Emile Durkheim was the founding father of academic sociology in France and the most influential early theoretician of archaic or primitive societies. A Jew from north-east France, Durkheim followed the educational and ideological path of the positivist generation of great Republican academics. He was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, taking a teacher’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate (1893). After a short period as a lycée teacher, he spent a year in German universities studying social theory. On his return, he was appointed the first ever lecturer in ‘social science and pedagogy’ in a French university, at Bordeaux (1887). In 1902 he transferred to the Sorbonne, where he held a chair for the rest of his life.
Durkheim’s seminal teaching and publications, included De la division du travail social (1893) (The Division of Labor in Society 1933), Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1894) (The Rules of Sociological Method 1938), Le Suicide(1897) (Suicide 1952), and work on socialism, family organization, the scope and development of German social theories. He attracted a cluster of gifted young scholars—mostly philosophers but also historians, economists and jurists (including Mauss, Hubert, Simiand, Fauconnet, Richard and Bouglé)—with whom he founded the Année Sociologique (1898). This was an essentially critical journal intended to cover the whole range of emerging social disciplines (social geography, demography, collective psychology, social and economic history, history of religion, ethnology and sociology proper). It was to become instrumental in developing and promoting a synthetic theory of social facts which overrode earlier disciplinary divisions.
Durkheim’s later work included studies and lecture courses on the sociology of education, morality and moral science, pragmatism, family sociology, history of the social sciences, vital statistics and several other topics, but after the birth of the Année he was primarily concerned with the study of archaic societies, and especially with primitive religion and social organization. The problem of social cohesion in so-called poly-segmentary societies which, according to Durkheim, were based on mechanical solidarity (as against the organic solidarity of modern societies, based on a division of labour) had been a major theme in his doctoral thesis (1893), but there it lacked any significant ethnological underpinning. Durkheim developed an intense interest in primitive society much later, after reading contemporary British ‘religious anthropologists’, above all, Robertson Smith and Frazer. This resulted in a reorientation of his work towards the study of ‘collective representations’ and, more specifically, of religion, from 1896 onwards.
There were two sets of reasons, theoretical and methodological, for this shift. First, religion was considered to serve an essential social function, creating a strong community of beliefs and providing a basis for social cohesion. The sacred and the profane became the two essential categories in Durkheim’s sociology, which ordered the system of social facts. Second, primitive religion, either because it was believed to be more simple and consequently easier to study, or because it appeared to be functionally interconnected with most other ‘social facts’ (like economy, law, technology and so on, which had gained a measure of functional autonomy in the course of later development) seemed to provide the key to a theory of social order. The religious system of archaic societies thus became a privileged topic of research for Durkheim and some of the most gifted scholars of his cluster, notably Mauss, Hubert and Hertz. One out of four review articles published in the Année was dedicated to social anthropology, and primitive societies now supplied, for the first time in French intellectual history, a central topic in public philosophical debate, which soon engaged other leading academics (like Bergson and Levy-Bruhl) as well.
In his anthropological work, Durkheim never surmounted the basic ambiguity of his approach to ‘primitives’, who were regarded either as prototypes, or as exemplifying the simplest imaginable occurrences of observable social types, or both at the same time. Moreover, he was initially sceptical about the heuristic utility of ethnographic data, and believed that preference should be given to historical documents over ethnographic information. His attitude changed, however, especially with the publication of more professional ethnographies, like Spencer and Gillen (on the Australian aborigines), Boas (on the Kwakiutl Indians) and the Cambridge scholars of the expedition to Torres Straits. He discussed all these new studies in pains-takingly detailed critical reviews. They also supplied the data for his own contributions in the contemporary international debate concerning archaic societies. These fall broadly under two thematic headings: social organization and belief systems (and various combinations of the two).
