ABSTRACT
This essay traces the emergence of the totem as a figure in Euro-American thought from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how it has been used to displace the anxieties produced by modern capitalism onto a “primitive” source. Derived from the Anishinaabe term odoodeman, meaning “ clan” or “ kinship group, ” the idea of the totem has paradoxically come to be understood as referring nearly exclusively to overvalued material objects. I trace this usage of totem back to a single, definitive source: the travel narratives of the fur trader John Long, arguing that his understanding of it as an object of religious veneration was actually a projection of his own mercantilist worldview onto the Anishinaabe with whom he lived and worked. Drawing on William Pietz’s work on the fetish, I argue that the totem emerged as a way of rationalizing the capitalist logic of commodification as nothing more than an extension of “ primitive” thought. The essay goes on to briefly address the way in which Modernist thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and T.S. Eliot drew on the totem as a means of critiquing the negative effects of capitalist modernity without having to locate their causes in modernity itself. Ultimately, I suggest that returning to the communalist kinship-ethic embedded in the original Anishinaabe concept of the odoodeman might allow for a more robust critique of capitalist commodification, and the systems of exploitation that lay behind it.
