What does a kangaroo have to do with God? To most people, the question seems absurd. But for Émile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding fathers, the answer to that question unlocks the very origins of religion itself. In his landmark 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim turned to the totemic practices of Australian Aboriginal clans to argue something radical: that when people worship a sacred symbol, they are ultimately worshipping their own society. Understanding how he reached that conclusion means understanding totemism – and why Durkheim believed it held the key to all religious life.
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Why Durkheim studied “primitive” religion
Durkheim’s goal was not to document exotic customs. He wanted to identify the most fundamental building blocks of religious experience. His logic was methodological: the simpler the society, the more clearly its core social processes are visible. Durkheim focused on Australian Aboriginal religion because, at that time, their culture was considered among the most ancient known, and with his view of cultural evolution, he believed studying the earliest documented religion would reveal the essence of all others.
He was not interested in whether these beliefs were “true” in a theological sense. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Durkheim approached religion as a social fact – something that exists independently of individual belief and exerts real influence on collective life. Religion, for him, was always and fundamentally a social phenomenon.
What is totemism?
Totemism is a belief system in which groups of people – typically clans in tribal societies – regard a specific animal, plant, or object as sacred. This sacred entity, the totem, is understood to share a special bond with the clan, representing its collective identity and origins. Durkheim saw totemism as one of the earliest and simplest forms of religious practice, found most prominently among Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Northwest Native American communities with clan-based societies.
In Aboriginal Australia, each clan had a totem – typically an animal or plant – depicted through drawings or carvings on wood or stone, usually linked to a creation myth that explained the clan’s origins and connected current members to that history. Clan members had obligations tied to their totem: they might be prohibited from killing or eating it outside of special ceremonies, and they were bound to one another through shared rules of kinship and conduct.
Crucially, totemism is a religion in which three classes of things – the totemic emblem, the animal or plant itself, and the members of the clan – are all recognized as sacred. It is not just a belief in a powerful animal. It is an entire system of classification, identity, and moral obligation.
The totem as a symbol of society
Here is where Durkheim’s analysis becomes distinctly sociological. He did not accept that clans worshipped animals or plants because they found them naturally impressive or powerful. Totems tend to be drawn from fairly ordinary creatures – lizards, caterpillars, rats – not the grand, awe-inspiring forces of nature like the sun or stars. If the feelings totems inspired were of a cosmic or overpowering order, the focus of veneration would be the animal itself. But the animal is secondary – it is the emblem that carries the sacred force.
Durkheim’s central argument is that the totem is not primarily a representation of a god or spirit. It is a representation of the clan itself. His study of totemic societies in Australia led him to the conclusion that the animal or plant each clan worshipped as a sacred power was, in fact, a symbol for that society itself. The power and awe people associate with their totem comes not from the animal’s actual properties, but from the collective social force of the group it represents.
The reason humans need a totem to worship, rather than worshipping the clan directly, is that the clan is too complex and abstract an entity for people to easily conceptualise – a religious symbol is a much simpler, tangible thing to revere. The totem functions as what we might call a social shorthand: a concrete image that stands in for a complex social reality. Just as a national flag represents a complex political entity, or wearing black at a funeral represents collective mourning, the totem represents the clan in simple, visible form.
The sacred and the profane in totemic life
Totemism gave Durkheim the material to develop one of his most influential conceptual distinctions: the separation between the sacred and the profane. The sacred refers to the realm of extraordinary experiences and objects set apart from everyday life, while the profane encompasses the mundane aspects of ordinary existence.
For Durkheim, religion is the collective practice of marking off and maintaining the distance between these two realms. In Aboriginal totemic life, this boundary was very clear. A kangaroo encountered while hunting is a profane, everyday animal. That same kangaroo, depicted on a sacred churinga stone and invoked during a clan ceremony, becomes something entirely different – something that must be treated with reverence, approached only under specific conditions, and never violated.
Durkheim observed that totemic symbols were treated with reverence and surrounded by prohibitions, demonstrating the clear separation of the sacred from the profane. This, he argued, was not unique to Aboriginal religion – it was the structural foundation of all religious systems everywhere.
Collective effervescence: when ritual creates the sacred
If the totem is just a symbol, how does it become sacred in the first place? Durkheim’s answer lies in what he called collective effervescence. Most of the time, clan members live dispersed lives performing ordinary tasks like hunting and gathering, which are profane. But during the rare occasions when the entire tribe comes together, a sense of heightened energy and unity – collective effervescence – emerges.