The essay on ‘La Prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines’ (1898) (Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo, 1963) obeyed to the letter his own prescription, ‘Explain the social fact by other social facts’. Social institutions could not be explained by invoking instinctive behaviour. They must be accounted for purely in terms of social causes. Incest and exogamy derived from the nature of the elementary, that is, uterine, clan. Respect for the clan’s totem manifested itself by a religious aversion to the blood of fellow clanspeople and, by extension, to sexual contact with the clan’s women. The prohibition of incest was accompanied by prescriptions concerning interclan marriage. Some modern writers on kinship (for example, Lévi-Strauss 1949) recognize their debt to Durkheim, though they have submitted his theory to substantial criticism. Similarly, in his essays on totemism (1902) and Australian kinship (1905a), Durkheim seemed clearly to anticipate much later structuralist approaches. He identified, beyond the social categories of kinship, truly logical categories which, he suggested, could be understood as ‘mathematical problems’ (Durkheim 1905a). He went further in the exploration of such logical categories in a famous study, written together with Mauss, ‘De quelques formes primitives de classification: contribution a l’étude des représentations collectives‘ (1903) (Primitive Classification 1963). This essay related ideas about space among some Australian and North-American tribesmen to their social organizations. Durkheim and Mauss argued that men ‘classified things because they were divided into clans’. The model of all classification (especially of spatial orientation) is the society, because it is the unique whole (or totality) to which everything is related, so that ‘the classification of things reproduces the classification of men’. Primitive classifications generated the first concepts or categories, enabling men to unify their knowledge. They constituted the first ‘philosophy of nature’. Durkheim and Mauss suggested that in these classifications could be discerned ‘the origins of logical procedure which is the basis of scientific classifications’. Durkheim would systematize these intimations in his last great work which focused on the social functions of religion proper.
Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1915) was the culmination of Durkheim’s anthropological studies. His focus upon Australians (and to some extent on American Indians) was grounded on the methodologically essential (and still ambiguous) assumption that their clan system was the most ‘elementary’ observable. The elementary religion is that of totemic clans. It contains the germ of all essential elements of religious thought and life.
Durkheim starts from the proposition that religious experience cannot be purely illusory and must refer to some reality. The reality underlying religious practice is society itself. Religion is ‘above all a system of ideas by which individuals represent the society they belong to’. Moreover, ‘metaphorical and symbolic as it may be, this representation is not unfaithful’. Certain types of ‘collective effervescence’ produce religious beliefs, or help to reconfirm beliefs and values of religious relevance. The type of religion is also determined by social structure. For example, the cult of the ‘great god’ corresponds to the synthesis of all totems and to the unification of the tribe.
Religion also helps to interpret or represent social realities by means of their projection in a special symbolic language. Thus, mythologies ‘connect things in order to fix their internal relations, to classify and to systematize them’. They represent reality, as does science. The function of religion is ultimately social integration, which is effected by ‘constantly producing and reproducing the soul of the collectivity and of individuals’. Symbolism is the very condition of social life, since it helps social communication to become communion, that is, the fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment’.
Durkheim’s religious anthropology has been severely criticized by field researchers, yet without ceasing to inspire scholars concerned with archaic religions. At the time, his sociology of religion had an immediate public appeal in consequence of the conflict then raging between the Church and the Republican State. The study of primitive religion allowed Durkheim to adopt a purely scientific posture, while offering an historical criticism and a sociological evaluation of contemporary religious institutions. (He once described the Catholic Church as a ‘sociological monster’ (1905b).)
Ethnographic evidence drawn from primitive societies also led to heuristic generalizations concerning the nature of social cohesion, its agents and conditions. Ethnology, moreover, lent itself more easily than other established disciplines (like history or geography) to Durkheimian theorizing, because it was an intellectually weak and institutionally marginal branch of study (see Karady 1981). Durkheim’s theoretical anthropology, together with the work of his followers and debating partners (such as Levy-Bruhl, Mauss, Hubert and Hertz) contributed decisively to the birth of French academic field anthropology between the two world wars. A later generation of French anthropologists, including Griaule, Métraux, Dumont and Lévi-Strauss, continued to exploit Durkheim’s heritage, while critically re-evaluating it. As a consequence of its Durkheimian roots, French social anthropology never broke with the other social sciences, and retained a penchant for high-level generalization.
Victor Karady
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
References
Durkheim, E. (1902) ‘Sur le totemism’, L’Année Sociologique 5.
——(1905a) ‘Sur l’organisation matrimoniale des sociétés australiennes’, L’Année Sociologique 8.
——(1905b) ‘Conséquences religieuses de la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat’, republished in E.Durkheim (1975) Textes, Paris.
Karady, V. (1981) ‘French ethnology and the Durkheimian breakthrough’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 12.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1949) Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, Paris. (English edn, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, London, 1969.)
Further reading
Besnard, P. (ed.) (1983) The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, Cambridge, UK.
Lukes, S. (1972) Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study, London.
Pickering, W.S.F. (ed.) (1975) Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies and Introductory Remarks, London.
