Vicissitudes of Totemism

After being the subject of many studies up until 1914,Totemism seemed to disappear from the literature.The publication of Freud's work Totem and Taboo was initially greeted with silence, and subsequently with rare and hostile reactions. C. Levi-Strauss was one of the only ones to devote a book to Totemism, but considered it as an illusion. Eminent members of the English School of Anthropology contested this view in the name of long field experience.Totemism appears in Freud's work as a way of dealing with one of the canonical forms of human destructiveness, namely, parricide.Why did eminent men find it impossible to utilize this book and those that followed it in the interwar period?The mass murders in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, however different they may have been, have in common the scope and horror of their consequences that became unrepresentable for Europeans for more than thirty years.Did this delay, and the attitudes towards authority of the following generations, result from a logic of "resistance" aimed at reestablishing refusals that did not take place at the time?The Western world seems to have forgotten the strength of family ties and of religion in the world.