The ‘Revelation’ in Durkheim’s Sociology

of Religion
A Moment of Creative Evolution?

William Watts Miller

Abstract: What was the nature of the ‘revelation’ and of the appreciation
of William Robertson Smith that, in 1907, Émile Durkheim dated to 1895?
This article tracks new developments in his thought after 1895, includ-
ing an emphasis on creative effervescence. But there was also continuity,
involving a search for origins that used the ethnology of a living culture
to identify early human socioreligious life with totemism in Australia.
It is this continuity, at the core of his thought after 1895, which helps to
bring out the nature of his ‘revelation’ and of his homage to Robertson
Smith. It also highlights a problem with his start from an already complex
Australian world, yet without a suitable evolutionary perspective available
to him. However, a modern re-reading can reinstate Durkheim’s interest
in origins, in a story of hominin/human evolution over millions of years.

Keywords: Australian ethnology, creative effervescence, Émile Durkheim,

evolution, revelation, totemism, William Robertson Smith

Émile Durkheim’s project for a secular, scientific understanding of religion

was bound up with a belief in evolution. Yet in a remark much discussed
by commentators, he said that in 1895 his approach to religion had been
transformed by a ‘revelation’. However, he said this in a letter over a
decade later (Durkheim 1907a: 404), and, apart from the issue of a recol-
lection’s accuracy so long afterwards, it is problematic in two main ways.
It is very brief and leaves open the question, not only of what was revealed
but also of how it was revealed and if it really arose out of thin air, in a
wholly ungrounded moment of insight.
In investigating these matters, it is not enough just to focus on his work
around 1895. It is essential to look at things from the perspective of his

Durkheimian Studies • Volume 26, 2022: 159–179

© Durkheim Press
doi: 10.3167/ds.2022.260107
William Watts Miller

work around 1907, the year of the appearance of the first known draft of
what he eventually published in 1912 as Les formes élémentaires de la vie
religieuse. But it is also important to note an intervening intellectual crisis,
rooted in developments in 1898 and 1899.1 Accordingly, in asking about
Durkheim’s revelation, my discussion starts with how his approach had
changed by the time of these developments, compared with what it had
been in his doctoral thesis of 1893, De la division du travail social.

Durkheim’s Approach to Religion before and after

His ‘Revelation’

Durkheim’s first main publications on religion after his ‘revelation’ began

to appear in the new journal he had founded, the Année sociologique. One
was an essay on the origins of the prohibition of incest (Durkheim 1898a),
followed the next year with an essay on the definition of religious phe-
nomena (Durkheim 1899b). But it is also instructive to consult, along with
reviews he contributed to the Année, the prefaces that, as editor, he wrote
to introduce each volume. However, in going over this material, there is
nothing that stands out, compared with his thesis of 1893, as a particular
change. Instead, there is a set of equally crucial, interconnected changes.

Comparisons with Durkheim’s Thesis

A message that Durkheim repeated again and again in his new journal was
that, in the beginning, religion permeated the whole of social life and this
religion was totemism. In contrast, although his thesis had also insisted
that religion originally permeated everything, it was a religion that he
identified as ‘naturism’ (Durkheim 1893: 319–320). Perhaps because the
claim was so embarrassingly out of line with his new theory, he silently
deleted it from a later edition of his thesis and instead inserted a reference
to totemism (Durkheim 1902c: 273).
However, what had changed in the Année was his account not just
of early religion but of early society itself. In his thesis, this began with
an ‘ideal type’ of solidarity through likeness and imagined the earliest,
simplest type of human society as an ‘absolutely homogeneous mass’ that
he called the ‘Horde’ (Durkheim 1893: 189). He then proceeded to theo-
rise early, historically identifiable human social worlds as associations of
similar, homogeneous ‘segments’ in the form of ‘clans’, and accordingly
constituting ‘segmental societies based on clans’ (190). But even in charac-
terising worlds of the clan as self-described worlds of kinship, he stripped
out any detailed concern with how their kinship systems regulated

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marriage and descent. The clan, in his view, was essentially a horde that
had lost its independence in becoming part of a society of similar groups,
and where solidarity rested on ‘nothing other than solidarity derived from
likeness’ (192).
Accordingly, what happened in the Année was in a way a restoration
of the ethnographic importance of understanding early kinship systems
and their rules of marriage and descent – a restoration that took place
through a re-identification of segmental societies based on clans as seg-
mental societies based on totemic clans. Moreover, this re-identification
took place, not by postulating a primal ‘horde’, but through a model of
an elementary, up-and-running type of totemic society, divided into two
main totemic, exogamous descent groups. However, in checking through
the ethnography, it was necessary to acknowledge ‘a process of segmenta-
tion’ that involved a further division of two ‘primary clans’ or ‘phratries’
into a system of at least four ‘secondary clans’ (Durkheim 1898a: 7–8),
and the Kamilaroi people of south-eastern Australia constituted the key
case discussed (11–28). This was to bring out the underlying logic of a
system of marriage and descent that had long puzzled ethnographers and
was ‘in appearance bizarre’ (16). But there are also some other points
worth noting here. One is how, drawing on an unspecified ethnographic
source, the Année’s prestigious inaugural essay made clear that a totem,
especially in the form of an animal, did not just serve as a human group’s
emblem and collective name, but was thought to be related to them by
kinship and descent. ‘If the totem is a wolf, all the members of the clan
believe that they have a wolf as ancestor, and accordingly that there is
in them something of the wolf’ (2). Another is how, as in the following
year’s essay, it was along with a totemic symbolism that the totemic
species itself constituted ‘a vast category of sacred things’ (Durkheim
1899b: 13). A somewhat different claim, in the Année’s first issue, is about
socioreligious fusion through a vast symbolism in which the totem is
integral to ordinary profane life and ‘the habitus of individuals, who do
their best to reproduce it in tattoos, hairstyles, etc.’ (Durkheim 1898b:
328–329).
Bound up with these various points, there are two key interconnected
changes between Durkheim’s thesis and his work in the early Année. In
his thesis, he made only limited use of ethnography. Instead, he priv-
ileged historical documentation, and in the process what emerged as
his paradigmatic case of segmental worlds of the clan was the case of
ancient Israel, the Pentateuch, and ‘the perfect moral unity shown by the
Jewish people’(Durkheim 1893: 194). In the Année, in contrast, he brought
ethnography to the fore and his paradigmatic case of worlds of the clan
became Australia.

