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Durkheim the elementary forms of religious life
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Can sociology prove that our fanatic behaviour is actually good for us, rather than just a guilty pleasure? Emile Durkheim spent his life working on sociological and psychological theories about society, and the way people function within it. He theorized ideas about sacred and profane habits and even created the theories of functionalism and collective effervescence. Many people connect his theories to modern day society, and, if you have not noticed, fandoms are sweeping the globe. Fandoms are a group of fans of a specific series of books, TV shows, or movies. The people in these groups band together and can create amazing things, like crisis support networks. They are basically just a group of people who like the same stuff. Many people say that fandoms consist of obsessive people, but could our obsessiveness actually change, develop, and be essential to society? Durkheim’s theories of sacred and profane, functionalism, and collective effervescence prove that, that is so. …show more content…
People find sacred lives in everything, not just religion. Sacred is the collective representations that are separated from society, like religious rituals. Profane is all other things, like work, school, and bills. Most people live the same profane lives, but not everyone lives the same sacred life. Lots of people live a sacred life through social media, TV shows, books, etc. thus fandoms are created. With the theory of functionalism, we know that sacred and profane lifes are essential to a stable society. Since fandoms are made up of sacred lifestyles that makes fandoms essential to a stable, functioning
Life is unpredictable that always contains the contradiction. Nothing appears to be fully good or fully evil. Based on that idea, Snyder invented a term “the other side of the sacred” in his books The Practice of the Wild. This term emphasizes the balance between the positive and the negative in every sacred thing. From that belief, Snyder affirms the importance of acknowledging the concurrent existence of the good and the bad to help humans survive and live a better life.
Durkheim Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917), believed individuals are determined by the society they live in because they share a moral reality that we have been socialised to internalise through social facts. Social facts according to Drukhiem are the “manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him [or her].” Social facts are external to the individual, they bind societies together because they have an emotional and moral hold on people, and are why we feel shame or guilt when we break societal convention. Durkheim was concerned with maintaining the cohesion of social structures. He was a functionalist, he believed each aspect of society contributes to society's stability and functioning as a whole.
Sport fans, sometimes also called sport devotees, followers, or supporters, are persons who are enthusiastically devoted to a particular athlete, team or sport. They may show their enthusiasm by often attending sporting events or watch on television, being members of a fan club, follow sport news through newspapers, online websites, and creating fanzines. Their disposition is often such that they will experience a game or event by living through their favored players or teams. These behaviors manifest itself in different ways. To enable better understanding of these behavioral patterns, we have to classify these sports fans into groups based on their devotion to teams: fair-weather fans, bandwagon and the super-fans.
Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist born in 1858, was a man on the leading edge of sociology in his time, but do his theories still hold up today? In 1897, he studied the French public records regarding suicides, and made some interesting connections. He found that people with a weaker connection to their community or family were more likely to commit suicide then those who had stronger ties in their social group. For instance, those who were married were less likely to end their lives than those who were single. A surprising example however would be that the wealthy had a much higher rate of suicide then the poor. Durkheim attributed this to the isolated and centric nature of wealthy members
From bandwagoning the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals to social trends and dances, bandwagoning has played a role in society across generations. The bandwagon effect is when beliefs, conduct, or ideas are blindly adopted by individuals solely because they are following the “herd”. The bandwagon effect has been proved in psychological studies to be a form of conformity or “groupthink” in social psychology (Bloom, Ali). In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, bandwagoning can be observed in 17th century Salem Massachusetts. This topic has plagued generations since the beginning of time, hindering individualism and personal growth in very serious ways. I intend to explore this effect and why we as humans have this desire, what this effect
In taking sociology 101 this semester, I have truly learned a lot about the different aspects and perspectives that sociologists take on society. There is more to human behavior than just being happy or sad or depressed and etc. Sociologists go into further detail into explaining why people feel the way they do or think the way that they do. For example, my personal favorite chapter throughout this text, chapter six, has done a great deal in explaining social control and deviance. It is for a fact, like Conley stated, “It is the deviants among us who hold society together.” Furthermore, in order for a society to function, one is dependent upon deviants to allow us to differentiate between the “good” and the “bad.”
The crux of Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life lies in the concept of collective effervescence, or the feelings of mutually shared emotions. Through a hermeneutical approach, Durkheim investigates the reflexiveness of social organization, the balance between form and content, and the immense cooperation in collective representations. In his work, society is the framework of humanity and gives it meaning, whereas religion acts as the tool to explain it. Since society existed prior to the individual, the collective mind must be understood before the concept of the individual can be grasped. However, one component seems missing from his social theory – what underlies society in terms of rituals and rites? Only when this element is fleshed out can the individual be comprehended with respect to the collective conscience. One, out of many, possibilities is the often-overlooked influence of emotions. What is the connection between social functions and emotions? Perhaps emotions reify social solidarity by means of a collective conscience. Durkheim posits the notion that society shares a bilateral relationship with emotional experiences, for the emotions of collective effervescence derive from society but also produce and maintain the social construct.
