Product Description: Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud's greatest cultural works, when Totem and Taboo was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. Thorough and thought-provoking, Totem and Taboo remains the fullest exploration of Freud's most famous themes...read more

Product Description: One hundred years after the publication of the great sociological treatise, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this new volume shows how aptly Durkheim¹s theories still resonate with the study of contemporary and historical religious societies...read more

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. For Durkheim, studying Aboriginal religion was a way 'to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity'. The need and capacity of men and women to relate to one another socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe. The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the intriguing origin and nature of religion and society. This new, lightly abridged edition provides an excellent introduction to Durkheim's ideas.

The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (A.S.A. Monographs 5)

Product Description: Anne Warfield Rawls argues that, although Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religion is the crowning achievement of his sociological accomplishments, it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that Durkheim's analysis represents an attempt to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations...read more

Product Description: The spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of Native Americans and African Americans have long been sources of fascination and curiosity, owing to their marked difference from the religious traditions of white writers and researchers...read more

Product Description: Though it is now discredited, totemism once captured the imagination of Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, James Frazer, and other prominent Victorian thinkers. In this lively intellectual history, Robert Alun Jones considers the construction of a theory and the divergent ways religious scholars, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists drew on totemism to explore and define primitive and modern societies' religious, cultural, and sexual norms...read more

Product Description: Sako Ma is an explorative look at the monkey as a sacred animal totem, ancestor, cult figure and religious icon in indigenous cultures in the East and West. Never before has a document looked at simian folklore and mythology cross-culturally.

Product Description: "Inside of each of us an animal lies in wait, ready to be revealed and explored. As humans we share the earth with many magnificent creatures, and through Pagan magic we can connect with the animal kingdom and with our individual animal spirits, or totems...read more

Product Description: This is the first collection of essays to be published on Durkheim's masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It represents the work of the most important international Durkheim scholars from the fields of anthropology, philosophy and sociology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this volume, which has been hailed as a major breakthrough in understanding the meaning of the elaborate kinship systems currently existing in Australian Aboriginal societies, C. G. von Brandenstein argues that such systems refer to an archaic theory of "world order" common to all these societies...read more