In The Totemism (1962), an example of the application of the structural method, he tried to lay the ‘problem of totemism to rest’ once and forever, arguing that totems were modes of classification; they were ‘good to think’ rather than ‘good to eat’. The binary opposition of nature and culture that evolved in his kinship study was further developed here.
Lévi-Strauss says that totemism covers relations between things falling in two series – one natural (animals, plants) and the other cultural (persons, clans). Further, ‘The natural series comprises on the one hand categories, on the other particulars; the cultural series comprises groups and persons.’
| NATURE | Category | Particular |
| CULTURE | Group | Person |
These two sets of terms can be associated in four ways, as is the case with the example given earlier.
1 2 3 4
NATURE Category Category Particular Particular
CULTURE Group Person Person Group
Totemism thus establishes a relationship between human beings (culture) and nature, and, as shown above, this relationship can be divided into four types, and we can find empirical examples of each one of them. Lévi-Strauss says that the example of the first is the Australian totemism (‘sex totems’ and ‘social totems’) that postulates a relationship between a natural category and a cultural group. The example of the second is the ‘individual’ totemism of the North American Indians. Among them, an individual reconciles himself with a natural category. For an example of the third combination, Lévi-Strauss takes the case of the Mota (in the Banks Islands) where a child is thought to be the ‘incarnation of an animal or plant found or eaten by the mother when she first became aware that she was pregnant’ , or what has come to be known as ‘incarnational totemism’. The fourth combination (group-particular combination) may be exemplified with cases from tribes of Polynesia and Africa, where certain animals (such as garden lisards in New Zealand, sacred crocodiles and lions and leopards in Africa) are protected and venerated (the sacred animal totemism).
The four combinations are equivalent. It is because they result from the same operation (i.e., the permutation of the elements that comprise a phenomenon). But, in the anthropological literature that Lévi-Strauss examines, it is only the first two that have been included in the domain of totemism, while the other two have only been related to totemism in an indirect way. Some authors have not considered the last two variants of totemism in their discussion. Here, Lévi-Strauss observes that the ‘problem of totemism’ (or what is called the ‘totemic illusion’) results from the ‘distortion of a semantic field to which belong phenomena of the same type.’ The outcome of this is that certain aspects (or the first and second types of totemic phenomena) have been singled out at the expense of others (the third and fourth types), which gives an impression of ‘originality’ and ‘strangeness’ that they do not in reality possess.
Lévi-Strauss has given that totemism is able to adapt to changes. To illustrate this, a hypothetical example may be taken up. Suppose a society has three clans totemically associated respectively with bear (land), eagle (sky), and turtle (water). Because of demographic changes, the bear clan becomes extinct, but the turtle clan enlarges, and in course of time, splits into two parts. The society faces this change in two ways. First, the same totemic association might be preserved in a damaged form so that the only classificatory/symbolic correlation is now between sky (eagle) and water (turtle). Second, a new correlation may be generated by using the defining characteristics of the species turtle to distinguish between two clans still identified with it. This becomes the basis for the formation of a new symbolic opposition. If, for example, colour is used, yellow and grey turtles may become totemic associations. Yellow and grey may be regarded as expressive of the basic distinction between day and night perhaps. A second system of the same formal type as the first is easily formed through the process of differentiation and opposition . As it is clear, the opposition between sky (eagle) and water (turtle) is split and a new opposition is created by the contrast of day (yellow) and night (grey). In this way, the problems caused by demographic imbalances (i.e., extinction of a clan or the enlargement of the other) are structurally resolved, and the system continues.