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A Trigger and Basis of the ‘Revelation’

Durkheim began to give a course on religion in 1894, and presumably

it was the work involved in teaching this course that, in 1895, helped
to trigger his revelation. But what was revealed to him, and how was it
revealed? The evidence suggests a moment of insight based on a develop-
ing concern with ethnography as the way to uncover an elementary world
with universal significance, the world of the totemic clan.
Accordingly, what might seem obscure, esoteric details of Durkheim’s
work can instead acquire special importance. For example, in a review
of Edward Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage, he criticised the
author’s failure to understand ‘the causes of exogamy, which are wholly
religious and closely linked with the institution of totemism’ (Durkheim
1895: 621). Even so, a key line of investigation is to explore how, as in his
letter about a revelation, he owed so much to ‘the works of Robertson
Smith and his school’ (Durkheim1907a: 404).
William Robertson Smith, along with many other achievements, was for
some time the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and James Frazer, a
rising star, was a close associate. Volume 21 of the Encyclopaedia included
an article on sacrifice by Robertson Smith (1886), and volume 23 included
articles on taboo and totemism by Frazer (1888a, 1888b). But it was not
until 1895 that Durkheim borrowed these volumes from his university
library for the first time (see items 304 and 306 in the list of his library
loans in Sembel and Béra 2013). It is highly unlikely that Durkheim ever
owned copies of these volumes himself. However, the article on totemism
was an abridged version of a small book already published by Frazer in
1887, but unavailable in Durkheim’s university library. So it might well
be that at some point he acquired his own copy of this, especially since
it was Frazer’s book on totemism that became one of the main references
in the Année’s inaugural essay. Above all, it includes the message that in
the beginning there is totemism, which is ‘both a religious and a social
system’, and continues: ‘How in the origin of totemism these two sides
were related to each other it is, in our ignorance of that origin, impossi-
ble to say with certainty. But on the whole the evidence points strongly
to the conclusion that the two sides were originally inseparable’ (Frazer
1887: 3). Except for its uncertainty, this encapsulates a view at the core of
Durkheim’s approach in his new journal.
Frazer later rejected such a line on totemism, while Durkheim held on
to it. Yet both of them still paid tribute to Robertson Smith, although from
quite different perspectives. Accordingly, in checking through Robertson
Smith’s works, it is important to look for something fundamental but also
especially appealing to Durkheim.

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There are only two, very brief references to Robertson Smith in

Durkheim’s thesis (1893: 60, 227). These are concerned with Kinship and
Marriage in Early Arabia (Robertson Smith 1885), neither reference men-
tions totemism, and indeed Durkheim ignored the work’s whole concern
with totemism brought out in its concluding chapter. This focuses on how
the Arabs might once have divided into ‘totem-stocks’, and emphasises
the need to establish three things: the existence of descent groups named
after animals, the belief that the group and the animal were kin and of
the same ‘blood’, and the animal’s treatment as sacred (Robertson Smith
1885: 189–207). There was then a quite confident presentation of the evi-
dence for the first two of these points, but a more hesitant discussion of
the third. This would have to wait. Even or especially in acknowledging
‘the intimate relation between religion and the fundamental structure of
society which is so characteristic of the ancient world’, it is ‘the social side
of totemism with which we are presently concerned’ (223).
Robertson Smith soon began to concentrate on the religious side of
totemism in his Encyclopaedia article on sacrifice. This questioned a tradi-
tional view of sacrifice as an offering or tribute required from the faithful
to expiate wrongdoing and avoid punishment. Instead, he saw it as a
meal of communion, indeed, a joyous, celebratory ‘banquet’ that ‘gods
and men share together’ (Robertson Smith 1886: 134). He then went on
to trace it back to an early elementary totemism, to make a fundamental
point about its expression of ideas ‘at the very root of religion, the fellow-
ship of worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity,
and the consecration of bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical
relation between man and man’ (138). Not long afterwards, in Lectures
on the Religion of the Semites, he reasserted his view that ‘the sacrificial
meal as an act of communion is older than sacrifice in the sense of a
tribute’ (Robertson Smith 1889: 227) and also restated his fundamental
point about this meal as ‘the sacred cement’ that ‘creates or keeps alive a
living bond of union between the worshippers and their god’ (295).
At the same time, all this involved a volte-face, usually unnoticed by
commentators. In the article, it was forbidden for a group to eat the animal
they themselves held sacred, but legitimate ‘to feast on the carcase of a
hostile totem’, since ‘to cast scorn’ on this was the most effective and laud-
able way ‘to honour their own totem’ (Robertson Smith 1886: 135). In the
lectures, in contrast, it was famously a group itself that ate its own totem
in a ‘mystic sacrament’ (Robertson Smith 1889: 276–277), and it was this
incorporation of a kindred being’s flesh and blood that helped to create
and re-create a ‘bond of union’ between them all (295).
In any case, in asking about Durkheim’s ‘revelation’, it is worth empha-
sising its grounding in a new intense engagement with three works by

