Now published (August 2018)
Wim van Binsbergen, Confronting the sacred: Durkheim vindicated,
Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, 567 pp, , ISBN 978-90-78382-33-1
to be distributed by Amazon.com, and meanwhile available from the present
website
click here for the text of the front and back covers
Table
of contents
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Preliminaries..................................................................................................................................... 5
Table of contents····························································································· 9
List of figures········································································································ 15
List of tables··········································································································· 19
List of special topics treated in the footnotes······· 23
Chapter 0. Preface···························································································· 27
0.1. Background, genesis, and general structure of
this book
0.2. Acknowledgments
Part I. Durkheim’s religion theory and its background...................... 45
Chapter 1. A century of
commentary and debate around Durkheim and Les
Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse··································································································· 47
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Durkheim against the background of his time and age
1.2.1. Durkheim’s political views
1.2.2. Durkheim as a Jew
1.3. Durkheim and philosophy
1.3.1.
Introduction
1.3.2. Durkheim and Kant
1.3.3. Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge
1.3.4. On
primitive classification
1.3.5. Durkheim’s puzzling realism in his approach to religion –
and the present writer’s proposal concerning the true ‘elementary forms of
religious life’
1.3.6. Durkheim the moralist
1.3.7. Durkheim and other philosophers
1.3.8. From
philosophy to sociology
1.4. Durkheim’s last major book: Les Formes Élémentaires
de la Vie Religieuse
1.4.1. Overview
1.4.2. Durkheim’s method in Les Formes
1.5. Early
reception of Les Formes
1.6. Commentators
upon Les Formes
in the course of the 20th c. CE and most recently
1.7. Where do we go
from here?
Part II. Sacred / profane in Durkheim’s Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse................................................................................................................................... 97
Chapter 2. General
observations; the problem········· 99
2. 1. General
critical observations on Les Formes
2.2. The paired
concepts sacred / profane as central
to Durkheim’s religion theory
2.3. The ambiguity
of the sacred
2.4. The
problem: Is the sacred universal and
eternal?
2.4.1. Pickering on modern Great-Britain
2.4.2. Prades
on the continued heuristic value of Durkheim’s
religion theory
2.5. A note on
comparative religion
2.6. Durkheim’s attempts at operationalisation
of sacred / profane
2.6.1. Why Durkheim
considers (a) the bullroarers to be sacred
2.6.2. Why Durkheim
considers (b) the totemic representations to be sacred
2.6.3. WhyDurkheim
considers (c) the totemic species to be sacred
2.6.4. Why Durkheim
considers (d) the humans involved to be sacred
2.6.5. Why Durkheim
considers (e) the individual totems to be sacred
2.6.6.
Discussion: Durkheim’s operationalisation
of the sacred
Chapter 3. Specialists’s
criticism of Durkheim’s paired concepts sacred
/ profane················································ 133
3.1. Jack Goody
3.2. Selected
specialists in the field of Australian societies
3.2.1. Australia
in the ethnographic literature
3.2.2. Durkheim reception in Australia
3.3. The war on
the sacred in 20th c. CE France
3.4.
Lévi-Strauss yet salvaging Durkheim’s analysis of totemism?
3.5.
Intermediate stock-taking
3.6. Back to Stanner
Chapter 4. Exploding the
paired concepts sacred / profane as
analytical tools··························································· 159
4.1.
Defectiveness of the paired concepts sacred
/ profane as analytical tools
4.2. The rise
and fall of structuralism in Amsterdam anthropology
4.3. Taking my
distance from the paired concepts sacred
/ profane
Part III. Vindicating Durkheim through anthropological fieldwork..................... 171
Chapter 5. Durkheim
vindicated: Shrines and societal segments in the highlands of North-western
Tunisia (North Africa)···················································· 173
5.1.
Introduction
5.1.1. Durkheim applied to North African social segmentation
5.2. Regional
and historical background
5.3.
Segmentation in Ḫumiriyya
today
5.4. Shrines in
Ḫumiriyya
5.5. Saints and
the living
5.6.
Segmentation and types of zyara
5.7. Local zyara in the valley of Sidi Mḥammad
5.8. Original and personal zyara in the village of Sidi Mḥammad
5.9. Conclusion
Chapter 6. Having your
cake and eating it: Intrinsic sacrality as a challenge to Durkheim’s religion
theory································································································ 213
6.1. Intrinsic sacrality as a puzzle
6.2. The
indirect relation between ecology and religion: A partial vindication of Durkheim’s theory of the sacred
Chapter 7. Transcendence
as an implication of Durkheim’s religion theory: Its
scope in space and time explored by reference to the Nkoya people of Zambia
(South Central Africa)················································································· 223
7.1.
Introduction: The relevance of transcendence to our present argument
7.2. Looking
for transcendence among the Nkoya of Zambia, and the
attending methodological requirements
7.3.
Transcendence among the Nkoya
7.3.1. Daily life among the small circle of kinsmen
making up the village
7.3.2. The
intimate domain of sexuality
7.3.3. The acts
of the priest-healer (nganga)
7.3.4. Ecstatic
healing cults
7.3.5. The
humble prayer to the ancestors
7.3.6. The deep
forest, where hunters roam
7.3.7. The
name-inheritance ritual of ushwana
7.3.8. The
ritual of girl’s puberty initiation
7.3.9. The
kingship
7.3.10. The
modern Zambia state
7.3.11. The
‘World of the Whites’
7.3.12. The historic forms of veneration of the High God Nyambi
7.3.13.
