3.25 ( )

Durkheim and Mauss concern themselves with symbolic classifications of a moral or religious nature, which they distinguish from practical schemes of distinctions which they call technological. They believe that the human mind lacks the innate capacity to construct complex systems of classification such as every society possess [ASS.], and which are cultural products not to be found in nature, and they therefore ask what could have served as the model for such arrangements of ideas. Their answer is that the model is society itself. The first logical categories were social categories. . . the first classes of things were classes of men; not only the external form of classes, but also the relations uniting them to each other, are of social origin. . . .

. . . Now society is alleged to be the model on which classification is based, yet in society after society examined no formal correspondence can be shown to exist. Different forms of classifications are found with identical types of social organization, and similar forms with different types of society. . . . There is very little sign of the constant correspondence of symbolic classification with social order which the argument leads one to expect, and which indeed the argument is intended to explain. . . .

. . . [I]n places they assume that a society employs only one mode of classification at a time. For example, they maintain that the Zuňi system of classification was preceded by one into six regions, and that before this there was one into four corresponding to the cardinal points. But not only is this conjectured development not demonstrated by the texts to which they refer, it is only plausible on the assumption that the Zuňi could not simultaneously possess classifications by seven, by six, and by four. Once it is admitted that they might do so, all need to relate these different modes of classification in an evolutionary progress vanish. . . .

Durkheim and Mauss [1903], Primitive Classification, Intro. & Tr.: Rodney Needham (U. of Chicago Press, 1963). Selections from the “Introduction”.