In searching for Durkheim's totem or totemic principle in modern times what we should be asking ourselves, or looking for, is what serves as the symbolic manifestation of society in its own eyes. Also, the totem has to be something public, something that is not only shared by all or most members of the group but also something which has ritualistic characteristic which brings the group together. The modern totem has to create unity in order to exert society's power over its members.
For that reason the modern totem has to distinguish sanctity and profanity, which are according to Durkheim the basic opposition on which religion is established. The modern totem has to be some object in which society imagines itself and to which it subjects itself.
Durkheim himself gave the national flag as an example of a modern object which resembles the totem in its function and as something which assumes the role of the totemic principle. Another candidate for the modern totem is of course the television. But his sentences are invariably clear and his version is faithful to the original.
After a careful analysis and critique of the animistic and naturalistic hypotheses, the author passes to an exposition of totemistic beliefs and rites in the light of his own sociology. The major part of the book is devoted to his elaborate exposition and analysis. For his facts Durkheim is dependent chiefly upon Spencer and Gillen and upon Strehlow — though he has practically exhausted the literature of his subject and draws liberally upon all the more important investigators.
But the arrangement and interpretation of the facts are his own, and, whether one agrees with him or not, no one can deny that his methods and conclusions are both original and brilliant. Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of the sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things.
Finally, rites are the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of these sacred objects. Now, the societies most simple in structure known to sociology are the tribes of central and northern Australia. For this and other reasons Durkheim conclude that the religion of this tribes is the most primitive of all religions; and he is the more convinced of this because he has been able, as he believes, to find in their religion the germs of all higher forms.
This primitive religion from all other religions have developed is, of course, totemism. But the totem is not only the symbol of this mysterious force; it is the symbol of the social group as well. So, if it is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one? In fact, a god is, first of all, a being whom men think of as superior to themselves, and upon whom they feel that they depend […] Now, society also gives us the sensation of a perpetual dependence.
Just as the soldier who dies for his flag in fact dies for his country, so the clan member who worships his totem in fact worships his clan. To the classical formula Primus in orbe deos fecit timor -- the fear-theory defended in various ways by Hume, Tylor, and Frazer -- Durkheim thus added a decisive, if not entirely original, dissent.
Following Robertson Smith -- indeed, it was probably this idea, seized upon in his anti-Frazerian mood of , that so dramatically altered Durkheim's conception of religion itself -- Durkheim insisted that the primitive man does not regard his gods as hostile, malevolent, or fearful in any way whatsoever; on the contrary, his gods are friends and relatives, who inspire a sense of confidence and well-being. The sense thus inspired, moreover, is not an hallucination, but is based on reality; for however misunderstood, there actually is a real moral power -- society -- to which these beliefs correspond, and from which the worshipper derives his strength.
This argument -- the very heart of The Elementary Forms 69 -- was also intimately bound to Durkheim's important conception of the role of symbols in society. Their utilitarian value as expressions of social sentiments notwithstanding, Durkheim's more ambitious claim was that such symbols serve to create the sentiments themselves. For collective representations, as we have seen, presuppose the mutual reaction of individual minds upon one another, reactions inexplicable in the absence of collective symbols; and, once formed, such representations would quickly dissipate in the absence of symbols which serve to maintain them in the individual mind.
Thus, society, "in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism. Inexplicable on the basis of ordinary experience -- nowhere do we see beings "mixing their natures" or "metamorphizing themselves into each other" -- such participation was explained by Durkheim as a consequence of the symbolic representations just described: once the clan became "represented" by a species of animal or plant, the latter were thought of as relative of men, and both were assumed to "participate in the same nature.
Finally, like the concept of mana , this notion of "participation" had significance for the evolution of scientific as well as purely religious thought.
To say that one thing is the cause of another, Durkheim explained, is to establish relations between them, to suggest that they are bound together by some natural, internal law.
Like Hume, Durkheim insisted that sensations alone can never disclose such law-like connections; and like Kant, therefore, he argued that the human reason must supply them, thus enabling us to understand cause and effect as necessary relations. The great achievement of primitive religion, Durkheim then suggested, is that it constructed the first representation the "law of participation" of what these "relations of kinship" might be, thus rescuing man from his enslavement to mere appearance, and rendering science and philosophy possible; and religion could do this, he added, only because it is a mode of collective thought, which imposes a new way of representing reality for the old manipulation of purely individual sensations.
Between religion and science, Durkheim thus concluded, there can be no abyss; for, while the former applies its logical mechanisms to nature more awkwardly than the latter, both are made up of the same collective representations. Throughout his discussion of the nature and causes of totemic beliefs, Durkheim insisted that no idea of the soul, spirits, or gods plays any role.
In order to complete this discussion, therefore, it was necessary to show how such ideas -- universal among the known religions -- could have evolved out of "the more essential conceptions" just described.
