The elementary forms of the religious life Book

One of my current reading projects is on Archaic Greece, and on my reading list are several books by Walter Burkert. In skimming through them, I noticed that they were rather dense and would require some background, so I looked at the bibliographies and notes, and then at the bibliographies and notes of the books they were based on, and then . . . my usual infinite regress. What I realized was that all the different paths seemed to converge on Durkheim's Elementary Forms, so I decided to start with this. Of course, Durkheim was hardly the first writer to deal with the origin of religions. The question goes back to the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries; Durkheim himself begins by summarizing and polemicizing against the theories of Tylor (animism) and Max Müller (naturism), but since he does summarize them and I need to start somewhere, I'm not going any further back than this (and I have already read many of the authors he refers to such as Fustel de Coulanges, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Frazer's The Golden Bough -- I have to admit my reading in the social sciences is mostly a century or more out of date.) I'm reading it in the 1915 translation by Joseph Ward Swain, which I bought from a sale at the library; I know there are at least two recent translations which may be better, but I didn't find any passages that didn't make sense because of translation problems (although for a print book there were a lot of typos).

Durkheim begins by defining religion as the division of the world into the categories of the sacred and the profane. He makes a further distinction, which I did not find very satisfactory, between religion as social and magic as private. He simply assumes, like the earlier writers, that there had to be one single origin for religion, either it originated once very early or if it originated in many places, it had the same cause and form everywhere, and went through the same stages. (Actually, he does say that a single effect can only be due to a single cause, which is simply bad logic.) While there are enough similarities between the religions of different parts of the world that I can't accept the postmodernist claim that there are no regularities, I think the situation is probably more complex than these early anthropologists assumed. His preferred version of religious origin -- the "elementary forms" of the title -- is totemism. There is a major problem with his method, which is to try to find the earliest form of religion by looking at the most "primitive" contemporary peoples known to ethnography (he explains that by "primitive" he means essentially close to the origins), which he takes to be the native people of Australia. The premise here is that "primitive" people today were somehow stalled at an early level of development while other peoples evolved pastoralism and agriculture, and maintained the same culture as they had at the beginning. Now, even a little bit of reflexion should show that a people with a rudimentary hunter-gatherer culture such as that of the native Australians could never have reached Australia to begin with; it's basically a big island, and a culture like that would have neither the technology nor the motivation for long sea voyages. So it seems that the culture of the Australians must be a secondary adaptation to the environment there on the part of people whose ancestors were at a different stage of development; and thus there is no reason to suppose that their culture, and particularly their religious ideas, had any continuity or bear any close resemblance to the original hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. It's as though someone were to assume that because dolphins and whales live in the ocean, they represent the primitive form of animals before the first amphibians arrived on land. The same would be true for other hunter-gatherers today; they all live in marginal environments which would not have been the choice of the original hunter-gatherers, and were probably forced into those environments by movements of other peoples. The Amazon Basin for example has many small groups with some of the most rudimentary technologies known, yet there is evidence that before European diseases and conquest, the area was heavily populated and had specialized agriculture and trade. If any culture today represents the primary hunter-gatherer culture, we have no way of identifying it, or any reason for assuming that it would have remained unchanged for tens of thousands of years or had no outside contacts and influence.

The general theory he presents is that the distinction between the sacred and the profane -- i.e. for him the origin of religion -- was derived from the experience of assemblies of the clans; where the ordinary "profane" life of the Australians was in separate family groups searching for food, the periodic assemblies were a very different type of experience, and thus became "sacred". The feeling of sacredness of the clan became attached first to its name and emblem, then secondarily to the totem species which the name and emblem represented. The totem, and other entities related to it, became considered as a part of the clan. The sacredness of the totem and the clan became considered as a special, impersonal power -- "mana" -- which was distributed in varying intensities to all the clan members, totem animals, and symbolic items, or in short to everything which was considered sacred. The portion of the "mana" in the individual gave rise to the notion of the soul; the idea of ancestral souls gave rise to spirits; the spirits tended to become spirits of various topological features which were sacred to the clan; and these local spirits, having powers over various natural phenomena, were then generalized into gods. In other words, the stages in Australia -- and presumably everywhere else -- were totemism, pre-animism, animism, "higher religion." He does state that these were logical rather than chronological stages and probably the belief in souls was not later than totemism but merely logically derived from it. In all this evolution, the real essence of the sacred was society itself, the power of the group considered under the various forms of totems, souls, and spirits, because it was a power which was outside the individual. In the second part of the book, he discusses various rituals and explains them on the basis of this theory, including the origins of sacrifice in the double form of communion and oblation.

It is easy to see why this book had such influence. Its major thesis is that religion originated, not from misunderstandings of psychic or cosmic phenomena as others had theorized, but from social structures; that in fact religion was, and still is, a social construct reflecting the organization of a given society. Leaving aside the methodological problems, and the particular theory of the various "stages", this is certainly a major insight into the nature of religion. Of course others, in particular Karl Marx, had much earlier considered religion, like all intellectual activity, as a superstructure based on socio-economic relations, but Durkheim and his "sociological" school were among the first to introduce the idea that religion is a reflection of social categories into academic sociology and try to establish it in detail. One might have expected from his thesis that he, like Marx, would have developed a materialist analysis, but in fact he explicitly defines his theory as "idealist" and claims that it refutes materialism. Essentially, rather than going on to consider the origin of the social order itself, he sometimes claims in circular fashion that it is derived from the totemist beliefs themselves, but more often he treats it simply as a given absolute, which is independent of the conditions which gave rise to it; he then emphasizes that the rites and behaviors of the clan members is determined by the "idea" of the totem and related "ideas". However, when he's not trying to philosophize -- and justify religion rather than exlain it -- he emphasizes just the opposite point, that the ideas or beliefs of religion are secondary to the rituals themselves, which is another concept that has become influential in later theories of religion.

There is much of interest in the book; I was especially impressed by his discussion of early systems of classification, which classify all phenomena into categories based on phratries and clans on the criterion of opposition; i.e. if a black cockatoo belongs to one group, a white cockatoo has to be in the other. This to me cast a new light on the similar classifications in the Presocratic philosophers, which always seemed to me to be totally random. He suggests that a modern survival of this classification system is to be found in the languages which have grammatical gender. His explanation of taboo and asceticism as basically ways of isolating the sacred from the profane is also interesting. He doesn't consider in this book the marriage system and thus deliberately excludes sexual taboos, which might be difficult to explain on this theory; or perhaps the origins could be explained, but they certainly serve other social purposes as well.

Obviously, however, a more than a century-old book is mainly of interest for understanding the later theories and books which it influenced, and that is the purpose for which I am reading it and would recommend it.