“Write short note: Collective representations.” (1987)
Collective representations are, for Émile Durkheim, the shared ideas, symbols, concepts, myths and categories through which a group represents itself and its world to itself. Examples are a flag, a totem, a sacred text or the word for “mother’s brother”. They are states of the collective conscience, different in kind from any individual’s sensations or images.
The argument of 1898
In “Individual and Collective Representations” (1898), Durkheim built an analogy:
- Individual representations arise from brain cells but cannot be reduced to them. Once formed, they have relative autonomy and combine by their own laws.
- In the same way, collective representations arise from the substratum of associated individuals: their number, grouping and spatial distribution. But they are sui generis: once formed, they attract, repel and combine, producing myths, theologies, legal codes and moral systems.
- They are therefore neither the average of individual minds nor mere by-products of material conditions. This was Durkheim’s defence of sociology’s autonomy against both psychology and crude materialism.
Features
- External and constraining: they pre-exist and outlast individuals, like language.
- Stable and impersonal: sensations flow like a river, but concepts resist change. They shift mainly through collective upheaval.
- Richer than individual thought: they condense the experience of generations.
- Integrative: shared symbols make communication and solidarity possible.
Categories of thought: a sociology of knowledge
- In Primitive Classification (1903), written with Marcel Mauss, the classification of nature into genera and species follows the social division into clans and phratries: the first logical categories were social categories.
- In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), the basic categories of time, space, causality and totality have social origins in the rhythm of collective life, the layout of the camp and religious force. Durkheim offered this as a sociological answer to Immanuel Kant’s question about where the categories come from.
Later developments and critique
- Maurice Halbwachs extended the idea to collective memory (1925).
- Serge Moscovici (La psychanalyse, son image et son public, 1961) reworked it as social representations. His version is more dynamic and plural: groups turn unfamiliar ideas into common sense through anchoring and objectification.
- Critics object that Durkheim made thought too dependent on social morphology, overstated consensus, and could not explain logical validity by social origin.
Indian illustration
The Ganga as a mother goddess is a collective representation that shapes pilgrimage, ritual and politics. In 2017 the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna living legal entities, a sacred representation carried into law. The Supreme Court stayed the order within months.
Conclusion
The concept makes knowledge itself a social fact and anticipates the later sociology of knowledge. Moscovici’s revision fits pluralistic, media-saturated societies better, with competing representations in place of a single collective mind.