Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion: Embodiment,Intoxication and Collective Life

Introduction

This paper argues that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies yet has tended to be overlooked by subsequent commentators. At its most apparent in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1995) suggests that collectivities develop through the bodies of their members being marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of normative patterns of recognition, action and interaction, while individual subjects must also be excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to inhabit their physical being as a social or religious body. Manifest via multiple forms of bodily marking, shaping and decoration, Durkheim suggests that the sacred symbols of group existence structure the appearance and behaviour of embodied subjects by stimulating an ‘intense hyperexcitement of physical and mental life’ resulting in an outer and ‘inward transformation’ of the individual that serves to sustain and embolden group life (Durkheim, 1995: 213, 218, 220).

Our interpretation of Durkheim's view of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication attributes importance to under-investigated issues. While the body has, after decades of marginalization, been interrogated by sociology, intoxication resides on its borders. There have been exceptions. Marx's (1970) analysis of religion as a social opiate is the most obvious, while dimensions of intoxication are evident in classical writings on charisma and eroticism (eg Weber, 1948), and subsequent studies of symbolic interaction (eg Becker, 1997), yet this does not change the overall situation. Ordinarily seen as an issue of drug addiction, spoilt identity, or a by-product of mass hysteria, irrational crowd behaviour, or religious fanaticism, intoxication is further marginalized through its depiction in official discourse as a pathological symptom of moral malaise (Jay, 2000; McIntosh and McKeganey, 2002). Similarly, the relationship between the body and intoxication has received inadequate consideration in terms of its implications for social order, and rarely features in the interdisciplinary field of ‘body studies’ (Shilling, 1993; 2005a; but see Nettleton et al., 2011). In contrast, Durkheim's (1995; 1984; 1952) writings (in particular, those on totemism, the division of labour and suicide) reveal the importance of understanding how societies and religions are constituted through the embodied intoxication of their members.

This conjunction of bodily inscriptions and intoxication occurs for Durkheim during what exists as the ‘second phase’ of life in his work. The second phase begins when those possessed of, or being prepared for, collectively sanctioned physical markings, decorations, and habits, leave behind the low intensity, economic activity of mundane life, and participate in effervescent assemblies. These ritual assemblies reenergise their socially shaped embodied being and, through this, their attachment to community, by enabling people to congregate in the face of totemic representations of what they consider to be sacred. Such religious congregations constitute ‘an exceptionally powerful stimulant’, an intoxicating excess that fills the individual to ‘overflowing, as though with a phenomenal oversupply of forces that spill over’ and ‘spread around’ the body subject (Durkheim, 1995: 212, 220, 222, 218). While this ‘high’ provokes wild, transgressive actions, its destabilising potential is counter-balanced by the symbolic and emotive structuring power of the sacred (ibid.: 217–20, 222; Gane, 1983a, b). The sacred exerts this structuring influence as its totemic expression guides and directs these ritual actions, and is marked upon the bodies of participants, processes that help individuals imagine and experience ‘the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it’ (Durkheim, 1995: 218, 221, 226–7, 229). When embodied intoxication occurs successfully, delirious excess is harnessed to social and religious reproduction, and participants are rejuvenated in their relation to the collectivity.

Before continuing with our analysis, we need to clarify two issues regarding terminology and the scope of our discussion. First, as already indicated, using the term ‘embodied intoxication’ enables us to highlight how Durkheim's focus on effervescent assemblies in ‘primitive’ religion contains within it a relatively neglected interest in collectively induced stimulants for experiences of delirium, excess and altered consciousness. Additionally, this term allows us to outline a distinctive, Durkheimian account of modern forms of intoxication, and, more broadly, the social contexts that have shaped them. Here, while drawing heavily upon Durkheim's exploration of intoxication within Australian totemism, we supplement this through a broader engagement with his writings on modernity. This provides us with a means of interrogating how the body is shaped and energised within the more complex conditions of the current era, including localised interactional settings in addition to larger ritual occasions.

Further to this, our focus on ‘embodied intoxication’ allows us to build on the implications of Durkheim's (1995: 228, 386–7) intriguing suggestion that ritual participants sometimes employ additional stimulants to reinforce or replicate the delirium occasioned by these assemblies. Durkheim does not develop this point, but it raises the possibility that if modern people are deprived of regular effervescent assemblies they may seek out other intoxicating means of provoking the transformations occasioned by group events (as well as being attracted to new movements promising such experiences). The salience of this point for modern individualised societies is reinforced by Durkheim's (1973: 152, 160) argument that the homo duplex constitution of humans combines egoistic desires with the capacity and need to go beyond ourselves, to express and experience ‘something other than ourselves.’ As we develop it, then, ‘embodied intoxication’ engages with the influence of collectivities on these stimulants, but is also suited to analysing the efforts of individuals, as well as the power of groups, to search out and provoke hyper-excitement outside traditional religious contexts. This provides us with the terminological means to apply and develop Durkheim's concerns to situations and milieu that developed fully subsequent to his inquiries.

