 | The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud Though it is now discredited, totemism once captured the imagination of Sigmund Freud, #65533;mile Durkheim, James Frazer, and other prominent Victorian thinkers. Robert Alun Jones considers the construction of a theory and the divergent ways religious scholars, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists drew on totemism to explore and define primitive and modern societies' religious, cultural, and sexual norms. Combining innovative readings of individual scholars' work and a rich portrait of Victorian intellectual life, Jones traces the rise and fall of a powerful idea. Robert Alun Jones is professor emeritus of religious studies, history, and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Émile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works and The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism. |