During ceremonies, the gathering of people generates an intense emotional charge. Singing, dancing, and shared ritual action build a powerful sense of collective energy. The individual clan member, transported from his ordinary profane existence into this heightened state, seeks an explanation for his altered emotional condition. He cannot easily comprehend that the real source is the gathering itself; but all around him, he sees the carved images of the totem – and fixes his social feelings onto these concrete objects, from which the power of the group seems to radiate.
The totem thus becomes the vessel for the group’s collective energy. The sacred object receives the collective force of the community and is thereby infused with that power – giving society a tangible representation of itself. What feels like the presence of a god is actually the felt reality of social life at its most intense.
For this reason, religious rituals must be repeated regularly. If the societal forces at the heart of religious life are not periodically re-animated, they weaken, and individuals lose their sense of connection to one another and to the broader social order. Religion is not merely a matter of belief – it requires the ongoing, lived experience of collective ritual to sustain itself.
Society worshipping itself
Durkheim’s most provocative conclusion follows directly from all of this. By worshipping the totem, clan members are actually worshipping society – and are thereby reminded that the collective is more important than the individual. The god that totemic religion conjures is not a supernatural being separate from the human world. It is the social group itself, experienced through its symbolic representation.
In Durkheim’s view, society is the soul of religion – the foundation of all religious belief. Totems are collective symbols that represent both god and society simultaneously. The primary purpose of religion, then, is to allow a people to imagine their society and express their social unity – which explains why religion persists not as a source of factual knowledge about the physical world, but as a force that binds people together.
Religious rituals reinforce the collective conscience – the shared beliefs, values, and norms that bind society together – and generate a sense of community and belonging that transcends individual experience. Through the totem, the clan becomes conscious of itself as a social unit.
Totemism as the foundation of all religion
Durkheim did not see totemism as merely a curiosity of Aboriginal life. He argued it was the prototype from which all religious systems developed. Totemism also constitutes a cosmology, in which all known things are distributed among various clans so that everything is classified according to the tribe’s social organization. In other words, the way a society divides up the sacred and the profane, assigns meaning to objects, and organizes collective ritual reflects the structure of that society itself.
Whether the religion in question involves totemic animals, ancestral spirits, national saints, or transcendent deities, Durkheim argued the underlying social logic is the same. Durkheim classified totemism as a form of religion because it fulfilled his core definition: a unified system of beliefs and practices centered around sacred things, which fosters a moral community among its followers. Magic, by contrast, he excluded – because magical practices lack the communal, church-like dimension that, for Durkheim, defines religion as a social institution.
Criticisms and limitations
Durkheim’s theory is influential, but it has attracted significant criticism. His analysis rested heavily on the ethnographic accounts of Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), meaning much of his work depended on the beliefs and practices of a single group, the Arunta tribe. Using one society as the basis for universal claims about all religion is methodologically risky.
Critics have also challenged the claim that totemism is the most “primitive” or original form of religion. Spencer and Gillen themselves leaned toward an animistic interpretation of Aboriginal religion, and scholars have argued that much more evidence would need to be produced before totemism could be considered the foundational form of all religions. The assumption that all religions share a single origin is itself contested.
On a theoretical level, Durkheim’s approach reduces religion to its social function. Critics argue that this is reductionist – that it overlooks the genuine spiritual experiences and individual beliefs of religious practitioners, and can be seen as ignoring the subjective meaning that religion holds for believers. Feminist scholars point out that Durkheim’s account largely ignores the patriarchal structures that religious rituals often reinforce, while Marxist critics note that religion can serve to maintain class inequality rather than a neutral collective solidarity.
These are valid concerns. Yet Durkheim’s core insight – that religious symbols are not just theological claims but social facts, and that collective ritual generates real social bonds – remains a foundational contribution to how we understand religion sociologically. His analysis opened the door to studying religious life not as a question of supernatural truth, but as a question of how societies create meaning, maintain cohesion, and represent themselves to themselves.
What do you think? If Durkheim is right that when people worship a totem they are really worshipping their own society, does that mean modern nations do the same thing through symbols like flags and monuments? And can religion truly be explained by its social functions alone, or does that approach miss something essential about religious experience?
References
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41360/41360-h/41360-h.htm
- https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/elementary-forms-religious-life-emile-durkheim
- https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
- https://revisesociology.com/2018/06/18/functionalist-perspective-religion-durkheim/
- https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html
- http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/totemism-notes.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elementary_Forms_of_the_Religious_Life
- https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-durkheim-sociology-of-religion
- https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2017/sociology-paper-i/durkheim-sacred-profane-sociology-religion
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
- https://puresociology.com/durkheim-theory-of-religion-sacred-profane/
- https://journals.openedition.org/assr/24395
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