The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Unabridged). Durkheim Émile

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СКАЧАТЬ and studying it well. Now there are no societies which present this characteristic to a higher degree than the Australian ones. Not only is their civilization most rudimentary — the house and even the hut are still unknown — but also their organization is the most primitive and simple which is actually known; it is that which we have elsewhere called organization on a basis of clans.210 In the next chapter, we shall have occasion to restate its essential traits.

      However, though making Australia the principal field of our research, we think it best not to leave completely aside the societies where totemism was first discovered, that is to say, the Indian tribes of North America.

      This extension of the field of comparison has nothing about it which is not legitimate. Undoubtedly these people are more advanced than those of Australia. Their civilization has become much more advanced: men there live in houses or under tents, and there are even fortified villages. The size of the society is much greater, and centralization, which is completely lacking in Australia, is beginning to appear there; we find vast confederations, such as that of the Iroquois, under one central authority. Sometimes a complicated system of differentiated classes arranged in a hierarchy is found. However, the essential lines of the social structure remain the same as those in Australia; it is always the organization on a basis of clans. Thus we are not in the presence of two different types, but of two varieties of a single type, which are still very close to each other. They represent two successive moments of a single evolution, so their homogeneousness is still great enough to permit comparisons.

      Also, these comparisons may have their utility. Just because their civilization is more advanced than that of the Australians, certain phases of the social organization which is common to both can be studied more easily among the first than among the second. As long as men are still making their first steps in the art of expressing their thought, it is not easy for the observer to perceive that which moves them; for there is nothing to translate clearly that which passes in these obscure minds which have only a confused and ephemeral knowledge of themselves. For example, religious symbols then consist only in formless combinations of lines and colours, whose sense it is not easy to divine, as we shall see. There are many gestures and movements by which interior states express themselves; but being essentially ephemeral, they readily elude observation. That is why totemism was discovered earlier in America than in Australia; it was much more visible there, though it held relatively less place in the totality of the religious life. Also, wherever beliefs and institutions do not take a somewhat definite material form, they are more liable to change under the influence of the slightest circumstances, or to become wholly effaced from the memory. Thus the Australian clans frequently have something floating and Protean about them, while the corresponding organization in America has a greater stability and more clearly defined contours. Thus, though American totemism is further removed from its origins than that of Australia, still there are important characteristics of which it has better kept the memory.

In the second place, in order to understand an institution, it is frequently well to follow it into the advanced stages of its evolution;211 for sometimes it is only when it is fully developed that its real signification appears with the greatest clearness. In this way also, American totemism, since it has a long history behind it, could serve to clarify certain aspects of Australian totemism.212 At the same time, it will put us in a better condition to see how totemism is bound up with the forms which follow, and to mark its place in the general historical development of religion.

So in the discussions which follow, we shall not forbid ourselves the use of certain facts borrowed from the Indian societies of North America. But we are not going to study American totemism here;213 such a study must be made directly and by itself, and cannot be mixed with the one which we are undertaking; it raises other problems and implies a wholly different set of special investigations. We shall have recourse to American facts merely in a supplementary way, and only when they seem to be able to make us understand Australian facts to advantage. It is these latter which constitute the real and immediate object of our researches.214

175 Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter.

176 This idea was so common that even M. Réville continued to make America the classic land of totemism (Religions des peuples non civilisés, I, p. 242).

177 Journals of Two Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia, II, p. 228.

178 The Worship of Animals and Plants. Totems and Totemism (1869, 1870).

179 This idea is found already very clearly expressed in a study by Gallatin entitled Synopsis of the Indian Tribes (Archæologia Americana, II, pp. 109 ff.), and in a notice by Morgan in the Cambrian Journal, 1860, p. 149.

180 This work had been prepared for and preceded by two others by the same author: The League of the Iroquois (1851), and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871).

181 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1880.

182 In the very first volumes of the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology are found the study of Powell, Wyandot Government (I, p. 59), that of Cushing, Zuñi Fetiches (II, p. 9), Smith, Myths of the Iroquois (ibid., p. 77), and the important work of Dorsey, Omaha Sociology (III, p. 211), which are also contributions to the study of totemism.

183 This first appeared, in an abridged form, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.).

184 In his Primitive Culture, Tylor had already attempted an explanation of totemism, to which we shall return presently, but which we shall not give here; for by making totemism only a particular case of the ancestor-cult, he completely misunderstood its importance. In this chapter we mention only those theories which have contributed to the progress of the study of totemism.

185 Published at Cambridge, 1885.

186 First edition, 1889. This is the arrangement of a course given at the University of Aberdeen in 1888. Cf. the article Sacrifice in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition).

187 London, 1890. A second edition in three volumes has since appeared (1900) and a third in five volumes is already in course of publication.

188 In this connection must be mentioned the interesting work of Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, 3 vols., 1894-1896.

189 We here confine ourselves to giving the names of the authors; their works will be indicated below, СКАЧАТЬ