Totem system

Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-06-01
Features: The author, Claude Lévi-Strauss, is one of the most influential and controversial anthropologists of the 20th century and the founder of French structuralism. This book is one of his most anthropologically focused works, exploring human modes of thought through the study of totemism. The author argues that through totemism, animal species provide humans with a system of differentiation or, in other words, a symbolic system. The series of distinctions among animals becomes a model for social distinctions.