Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis

By V. Crapanzano. 2003

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the few pages of the doctoral dissertation on sin and expiation that he managed to complete before his death in World War I, Emile Durkheim's student Robert Hertz (1988) struggled with the methodological and conceptual problems of his project. Like Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, he wanted to delineate for comparative study a set of categories that were prevalent in European thought and of universal pretension. Were these categories in fact universal? Or were they the product of a particular level of social development? How could the two positions, both of which were more or less held by the Durkheimians, be reconciled? An evolutionary model, or rather orientation, offered a way out: it was, in fact, a cover story for what could not be reconciled on either conceptual or methodological grounds.' How could one study, for example, the nature of expiation in societies so different from 20th-century France that the very category was in question? How could a primordial notion of expiation, or sin, be identified? If it were identified, would this not suggest that there were, as Immanuel Kant had assumed, innate categories of the mind resistant to social, or contingent, determination? Or were there universal features of social organization that were reflected in such categories? What would these features be? The question of definition troubled Hertz. After a long discussion of sin and expiation in Christianity in the introduction to his thesis (Hertz 1988:5-27), he noted how difficult it would be to avoid the deep penetration of these Christian notions in any comparative study of religion. Hertz could offer only a weak methodological exit: To examine the facts without taking a position, a parti-pris, but with method. But can one? Hertz recognized, I believe, the impossibility of the Durkheimian project. His own procedure, though not without contradiction, was rather more complex than that of the Durkheimians: it was more psychological or at least more experiential.

Subfields: General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d769e25e9548fe8b15493704f7f59f3145cdbf48