The Word and History

No matter how much I try, I tend to see life through the lenses of an historian. I am always drawn to the question of how context --whether that is geographical location, personal family history, or gender--conditions the beliefs I hold, the way I vote, or the food I eat. I am, as it happens, also very interested in languages. Far from being a rigorous linguist, I often find myself thinking about the relationship between language, society, and history. I have, as of late, been thinking about how words and their meaning arise from a historical context--a new invention ('google it'), an event (September 11), or a neologism to describe a new trend in society (globalisation). Languages seem to be built word by word as individuals and societies amass new experiences. Each national tradition and language has a distinctive flavor and way of understanding the world through their language because their experiences have been distinct from everyone other traditions', set apart as they are by geography, climate, wars, and events.

For the individual today, standing at the end of this long build-up of language, an interesting relationship exists between himself and his language. The words he uses have the interesting characteristic of having the potentiality to express almost an infinitely wide range of collective memories, individual experiences, but at the same time the word must be precise enough to function as a definite signifier for daily communication. As a historian, I am mostly interested in how the individual is more often than not completely oblivious to the cultural and historical meaning that the word and language contains. Apart from the historian who is able to methodically unpack the history of a word, we mostly concentrate on a standard (albeit subjective) understanding. But even as we use words to communicate something definite, the possibility of manifold meaning arising from the collective basis of the word is ever-present as Emile Durkheim points out:

"Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or lesser extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?" (482-3)

Durkheim's quote about how words contain meanings that go beyond the individual evokes a thought I had recently. It has to do with the way our culture collectively understands (or misunderstands) the meaning of the words "Barack Obama". This "event" stands arguably as one of the most momentous events in American society in the previous decade. I must admit that I had a hard time grasping the full rationale behind the excitement in media broadcasts that used such a word as "historic" to describe the significance of a black president being elected to the White House. It struck me last week why I was experiencing this disconnect with the excitement surrounding the election of the first African-American to the presidency. I can best explain it in terms of a generation gap which highlights the underlying historical side of language. Being born in 1985, what I associate with the word "African-American" is radically different from what my parents or grandparents associate with the word. I only have second-hand knowledge of the civil rights movement, I have not felt the full range of emotions over lynchings, fire hoses, church-burnings, etc. that my parents (to speak nothing of middle-aged Africans-Americans) did growing up in the sixties. Partly as a result of growing up in Utah as well, the word "African-American" has been to a great degree discharged of any divisive, controversial content. I may understand it intellectually, but the chances were slim that Barack Obama's election would bring a tear to my eye conditioned as it is to see the world through the language of post-1985 culture. The advancing years and changing conditions shifted the meaning of a word. For the older generation, those memories of hate and race riots and an American seemingly eternally biased and broke still clung to the word "Barack Obama" and thus their experience of the event was powerful as it was symbolic of the exact cultural change that left me tearless.

I hope, however, that this post communicates one aspect of the value of studying history. Its value lies in understanding the historical context for the language we use and thus expanding our ability to sympathize with others as we expand our understanding of the meaning contained in the language we use.

collective effervescence

I've just finished reading Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of the Religious". Durkheim--a pioneer in the field of sociology and anthropology--sets as his task in this book nothing less than the identification of the most basic (i.e. earliest, most fundamental) activity among civilizations that we can call "religious". His overall goal in this investigation is to identify how religious thinking and institutions arise in the first place and what aspects of religion are universal to all world religions. In what follows, I will try to explain the most striking evidence of Durkheim's thesis that "religion is inherently a social phenomenon" and its implications. That main piece of evidence is Durkheim's assertion that religion arises as a way to understand "collective effervescence", a phenomenon that occurs when individuals come together.

In order to understand what Durkheim means by this, we must summarize a portion of Durkheim's investigative process and findings. Durkheim spends most of his book exploring what he considers the most fundamental cult of the most primitive human civilization: the practice of totemism among the Australian aborigines. Durkheim describes totemism as the practice of a clan identifying itself with some object from the natural world (usually a plant or animal). In other words, a totem is a clan's flag. All societies seem to do this. We find symbols--often taken from the natural world--as stand ins for our community, nation, or group. Germany takes an eagle, the mormons take the beehive, and Japan takes the rising sun. Durkheim makes clear that what is important is not the real object itself, but the representation of the object. It is not the rabbit that is sacred, but the image of the rabbit. This is significant because what Durkheim argues is that the clan is in fact representing itself by means of the totem. When the clan reverences, worships, or in any way sets apart the totem as a sacred object, they are, in effect, simply reverencing the visual representation of their collective existence. The practices that spring up around the representation of the totem then become what we recognize as a "religion". Durkheim sees this process of taking outside objects as representative of oneself as a necessary means by which a community expresses and understands itself: "...collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects..." (466)

Why do societies seek to represent and then revere themselves in this manner? This is where we approach Durkheim's fascinating notion of a "collective effervescence". People have wondered what it is exactly that gives rise to religion and the idea of an all-powerful being named God. Durkheim rejects the idea that the notion of "God" comes from feelings of fear, or weakness in the face of powerful natural forces. Rather, Durkheim sees the beginnings of the practice of totemism, which then develops into the notion of a spiritual being, as beginning with the experience of community. Durkheim states that "...collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity..." (469) This "religious thought" begins with the feeling of "reverence" for something outside of ourselves that seems to be all-powerful.

On some level, we all reverence society and recognize its claims upon us. Durkheim theorizes that this sense of respect for society comes from the physical power we feel when participating in any communal event. We seem to be lifted out of ourselves in the presence of large groups participating in some important communal act. Durkheim puts it so:

"There are occasions when this strengthening and vivifying action of society is especially apparent. In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves" (240)

This physical force emanating from community is what Durkheim terms "collective effervescence". We can perhaps best understand it by reflecting on the excitement we feel as we sing together in a church assembly, or experience the sensation of 30,000 individuals cheering for a school basketball team. There seems to be a force that exists in community.

The Aborigines--experiencing this phenomenon as they came together to celebrate a successful hunt or something of that sort--began the process of seeking to understand this force that seemed to alight upon their community. It eventually led to the totem. In a more general sense, it is not very hard to see the connection between God and society. God is to us--in basic form--"a being whom men think of as superior to themselves, and upon whom they feel that they depend" (237). Durkheim argues that God is (I've simplified this a little bit) the expression we use for the individual's relationship to society. Society appears to us as an invisible, yet all-powerful entity. Its can demand everything from us simply by being what it is: society. We all seem to perceive that the greatest end that exists is the good of society. Durkheim feels that this attitude seemingly innate in us arises from an immaterial power that comes with communal existence:

"We say that an object, whether individual or collective, inspires respect when the representation expressing it in the mind is gifted with such a force that it automatically causes or inhibits actions, without regard for any consideration relative to their useful or injurious effects" (237).

Thus, Durkheim's main thrust can be summed up in three words: "Society is God". By way of conclusion, what I find most applicative in this theory is what Durkheim concludes about the ultimate nature of religious claims about a spiritual realm and the ethical teachings attached to the religion. To be perfectly blunt, Durkheim saves religion from being simply interpreted as an illusion, but ultimately concludes that while arising from very real physical forces, the literal notions of a corporeal God and heaven cannot be accepted. In his words, "...the reality which religious thought expresses is society..." (480) Further, the ethical claims that religion makes on individuals can be understood as how a community expresses the "collective ideal" (470).