Andrew Lang’s The Secret of the Totem is an anthropological study of the origins of totemism and its relationship to the development of kinship, group organization, and marriage regulations in early societies. Focusing particularly on Indigenous Australian communities, Lang argues that a totem was not merely an animal or plant regarded with reverence but also a group name and a social marker that distinguished and united its members. Questioning theories that treated totemic clans and marriage prohibitions as parts of a single system from the beginning, he proposes that group names and the mystical beliefs attached to them may gradually have developed into totemism and social law. By comparing competing theories with the complex social arrangements found in Australia, the work attempts to explain how human communities became organized through kinship, naming, belief, and custom.
