the elementary forms of religious life, emile durkheim

translator's introduction (karen fields)

(xix): "for durkheim, religions exist because human beings exist only as social beings and in a humanly shaped world. religion is 'an eminently social thing.'"

(xxiiii): "...the Durkheimian pedigree of Michel Foucault."

(xxv): "religion is the steady, day-in-day-out reality of millions, their routine framework of everyday activity..."

(xxxiii): "to exist at all, all communities must be imagined. what his intellectual descendant benedict anderson has so well shown for large-scale twentieth-century anticolonial nationalism is also true of any face-to-face community and of the smallest Australian clan."

(xxxiv): in sum--"bear three points in mind. first, religion is not defined in terms of anything that would turn a man of science positive away from observable phenomena, or the real--not divinity, the otherworldly... second, the phrase 'unified system' postulates that religius beliefs and rites are not hodgeppodges but are internally ordered. third, the objects of those rites and beliefs acquire their religious status as sacred, or 'set apart and forbidden,' as a result of joint action by people who set them apart and who, by the same stroke, constitute themselves a 'moral community' or 'a Church.' once again, then, religion is social, social, social."

(xxxviii): "...he assumes the Australians to be rationally constituted humans, as are their Parisian contemporaries. there is no question of one's being civilized and the other not, or of the two groups' having different mental constitutions."

(xliii): "...sacredness is eminently a representation collective... as a quality of things--or, rather, as Durkheim insists, a quality superadded to things--sacredness can come to be its real self only within the domain of collective consciousness... sacredness is an aspect of the real that exists only in the mind but cannot possibly exist as the real in only one mind."

(xlvi): "sacredness is not merely a set of peculiar relationships between people and certain designated objects. the very act that constitues those peculiar relationships also relates a designated group of people to one another and sets them apart from others to whom they are not bound and who do not have the same relationship to designated physical objects."

(li): "if durkheim's analysis is right, it suggests that this century's monstrosities in collecitve life arise not from aberrations in human reason but from what is fundamental to it. that analysis also leads to a disturbing suggestion: that the ordinary human agents who serve as raw material for extraordinary abusers of human dignity are, in vast majority, the normal and the the socially responsible... it suggests, finally, that the human nature on which we depend, our social nature, is our uplift and our downfall. the only exit from this dilemma appears to be individualism. but the incompatibility of individualist assumptions with human nature as it can be observed in the real world was chief among Durkheim's discovereies in Formes and throughout his work. what we see, through his theoretical lens of conscience collective, is present in a social world of the real that coannot be arrived at with notions of individual conscience alone... thus, in the end, there is a deep and tragic tension in Durkheim's discoveries."

introduction (1-18)

(1): "i have made a very archaic religion the subject of my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity."

(2): "fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. all are true after their own fashion: all fulfill given conditions of human existence, though in different ways. granted it is not impossible to rank them hierarchically..." [this last point seems different from what karen fields argued earlier--and generally incommensurate with the thrust of durkheim's move, here.]

(8): "if philosophy and the sciences were born in religion, it is because religion itself began by serving as science and philosophy. further, and less often noted, religion has not merely enriched a human intellect already formed but in fact has helped to form it. men owe to religion not only the content of their knowledge, in significant part, but also the form in which that knowledge is elaborated." [form/content -- here begins the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists]

(9): critical--"the principal categories... are born in and from religion. they are a product of religious thought. this is a point that i will make again and again in the course of this book... the general conclusion of the chapters to follow is that religion is an eminently social thing. religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups..."

(10): "it is not my time that is organized in this way. it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization. this by itself is enough to make us begin to see that any such organization would have to be collective. and indeed, observation establishes that these indispensable points, in reference to which all things are arranged temporally, are taken from social life. the division into days, weeks, months, ears, etc., corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals and public ceremonies at regular intervals."

(12-14): where he makes the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists: "faced with these opposite objections, the intellect remains uncertain. but if the social origin of the categories is accepted, a new stance becomes possible, one that should enable us, i believe, to avoid these opposite difficulties."

(16-17): key--"society cannot leave the categories up to the free choice of individuals without abandoning itself... we feel that we cannot abandon ourselves to them without our thought's ceasing to be really human... thus the necessit with which the categories press themselves is not merely the effect of habits whose yoke we could slip with little effort; nor is that necessity a habit or a physical or metaphysical need, since the categories change with place and time; it is a special sort of moral necessity that is to intellectual life what obligation is to the will."

book one

(24): religion cannot be sought in the supernatural, because the supernatural/natural antinomy is emphatically modern. "to be able to call certain facts supernatural, one must already have an awareness that there is a natural order of things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe are internally linked according to necessary relationships called laws."

