Design of the Frog Totem

Title: Design of the Frog Totem
Description: In the picture of a design of the frog totem (dreaming) I would have liked to have presented from Spencer and Gillen's 1899 monograph, the three large concentric circles—according to their "level" of interpretation—represent celebrated eucalyptus trees along the Hugh River at Imanda which, Spencer and Gillen say, is the center of the group of the frog totem to which the owner of the totem belongs.

The straight lines on one side of the Churinga represent the trees' large roots, and the little curves lines at one end stand for the smaller roots. Note that frogs are said to come out of the roots of these trees. Smaller concentric circles represent smaller roots of trees and, what to me is a radical shift in representational logic, the dotted lines alongside the edge of the Churinga are tracks of frogs hopping in the sand of the river bed. We would probably want to call this an abstract—a super-abstract—representation, but it has a decidedly mimetic concreteness to it also, as registered by those frogtracks. This type of abstraction thus turns out to be curiously complex—like the fetish itself; spiritually material, materialistically spiritual.
Designer: Taussig, Michael.
Date: 1972
Source: The Nervous System.
Bibliographic Citation: Taussig, Michael. 1972. The Nervous System. Routledge. Pages 123-124.