*Totemic* is the adjective from *totem*. Literally it describes anything to do with totems — totemic carving, totemic animals, a totemic system of clans. In this literal sense you will meet it mostly in anthropology books and museum labels. But the use you are far more likely to see in a newspaper is the stretched one: totemic means "treated as a powerful symbol of something bigger", usually something a group cares about deeply and argues over. A totemic issue is one that has stopped being an ordinary policy question and become a badge of what side you are on. A totemic figure is someone their movement holds up as standing for the whole cause. So people write "a totemic moment for the party", "her totemic 1998 album", "the totemic status of the health service". It is formal, journalistic, and rather British in feel — you would not use it chatting with friends. It carries a quiet suggestion that the feeling attached to the thing is larger than the thing itself, which is what makes it a useful word: it lets a writer say "people revere this" without saying whether the reverence is deserved.

圖騰的、被當成圖騰般的象徵性的。在新聞裡幾乎都是引申義：某議題或某人「被神格化、被當成招牌象徵」，中文可說「象徵性的、被視為圖騰式的、指標性的」。注意這比 symbolic 更重，帶著一種近乎信仰的崇敬感。