ABSTRACT
For Émile Durkheim, sociology is the "science of social institutions" with religion its cornerstone institution. The religious institution had to arise from a social environment of some sort, Durkheim reasoned, because as he liked to put it, only "nothing proceeds from nothing". A good starting point is Durkheim's overriding concern with social solidarity and the relationship between society and the individual. By 1888, as a young assistant professor in Bordeaux, his first course was on "Social Solidarity" because, for him, it was the foremost problem of sociology. Primates do not have bona fide institutions but they are socially inclined as they live in year-round societies where members undergo a long period of socialization. To evaluate Durkheim's assumption on whether or not humans are highly social by nature or nurture, one needs to compare the social structures of apes and a control sample of Old World monkey species.
