Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- 8 Durkheim and ritual
- 9 Embodiment, emotions, and the foundations of social order: Durkheim’s enduring contribution
- 10 Drag kings at the totem Ball: the erotics of collective representation in Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud
- 11 “Renegade Durkheimianism” and the transgressive left sacred
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
8 - Durkheim and ritual
from Part II: - Symbols, rituals, and bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- 8 Durkheim and ritual
- 9 Embodiment, emotions, and the foundations of social order: Durkheim’s enduring contribution
- 10 Drag kings at the totem Ball: the erotics of collective representation in Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud
- 11 “Renegade Durkheimianism” and the transgressive left sacred
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Although this chapter will begin with Émile Durkheim's ([1912] 1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Elementary Forms), I will focus on the place of ritual in the Durkheimian tradition, rather than add to the already enormous amount of explication of that book and the place of ritual in it. Even so, because of the vast influence of Durkheim on several disciplines, my treatment will be highly selective. I will focus on the ways in which ritual continues to be central for the understanding not only of religion, but of society.
There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the thought of Émile Durkheim than with a famous passage in his Elementary Forms:
Life in Australian [Aboriginal] societies alternates between two different phases. In one phase, the population is scattered in small groups that attend to their occupations independently. Each family lives to itself, hunting, fishing - in short, striving by all possible means to get the food it requires. In the other phase, by contrast, the population comes together, concentrating itself at specified places for a period that varies from several days to several months. This concentration takes place when a clan or a portion of the tribe . . . conducts a religious ceremony.
These two phases stand in the sharpest possible contrast. The first phase, in which economic activity predominates, is generally of rather low intensity. Gathering seeds or plants necessary for food, hunting, and fishing are not occupations that can stir truly strong passions. The dispersed state in which the society finds itself makes life monotonous, slack, and humdrum. Everything changes when a [ceremony] takes place . . . Once the individuals are gathered together a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them into an extraordinary height of exaltation . . . Probably because a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits harmony and unison of movement, [their] gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and dances . . .
(Durkheim [1912] 1995: 216-18)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim , pp. 183 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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