The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- J. W. Swain
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~270,000 words · 1,285 passages
Cite this work
- APAÉmile Durkheim. (n.d.). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (J. W. Swain, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/emile-durkheim/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life
- MLAÉmile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by J. W. Swain. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/emile-durkheim/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life.
- ChicagoÉmile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by J. W. Swain. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/emile-durkheim/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The book in which Durkheim looks for the simplest form of religion in order to understand them all, and concludes that what a society worships, without knowing it, is itself.
Context and history
Published in 1912. He takes as his elementary case the totemism of Aboriginal Australian peoples, and an honest qualification is needed here: Durkheim never went there. He works from other people's ethnographies, and that material has been heavily questioned since, both for its quality and for the assumption that those societies were 'elementary'. The sociological argument — the sacred as a collective force, ritual as what keeps it alive — has worn far better than the material it was built on.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
the causes which called it into existence, though remaining active, are no longer perceived, except across a vast scheme of interpretations which quite transform them. Popular mythologies and subtile theologies have done their work: they have superimposed upon the primitive sentiments others which are quite different, and which, though holding to the first, of which they are an elaborated form, only allow their true nature to appear very imperfectly. The psychological gap between the cause and the effect, between the apparent cause and the effective cause, has become more considerable and more difficult for the mind to leap. The remainder of this book will be an illustration and a verification of this remark on method. It will be seen how, in the primitive religions, the religious fact still visibly carries the mark of its origins: it would have been well-nigh impossible to infer them merely from the study of the more developed religions. The study which we are undertaking is therefore a way of taking up again, _but under new conditions_, the old problem of the origin of religion. To be sure, if by origin we are to understand the very first beginning, the question has nothing scientific about it, and should be resolutely discarded. There was no given moment when religion began to exist, and there is consequently no need of finding a means of transporting ourselves thither in thought. Like every human institution, religion did not commence anywhere. Therefore, all speculations of this sort are justly discredited; they can only consist in subjective and arbitrary constructions which are subject to no sort of control. But the problem which we raise is quite another one. What we want to do is to find a means of discerning the ever-present causes upon which the most essential forms of religious thought and practice depend.…