they must get it from another source. Aside from the human individual and the physical world, there should be some other reality, in relation to which this variety of delirium which all religion is in a sense, has a significance and an objective value. In other words, beyond those which we have called animistic and naturistic, there should be another sort of cult, more fundamental and more primitive, of which the first are only derived forms or particular aspect.This more fundamental and primitive cult is totemism.
The peculiar set of beliefs and practices known as totemism had been discovered among American Indians as early as 1791; and though repeated observations for the next eighty years increasingly suggested that the institution enjoyed a certain generality, it continued to be seen as a largely American, and rather archaic, phenomenon. J. F. McLennan's articles on "The Worship of Animals and Plants" (1870-71) showed that totemism was not only a religion, but one from which considerably more advanced religions had derived; and L.H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) revealed that this religion was intimately connected to that specific form of social organization that Durkheim had discussed in The Division of Labor -- the division of the social group into clans. As the same religion and social organization were increasingly observed and reported among the Australian aborigines, the documents accumulated until James Frazer brought them together in Totemism (1887). But Frazer's work was purely descriptive, making no effort to understand or explain the most fundamental aspects of totemism. The pivotal work in the explanation and interpretation of this institution, therefore, was Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), which made totemism the origin of sacrifice, and thus of the ritual apparatus of higher religions generally; and in The Golden Bough (1890), Smith's protégé Frazer connected the same ideas to the gods of classical antiquity and the folklore of European peasants. All these works, however, were constructed out of fragmentary observations, for a true totemic religion had not yet been observed in its complete state. This hiatus was filled, however, in Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), a study of totemic clans almost definitively primitive; and, together with the studies they stimulated, these observations were incorporated within Frazer's four-volume compendium, Totemism and Exogamy (1910).
The initial contribution of The Elementary Forms to this rapidly growing literature was simply its methodological approach. As a member of the "anthropological" school, for example, Frazer had made no effort to place the various religious systems he studied within their social and historical context; rather, as the name of the school implies, he assumed that man has some sort of innate, religious "nature" regardless of social conditions, and thus "compared" the most disparate beliefs and rites with an eye to their most superficial similarities. But for the sociologist, Durkheim emphasized, social facts vary with the social system of which they are a part, and cannot be understood when detached from that system. For this reason, two facts from different societies cannot be usefully compared simply because they seem to resemble one another; in addition, the societies themselves should resemble each other -- be varieties of the same species.Moreover, since the number of societies with which a sociologist can be genuinely familiar is quite limited, and since, in any case, he regarded the alleged "universality" of totemism as a question of only residual interest, Durkheim ultimately concentrated on the aboriginal societies of central Australia almost exclusively. These societies, indeed, suited Durkheim's purposes admirably -- the ethnographic reports of their totemic institutions were easily the most complete, their structural features were all of a single type (the "single-segment" societies of The Division of Labor and The Rules), and, since this type of societal organization was the most rudimentary known, it seemed to Durkheim the best place to search for that "most primitive" religion whose description and explanation was the central purpose of The Elementary Forms.