(27): neither can it be defined by the idea of divinity (see buddhism discussion on next page)

(33-34): important--definition of religion as a "system", which consists of beliefs and rites and a sacred/profane classification, of them [here it is appropriate to raise the concerns about how religions ossify and are cast off--how, in other words, there is development? since this, as a classically structuralist position, explains everything in a state of stasis...]

(38): "sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred."

(41): the Church--"...a society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church..."

(42): important--"a Church is not simply a priestly brotherhood; it is a moral community made up of all the faithful, both laity and priests..."

(44): definition--"a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite into on e single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."

(44): "the second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: in showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing."

(45-67): not animism, as a theory for why religion emerges

(68-83): not naturism

(84-85): "since, in themselves, neither man nor nature is inherently sacred, both acquire sacredness elsewhere."

(91): "first, for the sociologist as for the historian, social facts exist in relationship with the social system to which they belong; hence they cannot be understood apart from it..."

(91-92): "the comaprative method would be impossible if social types did not exist, and it cannot be usefully applied except within the same type." [the place to ask, again, about the 'social type' vs. 'ideal type' method]

book two

(100): two essential traits of the clam: 1. a bond of a particular sort, because they bear the same name. 2. the name it bears is also that of a definites species of material things with which it thinks it has a special relationship...

(118): "thus, while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. in fact, things are classified as sacred and profane by reference to the totem. it is the very archetype of sacred things."

(124): "this sacredness stems from one cause: it is a material representation of the clan..." [even if he means 'literally material' here, this still gives us an opportunity to ask about how his position here, and in general, resembles historical materialism.]

(145-146): e.g., how the idea of 'genus', or 'class' is born as a result of clan organization--"thus we have our first opportunity to test the proposition put forward at the beginning of this work and to assure ourselves that the fundamental notions of the intellect, the basic categories of thought, can be the product of social factors. the preceding shows that this is indeed the case for the notion of category itself."

(148): "in all probability, then, we would never have thought of gathering the beings of the universe into homogeneous groups, called genera, if we had not had the example of human societies before our eyes--if, indeed, we had not at first gone so far in making things members of the society of men..."

(156): "in sum, totemic organization as just described clearly must result from a sort of consensus among all the members of the tribe, without distinction. each clan cannot possibly have developed its beliefs in an absolutely independent manner; the cults of the various totems complement one another exactly, and so they must necessarily have been in some sense adjusted to one another." [here, must interrogate what work is being done by the notion of "consensus" -- this, again, is durkheim's strong (methodological-philosophical) bias in favor of non-contradiction, resolved tensions, etc.]

(191): the 'force'--"totemism is not the religion of certain animals, certain men, or certain images; it is the religion of a kind of anonymous and impersonal force that is identifiable in each of these beings but identical to none of them."

(192): "when i speak of these principles as forces, i do not use the word in a metaphorical sense; they behave like real forces."

(202): "that way of imagining religious things is by no means inherent in their nature. at the origin and basis of religious thought, we find not definite and distinct objects or beings that in themselves possess sacredness but indefinite powers and anonymous forces."

(208): key--"it follows from the same analysis that the totem expresses and symbolizes two different kinds of things. from one point of view, it is the outward and visible form of what i have called the totemic principle or god; and from another, it is also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. it is the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others... thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?... thus the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as totem." [here we have the loose contours of an important contribution, definitely--but i want to know much more about the nature of the link. what kind of a totemic principle is produced by different kinds of society? and isn't it unavoidable that this principle is produced by specific sectors of society? where is the consensus, emile? the fact that people reproduce something does not mean that they produced it? of course he will no accept this as an intelligible question. partly, of course, this entire line of questioning is complicated by his methodology--he is using 'primitive communism' to explain highly stratified societies. surely, stratification will begin to matter as we interrogate the notion of 'consensus'?]

(208): "society in general, simply be its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. a society is to its members of what a god is to its faithful."

(209-211): notion of 'moral authority' -- which we attribute to the 'divine' but is, in actual fact, something that society exerts upon us.

(214): "because we feel the weight of them, we have no choice but to locate them outside ourselves..."

(215): "just as society consecrates men, so it also consecrates things, including ideas..." [what is the nature of this agency?]

