Primitive Classification (Routledge Revivals)

Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135174316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the 'classificatory function' in society. On the basis of an intensive examination of forms and principles of symbolic classification reported from the Australian aborigines, the Zuñi and traditional China, they try to establish a formal correspondence between social and symbolic classification. From this they argue that the mode of classification is determined by the form of society and that the notions of space, time, hierarchy, number, class and other such cognitive categories are products of society.

Dr Needham's introduction assesses the validity of Durkhiem and Mauss's argument, traces its continued influence in various disciplines, and indicates its analytical value for future researches in social anthropology.

On some primitive forms of classification: contribution to the study of collective representations

The Problem

THE DISCOVERIES of contemporary psychology have thrown into prominence the frequent illusion that we regard certain mental operations as simple and elementary when they are really very complex. We now know what a multiplicity of elements make up the mechanism by virtue of which we construct, project, and localize in space our representations of the tangible world. But this operation of dissociation has been only very rarely applied as yet to operations which are properly speaking logical. The faculties of definition, deduction, and induction are generally considered as immediately given in the constitution of the individual understanding. Admittedly, it has been known for a long time that, in the course of history, men have learned to use these diverse functions better and better. But it is thought that there have been no important changes except in the way of employing them; that in their essential features they have been fully formed as long as mankind has existed. It has not even been imagined that they might have been formed by a painful combination of elements borrowed from extremely different sources, quite foreign to logic, and laboriously organized. And this conception of the matter was not at all surprising so long as the development of logical faculties was thought to belong simply to individual psychology, so long as no one had the idea of seeing in these methods of scientific thought veritable social institutions whose origin sociology alone can retrace and explain.

The preceding remarks apply particularly to what we might call the classificatory function. Logicians and even psychologists commonly regard the procedure which consists in classifying things, events, and facts about the world into kinds and species, subsuming them one under the other, and determining their relations of inclusion or exclusion, as being simple, innate, or at least as instituted by the powers of the individual alone. Logicians consider the hierarchy of concepts as given in things and as directly expressible by the infinite chain of syllogisms. Psychologists think that the simple play of the association of ideas, and of the laws of contiguity and similarity between mental states, suffice to explain the binding together of images, their organization into concepts, and into concepts classed in relation to each other. It is true that recently a less simple theory of psychological development has come to the fore. The hypothesis has been put forward, namely, that ideas are grouped not only according to their mutual affinities but also according to the relations they bear to movements.¹ Nevertheless, whatever may be the superiority of this explanation, it still represents classification as a product of individual activity.

There is however one fact which in itself would suffice to indicate that this operation has other origins: it is that the way in which we understand it and practise it is relatively recent. For us, in fact, to classify things is to arrange them in groups which are distinct from each other, and are separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation. From the fact that modern evolutionism denies that there is an insuperable abyss between them, it does not follow that it so merges them as to claim the right to deduce one from the other. At the bottom of our conception of class there is the idea of a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines. Now one could almost say that this conception of classification does not go back before Aristotle. Aristotle was the first to proclaim the existence and the reality of specific differences, to show that the means was cause, and that there was no direct passage from one genus to another. Plato had far less sense of this distinction and this hierarchical organization, since for him genera were in a way homogeneous and could be reduced to each other by dialectic.

Not only has our present notion of classification a history, but this history itself implies a considerable prehistory. It would be impossible to exaggerate, in fact, the state of indistinction from which the human mind developed. Even today a considerable part of our popular literature, our myths, and our religions is based on a fundamental confusion of all images and ideas. They are not separated from each other, as it were, with any clarity. Metamorphoses, the transmission of qualities, the substitution of persons, souls, and bodies, beliefs about the materialization of spirits and the spiritualization of material objects, are the elements of religious thought or of folklore. Now the very idea of such transmutations could not arise if things were represented by delimited and classified concepts. The Christian dogma of transubstantiation is a consequence of this state of mind and may serve to prove its generality.

However, this way of thinking exists today only as a survival, and even in this form it is found only in certain distinctly localized functions of collective thought. But there are innumerable societies whose entire natural history lies in etiological tales, all their speculation about vegetable and animal species in metamorphoses, all scientific conjecture in divinatory cycles, magical circles and squares. In China, in all the Far East, and in modern India, as well as in ancient Greece and Rome, ideas about sympathetic actions, symbolic correspondences, and astrological influences not only were or are very widespread, but exhausted or still exhaust collective knowledge. They all presuppose the belief in the possibility of the transformation of the most heterogeneous things one into another, and consequently the more or less complete absence of definite concepts.

