There seems to be a kind of reverence in the naming of several Inca settlements: Machu Pichiu or ”The honourable old Bird” [1], Sacsayhuamán and Vilcashuamán, where the name for a species of falcon is a part of them, and Pisaqa or ”a partridge like bird” [2].  Explorers were earlier of the opinion that they could trace signs of totemic clans in the naming, but that opinion has been abandoned today [3].

What does it mean to call a thing totemic? It is not possible merely just to be neutral and investigate to answer the question.

A theoretical background is needed.

The French anthropologist Philippe Descola has proposed to explain totemistic connections as a mode of identification of what is in the world. It is a model-based description of how some humans as co-creators construct their world out of elements from a multitude of relations and qualities, in which there are no rupture of continuity in the exterior physicality or in the inner, mental capacity [4].

A mode of identification protects itself by using a “cuckoo chick effect” – it eliminates other modes of construction – but when humans are co-creators of their world, it may happen unnoticed in the childhood that a child does not allow himself to be limited to use only one way of putting a world together.

Our account of totemic world building begins with a little boy who lived on a farm. Let´s call him little k.

Just as it happens in a children´s book, the main character, little k, gets up and eats breakfast. Then he runs out of the farmhouse and he sees a white cat in the garden. He walks to the cat to pet it, but it claws his bare legs and he runs away. He then tries to put a dumbledore into a matchbox, but it will not go into the box.  Then he enters the little wood behind the garden. Little k then walks on and meets a wood hen.

On his way toward the feeding place in the little wood, little k meets a wood hen beside the path – white and spotted as a hen – laying on a nest as if it were a pheasant – at a place designed for wildlife management for hunting purposes. If it were a hen, it could be petted and was his – were it a pheasant it was not to be touched. The place near the path suggested a hen – he tried to pet it – the bird flew up with a screech and a rattle – a white pheasant!- whose nest and eggs  were now abandoned. His father and the other hunters would not look kindly at that. Only years later little k saw a hatch of pheasant chickens, some of them white feathered, and he could breathe a sigh of relief. He had not exterminated the white pheasants by his action.

It was a harsh experience for little k. How could it happen like this? As if it were told to him by one of the indians on the wallpaper in little k´s nursery: the story of the totem human that was unknowingly among his own totem animals (bears) and by misfortune shot one of them during his hunt for a heard of large deer. A favorite spirit of his had assumed the shape of a bear and a bear scolded him [5].

A totem does not stand alone. Thus, Carl Georg von Brandenstein explains that, for example the Australian ” aboriginal ecological order emphasizes identification of those natural species and phenomena which have been classified by Aboriginal speculative thought in a system of opposed physical and temperamental qualities” [6].  And ”the whole world, preferably of animals and humans, is divided into the opposed temperaments ”active” and ”passive. The symbolic representative of ”active” is … the ”getter ” … a white cockatoo … whilst the symbol of ”passive” is … the ”watcher”, the raven” [7].

The theory is according to Descola that “the names of the totemic classes are terms that denote properties which are also used to designate the totemic species, and not the reverse, that is, names of zoological taxa from which would be inferred the typical attributes of the totemic classes. The basic difference is between aggregates of attributes that are common to humans and non-humans within classes designated by abstract terms…” [8].

During his walk, little k tried to lure the wood hen, and the hunters complied with the laws of game management, and little k could seek to stabilize his division of his world through other essences of relations and qualities, primarily by reading the book ”Either/Or” by Søren Kierkegaard.

In his book, Kierkegaard sets up two kinds of outlook of life that people can have, i.e. the aesthete and the ethician. The first mentioned is for seducers who wallow in their wild unruliness and who compare themselves to a truffle hog. The one that follows the second mentioned, will be choosing himself to become himself, as a self-totem, because ”in the choosing he makes himself elastic, transfiguring his whole externality into interiority” and renders himself a task. The two life philosophies are equal and stand opposed to each other [9].

