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Émile DurkheimThe Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 2, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Chapter 1 Summary: “Totemic Beliefs—The Totem as Name and Emblem”
In Aboriginal Australian societies, the practice of totemism is tied to the social structure of clans, which are groups identified by kinship ties (though in some cases of a nominal rather than familial nature). Each clan has a totem, and that totem is also the totem of each member in the clan. The majority of these totems are animals or plants, though in rare cases an inanimate object can act as a totem. Most of the clans and their totems are assigned by maternal descent, though some societies use paternal descent and a few allow a more individualized totemic practice, assigned by affiliation with a mythical ancestor. In addition to clans, totems can also be associated with matrimonial classes and with phratries (that is, collections of clans within a tribe). In each of these cases, it is important to note that the locus of the totemic cult is a particular social group.
The totem serves to identify these groups with a name, but they are also used in emblematic fashion, rather as a coat-of-arms. The emblem of a clan’s totem can appear on physical objects like houses and utensils, and is sometimes even imprinted or tattooed on the individual’s body. The religious nature of the totem becomes evident in the way it is used in religious rituals, particularly as the defining element of the separation between the sacred and the profane: “So while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. In fact, it is in connection with it, that things are classified as sacred or profane. It is the very type of sacred thing” (140). Durkheim analyzes three liturgical objects which are marked by their express sacredness—called churinga, nurtunja, and waninga—and deduces that they owe their sacredness to their association with totemic emblems.
Book 2, Chapter 2 Summary: “Totemic Beliefs—The Totemic Animal and Man”
The totemic emblem is not the only sacred thing; by extension, the beings and objects associated with it also become endowed with sacred aspects. This is the case with both the animal or plant represented by the totemic emblem and with the members of the clan associated with it. If a totem represents an animal or plant, there are usually strict rules against eating it—a religious interdiction which applies only to the members of that particular totemic clan. However, religious interdictions surrounding totems are more frequently attached to the totemic emblem than to the object which the totem represents, which leads Durkheim to a counterintuitive conclusion: “[…] that the images of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves” (156). This in turn suggests that the sacredness of the totem is rooted in something other than the represented object or being.
The members of a totemic clan also have a sense of sacredness about them. This sacredness is often attached to particular parts of the body, like blood or hair, which commonly feature in various totemic rituals. A member of the clan will express a sense of personal sacredness which is not below that of the totem’s represented object, but rather equal to it: “The attitude of a man towards the animals or plants whose name he bears is not at all that of a believer towards his god […]. The totemic animal is called the friend or the elder brother of its human fellows” (162). All are members of the totemic group, and while a person might call on the totemic animal for aid, it is more in the sense of a “kindly associate” (162) than a deity, because both the person and the animal derive their sacredness from the same source.
Book 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Totemic Beliefs—The Cosmological System of Totemism and the Idea of Class”
In Aboriginal Australian societies, totemic clans and phratries encompass not only their human members, but everything that exists. “For the Australian, things themselves, everything which is in the universe, are a part of the tribe; they are constituent elements of it and, so to speak, regular members of it” (166). Various objects and features of the physical world are assigned to clans, together with the clan’s human members, and they belong exclusively to that clan alone. As such, the social organization of human groups has come to be applied onto the physical world, such that social forces appear to be the organizing principle of human categories of thought. In phratries or clans where things happen to be divided into only two classes, these classes are antithetical to each other and represent opposed ideas (such as light/dark, white/black, and so on), a feature which matches the way that religious values produce clear demarcations between things.
The objects and features of the physical world which are classed as parts of a totemic clan thereby acquire a sense of sacredness inherent in belonging to that class. This sacredness can then provide the possibility of each such object later becoming the nucleus of its own totemic clan, thus allowing a way for the religious system to expand and develop. Further, these classes of physical objects, as members of totemic categories, fill the same function as divinities in polytheistic religions, by collecting a group of related features of the physical world together into a single circle of identity. The origins of the ideas of class and division thus appear to arise from human social groups, and to give religious thought some of its fundamental features.
