Product Description

'If religion generated everything that is essential in society, this is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.' In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim set himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigated what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. Aboriginal religion was an avenue 'to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity'. The need and capacity of men and women to relate socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe. The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the origin and nature of religion and society. This new, lightly abridged edition provides an excellent introduction to Durkheim's ideas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122871 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

The quintessential sociolological classic.
Durkheim's last major work contains discussions of, in their most highly developed forms, the main problems that consumed Durkheim at various points in his intellectual career; the problem of solidarity in an increasingly individualistic society, the sources and nature of the power of moral authority, his desire to cement sociology as a science, and his quest to expose the foundations and practical implications of social and scientific knowledge.

Firstly, Durkheim convincingly argues that religious phenomena is the symbolic arrangement by which society represents itself to its members and awakens the individual sentiments that account for the members relationship to that society. The last section of the work (Book III) contains Durkheim's symbolic theory regarding the resacralization of social life through the "collective ritual" of religious ceremony. The salience of this argument has led many Sociologists to return to Durkheim to try and explain where this symbolic "collective effervescence" might come from when the social conditions are those of unfamiliarity and differentiation; where society is characterized by the fragmentation of class, occupation, ethnic group, age, region and so on.

Implicit within the whole discussion is Durkheim's controversial theory of knowledge, in which he drives a middle ground between on the one hand, Kantian apiorism, which held that knowledge is inherant in the human intellect itself; and on the other, Humean empiricism, which attributed the acquisition of knowledge to human individual experience. Durkheim contests that religious thought is the origin of scientific thought, and that the former proceeds to the latter in a direct line of continuity. Supplementary to the main thesis is an insightful and perceptive introduction from translater Karen E. Field, in which she manages to significantly contribute to an already well-worn debate amidst the backdrop of her seductive and witty writing style. A compelling read from start to finish, social theorists who do not appreciate the quality of this perrennial classic are simply misguided - this master work deserves to be read and re-read.

The Advent of Sociology
Heralding the consolidation of modern sociology as an objective and scientific discipline within the Humanities, the works of Emile Durkheim reach a fascinating and approachable culmination in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It provides an important conceptual foundation to the history of French Intellectualism over the course of the twentieth century and is an eminently worthy departure in understanding suceeding writers such as Marcel Mauss, Robert Hertz, the Structural Marxists of the 1960s, and Claude Levi-Strauss.

His efforts in establishing sociology as a serious and pursuable academic discipline are of an invaluable and profound scope. Seeking to place the subject on a similar standing to that of the Natural Sciences and the nascent Psychology, Durkheim essentially came to analyse society in much the same way that a psychoanalyst would analyse an individual patient. He implemented several objective tools in this pursuit, such as the conception of the social fact and the social consciousness, and came to understand the influences of different parts of society upon the individual and the whole and how they related to one another.

Within the Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim applies this almost psychological perspective to the operation of religion within societies and groups. Although both rich and fascinating in its myriad accounts of differing rituals and practices, the greatest power of the book is invariably its ability in looking past the subjective and surface values of religion and observing instead the universal structures and phenomenon which unite its purposes to all of humanity. It seeks, in an anthropological vein, to understand and analyse the "simplest" and "earliest" of religious practices so as to garner a greater idea of how more "complex" and more "global" religions function.

In brief, any student of the social sciences will benefit greatly from reading the book and gaining a firmer understanding of the history of their discipline - as an academic text it reveals much of where modern theories such as structuralism were gestated for example. Yet equally, to those with more of a broad interest, particularly concerning the nature of religion and its place in the modern world, the Elementary Forms of Religious Life offers both theory and praxis in objectively understanding the hidden structures of why humanity has had such a great need for religion throughout its history, and why, in a sense, "If God did not exist, there would be a need to invent him."