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Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

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This book is a sociological text written by Durkheim. One of the forefathers of Sociology, he believed that to study sociology you must identify social phenomena and then trace it to its origins to see how it came about. This for Durkheim was the only way to understand society.

In this book he examines the origins of religion. He explains that religion develops from the collective feelings of security we gain from living in a group, and these feelings are very powerful and important to us. However, early tribes passed these feelings onto which ever object they were close to at the time of experiencing the emotions, or the most frequent object in their area. The object could include a plant, vegetable or an animal, which would then be represented in a carving of stone or wood and then worshipped. This for Durkheim is the beginning of totemism, the first religion.

He follows on to discuss how our first religion gave us an understanding of the world around us, our conception of space and time. For Durkheim 'the framework of our intelligence' is made up of the concepts of space, time, numbers and our existence, and they were born 'in religion'.

Durkheim's writing is suprisingly easy to read and very enjoyable. His examination of early societies gives much insight into their lives and how they understood the world to be. For anybody studying Durkheim, this book is a good topic area to concentrate on. However, for anybody interested in theology or in early societies, it is a fascinating read. I read this book as part of my degree course and, although I borrowed it from the library, even after my course has ended I am now buying my own copy to reread.

I recommend this book to a wide range of readers, not only those interested in sociology. Read it, you'll be suprised!

I, too am disappointed that the new edition is abridged. One reviewer noted that only about 30 pages were taken out, but for serious readers, students, and teachers, it is important to have the book exactly as Durkheim wrote it. I am a professor of sociology and I suppose this edition would be OK for teaching (the introduction is fantastic), but for my own scholarship, I could not depend on it
because I am unsure what has been excised and the rationale. This is not just the idle complaint of a pedant - this is one of the most important books in the history of modern social thought and there is no excuse for abridging it, especially when the cover DOES NOT note that it is abridged. In a classic, every word counts.

Durkheim's "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" is one of the deepest books I've ever read, but I will leave others to speak of that.

I would like to complain about this particular edition, the "Oxford's World Classics" edition. (This review has apparently been published elsewhere. The edition I'm talking about is a yellow-and-red "Oxford's World's Classics" paperback with a black-and-white photo of Durkheim looking off to his left.)

I have long been looking to replace my worn-out edition, and thought this offering (published 2001) would answer nicely. (Is it just me, or has this book been plagued with editions that have flimsy binding?)

Unfortunately, Amazon buries an important piece of information in its "Editorial Reviews" section: this edition is abridged.

Now, it's lightly abridged. The original, which I have a hand, is only slightly longer than what you're getting here.

Which is what puzzles me: why did they bother to abridge this at all? Printing the entire text would only have added about 30 pages to the thing. The lines they have disincluded seem, at least upon my examination, no more irrelevant or abstruse than what they've decided to include.

Puzzling.

There are some good things about this edition, though. There are explanatory footnotes at the end of the text: useful glosses, not those "textual comparison" kind. (The footnotes on the bottom of each page are Durkheim's own.) There is a 29-page introduction. There is also an ethnographic map of Australia. But the biggest plus for me is that the (paperback) binding is super-sturdy and promises to last through many reads.

This is the translation by Carol Cosman, done in 2001 specifically for this edition.

In this book Durkheim examines the origins of religion. He explains that religion developed from the collective feelings of security we gain from living in a group, and that these feelings are very powerful and important to us. Early tribes passed these feelings onto which ever object they were close to or the most frequent object in their area at the time of experiencing the emotions. The object could include a plant, vegetable or an animal, which would then be represented in a carving of stone or wood and then worshipped. This for Durkheim is the beginning of totemism, the first religion. He follows on to discuss how our first religion gave us an understanding of the world around us, our conception of space and time. For Durkheim 'the framework of our intelligence' is made up of the concepts of space, time, numbers and our existence, and they were born 'in religion'.

