanation of the origins of religion, morality, and society into a unity”—a task he leaves to others, while affirming in a footnote of Totem and Taboo the central role for psychoanalysis in such a synthesis (1912–1913, p. 157). Other anthropologists have made different choices concerning this over-determination of an institution that dates back well over a thousand years. Rieff (1959), for example, seems to have grasped the role of the Kairos (crucial moment) of the first crime, and of its repetition, in Freud’s essay; he reproaches him, however, for not having explored fratricidal (Cain and Abel) and filicidal (Abraham and Isaac) themes. Society, mankind, begins with a crime; man is not merely a killer, but a remorseful killer. For Rieff, Freud’s conviction is that the main problem of humanity is aggression and concludes that “Freud’s bait of falsehood”, snared a “carp of truth” (Wallace, 1983, p. 164; Rieff, 1959). In this sense, Rieff is close to the post-1920 version of Freudian meta-psychology which Totem and Taboo anticipates in many respects. Gardner Lindzey (1967) stresses the biological factors in the prohibition of incest: in his view, the effects of consanguinity are sufficiently pernicious to compromise the survival of societies that do not resist the most common endogamic tendencies. Over the course of time, the incest taboo favours those societies that practise it. The fundamental conflict discovered by Freud has a biological dimension for this author. *  *  * There exist, particularly in Wallace’s work, other modes of formulating the anthropological reticences towards the thesis (sometimes attributed to Freud) in a caricaturist form that is by no means a new rhetorical device.

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He draws attention to the fact that Freud’s thesis concerns the remote origins of highly complex institutions that are not Western. It is based, according to Wallace, on the analysis of two modern Western children (he recalls, none the less, that Freud did not treat either of them directly). He says that the weaknesses of this method of comparison are too obvious. How can such comparisons be made without approaching the origins of these very primitive forms of behaviour, without first determining the psychological factors that are involved in the upholding of taboos? And he concludes with the question, “What can we retrieve from Totem and Taboo?” (Wallace, 1983, p. 206). This question was to receive, to my great surprise, a highly personal answer from a major supporter of a renewed structural anthropology: “Nothing”, thereby giving to the title of the present volume, conceived before I read his book, an unexpected new perspective. But before discussing that, I want to give a brief description of the broad outlines of the evolution of French anthropological and psychoanalytical practices over the past fifty years.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The evolution of practices

ertain changes are linked to the quite sudden reduction of interest in totemism as a subject of publication noted by the historians19 of ethnology after the First World War, and interpreted with satisfaction by Lévi-Strauss as the sign of their disillusionment. Should this reduction in publications on totemism be regarded in a light other than just as a chronological coincidence with the publication and translation of Freud’s essay? The question certainly deserves to be asked, but I do not feel able to answer it. In these circumstances, then, the fortune or misfortune of Freud’s essay overlaps with the fortune or misfortune of totemism as a subject of scientific debates and publications. The Arunta Revolution had questioned the limits and coherence of the notion of totemism, and had also been a source of new developments in the debate relating to its definition.20 But it would seem that, in fact, the opposite was the case, and the radical contestation of the very existence of totemism by Lévi-Strauss, announced by American “morphologism”, appears as a characteristic phenomenon of the structuralism of the years 1950–1975 in France. From this point of view, P. Descola’s volume (2005) might appear to run entirely against this trend and be innovative in its own way.

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My reflections on the reception of Freud’s essay should also take account of the evolution in the practices of anthropologists and psychoanalysts during the twentieth century. Their descriptions would certainly merit in-depth studies, and I cannot give them the place they deserve within the limits of this book. I shall, therefore, simply sketch their broad outlines. The development of psychoanalytic theory and practice has enlarged the field of clinical experience of practitioners considerably, without always giving rise to sufficient efforts of theorisation capable of stimulating a collective debate, to the point that the identity of their practice has even become uncertain. The development of the possibilities of psychoanalytic work in settings that are more or less modified to accommodate the modes of functioning of patients has increased their experience of “non-neurotic modes of functioning” (Bion, Green, and Winnicott certainly figure among the authors who deserve to be cited in this connection). The Oedipus complex remains a configuration of a certain universality, but the formulations of Ernest Jones in the paper he gave to the Royal Anthropological Institute, albeit intelligible at that time, no longer have currency today. It is necessary to distinguish the structural oedipal organisation, attesting to the decline of the Oedipus complex, from diverse incestuous organisations lacking complexity. We also need to take account of those organisations in which the differences of the sexes and generations only have a weak organising value, or are even disorganising in a context where recourse to addictions, acting out, delusions, or somatic disorganisation are decisive elements in a dynamic and economic configuration marked by a lack of psychic being. Anything that attests to the lack of organisation or accessibility of the Oedipus complex in no way diminishes its importance. On the side of ethnology, the development of fieldwork practices, numerous and discontinuous trips, but over very long periods of time, made it possible to acquire a knowledge of languages and to forge real interpersonal relationships. It enriched and broadened our understanding of different possible modes of civilisation and enlarged our perspectives ineluctably centred on cultures that are familiar to us. But the shift of accent contained in the term social anthropology is equally descriptive of a very remarkable growth of the fields of interest (political, religious, and economic) in this discipline, which also has the task of reformulating the classical entities of culture, society, or ethnicity to

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the benefit of a variety of contemporary issues. This evolution goes hand in hand with an almost unlimited renewal of thematic domains. Anthropology today is concerned with domains ranging from biotechnologies in Europe to modes of international tourism, policies of development in South America, and African peasant guerillas. The advance of globalisation and the pressure towards uniformising different modes of life probably play their role in this evolution in which some are currently attracted by cognitivism. The vague and fallacious use of the notion of the unconscious for fashionable structuralist reasons has given way, as might have been expected, to its virtual disappearance for reasons of group psychology, probably linked to the very reasons that had “launched” this notion in the first place, with the result that this movement has perhaps resulted in a scaling down of the degree of progress in curiosity and the individualisation of ways of thinking in the domain of totemism, where we continue to be enriched by the work of certain anthropologists, even if they are now very much in a minority. The radicality of Ernest Jones in 1955 may be contrasted here with the contrary appreciation, equally excessive in my view, of Wallace in 1983, in his conclusion to the section in his book on the “History of Totem and Taboo”, when he writes, Despite its problematic hypothesis of the primal parricide, Totem and Taboo was given, by and large, a close and fair reading—testimony both to the open-mindedness of Freud’s audience and to the power of the less speculative parts of his volume. Indeed, a partial list of the anthropologists who commented (often favourably, as we have seen) on Totem and Taboo from 1920–1950—Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Goldenweiser, Sapir, Mead, Herskovits, Radin, Rivers, Seligman, Malinowski, Marett, Schmidt, Murdock, Kluckholn, White, Lévi-Strauss—reads like a hall of fame of that science. Scarcely one luminary failed to at least acknowledge Freud’s work. (Wallace, 1983, p. 169)

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Beyond nature and culture

n 2005, Philippe Descola, the successor of Lévi-Strauss and Françoise Héritier at the Collège de France, published an erudite and exceptionally well-documented volume entitled Beyond Nature and Culture, which obliged me to develop my enquiries into the vicissitudes of Totem and Taboo. This volume gives an important place, in its own way, to totemism. In contrast to his master, Descola recognises its existence but includes it within a highly original structural perspective. In contrast with the essentially classificatory concerns of Lévi-Strauss, Descola views totemism as an ontology, a mode of identification, a schema for integrating experience. It is an illustration of a system of social organisation and of a mode of relating to nature characterised by the fact that each individual is part of a group of persons who bear the name of, and are particularly associated with, a natural object. He takes Australian totemism as an example for its diversity and its structural unity. This choice alone determines a significant change in the meaning of the term totemism. First, I will attempt to give an idea of the broad outlines of the structural system in which Descola includes it. As my culture is derived entirely from books, without any practical ethnological experience, I shall try not to enter into a confrontation

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with him in this area, which would be absurd, and confine myself instead to a number of questions on this version of totemism. Then I shall make a more serious examination of naturalist ontology for, according to this volume, the “modern Western world” forms part of this “naturalist collective”. The aim is a monistic anthropology that includes not just man, but human and non-human existents as a whole. It rests on the conviction that “the origin of a system cannot be analysed before its specific structure has been brought to light” (p. xviii). One element of the world only becomes significant in contrast with others, but Descola hopes to avoid having to divide them up into the “black boxes of culture and nature” (p. 305). Setting aside questions of genesis and antecedent causality in favour of a resolutely synchronic approach, Descola thinks it is possible to illuminate the structural properties of the combinations identified and the conditions of their transformations. Even though he invokes his choice of method, which is, the precedence ascribed to the discovery of structural configurations over research into the causes of their genesis is no more than a methodological priority and that, however imperfect our understanding of structural configurations may still be, this should not be a reason to defer a study of the causes of their genesis. (p. 404)

the author’s priority is to carry out a combinatory analysis of the relations between human and non-human existents. Descola also writes, We should not be striving to reduce the diversity of established practices by assigning to them unverifiable origins, functions of a general nature that are not very illuminating, or hypothetical biological or subconscious bases. Rather we should ask ourselves what it is that renders these practices compatible or not compatible with one another, for that is the first stage for an inquiry into the rules that govern the syntax of these practices and their organization into systems. (p. 391)

It is, thus, a highly ambitious, speculative work. The author’s encyclopaedic culture, the clarity and rigour of his thought, and the richness of his ethnographical material make the reading of this volume, in certain respects, a pleasure. More precisely, Descola’s study, with its major division between the universality of nature and the contingency of human societies, is

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concerned with recognising the contingency and drawbacks of the dualism of nature and culture characteristic of the “naturalist ontology” of modern Western society. His universal erudition, which is attractive, albeit somewhat overwhelming, allows him easily to show the plasticity of the frontiers between nature and society in the populations studied, without their absence of writing or complex arrangements of social organisation (urban, for example) explaining everything. In these continuities between human and non-human existents, the notion of person would not define a singular and stable identity: the way in which the modern Western world sees nature is, he affirms, “scarcely shared by the rest of the world” (p. 30). From studying the lives of hunter-gatherers and itinerant shepherds, and taking examples from gardens and forests, from shepherds and hunters, it is clear for him that their contrasting perceptions “coincide hardly at all with the body of meanings and values that, in the West, have become attached to the two poles represented by the ‘wild’ and the ‘domesticated’ ” (p. 48), the history of which he traces. The latter culminates for our author in a division between nature and culture: the social and ideological, but also artisanal, construction of nature thus produced in the seventeenth century the objects of the new science. This “nascent modernity finally liberated humans from the matrix of objects both animate and inanimate” (p. 62). For the author, this was only one stage towards the construction of an ontological system particular to the cosmogenesis of the Moderns. The great division between nature and culture may be seen as exotic in comparison with the choices made by the rest of humanity (p. 99). Why not? This evolution towards the autonomy of nature, culture, and civilisation was certainly an essential debate for the birth of anthropology, but it is considered here chiefly from a collective angle, drawing in particular on the work of H. Rickert (particularly Science and History, 1962. “The cultural sciences,” he writes, aim to study whatever takes on meaning for the whole of humanity or at least whatever is meaningful for all the members of a community . . . a mechanism that will become increasingly effective as the human sciences abandon speculation on origins in favor of empirical inquiries and, as they accumulate positive knowledge begin to supply proof of their legitimacy. (p. 77)

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With this, the author’s convictions now become clearer. His choice is to grant greater stability and structural regularity to that which unites than to the contingent effects of the united elements. Their range would necessarily be more limited but might make it possible to “set up a typology of the possible relations to the world and others, be they human or nonhuman, and to examine their compatibilities and incompatibilities” (p. 92). These means, which are ever available to mankind, cannot be reduced solely to innate mental structures, the author contends, but “consist of a limited number of internalized practical schemas that synthesize the objective properties of all the relations that are possible between humans and nonhumans” (p. 94). How, he asks, can the possible existence of unconscious structural invariants based on contrasting oppositions engender conscious norms and supply an organising framework for implicit social practices? Descola affirms that his book “is founded on the hunch that it is possible to reveal elementary schemas of practices and to sketch a summary cartography of their distribution and their ways of operating” (p. 98). To do this, he draws on those developments in human cognition concerned with the non-linguistic dimensions of the acquisition and transmission of knowledge (as opposed to the sequential logic of computer programming) and on the connectionist models of robotics. “Schemas” are abstract structures organising knowledge and practical action without mobilising mental images or propositional knowledge; his focus is on collective acquisitions and this leads him to cite, as an example of non-propositional schemas, those that govern the organisation of the house in many regions of the world. The integrating schemas that leave their mark on the attitudes and practices of a collectivity in such a way that the latter appears immediately distinctive to the observer are crucial for the anthropologist. It is not easy to demonstrate them, however. “These schemas,” he writes, manifest themselves in what are, after all, a quite limited number of options, and can be felt in the quite restricted range of options available for distributing resemblances and differences between existing entities, and for establishing between the groups defined by these distributions and within them, distinctive relations of remarkable stability. (p. 110)

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Descola, moreover, reduces them to two fundamental ways of structuring individual and collective experience: identification and relations. Identification is the schema by means of which “I can establish differences and resemblances between myself and other existing entities by inferring analogies and contrasts” (p. 112). The stylisations of experience that the schemas of identification constitute for Descola are, in spite of their concrete diversity, united by affinities capable of defining vast ensembles. The relation is understood as external relations between the beings and things identifiable in typical behaviours, as distinct from observable practices, thus of an extrinsic type in contradistinction to identifications which, by specifying ontological properties, orientate them partially. Understood as dispositions bestowing form and content upon the practical links between myself and others, “relational schemas” can obviously be numerous, but the author concentrates on six types: exchange, predation, gift, production, protection, and transmission (p. 311; see Figure 1, p. 334). These schemas may be examined “from the point of view of the relational modes that they are able to sustain” (p. 535), with their consequences for the institution of collectives and mores (dominant regimes of knowledge and action, frontiers of identity and alterity). Clearly, they are far from exhausting all the forms of experience of the world and of others, but the author thinks that the relations engendered by secondary schemas (temporality, spatialisation, figuration, mediation, categorisation) are probably “derived from the one or other of the structures made possible by the interplay of the two primary modes” (p. 115). Each of the configurations resulting from the combination of the identificatory and relational modes reveals the general structure of a particular schema of integration of practices that is objectifiable in the models that he proposes, even though we know that “they are unable to take into account the infinite richness of local variants” (p. 115). Among these integrating collective schemas, Descola proposes to contrast “interiority” and “physicality” (p. 116). Interiority is understood as the range of properties covering the mind, conscience, subjectivity, and affects. Physicality concerns the external form, the substance, the dispositions in general that result from the morphological and physiological characteristics intrinsic to an existent being.

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Going “Beyond nature and culture” involves this new dualism (interiority–physicality) with which Descola constructs in the table reproduced below (Table 3) his four types of ontology, while conferring on “these already well established notions new meanings” (p. 122). Descola claims that four ontologies govern our relations with the other (human or non-human): (1) totemism (in which there is a continuity between the elements of interiority and physicality between beings); (2) animism (which assumes many human and non-human beings have similar interiorities but very different physicalities); (3) naturalism (all beings are radically separated by their interiority, although they have similar physicality), this ontology of contemporary Western society subordinates human society and its cultural contingencies to the universality of the laws of nature; (4) analogism (the interiority and physicality of beings is distinct; existent beings are fragmented into a multiplicity of forms separated by slight gaps which make it possible to recompose the initial contrasts into an inventive analogical network. By way of example, animism and naturalism are to be considered as ontological regimes of the collectives of human and non-human beings that comprise them. They appear as antithetical ways of discerning the properties of things: the first stresses the difference of bodies and the similarities of their interiorities permitting relationships with one other; the second underlines their physical continuity (all are subjected, for instance, to the laws of chemistry), while their capacities to manifest interiority is heterogeneous, as are their capacities for relationships. These schemas of identification “cannot be mutually exclusive”. When one is dominant, the others retain their capacity to play an essential role: thus, the majority of Europeans are spontaneously naturalists, but that does not prevent some of them from believing that the orbit of Jupiter will have an influence on their lives. However, he adds, Table 3.  The four ontologies (Descola, 2005). Similar interiorities Dissimilar physicalities Dissimilar interiorities Similar physicalities

Animism

Totemism

Naturalism

Analogism

Similar interiorities Similar physicalities Dissimilar interiorities Dissimilar physicalities

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the institutions that provide the framework for their existence and the automatic behavior acquired over the passing of time are sufficiently inhibiting to prevent such episodic slippages into other schemas from eventually endowing them with an ontological grid that is completely distinct from that which dominates their own environment. (pp. 233–234)

This ontological distribution has consequences for the structures and properties of collectives. Animism, for instance, results in the annexation of a large part of what we call the nature of social life; naturalism, for its part, gives precedence to the material continuity of the terms over the heterogeneity of relationships; unlike both, totemism leaves no trace of this type of ontological duality (pp. 236–238). In the “animist collective”, almost all the human and non-human beings have a social life on the model of the human society in question (pp. 342–347); in the ontology of the “naturalist collective”, humans are distributed within collectives differentiated by cultures excluding that which exists independently of them, that is, nature (p. 353); in the totemistic collective, nature and culture are in continuity, but segmented internally by differential properties embodied by nonhumans (p. 383). The use of the term “collectives”, without serving as a substitute for the usual categories (cultures, ethnic groups, civilisations) aims to circumvent the tendency to apprehend the particularities of human groups on the basis of the features they display. This distribution equally has an influence on the definition of the properties of the subject. Descola postulates that “identification and relations constitute the warp and weft of customs in the world, and that the ways in which they intertwine mark out some of the major configurations . . . established in the course of history” (p. 403). Far from exhausting all the possible combinations between identifications specifying the properties of existing entities and the relations specifying the general forms of linking, which are sometimes multiple within a given identification, the author confines himself to examining the variations of ethos in animism marked by the different relational schemas. His hunch is that it is possible to “set up a typology of possible relationships to the world and others, be they human or nonhuman” (p. 92) or, in a more measured way, as it seems to him at the end of the book, to group together a number of grand schemas of action

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structuring the life of human and non-human collectives with a view to examining their relations of compatibility and incompatibility, by grouping together some elementary structures that are constitutive of the variability of the ways of intervening in the world without being able to propose “any more than a rough syntactical sketch of them” (p. 334). As the author knows and acknowledges, the productivity of this combinatory system rests partly on the specificity of its elements, though he recognises, for example, that we “naturalists” sometimes participate in different ontologies. It might be supposed, however, that the construction of what seem to be ad hoc categories might weaken the productive force of this taxonomy. At the end of his work, Descola illustrates what he understands by the incompatibility between ontological distribution and relational schemas due, for instance, to the absence or slowness of the processes of change. By way of example, in the vicinity of the Behring Strait, in matters of hunting, animal domestication, and taming, in animistic and totemistic ontologies, the availability of a domesticable animal (caribou, hunted on the one hand, “reindeer”, raised on the other) does not necessarily lead to its domestication. The practical advantages and zootechnical questions seem less decisive than more moral reasons “such as the autochtonous distaste at the idea of raising an animal that they usually hunted” (p. 378). The example of Amazonia, with its adopted animals, shows the impossibility for the Indians of transforming their relational schemas to animals by generalising a protective attitude of which non-human masters of game have the monopoly. The development of rearing animals requires a rectification of ontological frontiers. The author develops in his epilogue more general considerations, preferentially linking ontologies and relations.

