Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Introduction Durkheim’s last major work entitled The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) was, until the mid-1960s or so, a more significant text for anthropologists than sociologists.1 Anthropologists, suggests Tiryakian (1988b), found this work especially interesting because of ‘its focus on the structures and functions of the religious life in societies studied by ethnographers’ (Tiryakian, 1988b, p. 373). Sociologists, by contrast, concentrated their attention on ‘avidly reading [Durkheim’s] more positivistic monographs: The Division of Labour, Rules of Sociological Method and, of course, that exemplar of theory and research Suicide’ (1988b, p. 373; Clark, 1968a, p. 52).2