Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations:Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory Amy Woodson-Boulton (bio) At the beginning of his 1963 work Totemism, the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss made a remarkable claim about totemism, a nineteenth-century theory that the origin of both religion and incest barriers lay in systems of animal worship: he argued that this anthropological model had been "like hysteria," an invention that suited the purposes of the scholars who created it. Indeed, he wrote, both hysteria and totemism had served their inventors "to mark off certain human phenomena—as though they constituted a natural entity—which the scholars preferred to regard as alien to their own moral universe" (1). He continued: [T]he idea of totemism made possible a differentiation of societies, … if not by relegating certain of them into nature (a procedure well illustrated by the very term Naturvölker), at least by classing them according to their attitude toward nature, as expressed by the place assigned to man in the animal kingdom and by their understanding or alleged ignorance of the mechanism of procreation. … This naturalist view offered a touchstone which allowed the savage, within culture itself, to be isolated from civilized man. (2) One of the striking things about this passage is that it is in fact a historical argument about the Victorian era, which, while not the real subject of Lévi-Strauss's project, offers an important historical insight. Indeed, judging peoples according to their attitude toward nature in order to separate the "savage" from "civilized man" has been well studied as a key cultural aspect of the New Imperialism (e.g., Adas). What is less well known is the role that animals and human-animal relationships played in that project. While the modern-primitive divide became an overarching frame of reference in this period, and all cultural fields had the potential to fall within it, the specific question of how different classes and societies understood their relationship to animals—which became particularly acute in questions [End Page 211] about killing and eating—became a source of exceptional energy, debate, and rhetoric. In the shadow of Darwinian natural selection and other new theories that connected animals to humans in radical ways, and in the midst of increasing opportunities to eat meat at home in Britain and for big-game hunting and ethnographic research abroad, late nineteenth-century scholars, reformers, and hunters thought and wrote a great deal about what it meant to eat (other) animals. In doing so, they helped to articulate an increasingly pervasive theory of social evolution, by distinguishing "primitive" and "modern" ideas about and practices around killing and eating animals and by rethinking human-animal relationships. How did different ways of killing and eating animals distinguish the human from the bestial, the civilized from the savage, the modern from the primitive, the bourgeois from the proletarian? Anthropologists heatedly debated the meaning of eating and worshipping totemic animals among hunter-gatherer peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa then under (or coming under) European control, understanding these peoples (or at least their cultures) as mostly doomed to extinction and in terms of set stages of social evolution. But even in seemingly unrelated cultural arenas, such as in the vegetarian movement or among big-game hunters, we see people applying similar logics about animals, identification, and consumption. Anthropologists, vegetarians, and hunters debated and defined "civilized" and "primitive" relationships with animals around questions of ingestion, relation, and prohibitions about what constituted allowable "meat" and what was prohibited (or sacramental) "flesh." As Lévi-Strauss noted, animals and our relationships with them were therefore crucial to late nineteenth-century definitions of primitive and modern. Using animals to establish what was "primitive" or "modern" went well beyond anthropologists or scholars, though; in fact, it was an essential feature of European imperialism. Moreover, such new attitudes were often provoked and made possible by new relationships with animals and animal products in Britain and its colonies. Vegetarians adapted the pervasive language of biological and social evolution, looking both "backward" at human anatomy and "forward" to transcending "primitive" and traditional diets, positioning their cause against "flesh-eating" as both natural...