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The Social Scientific Study of Religion
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Émile Durkheim on Religion
In this course, Professor Sondra Hausner (University of Oxford) explores Émile Durkheim’s writings about religion. In the first lecture, we introduce some key underpinnings of Durkheim’s work, such as his emphasis on the scientific method, his primary interest in understanding how societies cohere, and his definition of religion. In the second lecture, we consider a key aspect of that definition – that religion comprises beliefs and practices “relative to sacred things” – as well as Durkheim’s understanding of the distinction between the sacred and profane. Next, we think about “collective effervescence”, a concept Durkheim developed to explain how religious practices are essential to the formation of social groups. In the fourth and final lecture, we conclude with a discussion of Durkheim’s idea of the “moral community” as a central element to his definition of both religion and society.
The Social Scientific Study of Religion
In this lecture, we introduce some of the core premises of Émile Durkheim’s approach to religion, focusing in particular on: (i) Durkheim’s emphasis on the use of scientific method in the study of society; (ii) his understanding of societies as coherent, organised units, rather than merely collections of individuals, and his central interest in uncovering how social groups come together and sustain themselves over time; (iii) his work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), in which he argued that it was religion which enabled individuals to come together in this way; (iv) Durkheim’s definition of religion.
I'm Sandra Hasner,
00:00:06professor of anthropology of religion at the University of Oxford.
00:00:07And I'm the director of the British Centre for Dirk. I mean studies,
00:00:10and today I'm going to be talking about a meal. Dirk. I'm
00:00:14a meal dark. Him was a turn of the 20th century French philosopher.
00:00:18He taught philosophy. He taught law. He taught education. He taught history.
00:00:22He taught criminology. He taught him a lot of things,
00:00:27but his core interest. What he really wanted to understand was how societies
00:00:31worked,
00:00:37What made societies work.
00:00:38And he wanted to do this through what he
00:00:40saw as a scientific method.
00:00:42He wanted to use a scientific method to
00:00:45understand society because he thought society should be understood
00:00:48just like any organism,
00:00:52like any plant like anybody it to deserved
00:00:54the science That was all the rage by the end of the 19th century.
00:00:58So sometimes we talk about a milder came as the quote father of sociology
00:01:03in so far as he wanted to create a scientific study
00:01:08of
00:01:13society and
00:01:14effectively created what we now call the social sciences through that study.
00:01:16So he wanted the study to be technical.
00:01:21He wanted to be able to break society down, to understand its constituent parts,
00:01:23its components, to understand how the different parts of the whole that was.
00:01:29Society worked together to create that unit,
00:01:33and he did this in a lot of ways. Over the course of his career, he broke society down
00:01:39into lots of different classifications.
00:01:43If you like ordered systems trying to understand what made
00:01:46societies take how best to understand this social unit,
00:01:51he didn't want to only understand the individuals who were part of society.
00:01:55He wanted to understand what happened when individuals came together
00:01:59to create a
00:02:03society
00:02:04as a whole, the whole collective of those individuals
00:02:05and how he might understand that collective
00:02:09as an organic unit,
00:02:12one that would be different
00:02:14in every manifestation.
00:02:16In every period of history, no society looks exactly the same,
00:02:17but they all all societies anywhere on the planet at any moment
00:02:21in history share the quality of being social units socially organised.
00:02:26Having individuals come together in such a way that
00:02:32they recognise each other that they share values,
00:02:35that they share norms,
00:02:38or they sometimes might disagree about those values or disagree about those norms.
00:02:39But they might share a language they might share a sense of time.
00:02:43They might share a sense of place.
00:02:46Dot com was interested
00:02:48in what made those societies
00:02:49stick, even if there were moments of contestation. What made individuals part
00:02:52of the whole?
00:02:59So whatever the society might look like on the outside,
00:03:02all societies, according to Durkin, would have to share something
00:03:05that would make them,
00:03:10in some sense, comparable to each other.
00:03:12They would have a quality that would make them a social
00:03:15group.
00:03:19And Dirk I'm wanted to know scientifically what that quality
00:03:20was, how societies, for all their manifestations,
00:03:24would all somehow come to sustain themselves
00:03:28as unified to some degree
00:03:32social groups.
00:03:35After many decades of research,
00:03:37he decided that the best way to understand this quality,
00:03:39the capacity
00:03:43of a society
00:03:44to stick together
00:03:45despite all the differences individuals might have
00:03:47was through the phenomenon
00:03:50of religion.
00:03:52And so he wrote what we think of as his masterpiece
00:03:54the elementary forms
00:03:58of religious life.
00:03:59Because for Dirk, I'm
00:04:01religion
00:04:03is the fundamental way
00:04:04to get into the mechanisms of society, to understand what makes societies work,
00:04:07to understand what makes societies
00:04:12somehow through everything through all those differences and individuals
00:04:15stick together.
00:04:19So in that text in the elementary forms of religious life, which I just showed you,
00:04:22he argues that the best way to understand society scientifically
00:04:26method method a logically
00:04:31and methodically piece by piece by piece,
00:04:33as this core aspect of what we now call the social sciences
00:04:37is through religion.
00:04:41Dirk I'm argues that its religion,
00:04:44whatever it looks like, whatever its form
00:04:46that gives any society in the world
00:04:50those ties
00:04:53that make
00:04:55society hole
00:04:55that make social groups cohere or stick together
00:04:57just for clarification. He is not talking about world religions,
00:05:01they maybe once some of the religions that have the effect
00:05:06that societies cohere. But he means any religion
00:05:11in any form
00:05:14in any historical period in any part of the world.
00:05:16He is not talking about sacred texts.
00:05:19He is not talking about belief systems exclusively. He is not talking about faiths.
00:05:22He is not talking about gods
00:05:27and goddesses.
00:05:28So he provides us with the definition of religion that he wants to encompass
00:05:30any religion
00:05:35and any society,
00:05:36and I'm going to give it to you now.
00:05:38A religion
00:05:40is a unified system
00:05:41of beliefs and practises
00:05:43relative to sacred things.
00:05:46That is to say,
00:05:48things set apart and forbidden.
00:05:50That is beliefs and practises which unite into
00:05:53one single moral community called the church.
00:05:57All those who adhere to them.
00:06:01I'll read it again.
00:06:04A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practises relative to sacred things.
00:06:05That is to say, things set apart
00:06:12and forbidden
00:06:14beliefs and practises which unite into one single moral community called a church.
00:06:15All those who adhere to them.
00:06:21That's
00:06:24dark times definition of religion,
00:06:25and it is for him the baseline, the ground
00:06:28of any society.
00:06:32
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Hausner, S. (2022, February 15). Émile Durkheim on Religion - The Social Scientific Study of Religion [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/emile-durkheim-on-religion
MLA style
Hausner, S. "Émile Durkheim on Religion – The Social Scientific Study of Religion." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Feb 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/emile-durkheim-on-religion