73. In his video “Advertising and the End of the World,” Jhally states that there are two kinds of questions that one may ask of advertising. The first one is: does an ad campaign for a product increase sales? This is the marketing question, and is of primary importance to companies. But Jhally says this is the wrong question. The second, and of course right question, is: what impact does advertising have on the culture? That is, what is its cultural role? What are the values articulated and expressed in the cultural field of society? Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World, Video, written, edited, and produced by Sut Jhally (Distributed by Media Education Foundation, 1998).
74. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising(London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 47.
75. Jhally, “Advertising as Religion,” 227.
76. Ibid., 199.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. I am indebted to Mark Lewis Taylor for this example.
80. Mark Lewis Taylor, personal correspondence.
81. Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need(New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 57.
82. Ibid.
83. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 46.
84. John Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society, 2nd ed.
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 26.
85. Jib Fowles, Advertising and Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), 40–41.
provide for the conclusion. He does this most glaringly in his definition of religion. Second is the argument by elimination in which alternative explanations are presented only to be systematically discounted as Durkheim’s “correct” theory unfolds. Last is Durkheim’s treatment of evidence, wherein he ignores glaring facts that contradict his own work, such as clan societies without totems and vice versa.
4. Ibid., 34.
5. I do not intend to make a symmetrical correlation with Durkheim’s theories and present society. Much of Durkheim’s anthropological work has been shown to be rather “arm-chair” and has subsequently been disproven. Yet, let it be stated that Durkheim wrote at a time that was just beginning to see the rise of industrial capitalism, and certainly did not see advertising in the form that exists in the twenty–first century.
What I seek to do is discover how his theories of religion and the sacred and profane may be useful in understanding certain present religious phenomena.
6. Pickering states that Durkheim never uses the phrase “deification of society” or “sacralization of society.” It has been attributed to Durkheim by later scholars. See Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, 234, 259–261.
7. Ralph Piddington as quoted in Ferrarotti, Toward the Social Production of the Sacred, 27–28.
8. Levi-Strauss, Totemism, 45.
9. Ibid., italics in original.
10. See Robert Bellah, “Introduction,” in Emile Durkheim, On Morality and Society(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), xviii.
11. Durkheim has often been accused of abolishing the individual or posit- ing what may be thought of as “group think.” But Bellah argues that this is not true as Durkheim saw “collective life [as] an emergent process of human action with its own systematic properties . . .” and he did not think that the social was of a “greater nor lesser ultimate reality than individual life.” Ibid, xx.
12. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 13.
13. Ibid., 17. As Gianfranco Poggi states, this kind of “collective causality”
makes for a very interesting argument and contribution to the sociology of knowledge. See Gianfranco Poggi, Durkheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 161.
14. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 17.
15. Ibid., 9. Levi-Strauss thinks Durkheim’s explanation is “simplistic and reduces itself to an untenable attempt at monocausal explanation.”
That is, Levi-Strauss sees Durkheim’s theories concerning the categories as functionalist. See Levi-Strauss, Totemism, 95–97 and Ferrarotti,
Notes to Pages 34-37 159
Toward the Social Production of the Sacred, 28–29. See also Lukes and his analysis concerning the categories, Emile Durkheim, 436–445.
16. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 7.
17. Ibid., 4.
18. Ibid., 24.
19. Ibid., 27.
20. Ibid., 34.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 37.
23. Ibid., 38.
24. Ibid., 41.
25. Ibid., 42.
26. Ibid., 44. Italics in original.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Another reason that it is problematic, or at least intriguing, is Durkheim associated society with the sacred and the individual with the profane. Of course, the individual as he or she exists in society is one of the main top- ics for anthropology and sociology and has been taken up by such schol- ars as Mary Douglas, Thomas Luckmann, and Steven Lukes. For a good discussion of this aspect of Durkheim’s work see Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, 122–124. Also, one scholar in the tradition of Durkheim is Mircea Eliade. See his The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959).
32. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, 147. Pickering does an excel- lent job of outlining the various critics and their arguments concerning the sacred and profane dichotomy. See especially, Part II, Chapter 8.
33. Poggi, Durkheim, 147–148.
34. Ibid., 147.
35. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 4.
36. Ibid., 5.
37. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 85–88.
38. Ibid., 85.
39. Ibid., 88. Durkheim’s texts for analysis are Sir Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia(London:
Macmillan, 1899) and Sir Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia(London: Macmillan, 1904).
40. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 104, 105.
41. Ibid., 111.
42. Ibid., 114.
43. Ibid., 118.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 127.
46. Ibid., 133.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 133, 138.
50. Ibid., 150.
51. Ibid., 191.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 192.
54. Ibid., 208.
55. Ibid.
56. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, 232.
57. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 236. Pickering states that Durkheim adapts Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God:
“[S]ince God does not exist and society does and since a moral authority is needed, society is precisely authority formerly supplied by God.”
58. Ibid., 209.
59. Ibid. One might notice that at this point Durkheim has moved from Spencer and Gillen’s world of totemism to his contemporary French society to prove how god and society are one and the same, and to sup- port his idea of the sacred and the profane. Also, it is important to note that consumer society and/or capitalism assumes and relies on the pro- motion of individual self-interest for its success.
60. Ibid., 213.
61. Ibid., 214.
62. Ibid., 215.
63. Ibid., 222.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 226–227.
66. Durkheim does recognize, however, that this theory of religion may still seem delusional. He asks, “By what other name can one call the state in which men find themselves when, as a great result of collective efferves- cence, they believe they have been swept up into a world entirely dif- ferent from the one they have before their eyes?” Ibid., 227–228.
67. Ibid., 230. Italics in original.
68. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 8–12.
69. Ibid., 9.
70. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 303.
71. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 419–420. Italics added.
Notes to Pages 42-50 161
72. Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 159.
73. Ibid.
74. Indeed, my questions are/were also Durkheim’s questions. That is, one of the reasons he wrote Formswas to try and discern how it is that soci- ety sustains itself.
75. Poggi, Durkheim, 167.