ABSTRACT
The anthropological studies that would incarnate the new regime of ethnographic authority during the inter-war period were those of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and B. Malinowski, but two articles by A. Kroeber on the subject stand out by virtue of their quality. In his best-known paper, “The sociological theory of totemism”, Radcliffe-Brown sees totemism as a sort of social organisation of nature, concerned with the ritual relations between social units on the one hand and natural species on the other. For Radcliffe-Brown, the parallelism between natural species and tribal subdivisions represented an ideological construction by means of which the former were integrated with human society. The totemic supra-society, which he conceived of in the context of the local horde, could have different types of social organisation. Seligman was an anthropologist with medical training who was particularly active in disseminating psychoanalytic contributions within the academic community of anthropologists.