Game seduction stands versus hunting regulation, as the white pheasant stands versus the bird game, as little k stands versus the noble hunter, Boganis. The last mentioned was famous for his book ”Memories from the Hunt”, that was often visibly placed in the living rooms in the other farmhouses of little k´s neighbourhood.

Boganis had lived among the Chippewa people in Wisconsin for a couple of years, and some of his depictions of hunting of wood hens looked somewhat like little k´s fathers hunting parties hunting pheasants. There, there were pheasants sitting in the common spruces in the little wood and little k would clap his hands to chase the pheasants out of the wood for the hunters to shoot the male pheasants in flight. The female pheasants could often not be shot due to conservation periods.

Although Boganis learned the language of the Chippewas during his stay, he did neither mention the concepts “totem” nor “clan” in his account of the visit [10].

But according to professor Anton Treuer ”the Ojibwe do have a clan system where there is either a four-legged animal, bird, or fish that doubles as a spiritual guide and a symbol of one´s family” [11], [12].

There was no wood hen clan. There was an example of ”wood hen as a partridge” clan, but not of ”wood hen as a spruce chicken” clan. Children followed the clan of their father and there were examples of some children with European fathers claiming the chicken or sheep or the pig as a clan, or favouring the eagle or the marten as an adopting clan [13].

After being brought to Wisconsin from Europe in the late 1800s, it would be interesting if there were examples of the pheasant claimed as a clan too.

Keld Anker Olsen 2025

Notes:

1 ) According to Jaime Salazar

2 ) Nothoprocta ornata

3 ) HSAI see p. 253-5

4 ) Descola see p 272- 275

5 ) Long pp. 110-1. The story was told to John Long by a Chippewa. The English word “Totem” origins from the Chippewa word fragment ”Doodem”, f.x found in Chippewa ”Nindoodem” signifying ”My Clan” 

6 ) Von Brandenstein p. 169

7 ) Von Brandenstein p. 171

8 ) Descola p. 276

9 ) Kierkegaard see pp. xiv, xv, 29, 526 (citation), 531 and 588

10 ) ”Boganis” means hazelnut – a name given to Wilhelm Dinesen by the Chippewas, later used by him as an author mark.

11 ) Treuer Anton, Bemidji State University, personal communication

12 ) Ojibwe is a wider category than Chippewa

13 ) Treuer, Anton, personal communication

Literature.

Boganis 2013: Jagtbreve (1889) og Nye Jagtbreve (1892) Gyldendal. København.

Descola, Philippe 2014: ”Modes of being and forms of predication”. In Journal of Ethnograpic Theory, vol. 4, No 1, pp. 271-280.

Dinesen, Wilhelm 1987: Boganis sidste Jagtbreve 1891-94. Erindringer fra en rejse i Amerika 1872. Rosenkilde og

Bagger. København.

Handbook of South American Indians 1963. Julian H. Steward. Editor. Volume 2. The Andean Civilizations. Cooper Square Publishers. INC. New York.

Kierkegaard, Søren 2019 (1843): Enten – Eller. Lindhardt og Ringhof. København

Kinietz, W. Vernon: 1947: Chippewa Village: The Story of Katikitegon. Cranbrook Institute of Science Bulletin, no. 25. Bloomfield Hills. Michigan.

Long, John 1922 (1791) John Long´s Voyages and travels in the years 1768-88. R.R. Donnelly. Chicago.

https://archive.org/details/johnlongsvoyages00long_0/page/110/mode/2up

Vowles, Richard B 1976: ”Boganis , Father of Osceola; or Wilhelm Dinesen in America 1872-1874”. In Scandinavian Studies; Menasha, Wisconsin, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, Vol. 48 (4), pp. 369-83.

Von Brandenstein, Carl Georg 1977: ”Aboriginal Ecological Order in the South-West of Australia – Meaning and Examples”. In Oceania, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 169-186.