Embodied Memory: Commemorative Ritual in Sociology of Émile Durkheim

Abstract

Reconstruction of Emile Durkheim’s views on collective memory is the focus of the article. Durkheim had not created the completed concept of collective memory and his main attention was concentrated on its concrete form, that is to say the commemorative ritual. Thereby he laid the methodological foundations for further development of the concept of collective memory and influenced on later memory studies. Durkheim’s sociology leads with the necessity for a conclusion that for the support of stability of a community, its members have to remember certain things in a certain way and to forget, in an orderly way, other things. The general theme of Durkheim’s sociology is that a community needs a certain degree of intellectual, moral and emotional conformism of its members. This provision results in a more particular conclusion about the social necessity of the “memorial conformism”. The paper explores Durkheim’s work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life which takes a special position in the logic of Durkheim's research program. This book demonstrates the way to development of the general cultural theory of social, constructed on the basis of the category of sacred. However, for a long time this work, on the contrary, has been considered as less significant, almost marginal, written on a secondary ethnographic material. Only recently, in the context of the general cultural and anthropological movement in modern sociology, the “later Durkheim” was read anew.