Primitive Classification

by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Rodney Needham (Translator)

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss maintain that society is the source of the very categories of human thought. First published in the Année Sociologique in 1903, this classic essay has been translated by Rodney Needham, who also provides a critical introduction.

"[ Primitive Classification ] will impress the reader with its quiet elegance, its direct, logical form, its clarity of style, its spirit of careful, yet bold, exploration."—Harry Alpert, American Journal of Sociology

"Particularly instructive for anyone who wonders what social anthropology how, if at all, it differs from sociology and whether it has any unifying theoretical problem."—F. K. Lehman, American Sociological Review

Genres: Anthropology, Sociology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Social Science, Theory, Academic

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology.

In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions,[citation needed] its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.

Reviews

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Men's classification of the world invariably started from the classification of the social groups. And they observe things in the forms of groups instead of individuals. Such collective representations arises from special social sentiments. For a social scientist, then, his task would be to reveal the sentiments and more elaborated collective representations of one society. It's both of intellectual benefits and practical utility.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good question: what is the history of the idea of 'concept,' that certain things or abstractions 'belong' to each other? Have people always conceived the concept in the same way?

Bad answer: People got the idea to classify things because they were already classified into moeities, clans, and subclans, and all categorizations stemmed from people taking a good look at themselves.

[Luis Ignacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Se ha afirmado con harta frecuencia que el hombre comenzó por representarse las cosas relacionándolas consigo mismo. Lo que precede permite precisar mejor en qué consiste este antropocentrismo, que sería preferible llamar sociocentrismo. El centro de los primeros sistemas de la naturaleza no es el individuo, sino la sociedad"

[Brooklyn Butler · Rating 1 out of 5]

Booo tomatoes tomatoes throwing tomatoes

[Dyan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Originally published in 1903, this text has not aged well at all. Rodney Needham's introduction goes some way to highlight its many, many flaws. That being said, this was one of the first anthropological and sociological works to focus specifically on "classification" as a concept - and moreover, to contend that classification is a social process and not an inherently cognitive one, as had been argued by the psychology of the day. In that way it is indeed a "classic" academic text, and interesting to read as such.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

just awesome!

[Phoenix2 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good athropologiacl study on the classification.