(223): "because the religious force is none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan..."

(224): "such moral powers do not express the manner in which natural things affect our senses but the manner in which the collective consciousness affects individual consciousness."

(226): important--again, an exceedingly strong, stable conception of hegemony (and, then, where to for resistance?) -- "each individual carries the whole in himself. it is part of him, so when he yields to its promptings, he does not think he is yielding to coercion but instead doing what his own nature tells him to do." [this is what craig was saying--durkheim will not be helpful if we want to understand rebellion. but if we want to understand restraint/passivity, he's our man. to an extent, of course]

(227): "religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. such is its paramount role."

(229): important, and demonstrates his interesting insistence on seeing the modern and primitive together--"even though purely ideal, the powers thereby conferred on the object behave as if they were real. they determine man's conduct with the same necessity as phsycial forces. the Arunta who has properly rubbed himself with his churinga feels stronger; he is stronger... the soldier who falls defending his flag certainly does not believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth. such things happen because social thought, with its imperative authority, has a power that individual thought cannot possibly have. by acting on our minds, it can make us see things in the light that suits it..." [there is, perhaps, a positive project here, in deconstruction of this social (arbitrary?) authority? though, in durkheim, the tragic would re-assert itself, no doubt.]

(230): "the sacredness exhibited by the thing is not implicated in the intrinsic properties of the thing. it is added to them. the world of the religious is not a special aspect of empirical nature. it is superimposed upon nature."

(233): "we know, in fact, that social phenomena are born not in the individual but in the group. no matter what part we may play in their genesis, each of us receives them from without." [what would it mean to introduce the notion of class, here?]

(238): "we know furthermore that these religious ideas are the outcome of definite social causes... thus, it is social requirements that have fused together ideas that at first seem distinct..." [again, this is society in the abstract, not class society in the concrete. what would it mean to perform that transformation?]

(240): "...there is no gulf between the logic of religious thought and the logic of scientific thought..."

(242-275): inquiring after the soul -- see 265, where he writes, "the idea of the soul is a particular application of the bleifs relative to sacred things. in this way may be explained the religious character this idea has displayed ever since it appeared in history and that it still has today. the soul has always been considered a sacred thing; in this respect it is opposed to the body, which in itself is profane."

(276-279): inquiring after spirits and gods, beginning to track religion as it becomes steadily more complex

book three

(303): role of rites--"by definition, sacred beings are beings set apart. what distinguishes them is a discontinuity between them and profane beings. normally, the two sorts of beings are separate from one another. a whole complex of rites seeks to bring about that separation, which is essential..."

(304): introducing the notion of 'taboo'--"the institution in accordance with which certain things are withdrawn from ordinary use."

(312-313): generally-speaking, we see that sacred and profane life cannot exist at the same time, or same space

(316): asceticism

(400): taking it too far? -- "there is no relationship between the feelings felt and the actions done by those who take part in the rite." [here discussing funeral rites, which seems a classic overstatement]

conclusion

(418): seeing the study of primitive society as the opening phase of an inductive investigation

(420): "the cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically."

(420): footnote william james -- "like a recent apologist of faith, i accept that religious belief rests on a definite experience, whose demonstrative value is, in a sense, not inferior to that of scientific experiments..."

(421): "i have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens that feeling of support, safety, and protective guidance which binds the man of faith to its cult." [here we are deepening the arg re: consensus -- does it serve a personal need, also, and not just a social need?]

(421): "as i have shown, even collective ideas and feelings are possible only through the overt movements that symbolize them. thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source."

(421): "along the way, i have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and thus science itself, have religious origins... in short, then, we can say that nearly all the great social institutions were born in religion. for the principal features of collective life to have begun as none other than various features of religious life it is evident that religious life must necessarily have been the eminent form and, as it were, the epitome of collective life."

(422): interesting--echoes of discipline and punish, without any of the political implications--"in the end, the point is not to exert a kind of physical constraint upon blind, and, more than that, imaginary forces but to reach, fortify, and discipline consciousness."

(424): quite ambitious--the distinction between the real and the ideal can only be explained by my framework, he's arguing--"since what defines the sacred is that the sacred is added to the real. and since the ideal is defined in the same way, we cannot explain the one without explaining the other."

(424): "thus the formation of an ideal is by no means an irreducible datum that eludes science. it rests on conditions that can be uncovered through observation. it is a natural product of social life."

(425): "it is in the school of collective life that the individual has learned to form ideals. it is by assimilating the ideals worked out by society that the individual is able to conceive of the ideal."

