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The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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05-08-2019 , 10:10 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

I have a feeling this playground will be winding down, but I've got one last gasp at least. To that end, I recently bought a translation of this classic Durkheim text (1912) and after reading the first chapter it seems to me that it might be fun to live-blog (sort of) chapter by chapter. We'll see how this goes.

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05-08-2019 , 10:34 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

Introduction (Part 1)

The first chapter is split into two parts. The first part is basically an explanation/apology for Durkheim's decision to base a theoretical exploration of the sociology of religion in ethnographic fieldwork describing the social structure and culture of a group of Aboriginal Australian tribes. The second part of this introduction quite intriguingly launches into a very Durkheimian argument about the philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism, where Durkheim offers a kind of third approach to understanding the Aristotelian categories as products of a socially constructed knowledge, although that phrase ("social construction") is a modern one that Durkheim doesn't use. The second part was the more fascinating, but in order...

Towards a Sociology of Religion

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In this book we propose to study the most primitive and simplest religion currently known, to analyse it and attempt to explain it. We call a religious system the most primitive we have been able to observe when it fulfills the two following conditions: first, when it is found in societies whose organization is of the utmost simplicity; and second, when it can be explained without introducing any element borrowed from an earlier religion.

We shall do our best to describe the interrleated components of this system witht he precision and accuracy of an ethnographer or a historian. But our task will not be limited to this. Sociology sets for itself problems other than those posed by history or ethnography. It pursues knowledge of the earlier forms of civilization not only to know them and reconstruct them, but, like all positive science, its goal is first and foremost to explain a current reality, something close to us and consequently capable of affecting our ideas and actions.

Fairly straightforward, but noted here just to clarify the topic of the text. Durkheim goes on to address a complaint that the study of religion should favor studying some modern or more sophisticated religion in particular, concluding:

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We turn to primitive religions, then, not with the ulterior motive of depreciating religion in general, for these religions are no less worthy than others. They answer the same needs, they play the same role, they issue from the same causes. THey can effectively serve, as a result, to show the nature of religious life and consequently to resolve the problem we have set for ourselves.

But why grant them a special prerogative? Why distinguish them from all others as our subject of study? Solely for methodological reasons.

Those methodological reasons are basically

1) Durkheim proposes that it's useful to understand, historically, how religions develop over time, which means starting from some point of origin in the past

2) Following arguments made by cultural anthropologists of the time, he argues that the fundamental elements (the "elementary forms") will be clearer and more understandable in a simpler social context

Functionalism

One of the most important assumptions in Durkheim's approach is that he is viewing religion functionally; that is, he's not particularly concerned with the spiritual significance adherents place on particular symbols or practices but with the way in which those symbols/practices meet functional needs within society. He gets to this point by way of responding to a complaint about studying "primitive" religion if it taken to be "less true" than some later religion, e.g. Christianity:

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In any case, a sociologist of religion would not hold such a view. It is a basic postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest on error and falsehood or it could not endure. If it were not based on the nature of things, it would have met with resistance from those very things and could not have prevailed....

Our complaint against the schools from which we have diverged is precisely that they have misunderstood this principle. When we regard the formulas literally, of course, these religious beliefs and practices seem at times disconcerting, and we maybe tempted to see them as fundamentally aberrant. But we must reach beneath the symbol to the reality it embodies and which gives it its true meaning. The most barbarous or bizarre rituals and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, whether individual or social. The reasons the believer uses to justify them may be, and generally are, mistaken; none the less the true reasons exist, and it is tthe business of science to discover them.

Durkheim's functionalism is not tremendously different from the "cultural materialism" I emphasized in Marvin Harris' work, but we'll see as the book develops how it informs his analyses.

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05-08-2019 , 11:10 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

Introduction (Part 2)

This is where we sort of unexpectedly digress into the philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism. I thought this part was very interesting so I'll just quote enough of it to get the feel:

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We have known for a long time that the first systems of representation which man made of the world and of himself were religious in origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology as well as a speculation on the divine. If philosophy and the sciences arose from religion, it is because religion itself began by playing the role of science and philosophy. But it has been less frequently noted that religion has not merely enriched a performed human mind with a certain number of ideas; it has helped to form that mind. Men owe to religion not only a good part of their knowledge but also the form in which this knowledge is elaborated.

At the source of our judgements are a certain number of essential notions that dominate our entire intellectual life. These are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of understanding: notions of time, space, genus, number, cause, substance, personality, and so on. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are the solid frames that enclose all thought. Thought does not seem able to break out of them without destroying itself, since we seem unable to think of objects that are not in time or space, that are not countable, and so on.... They are, so to speak, the armature of intelligence.

Now, when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analyzed, these basic categories are encountered in the process. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought....

Durkheim is about to contrast rationalist and empiricist accounts of these basic categories of thought, before giving his alternative (which is essentially a social constructionist account, as I noted). But first he's trying to establish the connection of these categories to his larger topic of religion, hence the above. I think the argument for connecting them is probably a little weak as stated, but the ideas are intriguing anyway. I think Durkheim is really just using religion to also talk about some of his basic sociological ideas.