Descola ascribes new meanings to totemism based on Australian totemism According to the author, For over a century totemism has been regarded as a form of social organization in which humans divide into interdependent groups whose distinctive characteristics are borrowed from the realm of

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natural species either in that humans imagine that they have inherited certain of the attributes of those species, or in that they derive inspiration for their own internal differentiations from the contrastive distinctiveness that those eponymous species exhibit. (p. 258)

He sees a dichotomy here, in what he presents as an alternative, between social and natural systems, that appears to be absent from the ontological conceptions of the “totemists par excellence”, namely, Australian Aboriginals, and shows, with the help of the new meanings he ascribes to animism and totemism, how he can demonstrate the reversal of perspective that he is proposing. (A source of passionate controversies since the publications of Spencer and Gillen (1899), interest in Aboriginal totemism appears to be linked, especially in Europe, to the wish to have access to a reconstitution of origins, the “primitive” being confused within an evolutionist perspective with what is “true”.) In so far as I have properly understood this question on which I can scarcely form an opinion, the important point for him is not so much the difference of distribution, in both cases, of humans and nonhumans in isomorphic collectives, as their joint distribution between isomorphic and complementary collectives in totemism in contrast to animism, where humans and non-humans are distributed separately between collectives that are isomorphic but autonomous. Animistic groups are held to be homogenous from the point of view of their principles of organisation in contrast with the totemic groups which are heterogeneous owing to their principles of composition (Descola uses the word “hybridation”) and because there exist numerous sorts of totemistic collectives, in Australia, at least. This complexity (under the aegis of multiple totem individuals can be grouped by sex, by generation, by cult, by place of birth, by clan affiliation, or by matrimonial classes) lies in the fact of being exogamous either in principle or in fact, while others are not, which confirms for Descola that natural species—or the natural differences between species—do not constitute an analogical model that makes it possible for the totemic group to see itself as a totality sui generis, since, unlike animals and plants, “the human components of a totemic collective usually have to find a spouse in a collective other than their own” (p. 259). I confess that I might not have completely understood the logic of this argument, which, moreover, confirms, I believe, the particularities of

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Aboriginal totemism, without completely elucidating its excellence. I would readily qualify them as “structuralists par excellence . . .” on account of the way in which they seem, as we shall see, to be devoid of the existential contents that are considered important in many other cultures, and on account of their “obsession with classification unequalled elsewhere” (p. 294). It has not slipped my notice that in this new conception of totemism, the notion of taboo has disappeared. The word taboo is never employed, to the best of my knowledge, in the chapter of thirty-seven pages devoted to “Totemism as an ontology”, even though the life of the Aboriginals comprises numerous limitations and restrictions whose general features are most particular: Thus, “it has become customary to call ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘Dreaming’ ” (p. 146) the singular cosmological and aetiological system in which this form of totemism is rooted (regarded as very surprising by anthropologists since the “Aranda revolution”). Descola describes this cosmology: it is related to the time when the world took shape: primeval beings emerged from the depths of the earth, leaving behind them in the sites of the environment traces of their peregrinations before vanishing as suddenly as they had appeared, leaving humans, plants, and animals with their totemic affiliations. “These beings from Dreamtime . . . are generally represented as hybrids, part human and part nonhuman, divided into different totemic groups already at the time of their arrival” (pp. 146–147). This fabled genesis continues to make its effects felt even in the present. Consequently, the “beings from Dreamtime” cannot be likened to classic mythical heroes, and nor are they ancestors, in the strict sense since every existing being, whether human or nonhuman is linked to the entity that determines it in a direct relationship of duplication, actualization, or formation rather than through an affiliation that unfolds from one generation to the next. (p. 147)

In the primeval space of the Australian Dreamtime evoked by the author, the organising role of stable contrasting identities in various human and non-human figurations seems difficult to grasp, particularly as they do not appear to be very involved in the processes of temporalisation. This mode of functioning sheds light on a term emphasising its common characteristics with the dream processes utilis-

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ing inversion (in 1900, Freud spoke of “turning round into its contrary”), analogy, condensation, division (Freud spoke of the condensation and displacement typical of the primary dream processes). Identification in the Australian Dreamtime does not proceed first by listing common properties but “presupposes a massive and unthinking adhesion . . . we both come from the same ontological mold . . . because we are materializations of the same generative model” (p. 242). In this sense, we may wonder if this new term does not perhaps exploit the usual common meaning of the word dream by linking it to the childhood of the species. For the author (in contrast to what he observes in animistic systems), in individual totemism, these relations do not, of course, concern individuals, but the species. Notwithstanding the central place of wildlife and flora, objects of very elaborate knowledge as means of existence, and eminently placed in the “obsession with classification unequalled elsewhere” (p. 294), animals and plants are not treated as persons. At the very most, they are subordinate witnesses, impersonal vectors of the presence and intentions of the primeval Demiurges in relation to whom the Aborigines themselves enjoy only a slender margin of independence: “these totem entities borrow human bodies in order to perpetuate themselves” (p. 292). A few pages further on, Descola adds, “It is not surprising that animals and plants are not persons, given that humans themselves are hardly more than the personifications of a reality that determines them both physically and morally” (p. 294). These divergent attributes ascribed to the child-souls of conceptional totemisms, which are obliterated in the context of totemic identification and force themselves on our attention in practical experience, introduce enough singularity so that humans and non-humans, albeit part of the same whole, are treated as distinct entities (p. 295). We will see a bit further on the reasons for the truly particular features of this totemism that the author, from a new point of view, seeks to use as a reference, even if elsewhere he says that “totemic collectives are the basic units in the system that organizes the universe” (p. 267). As you will have noticed, the “Australian Dreamtime” says nothing about the genesis of totemism. Descola writes, Matrilinear clan totemism is based on the principle that all persons linked in an ascendant matrilinear line share the same corporeal

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substance (flesh and blood) derived ultimately from the totemic entity from which the clan emerged. This shared physicality leads to strict exogamy and a prohibition against the consumption of the totemic species, since no individual should ingest the same substance as itself [breast-feeding apart, I imagine?]. (p.152)

The relations between the members of the patrilinear clan stem from an intimate solidarity between the humans and the totemic beings, a solidarity that is nourished and strengthened by an identical spiritual genesis and an identical sacred geography—in short, by the same identificatory rooting in what may, justifiably, be called the genius of the place. (p. 153)

The human members of a totemic class share, moreover, a set of substantial and material properties that can be classed into series of physical and moral contrasting pairs (tall–short, slow–fast, dark–light, etc.) which intervene in the range of choices of spouses, although the Aboriginals are not overly troubled when the physical characteristics of an individual do not correspond to the norm of his sub-section. The idea that members of a totemic group conform to an ideal type finds expression particularly in metaphors of kinship, of particular affinity, and of shared filiation rooted in an identical origin, and it takes on a public character in the custom of subsuming all the members of a totemic group, both the humans and the nonhumans, under a generic name. (p. 161)

A few pages before, he writes, the identity of the totemic group is founded upon a specific collection of physical and moral attributes shared by all its members, whether human or nonhuman. This constitutes a sort of ontological prototype of which the totemic species constitutes the emblematic expression, not the concrete archetype from which those qualities are derived. (pp. 158–159)

Or again, “in totemic identification”, he writes, the prototype under which a class of humans and nonhumans is subsumed is not, strictly speaking, the Dream-being that has engendered

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the model of this class, nor is it the principal totem from which the class takes its specific name. Rather, it is the core of physical and moral properties that identify each of its members, one of which—usually the one after which the class and the totem are named—synthesize the characteristics of all the rest. (p. 242)

In the author’s conception of animism, the biological species serves as a concrete model for composing collectives. In these descriptions of the diverse types of totemism (individual, sexual, conceptional, and collective) which I am citing deliberately, it becomes clear on several occasions that Descola is concerned to differentiate these relations from the familiar theme, for most men and women, of relations with close relatives, which the author evokes implicitly, but at a distance, in precise and abstract terms, and with a certain semantic refinement. I find the contents of these examples, nourished by stable and hierachicised logical oppositions, very agreeable to read, but they stand in apparent and rather surprising contrast with the barely temporalised dream-like character of this dream-world that the author describes. It is clearly easier to say what it is not than what it is. Should we see as a manifestation of this instability of the oppositions and limits the fact that it is not forbidden to kill one’s totem among the Aranda “even if one is advised to eat it sparingly” (p. 164)? Moreover, mythical accounts and fables suggest that long ago it was customary to feed above all upon one’s totem. These relative contradictions seem only to have been elaborated minimally, reinforcing this somewhat dreamlike dimension. In contributions that employ with subtle rigour sets of oppositions close to those of the author who cites him, von Brandenstein (1982) has examined the diverse terms with which the Aboriginals “designate the concept that we call totem”: in this sense, he gives them their own voice, which we do not hear, literally speaking, in the numerous and very interesting descriptions of Descola. (I have found very few textual citations in this volume—a volume of 600 pages, it is true.) It is worth recalling, from the point of view of its possible translations, mobilising nuances of a sophisticated level of abstraction, that, at the moment of European conquest, there existed among the Aboriginals almost five hundred languages (p. 162). In the section “The semantics of taxinomies”, we learn that the most common terms employed by the Aboriginals themselves to

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designate the concept that we call totem are “anatomical”: they may be translated by “flesh” (or “meat”), “skin”, “head”, “forehead” (or “face”), “eyes”, “side”, “liver” (or “temper” or “colour”, in particular that of the skin). Next come corporeal humours or dispositions and also the qualities associated with them: “that which comes from somewhere”, such as “armpit sweat, behavior, color, exudate, odor, perfume, skin, taste, tune , voice”. Much less common are “moiety”, “section”, “friend”, and “same name”. This proximity with the body, with an anatomy, in my view, that is close in its most frequent formulations to sensuality, to cutting up, and to the culinary arts, stands in remarkable contrast, it seems to me, with Descola’s distant, abstract formulations. These very concrete (raw, one might say) modes of expression suggest, do they not, a world in which the space and qualitative limits necessary for the development of a capacity for metaphorical expression that can be used linguistically (capable of linking while separating) are missing. Thus, among the particularities of Australian totemism described by Spencer and Gillen, Descola notes in particular what they call the “reincarnation” of a Dream-being in a human, leading that human to be identified completely with the totemic species of the site: “the totem of any man is regarded . . . as the same thing as himself” (Spencer & Gillen, 1899, p. 202, cited by Descola, 2005, p. 164). The elaboration of the alternative similarity/differences seems to be confronted with a mode of thought using important quantities of energy that are difficult to handle.21 Anyone who might be led to see a connection here between the above terms and the Freudian theme of the totemic meal would really have to be joking. The author has informed us on several occasions of his interest in structures; from his point of view, the contents are of little interest. Is that the reason why the section “Totemism as an ontology” contains no mention of Freud’s volume from which, of course, it diverges completely? In truth, this avoidance of any reference to kinship has, at least in reference to Australia, its justifications, which are somewhat reminiscent of Malinowski’s in connection with the Trobriand Islands. Throughout the continent, representations of conception are all in agreement on one point, which Ashley Montagu already emphasized

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many years ago: “Neither male nor female parent contributes anything whatever of a physical or spiritual nature of the being of a child”. (p. 262)22

Is there a place in Descola’s work, in connection with these Australian totemists, for filiation, for paternity, and even for maternity? Collectives based on a totemic conception site are, he writes, the means by which, through appropriating the reproductive process of humans, these totemic entities choose to perpetuate themselves . . . For the Aranda the parents are no more than an adoptive father and a bearer-mother . . . Before taking the form of a fetus a child-soul leads an autonomous life, often in the shape of an animal or plant that its mother may then ingest, for she is seen as a mere receptacle . . . the incarnation of a child-soul comes about, in the first instance, from its desire to be embodied . . . It thus seems legitimate to wonder if, in such circumstances, one should even speak of human ancestors, since the whole of human life seems to be nothing but a vehicle of which the filiation totems take possession in order to become manifest in each successive generation. (pp. 262–263)

Elsewhere, he states, the identity of an Aboriginal is thus “alienated” in the full sense of the term, in that it resides in the traces left in things by the entities that have produced the class of which he is a member, a class that in itself is an entity whose presence he himself helps to actualise by performing rituals. (p. 293)

Thus, in the different forms of conceptional totemism, the human members are required to perform rites of multiplication to guarantee the fertility of the species associated with their totem. This example of functions guaranteed by collectives can be declined continuously to the benefit, depending on the case, of human or non-human partners. Should these ontological conditions of the Aborigines be considered as a possible consequence of their difficulty in constructing taboos of symbolic value, that is to say, capable of placing prohibitions on objects inscribed in networks of significations that are both distinct and associable? Are we to take literally this affirmation of the ignorance of the role of parents in conception in a people who, admittedly, do not breed animals, but live from hunting and gathering?

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In a temporality consisting, in any case, of successive reincarnations, without death or life in the “naturalist” sense, what are the issues at stake in the conceptions and births that the totemic entities seemed to have appropriated? Should a massive collective inhibition of sexual curiosity be seen as the source of difficulties in building a totemic system in Hartland’s sense, or, indeed, the contrary? The perspectives of Descola’s text do not throw any light on these questions. What value does death have in such a context? The chapter devoted to totemism does not mention this subject, with the exception of the following passage: Dream-beings are thus not plants or animals that undergo metamorphosis and change into humans, nor are they humans that change into plants or animals. Rather, they are original and originating hybrids, concrete hypostases of physical and moral properties that can thus transmit those attributes to entities all with their own individual forms but each of which is regarded as a legitimate representative of the prototype from which it came. Any example of my totemic species is, for me, not an individuality with which I can maintain a personal relationship (as would be the case in animist ontology). Instead it constitutes a living and contingent expression of certain material and essential qualities that I share with it, qualities that will not be affected if I kill it so as to feed on it, since they stem from an immutable matrix from which both of us have emanated. Far from mutually apprehending each other as subjects engaged in a social relationship, humans and nonhumans are merely particularized materializations of classes of properties that transcend their own existences. (pp. 164–165)

In his discussion of integrating schemas (identifications and relations), Descola asks himself, in connection with predation (one of the forms of relationship, along with exchange, gift, production, protection, and transmission), the question, How can one both set up a relationship of profound identification between a human and a nonhuman and at the same time accept that the former brings about or is complicit in that the first is an actor and an accomplice in the destruction of the latter? (p. 164)

For him, predation is a phenomenon of productive destruction that is indispensable for the perpetuation of individuals: far from being an expression of

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gratuitous cruelty or a perverse desire to annihilate others, it on the contrary transforms the prey into an object of the greatest importance for whatever creature ingests it. Indeed, it is the very condition of that creature’s survival. (p. 318)

But is this transposition of the biological domain to the social domain legitimate? After mentioning Hobbes’ pessimism, Descola contends that this predatory propensity is a disposition among others, a legacy of our phylogenesis, and if certain collectives have adopted it as their own particular ethos, this means, not that they are more savage and primitive than others, but simply that they have found it a paradoxical means of incorporating the deepest kind of otherness while remaining faithful to themselves. (p. 319)

What we have here is a “conviction” of the author, forged among the Achuar, that “predation constituted the cardinal schema for relations with ‘others’” in Amazonia; and he adds, “in order to truly be myself, I must take possession of another being and assimilate it” (p. 320), an operation that can only be carried out physically. Thus, Predation is not an unbridled manifestation of ferocity or a deadly impulse set up as a collective virtue. Even less is it an attempt to reject as inhuman some anonymous “other”. It constitutes recognition that without the body of this other being, without its identity, without its perspective on me, I should remain incomplete. This is a metaphysical attitude that is peculiar to certain collectives, not a troubled exaltation of violence that some ethnologists might be guilty of, as they project their own fantasies upon the Amerindians. (p. 320)

I do not doubt any of this; the inherited phylogenetic disposition evoked here, without further clarifications, undoubtedly reminds us of someone, but I must confess I am perplexed by the usage of the word predation,23 which seems here to subsume all forms of murderous practice. Reducing the relational schemas to six did not allow for the representation of the schema of loss (of relationships) linked to the mortal character of our species, relativised, it is true, in Australian totemism by the “dream” that is peculiar to it. None the less, Descola returns to the subject of predation with the aim of comparing the influence of different relational schemas within

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one and the same identificatory ontology: to this end, he compares the bellicose Jivaros and the pacific Tukanos Desana, who live in very similar conditions of habitat and milieu, the former associating slashand-burn agriculture with hunting and the second with fishing. They all maintain relations with plants, animals, and spirits, which leads the author to classify them in the animistic regime, though, in the case of the Jivaros, these relations are dominated by predation, and in the case of the Tukanos Desana, by exchange. These highly contrasting examples provide us with an opportunity for reflecting on the validity of the productivity of this system which applies here to groups that are both regarded as animistic in the Descola’s system of structural ontology. This is surprising for a reader of classical studies on totemism. Invoking the domination of the relation of predation in one society and of exchange in another seems to him to make this contrast intelligible. It is true that in connection with the notion of collectives, Descola mentions that none of these relations should be considered as entirely hegemonic: even among the Jivaros, the system of kinship based on the ideal model of an exchange of sisters between cross-cousins establishes a network of solidarity between real affines which, moreover, is probably indispensable for maintaining a predatory attitude (but “there are failures”: between brothers competing for the same potential spouses, disputes in the application of the levirate rule: “murders and abductions of women are not uncommon” (p. 360)). Using some of the classificatory combinations that he has constructed, Descola illustrates some of their results in the ontological registers of animism, analogism, and totemism. I shall confine myself to the latter. The identity of the composition of Australian totemic groups is reinforced by the identity of the relations that determines them: “they share the same origin (a ‘Dream-being’), inherence (in the class that Dream-being instituted), and parity (in the attributes that they received from it)” (p. 398). The paradox of totemism may be said to lie in the perfect synthesis that it realises between a multitude of existing beings which, at first sight, seem heterogeneous, albeit at the cost of a paralysing immobility that obliges it to establish relations with others that it is incapable of setting up within itself. So, between these groups which have in common the same type of genesis and the same type of attachment to particular places, exchange is “the dominant schema

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into which their links are subsumed” (p. 399): exchanges of women, services, and foodstuffs and resources. Transmission and production are not present. Humans “facilitate a process of engendering that they do not control” (p. 400). The choice of Australian totemism as a model of “totemic collectives”, which “are the basic units in the system that organizes the universe” (p. 267), puts me, in this present study related to the possible traces of the influence of Totem and Taboo, in a difficult position, for the author clearly situates himself here at maximum distance from Freud’s reflection. By choosing as a reference for totemism collective modes of functioning that are described apparently without any reference to the notions of filiation, paternity, and death, that ignore murder (replaced here by a quasi-ethological predation), that do not distinguish between the living and the dead, between mortals and inanimate objects, with subjects “alienated” in their identity (p. 293), how can one be further (apparently, at least) from the Freudian question of parricide in Totem and Taboo? I say “apparently” because this description of Australian totemism is nuanced, and even perhaps contradicted, by the following lengthy remarks concerning the absence of “veritable relations between the members of a totemic group”, the absence, at least, of any of the kind that stamp their vigorous mark on practices and inject the dynamism necessary for each collective to act in an autonomous way in the world. That is not to say of course, that there are no interactions between the elements that make up a totemic group, for this does include men and women, parents and children, plants and animals, material entities and immaterial ones, all squeezed together in a complex and contradictory tissue of affects, interests, and obligations. But the excessive proximity of these terms in permanent quest of individuation forces them to look outside the group that they form, to other totemic classes, for partners sufficiently different from themselves for a relationship of complementary opposition to become possible. (p. 399)

So, in spite of their ignorance of the links between sexual life and conception, it seems that there are in fact “parents and children”, albeit in a register that is “insufficiently differentiated”. Should we not be astonished here to see not persons, but “terms in permanent quest of individuation” (are we not dealing here, in fact,

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with a form of inverted animism which no longer sees anything but the abstract terms of a system in the place of persons?). A Freudian version would, no doubt, refer to the excessive proximity of persons rather than “terms”, and would perhaps link it to fears of incest in the light of what child observation and analytic treatments show. Is the author not paying the price here for choosing a model that is, in fact, marginal and controversial in relation to the subject of totemism in anthropology, especially as, for him, “totemic collectives are the basic units of the system that organizes the universe”. Descola writes, moreover, “. . . totemism, as I have defined it, may be present, in a minor mode or potentially, in animist ontologies even where, in the absence of any groups segmented by descent, there are no truly totemic instititions” (p. 171). It seems that this choice does not have enough importance for him to induce him to mention the consequences of it for the place of his study within anthropological literature, and even less for his position in relation to Freud’s essay, which, in this broad cultural context, he does not cite, with the exception of a few general remarks on psychoanalysis that suggest a lack of interest in it and contain little information. The way in which he defines transmission in the naturalist ontology perhaps throws some light on this subject.

The relation of transmission in the naturalist ontology This ontology constitutes in a certain way a counterpart to the totemic ontology, for it articulates a discontinuity of ontologies and a continuity of physicalities. The universal laws, for instance, of molecular structure, thermodynamics, or chemistry, which apply to all beings serve as a paradigm for defining the place of the diversity of cultural expressions. Descola proposes to re-evaluate the pretensions to hegemony of this “modern” ontology in the “collective” to which we probably belong. It is so dominant that it often seems self-evident. What differentiates humans and nonhumans, he writes, is reflective consciousness, subjectivity, an ability to signify, and mastery over symbols and the language by means of which we express those faculties, and furthermore that human groups are reputed to distinguish themselves from one another by the particular

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manner in which they make use of these aptitudes by virtue of a kind of internal disposition that used to be called “the spirit of a people” but that we prefer now to call “culture”. (p. 173)

He goes on to describe its genealogy and the predilection for classifications by attributes. The solidification of contemporary naturalist dualism results from the “work of epistemological purification” that is “necessary for the idea of culture as an irreducible totality to acquire its autonomy over natural realities”, and the author thinks, along with Rickert, that this domain of culture can only be differentiated from natural processes in its relationship to their value for all the members of the community (p. 77).24 Descola is very familiar with the reasons today for questioning the affirmation of a clear-cut discontinuity of interiorities between humans and animals: the ethology, in particular, of large apes; the recent theories of cognition of Varela (the mind appears in them as a system of emerging properties resulting from the retroactions between an organism and its milieu) and of James Gibson (the body occupies the foreground again as subjectivising physicality) (pp. 180– 188); or again, the ecological ethics of the environment and its possible legal developments. If, as the author points out (p. 178), philosophers have preferred the question, “What makes humans different in kind from animals?”, and have seldom asked themselves, “What makes humans animals of a particular kind?”, Totem and Taboo is unquestionably concerned with the latter. Freud’s essay, which may be considered as a proposed explanation of the birth of a widespread and lasting form of social and cultural organisation, does not venture at any point into the domain of the opposition between nature and culture. While it is true that we can find later on in Freud’s work questions linked to this subject, they scarcely show culture as a totality that is irreducible to the conquest of autonomy vis-à-vis natural realities. “As I understand it,” Descola writes, “transmission is above all what allows the dead, through filiation, to gain hold over the living” (p. 329). From my reading of Descola’s treatment of totemism—and let me add that the author is skilled in the habit of using a quite common term in a sense that is peculiar to him—and while waiting for the

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creation of new perspectives arising from this semantic policy, I am, none the less, somewhat surprised by the univocality of his remarks. The scale and importance of this accepted dependence on more or less distant ascestors, which is capable eventually of taking the form of a debt with regard to everything that conditions their existence, including, in some cases, a destiny, and the role of genealogies, certainly seems to me to be identifiable and understandable in their diverse forms throughout the world. Descola thinks that The depth of genealogies, the rules unequivocally confirming a maternal or paternal filiation, the segmentation into different descent groups that act in the manner of moral persons, and the legitimation of rights stemming from particular ancestral groups: all these are mechanisms that for a long time anthropologists failed to recognize were by no means universal. Now, however, it seems that they should be regarded as the means that certain collectives employ in order dogmatically to perpetuate the sovereignty that the dead exercise over the living through relations of transmision. The clearest expression of this relationship can be found where the dead are converted into ancestors to whom a cult is devoted. These are close ancestors, not the distant and more or less mythical figures also conventionally called “ancestors” who are sometimes placed at the origin of clans or tribes but are nevertheless not accorded any direct influence over the destiny of those they have created. (p. 330)

By way of an example, which he borrows from Fortès, he notes that in West Africa “a man has no economic rights, legal status, or ritual autonomy as long as his father is living” (p. 330). The power of the ancestors is expressed collectively (respect of moral and sociopolitical values) in their cult: “their solicitude is gained not by demonstrations of love, but by proofs of loyalty” (Fortès, 1959, p. 50, cited by Descola, 2005, p. 331). This cult addressed to the ancestors is, thus, “not so much a way of honoring them”, the author writes, “as an attempt to conciliate them and dispel their anger” (p. 331). Transmission is “also what distinguishes one collective, with all its elements, from another”, which are claimed by some collectives “as the principal source of their contrastive identity” (p. 332). In Indian Amazonia, however, the very idea of an ancestor appears incongruous. The recently dead are supposed to disappear as soon as

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possible (if some aspect of them subsists in the memory of the living, it is in the form if evil spirits to be avoided); genealogies seldom go back beyond the grandparents, and descent groups have no power; inheritance is limited to a few meagre objects and no cult is addressed to the dead. “This is probably”, Descola writes, “a feature of the animist regime in general . . . none of these practical schemas, on its own, dictates the ethos of a collective. Rather each schema constitutes an indeterminate ethical landscape, a styles of mores” (pp. 332, 335). But I am puzzled by the rather particular meaning that Descola gives to transmission that “allows the dead, through filiation, to gain hold over the living”; it is “a way of guaranteeing and reproducing the physical and moral dependence of the living on the dead” (p. 394). No doubt, but is it not also the contrary? That is to say, a means of mediation that makes the experience of separation and loss tolerable, allowing, at this price, for a certain liberty, at least in the naturalist collective of which, according to him, we are both part. Is the author making a comparison with the genealogies of the West and perhaps China? Nothing is less certain. He writes, For even if the dead and their legacy of objects of objects and ideas do combine to define our individual and collective identities, and even if their achievements have circumscribed the field of what we ourselves can accomplish, nevertheless our liberty as human subjects is also reputed to stem from our ability to transform the achievements of the present with a view to improving what happens in the future. This is why, despite our pronounced taste for commemorations and despite the ceaseless celebration of the heroes of the past, and the devotion with which it is considered seemly to surround the dead, there will be no trace among Moderns of that subjugation to the ancestors that is a sign of the purest forms of transmission. (p. 395)

The epilogue even teaches us, in connection with “those who are content to measure the promises of the present by the yardstick of whatever the past has bequeathed”, that “the same remark could well be applied to naturalism, so hypnotized are Moderns by the attenuated variant of transmission constituted by historical consciousness”; and further, that “for us the dead are not still-active despots who regulate our daily lives. They are just benign puppets to which we turn when involved in affairs that no longer concern them” (p. 395).

