Allen - On Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life

N. J. Allen won a scholarship in classics to New College, Oxford, in 1957. He studied medicine there and later in London. He returned to Oxford to study social anthropology, basing his D.Phil. on fieldwork in Nepal. He lectured in Durham from 1972 to 1976. Since then he has been Lecturer and Reader in the Social Anthropology of South Asia in Oxford. His forty main publications focus on the Himalayas, kinship theory, the history of French anthropology and Indo-European comparativism with special reference to Hinduism.

Werner Gephart has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Bonn since 1992. He was Alfred Grosser Guest Professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris. His main interests are in the sociology of law, sociological theory, symbolism, culture and religion, on all of which he has written various articles. He is to be the editor of a critical edition of Max Weber's sociology of law.

Terry Godlove, Jr., is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair at Hofstra University, New York. His research interests include epistemology and interpretation theory. In 1989 he published Religion, Interpretation and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson. His articles are on epistemology and the category of space in Durkheim.

Robert Alun Jones is Professor of Religious Studies, History and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana. His major research interests include Durkheim and his intellectual context, the methodology of the history of ideas, and the scholarly use of electronic documents and networked information systems. He is the author of Emile Durkheim: an Introduction to Four Major Works (1986) as well as numerous journal articles on Durkheim. He has been editor of Etudes durkheimiennes, and is also responsible for the Durkheim site on the Internet. He is writing a book on Durkheim's social realism.

Dominique Merlli teaches sociology at the University of Saint-Denis in Paris. He is a member of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Education et de la Culture (EHESS and CNRS, Paris). His research fields include social mobility and the uses of statistical categories. Among his publications are: Initiation la pratique sociologique (with P. Champagne, R. Lenoir and L. Pinto (1996), and La mobilite sociale (1994). He was the editor of a special issue of the Revue philosophique (1989, 4) about L. Lvy-Bruhl, which includes some of his publications on this author.

Howard Morphy is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has conducted fieldwork in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia, and has collaborated on many films with Ian Dunlop of Film Australia. His most recent books are