Method in the Study of Totemism

In 1911, Andrew Lang undertook one of anthropology's most vexing definitional challenges: can 'totemism' actually be defined at all? At a time when the discipline was still forging its scientific methods, Lang methodically dismantled the scattered, contradictory definitions that hadAccumulated from decades of field research. His target was the chaos itself: scholars had documented exogamous clans, taboo practices, animal-human kinship, and sacred naming rituals across British Columbia, Australia, and beyond, yet no one had successfully articulated what united these phenomena. Lang's argument is audacious in its scope. He contends that these apparently independent features are deeply interconnected, part of a coherent system with underlying structural unity. This is not merely a critique of others' failures, though it is that; it is a passionate defense of systematic inquiry against ethnographic particularism. Lang believed anthropology could be a real science, capable of generalizations, and this short, dense volume is his proof of concept. For readers interested in the intellectual history of how we came to understand 'primitive' societies, this remains a fascinating artifact: a window into a moment when scholars were still arguing over first principles.