Every known society, for example, acknowledges the existence of the human soul -- a second, ethereal self, which dwells within and animates the body; and since the Australian aborigines provide the most primitive instance of this belief, Durkheim's search for its origin began by asking how the aborigines themselves explained it.
According to the Australians, Durkheim observed, the souls which enter and animate the bodies of new-born children are not "special and original creations"; on the contrary, they are the old souls of dead ancestors of the clan, whose reincarnation explains the phenomena of conception and birth.
To such ancestors superhuman powers and virtues are attributed, rendering them sacred; and most important, they are conceived under the form not of men, but of animals and plants.
Durkheim thus concluded that the human soul is simply a form of "individualized mana ," the totemic principle incarnate, and the most primitive form of that conception of the "duality of human nature" which has perplexed the philosophers and theologians of more advanced societies for centuries.
The last point is important, for Durkheim claimed that this explanation of the belief in the soul helps us to understand two more advanced ideas: the theological conception of immortality , and the philosophical idea of personality. The first belief, Durkheim argued, cannot be accounted for by the moral demand for a future, just, retribution, 74 for primitive peoples make no such demand; neither can it be explained by the desire to escape death, 75 an event to which the primitive is relatively indifferent, and from which, in any case, his particular notion of immortality would offer little relief; and finally, it cannot be explained by the appearance of dead relatives and friends in our dreams, 76 an occurrence too infrequent to account for so powerful and prevalent a belief.
The failure of these explanations, Durkheim added, is particularly embarrassing in that the idea of the soul itself does not seem to imply its own survival, but rather seems to exclude it -- since the soul is intimately connected with the body, the death of the latter would seem to bode ill for the former.
This embarrassment is relieved, however, if one accepts Durkheim's explanation, in which the belief in the immortality of the soul and its subsequent reincarnations is literally required if the phenomena of conception and birth are to be explained.
And in holding this belief, Durkheim again asserted, the primitive is not misled; for the soul is simply the individualized representation of the clan, and the clan does outlive its individual members.
The belief in the immortality of the soul is thus the earliest, symbolic means whereby men represented to themselves the truth that society continued to live while they must die.
The philosophical idea of personality would seem to have posed greater difficulties for Durkheim; for the modern notion of what is "personal" seems to imply what is "individual" --an association which would surely confound any sociological explanation.
But Durkheim insisted that the terms were in no way synonymous, a distinction clearly evident in their most sophisticated philosophical formulations. In his suggestion that all reality is composed of "monads," for example, Leibniz had emphasized that these psychic entities are personal, conscious, autonomous beings; but he had also insisted that these consciousnesses all express the same world; and since this world is itself but a system of representations, each particular consciousness is but the reflection of the universal consciousness, the particularity of its perspective being explained by its special location within the whole.
The subsequent evolution of totemic beliefs is one from souls to spirits, spirits to "civilizing heroes," and heroes to "high gods," in which the focus of religious worship becomes increasingly powerful, personal, and international. Since the idea of souls is inexplicable without postulating original, "archetypal" souls from which the others are derived, for example, the primitive imagines mythical ancestors or "spirits" at the beginning of time, who are the source of all subsequent religious efficacy.
The result is a truly "international" deity, whose attributes bear a marked similarity to those of the higher religions of more advanced civilizations. The ancestral spirits are only entities forged in the image of the individual souls whose origin they are destined to explain. The souls, in their turn, are only the form taken by the impersonal forces which we found at the basis of totemism, as they individualize themselves in the human body.
The unity of the system," Durkheim concluded, "is as great as its complexity. Despite an occasional dalliance with the ritual theory of myth, Durkheim's most consistent position was that the cult depends upon the beliefs; but he also insisted that beliefs and rites are inseparable not only because the rites are often the sole manifestation of otherwise imperceptible ideas, but also because they react upon and thus alter the nature of the ideas themselves.
Having completed his extensive analysis of the nature, causes, and consequences of totemic beliefs, therefore, Durkheim turned to a somewhat shorter discussion of the "principal ritual attitudes" of totemism. Sacred things, as we have seen, are those rather dramatically separated from their profane counterparts; and a substantial group of totemic rites has as its object the realization of this essential state of separation.
In so far as these rites merely prohibit certain actions or impose certain abstentions, they consist entirely of interdictions or "taboos"; 85 and thus Durkheim described the system formed by these rites as the "negative cult. For all their diversity, however, Durkheim argued that all these forms are reducible to two fundamental interdictions: the religious life and the profane life cannot coexist in the same place, and they cannot coexist in the same unit of time.
Although literally defined in terms of these interdictions, however, the negative cult also exercises a "positive" function -- it is the condition of access to the positive cult. Precisely because of the abyss which separates sacred things from their profane counterparts, the individual cannot enter into relations with the first without ridding himself of the second.