Second, with reference to the scope of our discussion, ‘embodied intoxication’ signifies our dual concern with body markings and stimulation. Body markings are not confined to visible surface inscriptions, but include the multiple ways in which the habits, capacities and techniques of body subjects are shaped by societies and religions. In talking about bodies, then, we are concerned with the subject as an embodied whole rather than simply their flesh (Grosz, 1994; Mellor and Shilling, 2010). Our concern with intoxication is similarly broad: we are interested in the multiple methods and substances associated with the process whereby people are excited, enthused, inebriated, stimulated and made giddy in a manner that encourages them to transcend the egoistic parameters of their bodies. Intoxication is necessarily embodied, though we write about embodied intoxication to emphasise that this is a visceral phenomenon that occasions transformations in experience as well as consciousness. Conventional usages of ‘intoxication’ are too confined to consciousness for us to assume this term can be used on its own to signify a corporeal as well as a mindful phenomenon. Additionally, intoxication can affect the embodied individual in various ways and, in inviting exploration of how this occurs in any given situation, the holistic scope of ‘embodied intoxication’ can help illuminate some of the central vitalising characteristics of specific forms of social and religious life. These concerns are already evident in Durkheim's writings, yet can be developed in the context of contemporary societies.

Our paper progresses as follows: we begin by explicating the central elements of Durkheim's theory by exploring the marking and stimulating of bodies and, in a subsequent section, by examining the direction in which rituals steer these embodied processes in relation to their effects upon the collectivity. Our analysis then develops analytically his implicit concern that modernity has stimulated increases in abnormal forms of embodied intoxication (forms that fail to attach individuals securely to the wider societies in which they live), and by illustrating the utility of this analytical framework by applying it to the recent resurgence of Christian revivalism. ¹ In conclusion, we suggest that while body markings and examples of individual and collectively focused intoxication clearly exist in the present age, a Durkheimian account of how ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ these may be continues to raise important questions about tensions and problems within modern societies.

The ritualisation of embodied intoxication

In explicating Durkheim's theory, it is important to reiterate that the effervescent assemblies in which embodied intoxication occurs during the second phase of social life are centred around rituals that are themselves focused upon the totem of the collectivity; the sacred sign/symbol that represents the tribe to itself, and that is implicated in stimulating body markings and hyper-excitement among participants. This is clear in Durkheim's (1995: 375–80) description of the black snake rituals of the Warramunga. Adorned with figures representing the totemic black snake, two key celebrants exhaust themselves through running and jumping. Once they have collapsed, other ritual participants caress the emblematic designs covering their backs. Acting out the mythical history of the ancestor, additional totemic ceremonies are conducted involving those commemorating this past in repeated ‘rhythmic and violent trembling’ that disperses the down with which they have covered their bodies as a way of depicting the original scattering of the ‘seeds of life’ (ibid.: 376). Requiring dramatic expenditures of emotional energy, it is through these bodily markings and actions that the Warramunga ‘periodically revitalizes the sense it has of itself’ (ibid.: 379). Individuals exit these occasions with renewed group memories, a ‘feeling of strength and confidence’, and a consciousness transformed through the religious conviction that the black snakes themselves, sacred to the tribe, ‘cannot fail to increase and multiply’ (ibid.: 379, 377).

Durkheim provides other examples of how totemic images are key to the means by which individuals register and ‘hail’ others as participants in collective life (eg Durkheim, 1995: 125, 138, 233), but three main elements characterise each case of embodied intoxication. The first involves the totem's influence in structuring the body markings of a group. Evident ‘on the outside of houses and canoes, on weapons, instruments and tombs’, and also on people's bodies (Durkheim, 1995: 114), this involves variably visible identifications that associate (through signs, symbols, clothing, habits or techniques) subjects with the collectivity. As Durkheim, argues, individuals ‘imprint’ the totemic image ‘in their flesh, and it becomes part of them’; an assimilation that is ‘by far, the most important’ mode of representation … within totemic societies' (ibid.). Sociologists have long presupposed that individuals always exist within, and are shaped by, society, but Durkheim reminds us that being identified with a social or religious collectivity is not automatic but requires marks of membership.

Collective body markings date back to the earliest societies and major religions. Durkheim cites Procopius's suggestion that the first Christians had the name of Christ or the sign of the cross imprinted on their skin, while pilgrims tattooed their arms or wrists ‘with designs representing the cross or the monogram of Christ’ when visiting holy places (Durkheim, 1995: 234). Durkheim observes collective markings among ‘soldiers of the same camp, sailors on the same ship, and prisoners in the same house of detention’ (ibid.), but notes that such signs are not confined to mechanical solidarities, and exist within societies that celebrate individuality. Indeed, markings associated with particular styles or traditions have, if anything, flourished within a Western milieu associated with ‘the cult of the individual’ (Durkheim, 1984; Shilling, 2005b).

