The elementary forms of the religious life
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| Emile Durkheim |
In this book we propose to study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an explanation of it.
A religious system may be said to be the most primitive which we can observe when it fulfils the two following conditions: in the first place, when it is found in a society whose organization is surpassed by no others in simplicity; and secondly, when it is possible to explain it without making use of any element borrowed from a previous religion.
We shall set ourselves to describe the organization of this system with all the exactness and fidelity that an ethnographer or a historian could give it. But our task will not be limited to that: sociology raises other problems than history or ethnography.
It does not seek to know the past forms of civilization with the sole end of knowing them and reconstructing them. But rather, like every pqsitive_sçience, it has as its object the explanation of some actual reality which is near to us, and which consequently is capable of affecting our ideas and our acts: this reality is man, and more precisely, the man of today, for there is nothing which we are more interested in knowing.
Then we are not going to study a very archaic religion simply for the pleasure of telling its peculiarities and its singularities. If we have taken In the same way, we shall say of these societies that they are primitive, and we shall call the men of these societies primitives. Undoubtedly the expression lacks precision, but that is hardly evitable, and besides, when we have taken pains to fix the meaning, it is not inconvenient.
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