ON DURKHEIM'S ELEMENTARY
FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
This is the first collection of essays to be published on Durkheim's masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. A classic of sociology and the study of religion, and one of his most important and influential works, The Elementary Forms is currently enjoying a renaissance in other, related disciplines.
This collection represents the work of the most important, international Durkheim scholars from the fields of anthropology, philosophy and sociology. From these diverse viewpoints, the contributors examine Durkheim's perspective on the role of religion and social life. The essays focus on key issues, for example, the method Durkheim adopted in his study; the role of ritual and belief in society; the nature of contemporary religion, as well as on debates on the notion of the soul and contemporary collective civic rituals. This collection fills a major gap in studies on Durkheim, and will be a vital resource for students and researchers in anthropology, sociology and philosophy and religious studies.
The contributors N. J. Allen, Werner Gephart, Terry F. Godlove, Jr., Robert Alun Jones, Dominique Merlli, Howard-Morphy, Dnes Nmedi, Giovanni Paoletti, William Ramp, Malcolm Ruel, Warren Schmaus, Sue Stedman Jones, Ivan Strenski, Kenneth Thompson, W. Watts Miller.
The editors N. J. Allen is Reader in the Social Anthropology of South Asia at Oxford University and specialist in the work of Marcel Mauss. W. S. F. Pickering helped to found the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford in 1991. He has written on Durkheim's sociology of religion and, more recently, was joint editor of Debating Durkheim, published by Routledge. W. Watts Miller is editor of Durkheim Studies/tudes durkheimiennes, and the author of Durkheim, Morals and Modernity (1996). He lectures in the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Bristol.
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
1. HAYEK AND AFTER
Hayekian liberalism as a research programme
Jeremy Shearmur
2. CONFLICTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
Edited by Anton van Harskamp
3. POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ANDR GORZ
Adrian Little
4. CORRUPTION, CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY
John Girling
5. FREEDOM AND CULTURE IN WESTERN SOCIETY
Hans Bbkland
6. FREEDOM IN ECONOMICS
New perspectives in normative analysis
Edited by Jean-Franois Laslier, Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy
7. AGAINST POLITICS
On government, and order
Anthony de Jasay
8. MAX WEBER AND MICHEL FOUCAULT
Parallel life works
Arpad Szakolczai
9. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CIVIL SOCIETY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
G. B. Madison
10. ON DURKHEIM'S ELEMENTARY FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
Edited by N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller
11. ILLNESS AS A WORK OF THOUGHT
A Foucauldian perspective of psychosomatics
Monica Greco
ON DURKHEIM'S
ELEMENTARY FORMS
OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
Edited by N. J. Allen,
W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller
Published in conjunction with the British Centre
for Durkheimian Studies
First published 1998
by Roudedge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX 14 4RN
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Roudedge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
1998 Edited by N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and
W. Watts Miller
Typeset in Baskerville by
Florencetype Limited, Stoodleigh, Devon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
On Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life / edited by
N. J. Allen, W. S. F Pickering and W. Watts Miller.
p. cm. (Roudedge studies in social and political thought)
(hc : alk. paper)
1. Durkheim, Emile, 18581917. Formes lmentaires de la vie
religieuse. 2. Religion. 3. Totemism. I. Allen, N. J. II. Pickering,
W. S. F. III. Watts Miller, William, 1944
IV. Series
GN470.D83069 1998
306.6dc21 9729595
CIP
AC
ISBN 0415162866
CONTRIBUTORS
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