What emerges is no mere dry academic treatise, but an absolutely fascinating journey through topics such as the rain dances of the Pueblo Indians, the finger exercises of monkeys, and the hallucinations of alcoholics. Durkheim, of course, is the father of modern sociology and anthropology and even though sociology and anthropology have rejected many of his theories over the years he is still worth reading because the state of modern sociology and anthropology is polluted with all sorts of assumptions that are mostly politically correct eather than factually correct. The predominant belief that "we have come a long way since 1912" is completely misleading. Even though the fundamental assumption upon which Durkheim's work is based, that aboriginal practices are religion at its most basic and primitive, is no longer accepted as necessarily true - this theory was also current in Durkheim's time and he also discusses it over several chapters and effectively refutes it.

Durkheim's writing is suprisingly easy to read and very enjoyable. His examination of early societies gives much insight into their lives and how they understood the world to be. It's a fascinating read for anybody interested in human nature and early cultures. This is one of the three books that impacted me the most in my life.

I've read Suicide and Division of Labor and was interested in a historical sort of way. Elementary Forms is positively shocking. Pages 8-18 and 433-48 will change your life. In those 25 or so pages he outlines a sociology of knowledge that presages the works of Mead, Berger, and the phenomenologists. He's 50 years ahead of Merleau-Ponty's great Phenomenology of Perception which treads over much of the same material. The rest of EFRL is interesting as well but if you read nothing else of Durkheim's read those pages. They completely reinvigorated the stuffy "father of sociology" I had known.

This book is more than an explanation of the origins of religious belief; Durkheim was ultimately trying to show how religious thought lay the foundation for scientific thought, and how a priori knowledge was based on social norms rather than being "innate". I wouldn't say that Durkheim successfully proved all these notions, but there is enough good material in this book to furnish a reader with starting points for explorations in a number of different directions.

The most important concept in the book, from my perspective, is that of "collective consciousness", meaning the ideas, instincts, and general world-views that are formed by social cohesion. Social conventions are not external to people, they are internalized and appropriated emotionally, taking on the guise of "supernatural" or "divine" truth. Even outside of the religious sphere, one can begin to observe that much that is assumed as "truth" is a function of social convention. The process is organic, with individuals contributing to the process to create a greater whole--the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It opens up the question of what it means to be an individual in society, how much individuality of thought is truly possible, how resistance to collective "groupthink" is possible, and how much of individual identity is shaped by collective forces.

Related to this are ethical questions: are good and evil just products of social convention? Is the idea that there is an absolute measure of good and evil just a result of a social group's elevation of its social norms to divine/sacred status (which is the usual process, according to Durkheim)?

The book also raises interesting questions about process of human symbol-making: how can people unite themselves around a seemingly arbitrary symbol (e.g. an animal totem like a snake), then take individual identity from that symbol, make the symbol sacred, and create an entire ritual and mythic world around that symbol?

And there are a number of implicit and explicit questions about human knowledge. Durkheim says that scientific knowledge is based on the "generalizing" process inherent in a social setting: each individual has specific, particular perceptions and visceral responses, but when they become generalized beyond the purely individual, in order to allow communication between members of the group, they become universal; hence the beginning of universal principles, the foundation of scientific thought. But this tends to beg the question of what there is in the individual that allows him/her to have perceptions at all, rather than formless sense impressions; and it also tends to mean that science is nothing more than an explication of the social norms which give rise to the general principles in question, since they're supposedly derived from social conventions for group communication. In other words, does science say anything about the outside world, or is it just describing in detail the social processes which created universal principles?

Anyway, the book is straightforward (moreso than this review of mine), well-reasoned, and logically structured. It's one of the more compelling books I've read in years, and I'm not even particularly interested in religious things. Highly recommended.

Durkheim, of course, is a father of modern sociology and anthropology. Even though sociology and anthropology have rejected many of his theories over the years he is still worth reading. I think that many of his ideas can still provide useful ways to think about society and culture; this work may be a bit out-of-date but it's definitely not obsolete. Either way, anyone interested in sociology or anthropology should read this work, if only to get a better understanding of where these disciplines have been. Fields' new translation gives this old work new clothing and is well worth the investment.