(426): key, why my theory is not historical materialism--"in pointing out an essentially social thing in religion, i in no way mean to say that religion simply translates the material forms and immediate vital necessities of society into another language. i do indeed take it to be obvious that social life depends on and bears the mark of its material base, just as the mental life of the individual depends on the brain... but collective consiocusness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological base, just as individual consciousness is something other than a mere product of thenervous system. if collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur... they mutually attract one another... none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality.." [unless i am misinterpreting, this seems at odds with the presentation, earlier. isn't he giving an unreasonable autonomy to the individual, here? and anyway this is theoretical very unsatisfactory--the collective consciousness emerging more-or-less randomly, as product? doesn't make any scientific sense. why is it that, confronted with marxism, these people are afraid to defend themselves properly? he has eschewed the possibility of generalization, neglecting that this is what his study has done, throughout.]

(427): "we can now judge the worth of the radical individualism that is intent on making religion out to be a purely individual thing: it misconceives the fundamental conditions of religious life... the only hearth at whcih we can warm ourselves morally is the hearth made by the company of our fellow men."

(429): "there can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and stregnthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality." [this opens up grounds for a study of 'nationalism' as a durkheimian study of religion, certainly--he does this and more throughout his work]

(429): speaking of unjust inequalities. my my (remember, this is his last work)

(430): french revolution, and why "it instituted a whole cycle of celebrations in order to keep the principles that inspired it eternally young."

(430): "religion is not only a system of practices but also a system of ideas whose object is to express the world..."

(431): science, and religion; the same goal, hence a (limited) incompatibility (see below, also) -- "in this regard, both pursue the same goal; scientific thought is only a more perfected form of religious thought. hence it seems natural that religion should lose ground as science becomes better at performing its task... although the offspring of religion, science tends to replace religion in everything that involves the cognitive and intellectual functions."

(432): science and religion, con't -- "science is said to deny religion in principle. but religion exist; it is a system of given facts; in short, it is a reality. how could science deny a reality? furthermore, insofar as religion is action and insofar as it is a means of making men live, science cannot possibly take its place. although science expresses life, it does not create life, and science can very well seek to explain faigh but by that very fact presupposes faith. hence there is conflict on only a limited point."

(434): "the basic material of logical thought is concepts. to try to discover how society could have played a role in the genesis of logical thought therefore amounts to asking how it can have taken part in the formation of concepts."

(435): change, in concepts (when there is some imperfection) -- can this take us away from what is otherwise a theory of stasis?

(435): the 'concept' is always an emphatically social thing -- "it is common to all because it is the work of the community."

(436): moreover, "concepts are not abstract things that have reality only in particular circumstances. they are [collective] representations just as concrete as any the individual can make of his own environment, for they correspond to the way in which the special being that is society thinks about the things of its own experience..." [again the question of society's agency]

(437): thus, "we can now begin to see society's share in the origin of logical thought. logical thought is possible only when man has managed to go beyond the fleeting representations he owes to sense experience and in the end to conceive a whole world of stable ideals, the common ground of intelligences..." (conditions for truth, he adds are two--impersonality and stability)

(438): here, oddly, a narrative of primitive-to-civilized is re-asserting itself (but it is sort of a meta- realm, so more forgivable, perhaps)

(440): "to say that concepts express the manner in which society conceives of things is also to say that conceptual thought is contemporaneous with humanity."

(441-442): key, answering why and how the categories are social, in origin, through the notion of totality--"above all, there is no individual experience, no matter how broad or prolonged, that could make us even suspect the existence of a whole genus embracing the universality of beings, and in which the other genera would be only species coordinated among, or subordinated to, one another. this notion of the whole, which lies at the basis of the classifications i have cited, cannot come to us from the individual himself, who is only a part of the whole and never comes in contact with more than an infinitesmal part of oreality... since the role of the categories is to encompass all the other concepts, the category par excellence would indeed seem to be the very concept of totality."

(443): "the concept of totality is but the concept of society in abstract form."

(443-444): "there is another reason... the relationships they express could not become conscious relationships except in and through society..."

(444): "society is possible only if the individuals and things that make it up are divided among different groups... and if those groups themeselves are classified in relation to one another..."

(445): "to summarize, society is by no means the illogical or alogical, inconsistent, and changeable being that people too often like to imagine. quite the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life, for it is a consciousness of consciousness. being outside and above individual and local contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in their permanent and fundamental aspect..."

