Highlight the differences and similarities between totemism and animism

Animism

• Tylor, in Primitive Culture, defined animism as the belief that persons, animals, plants, and things have souls.
• Dreams, death, and trance were his evidence for how the soul idea arose.
• Animism is a philosophy of nature as peopled by wills. It need not organise a clan.

Totemism

• A totem is a plant, animal, or object that stands for a clan and is treated as sacred kin.
• Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, argued that the totem is the clan’s emblem, and that worship of the totem is society worshipping itself.
• Taboos of killing and eating, and rites that gather the clan, are the social machinery.
• Radcliffe-Brown and later writers debated whether totemism is one institution or a bundle of practices.

Similarities

• Both were used to describe religions without a single high god of the Abrahamic type.
• Both link the sacred to non-human beings.
• Both were placed by nineteenth-century anthropology at the start of a religious evolution, a ladder that later anthropology rejected as a law.
• Both can appear in the same society: spirits of place beside clan emblems.

Differences

• Animism centres souls in things. Totemism centres a social emblem and a group.
• Tylor’s path is intellectualist: people infer souls. Durkheim’s path is sociological: rites make the sacred.
• Totemism is a system of classification of groups. Animism is a theory of life in nature.
• Indian illustrations include village spirit cults that look animistic, and clan or gotra animal names that look totemic without being Australian totemism.