queries

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Thank you for introducing this quote from Durkheim, a left theorist (yes) who
we tend to overlook. I think you are mistaken to say " that's probably
nonsense." If I understand him right, he is probably referring to the way
pre-modern supernatural beliefs thought of  reality being divided into sacred
and profane space. Later forms of supernatural belief, the sky-god religions,
developed a notion of sacred time. Very good discussion of this distinction in
Bruce Lerro's FROM EARTH-SPIRITS TO SKY-GODS: THE SOCIOECOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF
MONOTHEISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND HYPERABSTRACT REASONING FROM THE STONE AGE TO
THE AXIAL IRON AGE. And pre-modern beliefs persist into the present day, in
attenuated forms. And as for sacred space, Eugen Weber cites peasants in the
nineteenth century even in so modern a country as France making offerings at
pre-historic dolmens, which must have been sacred spaces for thousands of
years.

Maybe we need to think about why advertising, etc., is reverting to this kind
of thinking.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:


> Perhaps not the usage but the idea has a long pedigree.  Durkheim e.g.
> seemed to think our categories were so to speak projections into the mind
> of the spatial arrangements of surrounding society:
>
> "The first logical categories were social categories ... the things that
> [genera] comprise are generally imagined as situated in a sort of
> ideational milieu, with a more or less clearly delimited spatial
> circumscription.  It is certainly not without cause that concepts and
> their interrelations have so often been represented by concentric and
> eccentric circles, interior and exterior to each other, etc.  Might it not
> be that this tendency to imagine purely logical groupings in a form
> contrasting so much with their true nature originated in the fact that at
> first they were conceived in the form of social groups occupying,
> consequently, definite social positions in space?"  --Durkheim and Mauss,
> *Primitive Classification* (1903).
>
> But that's probably nonsense.  --CGE
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > ... 1) When did the use of "space" illustrated in the quote below
> > become common? Is it a techie word originally? ...