Socially sanctioned body markings remain evident in the contemporary era, then, even if they reflect a differentiated, associationally based society, but it is importanttorecogniseotherwaysinwhichbodiesareimprintedbycollectivities. This is clear in Durkheim's analysis of representative or commemorative rites that bring individuals into contact with the totem. In the case of the Arunta, for example, participants mimic jumping kangaroos, the flight of ants, or the crying of eagles (Durkheim, 1995: 357). Mauss's (1973) writings are relevant here as they suggest that such totemic mimicking shapes the constitution of the habitus; the outcome of processes wherein social norms are internalized via the incorporation of body techniques. For Mauss (1973), seemingly natural actions of the body-subject are learned through collectively structured apprenticeships: these body techniques provide the cultural, biological and psychological potential for collectivities to reproduce themselves, revealing common ‘markings’ on the individual that reach beneath surface inscriptions.

Mauss's analysis of body techniques recalls Durkheim's (1982: 39, 52–3) emphasis on social facts becoming evident in individuals' feelings, habits and appearances, as much as in social institutions, and this mention of feelings introduces the second characteristic of embodied intoxication. For collectivities to exist, it is insufficient for bodies to be marked or shaped with the dispositional potential for normative patterns of mutual recognition and inter/action. Individuals have additionally to be motivated and emotionally energized to occupy and develop the social dimensions of these bodies. Durkheim (1995: 233–4) calls this collective intoxication; the process leading people to almost ‘instinctively’ copy the symbols, customs, affective foundations and consciousness of collectivities during the totemic rituals of effervescent assemblies. In its various forms, indeed, intoxication has operated alongside collective body markings/shapings in forming culture since before classical Graeco-Roman times (Wale, 2001: 2; Boothroyd, 2006: 10).

To be intoxicated, for Durkheim, is to be open to transcendence of the individual, egoistic characteristics of one's physical self. Stimulated by the collective experience of congregating amidst the sacred, participants are ‘pulled away from … ordinary occupations and preoccupations’, and moved to the point of delirium akin to ‘the religious state’ (Durkheim, 1995: 386). It is through this intoxicating feeling of hyper-excitement that individuals become attached or cathected to the collective dimensions of their bodies, and motivated to pursue impersonal ends and collective ‘rules of conduct’ (Durkheim, 1973). ² In exciting individuals about, and propelling them to invest in, the collective aspects of their embodiment, such experience exceeds the self, sensitizing the body to others (Jay, 2006). This opens embodied subjects to a ‘rush of energy’ from outside, a sustaining ‘lift’ resulting in an outwardly oriented confidence that revitalizes individuals to immerse themselves energetically within society and religion (Durkheim, 1995: 213). Once born, individuals may never escape entirely the influence of social factors, but Durkheim's analysis highlights the importance of recognising that embodied subjects can be characterised by varying degrees of attachment to the collectivities of which they form a part, and of understanding the processes related to varying degrees of unification or dislocation.

In this context, the rituals in which bodily markings and effervescent intoxications occur are effective not simply when they are associated with normative ideals, but because people experience them as an enacted social force (see Rawls, 1996). As Ramp (1998: 141) notes, it is these ‘charged emotional environments of ritual assemblies’ that ‘call individuals out of themselves, imbuing them with a heightened sense of their participation in the collective’. This propulsive charging is associated with a keen awareness of inhabiting a body that is markedly social, and that is stronger because it is socially marked. No longer dominated by egoism (Durkheim, 1973), the embodied subject feels ‘possessed’ and ‘regenerated’ by ‘external power’, a possession brought about and represented by the masks, decorations and physical ‘inscriptions’ that occur within or are re-focused upon by the ritual assembly (Durkheim, 1995: 218, 229, 353). Here, the sacred potential of the body ‘erupts onto the surface’, evident through decoration, ‘cutting, scarification, tattooing, painting’ and other manifestations that ‘affirm the communion of individuals in a shared moral whole’ (Durkheim, 1995: 138, 233).

Intoxication is vital in enabling embodied subjects to overcome egoistic sensory appetites that have ‘individuality and it alone as their object’ (Durkheim, 1995: 151). This is because transcending the self is not easy, involving a sacrifice of self-centred desire if individuals are to enjoy cultural existence (Pickering and Rosati, 2008); an argument reflecting Durkheim's (1973: 152–3) view that physical and emotional pain is involved in the formation of any religion or culture, and underpinned by his homo duplex model of the embodied subject. Rejecting constructionist assumptions about the individual as wholly social, Durkheim (1973) is keenly aware of the contingencies involved in maintaining body subjects as collective beings. Anomie and associated losses of energy, increases in melancholy, and the fading of threads attaching individuals to life may follow insufficient involvement in collectivities, but effervescent intoxication with collective life remains necessary for subjects to ‘reach beyond’ their individual selves in order to become connected energetically to group life (Durkheim, 1952: 287–8; 1973).

