ABSTRACT
Durkheim’s la conscience in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), significantly translated into English as both conscience and consciousness (see, for example, G.Simpson, original translator of The Division of Labour in Society [Durkheim 1964] and J.W.Swain, translator of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), is people’s awareness of their religious sentiment as morality. It is countered by the structuralist and marxist notion of unaware or underlying religious self-mystification or false consciousness. These two descriptions of religious thought, one producing moral society and the other masked and exploitative social formations, may once have separated Durkheimian functionalism from structuralism and marxism. Nowadays the descriptions are popularly abridged media theories which seek elements of both the moral and the exploitative in many modern forms of collective religious enthusiasm. Thus, persons described by Western media as ‘religious fundamentalists’ (to take one epithet) carry a globally recognized designation, which is part of a transnational demarcatory vocabulary, and may themselves have been inspired in the first place by examples of moral renaissance reported and explained in the media, sometimes in terms of underlying politico-economic and social conditions. The 1940s and 1950s objectivist scholarship of, say, Sundkler’s (1961) study of Bantu prophets in South Africa or that of Worsley on Melanesian cargo cults (1957) presented analyses of the complex interplay of spiritual and material deprivation from a metropolitan perspective and for a like readership. The issues they addressed have become subjectively compressed as globally purveyed news speak. Nowadays, religious participants, media readers and viewers alike communicate through example with one another: religious activists stress the fundamental, self-verifying truth of their mission, while non-participant media observers seek alternative explanations from outside the religion. Of the so-called world religions, the current claims for and about Islam are particularly focused.
