Durkheim and the idea of soul

Abstract

I have looked forward to the opportunity presented by a conference such as the Theory and Society one to debrief in a sense, to test out some observations I made while retranslating Emile Drukheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. But since it is in February, which is African American History Month, and since this is for a conference session on race, ethnicity, gender, and class, it is well to start with a forewarning or a reassurance (as the case may be) about the word soul in my title "Durkheim and the idea of soul." I do not intend to affiliate Durkheim, or Fields, with those collective representations, popular two decades ago, that joined things like jazz with a way of talking, and collard greens with a way of walking, in an alleged African racial essence baptized then as the idea of soul. What I have in mind is Durkheim's own title for Chapter Eight of Book Two of Formes: La Notion d'ime, he wrote, "the idea of soul." He did not write La Notion de l'ame, "the idea of the soul," as Joseph Ward Swain's 1915 translation mistakenly tells us, and the difference is consequential. When Durkheim meant the soul, something thought of as an inward and individual possession, he said so. When he said "soul," without the "the," he meant a generic substance or essence thought of as partly independent of individuals.