Book 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Totemic Beliefs—The Individual Totem and the Sexual Totem”
Having dealt with the totemic practices associated with large groups—clans and phratries—Durkheim turns his attention to another feature sometimes observed in totemic religion, in which an individual may practice a personal totemic cult. This is seen in some Australian societies but is better known by its appearance in certain Indigenous American cultures, in which an individual might be attached by name and identity to a certain animal with which the person is thought to share attributes. “The man participates in the nature of the animal; he has its good qualities as well as its faults” (185). Unlike the case of clan totemism, in which the members are often believed to have descended from the totemic animal in some mythological past, individual totemism assumes no such descent. A further difference is that the individual totem is acquired as the result of a process, often voluntarily, and not given or assigned.
Another variant of the totemic system is the sexual totem, by which Durkheim denotes societies in which all the members of one gender belong to a certain totem, as do those of other genders to their own respective totems. Durkheim does not provide an analysis of the interrelationship of these systems of clan, individual, and sexual totems, which in many cases overlap one another, and suggests that Aboriginal Australians are less concerned with a systematic understanding of those systems than Westerners are. Nevertheless, it is important to note that all forms of the totemic system derive their meaning and practice from the social order of their respective tribes.
Book 2, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Book 2 is devoted to an analysis of totemic religion, particularly as practiced by Aboriginal Australian societies. The first four chapters of that analysis are largely concerned with an exposition of totemic beliefs and practices, whereas the rest of Book 2 will study them with regard to the possible origins of those beliefs.
Much of the material in these chapters, then, is a summary and collation of ethnographic data which had been published by other researchers. Durkheim does not have original research of his own to add on the topic of Indigenous totemic beliefs and practices; his main goal in this section is simply to put forward for the reader’s examination those patterns of belief which he sees as relevant to the question at hand. The reader should be aware, however, that Durkheim’s own interpretation colors which sets of evidence he presents and in what order (as can be seen in his early emphasis on the essentially non-theistic character of totemic systems and his later admission of god-figures in the Aboriginal Australian religion (see Book 2, Chapter 9).
These chapters are, by necessity, more anthropological than sociological in their content, including copious references to indigenous objects, ideas, and customs. The length of Durkheim’s treatment of these subjects inclines the reader to view his argument as well-researched, even if Durkheim himself is reliant on the research efforts of others. While certain portions of the book weave sociological and philosophical reflections together with anthropological data, these chapters are the most purely anthropological section of the book.
Even though Durkheim’s aim in this section is exposition rather than analysis, he does draw attention to those areas of totemic practice which fit the thematic framework of fundamental religion which he has already established. Foremost among those areas is the idea of The Social Origins of Religious Belief. As Durkheim picks up this theme again, his main interest is simply to point out the ways in which Indigenous totemic practices appear to be rooted in, and reflective of, their social contexts. For example, he stresses the strong sense of identification of the totem with both religious sentiments on the one hand and with the group identity of the clan on the other. Even in areas in which totemism takes on an individual rather than a communal aspect, he is careful to set those practices in the context of the wider society’s collective totemic practices.
His second major theme, that of totemism as a foundational religious form, is the main focus of Book 2. While subsequent chapters will articulate the core of Durkheim’s argument in regard to that theme, some of its outlines already appear in Chapters 1-4. He notes the ways in which totemism promotes a classification of all things into sacred and profane categories (relative to each clan), which is one of the main criteria in his definition of religion. He also draws attention to the fact that the source of this sense of sacredness cannot be the totemic emblem itself, nor the animal or plant represented by it. Rather, all of these things appear to derive their sacredness from some other source, and the attention Durkheim gives to the group identity of the clan leads the reader to infer that the locus of sacredness in totemism is the collective group itself.