If we descend to the least evolved societies known, those which the Germans call by the rather vague term NaturvÖlker, we shall find an even more general mental confusion.¹ Here, the individual himself loses his personality. There is a complete lack of distinction between him and his exterior soul or his totem. He and his ‘fellow-animal’ together compose a single personality.² The identification is such that the man assumes the characteristics of the thing or animal with which he is thus united. For example, on Mabuiag Island people of the crocodile clan are thought to have the temperament of the crocodile: they are proud, cruel, always ready for battle.³ Among certain Sioux, there is a section of the tribe which is called red, and which comprises the clans of the mountain lion, buffalo, and elk, all animals characterized by their violent instincts; the members of these clans are from birth warriors, whereas the farmers, people who are naturally peaceful, belong to clans of which the totems are essentially pacific animals.⁴

If it is thus with people, all the more reason that it should be the same with things. Not only is there complete indifferentiation between sign and thing, name and person, places and inhabitants, but, to adopt a very exact remark made by von den Steinen concerning the Bakairi⁵ and the Bororo, for the primitive the principle of generatio aequivoca is proved.⁶ The Bororo sincerely imagines himself to be a parrot; at least, though he assumes the characteristic form only after he is dead, in this life he is to that animal what the caterpillar is to the butterfly. The Trumai are genuinely thought to be aquatic animals. ‘The Indian lacks our determination of genus, such that one does not mix with the other.’¹ Animals, people, and inanimate objects were originally almost always conceived as standing in relations of the most perfect identity to each other. The relations between the black cow and rain, between the white or red horse and the sun, are characteristic traits of the Indo-European tradition;² and examples could be multiplied infinitely.

Besides, this state of mind does not differ appreciably from that which still, in each generation, serves as point of departure for the development of the individual. Consciousness at this point is only a continuous flow of representations which are lost one in another, and when distinctions begin to appear they are quite fragmentary. This is to the right, that to the left; that is past, this is present; this resembles that, this accompanies that. This is about all that even the adult mind could produce if education did not inculcate ways of thinking which it could never have established by its own efforts and which are the result of an entire historical development. It is obvious what a great difference there is between these rudimentary distinctions and groupings and what truly constitutes a classification.

Far, then, from man classifying spontaneously and by a sort of natural necessity, humanity in the beginning lacks the most indispensable conditions for the classificatory function. Further, it is enough to examine the very idea of classification to understand that man could not have found its essential elements in himself. A class is a group of things; and things do not present themselves to observation grouped in such a way. We may well perceive, more or less vaguely, their resemblances. But the simple fact of these resemblances is not enough to explain how we are led to group things which thus resemble each other, to bring them together in a sort of ideal sphere, enclosed by definite limits, which we call a class, a species, etc. We have no justification for supposing that our mind bears within it at birth, completely formed, the prototype of this elementary framework of all classification. Certainly, the word can help us to give a greater unity and consistency to the assemblage thus formed; but though the word is a means of realizing this grouping the better once its possibility has been conceived, it could not by itself suggest the idea of it. From another angle, to classify is not only to form groups 5 it means arranging these groups according to particular relations. We imagine them as co-ordinated, or subordinate one to the other, we say that some (the species) are included in others (the genera), that the former are subsumed under the latter. There are some which are dominant, others which are dominated, still others which are independent of each other. Every classification implies a hierarchical order for which neither the tangible world nor our mind gives us the model. We therefore have reason to ask where it was found. The very terms which we use in order to characterize it allow us to presume that all these logical notions have an extra-logical origin. We say that species of the same genera are connected by relations of kinship; we call certain classes ‘families’; did not the very word genus (genre) itself originally designate a group of relatives (;γένος)! These facts lead us to the conjecture that the scheme of classification is not the spontaneous product of abstract understanding, but results from a process into which all sorts of foreign elements enter.

Naturally, these preliminary observations are in no way intended to resolve the problem, or even to prejudge its solution, but merely to show that there is a problem which must be posed. Far from being able to say that men classify quite naturally, by a sort of necessity of their individual understandings, we must on the contrary ask ourselves what could have led them to arrange their ideas in this way, and where they could have found the plan of this remarkable disposition. We cannot even dream of tackling this question in all its ramificat...