Christianity
7.4 . Conclusion
Part IV.
Vindicating Durkheim through long-range approaches.......... 251
Chapter 8. Theories
and methods towards a long-range perspective on Durkheim’s ‘Elementary Forms of
Religious Life’·········································································· 253
8.1.
Introduction: A long-range perspective
8.2. The
archaeology of religion
8.2.1.
Selected common approaches in the archaeology of religion
8.2.2.
Burial as an indication of Neanderthal star-orientated religion?
8.2.3.
Current debates among archaeologists of religion
8.2.3.1. Aldenderfer
8.2.3.2. The case of South-western Iran:
Again a known background context; repetition and non-randomness as
archaeological operationalisations of religion
8.2.3.3.
Building a religious-archaeological case from scratch? Or
rather on the basis of non-archaeological context information?
8.2.3.4.
Religious archaeology implicitly based on the analogy argument, even in purely
prehistoric and illiterate contexts such as the North-eastern Woodlands, USA
8.2.3.5.
Archaeological interpretation with an ever widening context of analogy:
Interpreting Native American archaeological burial data with Indonesian burial
ethnography? Enters the Sunda Hypothesis
8.2.3.6.
Felicitous archaeological identification of religious elements on the grounds
of peripheral dependence: The sphered ram in Saharan
rock art (Camps)
8.2.3.7.
The definitional problem in the recognition and reconstruction of elementary
forms of religious life in prehistory
8.3.
Long-range comparative and historical linguistics
8.3.1. How
*Borean semantics is structured: Introducing ‘range
semantics’
8.3.2.
Methodological difficulties in the long-range linguistic reassessment of Durkheim’s
claims
8.3.3.
Sketching a *Borean life-world
8.4.
Comparative Mythology
Chapter 9.
Vindicating Durkheim: A long-range perspective on the emergence of theistic
religion in prehistory······································································································· 329
9.1. Introduction
9.2. Cultural universals as a problem; the
possible contribution from religion
9.3. Words suggestive of absolute difference
in *Borean
9.4. ‘Death’ vs. ‘life’ as a likely instance
of Durkheimian absolute difference in prehistoric
religion
9.5. What to look for in *Borean?
Emic concepts attributed to Australian Aboriginal
religion and qualifying as ‘elementary forms of religious life’ according to Les Formes
9.6. The paired concepts sacred / profane in Indoeuropean, in the other
phyla of the Eurasiatic macrophylum, and beyond
9.7. Evidence for the sacralisation of space
/ of the kin group, in *Borean?
9.8. Exploring the semantics of ‘purity’ /
‘dirtiness’, in prehistoric lexicons
9.9. Exploring the semantics of ‘prohibition’
and ‘taboo’ in prehistoric lexicons
9.10. Exploring the semantics of ‘soul /
body’ in prehistoric lexicons
9.11. Exploring the semantics of ‘spirit /
spiritual beings’ in prehistoric lexicons
9.11.1. Demon
9.11.2. Altered states of consciousness
9.12. Exploring the semantics of ‘God, High
God, gods’ in prehistoric lexicons
9.12.1. ‘God’ semantics in the Eurasiatic macrophylum
9.12.2. The ‘god’ semantics in other
macrophyla than Eurasiatic
9.12.3. Prayer
9.13. Spiritual beings: The prehistoric emergence
of theistic beliefs
9.14. Why did theistic beliefs arise in Asia
c. 25-20 ka BP?
9.14.1. Evolution of mind and religious
transmission (Mithen)
9.14.2. The emergence of theistic religion,
conjoined with that of agriculture?
9.14.3. Let us grant that theistic religion
started c. 20-25 ka BP, can we imagine then what the earliest gods were like
and how they were conceptualised?
9.15. Magic, divination, sorcery
9.16. ‘Further instalments on the problem of
evil’: Indications of moral categories
in *Borean
9.17. Looking, beyond Durkheim,
for selected further religious concepts in *Borean
Part V. Conclusion and
reference material................................................... 429
Chapter 12. Summary and
conclusion; envoy·············· 431
12.1. Summary and
conclusion
12.1.1. Merits and demerits of Les Formes as a social-scientific theory
of religion
12.1.2. This
book’s implicit levels of methodology and orientation
12.1.3. Apologies
and disclaimer: The dangers of interdisciplinarity
and of homelessness
12.2. Envoy: The
reality of religion, but beyond Durkheim
12.2.1. Thinking
about God and the universe
Bibliography········································································································ 447
Appendix I. A listing of
the reconstructed *Borean (approx.) lexicon······························································································ 513
Appendix II. A provisional
and selective bibliography of mystery religion············································ 529
Appendix III. Another
global etymology: ‘leopard / speckled / striped / granulation’ ·············································· 533
Appendix IV. Yet another
global etymology: The complex ‘earth / bottom
/ human’··································· 537
Appendix V. Page index of the *Borean (approx.)
roots as discussed in this book ················································· 539
Index of authors···························································································· 541
Index of proper names other than those of authors
cited····································································································· 551