14 - Émile Durkheim

Summary

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translation Karen E. Fields

Émile Durkheim (b. 1858; d. 1917), the descendent of a long line of rabbis, is a founding figure of French sociology. In a letter from 1907, Durkheim reports that “it was not until 1895 that I achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life” (Lukes 1973: 237). Possibly, this “revelation” was occasioned by his reading of the Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889). His interest in religion first resulted in an essay “On the definition of religious phenomena” (1899). As a footnote to his definition (“religious phenomena is the name given to obligatory beliefs as well as the practices relating to given objects in such beliefs” [Durkheim 1994: 92]), Durkheim points to a clear distinction between “religious rites proper and magical rites” – the latter are “not directed towards the gods or sacred things” (Durkheim 1994: 99).

His main work on “religion” came out in 1912. In contrast to his books on the division of labour (1893) and on suicide (1897) that addressed problems of contemporary society and were based on contemporary evidence, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim adopted a different strategy: in order to analyse and to explain religion, in general, this work studies “the simplest and most primitive” religion currently known – namely, “totemism” among the Aranda in Central Australia.