Carl-Georg Christoph Freiherr von Brandenstein (10 October 1909 – 8 January 2005) was a German linguist who took up the study of Australian Aboriginal languages.

[1][2][3] Born in 1909 in Hannover to Carl von Brandenstein [de],[4] Carl-Georg finished high school in Weimar,[5] and studied oriental languages and the history of religion at Berlin University (1928–1934), and Leipzig (1938–1939).

[8]: 321–335  His major contribution consisted in challenging the use of the term and concept of totem adopted throughout anthropology from an original Ojibwa word, and widely used in kinship analysis.

Throughout the Australian totemic system he believed he could isolate a logic, which in its fullest form, evinced 8 combinations of three paired terms of primary properties.

Two totems in a binary tribal moiety could be shown to each involve a set of up to 20 features that could be distributed as traits over all human and non-human members of each of the two groups.