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Robertson Smith – Kinship and Marriage, ‘Sacrifice’, and Religion of the

Semites – and with the overall project at stake in them. This involved
a fundamental concern with origins, in which totemism especially
expressed the close relation in early worlds between society and religion,
or, more particularly, a socioreligious fusion of kinship, solidarity, ritual,
and belief.
It also involved acknowledgement by Robertson Smith (1885: 223)
that the project had its own origins in an article on totemism by John
McLennan. Entitled ‘The Worship of Animals and Plants’, this was divided
into two parts, published in The Fortnightly Review in 1869 and 1870. The
first part concentrated on totemism as a living culture among ‘tribes of
men (called primitive) now existing on earth’ (McLennan 1869–70: 427)
and on the indigenous peoples of Australia and North America as key
cases. It then helped to guide, in the article’s second part, a scholarly
tour de force that included the worlds of ancient China, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Greece, India, Israel, Mexico, Peru, and picked out from them a series
of vestigial totemic beings such as the serpent, the bull, the dove, the
crab, the bee, the eagle. It was nonetheless the first part that, with its
holistic interest in totemism as an entire living culture, gave the article
its intellectual coherence and cutting-edge. In turn, it was its analysis of
a living totemism’s interlocking elements that was further crystallised by
Robertson Smith (1885: 189–207).
A basic point in McLennan’s account was concerned with a social
world’s division into a number of descent groups. This emerged clearly
enough from a terminological confusion in which the author and his
sources variously talked about ‘tribes’, ‘clans’, ‘gentes’, ‘stocks’, and ‘great
families’ (McLennan 1869: 409–414). At the same time, the discussion
brought out how it was usually a species of animal or plant that, in con-
stituting a group’s totem, was not just the emblem and name of the group.
More significantly, it was considered their kin, belonging to the same
stock, or even with the same shared ancestor. Last but not least, the totem
was ‘sacred’, ‘regarded religiously’, and a source of both ‘ceremonies’ and
forms of ‘worship’ (414–418, 427).
It is quite possible that Durkheim never read McLennan’s article. There
is nonetheless a striking similarity, in its overall structure and message,
with Durkheim’s inaugural essay for the Année, the essay on the origins
of the incest taboo. Both texts involve a division into two parts, in which
the first part focuses on present-day cases of early elementary worlds of
the totemic clan, while the second part then brings out how these worlds
have a much wider, elemental significance. Indeed, Durkheim must have
started work on the essay launching the Année not long after his ‘revela-
tion’ and might well have experienced it as a revelation precisely because

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he had only a vague, indirect, subliminal knowledge of McLennan’s article

through Robertson Smith.
Moreover, although Durkheim’s thesis already had a fundamental inter-
est in origins, his work for the Année signalled a new approach to these.
Ethnography now had a leading role, especially the ethnography of worlds
of a living totemism, and above all an ethnography of Australia as the key
case. Accordingly, in asking about changes associated with the period of
a creative ‘revelation’ in Durkheim’s thought, it is time to situate them
within the perspective of subsequent developments and his creation of
The Forms.

An Intellectual Crisis and the Evolution of The Forms

Durkheim’s new approach began to appear in major articles, especially

for the Année, in 1898 and 1899. Yet it soon ran into difficulties, amount-
ing to an intellectual crisis. The crisis was partly internal, with roots in
tensions or even contradictions in his own ideas. At the same time, it was
external, especially involving his account of totemism and how it was in
tension or even conflict with ethnographies of Australia itself. Perhaps the
most dramatic challenge came, in 1899, from a work by Baldwin Spencer
and Francis Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, followed by
The Northern Tribes of Central Australia in 1904. As explained in the first
work, the unit of ordinary everyday life in the key case of the Arunta
people is not the so-called totemic clan, a term abandoned as ‘misleading’,
but is instead the group that along with its other roles is centrally con-
cerned with the regulation of marriage, in which ‘the question of totem
has nothing to do with the matter’ (Spencer and Gillen 1899: 59, 116).
However, Durkheimian Australia also involved misfits with other,
older ethnographies, notably a work by Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt
that first appeared in 1880 and focused on two south-eastern Australian
peoples, Kamilaroi and Kurnai. Its account was then amended in various
important ways in subsequent articles by Howitt, who in turn went on
to publish, in 1904, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. There were
also 117 articles covering the region – including five in French and five
in German – published by Howitt’s rival, Robert Mathews, between 1893
and 1907, the year of the draft of The Forms. In addition, there were brief
reports, by numerous authors, gathered together in volume 3 of Edward
Curr’s The Australian Race (1887). Indeed, it is instructive to consider
the ethnography of areas of Australia colonised early on by Europeans,
before turning to the case of Durkheim versus Spencer and Gillen on the
continent’s less accessible regions.

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William Watts Miller

The ‘Native Tribes’ of South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales,

and Queensland

When McLennan’s article began to appear in The Fortnightly Review in

1869, it was still quite plausible to see Australia as the homeland of a living
totemism. But the situation had changed by the time of Durkheim’s ‘reve-
lation’ and even more so by the time of The Forms, which saw totemism as
a holistic religious cosmology that classified everyone and everything in
terms of a division into clans. It was the work Kamilaroi and Kurnai that
had helped to launch the issue by drawing attention to separate reports
of a such a cosmology among the Mount Gambier tribe in South Australia
and the Port Mackay tribe in Queensland and commenting that cases so
far apart from one another suggested the cosmology’s ‘wide prevalence’
(Fison and Howitt 1880: 168). Both these cases, plus that of the Bellinger
River tribe in New South Wales, were cited in the essay on primitive
classification by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1903: 8–9, 14), and
then again in The Forms (Durkheim 1912: 201–202). But it was as if they
were cases of a whole living totemism, and without any mention of crucial
remarks in the original sources. In Mrs James Smith’s book on the people
of Mount Gambier, between Adelaide and Melbourne, this ‘once numerous
and powerful tribe’ is ‘now represented by a miserable remnant’ (Smith
1880: iii). In George Bridgeman’s report on Port Mackay, near Brisbane,
the ‘occupation by the Whites’ began around 1860, and around ten years
later, ‘about one-half of the aboriginal population’ had either been mas-
sacred or had died from previously unknown diseases (Bridgeman 1887:
44–45). In the article by A. L. P. Cameron that included the Bellinger River
tribe of New South Wales (capital, Sydney), in ‘the vicinity of all large
centres of population the natives are now extinct’, while elsewhere, ‘the
same causes which have destroyed them near the towns are proving just
as fatal, although acting less swiftly’ (Cameron 1885: 344).
What the new, developing ethnology aimed to do was to reconstruct
the pre-colonial world of Australia’s peoples through reliance, above all,
on ‘native’ informants old enough to have a knowledge based on partici­
pation in it. As Mathews explained, in urging the collection of data on
laws governing ‘the intermarriage of the totems’, this should be done
at once, ‘because the old blacks are the only ones who know precisely
what these laws are – when they die the knowledge will be lost forever’
(Mathews 1894–95: 27). Although, as in the work of Mathews himself, the
new ethnology covered a range of topics – including rites and ceremonies,
especially rites of initiation – a concern that became central involved a set
of three interrelated issues. One was to understand kinship systems and
the differences between them. Another was to look for linkages between
these systems, especially in an evolutionary dynamic or set of dynamics

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at work in pre-colonial Australia as a whole. The third was to investi-

gate in which ways, if at all, the systems were totemic. Accordingly, it is
worth emphasising that, far from entailing a picture of a static ‘traditional’
Australia, a key interest was in dynamics of change, stretching far into the
past. A key problem, then, was not just to penetrate beyond existing socio­
cultural disrepair to recover a pre-colonial world within living memory,
but how to use this to recover a long pre-colonial history of sociocultural
transformation.
Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) was the only ethno-
graphic monograph on Australia mentioned in Durkheim’s thesis (1893:
190). Their work’s conclusion, written by Howitt, reconceptualised the
‘horde’ as the ‘undivided commune’, which then underwent a process
of ‘segmentation’ into similarly constituted groups, or, more precisely,
a ‘segmentation’ into ‘two intermarrying communes’ (Fison and Howitt
1880: 335, 340). Talk of segmentation was not an established part of the
anthropological vocabulary of the time, and it is likely that Howitt was
the unacknowledged source of the reference to ‘segmental societies’
that turned up in Durkheim’s thesis immediately after the reference to
Kamilaroi and Kurnai.
In any case, Howitt went on to update the work’s account of the
Kamilaroi in two important ways. The work had suggested without being
able to show that the Kamilaroi divided into two primary classes (also
discussed in the literature as moieties or phratries). These were now iden-
tified as the Dilbi and Kupathin, but still divided, as before, into four
sub-classes – although they were now aligned, not merely with six totemic
groups, as before, but with at least as many as nineteen (Howitt 1883:
500). In a subsequent article, moreover, Howitt explained a developing
project. This was his concern with identifying a chain of ‘equivalents’,
with links and overlaps between the kinship systems of different peoples.
Not least, in identifying links and overlaps between the names of their
primary classes, it would help to show that they were originally totems,
even where, as among the Kamilaroi, the names no longer had a totemic
meaning (Howitt 1889: 35–41, 59). In turn, this combined with another
developing project, which culminated in his magnum opus of 1904.
As his work explained early on, an ‘entire community, tribe, nation, or
whatever it may be called’ is organised in two independent directions, one
‘local’, the other ‘social’. However, all of a people’s different locally based
groups share a similar social organisation, whether or not this involves
only two ‘exogamous intermarrying moieties’, or is further divided into
‘sub-classes’, as well as into ‘lesser groups’ attached to various totems
(Howitt 1904: 42–43); He then proceeded to a detailed account of these
social systems, arranged ‘to bring into orderly review’ their ‘various states
of development’. However, in leading up to those that have undergone the

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‘greatest changes’ and in starting with the simplest and ‘most primitive’,
it was no longer with a ‘hypothetical’ undivided commune. It was instead
with extant systems of two moieties, plus ‘lesser’ totemic groups, but no
sub-classes, and it was also in seeing an evolution ‘in two directions’,
one in which totems survived, another in which they disappeared (142).
However, he based the evolutionary atrophy and extinction of totems on
only two peoples, the Kurnai and the Chepara (134–137). Yet although
almost all of his data related to the survival of totems, there was some-
thing that did not quite fit with his orderly arrangement of systems from
the simple to the complex, and this was concerned with totemic groups
themselves. He began with the Dieri people of Lake Eyre, South Australia,
as a paradigmatic case of systems of two moieties with no division into
sub-classes. Instead, however, they divided into a total of 26 listed totemic
groups (or mini-groups?), along with the warning that such groups ‘are
more numerous than those recorded, and the same remark applies to
many if not all of the lists of totems given in this chapter’ (91). Or again,
the Wotjobaluk people of the Darling River also had two moieties with
no sub-classes, but instead divided into 11 main totemic groups together
with at least 44 totemic sub-groups, giving a total of at least 55 totemic
groups overall, along with the warning that the system as tabulated was
not complete. ‘The old men who were my informants’ knew about their
own groups, but were not so clear about others (121–122). In the case of
systems with two moieties and four sub-classes, the Kamilaroi people
were taken as the exemplar, and ‘although it is not certain that the totems
are numerically correct’, were shown as having at least 19 such groups
(104) – in contrast with the original ethnography’s six (Fison and Howitt:
1880: 43), but in line with a subsequent update (Howitt 1883: 500).
Accordingly, all of this helps to bring out major problems with
Durkheim’s inaugural Année essay. One is the table purporting to show
the Kamilaroi system and referencing the ethnography of 1880. However,
it revealed the names of the two moieties, as in the update of 1883. But
in retaining the original ethnography’s limited number of totemic groups,
it failed to show the update’s proliferation of these (Durkheim 1898: 11).
Yet Durkheim must surely have known about Howitt’s updated table of
the Kamilaroi system, since it was reprinted by Frazer (1887: 66) in the
manual on totemism that was one of the Année essay’s main ethnographic
sources. It was also confirmed in independent research on the Kamilaroi
by Howitt’s rival, Mathews (1894–95: 20).
A further problem is that Howitt based his evolutionary schema on
research that was not just unable to identify any instance of a people
divided into only two totemic clans. It also made clear that in many cases
the names of moieties, as among the Kamilaroi, had no known totemic
meaning whatever. In other words, life that revolved round these moieties

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and their sub-classes still revolved round kinship, but in a social, non-­
totemic expression of this, rather than a religious, totemic one. As part of
the same dynamic, social life could well seem much richer and more cel-
ebratory than in Durkheim’s essay. This concentrated on a system of pro-
hibitions, or indeed taboos, in the form of negatively sanctioned totemic
rules. It had little or nothing to say about ceremony and ritual, although
this was a major concern in Frazer’s little manual on totemism, as well as
in the work of both Howitt and Mathews, along with others.
One of the authors used by Durkheim wrote, in relation to Australia’s
colonised ‘aborigines’: ‘In 1868 I saw gatherings of from 800 to 1,000
in Western Queensland, about 150 miles north of the New South Wales
boundary line, and now I am told, on trustworthy authority, that the whole
district could not produce a third of that number’ (Cameron 1885: 344).
Yet even an assembly of 300 people would seem large for a ceremonial
occasion held, say, among one of the Kamilaroi’s 19 or more totemic mini-
groups. It is anyway clear from the rest of Cameron’s article that he was
concerned with the gatherings in which, as in the Bora ceremonies among
the Kamilaroi, ‘youths are initiated to manhood’, and in which there are
different stages involving the entire tribe, sometimes only the men and
the initiates themselves, sometimes men, women and children (357–360).
Howitt’s first article on initiation rites had appeared the year before, in
1884, and eventually, after an accumulation of material, he devoted two
chapters to them in The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. In these,
a basic point was that a youth’s initiation into manhood was generally
attended not only by his own tribe but also by other neighbouring tribes
(Howitt 1904: 511–512). Mathews, for his part, undertook independent,
extensive research on initiation rites, without ever writing it up in a book.
However, his unpublished papers as well as numerous articles on these
ceremonies have been illuminatingly discussed in a biography of him by
Martin Thomas (2012: 279–324). This is especially concerned with a series
of articles on the Bora of the Kamilaroi, published between 1894 and 1896,
and helping to bring out how a Bora was organised in turn by each of the
Kamilaroi moieties, with the Kupathin as the guests of the Dilbi at some
locations, and the Dilbi as the guests of the Kupathin at others (304–305).
Despite variations between these accounts, initiation rites in all of them
revolved round gatherings of tribes and moieties. They did not revolve
round Durkheimian totemic ‘clans’, even where these existed as a small
number of large groups, rather than as a proliferation of mini-groups.
Accordingly, a question is how best to summarise Durkheim’s view of
Australia on the eve of Spencer and Gillen’s challenging ethnography
of 1899. It could be said that his focus on the totemic ‘clan’ involved
a representation of the available ethnography that amounted to its mis-
representation, while his focus on totemism as a system of negatively

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William Watts Miller

sanctioned rules, in the form of the forbidden and taboo, involved a rep-
resentation of the work of Robertson Smith that amounted to its mis­
representation. But perhaps this is too harsh. In Durkheim’s letter of 1907,
a crucial concern was with the continuing influence of a ‘revelation’
and of Robertson Smith, in thinking and rethinking the insight of one
and reading and re-reading the work of the other.

Shock News from Central Australia, Good News from the North
Part of the reason for the significance of Spencer and Gillen’s book, The
Native Tribes of Central Australia, is that it ventured beyond the continent’s
highly colonised south-east, and, instead of just relying on informants,
drew on their own observation of rites and ceremonies of an apparently
still vibrant indigenous culture. It was based on fieldwork in 1896–97,
written up in 1898 and published early in 1899 in London, where its
impact was immediate. According to the president of the Anthropological
Institute, it was ‘a work of exceptional merit’ (Rudler 1899: 322). Another
leading figure welcomed the research as ‘striking testimony to the genius
and accuracy of the late Professor Robertson Smith’s scientific imagination’
(Jevons: 1899: 379). In a comment by the president of the Folklore Society,
‘I heartily join with reviewers elsewhere in expressing the gratitude of
anthropologists for a work which must for a long while rank among those
of the first importance’ (Hartland 1899: 239). Durkheim’s own review was
less enthusiastic, indeed, actively hostile. It nonetheless ended by admit-
ting that the book was ‘rich in materials’ (Durkheim 1900: 336).
However, his attitude gradually changed and he began a long essay
inspired by their follow-up ethnography, The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia, with the remark that a work by Spencer and Gillen was ‘always
good news’, since few researchers ‘have such a sure instinct for essential
institutions and crucial facts’ (Durkheim 1905: 118).
A pivotal moment in the change surfaced in his essay of 1902 on
totemism. This largely defended his old views in the early Année, but
also came with a new insight, even a revelation. ‘Up until the present,
we regarded totemism as little more than a system of wholly negative
practices, that is, of prohibitions . . . We were therefore unaware of how
it could have positive elements. From now on, this ignorance is at an
end’ (Durkheim 1902a: 116). In the case of Spencer and Gillen’s account
of initiation rites among the Arunta, he conceded that these ‘nowadays’
took place in assemblies, not of a clan, but of the tribe (120). But he
happily went along with their account of a rite called the intichiuma as
a key rite of communion in each totemic group and mainly restricted to
them: ‘under no circumstances are men who belong neither to the totem
nor to the right moiety allowed to be present’ (Spencer and Gillen 1899:

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169). But it was not until a later essay, co-written by Durkheim with his
nephew, that the number of such groups was acknowledged as at least 54
(Durkheim and Mauss 1903: 28). Even so, the earlier essay was sufficiently
aware of the issue of a proliferation of totemic mini-groups to argue that
the role of the intichiuma had changed, to something beneficial not just to
the clan but to the whole tribe, so that the ‘religion of each clan became
tribal in some respects’ (Durkheim 1902a: 120).
The same essay also marked the beginning of another key change. His
article on the definition of religious phenomena had approached totemism
in terms of sacred ‘things’ (Durkheim 1899b: 13–14). Now, he started
talking about these in terms of ‘forces’. In discussing sacred objects that
Spencer and Gillen called churingas, he described them as containers of
‘guardian forces’, or again, as the concrete focus of ‘mysterious forces’
(Durkheim 1902a: 93, 118). But it was in remarking that the Arunta
had only ‘a confused representation’ of these ‘religious forces’ (87). A
problem, however, is the difficulty of finding any report of a belief in
such forces in Spencer and Gillen. The problem, put another way, is how
Durkheim himself came up with the idea. Part of the answer involves the
Oxford anthropologist, Robert Marett. A paper on ‘pre-animism’ attracted
a lot of attention by arguing that the way to make sense of early religion
was through the notion of an essentially impersonal force, power, or
energy (Marett 1900). A subsequent paper linked this notion both with
the Melanesian idea of a force called mana and with what Spencer and
Gillen’s ethnography of the Arunta had identified as an evil magical force
called arungquiltha (Marett 1904: 60–61). The same link was also made
in a paper the same year by Durkheim’s nephew (Mauss 1904: 326). A
further development converted mana into a general anthropological term
for a type of belief found throughout ‘primitive’ societies (Marett 1908).
Durkheim was already moving in this direction in his draft of The Forms
(1907b: 91–93), and then talked about mana in this new general way in
the eventual work itself. His introductory guide to Australia provided a
trail of clues about an underlying force, together with a long list of ref-
erences (Durkheim 1912: 182n1, 182n2). But on checking through these,
I have been unable to find reports of belief in such a force. Instead,
there is simply a description of how people talk of the totemic species
as ‘bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh’ (Fison and Howitt 1880:
169). Or there is simply a description of a belief that individuals eating a
forbidden animal will fall sick and might die (Howitt 1904: 769). Or in yet
another example, there is simply a description of how food restrictions
‘seem to be done away with in the instance of very old men; they may
eat anything, but this only when they are really very old and their hair
is turning white’ (Spencer and Gillen 1904: 167–168). Later in The Forms,
arungquiltha was invoked as evidence of an idea of a vast sacred force

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at the heart of Australia’s totemic religion (Durkheim 1912: 281–83). But

according to the cited ethnographic source, arungquiltha had no connec-
tion with totemic beliefs and practices at all (Spencer and Gillen 1899:
548–52).
A criticism, then, is in no way about digging around ethnographic
material and arguing for inferences that might be drawn from it. Rather,
it is that Durkheim so often failed to make clear to readers that this was
what he was doing and conveyed the entirely false impression that he was
just reporting something that had already been reported by his sources
themselves. In any case, it is in his account of effervescence that he makes
perhaps his most plausible inference of all about mana in Australia. The
inference, then, is that explosions of energy in great gatherings and assem-
blies must also help to generate notions of a vast power itself.
However, around the time of his ‘revelation’ in 1895, he took quite a dim
view of effervescence. Thus it was also in 1895 that he began to lecture on
socialism, and it was in a lecture the following year that he first used the
term ‘effervescence’. But it was in an unambiguously negative sense and
was a complaint about ‘a state of unruliness, effervescence and manic agi-
tation’ (Durkheim 1928: 297). Indeed, it was not until about 1905 that he
began to incorporate a positive view of effervescence into his theory. For
example, in lectures of around that year, the French Revolution’s ‘efferves-
cence was immensely creative of new ideas’ (Durkheim 1938: vol. 2, 169).
Not long afterwards, his nephew’s essay on seasonal variations concluded
with how, among the Eskimo, summer is a time of individualistic disper-
sal and ordinary mundane life, while winter is a time of non-stop religion
and ‘a season when the society, strongly concentrated, is in a continuous
state of effervescence’ (Mauss 1906: 125). Then, at the very core of the
draft of The Forms, life in Australia divides into two very different phases:
a time of dispersal and the ordinary, mediocre, and profane and a time of
assembly and the prodigious, galvanising forces of the sacred (Durkheim
1907b: 96). In the eventual work, his star case of effervescence was the
highpoint of one of a series of ceremonies of the Warramunga people.
These revolved round the great snake, Wollunqua, the totem of the Uluuru
moiety, who organised the ceremonies, but with the participation of the
men of the Kingilli moiety. Durkheim’s source regarded the last ceremony
in this series as ‘the most impressive of any that we witnessed’ (Spencer
and Gillen 1904: 247). But another part was also quite impressive (237–
238) and this was the part selected in The Forms, where their account was
followed almost word for word (Durkheim 1912: 310–311). True, it was in
theorising their ‘scenes of the wildest excitement’ as effervescence. It was
also to draw an inference about an impersonal religious force in which
it was the extraordinary energy of such scenes that helped to give birth

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to ‘the religious idea’ (312). But it is merely mistaken and uninformed to

attribute these scenes to Durkheim’s own wild imagination.
A fairer criticism is of his exaggerated contrast between two times
of the sacred and profane, as a contrast between moments of enthusi-
asm and ‘a life that is unvarying, listless and dull’ (Durkheim 1912: 308).
In the reference he gives for this, the picture is significantly different.
Although, after initiation, a man’s life divides into two parts, what grad-
ually becomes more important to him is ‘the portion of his life devoted
to matters of a sacred or secret nature’ and ‘finally this side of his life
occupies by far the greater part of his thoughts’ (Spencer and Gillen 1904:
33). So in a way it is more faithful to the ethnography to argue, as in the
essay on totemism, that, thanks to a landscape filled with sacred sites,
symbols and memories, ‘the environment in which the Arunta live is
saturated with religiosity’ (Durkheim 1902a: 87). On the other hand, it is
still reasonable to insist on the role of specially sacred, ritual times. As in
The Forms, these are a key to a commitment to the ideal, without which a
society ‘can neither create nor re-create itself’ (Durkheim 1912: 603). As in
The Religion of the Semites, they are the glue that ‘creates or keeps alive a
living bond of union between the worshippers and their god’ (Robertson
Smith 1889: 295).
However, it would have been difficult for Durkheim to construct, in
a work subtitled ‘the totemic system in Australia’, a detailed account of
this system’s ideas and rites if he had relied on the ethnography of the
continent’s southern and eastern ‘native tribes’. The achievement of The
Forms was made possible by Spencer and Gillen’s two new studies of many
different peoples of central and northern Australia – even or especially as
an achievement that was problematic in its relation with their ethnogra-
phy and evolved in the jumps and starts of a series of new developments,
indeed, revelations. It might have been easier for Durkheim if he had
adopted the line in his nephew’s review of Spencer and Gillen’s first work:
‘At the bottom of all these cults and all these beliefs, there is not the
narrow and very limited idea of the totem, but the idea of the sacred and
of magical and religious action’ (Mauss 1900: 215). On the other hand,
Durkheim’s response might have been more creative, just because it was,
initially, so confrontational. But it also seems to me that his commitment
to a story of totemism was rooted in his original experience of a ‘reve-
lation’ and of engaging with Robertson Smith, an experience he evoked
with such conviction years later, while working on a draft of The Forms.

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Re-reading Durkheim: The Search for Origins and the

Category of Humanity
Durkheim set out to explain, in the preface to the second issue of the
Année, the pre-eminence his new journal gave to religion. In empha-
sising religion as the germ of all collective life, he also emphasised the
importance of investigating origins and was scathing about function-
alist accounts of a social world just in terms of interacting factors in
the present. This quick-fire method comes laden with illusions – cette
méthode rapide est grosse d’illusions – since, to understand the present, ‘it
is indispensable to have studied the social forms of the most distant past’
(Durkheim 1899a: v).
Yet Durkheim has long been rebranded as a functionalist, while his
search for social origins of the categories continues to be resisted by an
insistence on a priori philosophising. Both of these tendencies are out-
dated, in their failure to take into account a new, rapidly developing area
of investigation – the evolution of hominins from around 7 million years
ago, the eventual emergence of recognisably human groups, and the co­­
existence of three of these, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo Sapiens,
around 40,000 years ago (Humphrey and Stringer 2018). It is essential to
reread Durkheim and his search for origins in light of this whole new
vibrant movement of enquiry.2
His early work contained various friendly references to Alfred Espinas,
author of Sociétés animales (1877). But they were brief, vague references
that in no way committed him to Espinas’s project for a unified compara-
tive science of animal and human social life. Indeed, in discussing a new
article by Espinas on this project, he made clear his disagreement with it.
Since animals lacked ‘institutions’, there was a categorial difference with
humans (Durkheim 1902b: 129). It was a view he held until the end of his
life (Durkheim 1917: 57), although in The Forms it was on the basis that
animals lacked ‘ideas’ (Durkheim 1912: 602).
In another development, he appears to have stopped talking about a
primal horde. A review of a work on social origins by Andrew Lang (1903)
was the last occasion, to my knowledge, in which he ever referred to a
‘horde’ (Durkheim 1903: 423). In effect, both in the draft of The Forms and
in the work itself, his account of Australia began with what were already
segmental societies based on phratries and clans. But before consider-
ing various evolutionary options then available, it is important to track
Durkheim’s concern not just with collective but creative effervescence.
There are only a few references to the idea of creativity in his thesis,
and they are uniformly hostile (Durkheim 1893: 30, 157, 216, 288, 309).3
Above all, he attacked theories that assumed a magical creation out of
nothing. In The Forms, he continued to dismiss the very idea of a creation

