The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, or the birth of a symbolic socio-anthropology
The thesis developed in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life have often been criticized since the publication of the book, as much according to the validity of the facts it presented than according to the interpretation of totemism. Also, the «sociological» theory of the essence of religion is still hotly debated today. Notwithstanding those issues, the most fundamental question of this book, which is also the most pressing, since it drives the understanding of the role and of the nature of social sciences, is of an ontological status: this question deals with society as an ideal as much as a material reality, as much as an individual and collective reality, or in short, as a symbolic reality. Taking from the stimulating readings of Karsenti and Tarot, symbolism is presented here as a specific logic of collective representations, as a process through which a human group, while ordering itself through a structured pattern of value-ideas, only conceives itself as a concrete totality by the circulation of sensible forms maintaining actors in relational interdependence.