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Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life:
Positivist sociological theorysocial phenomena can be studied as
if they are natural (natural science of
human society)
1. Critical of evolutionist schemes of unilinear progress2.
Collective, social nature of religious and other social phenomena
(no psychological or biological
reductionism)
3. Relativistic (pluralistic)Social facts: social substratum
(physical association of people in groups; objective social
reality);
collective representations (mediate external social reality with
individual though and emotion).
How does the morally obligatory become the intellectually and
aesthetically and cognitively desirable?
Collective representations.
Sacred vs. Profane. Processual definition. Sacred as that which
is set apart from profane via ritual
interdiction. Temporally prior and spatially outside of the
everyday social world.
Profane: That to which interdictions are applied.
Ritual = collective activities that mediate relations between
these different realms.
Primitive Classifications(1903) (w/ Marcel Mauss)
Substratum constrains collective consciousness (representations)
which in turn shapes substratum.
Methodological Problems:
1. Assume from outset that moral considerations and original
categories are social classes(cramming; push ethnographic data into
oversimplified correlations)
2. Found that there were multiple types of correlations and
found that differences and similaritiesbetween social formations
and religious classifications did NOT align. (ignored or
rationalized
these problems)
Historical significance: transition from earlier focus on
substratum to collective representations in
Elementary Forms. Forerunner of major works on symbolic
classifications (French and British structural
theories) (taxonomic approaches to culture).
Methodological importance of Primitive Classification: Came at
the time where most anthropologists
were skipping around the world. This text focuses on regional
studies. Concern with context. Study of
religious classifications as parts of a larger whole
(holistic)
Theoretical significance of PC:
1. Theorizing classifications2. Asdfa3. Bodily, social, and
cosmological processes as classificatory organizations; bodies,
objects,
persons, and species are placed into a meaningful, hierarchical
ordering of inclusion and
exclusion.
4. Classificatory operations are deeply emotional as well as
cognitive
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Elementary Forms
Myth and ritual as ways of constructing heterogeneity and
difference within social worlds.
Functionalist theory: co-occurrences of different types of
phenomena (e.g., pig feasts with ecological
imbalance)
Australian Aboriginal Societies:
Totemic clansbond of kinship, shared name (mythic ancestor)
Churingas: iconic designs mythic ancestors; ritual prohibitions
(taboos): no killing or eating of totemic
species; secondary associations (foods, habits, etc.)
Society worships itself
Problems with functionalism:
1. Ahistorical (religious is seen as a conservative force that
maintains social status quo).2. Teleological (chicken and egg)3.
Little or no explanation of specific cultural forms4. Lacks
explanation of cultural creativity5. Mythic narratives as cold,
timeless
