Totemism in North Asia
Keywords:
totems, totemism, North Asia, social organization, symbols, symbolismSynopsis
Totemism is a form of social organization whereby families in a local community distinguish each other by means of natural tokens called totems. A totem is a symbolic ancestor in the shape of an animal, plant or some other phenomenon. Typical totems can be bear, wolf and eagle. The theoretical supposition is that local totems complement and supplement each other. There is a certain number of totems in each local community, for instance 12, and the number of local families have to correspond to this number. The basic premise is that local resources, forests and wildlife, had to be preserved and used in a sustainable manner, and by restricting the number of totemic units, here called totem clans, it was possible to limit the number of people who exploited the local resources, thus preserving them.
The basic assumption underlying this work is that totemism once was a global ideology. Two qualifications that must be made concern chronology and social complexity. In terms of chronology, roughly 10,000 years ago totemism was nearly global and universal in human societies. Today this is different. Truly totemic societies are few and far between. In relation to social complexity, societies where people are in less contact with nature usually are without totemism or show it only in vestigial forms. And in relation to chronology, most researchers assign totemism to a time period that no longer exists. This is in spite of the fact that even today thousands of people belong to totemic societies. The modern researcher simply cannot imagine that people identify themselves as animals: ‘I am a wolf’. This becomes a conceptual blind-spot, and is a basic case of ethnocentrism. We cannot imagine things that do not belong in our lifeworld. Put more bluntly: we cannot imagine the lifeworld of other people.
Yet totemism has been a universal paradigm and a model for social organization across the globe for most parts of the prehistoric and historic eras. People have been bears, eagles and turtles for most of human existence – comfortably so. One reason why this is not known, is that it makes modern people uncomfortable, and nobody are more queasy about this issue than social scientists. This book lays queasiness aside and bluntly asserts that people were totemists.
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