When Lang died, he left among his papers the completed manuscript of "Totemism". He was a prolific writer on a variety of anthropological topics, but mostly he was interested in the marriage customs and the "religious" ideas of the Australian aboriginals of whom so many reports were being sent to Europe by colonial officials and missionaries and travellers. "Totemism" is about those ideas and customs. Lang was an inveterate debater of these matters and the anthropological journals of the time, such as Folk-lore and the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, not to mention Anthropos, contain numerous articles, papers, notes, letters and contributions to discussions which he communicated over the years.
"Totemism", on which he had been working for the last three years of his life,[1] represents Lang's fullest account of his views on the topics just mentioned. The present introductory essay is intended as an integrated and extended commentary on the text; it is designed to show that Lang's thought has a direct and profound relevance to present anthropological concerns; and it provides a context for the appreciation of "Totemism". Thus in chapter 2 of this essay there is a fairly short biographical sketch of Andrew Lang's life, and the major works he wrote in each of the areas of interest to which he gave his time. Reliance has been placed, in general, on what he himself wrote or said about his work and his attitudes, on the ground that what a man says and writes is to be counted high among the evidences of what he is.
Chapter 3 provides a brief survey of the literature on totemism from Long, in 1791, to Torres and van Gennep in 1911. This background is essential to a proper understanding of the theoretical atmosphere in which Lang was writing his anthropology. He does not, in "Totemism", address many of the theories to which we allude in this chapter; but he did do so in Social Origins (1903) and in The Secret of the Totem (1905d). Indeed, in selecting those theories which were written before 1912, we have been guided to a large extent by what Lang himself thought worth mentioning in either or both of these books, as well as by van Gennep's compendious survey of the literature on totemism which he wrote in 1920. We have most often merely recited the theory of a particular author on the question of how totemism originated and, where appropriate, have outlined Lang's criticisms of the theory in question. This provides a convenient and easy entry into the sorts of views Lang was later to develop in "Totemism", for there is a remarkable unity in his thought, and to do so makes clear some of the assumptions which he brought to bear.
In the succeeding chapters of this introduction, we take up the specific arguments of "Totemism". In chapter 4, we outline some of the terms which Lang uses in the work, and then go on to deal, in turn, with Frazer's last theory of the origin of totemism, with the general question of "Virgin Birth", and with the notion that climate and environmental factors have some determinant influence on the development of social systems. We also address the question whether Lang was justified in assuming that "female descent" was the primal form of descent; also Lang's views on the fact that the Arunta have no names for their phratries (primary exogamous divisions) which is a main plank in his argument that the Arunta is the most developed form of totemism and not, as Frazer and others would have it, the most primitive. Finally, we look at Lang's claim that law, not chance, must have operated in the distribution of the totems among the two phratries. In chapter 5, we follow the course of Lang's argument against the widely held view, derived from Morgan, that primal man lived in a state of general promiscuity. Lang's attack is twofold: he argues that there is no evidence that he ever did, and that relationship terms and the Dieri custom of pirrauru have been misunderstood by those who claim that they provide evidence for primal promiscuity. In section V of this chapter, we turn to the origin of exogamy, and note Lang's views on the theory, to which Frazer and Howitt subscribe, that exogamy was due to a conscious aversion from sexual association between closely consanguine individuals. In the remaining two sections of the chapter, we look at Lang's arguments for the existence of an All-Father in Australia, a view which ran counter to anthropological orthodoxy as represented by the views of Tylor.
In the next chapter, we deal with Lang's theory of the origins of totemism and of exogamy. Here we are most concerned to see, not whether Lang is right or wrong in what he writes, but whether he has anything to say which could be helpful to us. The outcome of the process of interpretation to which we resort in recasing Lang's historical idiom in more modern, formal terms is that he is both relevant and important in three ways: viz., in the way he deals with social facts; in his evolutionary scheme, which shows marked similarities with work which is being done nowadays; and in his attempts to discover the origins of totemism and of exogamy, which are argued to be, when seen from our point of view, a way of talking about the nature of man. Moreover, Lang's theory is held to point to totemism as being an aspect of man's imagination.
