“Show how Durkheim through the study of totemism demonstrates the reality of religion.” (2012)
The dominant theories of Émile Durkheim’s time explained religion away. E. B. Tylor’s animism (Primitive Culture, 1871) traced it to dreams of souls and spirits, and Friedrich Max Müller’s naturism traced it to nature’s forces personified through language. Both made faith a collective hallucination. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Durkheim argued that an institution so universal and lasting “cannot rest upon an error and a lie”. Totemism was his proof.
Why totemism, and why the Arunta
- Durkheim sought the simplest religion, found in the simplest social organisation, the clan. Studying it would expose religion’s essential elements.
- His data came mainly from Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen (The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899) on the Arunta, supplemented by Carl Strehlow’s work and North American material.
The argument, step by step
- The clan and its totem: each exogamous clan bears the name of an animal or plant. Its members are bound by kinship-like duties.
- A gradient of sacredness: the emblem of the totem, carved on the churinga, is more sacred than the totemic species, which is more sacred than clan members. What is venerated is therefore not the animal but a symbol, the clan’s “flag”.
- The totemic principle: behind emblem, species and people lies an impersonal, diffuse force, akin to Melanesian mana, Sioux wakan and Iroquois orenda. It protects, punishes breaches of taboo and commands respect.
- The force is society: the totem symbolises both the god and the clan, “is that not because the god and the society are only one?” Society has everything needed to arouse the sense of the divine: superior power, moral authority, and the individual’s dependence on it.
- Ritual renews it: in the intichiuma increase ceremonies the assembled clan re-experiences its unity. The believer comes away genuinely strengthened.
Hence religion is “real”
- Believers are not deluded in feeling dependent on a moral power greater than themselves. They misname it, but that power is society. In this sense “there are no religions which are false”.
- Religion also has cognitive reality: basic categories of time, space, class and causality originate in religious and social classification.
Indian illustration
Oraon clans in Jharkhand bear totemic names such as Lakra (tiger), Nag (cobra), Bakula (heron) and Dhan (paddy), which regulate exogamy. Sarna ritual centres on the village sacred grove. The Jharkhand Assembly’s resolution of 11 November 2020, seeking a separate Sarna code in the Census, shows nature-centred religion working as a marker of collective identity, much as Durkheim argued.
Critiques
- Alexander Goldenweiser denied that totemism was essentially religious: clan organisation, totemic names and ritual vary independently.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion, 1965) held that the Arunta were untypical and that it was Durkheim, not the Aborigine, who made society a god.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (Totemism, 1962) saw totems as classificatory devices, species chosen because they are “good to think”.
- The argument is circular: society explains religion, and religion defines society.
Conclusion
Durkheim did not demonstrate that the gods exist. He demonstrated that what believers experience is real, being society’s moral force made visible. That shift from truth-claims to social reality made religion a legitimate object of sociology.