ABSTRACT
The anthropological and ethnographic literature on death is vast, and Hertz's name is not as singularly prominent in respect of it as it is with the theme of right and left. By no means all those writing on death find it necessary to mention his work, many mention it only as part of a routine survey of what has already been written on the subject, and only a few have examined his thoughts at all critically or sought to take them further. Nonetheless, he has importance as part of the Durkheimian shift from intellectualist to sociological approaches to the study of the topic. His essay, 'Contribution aune etude sur la representation collective de la mort' (1907a), has become one of its theoretical anchors, especially since its translation by the Needhams in 1960. The work is his longest, with a large number of detailed footnotes, and would have been longer still had not Durkheim and his colleagues pruned it considerably (Alice Hertz 1928: ix-x; see p. 4). Although it was referred to by Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915: 402 n. 1), it is hard at first sight to disentangle what, if anything, Hertz brought to the topic that was not already implicit in the master's method and arguments. Nonetheless, although basically Durkheimian, it does have an originality of its own. Halbwachs regarded it as the most important of his works (1928: 201).
