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Emile Durkheim's Perspective On Religion

Emile Durkheim argued that all societies divide the world into the sacred and the profane. The profane refers to ordinary daily life, while the sacred transcends it and is typically represented by collective symbols separated from everyday life, like churches. For Durkheim, religion is the practice of maintaining the distinction between sacred and profane through rituals, like weekly church visits. He believed understanding the relationship between sacred symbols and what they represent is key to understanding religion's role in society. Durkheim analyzed totemism among Australian Aboriginal clans, where each clan had a sacred totem animal or plant that distinguished it from others and represented the clan's origins. Through totem worship, clan members were actually worshipping society

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227 views3 pages

Emile Durkheim's Perspective On Religion

Emile Durkheim argued that all societies divide the world into the sacred and the profane. The profane refers to ordinary daily life, while the sacred transcends it and is typically represented by collective symbols separated from everyday life, like churches. For Durkheim, religion is the practice of maintaining the distinction between sacred and profane through rituals, like weekly church visits. He believed understanding the relationship between sacred symbols and what they represent is key to understanding religion's role in society. Durkheim analyzed totemism among Australian Aboriginal clans, where each clan had a sacred totem animal or plant that distinguished it from others and represented the clan's origins. Through totem worship, clan members were actually worshipping society

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Emile Durkheim’s Perspective on

Religion
A summary of Emile Durkheim’s Perspective on Religion, covering his concepts of
sacred and profane among other things….

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In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Durkheim argued that all societies


divide the world into two basic categories: the sacred and the profane:

 The profane refers to mundane ordinary life: our daily routine/ grind of getting
up in the morning, doing our ablutions, going to college, eating our daily Nachos, and
doing the dishes.
 The sacred refers to anything which transcends the humdrum of everyday life:
which typically take the form of collective representations which are set apart from
society (spiritual places such as churches or mosques are the most obvious examples of
‘sacred’ spaces.)

For Durkheim, Religion is the collective practice of marking off and maintaining
distance between the sacred and the profane, which is typically done through
rituals, such as those associated with the daily or weekly visit to the church or mosque:
prayer is an obvious example of an ‘occasional (sacred) ritual’ is marked out from
ordinary mundane (or profane) life.

Or in Durkheim’s own words:


Importantly for Durkheim, anything can be sacred (or rather, a society can determine
that anything is sacred): there is nothing in any object or action that makes it inherently
sacred: anything can be sacred: not only churches, mosques, and religious books, but in
some cultures, trees, or even rocks may be regarded as sacred.

Durkheim believed that in order to understand the role of religion in society, the
relationship between sacred symbols and what they represent must be discovered.

A work in progress, to be updated shortly!

Totemism

Durkheim saw Totemism as one of the earliest and simplest form of religious practice. It
is most commonly found among aboriginal peoples, such as the Australian aborigines,
and North West Native American Indians, who have clan based societies.

Durkheim used the totemic religion of Australian aborigines to develop his theory of
religion. Aboriginal society was divided into a number of clans, and members of the
clan had certain obligations that had to be fulfilled – such as mourning the death of
other clan members or helping seek vengeance if another member was wronged by
someone external to the clan. Each clan was also exogenous – people had to marry
someone outside of the clan.
Each clan had a totem, typically an animal or a plant which was represented by drawings
or carvings made on wood or stone, typically linked to a ‘creation myth’ that explained
the origins of that clan and linked current members into that history. The totem served
to distinguish the clan from all other clans.

To clan members, the totem was as sacred object, nothing less than ‘the outward and
visible form of the totemic principle or god’ – their animal/ plant was sacred and the
totemic representation just as sacred if not more so.

Durkheim’s ‘big idea’ is that by worshipping the totem, clan members are actually
worshipping society, and thus individuals are reminded that society is more important
than the individual, which is essential in Functionalist theory because individuals are
dependent on society.

The reason why humankind needs a totem to worship rather than just literally
worshipping society (or the clan in the case of Aborigines) is because the clan is too
complex a thing for people to conceptualise – religious symbols are just much simpler
entities to worship!

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