My buddy Emile

Another of my classes this quarter is Self, Culture and Society-2, the second of a required three-quarter (aka all year long) course all undergrads have to take in order to graduate. There are three or four other classes you can take to fulfill this graduation requirement, with titles like "Power, Identity and Resistance" or "Classics of Social and Political Thought," but they all fall under "social sciences core," aka a full year of basic social science/philosophy texts, with a bit of a difference focus depending on the class. "Self," as SCS is usually referred to, is a focus on conceptualizations of individuality vs society and the like. Last quarter we read some of the basic socio-economic texts, namely Smith and Marx and Weber. This quarter so far we've read Durkheim and we later will read Levi-Strauss, Foucault's Discipline & Punish, and a short little thing by Sahlins.

The Durkheim we're reading is Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which is actually pretty interesting. The Wikipedia article on it can be found here, but basically it is Durkheim examining how religion and society work--basically, to Durkheim, religion is simply an expression of society, of humanity's need for communal living and processes that help amplify this communal living, this sense of society. To do this Durkheim looks at some of the most elementary types of religion he knew at the time, namely that of American Indians and Australian Aboriginals and similar.

Of course, the assertion that religion is/can be society, and vice-versa, can be terribly unsettling to some people, whether because they want to despise religion or because they want to believe in some creator god who cares deeply about them. Religion fascinates me as a socio-cultural thing, mainly because rituals, and the idea of creating my own as an author, have always had a kind of deep imaginative hold on me. Much of creative writing, after all, is world-building, and what could be more fun than creating whole new societies and religions and bizarre rituals? I've always been an over-describer and this is probably part of the reason why. Of course, religion as some arbiter of truth, of life or death, has little hold on me, probably because too many of these rituals and stories are too ridiculous to actually believe literally.

Anyway, a kid in my class today really did seem alarmingly unsettled by all of this. I'm fairly certain he's devout Roman Catholic (Facebook stalking can be productive in this regard, plus he mentions his devoutness from time to time in class), which only amps up the hilarity. My professor is a sociologist with a thick Turkish accent and a propensity for saying things like "I am a sociologist--I hate people" and the like, and his general style of leading discussion is to be as much of a devil's advocate as possible. This entertains most of us most of the time, but when you're set on trying to disprove Emile Durkheim like this kid has been for the past few classes, I'm sure it's just annoying. This kid could be more of a devil's advocate himself if he could tone down the "prattling," as another classmate of mine put it today, and just ask some succinct questions instead of hinting that Durkheim has terrible methodology and doesn't know anything.

Thursday is our last class on Durkheim, and then it's on to Levi-Strauss. A few first-year friends of mine took from the beginning of school this year to referring to authors by their first names; thus, last quarter there were Adam and Karl and Max, and this quarter so far there's been Emile and, soon, Claude. I've enjoyed Emile, for the most part, even if not the 70-page sections I was assigned a few times in the past couple of weeks, and my Levi-Strauss experience is basically nonexistent, so I guess I'll have to see how it goes with Claude in the next two weeks.