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Émile DurkheimThe Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Émile Durkheim (The Author)
Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He came from a Jewish background and enrolled in a rabbinical school before choosing a different academic path and pursuing a largely secular life. Durkheim is regarded as a founder of the modern academic discipline of sociology, which before his career had largely been considered under the umbrella of other disciplines like anthropology. In addition to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1912, Durkheim was known for several previous books, all of which were concerned with sociological (though not necessarily religious) issues.
His 1893 book, The Division of Labor in Society, was influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte and posited a developmental view of human societies, from “primitive” ones marked by “basic” technologies and homogeneous roles, to “advanced” societies with more sophisticated technologies and greater distribution of roles in a complex division of labor. This developmental division did not necessarily imply for Durkheim that “advanced” societies exhibited progress in every area of social life; rather, he suggested that the move from a “primitive” society to an “advanced” one could be marked by serious crises and social disorder. This relatively positive view of the social benefits of so-called “primitive” societies is a feature also to be noted in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim then produced two books which helped advance the discipline of sociology to an independent status: his Rules of Sociological Method (1895) and Suicide (1897), the latter of which set a new benchmark in the use of social scientific research.
Durkheim believed that society ought to be treated as an object of study in its own right. He subscribed to the influential model of structural functionalism, which posited that the complex structures of human society, far from being a haphazard accrual of inefficient practices and institutions, in fact produce values which incline the overall system toward stability and other social goods. While he was not exclusively a scholar of religion, his publication of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life helped establish the study of religion as an appropriate object of social science. Durkheim’s view of religion portrays it as an emergent manifestation of society itself, a fundamental part of the structural complexity which directly contributes to the maintenance of social order and the promotion of social goods. Durkheim’s perspective helped sociologists recapture a positive view of religion’s place in human society, in contrast to the negative reactions toward religion which predominated in many circles of European academia at the time.
Edward Burnett Tylor
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist active in the mid-to-late 19th century and one of the leading theorists of the developing field of social anthropology. As such, he was an important voice in the emerging European debates about anthropology and sociology, and Durkheim interacted frequently with his work. Tylor promoted a developmental view of human society, inspired by the evolutionary ideas of Charles Lyell. He believed that societies pass through three stages of development—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—a view that remained influential into the early 20th century but which has since been regarded as Eurocentric and tinged with racist overtones. While Durkheim disagreed with certain parts of Tylor’s work, the former’s view of the so-called “primitiveness” of Aboriginal Australian societies and the implication that their religion represented a more original, less developed form of all human religion appears to assent to certain features of Tylor’s developmental theory.
Regarding the anthropology of religion, Tylor was an advocate of viewing animism as the foundational form of human religion (and it is to his credit that the term “animism” came into common anthropological usage). Here Durkheim disagreed with him, preferring totemism as a candidate for the original human religion. In Book 1, Chapter 2 of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim interacts directly with Tylor’s ideas on animism and devotes significant attention to refuting them.
James George Frazer
Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish anthropologist whose work on religion won him both popular fame and controversy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a leading scholar in the emerging field of comparative religion, and his analysis of mythology and folklore as a window into ancient religious development was printed in his landmark work of 1890, The Golden Bough. Frazer, like Tylor and many other contemporaries, took a developmental view of human society, and he believed that society tended to progress through stages marked by an adherence to magic, then to religious belief, and then ultimately to science. While The Golden Bough gained significant acclaim, it also engendered controversy by suggesting that the Christian narrative was simply an emergent part of mythologized religious sentiments common to the ancient world.
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Frazer represents a major voice in the debates over the development of religion, and Durkheim interacts with Frazer’s views throughout the text. While Durkheim shares with Frazer a sympathy for a developmental view of religion, he differs from Frazer in at least two important respects. First, he disagrees with Frazer’s view that magic represents an earlier stage of development, upon which religion grows, preferring a view which gives precedence to religion and views magic as a subversive derivation of religious principles. Second, Durkheim does not see science as being a higher stage of development, opposed to religion, as Frazer does. Rather, Durkheim holds that religion was the seedbed that made scientific thought possible in the first place, and that religion will continue alongside science because it is the manifestation of fundamental features of human society and an effective instrument for meeting continuing social needs and maintaining basic social ties.
Baldwin Spencer & F. J. Gillen
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen were anthropologists who together completed surveys of the Indigenous societies in the interior of the Australian continent. In the mid-1890s they undertook extensive fieldwork which culminated in the 1899 publication of Native Tribes of Central Australia. In the opening years of the 20th century, they again undertook a fieldwork expedition, this time producing a second tome, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904). As these were some of the earliest and most comprehensive treatments of Aboriginal Australian societies to become available to the Western world, they were enthusiastically received as important contributions to ethnography and anthropology. Their research was not uncontroversial, however, as some of their observations and conclusions were challenged by other ethnographers in the Australian interior—most notably, the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow, who published his own anthropological observations of Aboriginal Australian societies in a series of studies from 1907 to 1920.
Spencer and Gillen’s work (and, to a lesser extent, Strehlow’s) plays a major role in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Because Durkheim is a sociologist based in Europe, not a fieldwork anthropologist, he must rely on the cultural surveys published by scholars like Spencer and Gillen. His arguments on the fundamental forms of human religion rely to a great extent on the available data concerning Aboriginal Australian religion, and Spencer and Gillen constitute one of the leading sources of that data. While Durkheim occasionally disagrees with one of their points or conclusions here or there, he is deeply indebted to Spencer and Gillen for the volume and scope of their work.