(446): important--to the extent that there is dynamism in his picture, it is geometric--in other words, society will grow grow grow, until these concepts are stretched and need to be re-fit. it is not, though, that there is conflict.

(447): "the mystery dissolves once we have acknowledged that impersonal reason is but collective thought by another name. collective thought is possible only through the coming together of individuals..."

(448): "a new way of explaining man becomes possible as soon as we recognize that above the individual there is society, and that society is a system of active forces--not a nominal being, and not a creation of the mind..."

emile durkheim, suicide

editor's introduction (13-)

(13): "a short appraisal is still possible because throughout Durkheim's work on each and all of these topics subsidiary to suicide, is the basic theme that suicide which appears to be a phenomenon relating to the individual is actually explicable aetiologically with reference to the social structure and its ramifying functions."

(14): "it is these social concomitants of suicide which for Durkheim will serve to place any individual suicide in its proper aetiological setting."

(14): egoistic suicide--"which results from lack of integration of the individual into society."

(15): altruistic suicide--which "results from the individual's taking his own life because of higher commandments."

(15): anomic suicide--"when this regulation of the individual is upset so that his horizon is broadened beyond what he can endure, or contrariwise contracted unduly..."

(16): the "collective inclination [to suicide] conforms, Durkheim believes, to his definition of a social fact... that is, this inclination is a reality in itself, exterior to the individual and exercising a coercive effect upon him."

(17): "for durkheim all ameliorative measures must go to the question of social structure. egoistic suicide can be reduced by reintegrating the individual into group-life, giving him strong allegiances through a strengthened collective conscience."

preface

(37-38): "sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. there is no principle for which we have received more criticism; but none is more fundamental."

(38): "it is not realized that there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals."

book two: social causes and social types

chapter one, how to determine social causes and social types (145-151)

(145): "the results of the preceding book are not wholly negative. we have in fact shown that for each social group there is a specific tendency to suicide explained neither by the organic-psyhcic constitution of individuals nor the nature of the physical environment. consequently, by elimination, it must necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon; some of the facts examined, especially the geographic and seasonal variations of suicide, had definitely led us to this conclusion."

(146): doesn't make sense to proceed from the psychological-individual. so "let us reverse the order of study... consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them."

(147): "in a word, instead of being morphological, our classification will from the start be aetiological."

(148): more of the same--"if one wants to know the several tributaries of suicide as a collective phenomenon one must regard it in its collective form, that is, through statistical data, from the start."

(151): "the reasons ascribed for suicide, therefore, or those to which the suicide himself ascribes his act, are usually only apparent causes. not only are the reasons merely individual repercussions of a general state, but they express the general stats very unfaithfully, since they are identical while it is not..."

(151): his key methodological innovation--"we shall try to determine the productive causes of suicide directly, without concerning ourselves with the forms they can assume in particular individuals. disregarding the individual as such, his motives and his ideas, we shall seek directly the states of the various social environments (religious confessions, family..., etc.) in terms of which the variations of suicide occur. only then returning to the indivdiual, shall we study how these general causes become individualized..."

chapter two, egoistic suicide (152-)

(152-154): catholic vs. protestantism

(157): "the only essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the second permits free inquiry to a far greater degree than the first..."

(158): "we thus reach our first conclusion, that the proclivity of Protestantism for suicide must relate to the spirit of free inquiry that animates this religion... for the latter involves as much sorrow as happiness."

(159): catholicism, by comparison, "socializes men only by attaching them completely to an identical body of doctrine and socializes them in proportion as this body of doctrine is extensive and firm."

(160): the Jewish community, too, is "a small, compact, and coherent society with a strong feeling of self-consciousness and unity..."

(160-161): england vs. germany

(162): "... the progressive weakening of collective and customary prejudices produces a trend to suicide..."

(163-164): tied to individual learning, pursuit of knowledge? "does the craving for knowledge to the degree that it corresponds to a weakening of common faith really develop as does suicide?... the law can not only be verified by comparison of one faith with the other but also be observed within each religious confession..."

(167-168): hmm -- "the jew... seeks to learn, not in order to replace his collective prejudices by reflective thought, but merely to be better armed for the struggle..." [i..e, this is why they do not commit suicide in high numbers, despite being well-educated--a little bit of twisting/contorting to make the argument fit, but okay]

(168): important, two important conclusions

1. "first, we see why as a rule suicide increases with knowledge... man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. it is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized..."
   
