In their email announcement to RC16 members they wrote:
“We are thankful to Sage which has agreed to grant free access to the article in recognition of this achievement.
We are also thankful to Professor Philip Smith, Department of Sociology, Yale University, for his nomination of Lelis’s article.
The committee found Lelis’s paper to be truly pathbreaking despite dealing with a topic that has been at the center of sustained theoretical attention for decades; namely, trying to discover the origins of Durkheim’s later religious/symbolic/sacred sociology. Despite the field being picked over by so many specialists and leading scholars, Romulo has something new to say—and for this reason, this work will surely be of lasting significance.
Lelis argues in the paper that the prevailing, highly influential account about Durkheim’s reading experience of Robertson Smith is wrong. He offers a completely new way of looking at things. This lines up with much recent scholarship that sees Durkheim as part of a creative team rather than as a lone genius. Lelis goes further in connecting the dots in an evidentiary way than anyone before.
Romulo starts by noting what we have long known, which was that Durkheim always had a religious sociology. But in the early years, it was a sociology of religion preoccupied with duty, responsibility, morality and obligation. This was switched out, in the Elementary Forms, for one that looked to temporality, expressive action, signification, myth, the body, collective effervescence and ritual drama. Looking in a meticulous way to various under-explored original sources, Lelis shows that it was in fact Henri Hubert (1872-1927) who built the foundations for the Elementary Forms - especially in the period from about 1902-1905. With his key concepts and lines of vision, Hubert opened the doors for Durkheim’s magisterial synthesis, which was published a decade later. Importantly, Lelis argues that Hubert foreshadowed not only Durkheim’s familiar religious sociology but also an aesthetic turn that is buried within it. Only recently has this been identified and pitched as a viable, highly creative extension of Durkheim’s theory. But Lelis shows we should maybe think the other way round: this aesthetic sensibility was there right from the start, as one of the building blocks. In a sense the religious sociology of Durkheim emerged from Hubert’s earlier socio-aesthetic sensibility.
In sum, this is an exemplary study that illustrates the continuing necessity for sociological theory to, (1) Revisit familiar issues rather than complacently accepting received wisdom; (2) Engage in close readings of forgotten texts rather than looking only to the classics and old masters; and to (3) Pay attention to interactions between scholars as a source of creativity. But perhaps above all else there is a discovery here. The committee thought it was eminently worthy of the prize. Congratulations Romulo!”
Committee members:
Paul Joosse (University of Hong Kong)
Ilaria Riccioni (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
Daniel Silver (University of Toronto, Canada)