ABSTRACT
Culture, long a favorite stomping ground of anthropology and the humanities, has in recent decades become “discovered” with gusto by sociology, as a marked “cultural turn” has led to the formation of one of the largest sections of the American Sociological Association, the Section on Culture. As Gabe Ignatow noted in a recent issue of the section’s newsletter, Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and elsewhere “developed a ‘religious sociology’ that is an inspiration for much of contemporary cultural sociology.”2 yet, however much sociologists have made heuristic and other use of The Elementary Forms (hereafter, The Forms) in the growth of cultural sociology, it seems to have little significance for those writing in the sociology of art, such as Nisbet, Bourdieu, Luhmann, Alexander, and Zolberg.3
