Related Reading: Emile Durkhiem, "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life," pp. 8-11 in Ritual and Belief (1st ed); 11-15 (2nd ed)
Durkheim was a leading French sociologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His classic work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was published in 1912. He sought the origins of religion in society, rather than in the individual human mind. In the article in your reader Durkheim suggests that religion always involves a distinction between things that are sacred and things that are profane. He also distinguishes magic from religion, arguing that magic, though it may involve sacred things is not real religion, because it is done individually.
Unlike Frazer, Durkheim was not very interested in magic, though, like Frazer, he saw it as the ancestor of scientific practices. Because Durkheim's main interest was the ways in which society is bound together, he investigated the role of religion in doing this, and sought the origin of religion in communal emotion. He thought the model for relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that "God is society, writ large." Durkheim believed that people ordered the physical world, the supernatural world, and the social world according to similar principles. He wrote about this in an essay, Primitive Classification, which he co-authored with Marcel Mauss. He noted, for example, that in Native societies in the southwestern United States, the division of the world into four directions and four seasons corresponds to the division of society into four clans, each of which holds spiritual and political prominence during the appropriate season. His student, Robert Hertz, wrote an essay in which he suggested that the simple division between left and right, in virtually all cultures, takes on great spiritual and supernatural significance, with the left being seen in a negative light compared to the right. We can see this in the derivation of some English words, e.g. dextrous, which derives from the Latin "dexter" (right), and sinister, which is the Latin for "left." We do not possess a total ordering of the world, with "left" and "right" being linked to a long list or other oppositions, like "female" and "male" and "light" and "dark" or "the sun" and "the moon", but many cultures do. We will be examining this sort of total symbolic ordering of the world in the next module.
The excerpt from Elementary Forms of the Religious Life which you have in your reader is concerned with the distinctions between sacred and profane, religion and magic. A large part of the rest of the book deals with totemism, based on Durkheim's interpretation of the data which existed at that time about the totemism of aboriginal peoples of Australia. Like Freud, Durkheim saw totemism as the original form of religion, but for a different reason from Freud's. The totemic animal, Durkheim believed, was the original focus of religious activity because it was the emblem for a social group, the clan. He thought that the function of religion was to make people willing to put the interests of society ahead of their own desires. To do this, he suggested, religion worked in two modes: the positive cult and the negative cult. The negative cult consisted of all the taboos and prohibitions of religion, like fasting and abstaining from sex. The purpose, Durkheim believed, was to teach self-discipline. The positive cult consisted of communal ceremonies, which were centered around the totem, and which might involve relaxing the normal taboo on eating the totem in a communal meal, as well as dancing and other sensory indulgences, during which people achieved a state of heightened emotion, or effervescence, in the presence of other group members. The heightened emotion led to positive feelings toward the social group. Although most people today believe that Durkheim was incorrect in many of his interpretations of the data on totemism, the insight that religion serves to enhance social solidarity is widely accepted, as is the notion that in many traditional societies the ordering of the social, natural and super natural worlds link together and reinforce each other in a common system.
If you wish to read an intellectually challenging summary of Durkheim's
theory of religion, well beyond the requirements for this course, click here.