Emile Durkheim was a contemporary of Max Weber. Where Weber extended and refined Marxist understandings of legitimate domination, Durkheim drew on Marxist views concerning the division of labor and false consciousness to investigate the ways that religion could serve to unify communities. In Durkheim’s terms, religion promoted feelings of social solidarity among members of a community. Before I can discuss social solidarity, however, I must note one of the major flaws in Durkheim’s theories—his mostly mistaken distinction between the sacred and the profane ([1915] 1995:44).
All known religious beliefs. . . present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by. . . the words sacred and profane.
Ever since Durkheim first penned these words, scholars have made a sport of attacking them. Each new approach to the study of religion seems to begin with a critique of the sacred and profane—often crediting this division as a fundamental misunderstanding of religion that has pervaded all previous scholarship. Like pretty much everyone else, I reject Durkheim’s strict division of the sacred and the profane. I do not, however, believe that this is a particularly novel position or that Durkheim’s distinction represents some fundamental misunderstanding of religion by Western scholars. It seems clear that, with the exception of Durkheim and perhaps a few others (e. g., Eliade 1961), almost all scholars realize that religion is difficult to untangle from other aspects of human life and that religion permeates many, if not all, human endeavors. This is not to say that the definition of religion is unimportant or trivial. It isn’t. The point is that scholars of religion have explicitly struggled with this question for at least a century.
Despite Durkheim’s mistaken arguments concerning the sacred and the profane, many of his other arguments concerning religion are valuable. For the purposes of my work, Durkheim’s work on social solidarity is particularly important. In descriptions startlingly similar to Marx, Durkheim argued that a division of labor underwrote modern European societies. That is, different members of society were engaged in different activities (e. g., tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, etc.), each necessary for the perpetuation of society as a whole. Different functional parts of society needed to be integrated with other parts in the same way that different organs of the body perform specific functions that keep the body as a whole functioning.
This is what constitutes the moral value to the division of labor. Through it the individual is once more made aware of his dependent state vis-a-vis society. It is from society that proceed those forces that hold him in check and keep him within bounds. In short, since the division of labor becomes the predominant source of social solidarity, at the same time it becomes the foundation of the moral order. (Durkheim [1893] 1984:333)
For Durkheim, the chief way that people were “made aware of [their] dependent state vis-a-vis society” was religion. In the late nineteenth century, Durkheim suggested that a rise in the rate of suicides in France was the result of a diminishment of attendance in religious ceremonies ([1897] 1951). He argued that participation in religious ritual promoted a sense of belonging to a community. The loss of social solidarity, Durkheim argued, resulted in feelings of isolation, leading toward an increase in suicides. Though recognizing the legitimizing role of religion in perpetuating social inequality, in some sense Durkheim focused on the sunny side of false consciousness. This does not mean that Durkheim believed that people should continue attending religious ceremonies that perpetuated social inequalities—like Marx, Durkheim was a social activist who sought to refashion society in more equitable ways. Durkheim argued that in order for people to avoid a feeling of isolation that leads to despondency and suicide, people must engage in collective rites that reaffirm their codependence with other members of society.
[R]eligion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which are designed to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in these groups. (Durkheim [1915] 1995:9)
That is why all parties political, economic or confessional, are careful to have periodical reunions where members may revivify their common faith by manifesting it in common. (Durkheim [1915] 1995:212)
For Durkheim, collective rites—whether religious or secular—served a psychological need, promoting group identity and affiliation.
As formulated by Durkheim, social solidarity was a relatively unproblematic and uncontested social process. Durkheim convincingly demonstrated the importance of collective rites, but we need to consider exactly who gets to participate in these rites and the manner in which these rites are performed. Different rites can promote and perpetuate different conceptions of who is, and who is not, in the group and what sorts of inequalities are perpetuated. In some cases, social solidarity may be based on common affiliation with a charismatic leader. In others cases, solidarity may be more egalitarian or communal. Following Weber, attempts to establish particular forms of social solidarity are legitimations that confer legitimacy only when successful.
As described by Durkheim, the performance of collective rites maintains and fosters social solidarity. Rites are actions that people do in specific places—actions that may leave material traces of their practice. As in the distinction between legitimations and the state of legitimacy, the material record directly reveals only attempts at solidarity. The degree to which these material attempts were successful requires additional evidence and interpretation. While it is possible for people to engage in collective rites in unmodified natural spaces, people often construct elaborate facilities for the performance of collective rites. An analysis of the design and layout of these facilities can reveal both attempts to promote solidarity and the particular form of solidarity that was being attempted.
The identification of attempts at solidarity comes primarily through an analysis of the ways that spaces are designed to foster or impede relationships between people engaged in collective rites (Fogelin 2003, 2006). Many Quakers, for example, believe that all are equal before the Lord and that God speaks directly to each person. Quakers who hold this belief reject ritual leaders, preferring instead to sit silently until any member of the denomination feels moved to speak. For this reason, Quaker meetinghouses often consist of little more than a room filled with concentric rings of chairs or benches. This layout allows all members to see each other while limiting the possibility of any one person leading worship. As such, the design of Quaker meeting halls fosters a particular form of solidarity consistent with an egalitarian relationship among participants.
