The goal for now is to understand the organization of Durkheim's argument in the Elementary Forms while discounting the rhetorical forms ("primitive," "evolution") that marks this as a turn of the 20th century work. And while the book is of course about religion, I submit that it could also have been about "education" as an ubiquitous phenomenon that is still quite difficult to capture through the usual, more or less explicit, definitions.

In the introduction and first chapters, Durkheim sets the stage through a confrontation with some theoreticians of religion that he thus sets up as authoritative and in need of direct challenge. He thus inscribes himself in one tradition. He then works on achieving a definition through an examination of what is left aside in some of the other definitions that have been given.

1. Scapegoats (Introduction)
   1. Whom does Durkheim set up as his opponents? Those who write of religious objects as aberrations (p.2)
      1. He does not confront those who argue from within a specific religious tradition.
      2. He only confronts those (rationalists?) who refuse to take religion seriously and attempt to reduce it to anything else.
   2. If religion is not an abberation, then what is it?
      1. D. then goes into an aside as he explore "how" we will get to an understanding: it will be through history and ethnography, a search for the "primitive."
      2. and then he goes into a methodological aside where he summarized his understanding of "collective processes' and particularly "collective representations." This leads him to open the major issue of what we are to mean by "commonality" (p. 15-16)
         1. how are we to deal both with persistence (reproduction?) and historical drift (culture?)
2. Elaborations of definitions (Book One)
   1. If one jumps directly to the famous statement that closes Chapter One, then one misses the several steps D. takes to ensure that what is to be included in his interests (and those of whom he constructs as so interested) is indeed included. This leads him to a series of subarguments about what religion cannot be reduced to
      1. religion is not:
         1. the supernatural (p. 24)
         2. the divine
         3. magic
         4. animism
         5. naturism
      2. religion is about the active distinction of the two (mutually constituted?) domains of the sacred and profane. I would argue that these are not meant to be states but rather as products of an activity.