Émile Durkheim's Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) is one of the founding texts of the modern sociology of religion. Durkheim argues that the elementary forms of religion are visible, with unusual clarity, in the totemic religions of the Aboriginal peoples of central Australia; that these forms reveal religion to be at its core a way in which a society represents itself to itself; and that even the most apparently transcendent of modern religions inherits, in changed form, the same fundamental social functions.
This edition reproduces the standard 1915 Joseph Ward Swain English translation in full: Introduction, three Books, and Conclusion. A short editor's preface places the book in its biographical and intellectual context.
