著者

小川 伸彦

出版者

京都大学

雑誌

京都社会学年報 : KJS

巻号頁・発行日

vol.1, pp.31-48, 1994-03-31

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In his last work, Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse (1912), Durkheim wrote in an often neglected footnote that "today society treats criminals in a different fashion than subjects whose intelligence only is abnormal; that is a proof that the authority attached to logical norms and that inherent in moral norms are not of the same nature, in spite of certain similarities. [...] It would be interesting to make a study on the nature and origin of this difference [...]". This article tries to clarify, through the following procedure, the significance of this 'moral-logical' distinction by drawing upon his theory of ritual. After showing how consistently this moral-logical dyad was held in his conception of both society and human nature, we re-define this dyad to correspond respectively to action-representation dyad. Then, in the main part of this article, Durkheim's account of some ritual types (ie. sacrificial, representational and mimetic) will be analyzed to show that effervescent ritual action and its moral success will inevitably mobilize two systems of representations, which contribute to the construction of the reality of societe; one "totemic" (that which is directly needed to be able to pursue the prescribed ritual action) and the other "categorical" (that which lies on the context level). Finally, the possibility of the extension of this theory will be examined and it will be proposed how we can use Durkheim's theory of ritual as a sociological perspective into social life in general and symbolic aspects of group identity in particular.