Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society was published by Macmillan in 1910 in four volumes, and it represents Frazer’s most sustained ethnographic work — a comprehensive survey of totemic beliefs and practices across the globe, with particular attention to Australia (where totemism was most fully documented) and its relationship to marriage rules (exogamy: the prohibition of marriage within one’s own clan or totem group).
Frazer’s earlier short work Totemism (1887) had been a brief scholarly essay; the 1910 work expanded this into an encyclopedia. Frazer catalogued every reported instance of totemic belief and practice he could find, organized by region: Australia (which occupies two of the four volumes), Melanesia, Polynesia, Africa, India, and the Americas. The sheer accumulation of data — hundreds of societies, each with its own variation on the totemic theme — made the work an indispensable reference for subsequent theorists.
Frazer’s own theoretical explanation of totemism (that it originated in the belief that a woman’s pregnancy was caused by the spirit of an animal or plant entering her body) was not widely accepted. But the empirical data he assembled became the foundation for more sophisticated theories: Durkheim’s argument (in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) that totemism is the origin of religion itself, and Lévi-Strauss’s argument (in Totemism, 1962) that totemic classifications are systems of thought rather than superstitious beliefs.
Collecting Totemism and Exogamy
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1910): Four volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- Complete four-volume set: $200–$600
- Individual volumes: $30–$80