In contrast to Quaker meetinghouses, the layout of a Catholic church promotes a different form of solidarity, a hierarchically organized community based on the common identification with officiating priests who have special skills (e. g., transubstantiation) that are unavailable to lay Catholics. Rather than concentric rings, pews in Catholic Churches are typically arranged in rows, all facing an elevated platform on which a priest leads worship. Parishioners can clearly see the priest, but cannot see people behind them or the faces of those in front. While still housing collective rites that promote solidarity, Catholic churches promote a more hierarchical form of solidarity than Quaker meetinghouses.
Catholic churches and Quaker meetinghouses are, in part, attempts to promote particular forms of solidarity by those who designed and built them. In both cases, it seems that these attempts succeeded. Both Catholic churches and Quaker meetinghouses are long-lasting and ubiquitous architectural forms. It would seem unlikely that Catholics or Quakers would continue to construct these buildings if these attempts at solidarity had failed. It should never be forgotten, however, that there is no guarantee that attempts at solidarity will succeed. Throughout history, many, if not most, attempts at solidarity by aspiring religious orders have failed.
Rites of Passage and Liminality
Drawing from Durkheim’s concept of social solidarity, Van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1967) examined the common elements of ritual that mark the movement of individuals from one social status to another (i. e., child/adult, unmarried/married, alive/dead). That is, if society consists of people existing in relation to one another, shifts in the social status of one of its members become both important and problematic. Societies require mechanisms that can move individuals from one location within the social structure to another, without creating a rupture in the fabric of social life. Van Gennep identified three cross-cultural phases of ritual that affect the change from one social status to another. These three periods (separation, margin, and aggregation) make up what Van Gennep labeled rites of passage. The first phase of rites of passage removes an individual, both physically and metaphorically, from his or her existing social role. In the second phase, the liminal period, individuals have their social roles transformed. Finally, the third phase reintegrates the individual back into society, with his or her new social role. Important to my research on Indian Buddhism is the recognition by Turner and Van Gennep that spatial movement and material symbols often mark movement through the stages of a rite of passage.
In Turner’s (1967:ch. 7) classic discussion of boys’ initiation ceremonies among the Ndembu of central Africa, movement through the phases of the rite of passage were accompanied by the physical movement to a specially constructed camp in the bush. This camp, the physical location of the liminal phase, was marked by the construction of a fence blocking from view all activities that occurred within. Passage through a gate into the enclosure symbolically marked the passage into the liminal phase, complete with a symbolic rebirth as the men leading the ceremony forced the boys to pass through their legs.
As defined by Turner (1967:93), the liminal period is an “interstructural situation” that lies at the heart of rites of passage. Individuals within the liminal period are neither here nor there, or as Turner described it, “betwixt and between.” Lying between two culturally sanctioned categories, people in a liminal period are unclassifiable, and thus not part of their society. With this foundation, Turner investigated the perceptions of liminality. Relying heavily upon Douglas’s (1966) Purity and Danger, Turner argued that disorder and contradiction are considered unclean, polluting, and dangerous. Since people in the liminal period are outside any socially sanctioned category, they are themselves unclean and dangerous. This explains, in part, the typical pattern of separation and isolation of people going through rites of passage. Segregation limits the exposure of initiates to society and vice versa. Reintegration marks initiates’ return to a classifiable social category. But, passage through these periods of disorder and contradiction are necessary, and the transformative power of the liminal period is undeniable. Pollution, then, is not something to simply be avoided, but rather a necessary and dangerous source of transformative power.
Since the pioneering work of Van Gennep and Turner, anthropologists have come to recognize that liminality has much broader application than simply as the middle stage of a rite of passage. Certain people and places exist in a perpetual state of liminality—that is, certain people and places are perpetually betwixt and between. Religious figures, for example, can exist in the indefinable middle ground between the heavens and earth. Proximity to the liminal provides shamans, priests, and other religious figures with special skills and transformative power (e. g., soul flight or transubstantiation), but often results in a degree of isolation from normal social processes (e. g., living separately or sexual abstinence). Similarly, certain places can also be perpetually liminal due to their association with the divine. Those locations that blur the boundaries between the heavens and earth are powerful (e. g., churches, graveyards, stupas), but potentially dangerous. Swearing in church is a greater transgression than swearing in the course of daily life. The power and pollution of liminality must be contained in certain people and locations, or else the bulk of the population would be forced to live in a state of perpetual anxiety. Just as the Ndembu placed initiation camps in distant locations behind fences, religious figures and sacred locations in many societies are often isolated. Liminality, then, serves to partially explain the source of Durkheim’s ([1915] 1995:44) mistaken belief that “[a] religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”
Durkheim was wrong to suggest that the sacred is always set apart and forbidden, but as studies of liminality show, religious people, practices, and locations are often set apart and forbidden. For an archaeologist this is important because the methods people employ to separate and isolate the liminal can potentially leave material traces (e. g., walls, gates, geographic isolation). Spatial analyses can reveal liminal locations, illuminating specific conceptions of the sacred in the process. As will be discussed in later chapters, Buddhists often isolated monasteries and pilgrimage locations behind large walls or in remote locations, separating the sangha and the practice of Buddhist ritual from mundane, worldly concerns. This is not to say that Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage centers were completely set apart and forbidden—they weren’t. Indian Buddhists were constantly forced to strike a balance between their desire for isolation and asceticism with their desire to establish and provision a powerful, coherent community of Buddhists. As discussed in later chapters, much of the history of Indian Buddhism can be understood by examining how subsequent generations sought to balance and exploit these competing desires.
World History
