Émile Durkheim
sociology · 1858-1917 · France
Émile Durkheim built sociology into a discipline by insisting that social facts are real things — that a society exerts a force on the people inside it which cannot be reduced to their individual minds. He gives Vela the vocabulary for what a community does to the person within it: the heat of assembly, the loosening of norms, the line between the set-apart and the everyday.
What Vela reads them for
Durkheim is the originating voice for the religion axis of Vela's behavioral-science lens. Collective effervescence, anomie, and the sacred/profane distinction all trace to him, and together they let the Bible-as-proto-sociology arc read scripture as a record of social formation without arguing with its theology. Vela uses him descriptively — he explains how the social binds and charges, not whether the participants are right about what binds them.
Concepts they originated
Concepts they developed
Books in Vela's library
Honest framing
Durkheim's functionalism — explaining a practice by what it does for the group — is contested, and his readings of 'primitive' religion bear the marks of their period. Vela takes the concepts and leaves the dated ethnography.