Contemporary theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1972) utilise various terms, including ‘Body without Organs’, to express the openness of embodied subjects to external linkages. Durkheim not only recognized over fifty years earlier that this can occur, but also explored how individuals assume this expansionary existence through an intoxicating inhabiting of the collectively marked body. In focusing upon intoxication, moreover, Durkheim anticipated biological and psychological arguments that reinforce the significance he attributes to this process. These hold that intoxication involves neural pathways responsible for the pleasure we derive from social activities (including sex and social interaction) crucial to our evolutionary survival, and mirrors those strong emotions involved in the formation in infancy of human bonds (Tyler, 1988; Smith, 1992); factors suggesting that experiences of intoxication are key to stimulating involvement within collectivities. As Smith (1992: 249) puts it, intoxication constitutes a ‘ground form’ of the human and social condition.

Ritually mediated intoxication

If the first two characteristics of embodied intoxication involve marking and stimulating bodies in the context of totemic ritual assemblies possessed of sacred, religious character, the third is the directionality of this process. ‘Directionality’ is associated with Weber's comparative interest in the particular expectations and experiences associated with specific religions (Roth, 1987), yet also relates to Durkheim's interests and can be defined here as the trajectory of the collective effects initiated by the ritual marking and hyperexcitement of body subjects. In this context, directionality is akin to the function Parsons (1978) ascribes to cultural values in steering people's actions towards social norms, although Durkheim's concern with trajectory incorporates ritual actions and emotions, thus avoiding the overemphasis Parsons places on cognitive symbolism at the expense of embodiment.

The importance of directionality is evident in Durkheim's account of effervescent assemblies, but can also illustrated by accounts of status transitions. In the former, Durkheim associates effervescent assemblies with systems of rituals, or cults, distinguishable into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ types: the former focus on the potentially sacrilegious encounter with what a collectivity holds to be sacred, such as the Christian Eucharist where God is eaten symbolically/sacramentally; the latter maintain separation between sacred and profane through, amongst other things, taboos. Both can increase the social and ‘religious zest of individuals’ whether they proceed via ‘[a]nointings, purifications and blessings’ or through ‘fasts and vigils … retreats and silence.’ Neither effects a simple quantitative increase in stimulation, however, as both mark and prepare embodied subjects to act in certain ways and not others: participants are imparted, in other words, with a directionality in terms of how they should act and appear in relation to the sacred, totemic priorities of the collectivity (Durkheim, 1995: 314). Similarly, the intoxication associated with positive and negative cults is also possessed of directionality: hyper-excitement occurs in relation to the sacred norms of society or religion, seeking to organise individual bodily markings and motivations in directions that embolden the collectivity. This is clear in Durkheim's (1995: 375–6) analysis of the black snake rituals of the Warramunga mentioned earlier. Dramatic performances stimulate ideals and feelings linking past to present, leaving participants with a strong sense of moral well-being (ibid.: 379, 382).

Victor Turner's (1969) analysis of liminality supplements this account by focusing on a particular form of directionality, detailing how ritual processes recruit and re-attach body-subjects to collectivities, and direct their subsequent transition to new roles. Here, individuals approach the threshold of status-passages through a period of embodied-reconstruction-in-progress where they are energised to inhabit newly marked bodies as they move through societal structures. Durkheim's (1995) account of the positive rites of Native American males exemplifies this, summarising the corporeal marking and intoxication that occurs during the liminal, in-between period in which individuals have discarded previous roles and habits, but have not yet been re-formed as body-subjects able to assume new roles within the tribe.

Drawing on Heckewelder's work, Durkheim describes how in preparation for this period initiates are subjected to regimes involving fasting and intoxicating concoctions resulting in ‘visions’ and ‘extraordinary dreams to which the entire exercise’ leads them (cited in Durkheim, 1995: 164). In combination with the influence of dominant cultural symbols, this usually results in individuals encountering patron animals; figures who guide them in their new lives. Thus, the cultural and religious norms and objects marked upon and introduced into the embodied self during this period of liminal intoxication reshape individuals ‘in conformity with the moral order of society’ (Turner and Turner, 1992: 152). It is through these assemblies of embodied intoxication that the totem and community gets remade (Rawls, 1996: 448).

This analysis of ritual highlights Durkheim's (1995: 208–9) recognition that embodied intoxication does not simply provoke a feeling of hyper-excitement, and the ‘flooding’ of the body by external forces, but possesses specific cultural directionality. This directionality is steered by ritual actions and symbolism, and by the amount and nature of intoxicants consumed. Effervescent assemblies may result in intoxication in and of themselves, but Durkheim (1995: 228, 387) makes what is for us the essential point that participants seek out and consume additional ‘artificial’ intoxicants in order to extend and replicate the delirium of sacred assemblies.

