"From an African bestiary to universal science?"

Text heavy, but fascinating.

Totemism, in which animal species feature overwhelmingly, thus appears as a particular form of a mode of thought that in the past has been called ‘irrational’, ‘pre-logical’, ‘peripheral’, ‘primitive’, and which Levi-Strauss’s work (especially in La pensee sauvage, 1964)[9] made us appreciate as obsessed with logic, rational, standard and common in all human societies past and present including everyday life and untutored thought and expression in the contemporary North Atlantic society — even though in the latter the influence of the institutionally and politically dominant forms of scientific thought filters through in the untamed everyday and ritual expressions, masking their wildness and creating embarrassment.

Homepage: "Ancient Models of Thought."