things fall apart
What is totemism? Why have humans nearly universally claimed kinship with animals and plants, with the elements?
The human mind classifies; humans always everywhere compare, contrast, sort and group. The brain's complexity and power in fact allows us to produce a surplus of classifications, affinizing and relating everything we encounter in ramified, overlapping, complex systems of associations. In the absence of ready tools for elaborating abstract ideas, this surfeit of association—produced spontaneously, as the means by which creatures with minds encounter the world (a process we like to call "thinking")—provides the lumber for human life's bricolage. Some of these arbitrary observations of nature's rhyming possibilities get picked up and used to fix and track important or useful information in the world. There are many more relations and combinations than can practicably be given separate names; classifications provide matrices of association, syntax, means not only of naming but of understanding. Some of them get dropped, some get modified, some ossify into mnemonics....the structure of the language is to some extent protected by its practical purpose, which is to ensure communication. Language is therefore sensitive to the influence of demographic evolution only up to a point and in so far as its function is not impaired. But the conceptual systems we are studying here are not, or are not primarily, means of communication. They are means of thinking, an activity which is governed by very much less stringent conditions. One either succeeds or not in making oneself understood, but one can think more or less well. Thinking admits of degrees and a way of thinking can degenerate imperceptibly into a way of remembering. This explains why the synchronic structures of so-called totemic systems should be so extremely valuable to the effects of diachrony: a mnemotechnic procedure is less trouble to operate than a speculative one which in turn is less exacting than a device for communication. Chapter 2 ("the logic of totemic classifications"), page 67
I love this historical theory of the classifying, structure-making impulse: its growing tip is thought; its living layers are the stuff of memory, which recedes into heartwood as something like a collective unconscious. Culture is an emergent property of thinking; it's what we get as thoughts tumble together in the memory, smoothing their rough edges and contradictory corners and fitting into a cobbled-together bricolage. What of totemism, then? Here's what I'm thinking: for tens of thousands of years humans had a very hard time getting together without killing each other. But exotic strangers were also attractive. Trapped in a rapture of fear and longing, but with the bricoleur's toolkit to hand, people told each other just-so stories to explain themselves to each other. Elaborating animal ancestors and totemic myths furnishes a way to classify people not to separate them, but to bring them together. What's crucial here is this: rich cultural life isn't a product of the emergence of human society; it's the basis of it.
