After Lévi-Strauss
During the later 20th century, anthropologists and sociologists became increasingly preoccupied with such issues as the construction of meaning and identity in a postcolonial world.[citation needed] Given that totemistic belief systems had proved to be relatively durable over the course of human history, many scholars asked whether it was useful, as Lévi-Strauss had advocated, to dispose of totemism as a "mere" social construct. As a result, investigations of totemism generally declined; those that were undertaken moved away from treatments of its universality (or lack thereof) and toward studies that considered totem systems in more specific contexts