Durkheim was not as scientific (or as sociological, or even as valid) as he might have been, but that matters little. He helped start the discipline, and the rest of us have had a century to make advances. This is where to see it just beginning to take form.

A book of this kind needs no review; everybody intrerested in sociology of religion needs this text as one of the fundamental views of sociological reflection on the meaning of religion.

Much of the taken-for-granted substance of contemporary sociology is due to Emile Durkheim. His influence is greater than that of Marx or even the often cited and much lauded Max Weber. Read the prominent contemporary work of Pierre Bourdieu, and you'll find that he is a Durkheimian through and through, particularly with regard to his best known concepts, cultural capital and social capital.

The question that guided Durkheim throughout his fruitful career was "how is society possible?" In other words, how do we explain social cohesion, avoiding the pathologies and divisiveness attendant to egoism (social isolaltion) and anomie (cultural deregulation), terms introduced by Durkheim in The Division of Labor in Society and effectively applied in his book Suicide?

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life makes a profound contribution to answering questions as to the basis of social cohesion. Though limited almost exclusively to simple, largely undifferentiated societies based on a collective consciousness, Durkheim's account of the emergence and role of elementary religious influences has lessons applicable to contemporary times.

Specifically, Durkheim's discussion of the totem, an animal, plant, natural physical force, or simple material artifact, used to represent a clan or tribe can be likened to the American flag in the U.S., a symbol that has quasi-religious significance. When the flag is displayed, especially to comparatively large aggregates of Americans, it elicits a shared emotional response reflecting a commonly held moral ideal and set of shared beliefs. The shared response, moreover, serves to reaffirm and rejuvenate the moral code and belief system on which the response is based.

The same might be said of the crucifix for Christians, the Star of David for Jews, or a crescent and star on a green background for Muslims. As material artifacts the symbols are of little intrinsic value. However, as symbols of a collectively shared, morally binding world view they provide much-needed psychological sustenance, especially when invoked for aggregates gathered together to celebrate the rightness of a commonly held perspective.

Readers of Durkheim's earlier work will recognize that such assemblages and displays of a totem will be most effective in simpler societies where experiential commonality gives rise to a well developed collective consciousness. In more complex societies, where a vast diversity of life experiences diminishes the content and efficacy of the collective consciousness, symbols that have totemic influence are hard to find. While the American flag remains one such symbol in the contemporary U.S., the rancorous social, cultural, and political differences that separate Americans make clear that the flag as a totem means different things to different people. This diminishes its value as a source of social cohesion that reminds us of shared beliefs and common outlook. The diminished value of the flag as a totem is both a consequence and a cause of exaggerated diversity, not to be found within simpler organizational forms such as the clan or tribe among Nineteenth Century aboriginal Australians.

Having read The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, one can see the social provenance of commonly held, taken-for-granted ideas of space, time, number, cause and effect, and other fundamental categories. Moreover, Durkheim's conclusion that when people worship their totem they are, in effect, worshiping their clan or tribe is insightfully compelling. As already noted, however, one wonders if increasingly complex and diverse societies are foredoomed to dysfunction and dissolution because the cultural commonality that is manifest in the totemic principle is hard to find in highly differentiated social systems.

Durkehim's genius as manifest in his life-long commitment to finding intrinsically social explanations for a broad range of phenomena that are too often erroneously reduced to psychologisms is abundantly evident throughout The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. His contribution to sociology as a discipline is enormous and typically under-valued.

As an addendum, it is surprising that Durkheim did not use fundamental concepts such as mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity, and collective consciousness (used once), as well as anomie, egoism, altruism, and fatalism in a large number of perfectly suitable ways throughout The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Perhaps they were lost in this translation. Their absence works against establishing explicit continuity with his earlier work.