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Undoubtedly, we are hypnotised by historical consciousness, and our dead are also sometimes puppets. Very learned commentaries then follow on the links between this situation and naturalist ontology, which I shall refrain from contesting, but one particular figure of human destiny is missing here, and I shall be questioning the remarks of this eminent author when he speaks of filiation, ancestors, and the dead in the naturalist ontology described as ours. I can naturally only rejoice if life has so far spared him, and those close to him, from experiencing those moments of mourning when the presence of the deceased imposes itself on the grieving subject in painful modes that are sometimes scarcely foreseeable. That he has apparently never had the occasion to observe such situations in social life and sees the dead as nothing but benign puppets, and individuals plunged into mourning as hypnotised by historical consciousness, raises more difficult questions however. Admittedly, the respective points of view of a psychoanalyst or consultant psychiatrist in a centre open to anyone in a city like Paris and that of an eminent anthropologist of the Collège of France are elaborated in different places and circumstances, but it is difficult to believe that they can contrast so radically in relation to the attitude towards the dead in the culture from which they both come: the closing chapters in my book will perhaps give the reader a fair appreciation of this, in particular at the collective level. Is it really necessary to insist on the frequency of those situations in which the loss of the pleasure in living, an absence of freedom in forging ties, or, on the contrary, in undoing them, is revealed in connection with an impossibility of addressing words to a deceased person that were hitherto unthinkable, and which weighs heavily on the course of mourning? While these situations of mourning primarily concern our immediate ancestors, it would be a grave mistake not to take into account the deaths of children, in particular, with regard to their consequences for those who were conceived a short while after the child’s death by parents wishing, without realising it, and very understandably so, to spare themselves the suffering of such a loss. The problems of substitution that result from this situation are not univocal. For example, exceptional gifts in a child that might help the parents to emerge from their grief may be combined with a state of fragility and a sense of the futility of life. The child’s successes are attributed to someone else, or are never sufficient to make up for the

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early difficulties of cathecting the child and the grief of a bereavement that belongs, in fact, to the previous generation. Around the cradles of all newborn infants, the desired meeting of the fairies does not always preclude the presence of the malefic fairy, which sometimes assumes the form of an unrecognised mourning. So many studies over the past fifty years on the origins of psychoses in particular, but also the external behavioural aspects of non-neurotic modes of functioning, have illustrated this aspect of their genesis that it would seem difficult to be completely unfamiliar with them. Unless one thinks, as in the naturalist ontology proposed by the author, that radical otherness seems to lie on the side of those who are either devoid of minds or who do not know how to use them: savages in the past, the mentally ill (today), and, above all, the immense multitude of nonhumans, animals, objects, plants, stones, clouds . . . (p. 291),

which are all placed on the same level here. But we are, no doubt, also touching here on the heterogeneity of the materials treated by anthropology, as it appears in the very rich work of Descola, and by psychoanalysis. The first is interested, it seems, first and foremost, in observable collective behavioural norms, while the second is preoccupied by listening and works essentially on what men and women say individually. But this gap, which is obviously tangible, as are the differences between the epistemological strategies of the two disciplines, does not seem to me to be sufficient to explain this heterogeneity. *  *  * Attempting to give an account, in such a limited amount of space, of such a considerable work, without being a qualified professional, entails great risks, especially as this book is also presented as a scientific wager that remains to be validated. I shall, therefore, simply express my concern to see that, in this far-reaching anthropological work, mourning vanishes from human experience, and that the relationship of transmission is nothing more than the expression of an oppression in which ancestors are essentially considered as encumbering figures (when their representation exists), and, what is more, all this in the collective that is ours. Will the borrowing of synchrony from Saussurian linguistics be as fruitful as the author hopes? (Bally and Sechehaye’s notes on the

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Course of General Linguistics (Saussure, 1916) left out, did they not, a linguistics of speech that is present in the Écrits de linguistique générale published in 2002 by Gallimard (Saussure, 2002).) Could there be a connection between this omission and the disappearance in the author’s work of mourning from the experience of men and women? In a certain fidelity to Lévi-Strauss, Descola considers that The prohibition of incest is a rule of reciprocity in that it instructs a man to renounce a woman for the benefit of another man who, in turn rules out his use of another woman who thus becomes available for the first man. The prohibition of incest and the exogamy that is the positive side would therefore simply be a means of instituting and guaranteeing reciprocal exchange, which is the basis of culture and a sign of the emergence of a new order in which the relations between groups are governed by freely accepted conventions. (p. 311, my emphasis)

It seems to me that this version of the prohibition of incest, with its ambition of totalising exclusivity, is one example among others of the price of this choice. In Descola’s view, “we should not be striving to reduce the diversity of established practices by assigning to them unverifiable origins, functions of a general nature that is not very illuminating, or hypothetical biological or subconscious bases” (p. 391). Rather, it is a question of trying to account “for the differences in the ways of inhabiting the world and giving it meaning” (pp. 391–392), of “rendering less difficult the task traditionally assigned to anthropology, namely to set in order and compare the discouraging multiplicity of circumstances in this world” (p. 364). This multiplicity, which is discouraging for those who seek mastery through the knowledge of determining rules, might, from other, less demiurgic perspectives, appear encouraging, and even salvatory. The schematisation of experience in human beings draws on integrating schemas in order to structure the relations that they have with the world. Their effects can be felt in what ultimately amount to a rather limited number of options retained for distributing the resemblances and differences between existents, and for establishing between the groups defined by these distributions, and within them, distinctive relations of a remarkable degree of stability. “But these structures”, Descola writes,

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are not all compatible with one another, and every cultural system, every type of social organization, is the product of a selection and a combination that, although contingent, are frequently repeated in history, producing comparable results. Anthropology that seeks to be consequential has no choice but to gain an understanding of the logic of this work of composition by lending an ear to the themes and harmonies that stand out from the great hum of the world and concentrating on emerging orders whose regularity is detectable behind the proliferation of different customs. (p. 111)

In what is his fortunately imagised listening to this planetary harmony, somewhat resembling the music of the celestial spheres, Professor Descola, from Sirius, hears neither dissonances nor plaints; for him, “there is no other choice for a consequent anthropology”— but is this great “hum of the world” really that of men and women? The orientations of contemporary anthropology on the subject of totemism are diverse and much better documented than in the past. It is now possible to make a much more precise examination by theme and by author of the points of agreement and of the critical reservations concerning Freud’s volume.

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CHAPTER NINE

The new possibility of discussions on the principle axes of Freud’s thought in Totem and Taboo

want to consider here in succession the questions raised by the universality of the Oedipus complex, the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the treatment of the difference of the sexes in Totem and Taboo, the new ethological contributions related to the murder of the leader of the horde, cannibalism, and the totemic meal, before concluding with the “question of the deed” in Freud’s text, a summary of which the reader will find at the end of the present volume. I shall cite some recent anthropological contributions on these themes, comparing them with a number of psychoanalytic contributions, and in some cases with my own personal choices on these subjects, which in many respects remain open for discussion. Each of them could have been the subject of a book in themselves; my concern, therefore, is not to be exhaustive, but, rather, to try to appreciate their significance in relation to essential Freudian choices: the decisive role of the consequences of a particular murder in the edification of moral conscience and in the emergence of a number of characteristic features of the human species as distinct from the other animal species (symbolic thought, language, social organisation).

I

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Reading Moses and Monotheism (1939a), which confirms the thesis of Totem and Taboo, gives a very clear indication that Freud thought that it was applicable in contexts that were obviously very different from that of the Darwinian primal horde, since it is concerned with the birth of Judaism. I have, none the less, preferred to give a place to these objective aspects, even if, in my view, they are not necessarily as decisive as some seem to think.

The universality of the Oedipus complex Without being explicitly discussed, the question is present in Totem and Taboo. In this connection, I have already cited Malinowski, Jones, and Héritier; other anthropologists share the latter’s understanding of this question, in particular Stephens (1962) and L. Boyer (1978), who, after summarising the current publications on this subject, concluded that there was “clear evidence for the existence of the Oedipus complex” (Boyer, 1978, p. 269, cited by Wallace, 1983, p. 21), while also indicating that “when the classical Oedipal situation is absent, it is taken into account by using substitutes for the father”. After mentioning the quite convergent contributions of R. and T. Lidz (1977) in New Guinea, Wallace (pp. 216–217) puts forward the idea that every society has to come to grips with the sexual drives of its children, the first objects of whom are incestuous. The particular way in which each society deals with these drives will contribute to their intensity and presentation, the objects towards whom they are directed, the degree of frustration and consequent aggression, and the objects of this aggression, a statement he considers is close to Freud’s position. None the less, he considers that it is impossible to see the Oedipus complex as the sole and sufficient solution for all institutions, “even for one whose primary function may indeed be to deal with its manifestations” (p. 217), due to the influences of geography, climate, economics, history, and proximity to other populations who must all affect a given culture’s solution. In my view, this position is not really reminiscent of Freud’s own position and, what’s more, I also see, without any great surprise, that the question of the unconscious has disappeared.

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The inheritance of acquired characteristics The “Freudian Lamarckism” of Totem and Taboo has given rise to very vigorous objections. To the authors already mentioned must be added Ernest Jones, from whom some psychoanalysts (G. Roheim and D. Anzieu) differ on this particular point: after opposing Freud in this area with regard to dreams and neuroses considered as phylogenetic residues, Jones links Freud’s choice with his taste, his preference for, or even the manner in which he was “possessed” by, the biogenetic register, and his belief in phylogenetic inheritance. The fact that Freud upholds this position in Moses and Monotheism is compatible, for Wallace, with certain formulations in Freud’s earlier work that suggest Freud was searching for a middle path between ontogenesis and phylogenesis: for example, when he writes, “. . . what is at bottom inherited is nevertheless freshly acquired in the development of the individual, probably because the same conditions which originally necessitated its acquisition persist and continue to operate upon each individual” (1916–1917, pp. 354–355). Mention should also be made here of Freeman (1967), who points out that Freud’s unquestionable Lamarckian position in favour of the inheritance of acquired characteristics lost all its supporters not long after. Freeman reminds us in passing that Freud only resolved himself to this by saying, “It must be admitted that . . . any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a kind would seem to be preferable” (1912–1913, p. 158). The question of phylogenetic inheritance cannot be envisaged independently of the question of primal fantasies. Freud was not satisfied with a direct transmission through tradition: “The archaic heritage [of the human animal] corresponds to the instincts of animals even though it is different in its compass and contents” (1939a, p. 100). Remember that for him it was a question not of mythical contents as such, but of a sort of fund of instinctive knowledge “hardly definable, something as it were, preparatory to an understanding” (1918b, p. 120). What is there to gain from abandoning Freud’s position in the name of a contemporary global scientific logic, as if it were absolutely certain that such a logic concerns psychoanalysis and, thus, implies considering it as a science within today’s epistemological limits? In this domain that is still full of unknowns, is the scientific position not

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more a reflection of the needs for dogmatic certainty of the human species than of the complexity of biological phenomena? Would it not be preferable for the moment to leave the question open in its present state of demanding further work?

Totem and Taboo and the difference of the sexes and generations Let me begin by recalling the interesting reservations of Juillerat: the use of terms like family, father, and mother in relation to the members of the horde is at once debatable and intelligible if we utilise the knowledge, albeit difficult to acquire, that we have of the lives of the great apes to whom we are similar in many respects. For the moment, however, we have only rudimentary notions about their processing of affects which are organised in human beings in networks of meaning that make great use of the symbolic register: this does not seem, however, to be available to them to the same degree. Perhaps we can lean, but only to a certain extent, on Freud’s text “Negation” (1925h), which is convergent in many ways with what we can learn from psychopathology and baby observation. If a baby “recognises” its mother at an early stage (in so far as we can use the word recognition on the basis of the results of non-nutritive means of sucking), it probably does not distinguish her from itself. In ordinary conditions of life, it would seem that this dyad constitutes their world. A perception by the infant of the individuality of one of its partners does not, in principle, occur in an organised way before the second semester of its life, at least under ordinary conditions of maternal care. It is accompanied by a specific reaction of anxiety that may be compared with the fact that, for Freud, the object is first known in hate. (This throws light for me on Freud’s response to Jung’s comment that there could not be a father in the horde; Freud said that there was always one: “A father is one who possesses a mother sexually”.) In this sense, the destiny of the father is to be perceived as distinct, other, and hostile. This observation does not necessarily simplify the situation: is the stranger anxiety to which I have just referred peculiar to the human species? Most of the time it is understood as an indication of the capacity for splitting affects (in Melanie Klein’s sense) and for

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displacement, which makes it possible to retain a positive image of the maternal presence in her absence. These unconscious psychic movements of splitting may be seen as precursors of secondary repressions. What was the situation with the brothers of the horde? What hypotheses can we make concerning their modalities of psychic development? We probably have the tendency, anthropomorphically, to imagine the brothers as adolescents, whereas the two-phase development of human sexuality is a Freudian notion (as is, moreover, the period of latency, considered by Freud, under the influence of Lamarck, as a residual trace of phylogenetic development). The question of the age of the brothers could, thus, be posed in a quite different way, without a period of latency or adolescence. They might have been confronted at an early stage, and for a prolonged period of time, with the experience of their murderous wishes, without having the means to misconstrue them. Nicolle Kress-Rosen (1994) shares Juillerat’s astonishment at the absence of an incestuous act, once the murder has been committed. It seems to me that a careful reading of Totem and Taboo gives an image of the instinctual life of the father, the leader of the horde, which cannot be reduced at all to the practice of incest: he tolerates no limits to his sexual life and wants to have “all the women” at his disposal. It was in this mode that his sons identified with him (“Each one would have liked to have them all for himself” (1912–1913, p. 144)), and so there was no other solution to the conflict than banishment, and then collective murder, or the instigation of a process of change of reference following this murder of a figure that was both loved and hated. For Kress-Rosen, what is at stake is the possession of their mother by each of the sons, a point that she thinks Freud completely overlooked by speaking only of the “women of the father”. According to her, the notion of mother does not appear anywhere in Totem and Taboo; the story seems only to concern fathers and sons; women are there only as the father’s property and as the coveted objects of the sons; there is no reference to mothers or, for that matter, to daughters. For her, Freud’s choice of highlighting paternal issues was linked to his history and the obsessional dimension of his personality. In Freud’s text, the way that the leader of the horde deals with the difference of the sexes could suggest that he hardly has access to this difference, being organised more by the difference between himself and the others without further sexual clarification. On the other hand,

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the sons’ homosexuality during their banishment appears as a discovery of organising value during their separation from the horde. As Braunschweig and Fain (1975) have pointed out, the nature of their identifications with the maternal representation alongside that of the leader of the horde puts the latter in a position of an object of jouissance, who is then credited with an inverse desire, with the result that the desire to submit to him, like her, was then just as powerful. The psychic evolution produced in the sons in these circumstances leads them to commit murder as much out of homosexual deception as from the desire for female conquest—a murder they collectively vaunt as being reparative. The formula that treats the expression of incestuous wishes towards one of the parents and murderous wishes towards the other in the Oedipus complex as “logical” could well be “a simplification . . . aimed at protecting the self-love of each . . .” (p. 87). Freeman, drawing on the work of J. Whiting, also raises the question of the discrete presence of mothers in Freud’s text, opening up a veritable subject of debate. Are we to understand that a mother, as an objects, that is to say, distinguished from the subject himself, emerges from the world only subsequently, after the father has separated the sons from her? For it is from the sons’ point of view that Freud’s narrative is constructed. In his article “Totem and Taboo, a re-evaluation”, Whiting (1960) thus proposes a reorganisation of Freud’s thesis of parricide: in each generation, in societies where certain conditions are united, the sons have a strong wish in fantasy to kill and devour their father. The “totemic myth” could thus be seen as a cultural invention that protects them against this wish. While setting out the factors that for him are capable of maximising the hostility between father and son, Whiting compares the traditional nuclear family and the “mother–child household” where the father sleeps outside the home. The results of his study did not confirm his hypotheses. So he modified them, considering that the predominance of the totemic organisation in mother–child households is linked to the seduction exerted by the mother and to the strength of feelings aroused by the separation, in the society in question, from her children at the age of three and a half: for Whiting, conflict, murderous wishes, and cannibalism are organised with the mother. Once he has put aside what seems imprecise or simplistic in this proposition (the totemic system is at once a counter-cathexis of hate for the father, a mode of expression of guilt and nostalgia, and

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also a celebration of revolt, described in detail in Totem and Taboo by Freud), Whiting puts his finger here on a complicated question of some interest. Freud, in his clinical writings and in his version of psychoanalytic technique, very often privileged the paternal transference. He did not, however, break with Melanie Klein who, for all sorts of reasons, and with a special technique, privileged the maternal transference with young children, emphasising the importance of early object relations. Freud’s feeling seems to have been different (moreover, he was never directly involved in clinical work with children). “Everything in the sphere of the first attachment to the mother,” he wrote in “Female sexuality” (1931b), “seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis—so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression” (p. 226). Many analysts would subscribe to these remarks, which are not only a mark of personal preferences, but also describe the difficulties in reaching back to experiences that precede the possibilities of binding through language, especially if the context was not favourable to binding subsequently. There can be little doubt that young children have to deal with emotions that are triggered in them by their aggressive organisation and their imaginary consequences. It would be very surprising if these movements did not involve their mother, even if these questions are posed in both sexes in a slightly different way. Freud, moreover, described the Oedipus complex as the conjunction of two triangular configurations in which the mother, in both sexes, is sometimes in the position of a desired object and sometimes in the position of a rival. All these considerations leave one with the feeling that a level of intelligibility of the organisation of the psyche might exist in a “first” register that is different: the term dual register would be inappropriate here, for the mother–infant organisation is only dyadic for the observer; it very much seems as if the infant does not distinguish him or herself from the mother at the beginning. The “second” register, which Freud focused on preferentially, tries to remedy this situation; in particular, by setting up, through the function of the third, a differentiating factor of affects and identities that is necessary for the edification of a minimal individual and social organisation. I am employing inverted commas here with the terms “first” and “second”, for there are reasons for thinking that the “second” register marked by

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thirdness comes about psychically before the “first”. Whiting’s proposition, therefore, could, paradoxically, coincide with psychoanalytic practice understood as a practice of fantasmatic life.

