ABSTRACT
Women have been burdened…by a long history of deeply unsettling, mystifying, mixed messages about themselves.
(J.Ochshorn, 1981:243)
1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Durkheim’s sociology, it has quite often been said, reflects a tension created by the action of two quite distinct principles. On the one hand, it suggests the idea that social forces exercise an external constraint over the individual (thus producing a conception of an external logos as emblematology); on the other, it posits the thesis that in society ‘individuals’ are themselves hierarchically organised by the action of these forces (and therefore reflect differential levels of civilisation). The former principle has in effect tended to dominate interpretations of his sociology so that the application of the principle of constraint has not been developed as inter-caste or -class, or -sex domination. Thus the Durkheimian proposition that certain individuals are constrained in a certain way and to a certain degree by social facts, a constraint which then enables them to form a dominant social group, has been ignored though it is at the heart of his sociology (of religion, of law, of education, etc.). The primary categories of Durkheim’s sociology-men, women and children-reflect both the action of social constraint but also stand in unequal relationship to each other as an order of domination. In presentations of Durkheim’s work, relations of this second type (social hierarchy, power, moral domination) have been neglected, even as politics while the elements of methodology have upstaged them.1
