ABSTRACT
The ever-growing number of critical assessments of Emile Durkheim's social theory - particularly his interpretation of ethnological data relative to archaic law, the prohibition of incest, kinship systems, types of social cohesion, totemism and, more generally, religion - confirms implicitly the challenge it still represents to students of nonindustrial societies. The need for the intensive exploitation of ethnographic data was thus an in-built element of the original Durkheimian project. The continued preservation of the theoretical ambitions of French ethnology, a clearly Durkheimian heritage, is of course largely due to the high standing of the academic recruitment of many of the best field scholars, a manifest survival of the model set by the Durkheimian cluster. A non-exclusive reference to Durkheim and to the demand his work implied for the extension of the knowledge about archaic societies represented the intellectual background leading to the foundation of the Institut d'ethnographie of the University of Paris.