Ethological references There can be no doubt that Freud’s references, through the intermediary of Charles Darwin, were dated. The progress made in the ethology of primates and paleo-anthropology is worthy of our interest. What I have found suggests that developments in this field might provide us with a better knowledge of the behaviours of predation and aggression in the great apes and Australopithecus that preceded the different forms of primitive man. In addition to Juillerat, I should mention here D. Freeman’s chapter “Totem and Taboo: a reappraisal” in Man and his Culture (1967), which proposes to “identify the scientifically untenable elements in Freud’s hypothesis about the origin of totemism and to advocate that these elements ought now to be abandoned” (p. 54). He goes on to cite the ethological data furnished by Dr Savage on the social life of gorillas, which turns out to be more diverse than was described by Darwin. These observations, says Freeman, call for modifications: the dominant male gorilla certainly retains exclusive control over procreation in its group, obliging the young adult males to emigrate; however, there is nothing to prevent them from copulating beforehand with young females in their family, providing they are not fertiliseable. The only observable conflicts occur between adult males of different groups and, here again, these usually boil down to play-acting and intimidatory manoeuvres. The situation is quite different with chimpanzees, which live in larger groups. The only identifiable families are those formed by the mothers with their young. From puberty onwards, the males live together, spending most of their time engaged in internal power struggles. The dominant male, far from possessing all the females, has the sole prerogative of never allowing disputes over the female he has chosen. We know today, therefore, that very diverse systems of organisation exist in the primates, whether monogamous gibbons, chimpanzees

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where the mothers live with their offspring away from the adult males, or gorillas where the young males will found a new group without entering into any particular confrontation with the dominant male. In almost all species, the young remain dependent on their mother for several years, and pubertal males avoid spontaneously any sexual relationship with their biological mother. Incest here is the object of neither prohibition nor horror, but, rather, of an “instinctive avoidance” whose determining factors we should like to understand better; the prolonged period of dependency on the mother seems to guarantee the absence of sexuality between mother and young males. In this form of social organisation, the only female that the young males never seek to dominate is their mother. Kress-Rosen (1994) has described in this connection their long period of dependency on her which leads her to be a dominant individual forever. However, certain ethological findings differ greatly depending on the species; thus, Goodall (1979) says that it is not exceptional for females who are objects of dispute in the conflicts between male chimpanzees to be torn to pieces. In a review of the literature on this subject, from 1932 to 1979, Wallace confirms this diversity depending on the species; if openly aggressive acts are far from being the norm, they have nevertheless been observed by Goodall amongst chimpanzees, in the form of cannibalism, the systematic extermination of one group by another, and one isolated case of the co-operation of two brothers with a view to occupying the place of the dominant male. These studies demonstrate convincingly the interest in pursuing them further. But it would seem that, in recent years, notwithstanding a considerable effort (thousands of hours of observation in hundreds of sites), there have only been a handful of attempts to undertake vast comparisons of the wildlife of the primates in the different regions of the world and to understand their differences and their similarities (Fleagle et al., 1992). A recent work by C. Herzfeld (2012) underlines the role of Japanese anthropologists and of women in these researches into primates for multiple reasons that are very interesting. It is also striking to see that very little interest has been raised in these recent contributions by the possible existence of restrictions akin to the taboo on incest.

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Parricide, cannibalism, the totemic meal The subject of the primordial murder, considered as scandalous or absurd, and the scarce emphasis placed on the totemic meal in “ethnological material”, clearly stand in contrast to the more commonplace evocation of cannibalism in explicitly imaginary forms in fairy tales, burlesque comedy, or horror films. (It does not seem unreasonable to see ogres, ogresses, and vampires as erotically charged inverted versions of maternal suckling.) Although Freud devotes several pages of his essay to sacrificial rites and to the place played in them by the food offered to the gods, the evocation of cannibalism in anthropology appears to be only discreetly present in the debate. (Perhaps the studies of paleo-anthropology utilising new advances in the dating and identification of organic materials will enlighten us further on these past customs.) The different results of the observations of the aggressive behaviours of diverse species of great apes have not led as yet to decisive conclusions. These behaviours appear to be different, however, from the ethological patterns observable in the carnivorous predatory wild animals that kill for food. Freud’s description did not venture to articulate more precisely murder and cannibalism. One of the specificities of the orality that he described in man is that of tolerating a dimension of incorporative absorption, and a specifically aggressive destructive dimension linked in particular to the use of teeth. Incorporating the flesh of someone one has just killed gives rise to a quality of quite singular affects (exploited, moreover, in attenuated forms in the plays of William Shakespeare).25 How can one benefit from what one has just ingested without guilt and fear of retribution? It may be supposed that the members of the horde, in this collective crime of passion, like the great apes of today, had seen their aggressive movements become relatively detached from direct oral predation, involving essentially the mouth and teeth, to the benefit of the offensive use of their upper limbs liberated progressively by terrestrial bipedalism. The paleo-anthropologists have taught us about its multiple possible consequences: the development of sight at the expense of olfaction, the descent of the larynx, the swing of the pelvis, and the shortening of gestation. We know now that these

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modifications were probably accompanied by a development of the frontal lobes and the appearance of new psychic acquisitions, including language and modifications of sexuality, henceforth dissociated from the period of fecundity. Sigmund Freud was clearly interested in the consequences of these modifications for psychic life: Braunschweig and Fain (1975) write, They are the reactions of the murderers to the murder of a figure of instinctual strength who admitted no restrictions to his power, who then became the central element of a mental system called on to restrain the instinctual appetites of human beings. It was in the evolution of modes of relating to this agency included in the psyche of man that Freud saw the essence of the progress of human thought. (p. 81, translated for this edition)

“The lack of precision,” writes Freud, “in what I have written in the text above, its abbreviation of the time factor, its compression of the whole subject-matter” is explicitly mentioned in Totem and Taboo (pp. 142–143). We know that Freud returned to the issue in a much more thorough way in Moses and Monotheism (1939a), when he wrote, “The story is told in an enormously condensed form, as though it had happened on a single occasion, while in fact it covered thousands of years and was repeated countless times during that long period” (p. 81). In the light of modern studies, these lapses of time have taken on impressive proportions and are often updated: advances in palaeontology today date back the appearance of the proliferation of species from which we originated (some of which have disappeared, for the time being without explanation) several hundreds of thousands of years. The migrations out of Africa of Homo sapiens (500,000 to 1,000,000 years for palaeontologists; 270,000 to 400,000 years for geneticists; 50,000 years for F. Fukuyama) seem to be contemporaneous with significant reorganisations, in particular of the wildlife along the paths of these migrations. So, when Freud wrote in Totem and Taboo, Thus, the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together— but not, perhaps, until they had passed through many dangerous crises—but to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching their father. (p. 144)

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he had at his disposal a chronological space of unexpected magnitude. Could it have been on the scale necessary for the successive generations of brothers to realise that the behaviours closely linked to their identifications with the leader of the horde had led them regularly, on a concrete level, to a violent death? That is, before their psychic development had led them to imagine the danger of retribution and had made them participate in psychic dynamics of a different quality? Did the deployment, in the Middle East originally, of bands from which we all originated, involve for very long periods modes of reproduction that were sufficiently endogamic to give them physical appearances distinct from the diverse human groups, formerly considered as “distinct” races? In addition to demographic considerations linked to the geographical isolation of bands and tribes with a limited number of members, was there already a trace during this period of the narcissistic and incestuous implications linked to neotony? Can they be said to be characteristics of the species on the path of hominisation, and an indication of the relatively recent character of the actual prohibition of incest and of a process of humanisation after very long periods in which alliances functioned endogamically? The Freudian narrative also questions our capacities to picture death (essentially the death of others), possible modes of mourning, and burial practices to which we are the only ones, among the animals, to have recourse. Freeman, in his critical project of abandoning all the “scientifically untenable” elements in Totem and Taboo, insists on the rarity of examples of totemic meals in the anthropological literature, an objection that has been taken up by many authors. Have they fully appreciated the violence of the affects involved in such situations and their consequences? Killing someone towards whom one has extremely intense and contradictory feelings (love, envy, hostility) cannot easily be made the object of a narrative. The recollection of collective crimes comes up, does it not, against powerful resistances, and well after the demise of the participants. It seems to mobilise intense unconscious resistances, while at the same time indirectly producing profound modifications of conduct before giving rise to a conscious forgetting that is palpably desired. This, at least, is what observation of the political life of the past century in my country would suggest.

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Why, in discussions on this theme, regarded as implausible, does the example of the Eucharist (a feature of one of the most widespread religions in Europe and America today) not come up more often? Christians have had several confrontations between themselves over the literal or metaphorical character of Christ’s formulations: “This is my body . . . this is my blood.” If there is a mystery for some in the Eucharist, it is precisely because it is not just a question of a symbolic commemoration. It was also, was it not, for this reason that a Christian anti-Semitism developed, with the task of pinning responsibility for Christ’s murder once and for all on identifiable scapegoats considered to be outside the group. Although an agnostic and non-practising Jew, Freud’s acknowledged Jewish descent did not prevent him from mentioning, without insisting on it, this obvious analogy, before studying it in depth in Moses and Monotheism (1939a). This observation of the rarity of instances of the totemic meal in the anthropological literature is, nevertheless, astonishing (suggesting a surprising lack of interest on the part of anthropologists in living human groups). It is by no means easy to find in the external world of perception facts whose existence is rejected in one’s inner world. The history of the discovery of infantile sexuality by Freud highlights the failure of recognition by the psychiatrists of the nineteenth century. Are not anthropologists in a similar situation with regard to the totemic meal? A reading of a recent volume of the Cahiers de l’homme, “Anthropologie et psychanalyse” (2005) by a group of collaborators from both disciplines is very interesting in this connection, giving an idea of the possible fruitfulness of these “crossed perspectives”. I refer the reader particularly to the article by G. Gillinson “Totem et tabou dans les Hautes terres de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée”. According to this article, the conception of the transition from the pre-human state to the human state among the Gimi people of Papua New Guinea is similar to the Freudian model, even though it constitutes an original variation of the latter. I will simply give some elements of it here: before the Australian pacification of the 1960s, the neighbouring villages were in a state of permanent war and Gimi women practised a ritual cannibalism during the funeral rites devoted to the men of their husband’s clan. They would ritually steal and eat the corpses of the men killed in war and exposed before their

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funerals. In the mythical constructions of the Gimis, if the men carry out the murder of the Dream-Man, the first husband of all the women, it is the women who practise, one could say, the cannibalism which gives rise to their theatrical ritual punishment “explaining” their sexual anatomy. Menstrual blood is considered as a sign of their commemorative, and regularly renewed, murderous activity, carried out in complicity with the men. The history of the species is conceived of as unfolding within a maternal womb; the murder of the father takes place, as it were, in utero, and is confronted, it could be said, with a taboo on the cannibalism of the eldest child. Carried out through field studies over a period of fifteen years or so, this work gives us a particularly courageous and lively idea of anthropology today.

The question of the deed “And that is why,” Freud writes, concluding Totem and Taboo, “without laying any claim to any finality of judgement, I think that, in the case before us, it may safely be assumed that ‘in the beginning was the Deed’” (1912–1913, p. 161). We may wonder what part was played in this carefully considered choice by the pleasure of concluding with a citation from Goethe’s Faust, an author Freud particularly admired.26 In connection with Freud’s choice in favour of the deed, it is surprising that the counterpoint that this formula must have represented (at least for him, as a cultivated agnostic, and for Goethe, too) to another formula of reference for Christian European culture, “In the beginning was the Word”, with which St John’s Gospel begins (a reminder of the creative all-powerfulness of the Word of God in Genesis in the Old Testament), has not been emphasised more often. “Im Angfang war die Tat” (Faust, Part I, Scene 3): was this, then, also to be the choice of the agnostic Freud? This choice, taken after a carefully argued contradictory debate, accentuating the force of his argument, particularly as it seems to have been given careful consideration, seems to have nourished the understandable reservations of readers, even though the forms they take may sometimes be puzzling.

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Freud’s choice in favour of the deed in his conclusion to Totem and Taboo seems untenable to D. Freeman: he criticises, not without certain reasons, Freud’s stance in Totem and Taboo in favour of the lack of inhibition of primitive people, but he is then led to ask: “What then can have been the basis of the special attraction which the theory of the primal deed had for Freud?” (Freeman, 1967, p. 68).27 My own reflections lead in a different direction, while remaining in disagreement with the Freudian position justifiably criticised by Freeman. The knowledge acquired by anthropologists has taught us much and modified our ways of seeing things, in particular, for example, on the subject of totemism and the anthropology of kinship: by evoking the lack of inhibition in primitives, thereby seeming to underestimate the psychic work that he had, on the contrary, pointed up in totemism, Freud, it could be argued, was improperly putting the “primitive” and the young child on the same level. In the latter, it is easy to see that action can be a formidable rival for psychic life: in order to develop, the child has to be able to suspend the discharge of tension to a certain degree, and must have the capacity to tolerate this suspension. The deed (action) offers immediate discharge, using much higher economic quantities of energy, but what we have learnt over the past fifty years about the complexity of the psychic life of very young children scarcely leads in the direction of simple oppositions. On this question of the deed in the beginning, would it not be preferable to avoid engaging in speculations that for the time being are interminable? It would seem more fruitful to adopt the position put forward by J. Neu (1977) and André Green (1995), emphasising the power of conviction of the narrative “whether there was actually a deed in external reality or simply a fantasmatic production that took place in psychic reality”, especially as there are arguments in favour of a certain hallucinatory activity that is suppressed in all perception. The animistic dimension of thought which may be credited to the brothers of the horde is not necessarily consistent with a clear and definite distinction between wishes, dreams, perceptions, and memories: we know, moreover, that these distinctions are inconstantly and unevenly assured in our psychic lives today. Freud speaks of a murder that is forgotten and denied, and accompanied by unconscious guilt, but as there is scarcely any work of mourning it can be replaced in a quasi-maniacal mode by the totemic meal: his thesis is one the compulsive return of this conduct. The

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edification of totemic systems forms part of the more developed ways of dealing with this mourning. They involve prescribed collective behaviours, rituals that appear as unconscious counter-cathexes of impulses of hate or even as annulations of these impulses in the mode of reaction formations, particularly as we are dealing with forms of totemism which are more in keeping with religion. These prescribed collective behaviours are constructed on the accepted basis of an unconscious displacement of the problem on to a class of natural elements, typically an animal, thus with a dimension akin to symbolism employed in neurotic phobias, even though behaviours and character traits dominate the scene. This totemic system guarantees, as it were, a taboo organisation and exogamic matrimony. For Freud, observing the limits that this system prescribes is aimed at avoiding the return of the deceased in a vengeful phantasmatic form, or in the form of a leader like that of the horde with all the impulses of hatred that such a desired return would arouse, but on the condition that nostalgia, for example, or guilt, are not too strong and do not organise in one way or another the acceptance of the return of this leader, now a father, with all the erotic benefits that that would entail. From this point of view, the unconscious nature of these psychic dynamics makes the process of renunciation and mourning difficult. At the same time, it participates in the sustainability of the repetition of the murder that is dreamt about or acted out, more or less symbolically, through reparable offshoots, in power struggles against legal, political, or social institutions. Men and women will have all the more difficulty in freeing themselves from this dynamic in that they are constantly enacting it. But why would they attempt to modify something when they have the feeling that they have never been involved in it, particularly as they still are? The level of awareness for this orientation requires a minimum of renunciation, of mourning, which has not necessarily been acquired. The old and, in fact, always present character of murderous wishes, relegates into the background the debate between deed or fantasy; the entire history of the species shows, does it not, the frequency of murders carried out in a context where, for symbolic or real reasons, the victim occupies a place that is felt to be paternal. Personally, I remain impressed by the fecundity and plausibility of this final choice in favour of the deed.

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The study of the collective emergence of this enacted repetition beyond the pleasure principle under the pressure of anxiety would require an interdisciplinary study. I do not think, though, that it has ever really been attempted. The reproach made of Totem and Taboo by Lévi-Strauss, when he writes, “With Totem and Taboo Freud constructed a myth . . . but like all myths . . . it tells us how men need to imagine that things happened in order to attempt to overcome the contradictions they experience in their lives” (1991, p. 107), seems to me once again, in the area of totemism, little justified and extremely casual in view of all this complexity.

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CHAPTER TEN

Totem and Taboo, politics, and law

s Braunschweig and Fain (1975) have written,

A

The one who possessed, primordially, an instinctual force that brooked no limitations on his power and his jouissance, became, by virtue of his murderers’ reactions to his murder, the central element of a mental system that would be required to restrict and organize the instinctual appetites of human beings. (p. 81)

In dealing with the modifications that are necessary in the symbolic functions of the father, Totem and Taboo also deals, in its own way, with the emergence of the superego and the means of dealing with destructiveness, with the appearance of hatred and its relations with the libido in oedipal functioning, allowing for the possibility of individual and collective, social and cultural, sublimations and creations. Obedience, after the event, to the dead father, the recognition of the existence of an introject acting as a constraint (as Green has emphasised (1995), accompanied by the prescription of taboos, inscribes relations to ancestors in a position, which, by condensing anteriority and authority, confers a significant value on the difference of the generations. 207

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From this point of view, the first obstacles to instinctual discharge, the first prohibitions of the taboo, are directed towards the constitution of what will become the superego. To the best of my knowledge, prior to the work of Fortès (1967) the connections between totemic institutions and the organisation of individual and collective values, of tradition, of group consciousness, had been given little consideration, and were even carefully avoided by Lévi-Strauss and, more recently, by Descola. It is, no doubt, understandable that in this domain of the possible relations between totemism and the different observable systems of authority, that is, social legality and political legitimacy, the choice of authors has been directed more towards Freud’s work as a whole, particularly towards the contributions already mentioned between the years 1915 and 1939, to which must be added Civilization and its Discontents (1930a) and The Future of an Illusion (1927c). Thus, staying within my framework of reference of Totem and Taboo, I shall be able here only to mention the authors of the political school of philosophy of Frankfurt, in particular T. W. Adorno (Freudian theory and the pattern of Fascist propaganda, 1951), and then Habermas for his work on the relations of Freud’s sociological ideas with Marx’s reconstruction of the history of the species (Knowledge and Human Interests, 1968). The courageous and well-documented attempt of P. Roazen in Freud: Social and Political Thought (1968), certainly deserves a mention, even if the arduous character of such a vast subject on the basis of an oeuvre of this size plays its role in the difficulty of the book to live up to its title, especially as he also evokes Freud’s close relations and postFreudian authors. The emotions that sustain religious people, the distress of men and women and their need for omnipotence, their aggressive desires and the sense of guilt that results from them, the unconscious mechanisms at work in punishment, and the relations of authority and social cohesion elucidating historical and cultural processes, are all described here at length. But they are described from a perspective which regards Freud’s growing interest in the ego as an advance in psychoanalysis. This rich theme is related to the major recastings of his work that Roazen knows well, and is accompanied by numerous but also very brief citations. Totem and Taboo is certainly cited in order to contest different rational theories of punishment (Bentham) and of political authority

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(Hobbes), but, in this difficult work, Roazen draws on Freud’s clinical and theoretical work as a whole (correspondence included), the results of which are not easy to use for the topic I am dealing with. I am, nevertheless, grateful to him for his citations from the work of Kris (1943) on Nazi propaganda during the Second World War. Roazen thinks that Freud’s final choice in favour of “historical reality”, rather than the imaginary desire of killing and devouring, nourished in Freud’s readers an understandable reticence. It curtailed their possibilities of examining the different imaginable consequences of this situation of the group of brothers of Totem and Taboo. “This tale about the origins of social life”, as Roazen (p. 99) calls it, is the reason why the essay was described as a “Just-So-Story”. “Freud”, he writes, tries to deal in it with one of the most fundamental questions of political theory . . . he was preoccupied with justifying society, with finding a standard that would support civilized life and, at the same time, enable him to condemn particular institutions as inappropriate. (1968, p. 255)28

These concerns ascribed to Freud and formulated, in my view, in a manner that is contestable, but which were perhaps appreciated in the author’s American culture, seem to me to have an effect on the entire work. In a psychoanalytic work on social ties, De la horde à l’État, Enriquez (1983) comments in an original way on Totem and Taboo by drawing on his experience as a sociologist and on his thorough knowledge of Freud’s work. He stresses the fundamental role of the murder of the leader of the horde for social organisation: it was out of the hostile gathering of the brothers against him that the first ties of solidarity between them emerged in order to escape from their feelings of impotence and fascination towards him. For the sons, the murder transformed this unbearable figure (owing to the feelings of hatred and impotence that he aroused in them) into a father they could miss; in this sense, for Enriquez, as for Freud, humanity was born of a “common crime” (p. 32). (I cannot agree with him, however, when he suggests that there is no real father, that he only exists as a mythical being, for “if he arouses love, he takes on the aspect of the elder brother, the friend, the confidant” (p. 35).) In a fruitful way, he shows that guilt leads to the totemic institution and to a world of renunciation, substituting power struggles with

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more complex relations of alliances and solidarity. The world is fragile: the return of fraternal rivalries and of the father’s murderous tendencies is only suspended. Enriquez thinks that the sacred character that power subsequently acquires amplifies and perpetuates its fascinating aspect. The failure to take into account aggressivity towards the rival is, for him, one of the reasons for the failures of attempts to explain the repression of incest. Deeming that tendencies (“among which there were a good number of magical intentions”) that were initially in the service of art, and which Freud believed had died out, are, in fact, still very much alive, and even often taken to the extreme, Enriquez questions the art of government and politics: the advocacy of miraculous solutions and the magic of words are very reminiscent of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c), of hypnosis, of the powers of the leader of the horde and with his possibilities of using speech. He links the theme of murder with this usage. This point of view coincides with that of Kaufman, a philosopher and member of the Ecole Freudienne until its dissolution in 1980, who wrote in his book, L’inconscient du politique (1988), The access of humanity to language has as its counterpart the emergence of a collective guilt and the inscription of prohibition, in so far as the group, by evicting the omnipotent leader of the horde, has given itself the means of appropriating the signifying power. (p. 60, translated for this edition)

The acquisition of language, and the possibilities that it offers for the development of thought, can, thus, acquire unconscious significations owing to the freedom they give in the symbolic use of representations: it is possible to make them appear or disappear, present or absent, at will. Are the persistent obscurities in our knowledge of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of language related to this dimension of unconscious guilt, notwithstanding all the restrictive measures prescribing precisely the good practices of phonetics and syntax, crowned, it might be said, by the use imposed by the name of the father? Based mainly on citations from Freud’s “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (1915b) and Moses and Monotheism (1939a), which may be regarded as developments of Totem and Taboo,

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Kaufman’s book has the disadvantage of never giving precise references for them, which risks masking the gap between his positions and Freud’s, even though this gap appears to be productive, for example, in the way in which Kaufman links the eviction of the leader of the primitive horde with the deployment of language. It is a question of taking away from this fascinating figure his privileged monopoly of the use of the signifier at a moment when animism, the omnipotence of thought, confers on language, even at a reduced level, maximal power. We know that Freud was to write in Moses and Monotheism: “. . . in primaeval times there was a single person who was bound to appear huge at that time and who afterwards returned in men’s memory elevated to divinity” (1939a, p. 129).29 If “culture has opposed them at all times and in all places”, these acts have, of course, none the less been committed. No doubt there are other reasons for the power of this ancient and lasting dream. Finally, and this is the most significant aspect of the casual character of LéviStrauss’s work in this domain, at no point in his work does Freud speak of “symbolic gratifications in which the nostalgia for incest finds its expression” (a formulation which probably expresses LéviStrauss’s horror of effusions and which did not escape M. Moscovici’s (1986) notice. This formulation “nostalgia for incest” (le regret de l’inceste) contains, moreover, possible ambiguities. Freud discusses the urge for, and fear of, incest. Perhaps the author wants to speak of a nostalgia concerning the absence of incest, that is to say, the contrary? This nostalgia concerning the absence of incest existed, in any case, well before the parricide and does not appear in Freud’s work as the consequence of an event. Or, alternatively, perhaps he wants to speak of the remorse (regret in French can mean both nostalgia and remorse) accompanying incest? It would seem that those who practise it consciously scarcely have access to this register). These circumstances, which are linked for Kaufman with the murder of the leader of the horde, would account for the “erasure of the traces of the origins of the ‘normative state’ ” inscribed in this repetition. He gives an illustration of this with reference to two speeches by Robespierre on 25 December 1793 and 17 February 1794 during the Reign of Terror. Summarising them briefly, I would say that the Reign of Terror appears as the reconstruction of a group united by patriotic love and engaged in a death struggle against “the abjection of death-dealing

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individualism”, providing the example of a violence that ensures that it remains ignorant of itself. The approach is not unrelated to that of the brothers of the horde, but, in Freud, in particular in “Instincts and their vicissitudes” (1915c), the tendencies to egoism and cruelty are credited with a future, that is to say, with a long and complicated evolution in which reversals and inhibitions of aim organise pairs of opposites that are responsible, precisely, for the ambivalence of virtue, in a style that is not exactly that of he who was nicknamed “the incorruptible one”. Kaufman’s study seems to me to be one of those that have taken furthest the wish to understand how psychic organisations inherited from the restricted society of the family, and whose presence is attested by mass psychology, participate in real political actions in society at large.

