Curator Jo Baring begins her ‘journey into the heart of sculpture’ by distinguishing between a statue (‘a queen on her throne’) and a sculpture (‘intended to inspire a more universal feeling or emotion’). But her book really gets going when she introduces the English adventurer John Long, who in 1791 used ‘totam’ to denote the personal guardian spirit in whom members of the Ojibwe, an indigenous people of North America, placed their trust.

‘Totem’ is an anglicisation of the Ojibwe word ototeman or odoodeman (‘he is a relative of mine’ or ‘his clan’). Its root associations are with belonging; its base means ‘to dwell together’, writes Baring, who is fascinated by instances of the word being used to describe sculptures, ancient and modern. She thinks of it as ‘a net thrown to catch the secrets of works made thousands of years apart’. Her researches might have ended there, stymied by the reactions of art world colleagues who ‘shuddered’ at her title’s associations with colonialism and empire, but she persisted. The word’s root, with its relationship to community, has the potential, she suggests, to unlock ‘the reasons why, for forty thousand years, we have been shaping material into new form’. 

Totem is in part a travelogue, and the writer’s quest for sculptural enlightenment takes her to Oxford and Newcastle, Târgu Jiu in Romania (home to Brâncuşi’s Endless Column) and Barbara Hepworth’s Cornish studio. Julia Ashe’s illustrations enhance Baring’s narrative approach, though the omission of the artist’s name from the title