The Secret of the Totem

"Though it is now discredited, totemism once captured the imagination of Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, James Frazer, and other prominent Victorian thinkers. In this intellectual history, Robert Alun Jones considers the construction of a theory and the divergent ways religious scholars, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists drew on totemism to explore and define primitive and modern societies' religious, cultural, and sexual norms. Combining innovative readings of individual scholars' work and a rich portrait of Victorian intellectual life, Jones traces the rise and fall of a powerful idea."--Jacket.