Confronting the Sacred: Durkheim vindicated through philosophical analysis, ethnography, archaeology, long-range linguistics, and comparative mythology

With Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) the soci0logist Émile Durkheim formulated the most influential social-science theory of religion to date. Pivotal are the paired concepts ‘sacred / profane’, the notion of ‘collective representations’, and the hypothesis that through such religious symbols, society compels its members to venerate herself i.e. to submit to the social as an irreducible instance in its own right. Having grappled with this Durkheimian inheritance for half a century, the anthropologist of religion and intercultural philosopher Wim van Binsbergen in this book traces his own steps in confront­ing Durkheim’s sacred, through theoretical criticism, through ethnographic application (to popular Islam in the segmentary social organisation of the highlands of Northwestern Tunisia), and by state-of-the-art long-range methods of linguistic and comparative mythological analysis. Thus, much to his surprise, he demonstrates the continued validity of Durkheim’s insights in religion.