text on back cover:

Wim van Binsbergen Confronting the Sacred: Durkheim revisited

Shikanda Press, Hoofddorp, August 2018, 567 pp. , ISBN 978-90-78382-33-1

With the publication of Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Elementary forms of religious life), in 1912, the French founding father of sociology Émile Durkheim formulated the most influential social-science theory of religion to date. Pivotal to this theory are the paired concepts ‘sacred / profane’, the notion of ‘collective representations’, and the hypothesis that through such religious symbols, society compels its members to venerate herself and thus to submit to the social as an irreducible sui generis instance in its own right. Having grappled with this Durkheimian inheritance throughout the half century of his professional life, the anthropologist of religion and intercultural philosopher Wim van Binsbergen in this book traces his own steps in confronting Durkheim’s sacred, through theoretical criticism, through ethnographic application (to popular Islam in the segmentary social organisation of the highlands of Northwestern Tunisia), and by state-of-the-art long-range methods of linguistic and comparative mythological analysis. Thus, much to his surprise, he vindicates the continued though qualified, validity of Durkheim’s theoretical insights in religion.

<< the author inspecting the temple complex of the Late Iron Age site of Siracusa, Sicily, Italy, October 2017.

WIM VAN BINSBERGEN (*1947, Amsterdam) took two social-science degrees from Amsterdam University (1968, 1971), and crowned his formal education with a cum laude PhD (1979), from the Free University, Amsterdam (supervisor Matthew Schoffeleeers, external examiner Terence Ranger); two years later this thesis became his first major book, Religious Change in Zambia [1500-1979 CE], London: Kegan Paul. He taught theoretical sociology at the University of Zambia (1971-1973), and held professorial chairs in the social sciences at Leiden (acting), Manchester, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Durban, prior to succeeding the Hegel scholar Heinz Kimmerle in the Chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam (1998). From 1977 on van Binsbergen has held senior appointments with the African Studies Centre, Leiden, where since his retirement (2012) he has been an Honorary Fellow. His recent scholarly books include Ethnicity in Mediterra-nean Protohistory (with Fred Woudhuizen, British Archaeology Reports, 2011); Black Athena Comes of Age (LIT, 2011); Before the Presocratics (Quest, 2012); Vicarious Reflections (Shikanda, 2015); Researching Power and Identity in African State Formation (with Martin Doornbos, UNISA Press, 2017); and Religion as a Social Construct (Shikanda, 2017). He is the Editor of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy; a poet incorporated in the Dutch literary canon (Gerrit Komrij, Leonard Pfeijffer); a certified diviner-healer in the Southern African tradition; and the adopted son of king Mwenekahare Kabambi, Zambia. He was President of the Netherlands Association for African Studies (1990-1993), and has been founding member and Director of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, since 2006. Most of his published work is also available from http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda, with a full list of his numerous publications. Vindicating the place of Africa within global cultural history, and a fortiori within the global politics of knowledge, has been his principal scholarly concern during the last few decades; his theoretical, methodological and interdisciplinary explorations have been prompted by this concern. He is married with the breathing pedagogue and musical performer Patricia Saegerman, and father of five adult children.