Claude Levi-Strauss approached totemism not as a distinct or primitive religious institution but as a form of classification embedded in the human mind. Rejecting earlier anthropological interpretations that treated totemism as a unique stage in the evolution of religion, he argued that it is fundamentally a symbolic system through which societies organize and understand the world. His structuralist perspective emphasized that human thought operates through binary oppositions and the classification of differences, and totemism exemplifies this universal cognitive process. Levi-Strauss criticized earlier scholars such as Durkheim and Frazer for isolating totemism as a special category of religion. Instead, he suggested that what has been labeled as totemism is merely one expression of a broader human tendency to classify natural and social phenomena. According to him, the association between social groups and natural species, such as animals or plants, does not