“The rules of taboo as the first unwritten code of law”? In Civilization and its Discontents (1930a), Freud writes, In Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), I tried to show how the way led from this family to the succeeding stage of communal life in the form of bands of brothers. In overpowering their father, the sons had made the discovery that a combination can be stronger than a single individual. The totemic culture is based on the restrictions which the sons had to impose on one another in order to keep this new state of affairs in being. The taboo-observances were the first “right” or “law” (pp. 100– 101)

In this text, Freud mentions the role of the totemic system in facilitating reconciliation with the dead father, in regulating taboos relating to the dead (the need to reconcile oneself with them, the fear of enemy spirits, and the logic of the debt towards those one has harmed). A contract of protection after the murder, and a cult aimed at appeasing guilt, the totemic system was, as it were, a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father – protection, care, and indulgence – while on their side they undertook to respect his life, that is to say, not to repeat the

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deed which had brought destruction on their real father. (1912–1913, p. 144)

Is it possible to identify an underlying theory of law in Totem and Taboo? At certain moments in this book, I have referred to the example of the French Revolution. One of the chief problems with which the revolutionaries were often faced was to find a mechanism in which the authority necessary for law and power could reside. I will be drawing here on Hannah Arendt’s (1963) work On Revolution. For her, the founding fathers of the American revolution following the War of Independence, who were very aware of the violence that was likely to break out in this situation, were the only ones who succeeded in creating what they considered to be the foundations of freedom, and in establishing lasting institutions based on the respect of civil law. They were acting within a social arena that had been powerfully organised for years by a population of settlers in their municipalities through pacts and reciprocal commitments in their associations throughout the different states. Although Arendt does not mention it in this text, the relative state of prosperity of this population cannot be envisaged without recalling the gradual eviction of the Indians and the use of the enslavement of black people deported from Africa. It would seem that, since this founding moment, a particular cult of the Constitution has constituted for Americans, who have largely remained deists, the founding function of the authority necessary for this particular political organisation. We know the extent to which the French revolutionaries were confronted after the regicide with the destruction of a social and political fabric of quite a different quality: in Europe, the people, who were the source of the origin of the legitimate political power, were neither organised nor constituted; diets, parliaments, orders, and corporations were based on birth, on professions. The violence that had accumulated in a multitude liberated from all ties and from any form of political organisation was such that it was incapable of giving birth to a new form of power. As the attempt to create a cult of Supreme Being proved to be of little help in establishing the authority of the successive constituent Assemblies, the political actors were swept away by the pre-political “natural” force and misery of this multitude.

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The recourse to regimes based on force and violence, owing to their lack of authority in the sense in which we understand it, seems to be a quasi-constant outcome of revolutions. For want of gods, Robespierre felt the need for an “Immortal Legislator”, or again for “a continual call to justice” (it was a question of the immortality of the soul and of a vengeful god in the beyond which were politically necessary to ensure the respect of basic prohibitions, the first, obviously, being that of murder). This need for an absolute which would validate the positive laws created by man appears, in fact, to be a consequence of the political absolutism of the previous centuries, backed up by religious authorities, ultimately of divine origin. Natural law needed a divine sanction to become an obligation in the eyes of men, whether it spoke to them through the voice of conscience or whether it enlightened them with natural reason. In their efforts to establish governments founded on law and not on men, the political actors of this period in France, as in America, turned towards Roman history. Their need to draw inspiration from models that were admired and felt subjectively to be ancestral references of civilisation led them in this direction. But neither the Romans nor the Greeks utilised a political or legal system based on the gods; they conceived of a people’s existence as quite independent from the laws whose functions were different. Professor A. Schiavone (2005), an eminent jurist, has recently published an erudite volume entitled The Invention of Law in the West, in which he traces the history of the origins of Roman law, a framework of thought elaborated continuously over a little more than two thousand years. One of the important findings of this book, which does not refer at all to psychoanalysis, is an observation that seems to me to bring us back to our theme. Concerning the genesis of what would be the law of this city-state, he writes, At the centre of Western consciousness, around a decisive element in its formation—the genesis and original structure of its legal vocation—there continued to be an unexpected and surprising void of knowledge: a deep and vast zone of shadow, all the more serious because the changes we must consider demand a profound reflection on the meaning of our past, and the substance and quality of our roots. (pp. 22–23)

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This gap leads him, moreover, to speak of “a prohibition of genesis” akin to Kaufman’s “erasure of the traces of the origins of the normative state”. (In Rome, the work of legal regulation inevitably present in every human group was reserved very early on for a group of specialists. Even in its simplest forms, it presented itself as a separate object and would be recognised in the deployment of structures endowed with a powerful and specific rationality. Its separation would appear as a particularity of the Western world. Around it, from the outset, an extraordinary ideological discourse would be organised to elaborate it as independent and neutral.) Is this self-isolation of ancient legal knowledge (the psychoanalytic term “isolation” would probably be adequate here), since the emergence of rules, open to question? What form of contact had to be avoided? If the legendary myth of Romulus and Remus and the foundation of the city of Rome clearly shows how this register tolerates, or even celebrates, murder, the incomplete account of the life of the first kings of Rome, like the process of elaboration of what would become jurisprudence, shows a remarkable concern to avoid any contact between a historical context and the edification of an abstract formalism whose strength lies in its detached generality. This sort of formalism is reminiscent of the theoretical concerns of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Descola, and, perhaps, also of our Aboriginal brothers. But we know that for Hannah Arendt, notwithstanding the considerable influence in Europe of Roman law, the model from which the Christian West has derived the quintessence of its laws is that of the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible. We are, thus, once again referred to the figure of Moses. (It is worth recalling that, in Moses and Monotheism, which, as I have already said, restates the essential choices of Totem and Taboo, Freud illustrated, with a degree of creativity that was as exceptional as it was historically contested, the transformations at work on the religious level after the murder of Moses in the human group of the Hebrews, whose constitution took place over several millennia. Totem and Taboo, politics, and law . . . I am quite aware of the wide compass of the subject, as well as of the summary character of my inventory of the studies relating to it, but this makes the current disappearance of totemism from contemporary studies devoted to the history of the human species all the more curious.

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Totemism and global history As we know, the recent works of global history propose to retrace the thread of the history of mankind over long swathes of time, and in vast syntheses. Those that I have consulted have greatly surprised me. In the prologue to the first chapter (“Before class”) of his book, A People’s History of the World (1999), Chris Harman states that, contrary to widely shared beliefs that “hierarchy, deference, greed and brutality are ‘natural’ features of human behaviour” (p. 3), a “cumulation of scientific evidence shows that their societies [those of our ancestors before recorded history] were not characterized by competition, inegality, and oppression”, which are, in fact, the product of recent history. Following the findings of the anthropologist Richard Lee, echoing Engels, he describes a “primitive communism” (p. 4) in the hunter-gatherers, a “society of original abundance” (Marshall Salins). The author gives a very convincing description of “this long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past” (p. 7) as a condition of survival of these first human groups, which once linked groups of nuclear families with a mythical common ancestor, but, henceforth, organised the work of the exploited class in the interests of the exploiting class. In Une histoire du monde globale (Norel & Testot, 2012), after a description of neolithic humanity by J. P. Demoule, there is an interview with J. Guilane on the subject of the neolithic heritage and what remains of it (in particular, practices of sociability and power). This archaeologist, a professor at the Collège de France, accords a significant place to sedentarity, to the home, to the village: he writes, a new feeling now links the dead to the living. The deceased are heralded as the founders of the land; they legitimize the origins of the community and are its cement in time. They acquire the status of ancestors and are venerated for that. (p. 86)

Although they use the notion of “ancestors” with a particular status, neither of these two volumes mentions totemism. The term does not appear in the index or glossary of these works of more than 500 pages. Even if the existence of totemism has been the object of a degree of interest that is considered excessive today, this silence is striking none the less, particularly in the second of these volumes,

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where the existence of this mode of social organisation is evoked without being named as such (Freud is cited, but for his hypotheses on the Egyptian origins of Judaism). Has the word totemism become taboo for the historians of this contemporary trend of history in vogue today? I have indeed found myself asking the question. The Origin of Political Order, the latest book by F. Fukuyama (2011), which is poles apart from Harman’s book from the political point of view, nevertheless shares a common and dominant interest in economic history. He contributes original and interesting ideas to this theme on account of their grand scale in time and space. At this level, he cannot be reproached for being superficial and incomplete: however, like the last two writers mentioned, he can be at the level of construction. Although he disregards totemism (the word only appears once in 450 pages, where it is applied to the respectful attitude of the Indians towards cows), and overlooks Freud’s work as a whole, he nevertheless offers findings that may be linked up, I think, with Totem and Taboo in his description of a trajectory from “tribalism to the State”. Fukuyama describes the evolution over the centuries of the conflictual tensions that exist between the organisations of tribes and bands originating in diverse types of families, and the emergence of states. The different solutions invented, depending on the places, epochs, and circumstances, illustrate a kind of trajectory towards the developed modern state from an “Evolutionist” perspective in which the political conditions of economic development are the main object of the author’s interest. To use his vocabulary, it is a question of leaving behind “patrimonialism”—that is to say, a political regime depending on kinship relations as a basis for local social organisation—and of moving towards a uniform and, according to him, “impersonal”, centralised administration that is favourable to economic development. “The favouring of family or friends,” he writes, “with whom one has exchanged reciprocal favours, is a natural form of sociability and is a default manner of human interaction” (p. 453). For Fukuyama, one of the forms of political decline is also this return to the predominance of families that he calls “patrimonialism”. Efforts at state-building rarely succeeded, of course, in abolishing the influence of kinship (and of its oedipal organisation, I would add), but a large part of the history of the institutional development of

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societies revolves, for Fukuyama, around a struggle, a conflictual coexistence, between tribal and state organisations. The relative abandonment of the relations of kinship as a basis of political and social organisation seems to him to have begun much earlier in Europe than Max Weber or Karl Marx thought (just before the Industrial Revolution, after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution). He sees the emergence of feudalism, following the decline of the Roman empire, as an attempt to combat social isolation and to replace the kinship relations of solidarity weakened by the consequences of pillaging during the great invasions (M. Bloch). This return of a “patrimonial” mode of organisation after the Roman Empire and Christendom would be combated, particularly in France, with great vigour during the “Ancien Régime” by the royal power that was being constituted. The monarchy gradually deprived this alternative to kinship of its value, leading to the loss of significance of the administrative and legal functions that were assured locally by the feudal nobility. All that remained to the aristocracy were military functions and privileges that were increasingly detached from, and devoid of, responsibilities and powers. Tocqueville saw this continuity of the Ancien Régime, with its subsequent centralising effects of the French Revolution, as one of the conditions of its occurrence. It would seem logical to me, following Fukuyama, to understand the considerable repercussions of the Revolution, and its astonishing character as a model (if only for the Russian revolutionaries), as a grandiose attempt to put a supposedly definitive end to any “patrimonialist”, if not paternal, reference, and to the abuses that destroyed its legitimacy by means of regicide. The numerous oscillations of the political regimes in France showed the contradictory succession during one century of practically all the known forms of government before culminating in a series of Republics whose mores, which are sometimes monarchical in appearance, make our neighbours smile. The quite particular place of the revolutionary theme in the history and mythology of our country has had special implications for me as I have been reflecting on this theme. Its different parameters, which can rarely be appreciated in isolation from one another, naturally impose the use of the notion of over-determination, and certainly would require a pluri-disciplinary approach. This is difficult to envisage, I think, without examining the impressive character of its emotional implications, as variable as they may be, depending on the

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authors concerned. The divergences between a Tocqueville and a Michelet, or between Marxist authors and F. Furet, show, do they not, the power and depth of emotions that this subject is capable of mobilizing. (It is also the persistent source, is it not, of a certain sense of incarnating an ideal type of access to a democratic social and political project that is universally desirable at any moment . . . without necessarily always being productive for our geopolitical understanding of the world.) The difficulties linked to the resistance of tribal organisations (maximally extended forms of the family) have of course found different solutions in other cultures, and one of the advantages of Fukuyama’s book is to show their diversity in the face of what would appear to be an old anthropological problem that Totem and Taboo shows at its inception in the “choice” (imposed, in fact) of exogamy and in the transition from the leader of the horde to father. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but—not, perhaps, until they had passed through many dangerous crises—to institute the law against incest . . . In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong—and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde. (1912–1913, p. 144)

In China, an empire unified since the Qin dynasty, the millennialong struggle between agnatic family lineages and the establishment of an imperial administration culminated, with the Ming dynasty, and well before the advent of Europe, in the first “modern” state with a unique system of calligraphy and a competitive hierarchy of imperial civil servants. This state, however, was in no way linked to a legal authority capable of limiting its power or of imposing procedural responsibilities on it. Being exceptionally concentrated, the only limits it knew were of a moral order, but lapses into “patrimonialism” did not spare it from the return of the influence of large aristocratic families in the course of the succession of the numerous dynasties of its long history. In India, the political and religious institutions dominated by Brahminism (ten centuries before “our era”) have never acquired such centralised features; in particular, they have had little influence on the

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caste system and the weight of endogamic factors that it entails in questions of marriage. In the Middle East, one of the merits of the author is to describe an “extreme” solution adopted in a powerfully tribal culture in favour of the constitution of a unified state—that of the military slaves invented by Muslims in the middle of the ninth century (Janissaries, Mamluks)—and to compare them, for their similar political dynamic, with the state of celibacy imposed in the tenth century in Europe on the priests in the Christian church directly in relation with the very considerable material and institutional interests of the Roman Catholic church (J. Goody, 1986). In the Middle East, it was a question of constituting elite military and administrative groups comprising children removed from their families (in general, non-Muslims) before adolescence, one tenth of whom benefited from very privileged conditions of education and opportunities to gain access to important positions, but without ownership of their functions or their possessions. These Janissaries remained the slaves of the Sultan, who had the power to dismiss them or have them executed at his slightest whim. The fact that celibacy was long required of these groups meant that they had all the more solidarity and cohesion, and minimal affective ties outside the framework of their function in the State. Invented by the Arab Abbasid dynasty, which could not count on any stable political organisation among the tribes to defend the empire that they had swiftly conquered and united by means of the religion of the living Mohammed during the expansion of Islam throughout a large part of the Middle East and all of the south of the Mediterranean world, this system, Fukuyama writes, “appeared as a brilliant adaptation for creating a powerful state institution against the backdrop of one of the most powerful tribal societies on earth” (p. 192). However, this “behaviourist solution”, founded in a context dominated by ties of kinship and the incapacity to take sustained collective action 100 years after the death of the founder of the Muslim religion, which was refined over the course of the centuries in the Ottoman empire, gradually showed its limits at the moment of the latter’s decline. The appearance of women and children in these groups of “celibates”, who had long been deprived of the possibilities of selling or handing on their patrimony, and, thus, of constituting a privileged class based on birth, finally rendered these Mamluks

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capable of deposing the Sultan. This led, after numerous vicissitudes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the reform of the Turkish army and to their demise in 1826. Their history appears, does it not, as a remote and distorted repetition of the group of banished brothers in Freud’s essay who were condemned to celibacy and to homosexuality, but became capable of uniting in a murder that had hitherto been beyond their means, and, thus, strong enough to want to put an end to their banishment. *  *  * The persistence of these issues in the contemporary world can easily be observed, for instance, in a recent article by Mathieu Guidère entitled “Histoire immédiate du printemps arabe” (2012): for several reasons, he does not think that the recent movements in the Arab world are necessarily tending, for the moment, at least, towards democratic states. The societies of the Maghreb and Middle East are certainly not impermeable to “modernity”, but societal reflexes persist, “as well as habits inherited from the past that are anchored in the collective imagination and in popular practices” (p. 133, translated for this edition). He underlines the importance of allegiances running through families, clans, and tribes, including the institutions of the state as a whole . . . Each country is permeated by networks of belonging, allegiance, solidarity and clientelism that are specific to it and rooted in its history . . . (p. 134, translated for this edition)

He identifies three active forces. First, the tribe, a maximal extension of the family, founded on real or imaginary blood ties; its place and role are variable according to the regions, but it can assume a clan or regionalist dimension and resist processes of social and economic transformation, especially as they have often been imposed from above. Second, the army, considered as a sort of military tribe consisting only of men who are linked by codes of honour and virility. Finally, not religion but the mosque: that is to say, “the collective investment of this particular part of collective space by the logic and dynamics of the religious person, where individual spiritual experience does not seem to be the decisive dimension” (p. 136, translated

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for this edition). (Our instruments of political analysis seem to be heavily conditioned, do they not, by networks of meaning that we are already familiar with.) When all is said and done, the consultation of these recent publications has left me pensive. Having been one of the elective objects of interest for more than half a century for a group of minds, sometimes of the first degree, particularly interested by its cultural dimensions and origins, totemism today finds itself the object of interest of a minority of eminent academics, often of Anglo-Saxon background. They have field experience which leads them in their work to refer to Freud (and not only in the title of their articles, which they sometimes borrow from him), whereas others seem practically unaware of its existence (Fukuyama, for instance) and, consequently, of the history of their discipline, or they avoid calling it by its name whenever they mention it summarily. Alongside Lévi-Strauss’s hypothesis of the disappearance of an illusion of the anthropologists, are there not grounds for advancing the hypothesis that there is a link between Freud’s essay and the term totemism, which, on this account, has become unpronounceable? From this point of view, it might be said, might it not, that one of the vicissitudes of totemism is that it has never existed, unless the term is to be used in a very particular new sense, which would obviously not be “reasonably ambiguous”, as the Australian Hiatt wished.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Totemic systems and totalitarianisms: the point of view of Totem and Taboo

A

t the end of the introduction to her work On Revolution, Hannah Arendt writes,

The relevance of the problem of the beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious. That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and mythical antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating. The first recorded deeds in our biblical and our secular tradition, whether known to be legendary or believed in as historical fact, have travelled though the centuries with the force which human thought achieves in the rare instances when it produces cogent metaphors or universally applicable tales . . . The tale spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime. The conviction – in the beginning was a crime – for which the phrase “state of nature” is only a theoretically purified paraphrase – has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than the first verse of St John, “In the beginning was the Word”, has possessed for the affairs of salvation. (1963, p. 10)

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This text did not trigger any sort of scandal, which is perhaps a sign of a certain evolution in public opinion. (While expressing a point of view akin to Freud’s, without citing him or explaining the links between violence and the beginning of history, Arendt does not seem to me to show much curiosity for fraternal hatred, though the latter necessarily implies, does it not, at least one third party.) Although indignation is no longer appropriate, we still seem to be unaware of the unconscious traces of the psychic organisations inherited from family modes of functioning in social and political life today. Thus, at the heart of obviously complex aetiological configurations, I would defend the unrecognised role of our deafness to Totem and Taboo. Should we tolerate the accusation that the human species is guilty of continuous complicity in a crime that both belongs to the remote past and is constantly repeated, and, among Freud’s (1915b) “Thoughts for the times on war and death”, take over in our own name his statement, The very emphasis laid on the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ makes it certain that we spring from an endless series of generations of murderers, who had the lust for killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have today. (p. 296)

The demand of our contemporaries that is given so little thought, and so often repeated today, for a “society without taboos” attests, does it not, to a significant ignorance of this dynamic. Among all the taboos invented by man in the course of the processes of civilisation, the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, from Moses’ Decalogue, even if it is only observed intermittently, still has authority in principle, does it not, for a large part of humanity. It is difficult to understand why, among this group of cultivated anthropologists, some of whom were renowned for their energy and strength of character, there was not one, in his professional publications following the massacre of the First World War and prior to the Second, who thought that Totem and Taboo could shed some light on the destruction in Europe of all the taboos of war, and many of those of civilisation. Should this destruction, which was sometimes progressive, dissimulated behind apparent policies of progress, and sometimes clearly programmed, carried out by different totalitarian parties and

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then regimes, not be examined also in the light of this essay in so far as it is a story of power, crime, guilt, and authority, and their links with civilisation? “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (1915b), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c), The Future of an Illusion (1927c), Civilization and its Discontents (1930a), and Moses and Monotheism (1939a) were all written during this inter-war period; they bear witness to Freud’s ongoing reflection and to his exceptional capacity for work and creativity. Did ethnology work, as it were, against anthropology by abandoning, after the Second World War, this domain of studies to the historians, philosophers, and sociologists? This, in any case, is the feeling one gets from reading the bibliographical references of a work as important as Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). “Though he was hardly interested in the political phase of the problem, Freud clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories,”, noted T. W. Adorno in his (1951) article “Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda” (p. 134). Leaving aside the directly instinctual aspect, which is clearly very important, the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris described, in 1943, in relation to Nazism, the use of brutality which was supposed to serve several aims: intimidating adversaries, giving the impression of a ruthless strength of determination, associating the population with it in order to create ties of complicity and collective guilt: the notion of “blood brothers in crime” was clearly announced in a project electing a scapegoat, accompanied by collective threats in case of possible acts of revenge by the victim. This description of Nazi propaganda shows the perverse use that can be made of certain mechanisms at work in human groups that were described by Freud among the consequences of the primordial parricide: Society was now based on complicity in the common crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and the remorse attaching to it; while morality was based partly on the exigencies of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of guilt. (1912–1913, p. 146).

