The Elementary Forms Of Religious Life

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1915 Edition.

This book, first published in 1984, examines the whole range of new religious movements which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in the West. It develops a wide-ranging theory of these new religions which explains many of their major characteristics. Some of the movements are well-known, such as Scientology, Krishna Consciousness, and the Unification Church. Others such as the Process, Meher Baba, and 3-HO are much less known. While some became international, others remained local; in other ways, too, such as style, belief, organisation, they exhibit enormous diversity. The movements studied here are classified under three ideal types, world-rejecting, world-affirming and world-accommodating, and from here the author develops a theory of the origins, recruitment base, characteristics, and development patterns which they display. The book offers a critical exploration of the theories of the new religions and analyses the highly contentious issue of whether they reflect the process of secularisation, or whether they are a countervailing trend marking the resurgence of religion in the West.

This is the first collection of essays to be published on Durkheim's masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It represents the work of the most important international Durkheim scholars from the fields of anthropology, philosophy and sociology. The essays focus on key topics including: * the method Durkheim adopted in his study * the role of ritual and belief in society * the nature of contemporary religion The contributors also explore cutting-edge debates about the notion of the soul and collective rituals.

'If religion generated everything that is essential in society, this is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.' In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim set himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigated what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. Aboriginal religion was an avenue 'to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity'. The need and capacity of men and women to relate socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe. The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the origin and nature of religion and society. This new, lightly abridged edition provides an excellent introduction to Durkheim's ideas. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

David �mile Durkheim's classic analysis of religion offers a reasoned and sustained examination of faith, its origins and its nature, to the reader. First appearing to the public in 1912, the poignant nature of the text and its incisive examination of religion and its pivotal nature in society resulted in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life becoming a classic of sociology. Durkheim's researches were lengthy and thorough, ranging across the examination of tribal groupings in the Americas and Australia. For his part, Durkheim viewed religion as a generally positive thing for its promotion of community, social unity and friendships within a social structure. His personal preoccupation with societal trends, whereby science and technology were supplanting religion as a driving force in most Western societies, is expressed within this text which seeks to explore the value in the rituals and practices peculiar to religions. The book begins by reaching for a definition of religion and the phenomena which connote religious faith. The various tenets which constitute a faith are examined in turn, with examples given. Later in the text, consideration is given to the foremost practices; Durkheim continually refers to the 'primitive cult', and posits that human veneration of objects and phenomena leads to totemism, which in turn forms the founding of a sophisticated belief system. The author consistently attempts to discover common strains which religions possess, while purposely putting the supernatural and divine to one side for the sake of better focusing on the traits which comprise faith within small communities and in wider society. As a result of Durkheim's rigorous analysis, this text remains relevant and valuable for students and practitioners of sociology and psychology to this day. This edition of the text contains the original and highly regarded translation to English by Joseph Ward Swain.

The famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim is universally recognised as one of the founding fathers of sociology as an academic discipline. He wrote on the division of labour, methodology, suicide and education, but his most prolific and influential works were his writings on religion, which culminated in his controversial book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Although his influence continued long after his death in 1917, this is the first book to provide a detailed look at the whole of his work in the field of religion. Durkheim on Religion is a selection of readings from Durkheim's writings on religion, presented in order of original publication, ranging from early reviews to articles and extracts from his books. Also included are detailed bibliographies and abstracts together with contributions by such writers as Van Gennep, Goldenweiser and Stanner. This book will be invaluable to those studying sociology and anthropology, but will also be of interest to those studying the history or philosophy of religion, as well as to anyone with an interest in Durkheim.

Education and punishment are two crucial sites of the "disciplinary society," approached by Durkheim and Foucault from different perspectives, but also in a shared concern with what kind of society might constitute an "emancipatory" alternative. This collection of essays explores the issues that are involved and that are illuminated through a comparison and contrast of two social theorists who at first sight might seem an "unlikely couple" - Durkheim and Foucault.

"The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" is a book that analyzes religion as a social phenomenon. The author, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, attributes the development of religion to the emotional security attained through communal living. He drives his conclusions from the study of totemic societies in Australia, which led him to a conclusion that the animal or plant that each clan worshipped as a sacred power was, in fact, that society itself.