Fitz Poole's (1985, 1998) analysis of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea usefully illustrates how additional intoxicants facilitate status transition in tribal societies. The core features of Bimin-Kuskusmin lore are transmitted via male initiation rituals demarcated through twelve stages of cultural hierarchy, physical conditioning, and the consumption of increasingly potent intoxicants. Each stage constitutes an ordeal providing the individual with culturally approved spiritual knowledge, testing their capacity to direct body and mind toward tribally normative outcomes. They culminate in ecstatic trances in which the individual ‘remains in the body whilst the “social person” spirit travels out of the body and, helped by a guardian ancestor spirit, visits the ancestral underworld to learn the secrets of esoteric knowledge’ (Rudgley, 1993: 83–5). This directionally structured embodied intoxication results in a joining of the initiate to the collectivity at progressively deeper levels of its heritage.

The processes of bodily marking and intoxication identified in the first part of this paper – processes structured through ritual-based effervescent assemblies which steer the direction in which individuals are affected by hyper-excitement or feelings of transcendence – constitute the basics of Durkheim's approach. Durkheim developed this framework most clearly in relation to ethnographic materials on totemism, however, and this raised questions about its relevance to modern societies. Some critics associated Durkheim with a Western anthropology of ‘primitivism’ that engaged in imperialist depictions of traditional societies as ‘primitive’ and inferior to ‘the modern’ (eg Kuper, 1988). Others felt his work required a post-modern reading which disconnected it from its original empirical grounding (eg Mestrovic, 1993).

In addressing these doubts, it should be noted that Durkheim was aware of the inadequacies of rigid historical dichotomies, emphasised the diversity of non-European peoples, and studied non-Western cultures as a means of critiquing Western cultural developments, particularly for their individualism, their reduction of humans to Homo economicus, and their marginalisation of collective religiosity (Durkheim, 1984; Mauss, 1969a; Kurasawa, 2003). ³ He did not, in other words, view his ethnographically grounded work as irrelevant to modernity, but guarded against unwarranted extrapolations of his findings to contrasting historical epochs. Understood in this context, Durkheim's work on embodied intoxication remains relevant to modernity. Developed as it was in the context of elementary forms of religious worship, however, it requires extending in relation to his other studies. It is to these that we now turn.

Tradition, modernity and forms of embodied intoxication

Three aspects of Durkheim's broader writings are, we suggest, central to the issue of embodied intoxication in modernity. These involve his recognition of: 1) the distinctive ends to which normative forms of embodied intoxication are directed in traditional and modern societies, 2) the growing gap between societal and religious intoxication in modernity, and 3) the increase of ‘abnormal’ forms of bodily intoxication within modernity. Durkheim explored these developments in writings on moral education and nationalism, professional ethics, the division of labour, and suicide. The first two developments enable us to explain why modernity is particularly vulnerable to ‘abnormal’ forms of intoxication, while the third highlights the implications for modernity of dysfunctional quantities and qualities of embodied intoxication. Taken together, they reveal the differentiation of religion into an institutional sphere, the shrinking scope of extra-religious effervescent assemblies, and the rise of body markings and intoxicants undermining of societal solidarity. While embodied intoxication remains associated with certain conventional social assemblies in the modern world, such as nationalistic rituals and sporting spectacles (Dunning, 1999), it also occurs in milieu possessed of highly ambivalent relationships with the norms of rational society (Juergensmeyer, 2003).

In what follows, we consider in turn the three developments identified above. Our aim is not simply to show how Durkheim's analysis is relevant to modernity, but to develop creatively and extend analytically his account in order to illuminate contemporary phenomena. Durkheim acknowledged that modernity restructured the collectivity so that it became more dispersed – except when assembled for national and other occasional rituals – but we can now look at social changes since his time as well as the difficulties they have posed for normal forms of embodied intoxication.

The first additional aspect of Durkheim's work considered here involves his recognition of the distinctive ends to which traditional and modern intoxication have been directed. In studying totemism, Durkheim (1995) focused on the energised occupation of socially/religiously marked bodies characteristic of mechanical solidarities. Integration was based on resemblance. The whole took precedence over the individual, and mechanical solidarities were characterised by minimal individuation and a weak division of labour. Here, embodied intoxication sought through positive and negative rites to dissolve boundaries separating individuals, achieving significant identity between subject and collectivity, by facilitating the development of an ‘open body/collective self’ (cf. Falk, 1994). The precise markings and shapings of bodies within tribes could be differentiated via sex, age and status, with allowance made for exceptional functionaries such as shamans. These distinctions would occur within a restricted range, however, facilitated by the directionality of rituals that maintained their overall relationship to the totem. They would be characterised by varieties within an overall unity; forms of marking and intoxication Durkheim referred to as normal because they engendered social solidarity.