This description of a mode of functioning that was established in the wake of the totemic system, in its traces, no doubt remains broadly

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adequate today; one can surely think, however, of other ways of accounting for human gatherings that function like instinctual masses in the service of the narcissistic illusions with which their members are identified in a scarcely differentiated mode (for example, the “archaic maternal” mode). Group Psychology (1921c) follows up the reasoning of Totem and Taboo by describing the functioning of human groups: Freud writes, The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal. (p. 127)

as if, moreover, he no longer had in mind the distinction “primal father”/“leader of the horde” of Totem and Taboo in this description of contemporary groups. Freud’s description seems, in retrospect, to have been premonitory, does it not, with regard to the fascinated groups of totalitarian regimes. (Mein Kampf appeared in 1924; Stalin, the Secretary General of the Communist party in 1922, eliminated all his rivals at the end of 1928.) In a very schematic and not very original way, one may briefly compare the cult of the totalitarian leader, organised around a version of his own personality, with the cult of the totem which forms part of a network of symbolic values that are linked, not to his person, but to a sense of belonging, an affiliation, or common collective relationship with, more often than not, an animal species. The “Führer”, or the “little father of the people”, seduced people by erecting instinctual discharge as an ideal in contradistinction to totemic taboos whose aim, assisted by their prohibitions, was the adoption of paths of deferred, partial satisfaction, giving birth to the psychic register thanks to this complexity. Totalitarian leaders deny the scapegoats they deport any form of human character, and imprison or massacre en masse without any other reference than their whims or their calculations aimed at maintaining terror and preserving their power. Depending on the circumstances, the people in question here are Jews, communists, “enemies of the people”, Kulaks, the bourgeoisie, Ukrainian peasants,

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or Tartars . . . This regime of persecutions without any limits has no rules, and once again differs here from the confrontations between clans of different totems involving “savages”, where there are at least prescribed arrangements. It is the case, is it not, that certain surprising contemporary traits of the social, political, and cultural life of diverse countries and their types of development show, in particular in the evocation and practice of violence and murder, a dimension that could be qualified as pretotemic. By this term, I mean the forceful potential of psychological dynamics devoid of inhibitions which are much more suggestive of the horde and its leader than of the group of brothers and its complicated cult of the assassinated father. Without taking linear chronology literally, which has the disadvantage of drawing attention to the qualifier of “pre-totemic”, I am referring more here to the fragile, discontinuous, and reversible character of access to civilisation. I have chosen to speak here about the reception given by anthropologists to Totem and Taboo because Freud drew support from their work to address them, and, no doubt, also because they were wellinformed men who were particularly capable of expressing their point of view on this kind of subject. Their professional group, chosen as a typical example of this relative deafness, is obviously not alone in this respect; moreover, it cannot be said today to have a uniform point of view on this subject. As Juillerat writes, When one looks back on the history of anthropological thought, one can see that it has progressed by virtue of a succession of always excessive and exclusive crazes for earlier and concurrent contributions, and a latent interdisciplinary “war” where scientific progress was—and still is—too easily confused with a quest for novelty at any price. (2001, pp. 53–54, translated for this edition)

Should we not adopt this lucid description of the war of generations, which is applicable to many other disciplines in the human sciences? That is the way with men and their “sciences”. How could it be otherwise? But I must confess that it is also, for me, a question of facility of presentation because, in fact, I am speaking just as much about us. I am less interested in the characteristics of men who devote their energy to holding positions akin to that of the leader of the horde than

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in the other, collective aspect of totalitarian situations, without which these regimes of terror cannot last. I would like to throw light on the forced nature of the acceptance of servitude, which can only with certain reservations be described as “voluntary” (cf. the highly original and vigorous work of Etienne de La Boétie, 1548), but which the title of a recent book by M. Crépon (2012) designates rather well as Le Consentement meurtrier (Murderous Consent). Totem and Taboo makes this eagerness to submit, which can be observed so readily, more intelligible, does it not? This is perhaps the right moment to examine more closely the repeated astonishment with which we react to the occurrence of dreadful massacres in very different countries, perpetrated on diverse pretexts, where it is particularly difficult to evaluate the respective roles of politics and the economy. Thus, at no moment in his very well documented book, The Origin of Political Order (2011), probably following up on his End of History (1992), does Fukuyama mention the totalitarian catastrophes that disrupted Europe in the twentieth century. The fairly obvious remark may be made that they concerned countries where the organisation of the state and its administrative machinery had in some cases reached a high level of development and organisation, which were intimately connected with their horrific murderous undertakings. Yet, the author of The Origin of Political Order centres his work on the advent of conditions that are favourable for economic development.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

The price of murderous consent?

n its Freudian version, totemism appears as a more or less elaborate institutional means for dealing with one of the canonical forms of human destructiveness: parricide. Without in any way exhausting the subject, the latter constitutes a plausible model of homicidal desire, as it is encountered particularly in men in the rivalries of private life, as well as in the conflicts of power in public life. The subject of this final chapter is not the fate of the victims of mass murders that I have referred to, or the consequences of their dreadful sufferings for them and their loved ones, but, rather, the effects of these mass murders on the social group as a whole which consents to their execution in varying degrees and circumstances. In his “Thoughts for the times on war and death” (1915b), Freud writes that his disillusionment on account of the uncivilised behaviour of his “fellow-citizens of the world” during the First World War was unjustified:

I

In reality our fellow citizens have not sunk as low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed . . . Anyone thus compelled to act continually in accordance with precepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations, is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means. (pp. 284–285)

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Yet, it seemed to him, in 1914, that this temporary or lasting regression “probably involved no breach in their [peoples and states] relative morality within their own nations” (p. 285). This question, it seems to me, is worth posing once again today. The consequences of the massacre of the First World War for European peoples cannot be envisaged without taking into account the concomitant effects of the Russian revolution of 1917, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the global economic crisis in the 1930s. I am conscious of the need to confine myself to my area of competence; the considerable economic and political consequences of this terrible conflict were certainly considerable: they contributed substantially to the destruction of the European leadership. The War in Europe resulted in nearly ten million dead and eight million invalids. What meanings can be ascribed, anthropologically speaking, to this massacre of young and not so young men? The limits that have been imparted to me in this study and those of my historical culture oblige me to limit myself to the domain of the unconscious aspects of group psychology. I shall do this without ignoring the importance of factors belonging to other possible networks of causality, and will use France as quite a significant illustration in this domain, without being able to deal in such a detailed way with those of the other European countries that are different in many respects. It is also the country that I know best. In France, 10% of the active masculine population was killed (1,390,000 dead or missing; 3,000,000 wounded, of which 700,000 were amputees). The brief passage of the “Roaring Twenties” (“les années folles”, literally, the crazy years) was probably not enough to make those who were mobilised in 1939 forget this context that could easily be observed within the population periodically gathered around the 36,000 monuments to the dead erected around the country. It would be quite surprising if this context did not have its role to play in the “Étrange défaite” (M. Bloch, 1946) and in a part of what followed. We know that the conditions of application of the Nazi ideology in Europe had quite contrasting outcomes, owing in particular to the diversity of attitudes of the more or less silent majority, in particular towards the persecutions of Jews. After Yalta and the division of Europe, the conditions of access to knowledge of the existence of the Soviet gulags were obviously completely different on each side of the Iron Curtain. The very difficult situation of Eastern Europe, where two

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generations passed without experiencing a democratic political regime, was further complicated by the efforts organised by the governments of popular democracies to erase the Holocaust completely from public memory. The fact that in this present work I am setting the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags alongside each other has not made me lose sight of the differences between the particular and intrinsically perverse character of the Nazi ideological system, and, unfortunately, the very regular and perverse deviation of communist ideology. It is no less striking that, apparently, in spite of all this complexity and of all these differences, the global recognition of these two practices of mass murder in Europe took a minimum of almost thirty years after the end of the Second World War to gain the interest of public opinion, even though quite a large number of witnesses had sought to have their testimonies heard (Judt, 2007). In their exceptional scope and their extreme gravity, they overwhelm our capacity to represent them, even at an unconscious level, and, as a result, they continue to have a certain traumatic potential. It perhaps helps us to understand the length of time that was necessary for them to be revealed and the massive underestimation, in my view, of their consequences, without justifying them in any way. In their time, the unwillingness of certain important figures who were responsible for these catastrophes to answer for them, even though they had occupied, or continued to occupy, positions of authority in the state apparatus, with the help of dissimulations, falsifications, and diverse complicities, contributed to the difficulty of evoking them before their deaths. How is the silence that they seem to have been able to obtain in their lifetimes to be understood? Was it fear or residual respect for the men who were in power, in respect of whom it was necessary to accept that one had painfully contradictory feelings? Or the shared interests of groups of leaders covering each other? The result, in any case, is easy to see and confirms, I think, the existence of a malaise that is entirely intelligible. My purpose is to argue that it was not without its consequences for the functioning and organisation of the political and social life of the generations that followed. This malaise apparently affects, once again in varying degrees, the whole of Europe, even if, from one country to another, depending on their history and their more or less divergent political and economic

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situations in relation to Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms, its modes of expression differ. It seems to me that its translation in France is particularly evident on account of the past manifest affirmations of the political and cultural leadership of this country. In former centuries, the French often gave free expression to their sense of figuring among the “beacons of civilisation”, sometimes with success in certain domains. From this point of view, the official and real collaboration of our country in the anti-Semitic policy of the Third Reich, and the deliberate political strategy of dissimulating the Stalinist gulags by the political apparatuses representing the Socialist and Communist left, which were followed for a long time by a very large part of the post-war intelligentsia, contradict in an extremely serious way this ideal imaginary view. These behaviours have become powerful and lasting sources of discredit, especially as they were carried out by personalities who occupied positions of influence, authority, or power in public life—positions that rarely failed to have ideal references affectively attached to them. Each of them in their own way collaborated in, or covered up, mass murders of unequalled scale and horror. The discovery of the scale of the indifference towards the Jews and proof of the blindness towards the real utilisation of terror by regimes which officially embodied credible hopes for social progress, and even for the liberation of humanity, severely tarnished the image of the Republic of Human Rights and called for revisions that were sometimes so divisive that they were never carried out. Taking the measure of the consequences of these catastrophes and of the destructiveness to which they bear witness implies the need for a work of mourning with regard to certain ideal representations of the human species. Extreme political programmes that claimed to offer radically opposing ideological alternatives joined hands to some degree with exceptionally serious and bloody consequences. It is difficult, I think, not to see a connection between these catastrophic collective choices and the disappearance of these two dimensions: of authority and of an ideal reference that is shared by the contemporary world, but taken to an extreme in this country. The collective work of mourning required by these dramas, the monstrous and dissimulated scale of which is difficult to conceive, necessitates trying moments of remembering. The rituals of mourning of past times tried to organise psychological and social conditions

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favourable to the elaboration of these emotional burdens, which, in this case, are gigantic. The life of political debate, and the speculative space of illusion that is necessary for it, has quite different requirements. It is not so surprising, then, that the spirit of politics has disappeared from public life, and that this has perhaps been the case for a much longer period of time than is generally supposed. Taking a few truly monstrous historical figures as scapegoats and holding them responsible for these collective catastrophes is a strategy that is quite commonly used, more or less convincingly. However, it can come at a high price when, through interminable and passionate criticism, for it is unconscious of its own determinants, it leads to discrediting as a matter of principle any form of organisation of collective values by making a confused attack on the very notion of collective ties, and even more so of leadership. Is it not remarkable that in this context of post-war economic prosperity, from the 1960s onward, there has been such a strong demand in Western Europe for individual autonomy, such determination to eliminate all constraints pertaining to private life, followed by a growing disinterest in public affairs and a discrediting of the political system as a whole, not to mention a mistrust of all public authority (but accompanied by a particular attachment for the generous European “social model”). The almost total disappearance of any genuine political debate and of any effective ethical reference among a significant number of the leaders of finance, and above all in politics, is often attributed to their mediocrity—mediocrity which is sometimes real and growing, but which validates the choices of these cynical figures who display, to a greater or lesser degree, their sense of impunity. It is difficult to imagine that the prolonged and ruthless nature of the criticisms to which they are subjected is not, in certain respects, also a source of pleasure. Generally speaking, the existence of a space for criticising powerful figures is part of the democratic system and, moreover, of every viable political organisation, but it seems, particularly in France, that the election of personalities with evident deficiencies that are incompatible with the functions for which they are candidates is the source of quite an original mixture of anger and enjoyment. This might be said to be the only form of consensus that the French can tolerate, on the express condition that it does not unite them

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around any given source of power, but, rather, in “resistant” opposition towards it. Certain left-wingers of the 1960s and 1970s sometimes expressed their generous devotion towards the Third World in such revolutionary terms that it sometimes gave one the feeling that it compensated for their complete lack of involvement during the war, and that it was an attempt to restore their image while masking this. Without having been involved directly and practically during this period, the students of 1968 participated with their astonishing slogan “CRS (French anti-riot forces) = SS” in an imaginary memorial liturgy where they could choose their camp without undue risk, while differentiating themselves from the hesitations or errors of their parents and grandparents. This psychic work was, it seems, necessary for them at this moment in their lives. In spite of the considerable influence it had on cultural life, this movement was only transmitted to political life and to the following generations in a caricaturised form that was not particularly productive. Are Europeans, and particularly the French, not in a similar anachronic state with regard to everything that resembles a consensus, remaining fixed, without realising it, to the almost unrepresentable consequences of the catastrophic political consequences of the two previous generations with whom they cannot identify? The capacity to resist political policies of force and terror legitimately was only accessible at the time to a minority. The following generations, prey to doubts about the choices that they might have made in such a context, try to find their own way, with a disregard for chronology, by repeating a scenario of rebellion: they are playing out a scenario which, unfortunately, did not take place. Associated today with the desire to repair the narcissistic wound of submission to totalitarian powers, or of connivance with them, is the more elementary pleasure of rebellion for its own sake, marked by an ambivalence of feelings that the text Totem and Taboo seems to me to elucidate—that is to say, a combination of extremely critical revolt with attachment to the positions of the previous generations. I am, of course, fully aware that this description principally concerns my own country, and that, for instance, the history of the political responsibility of Germany is different, as is its economic and social situation. The latter is dominated by an aptitude for negotiation and consensus and by an energy for work, which, moreover, stands in

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contrast with a demography that remains a matter of concern. I am also conscious of the contrasting diversity of certain countries of central Europe in their political positions towards the Soviet Union, as well as in their attitudes towards their Jewish populations. I neither have the capacity nor the intention of demonstrating here what can sometimes be understood about their social and political attitudes in this domain of the consequences of murderous consent, and sometimes much more than that. I simply want to propose a plausible version of one dimension of the European malaise: it is tangible for me in the growing forms of refusal, for more than forty years now, of responsibilities and projects aimed at establishing collective ties that would constitute a reference for social organisation. The gravity of the discredit of the ruling class, and the risk of chaos in a difficult economic context, favours the emergence among those who are most socially vulnerable of a populism that is favourable to the appearance of a leader along the lines of a leader of the horde. The acceptance of a number of ground rules over which there is a consensus in social life necessarily entails ambivalence. We all, of course, individually, have more or less conscious reasons for refusing constraints, for debating their usefulness and legitimacy, even to the point of manifesting an unwillingness or impossibility to identify with positions of authority, of prohibition, and of power, of whatever kind. It seems to me that we also sometimes find ourselves here on somewhat surprising ground, one that is generally considered as private and encountered in the profession that I have practised for the last forty years. In a paper devoted to the decline of parental authority (Lucas, 2010), as I have observed it as a consultant doctor in a centre for psychiatric consultations for children and adolescents in Paris (Alfred Binet Centre), I have tried to understand certain social and political dimensions of this decline. I am not referring here to the classical difficulties of parent–child relations in adolescence, but to those that also arise today with young, and, indeed, sometimes very young, children. Daily choices, for example, to do with arrangements for meals, going to bed, washing, dressing, and, later on, education, are sometimes dealt with by the parents in an atmosphere of anxiety in such a way that it affects the child and spoils his or her relationship with them.

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The family is not the only setting where this situation of reluctance to take on educative positions that were formerly occupied without major anxiety with very young children can be observed. It can also be encountered in kindergarten with some teachers who lack authority with first and second year children, who themselves are quite disorientated by the scale of the effects that their enquiring provocations have on their teacher. I suggested, of course, that these difficulties of identifying with parental functions and with the exercise of authority hitherto considered as legitimate be understood in relation to the personal histories of the different protagonists. But I was also struck by how these parents seemed unable to find any useful points of reference in contemporary ways of living. I understand authority here in the sense that it was accorded to parents in the past, particularly with children. It may be understood in the sense in which one can, for example, say today that the work of Darwin is held to be authoritative on the subject of the evolution of the species in most European countries. As Arendt (in On Revolution, 1963) notes in the chapter that she devotes to authority, it appeared as the expression of a hierarchy that was collectively accepted for its fairness and its legitimacy, orientating the knowledge of the past and constituting links in the succession of generations. The obedience that it requires thus excludes any use of coercion, or even of reasoned persuasion, and even more so of force and violence, which are a mark of its weakness. I am not overlooking, whether one deplores it or is delighted by it, the quasi-disappearance nowadays of this dimension that was once decisive in many of the ties of past civilisations (with tradition and religion). Over the past five centuries in Europe, family or customary mediations which formerly linked together the different traditional figures of authority, family, social, political, and religious, distant heirs of the totemic system, have become weaker for all sorts of social, economic, and cultural reasons. Interested in what they could gain politically from the disarray of a part of the population after the end of the First World War, totalitarian regimes generally tried to substitute themselves for families via youth movements capable of exerting a powerful hold over the population, sometimes even by asking their members to show their symbolic aptitude for parricide in a univocal logic that was quite different from that of the totemic meal.

