Durkheimian Studies

Mauss was a student at Bordeaux between 1890 and 1895, and this discussion of his university library loans directly complements an earlier article on those of Durkheim, who taught there from 1897 to 1902. Mauss worked hand in glove with his uncle, and although the profiles of their library use were quite different, all the material borrowed by Mauss was closely related with material amongst Durkheim's loans. Archival evidence brings out how Mauss prepared for the agrégation in philosophy in a way that went well beyond the examination itself, indeed, that in effect transcended philosophy, and that included a year at the Sorbonne that was crucial for the future. If Durkheim showed a methodological imagination – drawing on a variety of disciplines, albeit largely through a ‘hidden’ reading of uncited references – in order to elaborate a sociological approach for his time, Mauss showed a sociological imagination in an effort, in parallel with his academic commitments, to develop his uncle's work straightaway. Their close collaboration with one another during this period is a platform for reconsidering the nature, up to 1914, of the intellectual link between Mauss and Durkheim, as two sociologists who were above all separated by a ‘chronological’ gap, who occupied two different positions that, while helping to explain disagreement, made possible their project of disciplinary ‘conquest’ begun at Bordeaux, and who, lastly, produced the same general sociology based on two related approaches. My conclusion returns to their Bordeaux ‘moment’ and the veritable symbolic blitzkrieg they conducted there.

Les entrées sont classées pour chaque année universitaire dans l'ordre chronologique des emprunts par Mauss. Leur énoncé est le suivant : numéro de l'entrée ; patronyme auteur ; titre simple ; numéro de tome (np = non précisé) ; année(s) de publication ; date d'emprunt – date de retour ; durée de l'emprunt (j. = jours) ; cote.

Le propos de cette note de recherche est d'éclairer un peu plus l'origine de l'arrivée de Durkheim à Bordeaux lors de sa nomination sur un poste universitaire en 1887. Promulgué par arrêté le 20 juillet 1887, effectif lors de la rentrée suivante d'octobre, ce poste de philosophie est centré sur l'éducation (« science sociale et pédagogie ») et constitue un résumé à lui seul de la complexité administrative de l'enseignement supérieur (Gautherin 2002, Callède 2011). Il sera renouvelé annuellement sept fois, puis « sans limite » à partir de juillet 1894. Durkheim, parti en 1902 à Paris pour suppléer F. Buisson (devenu député) pendant 4 ans, jusqu'en 1906, sera remplacé par Gaston Richard également pendant 4 ans. Leur double titularisation aura lieu cette année-là. En 1930, à la retraite anticipée d'un an de Richard, il est destiné à Théodore Ruyssen, âgé de plus de 60 ans, qui ne l'occupe finalement pas, et est attribué, via le Doyen, par des disciples de Durkheim (Davy, Mauss...) et de Hamelin (Darbon, Daudin...) un peu démunis, à Max Bonnafous. Ce dernier se consacre assez vite à sa carrière politique (commencée dans le socialisme et terminée dans la Collaboration), prenant à nouveau de court les gate-keepers du poste. Passeront également par ce poste de Bordeaux Georges Gurvitch, lui aussi rapidement parti, ou Raymond Aron, encore plus rapidement, après six mois.

The article begins by examining Durkheim's editorial role in the creation of Hubert and Mauss's essay on sacrifice, published in his new journal, the Année sociologique, in 1899. It then brings out how, in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Durkheim operated both with an ‘official’ and a more or less ‘hidden’ theory of sacrifice, the first based on the approach in Hubert and Mauss's essay, the second rooted in Durkheim's earlier views and critical editorial comments on Hubert and Mauss's ideas. In the process it brings out, through a detailed analysis of the work's chapters specifically on sacrifice but also on piacular rites, tensions, ambiguities and cross-purposes in the work as a whole. These especially turn round Durkheim's approach to violence and to the sacrificial offering or gift, and are also evident in his concern with different types of effervescence, the foundational and commemorative, as well as the ‘joyous’ and piacular. The article concludes by linking these tensions with issues at stake in Durkheim's interest in the French Revolution and account of the role of effervescence in moments of rupture and fundamental social change.

This article develops that of William Watts Miller (in Durkheimian Studies 2005), who called for further detective work on the idea of ‘dynamogénie’. My investigations show a way of linking it with Durkheim and Mauss in bringing out that Eugène Gley – according to Mauss, a ‘lifelong friend’ of Durkheim's – was one of the last to work with the idea's chief originator, C-E. Brown-Séquard, a doctor who succeeded Claude Bernard at the Collège de France and a central figure in Watts Miller's article. ‘Dynamogénie’ was first described by Brown-Séquard in 1851 in relation to a case of religious ecstasy, and was characterized by him as an exceptional and unconscious mobilization of nervous and muscular energy. It was then actively – if somewhat mysteriously – taken up by Durkheim and Mauss over sixty years later in their co-signed review of Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Gley, whose trajectory ran in parallel with Durkheim's and to a lesser extent Mauss's, constitutes a link between them and ‘dynamogénie’ that helps us fill out the two men's intellectual horizons.

Alexander Riley, W. S. F. Pickering and William Watts Miller (eds.). Durkheim, the Durkheimians and the Arts. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, 320 pp.

Robert Hertz. Sociologie religieuse et anthropologie: deux enquêtes de terrain (1912–1915), presented and edited by Stephane Baciocchi and Nicolas Mariot, with a postface by Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presse Universitaires Françaises, 2015, xiv +398 pp.