(see also notes for a seminar at Teachers College)

The purpose of sociology is to explain a present reality that is near to us and thus capable of affecting our ideas and actions. That reality. .. is present day man for there is no other that we have a greater interest in knowing well. I have made a very archaic religion the subject of my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity.

"man," of course, should be rewritten as "human beings" and "archaic" as "local" and "non randomized sample." With these changes we have the only argument for ethnography of singular cases as a priviledged mode for understanding the conditions of human beings in "(post-)modernity," (advanced, late) capitalism, "global society" or whatever unit is considered "our present reality."

The group regularly produces an intellectual and moral uniformity of which we find only rare examples in the more advanced societies. Everything is common to everyone. The movements are stereotyped; everyone executes the same ones in the same circumstances; and this conformity of conduct merely translates that of thought. (p. 5)

D. was summarizing what he wrote repeatedly about "mechanical" solidarity in the "less advanced" societies. While it is tempting to latch onto the dichotomy more/less advanced as the key in this passage, the key is the model of a society where conduct (which comes first) and thought is uniform. D. is convinced that this would apply to a vanishingly small group of societies. Contrast this to Dewey on communication (1916), many Boasians on "culture," Gramsci-as-interpreted on "hegemony," Bourdieu on habitus. After a century, the problem with modeling any society without relying on uniformity remains.

The general conclusion of the chapters to follow is that religion is an eminently social thing. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups. (p. 9)

A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activity while ensuring that regularity. [...] Since all men of the same civilization conceive of space in the same manner, it is evidently necessary that these ... also be held in common--which imples almost necessarily that they are of social origin. (p. 10-11)

this continues the theme of commonality but possibly with a twist: the commonality is insured by the calendar (to take one of the D.s example) rather than by the generality of a person's conception across a group. Strictly speaking, D. is generalizing outrageously when he talks of similarity at the "civilization" level if he means conception--but not if he means calendar: under what condition can someone who resides in the U.S. ignore its calendrical rythms (particularly the more ritual rythms)?

If the categoiries are essentially collective representations ... they translate {traduisent} states of the collectivity, first and foremost. They depend upon the way in which the collectivity is organized, upon its morphology, its religious, moral, and economic, institutions, and so on. [...] Society is a reality sui generis; it has its own characteristics that are either not found in the rest of the universe or are not found there in the same form. The representations that express society therfore have an altogether different content from the purely individual representations, and one can be certain in advance that the former add nothing to the latter. (p. 15)

As part of society, the individual naturally transcends himself, both when he things and when he acts. (p. 16).

[...] if society is a specific reality, it is not an empire within an empire. It is part of nature and nature's highest expression. (p. 17)

... no matter how men have conceived {se soit representee} their experience of novelties and chance occurencs, these conceptions can in no way be used to characterize religion. Religious conceptions aim above all to express and explian not what is exceptional and abnormal but what is constant and regular. [...] Thus the idea of mystery is not at al original. It does not come to man as a given; man himself has forged this idea as well as its contrary. (p. 26)

First, let us note that, in all these formulas, scholars have been trying to express the nature of religion as a whole. Although religion is a whole composed ofparts--a more or less complex system of myths, dormas, rites, and cermonies--they operate as if it formed a kind of indivisible entity. Since a whole can be defined only in relationship to the parts that comprise it, a better method is to try to characterize the elementary phenomena from which any religion results, and then characterize the system produced by their union. (p. 33)

there is a definition and a statement of method: how is this related to the overall definition and other statements of method?

Religious phenomena fall into two basic categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinions and consist of representations; the second are particular modes of action. Between these two categories of phenomena lies all that separate thinking from doing. (p. 34)

This is easiest to rewrite so as to move out of the morass that the distinction has produced in social thought as people read this as a call for two separate kinds of investigations. Beliefs, for the natural scientists, are observable as texts, discourses, statements, etc., and the analyst can leave aside (for other disciplines to explore) the specific concern with "thinking." Conversely, rites must be looked at as discursive practices and thus related through embodiment to imagination, representations, and perhaps even thinking.

Whether simple or complex all known religious beliefs display a common feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive of into two classes--two opposite genera--that are widely designated by two distinct terms, which the words profane and sacred translate fairly well. (p. 34)

Does this distinction have to be taken as seriously as it has been in the exegetical literature? It does sound like an a priori classificatory scheme. What can we now do with it? Before we do check the mutualitywritten into the following elaboration of the distinction:

Sacred things are things prohibitions protect and isolate; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions apply and that must keep a distance from the first. (p. 38)

I disagree with the translator who shaped this sentence in the passive voice. In French, the prohibitions are the active subjects that protect and isolate. I would say that the prohibitions are the practical activity of particular kinds of agents.

We arrive at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to it. (p. 44)

Note that this definition is "arrived at." The whole chapter traces the journey D. wants us to take.

October 8th , 2004