ANTHRO 3AC Study Guide - Final Guide: Marcel Mauss, Social Fact, Human Science
Document Summary
It is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics, it consists of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. French sociologist mile durkheim defined the term and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. Effervescence (discuss in context of durkheim"s understanding of religion) The experience of the social, the experience of collective consciousness in. The rites are a manner of acting which takes rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in these groups . Ll religions answer to the given conditions of human existence . Durkheim says: all religions are true just like all creatures from single-cell organisms to human beings are alive, so religion for the social being is like life for the individual being.
