Emile Durkheim’s masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is usually associated with totemic religion in faraway places, but in writing it, Durkheim had in mind a social world much closer to hand in the France of his time. Sociologist Karen Fields will adapt Durkheim’s methodology to explore curious features of that world and our own. Dr. Fields borrows from Durkheim’s method in her research exploring the invisible ontology of the social world. Her publications include a re-translation of Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995), and Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (with Barbara J. Fields, forthcoming).

Co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Department of History, and the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life