The book “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion”, written by Mircea Eliade, investigates four aspects of the sacred universe: space, time, nature, and self. Eliade splits each aspect into two forms of perception, the sacred and profane. Religious men, specifically the ancient, traditional men, view the universe as sacred. In other words, they acknowledge a distinct qualitative difference between a sacred and profane (non-sacred) universe; whereas, nonreligious, specifically modern men, are unable to understand such differences in the world. This claim rests on the on the concept of heirophanies or manifestations of the sacred. A hierophany is the religious man’s source of absolute reality and it illuminates the glory and power of God. This manifestation of divine glory charges a site with special significance, thereby losing a sense of homogeneity throughout the universe. Eliade’s underlying thesis is that due to the human experience of both the sacred and profane in day to day life, the transitional zones between the two are exceptionally illuminated and charged with the divine glory of the sacred.
The word sacred has a variety of different meaning to different people depending on what context “sacred” is used. So for definition purposes according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2013) sacred is “Regarded with a great respect and reverence by a particular religion, group or individual” this is just one of the example of the definition as it hold many more but this one incorporates the meaning of a sacred place or space. Sacred Places are found in different countries and cultures, past and present. Such places are marked or embellished by architectural structures and art, therefor having the ability to appeal to a multitude of different people, but still being sacred to each individual person or group in its own specific way. The question is how much of a places sacredness or character is directly linked to the human activity that the place attracts
Fan Culture is something that has been around for a while, but it the last twenty years, since the introduction of the Internet, it is also something that has changed dramatically. A fan is an enthusiast of something and now the Internet is a good home for fans to gather and build together a community of fans, a ‘Fandom’. The turn Fandom means a community of a group of people who all enjoy them same thing and the Internet has created a place for online communities. Fan Culture has irreversibly changed the media industry because of the ability share information and fan made created content. The creation of these online based communities have meant that people from all over the world can talk about the latest TV shows, movies, books, comics and other forms of content and create groups dedicated to them. The Internet has also become a platform for the creation of a collective community, where individuals who all have shared interests can go. “Fans uses of technologies bring a sense of playfulness to the work of active reading” (2010; 12). Digital Fandoms are user-led forum of content creation, the fans create a number of things; fan fiction, fan blogs, fan made videos, fan art work, wiki leaks. The fans create a whole new life, another side of the TV show, film or book, that is complicity run and used by the fans. These fan made creation do not have to stick to what is canon in the show and can do what they wish with the character and the storylines. However is this an okay thing to do, Henry Jenkins refers to the fans who create these things are ‘Textual Poachers’. Those fans are now active interpreters instead of passive consumers. In this view the fans are poaching the created content of the writer. The fans have power to create t...
The term “fandom” is thought to have first come into use in 1903, which is when Merriam-Webster’s dictionary first found evidence of the term being used, though its meaning has since evolved. The fandom of 2014 is very different to the fandom of 1903, and this is because of the fact that as the world evolved, so did the meaning of the word “fandom”. Social media is the main reason for the fact that fandom is used to refer to many different areas of interest. Sites such as “Tumblr” and “Twitter” have allowed fans to form a global community with those who share ...
This aversion followed naturally from Durkheim's preemptive rule of sociological method; for once he wanted that we recognize that social facts are real things, resistive forces prevailing over individual will, it becomes clear that no human need or desire, however imperious, could be sufficient to such an effect (Durkheim, 1982). Durkheim faced two common objections while establishing his sociological rules. The first was that, since the sole elements of which society is composed are individuals, and then the explanation of social phenomena must lie in psychological facts. To this objection Durkheim's habitual response was to revert to the biological analogue i.e., the constituent molecules of the living cell are crude matter, yet the association of such cells produces life. The whole, in other words, is something greater than the sum of its parts.
Sociology is the study of the structure of groups, organizations, and societies, and how individuals interact within these environments. Sociology at one time was not a respectable or well-known field of study until Emile Durkheim, a college professor, made sociology a part of the French college curriculum. Durkheim is regarded as one of the founders of sociology. He introduced sociology as a branch of learning separate from other sciences by declaring that sociologists must examine specific characteristics of group life. In this paper, I plan to provide some insight into who Emile Durkheim was and his contributions to the field of sociology.
Durkheim is a highly influential name to remember when thinking of sociology. Durkheim’s mission was to develop sociology so it could be defined and to develop a method on how sociology should be used. Durkheim’s main concern in his career was primarily associated with how societies might preserve their integrity and rationality within modernised society, when things such as shared religious views and ethnic backgrounds are seen as things of the past. In relation to Durkheim’s social realism his concern was with the growing individualism in society. Durkheim argues that we are in an era which is imperfectly moving towards a morality based on individualism as “Durkheim regarded individualism as a collective representation, a force that would impress itself on human minds regardless of their subjective opinions, as well as the manifestation of the egotistical will”. (Mestrovic 1988: 8).