The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

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.

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 A New Release Of The Original 1915 Edition.

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.

One hundred years after the publication of the great sociological treatise, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this new volume shows how aptly Durkheim1s theories still resonate with the study of contemporary and historical religious societies. The volume applies the Durkheimian model to multiple cases, probing its resilience, wondering where it might be tweaked, and asking which aspects have best stood the test of time. A dialogue between theory and ethnography, this book shows how Durkheimian sociology has become a mainstay of social thought and theory, pointing to multiple ways in which Durkheim1s work on religion remains relevant to our thinking about culture.

This comprehensive collection of classical sociological theory is a definitive guide to the roots of sociology from its undisciplined beginnings to its current influence on contemporary sociological debate. Explores influential works of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Simmel, Freud, Du Bois, Adorno, Marcuse, Parsons, and Merton Editorial introductions lend historical and intellectual perspective to the substantial readings Includes a new section with new readings on the immediate "pre-history" of sociological theory, including the Enlightenment and de Tocqueville Individual reading selections are updated throughout