 An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and his uncle Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), employs the term to describe private rites and ceremonies and contrasts it with religion, which it defines as a communal and organised activity.By the 1990s many scholars were rejecting the term's utility for scholarship.They argued that the label drew arbitrary lines between similar beliefs and practices that were alternatively considered religious, and that it constituted ethnocentric to apply the connotations of "magic" - rooted in Western and Christian history - to other cultures.