The traitement of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in sociological textbooks: from occultation to rejections
This article analyzes the treatment of the last classical book of Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in a sample of about twenty textbooks, dictionaries or short introduction to sociology since the 1960s (and more specifically since the 1980s). While some authors (about 1/3 of the sample) simply avoid mentioning Durkheim’s last book, we have classified the critics that have been addressed to this book by the other ones. Throughout authors who often are either anthropologists or ethnologists, dead, and not French, it is possible to distinguish five categories: the critiques fall into categories of epistemological, theoritical, methodological, empirical or moral critiques.