As modernity attributed increased significance to the individual as the unit of action – albeit an interdependent unit within the social division of labour – markings and intoxications based upon the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries become inimical to societal development. For Durkheim (1984: 85), this indicated a move from mechanical towards organic solidarity in which unity is achieved by coordinating individual difference rather than reproducing collective resemblance; a development that reduced opportunities for effervescent assemblies and stigmatised stimulants that undermined individuality. In contrast to the open body/collective self of traditional societies, legitimate intoxication became characterised by limited endorsements of intoxicants supportive of what we refer to as an ‘energised body/productive self’ suited to economic milieu in which individual performativity was key. This shift was most visible, after a period of liberal experimentation in the nineteenth century, as states adopted prohibitive approaches towards drugs associated with the dissolution of ego boundaries and the promotion of relaxed sociability (Jay, 2000). Alcohol was banned from the workplace (and, for periods, from societies), for example, while governments criminalized intoxicants, such as marijuana, assessed by authorities, and often experienced by users, as inimical to instrumentalism and possessive individualism (McKenna, 1992: 154, 160; Roberts, 1992).

This shift in acceptable forms of intoxication was not, however, unproblematic. In an increasingly segmented society – in which intoxication was restricted in the productive sphere, yet advocated in specific non-chemical forms within education as necessary for stimulating passion among future citizens and producers – issues related to the co-ordination of distinctive bodily markings and excitements loomed large (Durkheim, 1961; 1984; 1992). If states sought to limit intoxication within the workplace, how could they ensure individuals were motivated sufficiently to secure commitment without compromising productivity? Would occasional educational/ritual celebrations of nationalism suffice as focal points that harnessed increasingly differentiated and individualised forms of embodied intoxication?

This issue of coordination was made acute by the second element of Durkheim's work considered here; the growing gap between societal and religious intoxication. Within traditional collectivities, ‘society’ and ‘religion’ were synonymous to the extent that Durkheim sometimes used the terms interchangeably (Fields, 1995: xxxiv–xxxv). Society was the religious object that formed the basis on which embodied individuals were marked and attached to the collectivity. Reflecting the morphology of their social and natural milieu, the treatment of bodies and excitement of subjects congregating in effervescent assemblies, focused upon the presence of a tribe's sacred totem, constituted a religious worship of society (Durkheim, 1995: 225–36). In modernity, however, while similarities between religious and social processes remained, social differentiation concentrated religious intoxication into institutions possessed of limited influence. Religious intoxication was itself weakened, moreover, by the post-Reformation spread of Protestantism. Durkheim follows Weber here in depicting Protestantism as a faith based upon a ‘spirit of free inquiry’ and the disorganisation of traditional habits, yet whose relatively few common beliefs and bodily practices failed to forge a ‘temporal bond of union’ among followers (Durkheim, 1952: 158–9). Alongside the modern focus on the energised body/productive self, this situation marginalised religious forms of intoxication. For Durkheim (1984), this not only raised the issue of coordinating the distinctive forms, intensities and absences of bodily intoxication across differentiated societies, a task he did not believe was undertaken adequately, but also increased his concern that modernity was vulnerable to a proliferation of abnormal forms of embodied intoxication. This brings us to the third element of Durkheim's work pertinent to its contemporary relevance.

While Durkheim explicated his approach to society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication with reference to ‘normal’ forms within traditional societies, forms that strengthened the collectivity, his work suggests ‘abnormal’ forms could undermine moral cohesion. This is implicit in his discussions of how the hyperexcitement associated with effervescent assemblies could for a time lead to transgression and the overturning of social norms, and the injury and even death of participants (eg Durkheim, 1995: 217–18, 396). It can also be developed from his writings on suicide and the division of labour, when he identifies the problems that follow a dysfunctional relationship between the individual and society. The dislocation that follows inadequate social integration can leave individuals' passions uninformed or overregulated by collective relations and deprived of sufficient opportunities to be expressed in and moulded through socially authorised occasions (eg Durkheim, 1952: 258; 1984: 306). This can result in individuals developing ‘unregulated temperament[s]’, and searching for ‘new sensations’ not tied to the consolidation of the collectivity. As Durkheim's (1952: 288, 281) writings on suicide suggest, such outcomes are damaging not only for social cohesion, but also for individuals who can reach the stage where they only find ‘intoxicating’ the prospect of death (Durkheim, 1952: 288, 281).

In clarifying what is involved here, we need to analyse the two variables that underpin Durkheim's assessment of normal forms of embodied intoxication, as it is their development within modernity that reveals his continued relevance for understanding contemporary forms of abnormal intoxication. The quantity and the quality of embodied intoxication were, for Durkheim, crucial in determining whether the marking and effervescent motivating of body subjects would strengthen or undermine collectivities. Durkheim suggested that normal quantities of embodied intoxication actually included periods of apparently ‘excessive’ hyper-excitation alongside regular experiences of intoxication, if group life was to be consolidated. Normal qualities of intoxication, in contrast, concerned the need to utilize rituals, and specific intoxicants, appropriate to the directional task of attaching individuals to the collectively shaped aspects of their embodied being (rather than, for example, to objects, ‘highs’ or obsessions undermining of these collective dimensions of physical being). Without appropriate direction, Durkheim recognized that the marking and intoxication of bodies can occur in a manner that is abnormal in relation to the reproduction of the collectivity. Given that these variables were key to his arguments about the proliferation of abnormal forms in modernity, we now focus on them in detail.