2. "... if religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society..."
   

(169): "far from knoweldge being the source of the evil, it is its remedy, the only remedy we have..." [an interesting paragraph, here, in general--"let those who view anxiously and sadly the ruins of ancient beliefs... not ascribe to science an evil it has not caused but rather which it tries to cure!"]

chapter three, egoistic suicide con't (171-

(171): "if religion preserves men from suicide only because and in so far as it is a societ, other societies probably have the same effect. from this point of view, let us consider the family and political society..."

(198): "from this table and the preceding remarks it appears that marriage has indeed a preservative effect of its own againt suicide. but it is very limited and also benefits onesex only... the fact remains that the family is the essential factor in the immunity of married persons... reserving the special effect of marriage for later study, we shall say that domestic society, like religious society, is a powerful counteragent against suicide."

(202): "our previous conclusion may thus be completed to read: just as the family is a powerful safeguard against suicide, so the more strongly it is constituted the greater its protection."

(203): "great political upheavals are sometimes said to increase the number of suicides. but morselli has conclusively shown that facts contradict this view."

(208): in sum, "we have thus successively set up three following propositions:

1. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society.
   
2. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society.
   
3. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society.
   

(209): "the only quality satisfying this condition is that they ar all strongly integrated social groups."

(209): and thus--"the more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends on them.. if we agree to call this state egoism, in which the individual ego asserts itself to excess in the face of the social ego and at its expense, we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism."

(209): "when society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service, and thus forbids them to dispose wilfully of themselves. accordingly, it opposes their evading their duties to it through death. but how could society impose its supremacy upon them when they refuse to accept this subordination as legitimate?"

(210-211): "we may push back the frontier for some generations, force our name to endure for some years or centuries longer than our body; a moment too soon for most men, always comes when it will be nothing..."

(212): hmm -- the more one thinks, the less one believes. the less one believes, the more one asks "the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?"

(214): even still, one's plight can never be exclusively individual -- "however individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining--the very depression and melancholy resulting from this same exaggerated individualism."

chapter four, altruistic suicide (217-)

(217-218): danish warriors considered it an ignominy to die in bed.

(219): though egoistic suicide was not known to ancient societies, altruistic suicide was--"when a person kills himself... not because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because it is his duty..."

(221): "we thus confront a type of suicide differing by incisive qualities from the preceding one. whereas the latter is due to excessive individuation, the former is caused by too rudimentary individuation...."

chapter five, anomic suicide (241-

(241-242): financial crisis suicides--but they don't have to do with increased hardship...


(246): an equilibrium theory of suicide--"if therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is disturbances of the collective order."

(250): equation of being docile to collective authority with "a wholesome moral constitution" -- this is, perhaps, somewhat lost in translation...

(250-251): with a different spin, what he is discussing here could quite easily be formulated as a theory of hegemony...

(251): natural ability objection to equality--borrrrrring.

(252): "man's greatest privilege is that the bond he acceptes is not physical but moral; that is, social. he is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels..."

(253): disequilibrium in event of crisis

(254): "poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraing in itself" [but this is emphatically false, insofar as poverty is the cause of many a suicide. what do we do with this?]

(254): "if anomy never appeared except, as in the above instances, in intermittent spurts and acute crisis, it might cause the social suicide rate to vary from time to time, but it would not be a regular, constant factor. in one sphere of social life, however--the sphere of trade and industry--it is actually in a chronic state."

amilcar cabral on culture and national liberation (1970):
In order to escape this choice--which may be called the dilemma of cultural resistance--imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only gross formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege of the indigenous populations on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy). This, for example, is the case with the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question.
(...) [on giving culture a place in materialist view of history] The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.
(...) History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
(...) [does he distance himself from progressive views of culture, if culture is melded to history?]
Thus it is understood that imperialist domination by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is also understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.
(...) [he is confused, in my opinion: because understands that the old metrics no longer apply] In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.
(...) [levels of culture?] In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly.
(...) [durkheimian claims] In societies with a horizontal social structure, such as the Balante, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked uniquely to characteristics of individuals or of age groups. On the other hand, in societies with a vertical structure, such as the Fula, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. These differences in social structure illustrate once more the close relationship between culture and economy, and also explain differences in the general or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups in relation to the liberation movement.
(...) [much like fanon here] A reconversion of minds--of mental set--is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reonversion--re-Africanization, in our case--may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.
(...) [has been working backward from this point, i suspect] Whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture.