Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917)
This web site is a project for William Kelly’s graduate seminar in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Yale University and is one of many such student projects. Use the bar to the left to navigate through the project.
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Emile Durkheim |
In 1896, when Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and his nephew Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) began to recruit a group of mostly young scholars to collaborate in publishing the Année sociologique (whose name one might translate as "sociological year," or, perhaps more idiomatically, as "the year in sociology"), their goal was ambitious: to invent a new "science" called "sociology." Comte had coined the term "sociology" during the mid-nineteenth century, and many since Comte had used the term to describe various kinds of studies or philosophies, but the term had never designated a well-defined field, discipline, or method. It was through the Année sociologique that sociology as a scientific discipline and field emerged. Additionally, the journal began a transformation other social sciences in France and abroad, including anthropology.
The Année scholars insisted that all the human sciences - physical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, archaeology, ancient civilizations, law, criminology, history, comparative religion, literature, and so on - provided the essential data for sociology’s analyses. Not only did sociology depend on these other fields for its subject matter, but these fields could not adequately explain their objects - they could not be truly "scientific" - without sociological methods. Of course, these brazen claims raised quite a controversy in established disciplines. But the work of the Année sociologique circle greatly influenced and in some cases led to a reinvention of other disciplines, especially French anthropology.
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Marcel Mauss |
In his later years Marcel Mauss extended the mission of the journal, turning "ethnology," up until then a category of mostly speculative philosophical writings, into a scientific discipline taught in the universities. Ethnology, which Mauss described as the study of "elementary social structures," was the "first chapter" of all sociology and therefore was of highest priority for the social sciences (Mauss, qtd. Fournier, 1994:141). In the process, he cultivated the (in France) new academic practice of "ethnography," up until that point practiced mostly by missionaries and colonial officials. Although he never engaged in ethnography personally, Mauss trained a generation of ethnographers who made ethnography a fundamental part of ethnology or anthropology. French anthropology as we know it today (still often referred to as "ethnologie") therefore descends directly from the Année sociologique.
My project is divided into three complementary sections. The first two sections historicize the circle from a different perspective:
• Social History - the Année sociologique as a site of both collective and negotiated interests and projects
• Political History - the relationship between the rise of sociology as a "moral science" and its political context
These are not the only possible viewpoints, and even these two are only arbitrarily separable. My account deals little with the theories of these scholars, which often contradicted each other and even themselves and would require much more attention than I can give here. I am mostly interested in how the group came together and accomplished what they did as a geographically dispersed yet academically focused group of scholars.
The final section gives a few examples of the Année sociologique school’s impact on anthropology and on the social theory that informs it. I deal mostly with Mauss after the Année sociologique ceased publication, when he shifted his attention to ethnology. I also give a few examples of the impact of Mauss’s theoretical writings, which were never published as monographs or constituted a system of thought but which have in many ways reshaped the field of anthropology.
The objective of my project is not to make an argument about the Année sociologique circle but to give an idea of the context in which it arose and its impact on anthroology. Along the way I introduce historical information and make many smaller arguments along the way. This project might be seen more as a collection of very short essays rather than a longer integrated one.