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ex nihilo (Durkheim 1912: 123). But he was also very positive about what
he regarded as ‘creation properly so-called’, which is ‘the creation of some-
thing entirely new’ (509–510). So a question is how, without assuming a
creation from nothing, it is possible to identify a creation of the wholly
new. The answer is that, far from being a merely mystical operation, soci-
ety’s immense creative power is the product of a ‘synthesis’ (637), an effer-
vescent fusion of different elements from which there can arise something
new, in that it is distinct from these and irreducible to them. Put another
way, creative effervescence is still grounded in processes of causation,
but not in mechanistic chains of causation, and instead in the jumps and
breaks in continuity of a creative evolution.
Even so, there is still a problem with the appeal in The Forms to efferves-
cent social milieux as the very birthplace of ‘the religious idea’ (Durkheim
1912: 313). What gave birth to these social milieux themselves? As in the
star case of the Warramunga, the assemblies that the work describes come
with the already constituted organisation of segmental societies based on
totemic groups, complete with ritual, symbolism, art, and a pre-existing
sense of the sacred. But it is sterile to accuse Durkheim of circularity and
more constructive to ask about the structure of the human groups that
emerged from millions of years of hominin evolution.
One possibility is that they were ‘hordes’, a view nowadays supported
by Alexandra Maryanski (2018). Or they might have already involved a
segmental structure, as suggested by Nick Allen (1998) in a pioneering
article concerned with ways of organising a primitive small-scale society
and identifying an ideal-typical tetradic system as the simplest way. This
involves a vertical axis of two exogamous lineages and a horizontal axis
of two alternating marriage-classes, in a system that simultaneously
excludes incestuous brother-sister and parent-child unions (Allen 1998:
154). In any case, another possibility is that different varieties of the horde
and different varieties of segmental society coexisted with one another in
the world of early, distinctively human groups. Indeed, a key point I would
like to make here is that it was a world in which at least some instances of
a Durkheimian segmental society might have already emerged.
Allen’s elementary tetradic model is still quite complex and entails a
need to store and access vast amounts of social information that makes
it highly relevant to Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis. A segmental
system could have emerged as far back as 500,000 years ago, in line with
one set of calculations by Dunbar (2003: 173–77). Or it might not have
emerged until later, if inseparable from religion, and given the different
set of calculations of what this requires (177–179). Either way, what is
involved is a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM), investigating animals, hominins, and
humans in terms of four increasingly powerful levels of social cognition
(169–172). Dunbar’s approach has its critics, including Maryanski, but is

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supported, for example, by Sang-Hee Lee (Lee with Yoon 2015) in research
especially focusing on women in early human societies. It has also been
taken up by Clive Gamble (2013), in research combining a Durkheimian
interest in ideas with a Maussian interest in techniques, the body and the
material environment. He outlines a social evolution of technology cover-
ing 2.6 million to 6,000 years ago, running in three stages and implying,
it seems to me, that a segmental kinship system would have begun in
the second stage, from 100,000 to 21,000 years ago. But the implication
he himself emphasises is that the social conditions of religion were laid
during the second stage. This does not mean that the hominins/humans
of the time ‘got’ religion, but that they possessed ‘the more fundamental
Durkheimian property of social imagination’ on which religion depends
(Gamble 2013: 137).
Put another way and borrowing the title of a book by Marett (1909),
they stood at the threshold of religion. However, returning to Durkheim
himself and his concern with effervescent assemblies, it has been empha-
sised by Allen (1998: 158) that these might ‘go back many millions of
years’, given the long-standing evidence of effervescence among chimpan-
zees in a work by Vernon Reynolds (1967). In conclusion, then, a modern
re-reading of Durkheim makes it possible to revive his search for origins
in an account that involves, through collective creative effervescence, a
collective creative evolution. Instead of a single dramatic leap across a cat-
egorial Rubicon, there have been many qualitative jumps – physiological,
moral, cognitive, cultural, technical – over many thousands of years in the
pathways from ancient hominin to early human society.
Analogously, in the case of the development of Durkheim’s œuvre
itself, his legendary ‘revelation’ can also be seen as a moment of creative
evolution.

Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Matthieu Béra, Jean-Christophe Marcel, and Nicolas
Sembel for their many different contributions to the field, which have been
so helpful in my own work, and for their support in recent, personally
difficult times.

William Watts Miller was for many years editor of Durkheimian Studies

/ Études durkheimiennes and a close colleague of the late Bill Pickering,
founder of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, the University of
Oxford. Email: wwattsmiller@gmail.com

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Notes
1. See Watts Miller (2012) for a detailed discussion both of this intellectual crisis
and of the early draft of Les formes.
2. The term ‘hominin’ refers to a group consisting of modern humans, extinct
human species, and their immediate ancestors.
3. See Watts Miller (2017) for a detailed discussion of Durkheim’s interest in cre-
ativity, and Watts Miller (2022) for a comparison and contrast with Bergson
on creative evolution.

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