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During the past half century, the attenuation of the indications of accepted limits has pushed into the background the manifest conflictual aspects of psychic life, allowing issues linked to a lack of a capacity for containing conflict and to a lack of organisation of psychic life to appear more clearly in the development of children. They are often expressed at a behavioural level. Are they more favourable to the work of elaboration that has been required by civilisation up until now, admittedly in a certain state of discontent, described by Freud nearly eighty years ago, but obviously not exclusively (discontent is also possible independently of it)? The question remains open for the time being. Particularly in view of the fact that today “progress”, as undeniable as it is in the domain of technologies, is open to some doubt: its authority is no longer beyond question either. This whole context has given parents more freedom: in their educational choices, for instance. At the same time, this new margin of freedom has become loaded for some, if not many today, with worrying significations: in their parental functions, without external references, they feel lost and alone. Today, many people can only rely on their personal capacities for elaborating their identifications with their own parents. Identification with parental authority as Freud described it in his New Introductory Lectures (1933a, p. 62ff) requires a certain decline of conflict with it, a certain conscious work of renunciation and mourning of childhood wishes. Whether it is compensation after a renunciation or a preventative promulgation before a restriction imposed from without, identification with parental authority comprises a painful dimension. Many people, in today’s cultural context, apparently have great difficulty in facing this and in setting limits for their children. They feel at a loss when it comes to resignifying prohibitions linked to the difference between the sexes and the generations. Occupying this place is, for them, in a certain way, a way of answering for the world, and they feel they do not find support for their legitimacy in their relations with the previous generations. This situation is certainly not a new one, but I wonder if the dramas that they went through do not aggravate it very considerably by reducing the transmissions necessary for the succession of generations. Perhaps we have not sufficiently recognised collectively the extreme gravity of the blow inflicted by our behaviours on our identificatory reference

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points and on our collective and individual ideals. The construction of political projects, with what it entails in the way of an ideal dimension around which there is a consensus, is apparently compromised. In putting forward these ideas, I am not overlooking the “individualist” collective benefits that this situation confers on those who freely disguise a simple “return to savagery” (“ensauvagement”) (T. Delpech, 2005) and think that we can invest the values of civilisation without first recognising the gap that separates us from them. Only then will we be able to maintain them energetically as ideas to be attained. *  *  * As I was looking through the anthropological literature over the past century on the subject of totemism, I was surprised on several occasions by the distance taken by this literature from Freud’s essay, even though this text and those that followed it on the same theme seemed to me to find terrible illustrations in the political events of this century. I shall, no doubt, be reproached for utilising the benefit of hindsight in support of my thesis; while the suggestion that this publication had a traumatic effect for anthropologists seems plausible, the orientations of structural anthropology are clearly more complex and personal, and I do not feel it is possible to tackle them any further in this book. However, with regard to the difficulties encountered in introducing the notion of the death drive in 1920, Freud wrote, I presume that a story is coming into effect in this rejection. Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct? Why did we hesitate to make use, on behalf of our theory, of facts which were obvious and familiar to everyone . . . It contradicts too many religious presumptions and social conventions. No, man must be naturally good or at least good natured. If he occasionally shows himself brutal, violent, or cruel, these are only passing disturbances of his emotional life, for the most part provoked, or perhaps only a consequence of the inexpedient social regulations which he has hitherto imposed on himself. (1933a, pp. 103–104)

The present “crisis” could be linked to the sense that the ruling classes have, that in spite of extensive measures of deregulation, “growth” today has its limits and will not be able, as in the post-war period, to dampen future conflicts. It will, thus, be linked to the fear

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of an elementary “pre-political” form: that of the primitive struggle of the brothers of the horde who have scarcely changed and, in the absence of sufficient mental work, can only take the path of extremist pseudo-religiosities which, in many respects, are “pre-totemic”. A reflection on the nature, the origin, and the functions of totemic systems of former times is, thus, far from being irrelevant to the present situation: Totem and Taboo presents them as very old and widespread examples of modes of the social and cultural creation of authority which were powerfully involved in former times in the processes of hominisation and civilisation by their capacity to lay down a hierarchical organisation of taboos and values, collectively accepted for the fairness and legitimacy that they established. Traces of these types of institutions can still be observed in many civilisations. The progressive individualisation of religious organisations and the distinct legal systems in Europe, their relative detachment from any political, ethnic, or national dimension, constitutes, in fact, an exception on the planet. In its longstanding sense of itself as incarnating progress, the West conducts itself as if it had forgotten the strength of the mixed ties of families, tribes, castes, and religions that are actually at work in the lives of many men and women in the world.

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APPENDIX

Summary of the main lines of Freud’s essay

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will be brief with the first three chapters. Freud begins by pointing out that those whom we describe as savages . . . set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment. (1912–1913, pp. 1–2)

Borrowing his description of the totemic system from some of the most well known ethnologists of his time, he insists on the fact that in almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is “exogamy”, an institution related to totemism. (p. 4, original emphasis)

Taking all sorts of examples, he illustrates his understanding of the totemic system as being related to the horror of incest, while his practice of psychoanalysis had led him to consider the child’s relation to 241

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his parents, dominated as it is by incestuous longings, as the nuclear complex of neurosis. Freud then draws on the ethnological literature to discuss the signification of taboos (taboos attached to enemies, kings, and dead persons are given as examples). Their existence seems to rest on the presence in these situations of a dangerous force transmitted by contact, and then probably divided between the two contrary, but equally untouchable, categories of the sacred and the unclean. He then compares these phenomena with the compulsions and rites that are observable, in particular, in obsessional neurosis. Common to these customs, taboos, and compulsions is the fact that they lack any assignable motive and are maintained by an internal necessity. The practice of psychoanalysis shows the relation between compulsions and ambivalence: the existence in the mind of two currents of contradictory desires in relation to which no compromise is possible, for if the prohibition against contact is noisily conscious, the desire for contact is unconscious because it was repressed in very early childhood. Freud then examines the consequences of this relationship: Taboo is a primaeval prohibition forcibly imposed (by some authority) from outside, and directed against the most powerful longings to which human beings are subject. The desire to violate it persists in their unconscious; those who obey the taboo have an ambivalent attitude to what the taboo prohibits. The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation; and it acts like a contagion because examples are contagious and because the prohibited desire in the unconscious shifts from one thing to another. (p. 35)

“The primitive races of whom we have knowledge”, he writes, whether in past history or in the present time . . . people the world with innumerable spiritual beings both benevolent and malignant . . . we ourselves are not very far removed from this belief that the souls which live in human beings . . . are to a certain extent independent of their bodies. (p. 76)

If the authors are to be believed, humanity has produced three great conceptions of the world: animistic (mythological), religious, and

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scientific. The concrete need to put the world in the power of men plays its part in the system of animism; it is accompanied by a body of magical instructions which Freud prefers to compare with technology: it is a matter of subjecting natural phenomena to the will of man, of protecting the individual from his enemies, and of giving him the power to harm his enemies. Psychological laws are here put in the place of natural laws: primitive man has immense trust in the power of his desires. Freud compares this situation, moreover, with children’s play where “the omnipotence of thoughts” is operative. Particularly remarkable in compulsive ideas, this omnipotence of thoughts can be observed in all the other neuroses. If the successive conceptions of the world, animistic, religious, and scientific, trace a sort of evolutionary process during which man may be said to have gradually given up his omnipotence and taken the measure of his insignificance, in fact, in the confidence in the power of the human mind there survives a portion of the primitive belief in omnipotence in connection with the principal traits of psycho-sexual evolution: the initial narcissistic positions are never completely abandoned: “a human being remains to some extent narcissistic” (p. 89). Drawing on his conception of the function of dreams, Freud suggests that, in the animistic system, the manifest reasons for the observable customs or observances considered as superstitious do not excuse us from the duty of searching for their hidden motives, as in dreams and symptomatic manifestations. They turn out to be provisional psychological constructions that, like screens, act as defences against understanding. “Once we go beyond these constructions,” he writes, we begin to realize that the mental life and cultural level of savages have not hitherto had all the recognition they deserve . . . as is true of our attitude towards the mental life of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so greatly underestimated. (pp. 97, 99)

In Chapter IV, which concludes his essay, Freud turns in succession to the texts of anthropologists in order “to obtain a correct picture of the nature of totemism”. He writes,

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If we seek to penetrate to the original nature of totemism, without regard to subsequent accretions or attenuations, we find that its essential characteristics are these: Originally, all totems were animals, and were regarded as the ancestors to the different clans. Totems were inherited only through the female line. There was a prohibition against killing the totem (or – which under primitive conditions, is the same thing – against eating it). Members of a totem clan were forbidden to practise sexual intercourse with one another. (p. 107, original emphasis)

Freud is, none the less, struck by the fact that, in Reinach’s description, the taboo of exogamy is not mentioned at all, while the taboo founded on descent from the totem animal is only referred to in passing. In fact, a wide divergence of opinions on the subject exist, and in particular on the relations between totemic organisation and the taboo upon incest. Devoting fifteen or so pages to the different theorisations of the origin of totemism, Freud sets out in succession the nominalist, sociological, and psychological theories. The origin of exogamy and its relations with totemism are the subject of opposing theories: . . . one which seeks to maintain the original presumption that exogamy forms an inherent part of the totemic system, and the other which denies that there is any such connection and holds that the convergence between these two features of the oldest cultures is a chance one. (p. 120)

It seems to him, none the less, that it is impossible not to agree with those opinions according to which “the increasing complication of the Australian restrictions upon marriage . . . bear ‘the impress of deliberate design’ and were aimed at achieving the result that they have in fact achieved” (p. 121). Contrary to the opinion of Westermarck that “there is an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth” (p. 122), Freud cites Frazer’s considerations on the incest taboo: It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by law. There is no law commanding men to eat and drink or forbidding them to put their hands out of the fire . . . The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do. (p. 123)

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So, he turns to a quite different attempt to explain the origin of the fear of incest based on a hypothesis of Charles Darwin who “deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity” (p. 125). After citing Darwin at length, Freud mentions Atkinson (1903), who was the first to realise that “the practical consequence of the conditions obtaining in Darwin’s primal horde must be exogamy for the young males” (p. 126). A few pages further on, Freud stipulates, All we have done is to take at its literal value an expression used by these people, of which the anthropologists have been able to make very little and which they have therefore been glad to keep in the background . . . If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core – not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem – coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two principal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis. (pp. 131–132)

Freud then extracts from a book on the religion of the Semites by [Robertson] Smith (1899) the hypothesis according to which a singular ceremony, the totemic meal, has always been an integral part of the totemic system. Animal sacrifices appear to be older; linguistic survivals make it certain that the portion of the sacrifice allotted to the god was regarded as his real food: the oldest form of sacrifice, prior to the use of fire, resided in the shared enjoyment of the flesh and blood of an animal. The ethical force of this collective meal rested upon very ancient ideas of the significance of eating and drinking together, and the author stresses the importance of fellowship in the laws of hospitality. The sacrificial meal was, thus, at the origin of a tribal feast, obeying the law that only the tribal parents eat together. There cannot be the slightest doubt, says Robertson Smith, that the slaughter of an animal was originally among the acts which “are illegal to an individual, and can only be justified when the whole clan shares the responsibility of the deed” . . . The rule that every participant at the

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sacrificial meal must eat a share of the flesh of the victim has the same meaning as the provision that the execution of a guilty tribesman must be carried out by the tribe as a whole. (p. 136, Freud’s emphasis)

Robertson-Smith, Freud writes, “brings forward copious evidence for identifying the sacrificial animal with the primitive totem animal”. He derives this evidence from later antiquity, but also from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs as well as the sacrifices of bears in North America and in Japan. For him, the periodic killing and consumption of the totem in times before the worship of anthropomorphic deities had been an important element of totemic religion. Freud says he is not unaware of the objections to this theory of sacrifice, “but they have not diminished to any important extent the impression produced by Robertson Smith’s hypothesis” (p. 140). Freud then returns to the manifestations of mourning and to the festive occasion as decisive emotional elements of the totemic meal: by eating the totem, the clan members reinforce their identification with it and with one another, but they also need to reject the responsibility for the slaughter. Psychoanalysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing is a festive occasion – with the fact that it is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the father. (p. 141)

How could the earliest form of social organisation have developed out of a state that Freud imagines on the model of Darwin’s primal horde where, of course, there is no place for totemism? By way of providing an answer to these questions, Freud writes, One day, the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength.) Cannibal savages as they were, it

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goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of the brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things – of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion. (pp. 141–142)

After calling attention to the close similarity of Atkinson’s conclusions and his own with regard to the murder of the father of Darwin’s primal horde, Freud returns to the ambivalence of the brothers’ feelings and to the role of their guilt, which coincides in this instance with the collective sense of remorse involved in the construction of the totemic system. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psychoanalyses under the name of “deferred obedience”. (p. 143)

They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the substitute for their father, the totem, and they renounced its fruits by renouncing their claims to the women who had now been set free. In this way, moved by their filial sense of guilt, they created the two taboos of totemism that, for that reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. If the first taboo is founded wholly on emotional motives, the second has a powerful practical basis as well: sexual needs divide men; each of the brothers would have liked to have all the women to himself, like the father of the primal horde. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together – but not, perhaps, until they had lived through many dangerous crises – to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching their father. In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong – and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde. (p. 144)

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Freud then seeks to show how the taboo that protects the life of the totem animal was considered as the first attempt at a religion: an attempt to solve the problem of filial guilt towards the father. Totemism not only includes manifestations of remorse and attempts at atonement, but also, in the commemorative festival, a repetition again and again of the murder whenever, as a result of the changing conditions of life, the cherished fruit of the crime – appropriation of the paternal attributes – threatened to disappear . . . In the main, it was with the impulses that led to parricide that the victory lay . . . For a long time afterwards, the social fraternal feelings, which were the basis of the whole transformation continued to exercise a profound influence on the development of society. (pp. 145–146)

Although restrained by “a great number of powerful motives” from any attempt to follow the history of religions from their origin in totemism to their condition today, and, thus, following only the threads of the totemic sacrifice and the relation of son to father, in the last twenty pages of his essay, Freud explores his thesis further, always with clarity but involving a proliferation of condensed ideas which are not really possible to summarise in the same way as I have been doing so far. Long commentaries would be necessary and many ideas outlined here are developed further in Group Psychology (1921c) and later in Moses and Monotheism (1939a). It is striking, moreover, that these last and difficult pages, owing to the proliferation of ideas, have given rise to very few critical remarks. I will just give a succinct summary of them here, inviting the reader to read them himself. It is a question of showing, with all the necessary tact, that nostalgia for the father is always at work in the different religious constructions, from the appearance of gods, and then of kings, up to the present time. He writes, If psycho-analysis deserves any attention, then – without prejudice to any other sources or meanings of the concept of God, upon which psycho-analysis can throw no light – the paternal element in that concept must be a most important one. But in that case the father is represented twice over in the situation of primitive sacrifice: once as God and once as the totemic animal victim . . . Thus, while the totem may be the first form of father-surrogate, the god will be a later one,

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in which the father has regained his human shape – if in the process of time some fundamental change has taken place in man’s relation to the father, and perhaps, too, in his relation to animals (domestication). (pp. 147–148)

Over the course of time, their resentment against their father diminished and their longing for him increased. “It thus became possible,” he contends, for an ideal to emerge which embodied the unlimited power of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him. As a result of decisive cultural changes, the original democratic equality that had prevailed among all the individual clansmen became untenable; and there developed at the same time an inclination, based on veneration felt for particular human individuals, to revive the ancient paternal ideal by creating gods. (pp. 148– 149)

Further on, he adds, “Let us assume it to be a fact, then, that in the course of the later development of religions the two driving factors, the son’s sense of guilt and the son’s rebelliousness, never became extinct” (p. 152). And Freud goes on to give several illustrations of the efforts of the son to put himself in the place of the father-god. He draws a comparison between the religion of Mithras and Christianity: “a son-religion replaced a father-religion” (p. 154). Further on, he adds, An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of the sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise . . . the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex . . . though my arguments have led to high degree of convergence upon a single comprehensive nexus of ideas cannot blind us to the uncertainties of my premises or the difficulties involved in my conclusions. (p. 157)

Freud concludes by saying that the basis of his whole argument is the supposed existence “of a collective mind in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual”, and adds that “any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a

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kind would seem to be preferable” (p. 158). So, the question becomes: What are the paths and means of transmission in the sequence of generations? “A part of the problem”, he suggests, “seems to be met by the inheritance of psychical dispositions which, however, need to be given some sort of impetus in the life of the individual before they can be roused into actual operation”. Freud explicitly states that there are no mental impulses that could be so completely suppressed as to leave no trace whatever behind them, and he adds, “An unconscious understanding such as this of all the customs, ceremonies and dogmas left behind by the original relation to the father may have made it possible for later generations to take over their heritage of emotion” (p. 159). Finally, the guilt feelings of neurotics have their source not in factual reality, but in psychical reality: was it not perhaps the same with primitive men? The distinction that might appear fundamental to others does not affect the heart of the matter in Freud’s judgement: “if wishes and impulses have the full value of facts for primitive men, it is our business to give their attitude our understanding attention”. Historical reality also has its share in the impulses of neurotics, childhood being the forerunner of the subsequent phase of excessive morality. There is no sharp separation between thinking and doing in either of them. “And that is why,” Freud concludes, “without laying claim to any finality of judgement, I think that in the case before us it may safely be assumed that ‘in the beginning was the Deed’” (p. 161). “Into this obscurity,” Freud writes, “one single ray of light is thrown by psychoanalytic observation . . . There is a great deal of resemblance between the relations of children and of primitive men towards animals” (p. 126). And he then compares the totemic system with the animal phobias easily observable in children. He was the first to have described them and to have linked them to the ambivalence of children’s feelings towards their parents, and particularly their father. Through the father’s attempt to treat the phobia of his fiveyear-old boy, Freud shows the connection of these difficulties of development with the Oedipus complex: “These observations justify us, in my opinion”, Freud writes, “in substituting the father for the totem animal in the formula for totemism (in the case of males)” (p. 131).

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1. Goldenweiser is surely right to confine himself to the historical facts; for, in questions of prehistory, the succession of hunting, gathering, agriculture, the Stone Age, and the discovery of fire and metals, is more or less classically admitted. 2. I do not see any serious reason to criticise Boas for not having had the opportunity in his time of fully appreciating, on the subject of marriage, what the strength of desires, the power of the imagination, the hatred of all limits, perversity or madness, can consist of in the human species, depending on the situation. 3. This accusation of not having been able to formulate a sociological theory of totemism seems to me to be eloquent, in as much as this theory aspires to give an exclusive account of the totality of the points of view on the totemic phenomenon. It touches on a more general epistemological question. For Rosa, the criticism of Lévi-Strauss is clearly excessive. 4. This is confirmed explicitly by Freud’s footnote in Totem and Taboo: The lack of precision in what I have written in the text above, its abbreviation of the time factor and its compression of the whole subject-matter, may be attributed to the reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic. It would be foolish to aim at exactitude in such

251

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questions as it would be unfair to insist upon certainty. (1912– 1913, pp. 142–143) 5. The reader will find a quite unexpected elucidation of this question in E. Todd (2011, p. 147). Todd seems to have sidelined totemism and anthropology. However, his conclusion coincides partially with one aspect of the original form of family life which approximates to the Freudian hypothesis (succeeding that of the horde, in the Ango-Saxon sense, of groups of apes, borrowed by Darwin from Dr Savage . . .). Todd, a demographer by training, speaks about it with humour: he says it had taken him forty years of powerfully documented work to propose the idea that the original family common to the whole of humanity since the beginnings of the Sumer civilisation largely resembles the one with which we are familiar, that is, the nuclear, bilocal family treating men and women in an “equivalent” manner, surrounded by a large network of kinship with organisations of a patrilinear clan type. This family, he affirms, is, in fact, archaic, and typical of distant parts of Eurasia; the application of a diffusionist method across the continent suggests to him that this mode of family organisation was progressively driven out of the centre of Eurasia by strongly patrilinear family systems conferring considerable advantages of efficiency and prestige in activities of territorial conquests and of war. He argues very convincingly in favour of the coincidences between the above and the historical data of the very numerous migrations of nomad populations from central Asia to Europe. 6. I have not had access to Radin’s text and owe this citation to Pulman (1991b, p. 440). 7. See the Editor’s note to the English translations (Freud, 1912–1913, p. ix). 8. I will not insist here on the long-standing importance of the implications of this theme of “the good savage” developed in this book, which ends by evoking the work of Rousseau. 9. He did not ask himself the same questions as Freud concerning the relations between thing and word representations: the source of these representations is always in external perceptions, on the condition of bringing into play their capacities for binding so that they may gain access to consciousness and, consequently, the role of the object in these bindings. A relatively recent line of thinking emphasises, moreover, the interest of not distinguishing prematurely the opposition between outside and inside. There is nothing particularly surprising about that. Just as psychoanalysis is a growing body of knowledge, so, too, I believe, is the corpus of experiences and observations in ethnology. The question has obviously been studied at length by psychoanalysts from the particular angle of this

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

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nothing outside, as a trace of an absence, that is to say, of a past presence, but one that has never gained access to consciousness and returns, for example, in a delirious form. Yes . . . “freely” . . . “with certain ritual precautions . . . prior permission to hunt and retrospective apology”. And a bit further on we read, “the animal offered itself more readily to the iron of the hunters from its clan . . .”. Is this a traditional Ojibwa joke that makes it possible to avoid ascribing meanings to these ambiguous, if not contradictory statements? With this author, on the question of taboo, his facetious casualness is apparently not meant as a joke. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud relates the story of the owner of a kettle who complained that the person who had borrowed it had returned to him with a hole in it. The person who borrowed it replied, first, that it was already damaged when he borrowed it; second, that he had returned it intact; and third, that he had never borrowed it in the first place. Does this amount to a sort of self-portrait, quite a poignant marker along a trajectory leading from the sensibility, the sensuality, and the charm of Tristes tropiques to ambitious and abstract systematic generalisations in the service of a theoretical apparatus that is as original as it is questionable? Is this the price paid for the sacrifice of affect in a man who, both in his early work, Totemism, and in his last writings (Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, 1988, p. 167), expresses his admiration for Rousseau, his identification with him, with his compassion? This gap, this struggle against his sensibility, resonate painfully, and encourages us to go beyond the casual (at the very minimum) attitude that he cannot help adopting towards psychoanalysis. It is only in Chapter Fourteen of The Jealous Potter that Lévi-Strauss recalls the existence and the role in Freud’s work of oppositions organised by the movements of “turning round into its contrary” and “turning round upon the self” described by Freud (1915c). These movements, which are described as occurring prior to repression, are an integral part of the evolution of the drive organisation. The honesty of this admission is praiseworthy. I know this text only from my reading of Pulman, 1991b, p. 440. It is worth pointing out here that this dialectical contrasting pair separating–uniting exists in Freud’s description of repression as early as 1915. In his presentation of psychoanalysis, Freud evokes neurotic disorders, which constituted the majority of his clientèle, even if today many discussions are possible in this area.

