Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Positivist sociological theory social phenomena can be studied as if they are natural

l (natural science of human society) 1. Critical of evolutionist schemes of unilinear progress 2. Collective, social nature of religious and other social phenomena (no psychological or biological reductionism) 3. Relativistic (pluralistic) Social facts: social substratum (physical association of people in groups; objective social reality); collective representations (mediate external social reality with individual though and emotion). How does the morally obligatory become the intellectually and aesthetically and cognitively desirable? Collective representations. Sacred vs. Profane. Processual definition. Sacred as that which is set apart from profane via ritual interdiction. Temporally prior and spatially outside of the everyday social world. Profane: That to which interdictions are applied. Ritual = collective activities that mediate relations between these different realms. Primitive Classifications (1903) (w/ Marcel Mauss) Substratum constrains collective consciousness (representations) which in turn shapes substratum. Methodological Problems: 1. Assume from outset that moral considerations and original categories are social classes (cramming; push ethnographic data into oversimplified correlations) 2. Found that there were multiple types of correlations and found that differences and similarities between social formations and religious classifications did NOT align. (ignored or rationalized these problems) Historical significance: transition from earlier focus on substratum to collective representations in Elementary Forms. Forerunner of major works on symbolic classifications (French and British structural theories) (taxonomic approaches to culture). Methodological importance of Primitive Classification: Came at the time where most anthropologists were skipping around the world. This text focuses on regional studies. Concern with context. Study of religious classifications as parts of a larger whole (holistic) Theoretical significance of PC: 1. Theorizing classifications 2. Asdfa 3. Bodily, social, and cosmological processes as classificatory organizations; bodies, objects, persons, and species are placed into a meaningful, hierarchical ordering of inclusion and exclusion. 4. Classificatory operations are deeply emotional as well as cognitive

Elementary Forms Myth and ritual as ways of constructing heterogeneity and difference within social worlds. Functionalist theory: co-occurrences of different types of phenomena (e.g., pig feasts with ecological imbalance) Australian Aboriginal Societies: Totemic clansbond of kinship, shared name (mythic ancestor) Churingas: iconic designs mythic ancestors; ritual prohibitions (taboos): no killing or eating of totemic species; secondary associations (foods, habits, etc.) Society worships itself

Problems with functionalism: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Ahistorical (religious is seen as a conservative force that maintains social status quo). Teleological (chicken and egg) Little or no explanation of specific cultural forms Lacks explanation of cultural creativity Mythic narratives as cold, timeless