The 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 critical and hostile reactions. C. Lévi-Strauss was one of the few to devote a book to totemism but considered it as an illusion, although a number of prominent members of the English school of Social Anthropology contested this view, describing the direction adumbrated by Freud’s enquiry