DETOTALIZATION

Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, The Athlone Press, 1999

In other words, creation equals detotalization. Having created the earth, Omalyce takes mud from which he creates the five original men (ancestors). These men, ostensibly of mud, are of course made of Omalyce's body, since the earth is his body too. The fact that these men are detotalizations of Omalyce is further signalled by the fact that Omalyce names these men after his five fingers, the fingers of the hand being the symbolic exponents of detotalization, as [the diagram] shows.