[
US
/ˈtoʊtəm/
]
[ UK /tˈəʊtəm/ ]
[ UK /tˈəʊtəm/ ]
NOUN
- a clan or tribe identified by their kinship to a common totemic object
- emblem consisting of an object such as an animal or plant; serves as the symbol of a family or clan (especially among American Indians)
How To Use totem In A Sentence
- The conference began with a Wednesday evening welcome reception, held at Chicago's Field Museum, where 28 mostly Illinois breweries had set up beer stations among two stuffed elephants, a couple of totem poles and a tyrannosaur skeleton. Beer: A celebration of craft brewing
- A lot of the foods that we connect with African-Americans, whether totemically, whether positively or negatively, are indeed and in fact foods from the continent. NPR Topics: News
- But again, perhaps problematically, they are beautiful statues – inspiring, optimistic, and utopian; totems to the radiant future that was always promised, but never quite arrived.
- It was the boobook owl, mopoke, a totem being to the Arrernte Aborigines of these arid lands along the Macdonnell Ranges to the west of Alice Springs. Wildwood
- Long ago, the world was ruled by two great animal totems.
- Colorado Plateau sandstone is nearly totemic in texture and color: voluptuously carved by wind and water, bared to a glory of sunset colors.
- It depends whether their religion is totemistic, pantheistic or monotheistic, surely.
- I shaped a bird of sorts on the handle and incised Somare's totem on the blade.
- Irigaray wonders why law and community have to be founded on violence as in Freud's founding of culture on parricide in Totem and Taboo and symbolic sacrifice as in Girard's Violence and the Sacred: ‘Why did speech fail?’
- Finally, in the theory that the clan totem is the natural development of the individual totem, the contention of some scholars that the term totem should be reserved to the clan totem is of little moment. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 14: Simony-Tournon
