Making religions equal in dignity: Durkheim's anthropological endeavor


Jean Louis Fabiani, Central European University (Vienna)

Over the past fifty years or so, Émile Durkheims work has been extensively revisited, not only for historiographical and scholarly reasons, and its potential rehabilitated. Erving Goffmans sociology of interaction rituals and Harold Garfinkels ethnomethodology explicitly follow in Durkheimian footsteps. Anne Rawlss great book has been the high point of this renewed interest ( Epistemology and Practice. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 2004) : the author of The Elementary Forms of Religious is no longer the austere bearded man of the Third Republic, but the author of a decisive work on the question of modernity, as Bruno Karsentis new and stimulating reading of several of his books shows (see his recent La place de Dieu , 2023). Although Durkheim was entirely caught up in the republican ideology dominated by the "colonist" party, which aimed to civilize indigenous peoples while remaining silent about the extreme violence of the process (the sociologist merely lamented the "excesses of colonialism" without condemning its principle), he nonetheless outlined the possibility of a post-colonial anthropology that places all religions on an equal footing, making Australian totemism the matrix of all religious construction, and thus situating his work in a non-hierarchical perspective of distinction between peoples. This point has often been overlooked in favor of Durkheims epistemological project (aiming to produce a table of categories whose origin lies in the social process and not in the individual mind). In revisiting Durkheims analysis of religion, we take a fresh look at the question of the authors "secularism" and its contradictions, while at the same time seeking in the concept of effervescence the very principle of the establishment and reactivation of the social bond. Durkheim endeavors to think critically about modernity, through the concept of pathology, which seriously considers the unexpected consequences of the division of labor and the contradictions inherent in a world that has distanced itself from sacred functions, but does not provide itself with the means to make modernity sacred.

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