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17. If I have understood Lévi-Strauss’ conclusion correctly, totemic illusion results from a projection aimed at satisfying instinctual demands. This theory of projection is neither affirmed nor related to existing theories. I do not particularly want to reproach the author in this connection, knowing how difficult this theory is and the implications of great complexity that it has in ordinary and pathological psychology. We also know that Freud tried to develop such a theory, but then abandoned it. 18. “But one of our main theses is precisely that the properties by virtue of which the peripheral systems are modular are not properties of the central cognitive processes in general” (Fodor, 1983, p. 67, translated for this edition). 19. Poirier (1968) and Rosa (2003) both mention it in their volumes. 20. At the end of the nineteenth century, a publication by Spencer and Gillen (1899) had questioned important totemic notions in the Arunta people. For example, they asserted that clan totemism was not hereditary; that the modalities of exogamy and totemic affiliation were related to an ancestor reincarnated in places among which the mother chooses the place where she first felt she was pregnant; that the alimentary taboo of the totem could be replaced by a solemn act of eating. 21. I am grateful to P. Descola and to anthropologists for bringing to our knowledge the existence of this mode of waking psychic life akin to the dream without being indistinguishable from it. Some of the features of his description of Aboriginal culture (the coexistence of intense emotional movements overwhelming the possibilities of symbolic expression, crude concrete language, obsessional classificatory preoccupations) mobilise the semiological sets present in a certain percentage of the populations in which the “naturalist collective” is dominant. Links no doubt exist between the sets of traits that psychiatrists, on their side, have collected, and those of the Aboriginals, but in different senses because, for the latter, such traits are present in their culture and guarantee their integration within their group, whereas the patients of psychiatrists elaborate, in a more or less personal way, this type of relation in the movements of withdrawal of the groups in which they find themselves. 22. Is it on this basis that we must understand, in connection with “lines of filiation of analogy”, accounting for the often preponderant place that ancestors occupy in this mode of identification, the somewhat surprising observation that “all this stands in total contrast to animism and totemism, from which these cumbersome ancestral figures are absent”? (p. 227). 23. According to the Larousse Dictionary, predation is

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a very widespread mode of nutrition in the animal kingdom that consists in taking possession of a prey [animal or vegetable] for the purpose of devouring it or using its substance as nourishment; mode of acquiring food of paleolithic man, and partially of mesolithic man who lived from hunting and gathering. 24. To what extent is the history of this great division between nature and culture, and the debate to which it has given rise, particularly in anthropology, of interest to psychoanalysts? The issue of the relations between nature and culture is of little interest for psychoanalysis as a method of investigation or therapy. It is scarcely implicated in its peripheral developments. Freud never reneged on the irreducible character of drive conflicts in the process of socialisation. His project is much more centred on the modes of conflict, the articulations of the conflicting forces, their dynamic, their topography, and their economy, than on a taxonomic delimitation of territory. The alternatives of the agencies of the second topography (ego, id, superego) all contain ambiguities vis-à-vis this issue. The drive, which some think perhaps can be approximated to nature, is, in fact, for Freud, from the outset a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. (1915c, p. 122) 25. In Titus Adronicus, for instance, Shakespeare has a queen unwittingly eat pâté made with the heads of her children. 26. Freud’s final decision in favour of the deed stands in contrast here with his open hesitation with regard to the case of the “Wolf man”, written in 1913–1914 (1918b). Thus, before Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the topographical revision of 1920, there was already here the idea of a connection between the traumatic factor, the absence of representation, and repetition through acting out. 27. After highlighting with a freshness of mind that is enviable in certain respects, the existence in Freud of traits related to his Oedipal organisation, particularly his possible guilty feelings of rivalry with his father, Freeman (even though this plausible rivalry did not trouble Freud too much in the course of his destiny) goes on to interpret the invocation in Totem and Taboo of a murderous act on the father of the primal horde as a consequence of Freud’s alleged personal problem. In so doing, he does

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not take any major risks (for it is difficult to imagine why Freud would not have attained this developed register of psychic life), but what leads him to ascribe a symptomatic status to this group of notions which, it seems, are quite ego-syntonic for the man Freud? 28. At the limits of my subject, a reading of Civilization and its Discontents would show us that Freud was divided and very far from turning psychoanalysis into a Weltanschauung, that is, an intellectual construction capable of resolving in a homogenous way all the problems of existence on the basis of a hypothesis that governs everything and where, consequently, no problem remains open (see Freud, 1933a, pp. 158–182). For him, in keeping with the thesis of Totem and Taboo, violence in an elementary form is the source of power; law is defined as the strength of the community. The decisive step is this substitution, but “this transition to the social state leaves this discontent internal to civilization irreducible” (Assoun, 1981, p. 170). The Freudian view of the social contract is not at all the same as Rousseau’s. 29. The gap with Lévi-Strauss’s formulations in connection with Totem and Taboo at the end of his Elementary Structures of Kinship is clearly tangible. The text seems to him to admit of two interpretations (the desire for the mother or the sister, the murder of the father and the sons’ repentance): But perhaps they symbolically express an ancient and lasting dream. The magic of this dream, its power to mould men’s thoughts unbeknown to them, arises precisely from the fact that the acts it evokes have never been committed, because culture has opposed them at all times and in all places. Symbolic gratifications in which the nostalgia for incest (“le regret de l’inceste”) finds its expression, according to Freud, do not therefore commemorate an actual event. They are something else, and more, the permanent expression of a desire for disorder, or rather counter-order. (1949, p. 491)

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REFERENCES

Adorno, T. W. (1951). Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda. In: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (pp. 132–157). London: Routledge Classics. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, H. (1963). On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1965. Assoun, P. (1981). Freud et la politique. Pouvoirs, 11: 155–181. Atkinson, J. J. (1903). Primal Law. London: Longmans, Green. Bachofen, J. (1861). A Study of the Religious and Juridical Aspects of Gyneecrocay in the Ancient World. New York: Mellen Press. Bartoli, H. (1977). Economie et création collective. Paris: Economica. Bloch, M. (1946). Strange Defeat. A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Boas, F. (1911). Handbook of American Indian Languages. Washington Government Print Office, Bureau of American Ethnology, 40. Boas, F. (1916). The origins of totemism. American Anthropologist, 18(3): 319–326. Boas, F. (1920). The methods of ethnology. American Anthropologist, 22(4): 311–321. Boas, F. (1938a). General Anthropology. New York: Heath. Boas, F. (1938b). The Mind of Primitive Man. London: Macmillan. Bolk, L. (1926). Le problème de la genèse humaine. Revue française de psychanalyse, 25(2): 243–279. 1961. 257

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INDEX

Adorno, T. W., 208, 225 affect(ive), 90, 97, 109, 118, 135, 153, 165, 179, 192, 195, 200, 232, 253 aspects, 15 complex, 136 disagreeable, 109 manifestations, 93 plane, 96 singular, 198 splitting, 192 ties, 220 aggression, 66, 95, 154, 190, 195–198, 208, 210, 238 American Psychoanalytic Association, 39 anxiety, 47, 89–91, 192, 205, 235–236 Arendt, H., 213, 215, 223–225, 236 Ashley Montagu, M. F., 65 Assoun, P., 256 Atkinson, J. J., 46, 64, 142, 245, 247 attachment, 41–42, 47, 70, 124, 126, 178, 195, 233–234

autonomy, 126, 134, 163, 169, 175, 181–182, 233 Bachofen, J., 115 Bartoli, H., 111 behaviour, 48, 65, 90, 118, 121, 147, 155, 198, 200, 204, 220, 232, 237 aggressive, 198 ancestral, 96 animal, 96 aspects, 185 collective, 185, 204 cycles of, 36 differential, 84 human, 216 mental, 23 modes of, 90 of predation, 196 performative, 119 positive, 84 social, 23

267

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268

INDEX

traditional, 31 typical, 165 uncivilised, 229 Bloch, M., 218, 230 Boas, F., ix, 7, 18–28, 46, 49, 63, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 84, 139–140, 145–147, 159, 251 Bolk, L., 58 Boyer, L., 190 Braunschweig, D., 194, 199, 207 Caillois, R., 92–94 Campbell, D., 130 cannibalism, 54, 93, 189, 194, 197–198, 201–202, 246 Chuliat, C., 27 conscious(ness), 22–23, 25, 44, 56, 62, 77, 146, 211, 214, 230, 235, 242, 252–253 see also: unconscious(ness) amorphous, 103 ego, 41, 152 expressions, 145 field of, 72 forgetting, 200 group, 208 hesitation, 56 historical, 183–184 norms, 164 pre-, 109 psychic life, 152 reactions, 42 reasons, 235 reflective, 180 sub-, 72, 162, 186 thinking, 43 work, 237 Crépon, M., 228 Darwin, C., 33–34, 36, 46, 64, 142, 190, 196, 236, 245–247, 252 death, 4, 41–42, 44, 49, 66, 97, 176, 179, 184, 200, 211, 220, 231 awareness of, 116 drive, x, 238

violent, 200 wishes, 41, 97 Delpech, T., 238 Delrieu, A., 154 Descola, P., 157, 161–162, 164–171, 173–178, 180–183, 185–187, 208, 215, 254 desire, 37, 42, 44, 79, 88, 119, 138, 175, 185, 194, 199–200, 204, 234, 242–243, 247, 251, 256 see also: object aggressive, 208 contradictory, 242 homicidal, 229 imaginary, 209 incest(uous), 32, 153 perverse, 177 prohibited, 242 suppressed, 23 development(al), ix, 19, 21–23, 39, 41, 47, 58, 78, 103, 119, 132, 152–153, 157–159, 164, 168, 174, 181, 193, 196, 198–199, 210, 227–228, 237, 248–250 conspicuous, 11 counterpart, 17 critical, 106 cultural, 19–20, 38 economic, 217, 228 fullest, 1 historic, 17, 74–75, 122 institutional, 217 integral, 14 orthogenetic, 19 peripheral, 255 phylogenetic, 193 progressive, 38 psychic, 193, 200 roots, ix stages, 13 truths, ix disorders, 135, 256 emotion, 90 hysterical, 72 internal, 90, 92

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INDEX

neurotic, 25, 137, 253 structures of, 90, 92 Dosse, F., 92, 109–110, 148 Durkheim, E., 4, 24, 70, 89, 112, 122, 124, 128, 132, 135 Edelman, G., 148 ego, 79, 208, 212, 226, 255 see also: conscious(ness) ideal, 226 super, 207–208, 255 -syntonic, 256 Elkin, P., 85–88, 123, 132–133, 143 emotion(al), 88, 91, 93, 104, 135, 195, 208, 250 see also: life attitude, 36–37, 246 burdens, 233 character, 7 depth of, 219 disordered, 90 elements, 246 excess of, 94 hostile, 32 movements, 254 motives, 247 quasi-religious, 2 reserve, 94 resistances, 62 suspended, 36 turbulence, 135 value, 12, 16 Enriquez, E., 64, 209–210 Eribon, D., 81, 148, 253 Evans-Pritchard, E., 98–99 Fain, M., 194, 199, 207 fantasy, 44, 51–52, 54, 119, 177, 194, 196, 203–204 activity, 79 iridescent, 50 primal, 191 Ferdigan, L. M., 114 Firth, R., 83–85, 95–96, 123 Fleagle, J., 197 Fodor, J., 148, 254

269

Fortès, M., x, 77, 94–96, 121–129, 132, 135, 182, 208 Frazer, J., 2–3, 6–8, 29, 112–113, 128, 244 free association, 25, 73, 132, 138, 140–141, 143 Freeman, D., 191, 194, 196, 200, 203, 255 Freud, S. (passim) cited works, ix–x, xii, 1, 5–6, 13, 21, 24, 34, 39, 45, 47, 53, 56, 63, 70, 73, 80, 113, 117, 129, 137–139, 142, 152, 154, 191–193, 195, 199, 201–202, 208, 210–212, 224–226, 229, 237, 241–253, 255–256 Wolf Man, 56, 255 Fukuyama, F., 199, 217–218, 220, 222, 228 Furet, F., 55, 219 Gantheret, F., 56–57, 116, 142 Gillen, F., 39, 169, 174, 254 Gillinson, G., 201 Girard, R., 119–120 Godelier, M., 118 Goldenweiser, A., xi, 7–9, 11–16, 18, 47, 76, 113, 251 Goodall, J., 197 Goody, J., 105, 121, 127, 220 Granger, G. G., 111 Green, A., 140, 158, 203, 207 Guidere, M., 221 guilt, 41, 50, 116, 177, 194, 198, 204, 208–210, 212, 224–225, 246–250, 255 see also: unconscious(ness) Habermas, J., 208 Haddon, A. C., 3, 28 Hallowell, A., 120, 124, 126 Harman, C., 216–217 Harris, M., 120 Hartland, E. S., 1–2, 5, 31, 176 hate, 47, 192–194, 204, 207, 209, 224, 251

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270

INDEX

Héritier, F., 56–57, 117–118, 161, 190 Hertz, R., 99 Herzfeld, C., 197 Hiatt, L., 121, 129–136, 222 Hogbin, H., 66 Hutton, J. H., 66 incest(uous), 6, 35, 42–43, 45–46, 51, 106, 113–114, 117–119, 128, 153–154, 190, 193, 197, 199, 211, 219, 241, 244, 247, 256 see also: desire act, 193 attachment, 42 avoidance of, 119 couple, 106 dimension, 37 diverse, 158 drive, 51 fears of, 180, 211, 245 implications, 200 impulses, 37 longings, 242 prohibition of, 7, 33, 51, 118, 153–154, 186, 200 repression of, 210 sexual relations, 241 situation, 106 theory, 149 wishes, 44, 194 instinct(ual), 36–37, 244 aggressive, 238 animal, 191 appetites, 199, 207 aspect, 225 avoidance, 197 bond, 36 demands, 254 discharge, 116, 208 drive source, 121 emotional attitude, 36 force, 207 human, 244 inclinations, 229

knowledge, 191 life, 41, 193 masses, 226 psychological, 47 satisfaction, 58 sexual, 21 strength, 199 International Psychoanalytic Association, 39 intervention, 39, 66, 112, 139, 151, 168, 172 aggressive, 95 direct, 107 Jakobson, R., 26 Janet, P., 72 Janson, J., 197 Jones, E., 5, 29, 32, 35–46, 52, 120, 158–159, 190–191 Jones, M., 39 Judt, T., 231 Juillerat, B., 114–117, 192–193, 196, 227 Jung, C. G., 40, 57, 192 Kaufman, P., 210–212, 215 Kluckohn, C., 120 Kress-Rosen, N., 193, 197 Kris, E., 209, 225 Kroeber, A., 29, 38, 46–54, 57, 59, 63, 90–91, 143, 159 La Boétie, E. de, 228 Labarre, W., 120 Lang, A., 3, 7 Laplanche, J., 25, 138 LeVine, R., 141 Lévi-Strauss, C. (passim) cited works, 67, 70–71, 74–75, 78, 80–81, 83–91, 93–100, 102, 105–106, 110, 122–124, 130, 134–135, 145–148, 253 Lidz, R., 190 Lidz, T., 190

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INDEX

life, 23, 25–26, 42, 44, 114, 142, 144, 159, 168, 170, 176, 184, 192, 215, 248, 250 see also: instinct(ual) adult, 246 animal, 34, 100, 102 autonomous, 175 civilised, 37 commitments, 125 cultural, 19, 227, 234 elixir of, 44 emotion(al), 238 family, 252 fantasmatic, 196 futility of, 184 human, 34, 175 mental, 74, 80, 243 moral, 4 political, 200, 224, 234 primitive, 23 private, 229, 233 psychic, 67, 73, 99, 120, 151–152, 199, 203, 237, 254, 256 public, 229, 232–233 reactions to, 42 sexual, 59, 179, 193 social, 90, 94, 125, 145, 152, 167, 184, 196, 209, 231, 235 Lindzey, G., 154 Linton, R., 77–78, 81, 102, 133 London Psychoanalytic Association, 39 Lowie, R., 15, 20, 79, 159 Lucas, G., ix, 235 Makarius, L., 112 Makarius, R., 112 Malinowski, B., 27–29, 32–38, 45, 52, 56–57, 88, 96, 128, 159, 174, 190 Marett, R., 66, 159 Marx, K., 110, 118, 208, 218–219 Mathews, R. H., 107 Mauss, M., 24, 41, 70, 79, 149 McGuire, W., 57

271

McLennan, J., 115 Mead, M., 27, 120–121, 159 Merton, R. K., 65 Moscovici, M., 211 mourning, 48–49, 184–186, 200, 203–204, 232, 237, 246 Muensterberger, W., 58 Murdock, G. P., 159 Neu, J., 203 Norel, P., 216 object, 2–4, 12, 15, 30–32, 66, 83, 89, 94, 115, 118, 122, 126–127, 149, 154, 163, 171, 175, 177, 183, 185, 190, 192–194, 197, 200, 215–216, 222, 252 desire, 195 inanimate, 42, 179 material, 123 natural, 30, 83, 161 of phobias, 101 relations, 59, 195 totemic, 124 objective, 30 analogy, 96 analysis, 132 aspects, 190 categories, 23 gambit, 124 institution, 71 manner, 121 model, 123–124 properties, 164 oedipal, 46 drama, 153 functioning, 207 organisation, 46, 158, 217, 255 situation, 190 Oedipus complex, ix, 32–33, 36–38, 43, 46, 51, 56–57, 118, 121, 128, 142, 149, 152, 158, 189–190, 194–195, 247, 249–250

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272

INDEX

parricide, 33, 35, 37–38, 90, 119–120, 179, 194, 198, 211, 229, 236, 248 impulse, 91 primal, 36, 116, 159, 225 primitive, 119 Platt, G., 150 Plon, M., xi Poirier, J., 28–29, 69, 146, 254 Pontalis, J.-B., 25, 138 Popper, K., 140 Pouillon, J., 148 Pulman, B., xi, 28, 39–40, 57, 252–253 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 24, 29–31, 41, 69, 89–90, 99–103, 121–125, 128, 131, 153 Radin, P., 40, 57, 159, 252 Reed, K., 197 repression, 18, 32, 41, 109, 195, 210, 242, 245, 253 moral, 32 process, 51 secondary, 193 wishes, 247 Reuterskiöld, E., 4 Rickert, H., 163, 181 Ricoeur, P., 119, 150 Rieff, P., 150, 154 Rivers, W. R., 6, 8, 22, 24, 28, 40, 78, 159 Roazen, P., 208–209 Roheim, G., 40, 52, 58–59, 114, 191 Rosa, F., xi, 6, 15, 27, 29–31, 40, 69, 99, 107, 251, 254 Roudinesco, E., xi Royal Anthropological Institute, x, 78, 158 Sapir, E., 41 Saussure, F. de, 26, 145, 186 Schiavone, A., 214

self, 253 -analysis, 93, 142, 150 -awareness, 124 -centred, 44 -evident, 43, 180, 223 -isolation, 215 -love, 194 -regulation, 111 -taught, 73 sexual see also: incest, instinct, life access, 57 anatomy, 202 clarification, 193 competition, 119 curiosity, 176 difference, 118 drives, 190 homo-, 194, 219, 247 impulses, 47 intercourse, 2, 244 intimacy, 42 needs, 247 organs, 44 promiscuity, 115, 245 psycho-, 243 relationship, 197, 241, 245 rivalry, 119 symbol(-ism), 24, 140 taboos, 51 totemism, 99, 173 sexuality, 40, 197, 199 adult, 75, 128 bi-, 44 homo-, 47, 49, 118, 221 human, 119, 193 infantile, 32, 75, 201 Smith, W. R., 6, 18, 46, 53, 64, 128, 142, 245–246 Spencer, H., 3 Spencer, W., 39, 169, 174, 254 Stanner, W. E. H., 132 Steiner, F., 120 Stephens, W. N., 141, 190 Strehlow, T., 134

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symbol(-ism), 4, 12, 18, 22, 44, 86, 94–95, 118, 126–127, 129, 131, 133–135, 180, 204, 210, 256 see also: sexual animal, 95 aptitude, 236 association, 131 commemoration, 201 conception of, 44 differences, 149 elaborate, 24 expression, 90, 254 function, 109, 136, 207 gratifications, 211, 256 incestuous, 43 interpretation, 23–24, 140 mediations, 70 moiety, 132 of emotional value, 12, 15 of integration, 141 of psychoanalysis, 24 qualities, 131 register, 192 religious, 24, 139 representation, 129 ritual, 95 significance, 24, 123 systems, 135 theory of, 23, 42 totemic, 132 value, 175, 226 Testot, L., 216 Tjon Sie Fat, 118 Todd, E., 108, 252 Trautman, T., 118 Trillat, E., 71–73 Troubetskoy, N., 26, 109, 145 unconscious(ness), 22, 41–42, 44, 74, 79, 107, 109, 121, 145, 154, 159, 190, 233, 242, 250 see also: conscious(ness) activities, 22 aspects, 230

273

atemporal, 116 character, 62, 118, 152 collective, 58 conflict, 41 content, 42 counter-cathexes, 204 dimension, 120 displacement, 204 dynamic configuration, 142 effects, 153 factors, 43 foundations, 145 function, 105 guilt, 203, 210 human, 57 level, 231 manifestations, 41 meaning, 138, 140 mechanisms, 208 mirror, 40 nature, 62, 145, 204 origin, 146 participation, 72 prejudice, 41 psychic implications, 26 meaning, 141 movements, 93 resistances, 200 role, 49 significations, 210 structural invariants, 164 subjective, 153 thoughts, 42–43, 45 traces, 224 wishes, 42 Van Gennep, A., 85–86 Vernant, J. P., 110, 140, 151 Villa, F., 143 violent, 34, 65–66, 99, 177, 200, 212–214, 223–224, 227, 236, 238, 247, 256 see also: death Von Brandenstein, C., 173 von den Steinen, K., 4

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274

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Wallace, E. R., 120–121, 136, 149–151, 154–155, 159, 190–191, 197 war, 65–66, 77, 102, 106, 201, 234, 252 colonial, 67 First World, ix, xi–xii, 5–6, 27, 63, 65, 69, 77, 157, 224, 229–230, 236 pre-, 147 inter-, xii, 29, 69, 147, 150, 225 interdisciplinary, 227 of Independence, 213 of generations, 227 post-, 6, 57, 70, 110, 232–233, 238

Second World, 29, 58, 67, 69, 110–111, 209, 225, 231 taboos of, 224 Weber, M., 218 Weinstein, F., 150 White, L., 120, 159 Whiting, J., 194–196 Wittgenstein, L., 130 Worsley, P. M., 132 Wundt, W., 152 Yerushalmi, Y. H., 142

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