In the initiation ceremony, for example, the neophyte is submitted to a large variety of negative rites whose net effect is to produce a radical alteration of his moral and religious character, to "sanctify" him through his suffering, and ultimately to admit him to the sacred life of the clan. But here, again, religion is only the symbolic form of society which, while augmenting our powers and enabling us to transcend ourselves, demands our sacrifice and self-abnegation, suppresses our instincts, and does violence to our natural inclinations.
There is a ruthless asceticism in all social life, Durkheim argued, which is the source of all religious asceticism. But if this is the function of the negative cult, what is its cause? In one sense. The peculiar attribute of sacred things which renders them, in particular, the objects of the negative cult is what Durkheim called "the contagiousness of the sacred" -- religious forces easily escape their original locations and flow, almost irresistibly, to any objects within their range.
In so doing, of course, they contradict their own essential nature, which is to remain separated from the profane; and thus a whole system of restrictions is necessary in order to keep the two worlds apart.
But how was this contagiousness itself to be explained? Indeed, it is by an initial "act of contagion" see above that ordinary objects receive their sacred character in the first place; and it is natural that, in the absence of rigorous interdictions, they should lose this character just as easily.
This brings us to the most crucial phase of Durkheim's treatment of totemic rites, that based upon those materials which, in the period, so dramatically altered his understanding of religion. The significance of Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia , therefore, was that it described one ceremony in particular that exhibits the essential features of the "positive cult" found in more advanced religions -- the Arunta Intichiuma ceremony. In central Australia, Durkheim explained, there are two sharply divided seasons: one is long and dry, the other short and very rainy.
When the second arrives, the vegetation springs up from the ground, the animals multiply, and what had been a sterile desert abounds with luxurious flora and fauna; and it is at the moment when this "good" season seems near at hand that the Intichiuma is celebrated.
Every totemic clan has its own Intichiuma , and the celebration itself has two phases. The object of the first is to assure the abundance of that animal or plant which serves as the clan's totem, an object obtained by striking together certain sacred stones sometimes drenched with the blood of clan members , thus detaching and scattering grains of dust which assure the fertility of the animal or plant species.
The second phase begins with an intensification of the interdictions of the negative cult -- clan members who could ordinarily eat their totemic animal or plant if they did so in moderation now find that it cannot be eaten or even touched -- and concludes with a solemn ceremony in which representatives of the newly increased totemic species are ritually slaughtered and eaten by the clan members, after which the exceptional interdictions are lifted and the clan returns to its normal existence.
To Durkheim, the significance of this system of rites was that it seemed to contain the essential elements of the most fundamental rite of the higher religions -- sacrifice; and equally important, it seemed in large part to confirm the revolutionary theory of the meaning of that rite put forward by Robertson Smith twenty-four years earlier.
Noting that in many societies such commensality is believed to create and re-create a bond of kinship, Smith had suggested that the earliest sacrifices were less acts of renunciation and expiation than joyous feasts, in which the bond of kinship uniting gods and worshippers was periodically reaffirmed by participation in the common flesh. Insisting pace Smith that it was participation in sacred flesh that rendered the rite efficacious, Durkheim argued that the ceremony concluding the second phase of the Intichiuma was precisely such a rite; and in the Australian rite, he added, the object of such communion was clear -- the periodic revivification of that "totemic principle" society which exists within each member of the clan and is symbolized by the sacrificial animal or plant.
This in turn explained the temporal aspect of the rite -- the totemic principle would seem most thoroughly exhausted after a long, dry period, and most completely renewed just after the arrival of the "good season," and analogous practices were found among many, more advanced peoples: " But if Durkheim shared Smith's view that the earliest sacrifices were acts of communion, he did not share his view that this was all they were, nor did he share Smith's reasons for holding these views in the first place.
For Smith was a devout Scottish Calvinist who found the very idea that the gods receive physical pleasure from the offerings of mere mortals a "revolting absurdity," and insisted that this conception had no part in the original meaning of the rite, emerging only much later with the institution of private property.
To Durkheim, moreover, this was not a minor, antiquarian quibble, for his subsequent explanation of this "mutual interdependence" of gods and worshippers was a major part of his sociological theory of religion. We have already seen, for example, how the "logic" of the Intichiuma corresponds to the intermittent character of the physical environment of central Australia -- long dry spells punctuated by heavy rainfall and the reappearance of animals and vegetation.
This intermittency, Durkheim now added, is duplicated by the social life of the Australian clans -- long periods of dispersed, individual economic activity, punctuated by the intensive communal activity of the Intichiuma itself. In addition to this primitive form of sacrifice, Durkheim discussed three other types of positive rites -- imitative, representative, and piacular -- which either accompany the Intichiuma or, in some tribes, replace it altogether.
