Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
From Australian totemism: religion divides the world into sacred and profane, and in worshipping the sacred a society worships itself; even the categories of thought have social origins.
Introduction
Durkheim’s last major book (1912) uses ethnographic reports on Aboriginal Australians, above all Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen’s accounts of the Arrernte (Arunta), as a test case: in what he took to be the simplest known religion he hoped to find the elementary forms of all religion. He defines religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things that unites its adherents into a single moral community, a “church”. The totem is at once the emblem of the clan and a sacred object; in the “collective effervescence” of ritual gatherings people experience the power of society itself. Durkheim never visited Australia, and his evolutionary premise and use of sources have been much criticised.
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Connections
Builds on
- The Rules of Sociological Method1895 · Émile Durkheim
Taken up in
- Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo1966 · Mary Douglas
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