ABSTRACT
Religious behavior revolves around the capacity to conceptualize a supernatural realm, beyond the mundane and temporal world of daily activities. As Durkheim emphasized, sacredness is a property of religion, even though people can feel the same emotional experience toward objects that are sacred only to a single individual. A totem is an object symbolizing a group formation, and it can have very special significance and importance to people, which is why they totemized the group in the first place. When it is seen to have sacred qualities separated from the profane and mundane, then the totem takes on religious significance. Most hunter-gatherer populations have some sense of supernatural forces, entities, and beings with the power to affect profane activities, but as emphasized earlier, there is considerable variation in how clearly demarcated the supernatural is from the profane and how the supernatural forces operate and affect daily life.