The rise of abnormal forms

The quantity of embodied intoxication constitutes the first key variable in Durkheim's assessment and it is important to reemphasise here the counterintuitive point that normal forms include occasions of seemingly excessive intoxication that consolidate the symbolic order of society, despite appearing to threaten it. This is evident in our earlier analysis of Durkheim's description of the delirium associated with positive rites, an analysis he develops with reference to ‘the ambiguity of the sacred’. By this, he is concerned to highlight how religious ceremonies can stimulate a hyper-intoxication so intense that it provokes wild actions, sexual relations and passions that ‘can be satisfied only by violent and extreme acts’, while still ultimately reinforcing a collective order (Durkheim, 1995: 218, 213). Thus, the brutal aggression of the Crusades and the French Revolution (Durkheim, 1995: 213, 397–403), and the delirium evident in tribal funeral rites and orgiastic feasts (Durkheim, 1995: 218), are all identified as ‘religious’ processes in which collective life is strengthened through an excessive intoxication that threatens to overwhelm it (see Ramp, 1998).

Mauss and Bataille provide additional examples of how ‘excessive’ intoxication can be normal in relation to the consolidation of collectivities. Mauss's (1969a: 11–12, 37) analysis of the potlatch, where sacred rituals involving marriages, initiations and séances co-exist with orgies, violence and the overturning of hierarchies, captures the combination of solemnity and wild celebration characteristic of such occasions. So does Bataille's (1991) use of the ‘primitive feast’ as a model for the religious embrace of delirious excess, the ‘accursed share’, which underpins and threatens society. Here, occasions of excessive indulgence, that provide spectacular examples of ‘surplus’ intoxication, re-charge and sustain more mundane instances of excitement within a ‘general economy’ of collective energies flowing above and below the ‘restricted economy’ of contemporary capitalism (Bataille, 1991: 9). Both Mauss and Bataille reflect Durkheim's (1995: 209) own emphasis on the importance of excessive and more mundane exchanges of intoxicating energies in overriding tendencies towards individualism and utilitarian calculation that would otherwise dominate modern social interaction. In these cases, hyperexcitement seems to threaten the orders it reinforces, but is structured and steered respectively by customised bodily habits of reciprocity based upon collective memory that enforce reciprocity in the potlatch, and the myths and customised bodily practices common to the expenditure of the accursed share.

While Durkheim classifies intoxication as ‘normal’ when delirious excess and ordinary daily life emboldens the collectivity, it is the modern aversion to excess that allows him to define those restricted forms of intoxication characteristic of contemporary societies as ‘abnormal’. In contrast to a situation where intoxication is so important that individuals become social beings through it (shaped collectively via an ‘open body’ subject to the regulation of religious rituals), the dominant modern approach to intoxication is characterised by fear of its threat to social differentiation and individualization (Durkheim, 1984: 291–328). Reflecting the destabilising effects of the delirious excess intoxication can provoke, Rudgley (1993: 145) notes that societies routinely distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms, and intensities, of intoxication. In traditional societies characterised by collective religious engagements with non-rational, intoxicating emotional energies, however, social orders could more easily be strengthened through the regulated embrace of this excess. In modernity, not only have religion and society separated, but the dependence of the latter on instrumental rationality makes intoxication more potentially destabilising. In marginalising religion, modern Western society has removed from itself the major means through which potentially destructive emotional energies were harnessed and controlled; those religiously prescribed and proscribed rites and taboos that mediated people's relations with the sacred and profane. Thus, contemporary societies remain dependent on degrees of intoxication to produce the ‘energised body/productive self’ fit for capitalism, but increasingly regulate against the dangers of ‘excess’ intoxication; a situation Durkheim regards as exacerbating the anomic, devitalizing effects of an inadequately coordinated division of labour (Durkheim, 1995, 1984).

In this context, modernity for Durkheim has entered a ‘dispersed state’: life becomes ‘monotonous, slack and humdrum’, and people lack incentives to maintain or energetically occupy the body markings or habits through which they recognize themselves and others as members of a collectivity (Durkheim, 1995: 217; 1952; 1984). The concern for Durkheim (1952; 1961) is that instead of being physically marked and motivated to inhabit the social elements of their bodily being, individuals lacking integration of their appetites and desires would experience dissatisfaction and the creeping paralysis of despair. Such circumstances result in intoxication becoming dangerously individualistic, unadjusted to social norms, ‘freed from all restraint’ and having no object other than itself (Durkheim, 1952: 209, 287). Turned inwards, the individual can fall victim to the ‘infinity of desires’, ‘feeling there is nothing to which he can attach himself’, lost and desperate in a destructive inner search for a referent firm enough to anchor and impart sense to the experience of intoxication (ibid.: 287–8).