In chapter 7, we return to our survey of what other people have written on totemism, since 1912, ending with Levi-Strauss's famous book, Totemism, first published in 1962 as Le Totemisme aujourd'hui. Lang, of course, did not have the opportunity of commenting in print on any of the works we deal with in each chapter. We rely therefore, largely on our own criticisms here. We are particularly concerned to scrutinise the claim, which Levi Strauss himself makes in Totemism, that he has managed with this work to dissolve the problem of totemism. Our view of his work is twofold: first, that in a sense he did not say very much which Lang had not already said in "Totemism", i.e. that men used animal names to distinguish each other; second, that where Levi Strauss diverged from Lang in his view that totemism represents an intellectual and not an imaginative "operation" Levi-Strauss is wrong while Lang is right. We try to show, moreover, that Levi-Strauss's theory is both incoherent and not borne out empirically.
In the final chapter of this introduction, we apply what Lang said to the standing problem of totemism. Our conclusion is that Lang was indeed right as seeing totemism, implicitly, as an aspect of the imagination, and that, by so seeing totemism, we are able to dissolve the problem. We are able to use Lang's work for our own ends because whatever he wrote was clear and definite. In his own time, moreover, his views were well respected, too, and his work received attention from the greatest anthropological figures of the time, such as Durkheim and van Gennep, Howitt and Spencer, Marett and Haddon, and others. [2] It is ironical, then, that a plea should now have to be made that Andrew Lang's work itself be given "a fair chance". He does not get one today, most unjustifiably. A glance at the index of many, if not most, introductions to social anthropology which have a currency these days, shows that he is not mentioned at all, and when he is mentioned the author in question makes little more than passing reference to his name.[3] Moreover, or perhaps simply because of this, many students of social anthropology seem never to have heard of him, let alone to have read any of his work.[4] Whether most of their teachers have done either is a moot point; but it is certainly the case that he is very little cited.[5] We shall not attempt to conjecture why this puzzling state of affairs should have come about. Fashions change for reasons which are too multifarious to go into here. One of the reasons, though, is perhaps that his work is difficult, and in being asked to give "Totemism" (and his other work) a fair chance the reader is being asked a lot. Lang's method of argumentation leads him to spend a lot of time getting the facts straight. His arguments are clear but tight, and effort is required to follow the subtle twists and turns of Lang's mind.
Furthermore, his interest at first sight appears to be in a subject, "kinship", which seems to students often, (and to their teachers as well, perhaps) recondite, austere, and exacting. Thus in many parts of his work "Totemism", Lang writes of descent and alliance, of relationship terminologies and of phratries and subsections, and such like. These subjects are indeed exacting, but then so is anything which is worth thinking about. Lang's style of analysis, though, which uses an historical idiom, and the clarity of his writing help us to get over this reputation which "kinship" seems to have acquired. It provides us with a way of thinking about these difficult questions which is perhaps a little closer to the way we generally think about things than is the formal analysis of relationship terminologies and section-systems.
Lang's analysis of these matters, however, is only part of his interest in the question of the origins of totemism and of exogamy, and his fascination with the question "Why are all totemic clans always exogamous?" His analysis makes the point, by example as will be seen, that systems of social classification and the division of societies into classes are merely part of other aspects of the society of which they form part, and that they are in principle neither distinct from nor more difficult than other matters, such as "symbolism", with which anthropologists habitually concern themselves.
The mention of origins may have put the reader off a little. A certain tinge of dogmatic positivism in current anthropological thought still rather deprecates such enquiries. But we might look upon the conjectures which Lang makes about the state of presocial man as a story -- for that is what it is, be it true or false -- which can help us think about many difficult concerns of contemporary social anthropology. We shall have occasion, in what follows, to point out some of the false premisses upon which Lang relies in "Totemism", and some of the questionable conclusions to which they lead him. These are instructive in themselves, for it is a truism that we can learn as much from the mistakes of others as we can from our own errors.
But these flaws do not much detract from the merit of "Totemism". It is, as is contended later, a masterpiece of social anthropology in which Lang manages to synthesise three ways of looking at social facts, and three ways which are useful today.
The value of Lang's work, however, lies not just in that, nor in his relevance to some of the things anthropologists are thinking about these days; it lies in what Lang wrote per se. His work, that is, helps us to dissolve fogs, and to criticise and step over our prejudices by loosening rigid and constructing modes of thought, bringing us to see things in a new light from a wider standpoint. It thus contributes to the fundamental anthropological task of "the quiet and patient undermining of categories over the whole field of [anthropological] thought" (Waismann 1968: 21). Yet he can do nothing of the kind if he is not given a fair chance, if he is forced to remain in the oblivion into which, as Evans-Pritchard wrote some 25 years ago, but which remains equally true today, he has been consigned.