Durkheim and Mauss array themselves at the outset of the work against
“Logicians” and “Psychologists,” both of which, they argue, treat the process
of classifying things, events, and facts about the world as at worst innate and
at best individually constituted; that is, they assume that there is one
essentially uniform way of ordering the world that is common to all people. In
contrast, Durkheim and Mauss mobilize the anthropologist’s ubiquitous
argumentative weapon: the historical and crosscultural variability of nearly
any human phenomenon. Indeed, they contend, that which is commonly
understood as classification is of rather recent origin, having its true birth in
the thought of Aristotle. This historical origin of logical classification
presupposes an extended prehistory, during which humanity (or at least one
part of it) gradually removed itself from its original “state of indistinction.”
Durkheim and Mauss document this indistinction, or “mental confusion,”
which, they argue, is in places and at times so extreme that “the individual
himself loses his personality.” Human consciousness, in its primitive state, is
a continuous and unregulated flow of representations bleeding into one
another. The phenomenon of totemism—the belief in a relation of
consubstantiality between members of a social group and a category of
things (for example, bears, eagles, and lightning)—is a vestigial product of
this sort of thought. The primitive inability to distinguish aspects of the world is
taken as evidence that in the beginning, at least, humanity lacked the
capacity to classify and that, consequently, such a capacity must be acquired
from somewhere.
If it is not the human mind which provides this model, as a priori philosophers
such as Immanuel Kant would have it, then perhaps the groupings and
relations of things are inherent in the things themselves; perhaps, as David
Hume and the empiricists claimed, it is nature itself which indicates how
things should be perceived. Durkheim and Mauss reject this option as well,
arguing that the inherent resemblances of things are not sufficient to
determine the complex schemata by which they are apprehended. Having
rejected both of these solutions, Durkheim and Mauss resolve the situation
by, as Steven Lukes, Durkheim’s biographer, has put it, “restating the old
epistemological questions in sociological terms.”
Classification Essay Example