But before getting to his argument, he first has to back up to say something fundamental about his view of religion:

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This point is of some interest in itself, but here is what gives it its full range of implication. The general conclusion of the book you are about to read is that religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rituals are ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and are meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups. But if these categories of thought have religious origins, they must participate in what is common to all religious phenomena: they too must be social things, the products of collective thought. At the very least -- considering the present state of our knowledge of these matters, it is best to refrain from any radical and exclusive statements -- it is legitimate to assume that these categories are rich in social elements.

Even now this social dimension can be glimpsed in some of them. Try, for example, to imagine the notion of time without the procedures by which we divide, measure, and express it by means of objective signs, a time that is not a succession of years, months, weeks, days, and hours. It is almost unthinkable.

The point being that those divisions of time correspond to socially regulated behavior: recurring cycles of rituals, holidays, public ceremonies, and so on. He makes a similar argument about the way we conceptualize space.

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In other words, space would not be what it is if it were not, like time, divided and differentiated. But where do these basic divisions come from? Inherently, there is no right or left, above or below, north or south, and so on. All these distinctions evidently come from the different affective values attributed to these regions. And since all people of the same civilization conceive of space in the same way, it is clear that these affective values and the distinctions that depend on them are also held in common; this implies, almost of necessity, that they are social in origin.

Moreover, in some cases this social character is made manifest. There are societies in Australia and North America in which space is conceived in teh form of a vast circle because the encampment itself is circular, and the spatial circle is divided just like a tribal circle and in its image.

Having set up the idea of these Aristotelian categories as being both socially constructed and closely tied to the cosmological aspects of religion, Durkheim then goes on to suggest that this view of the categories as "social facts" is superior to both the common rationalist and empiricist way of understanding them.

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Once this hypothesis is accepted, the problem of knowledge is posed in new terms. Until now, two contrasting doctrines prevailed. For some, the categories of understanding cannot be derived from experience: they are logically prior to it and condition it. They are conceived as simple givens, irreducible and immanent in the human mind by virtue of its inherent make-up. This is they they are called a priori. For others, by contrast, these categoriees are constructed, made of bits and pieces, and it is the individual who forges the construction.

But both solutions present serious difficulties. If we adopt the empiricist thesis, we must strip the categories of their characteristic properties. In fact, they are distinguished from all other knowledge by their universality and their necessity. They are the most general concepts that exist since they apply to everything that is real.... They are the common ground where all minds meet. Moreover, minds necessarily meet there, since reason, which is none other than the whole set of fundamental categories, is invested with an authority we cannot evade at will.... So not only are these categories independent of us, they impose themselves on us. But the characteristics of empirical data are quite the opposite..... Under these conditions, to reduce reason to experience is to conjure it away, for the universality and necessity that characterize it are reduced to pure appearance, illusions that can be practically useful but correspond to nothing in things themselves.

The rationalist position does not have that problem, Durkheim argues, but it suffers from an ontological problem about the source of the mysterious capacity for reason which supposedly transcends experience:

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On the contrary, they [the rationalists] leave [the categories] with all their defining characteristics.... To do this, however, they must attribute to the mind a certain power of transcending experience and adding to what is immediately given; but they neither explain nor justify this singular power.

Durkheim then appeals to this idea of collective representations and social facts as realities sui generis as a way of maintaining the apparent universality and necessity of the categories without positing some super-natural human intellectual capacity. The idea of collective representations and socially-constructed knowledge as irreducible elements in functional explanations of social behavior is one of the core elements of Durkheim's overall philosophy of social science.

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If reason is only a form of individual experience, there is no more reason. ON the other hand, if its self-proclaimed powers are acknowledged but unaccounted for, then it seems to lie beyond the boundaries of nature and science. Faced with these contradictory objections, the mind hesitates. But if we accept the social origin of categories, a new perspective becomes possible that should help us avoid these contrary difficulties.

The basic thesis of apriorism is that knowledge is formed from two kinds of elements that are not interchangeable, two distinct and superimposed strata, as it were. Our hypothesis endorses this principle. The kinds of knowledge called empirical -- the only kind that theorists of empiricism have ever used to construct reason -- are those which the direct action of objects initiates in our minds. These are individual states, then, that are entirely explained by the psychic nature of the individual. But if the categories of thought are essentially collective, as we believe, they translate in the first instance states of the collectivity. They depend on the way this collectivity is constituted and organized, on its morphology, its religious, moral, and economic institutions, and so on. The distance between these two kinds of representations, then, separates the individual from the social, and the second can no more be derived from the first than society can be derived from the individual, the whole from the part, the complex from the simple. Society is a reality sui generis.

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05-19-2019 , 05:36 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

Chapter 1 - Definitions of Religion

Work and travel has put me behind on blogging, but not on reading, so I'm well ahead of myself now, but carrying on.

The interesting thing about this chapter is that the definitions of religion which Durkheim wants to contest are still quite relevant, at least in popular consciousness. And Durkheim's criticisms are also still relevant because of that.

