← Table of contents
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Note 452 — Chapter III · TOTEMIC BELIEFS—continued The Cosmological System of Totemism and the Idea of Class

Joseph Ward Swain translation

One of the signs of this primitive lack of distinction is that territorial bases are sometimes assigned to the classes just as to the social divisions with which they were at first confounded. Thus, among the Wotjobaluk in Australia and the Zuñi in America, things are ideally distributed among the different regions of space, just as the clans are. Now this regional distribution of things and that of the clans coincide (see De quelques formes primitives de classification, pp. 34 ff.). Classifications keep something of this special character even among relatively advanced peoples, as for example, in China (ibid., pp. 55 ff.).

Explore with AITake your curiosity a little further.

Reading settings