text on back cover:
Wim van Binsbergen Confronting
the Sacred: Durkheim revisited
Shikanda Press, Hoofddorp, August 2018, 567 pp. , ISBN
978-90-78382-33-1
With
the publication of Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Elementary forms of religious life), in
1912, the French founding father of sociology Émile Durkheim formulated the most influential social-science
theory of religion to date. Pivotal to this theory are the paired concepts
‘sacred / profane’, the notion of ‘collective representations’, and the
hypothesis that through such religious symbols, society compels its members to
venerate herself and thus to submit to the social as an irreducible sui generis instance in its own right. Having grappled with
this Durkheimian inheritance throughout the half
century of his professional life, the anthropologist of religion and
intercultural philosopher Wim van Binsbergen
in this book traces his own steps in confronting Durkheim’s
sacred, through theoretical criticism, through ethnographic application (to
popular Islam in the segmentary social organisation
of the highlands of Northwestern Tunisia), and by
state-of-the-art long-range methods of linguistic and comparative mythological
analysis. Thus, much to his surprise, he vindicates the continued though qualified,
validity of Durkheim’s theoretical insights in religion.
<< the
author inspecting the temple complex of the Late Iron Age site of Siracusa, Sicily, Italy, October 2017.
WIM VAN BINSBERGEN (*1947, Amsterdam) took two social-science degrees
from Amsterdam University (1968, 1971), and crowned his formal education with a
cum laude PhD (1979), from the Free University, Amsterdam (supervisor Matthew Schoffeleeers, external examiner Terence Ranger); two years
later this thesis became his first major book, Religious Change in Zambia
[1500-1979 CE], London: Kegan Paul. He taught
theoretical sociology at the