Mana
• Energy, or supernatural force, a kind of
sacred power.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
• “Primitive mind” is pre-logical and
immersed in a mystical frame.
Totemism
• The particular religious practices centered
around animals, plants, or other aspects of
the natural world the group is intimately
connected with.
Totemism
• For Malinowski, totemism is a form of
magical thinking and practice.
• Totemism’s goal is to supply the tribe with
abundance.
• In order to do so, totemism implies the
setting up of taboos: prohibitions to kill and
to eat certain species.
Durkheim
• Social behaviour cannot be explained by
psychological or biological factors.
Social phenomena
are Social Facts:
• Manners of acting, thinking and feeling
that are external to individuals, and that
are invested with a coercive power by
virtue of which their exercise control over
them.
• Although social facts are independent of
individuals, and endure over time, they
become effective only when internalized.
Durkheim
• First and foremost proponent of
understanding religion as a form of
validation of the social order.
• The earliest religions were based on clans,
each expressing its solidarity through the
emblem of its respective totem.
Totem
• An object, an animal species or a feature
of the natural world that is associated with
a particular group or clan. The totem is
held to be ancestral or to have other
intimate relationship with the group.
Totemism for Durkheim
• Uses nature as a model for society.
• In worshipping totems, members of the
group were in effect celebrating their own
existence and continuity and giving
concrete expression to it.
Totemic principle:
• In worshipping the sacred, people worship
the society they belong to.
What do you think
of this idea?
• Totems carry with them a kind of energy or
supernatural force, a sacred power
described as mana.
• Melanesians of the South Pacific used the
word mana to describe the sacred,
impersonal force that exists in the
Universe. This religious power or energy
can be concentrated in objects, people,
plants or animals.
Taboo
• A collective prohibition.
• Things that are set apart as sacred, and
are off-limits to ordinary people.
Totemism
• Does not include a belief in a supernatural
being.
• All we have is mana, an impersonal force
contained in sacred things.
Durkheim
• The very thing that defines religion is the
distinction between the realm of the
sacred and the realm of the profane.
Durkheim
• The distinction between what is natural
and what is supernatural is a recent
construction of the positive sciences.
Durkheim
• Contests the idea that religion is defined
by the existence of divinity.
Durkheim
• Religion is a system made up of parts, and
can only be defined in relation to its parts:
myths, dogmas, rituals and ceremonies.
• Two fundamental categories: beliefs and
rituals.
Durkheim
• All religious beliefs have one
characteristic. They presuppose a
classification of all things, real and idea,
into two classes of opposed groups: THE
SACRED and THE PROFANE
Examples of sacred things in
our society?
• The sacred thing par excellence is that
which the profane should not touch, and
cannot touch with impunity.
Church
• A society whose members are united by
the fact that they think in the same way in
regard to the sacred world and its relations
with the profane world, and who translate
these common ideas into common
practices.
Religion
• The unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things which unite into
one single moral community (a Church) all
those who adhere to them.
Shared emotion = Collective
effervescence