The Secret of the Totem
Subtitle: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: August 16, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780231134385
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Sociology, Social Studies; Literary Criticism; Religion - Church History; Europe; History; Social Science / Anthropology / General; European - General; Totemism
Description: "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.