Marcel Mauss - Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites: Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-775-4 (pbk)

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Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert

For the past several decades, a significant effort in the reinterpretation of the work of mile Durkheim and his colleagues on the research team affiliated with the journal lAnne sociologique has been underway (see e.g., Besnard 1983; Alexander 1988; Gane 1992; Martins and Pickering 1994; Pickering 1999; Allen, Pickering, and Miller 1998; Cladis 2001; Turner 2003; Alexander and Smith 2005; Strenski 2006; Riley 2009). It would be a worthwhile project to publish this volume if our interests were only related to the history of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, since the selections are important classic contributions by central members of the most important early school of social science, but our ambitions in presenting them are considerably broader. We believe these early Durkheimian works on religion and culture, which are relatively little known in the English-speaking social scientific world, make an important contribution to this reinterpretive effort.

Some readers will immediately note that Durkheim is not the author of any of these pieces and will perhaps therefore inquire as to their Durkheimianness, so some small bit of relevant intellectual historical context might be merited. All six of these studies are by students and colleagues of Durkheim who not only produced their own seminal works in the sociology of religion, many of them first published in the Anne, but who in fact significantly contributed to the direction that Durkheims own work on religion and culture took. Like Durkheim, Marcel Mauss (18721950), Henri Hubert (18721927), and Robert Hertz (18811915) devoted considerable energy to the analysis and description of the sacred, the key concept in the Durkheimian theory of religion. All three authored many pages devoted to the examination of particular elements of the sociology of religious knowledge and experience: sacrifice, magic, sin and expiation, myth, ritual, taboo. And, like Durkheim, they were quite interested in speculating about how these concepts would change as the social world evolved. Durkheim indicated in The Elementary Forms that the sacred would certainly transform itself in modernity, although he limited his conjecture as to precisely how it would do so to some brief remarks on popular political manifestations of collective effervescence and sacred symbolic production. In their introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith speak of the new Durkheim, by which they mean Durkheimian theory after the cultural turn and in a social world where religion, while it has not disappeared, has lost much of its ability to provide the central site for the meaning production that remains at the core of human activity (Alexander and Smith 2005:12). Durkheim had already pointed to the nascent rise of what Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) called, in the American context, Sheilaism or religion become individualist and anti-ritualistic, but he did not see this as a reason to believe the symbolic practices centered around varieties of sacredness would disappear. As Bellah put it elsewhere, echoing Durkheims sentiments precisely, he had optimism that, as has happened before, new resources for ritual meaning and moral solidarity could emerge once again (Bellah 2005:195). Much contemporary work in cultural sociology has invoked Durkheim to postulate new manifestations of the sacred in seemingly secular cultural spaces and forms. These six classic texts show how thoroughly such contemporary efforts to analyze those new forms of symbolic and ritual life to which Bellah alluded can be rooted in the work emerging in the original Durkheimian school during its heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century.

So, Mauss, Hubert, and Hertz were indeed Durkheimians. In some ways, in fact, the three writers whose works we translate here can be thought of as intellectually one, and as one united with the towering figure in French social science who was mentor to all of them. Too much has been written on the cohesiveness and unified intellectual direction of the Anne sociologique team over the past several decades for us to need to prove that case again (see especially Besnard 1983). But though they were Durkheimian, they were not Durkheim, and numerous accounts have contributed to an understanding of the frequently overlooked intellectual differences the three younger Durkheimians had with Durkheim and how their own work subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, diverged from and added to Durkheims (Isambert 1983; Karsenti 1997; Riley 2002, 2005, 2009). A brief summary of some of the contents of the essays in this volume will reveal both some of the continuity and the difference, while also pointing to their contemporary relevance in sociological research.