The first consists of movements and cries whose function, guided by the principle that "like produces like," is to imitate the animal or plant whose reproduction is desired. These rites had been interpreted by the "anthropological school" Tylor and Frazer as a kind of "sympathetic magic," to be explained, as in Jevons's account of the contagiousness of the sacred, by the association of ideas; and as it had been to Jevons, Durkheim's response to Tylor and Frazer was that a specific, concrete social phenomenon cannot be explained by a general, abstract law of psychology.
Indeed, restored to their actual context, Durkheim argued, imitative rites are fully explained by the fact that the clan members feel that they really are the animal or plant of their totemic species, that this is their most essential trait, and that this should be demonstrated whenever the clan gathers. In fact, it is only on the basis of such demonstrations that the Intichiuma could have the revivifying efficacy which Durkheim attributed to it.
The principle "like produces like" thus has its origin in collective representations rather than the association of ideas in the individual mind, a fact of as much interest to the history of science as to the history of religion and magic; for Durkheim insisted that this principle was itself a primitive version of the more recent, scientific law of causality. Consider the two essential elements of that law: first, it presumes the idea of efficacy, of an active force capable of producing some effect; and second, it presupposes an a priori judgment that this cause produces its effect necessarily.
The prototype of the first idea, as we have seen, is that collective force conceived by primitive peoples under the name of mana , wakan , orenda , etc. The second is explained by the fact that the periodic reproduction of the totemic species is a matter of great concern to the clan, and the rites assumed to effect it are thus obligatory.
What is obligatory in action, however, cannot remain optional in thought; thus society imposes a logical precept -- like produces like -- as an extension of the ritual precept essential to its well-being. Durkheim thus repeated the claim of his introduction -- that the sociological theory of the categories could reconcile the a priorist with the empiricist epistemology -- by showing how their necessity and universality could be both retained and explained: "The imperatives of thought," Durkheim concluded, "are probably only another side to the imperatives of action.
Nonetheless, throughout Durkheim's discussion of sacrificial and imitative rites, there is a palpable air of insecurity; for the Intichiuma gave almost every indication of being precisely what Frazer, Spencer, and Gillen had said that it was -- a cooperative system of magic designed to increase the supply of the totemic animal. But a mythology, Durkheim observed, is a moral system and a cosmology as well as a history; thus, "the rite serves and can serve only to sustain the vitality of these beliefs, to keep them from being effaced from memory and, in sum, to revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness.
Durkheim concluded his treatment of the positive cult with a discussion of "piacular" rites -- those which, in sharp contrast to the confident, joyous celebrations just described, are characterized by sadness, fear, and anger.
Such rites ordinarily follow some disaster that has befallen the clan the death of one of its members , and may involve the knocking out of teeth, severing of fingers, burning of skin, or any number of other self-inflicted tortures; but Durkheim insisted pace Jevons again that none of these acts were the spontaneous expression of individual emotion. On the contrary, such "mourning" appeared to be a duty imposed by the group and sanctioned by severe penalties, which the primitive says are required by the souls of ancestors; but in fact, Durkheim argued, the obligatory character of these rites is to be explained in the same way as their more joyous counterparts -- when someone dies, the clan assembles, thus giving rise to collective representations which reflect its sense of loss while simultaneously reaffirming the sense of its own permanence and solidarity.
Finally, this account of piacular rituals also accounted for what Durkheim called the "ambiguity of the sacred. But while Smith had an "active sentiment" of this ambiguity, Durkheim observed, he never explained it. And how are they transformed into their counterparts? Durkheim's answers were that evil powers are the symbolic expression of those collective representations excited by periods of grief or mourning and consequent assemblies of the clan, and that they are transformed into their more benign opposites by that reaffirmation of the permanence and solidarity of the group effected by the ceremonies thus celebrated.
These two extremes of the religious life thus reflect the two extremes through which all social life must pass. Social scientists who have attempted to "explain" religion have typically regarded it as a system of ideas or beliefs, of which the rites are an external, material expression; and this has naturally led to a concern for whether these ideas and beliefs may or may not be reconciled with those of modern science.
The difficulty for this approach, Durkheim argued, is that it does not correspond to the religious believer's own account of the nature of his experience, which is less one of thought than of action: "The believer who has communicated with his god," Durkheim observed, "is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger.
He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. Durkheim thus agreed with William James, who, in The Varieties of Religious Experience , had argued that religious beliefs rest upon real experiences whose demonstrative value, though different, is in no way inferior to that of scientific experiments. As with such experiments, Durkheim added, it does not follow that the reality which gives rise to these experiences precisely corresponds to the ideas that believers or scientists form of it; but it is a reality just the same, and for Durkheim, the reality was society.
This, indeed, explained why the cult rather than the idea is so important in religion -- "society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common.
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