So, this chapter begins by first criticizing two ways of defining religion -- as concern for the supernatural, or as concern with divinities -- and then Durkheim offers his own preliminary definition, based around the idea of dividing the world into the categories of "sacred" and "profane".

Religion as Belief in the Supernatural

In a nutshell, the problem with this definition is that it presupposes a very modern, western way of thinking about religion that is quite foreign to the self-understanding of the older religions Durkheim is interested in making sense of. As he puts it, in reference to the members of the tribes he wishes to study:

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For him, there is nothing strange in using one's voice or gestures to command the elements, to halt or advance the progress of the stars, to make the rain fall or not, and so on. The rites he uses to ensure the fertility of the soil or the fecundity of animal species that provide him with food are no more irrational, in his view, than the technical procedures our agronomists use for the same purpose.

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Moreover, the idea of the supernatural, as we understand it, is of recent vintage: it presupposes its opposite, which it negates and which is not at all primitive. In order to call certain phenomena supernatural, one must already have a sense that there is a natural order of things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe are connected to one another according to certain necessary relationships called laws. Once this principle is established, anything that pertains to these laws necessarily appears to be beyond nature, and so beyond reason...

The point being that this view of nature is relatively late and thus can't provide a conceptual basis for a definition of religion that will make sense of ancient religions.

Religion as concern with linking man and some divinity

Just as the definition of religion as "belief in the supernatural" is clearly tied to modern understandings, this definition is too centered around the theistic, Abrahamic religions to serve as a universal definition.

The first problem Durkheim points out is just the existence of religions where divinities are not central at all, like the oldest forms of Buddhism and Jainism. This is a well known criticism, I think.

The second point he makes is more interesting in connection to his own definition:

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Even in deistic religions, we find a great number of rites that are entirely independent of any idea of gods or spiritual beings. First of all, there are a multitude of prohibitions. The Bible, for example, commands women to live in isolation for a specified period each month, and requires the same sort of isolation during childbirth. It forbids yoking together the ox and the ass, or wearing a clothing in which wool is mixed with linen, though it is impossible to see what role the belief in Yahweh can have played in these prohibitions. He is absent from all the prohibited relations....

In every cult there are practices that act by themselves, through a virtue of their own, without any god mediating between the individual who executes the rite and the goal pursued...

In Durkheim's view, since there are foundational elements of religious practice which appear independent from belief in deities, as well as non-theistic religions, that belief cannot be enough to establish a universal definition of religion.

Durkheim's definition -- the sacred and the profane

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Religious phenomena fall quite naturally into two basic categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion and consist of representations; the second are fixed modes of actions. These two classes of phenomena differ as much as thought differs from action....

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present a common quality: they presuppose a classification of things -- the real or ideal things that men represent for themselves -- into two classes, two opposite kinds, generally designated by two distinct terms effectively translated by the words profane and sacred.

The division of the world into two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane, is the hallmark of religious thought. Beliefs, myths, gnomic spirits, and legends are either representations or systems of representation that express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers attributed to them, their history, their relations with each other and with profane things. But sacred things should be taken to mean simply those personal beings we call gods or spirits. A rock, a tree, a spring, a stone, a piece of wood, a house, in other words anything all, can be sacred. A rite can have this sacred character as well; in fact, no rite exists that does not have it to some degree. There are words, speeches, and formulas that can be spoken only by consecrated persons; there are gestures and movements that cannot be executed by everyone. If, according to mythology, Vedic sacrifice was not just a way of winning favour with the gods but actually created them, that is because it possessed a virtue comparable to those of the most sacred beings.

The circle of sacred objects, then, cannot be fixed once and for all; its scope varies endlessly from one religion to another. Buddhism is a religion because, in the absence of gods, it accepts the existence of sacred things, namely the Four Noble Truths and the practices that derive from them.

Durkheim goes on to try to qualify the nature of the difference between sacred and profane things in a general way, but I'll pass over it because I think it might make more sense when we get to his later definition of religion which builds on this distinction between the sacred and profane, which is more intended just as starting place.

The last part of the chapter is concerned with drawing a distinction between religion and magic, which again foreshadows the larger goal of Durkheim's system building:

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Magic also consists of beliefs and rites. Like religion, it has its myths and its dogmas... Magic also has its ceremonies, sacrifices, purification rituals, prayers, chants, and dances. The beings invoked by the magician, the forces he puts into play, are not only similar in nature to the forces and beings addressed by religion but often identical.

So, how then are the two different? The difference, for Durkheim, is that religion is an inherently collective and social phenomena in a way that is distinct from magic.

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Religious beliefs proper are always held by a defined collectivity that professes them and practices the rites that go with them. These beliefs are not only embraced by all the members of this collectivity as individuals, they belong to the group and unite it....

When it comes to magic, the situation is quite different. It is probably true that magical beliefs are always in vogue. They are often widespread among large sectors of the population, and there are even people who believe in magic as much as they do in religion proper. But magic does not bind its followers to one another and unite them in a single group living the same life. A church of magic does not exist.

This distinction between individual practice and collective practice will come up again later.

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