A Study Of Durkheim’s Anthropology Thought

Emile Durkheim is not only a grand sociologist and jurist, but also a philosopher and anthropologist in France at the turn of the20th century. He made a significant contribution on the development of anthropological thought. His thoughts of anthropology are very originative which mainly focus on religion, totem, ritual, classify and so on. He regarded social fact as research object of sociology, such as religion, moral, law, suicide. So these phenomena can be researched by positivism methodology built by him. Durkheim discussed the connection between social division of labor and social integration. At the same time, he brought out the relations of cause and effect, function and structure among social facts. He utilized quantitative approach to study suicide phenomenon and analyzed the process of emerging and development of original classification. He not only probed into the origin of the incest taboo, but also the religion of Australian aboriginal. The thesis tries unscrambling his original work to systematically understand his anthropology thought.This paper is divided into four parts to probe into his anthropology thought. The first part is mainly introduced Durkheim’s life, ethos and character which had huge influence and his ideological characteristics to his academic thought. Times background has a significant influence on Durkheim’s academic research. At that time, many popular ideological trends were reflected in his ideas. The Enlightenment has a irreplaceable function to the form of Durkheim ’s thought, so did Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer etc. As a thinker, the main characteristics of Durkheim ’s thought includes orientation of theory of knowledge of relative rationalism, orientation of methodology of positivism, focusing on social reality, trend of social evolutionism and refusing to use the method of psychology in the study of sociology.The second part primarily discusses Durkheim’s origin of sociology. Durkheim’s anthropology thought was set up on his thought of sociology, whose ideas of sociology chiefly reflected on his three works, The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide. The three works established the basis of his thought of anthropology and provided many significantly effective concepts such as collective consciousness, social fact, mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity. Durkheim transplanted his concept and method of sociology to his research of anthropology and got many important results. In some senses, his anthropology study deepened his research of sociology. The third part primarily focuses on bringing out Durkheim’s anthropology works, which analyze his theory about incest taboo, classification and religion. He thought such phenomena are closely contacted with "society", which are formed in people’s social life and collective consciousness. Essentially speaking, these phenomena are represented social power and social integration. Durkheim believed that incest taboo is the originative form originated from Exogamy. With regard to classification, he considered the form of which came from society and the motive power from collective sentiment. One of the most significant part of Durkheim ’s anthropology theory is religious theory. In Durkheim’s the elementary forms of religious life, he thought religion was a kind of social reality and reflected self-creation of human society namely self-development of human society. Religion was a kind of social integration and had many kinds of function, such as integrating society, strengthening socialization and association, succeeding to tradition, reconstructing personal belief, carries forward moral education, holding together group existence and so on.The fourth part mainly analyzes Durkhelm’s academical heritages and mainly impacts of his anthropology thought. His holistic perspective, collective representation, methodology of positivism, thought of classification, religious research and functional analysis were not only provided new perspective, theory, method for anthropology study but also enriched knowledge base of anthropology. Durkheim’s anthropology thought has an extensive impact, especially for France, Britain, the United States and China. As a giant in The French academic tradition, he established a school of Annual Review of Sociology, many anthropologists were deeply influenced by Durkheim’s thinking, such as Lvy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Robert Hertz, Henri Hubert, Marcel Granet, Claude Levi-Strauss. In Britain, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown developed his functional view to be a whole theory, so an important school of functionalism was formed. Besides, Durkheim’s functional perspective also affected the research of Dame Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach and so on. Durkheim’s impact on American anthropology chiefly represented on the school of Culture and personality and Talcott Parsons, Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz. In the20th century, Chinese scholars, such as Ling Chunsheng, Yang Chengzhi, Yang Kun, Xu Yitang and Wei Huilin were fully influenced by France national school. Besides, some scholars were affected indirectly by Durkheim. Beyond that, China’s functional school was formed. Durkheim’s disciple, Marcel Granet, utilized Durkheim’s theory on Chinese study and received many important results.