"By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the "category project" which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa"--.

• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction — The Durkheim School’s “Category Project”: A Collaborative Experiment Unfolds
• Part I — Silenced Influences and Hidden Texts
• Chapter 1 — Kantian Categories and the Relativist Turn: A Comparison of Three Routes
• Chapter 2 — Hidden Durkheim and Hidden Mauss: An Empirical Rereading of the Hidden Analogical Work Made Necessary by the Creation of a New Science
• Chapter 3 — Mana in Context: From Max Müller to Marcel Mauss
• Chapter 4 — Durkheim, the Question of the Categories, and the Concept of Labor
• Chapter 5 — Inequality is a Scientific Issue when the Technologies of Practice that Create Social Categories become Dependent on Justice in Modernity
• Chapter 6 — Experimenting with Social Matter: Claude Bernard’s Influence on the Durkheim School’s Understanding of Categories
• Part II — Lateral Links and Ambivalent Antagonists
• Chapter 7 — Freedom, Food, and the Total Social Fact: Some Terminology Details of the Category Project in “Le Don” by Marcel Mauss
• Chapter 8 — Durkheimian Thinking and the Category of Totality
• Chapter 9 — Durkheimian Creative Effervescence, Bergson, and the Ethology of Animal and Human Societies
• Chapter 10 — “It Is Not My Time that Is Thus Arranged…”: Bergson, the “Category Project,” and the Structuralist Turn
• Chapter 11 — “Let Us Dare a Little Bit of Metaphysics”: Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Louis Weber on the Categories of Causality, Time, and Technology
• Part III — Forgotten Allies and Secret Students
• Chapter 12 — The Rhythm of Space: Stefan Czarnowski’s Relational Theory of the Sacred
• Chapter 13 — La Pensée Catégorique: Marcel Granet’s Grand Sinological Project at the Heart of the L’Année Sociologique Tradition
• Chapter 14 — Drawing a Line: On Hertz’s Hands
• Chapter 15 — Between Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, or What is the Meaning of Mauss’s “Total Social Fact”?
• Chapter 16 — From Durkheim to Halbwachs: Rebuilding the Theory of Collective Representations
• Chapter 17 — Durkheim’s Quest: Philosophy beyond the Classroom and the Libraries
• Index