Henry Imler September 18th, 2006

(Notes taken from Eight Theories of Religion on Emile Durkheim)

• He was the Father of sociology, much like Freud was the father of psychology. It was a fundamental shifting of how to look at everything.
• Before systems focused on the individual, now name just about anything and you can place social in front of it: Social Sciences, Social engineering, social psychology, ECT…
• Society was seen as a collection of individuals. See Freud, Descartes, ECT… Now to viewing things from a social perspective is almost our default setting
• He really created the rules of the science that enabled serious study of societies – gave it legs, not just speculation on how it could be done.

Life

• Father was a rabbi
• Heavily influenced by a catholic school teacher
• Was an agnostic
• Went to a very prestigious school – studied history and philosophy
• Unsatisfied with the rigid study program
• Hint of him studying outside the box – often find people doing this that end up creating new paradigms of thought – Galileo, Newton, ECT…
• Did several Major works
  • Suicide
  • Division of Labor
  • Rules of Sociological Method
  • Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

Influences

• Montesquieu – Social Structures can be critically examined
• Saint-Simon – Socialist, all private property should be given to the state
• Comte – Evolutionary Pattern to civilization
• Muller and Tylor – Evolutionary pattern to religion

Ideas of Religion

• Religion is a unified system of beliefs relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.
• Religion is simply a natural instinct that is a logical response to the world as a society encounters it.
• Everything is split into the sacred and profane.
  • There is not good / evil distinction between the two.
• Purpose: unite into one moral community called church, all those who adhere to them.
• Religion does not replace magic, like Frazer thought. Magic is a private matter, religion is a social matter.
• He rebelled against Muller and Taylor and their evolutionary views of religion
  • Muller: Great Nature forces -> Gods
  • Taylor: Idea of the soul ->Gods
• Wrong approach: Durkheim thought that they had taken the religion of the day and tried to de-evolve it to the primordial religious views. Also had used data badly to back up their claims
• Right Approach: Find the most elementary form of religion and study it scientifically to see what the real basis of religion is.

Case Study: Aborigine Tribal Religions

• Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen did a massive and detailed study of the tribes, including their religious practices.
• Each tribe had a totem, a sacred animal that was the mascot of the tribe.
• This totemism did not come from animalism or magic, instead it was the basis of religion, so it would be foolhardy to try to trace it to something else.
• They do not actually view the totem as a god and worship it.
• Instead, their worship is “of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each one of these beings, but not to be confounded with any of them”.
• Called this the Totemic principle
• What is the totem a symbol of?
  • Of the tribe, of society
  • The totem is sacred
  • Without the tribe, the individual will perish
  • Therefore, the animal is a symbol of the whole tribe
  • Worship is communal, it creates a sense of oneness with the tribe and strengthens its ties and therefore ensures its survival.
  • Why animals? They are close by, not something abstract that people can lose sight of

Idea of the Soul

• Because they are the clan, and the clan is the totem, there is a piece of the totem in each person
• Soul is the idea of the self, a “fragment of the ‘clan within’”
• Since the clan is immortal, the soul is immortal.
• Souls are also fragments of the clans past, remembered in deceased persons

Idea of Gods

• As clans interact, they encounter the other totems. They project other totems as gods, as personalization of other totems.
• With more and more contact with other clans, and therefore other gods, there is a since of one large community and out of that develops the idea of a supreme God.

Ritual and Totemism

• The cult (worship) practice “consists of emotional group ceremonies held on certain occasions and is the very core of the clan’s life together”
• Worship has three forms, positive, negative, and piacular
• Negative worship: keeps the sacred separate from the profane.
  • Taboos of location – can’t go to a certain cave
  • Taboo of time – holy days
  • They deny the self for the sake of the whole.
• Positive worship: The self joins with the sacred to renew the commitment to the clan
  • Intichiuma rite – eating the sacred animal – the worshipers give life to their god (setting it apart and worshiping it), and the god returns it to them (in eating the totem) - Compare this to the practice of communion in Christianity
• Piacular rituals – Atonement and Mourning
  • When a person dies, a piece of the clan has just died and a part of everyone has died.

Conclusion

• Religion is not intellectual, but social. It serves to bind a society together and thus ensure its survival. It is the soul of society.

Problems

• Assumptions – How do we know that there is only one root cause of religion?
• Evolutionary view – is the Aborigine religion really an accurate example of the most primitive religion? Perhaps it is just one outworking of many branches of the religious evolutionary tree
• There might be more than one evolutionary tree since religions sprung out of geographically isolated groups.
• Is he operating off of good evidence and good analysis of the evidence? This has been called into question by at least one person, Goldstien.
• Denys the role of the supernatural or the belief of the supernatural as a basis of religion. Durkheim thinks there is only the sacred and the profane and no distinction between the supernatural and natural in other’s basic beliefs.
• Aggressive reductionalist functionalism – tries to reduce religion to something it does not seem to be.

• Notes , Religion
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