2005. vol. 4. No. 1

It is generally thought that Durkheim based his theory of knowledge on a theory of representations. However, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]) he places great emphasis on concrete and witnessable aspects of practice such as sounds and movements and downplays the importance of beliefs and representations. He argues that ritual sounds and movements, when collectively enacted, can create sentiments that give rise to the essential concepts that he refers to as the categories of the understanding. Representations are, in his view, secondary phenomena that arise only after participation in social practices. This article demonstrates this through an analysis of Durkheim’s text where he specifically referred to ritual practices in concrete and not representational terms at strategic points in the argument. Furthermore, it is here argued that the collective experience of concrete sounds and movements was, in Durkheim’s view, a prerequisite for the subsequent development of representations. Opposite to Durkheim’s intentions, the substitution of beliefs for practices became one of the primary characteristics of contemporary sociology. In fact, a focus on beliefs and representations, instead of practices, has characterized most of 20th-century sociology. In this article this predominant point of view is characterized as the “fallacy of misplaced abstraction”, which causes us to treat all phenomena as conceptually mediated. However, sounds and movements must be rendered recognizable in concrete terms before they have conceptual significance. In other words, while concepts may define the boundaries of what can be understood, the recognizability of sounds and movements defines the boundaries of what can be rendered in conceptual terms.

The paper observes several recent approaches in the developing sphere of cultural sociology. It attempts to show that the principle of autonomy of culture, which is central for this perspective, is hard to maintain, as avoiding one particular reductionism can often lead to another one. If we do not assume this, the very explanatory power of this approach diminishes. Thus, the new Durkheimian cultural sociology, which itself is explicitly built on the principle of cultural autonomy, tends to come to a dead-end of structural reductionism or the “principle of the unity of the nature”. The idea of the modification of Durkheimian theory, called as “the morphogenetic turn” in the theory of the sacred, is proposed to avoid those dead-ends.

This paper is dedicated to a neo-Leibnitzian reconceptualization of spatiality in current sociological theory. The material turn, one of the most significant events of XX – XXI sociology, has dramatically altered the very agenda of sociological thinking in 1990s and keeps on strengthening its influence on social theorizing. Alongside the revision of basic ontological and epistemological assumptions, it brought back the category of “space” neglected for a long time in social thought. However, two major theoretical projects in current actor-network theory (“social topology” by John Law and “sociology of materiality” by Bruno Latour) suggest two different strategies for rehabilitation of “space”. Analyzing the return of the material object in social theory and its hidden conceptual implications, the author compares these two strategies, their axiomatic assumptions, basic metaphors and philosophical resources.

In this interview a well-known Soviet and Russian sociologist, Ovsei Shkaratan, narrates his academic career and the renaissance of sociology in Soviet academia at the end of 1950s and the beginning of the early 1960s. He describes the first social research projects in Leningrad, such as the study of “communist labor teams” which pioneered the sociology of labor in the USSR. The interview gives an opportunity to become aware of the Western sociologists who were known amongst the Soviet sociologists during this period and also to further understand the reception of Western theories at the time. The position of Shkaratan with regards to Soviet authorities of that time and of the time of interview (2000s) is of a particular interest. He further shares his views on the social policy of the Russian government and on the perspectives of sociology in modern Russia.