Thus, while authorized intoxication has not been obliterated within modernity, the prescriptive approach adopted by legislatures (manifest in the case of intoxicants labelled ‘illegal drugs’, but also evident in legislation controlling marches, meetings and worship), raises doubts about the quantities of attachment secured by contemporary bodily stimulation. In Durkheim's (1995: 218–9) terms, the concern here is whether ‘the first phase’ of low intensity, ‘monotonous, slack and humdrum’ life has overwhelmed second phase assemblies in which frenzied body markings and intoxicating emotions reinvigorate society. This is evident in the weakness of those intoxicants considered legitimate promoters of the modern commitment to productive and possessive individualism. Previously used in mind-altering strengths and ritual situations designed to open individuals to the collectivity, for example, tobacco was introduced to the modern West in mild forms suited to providing palliative relief from the routines of instrumental life, yet ill-suited to reinforcing the delirium associated with effervescent assemblies (Lenson, 1995: 37; Hughes, 2003: 6). As tobacco became tightly regulated, following concerns regarding its effects on health and productivity (Jackson, 1995), caffeinated and other ‘energy drinks’ have become intoxicants of legitimate choice. Possessed of a history in the West related to the development of commerce, insurance and bourgeois respectability (McKenna, 1992; Smith, 1995: 154–6), coffee was consumed ritually in commercial sites associated with ‘honesty, reliability and moderation’ and helped energise local interactional rites based around business (Smith, 1995: 154–5). While alcohol ‘dulled the senses’, coffee was viewed and experienced as increasing mental acuity, ‘thereby promoting better business’, and has become the liquid drunk by individuals needing to wake up for, and obtain a boost during, work (Gusfield, 1996: 69). Energy drinks are also consumed within contemporary sporting sub-cultures associated with competition and also with collective rites of masculinity within these limited interactional settings (Miller, 2008).

A Durkheimian concern with such intoxication, however, is that its relative weakness and instrumentality fails to connect individuals to overarching moral collectivities. Such intoxication may not only be insufficient to prevent the anomic dislocation of individuals from wider society, but could also leave individuals and collectivities exposed to egoistic forms of intoxication in which desire or escape from the devitalisation of life is pursued as an end in itself, as evident in the modern preoccupation with drug addiction. A recurring theme in sociological studies of drug use classified and experienced as highly addictive, for example, is how the search for supply dominates users' lives (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009). What we have here is a meeting of insufficient intoxication at the level of society, and excessive intoxication at the level of the individual: at each level, there is an absence of the collective regulation of intoxication other than that provided by the legislature.

Generally, this leaves individuals exposed to the socially corrosive, intoxication excesses of, for example, ‘illicit’ drug use, or to the temptations of engaging in potentially criminalising taboo breaking behaviour for its own sake, but also to the intoxicating appeal of aberrant religious and neo-religious groupings centred on centripetal nationalism, anti-Semitism, ethnic revivalism and terrorism (Mestrovic, 1994; Hervieu-Léger, 2000). In all these cases, the vacuum of an insufficiently stimulating society provides the context in which individuals engage in practices damaging to themselves and/or to an overarching moral order. Addictive drug use still involves localised rituals, but also results frequently in ill-health, disease and anti-social behaviour (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009), while extreme nationalist, religious or racist groupings engage in rituals actions that stimulate a virulent excitement associated with undermining wider societal cohesion (Scheff, 1994).

The quality of embodied intoxication constitutes the second variable in Durkheim's assessment of abnormal forms, moving us from considerations about the amount of intoxication towards directional issues regarding its culturally corrosive character. While delirious excess, in its individuated form, along with the broader insufficiency of modernity's collective engagement with intoxication, can be damaging to collective life, the non-normative, culturally corrosive direction in which intoxication can stimulate embodied subjects is also destructive. We noted previously the importance of positive and negative rites in imparting cultural direction to the inclinations and compulsions stimulated by intoxicants, but the collective importance of this directionality is clarified by Wallace's experimental work on the effects of peyote on North American Indians and white Americans. As a longstanding, culturally embraced, ritually ordered intoxicant in a number of North American Indian tribes, it provoked among native Indians stable shifts in mood alongside feelings of religious reverence. The white subjects for whom peyote held no such cultural or ritual significance, in contrast, experienced extreme and volatile shifts of mood ranging from depression and anxiety to euphoria (Rudgley, 1993: 76). While the former, Indian use, was directionally normative, the latter risked cultural corrosion.

It is not just the cultural/ritual framing of intoxication that imparts it with directionality, however, but the specific means or type of intoxicant utilized. Durkheim generally locates intoxicating hyper-excitement in the effervescence stimulated by sacred collective assemblies, yet also references the importance of specific intoxicants, including drugs, in attaching individuals to the orientations and norms imprinted on their bodies by society (Durkheim, 1995: 163–4). The precise intoxicants involved are crucial and are chosen or forbidden because of their capacity to facilitate appropriate linkages to the collectivity. As McKenna (1992: 154) argues, the ‘way of life of an entire culture’ is often linked to ‘the attitudes and assumptions engendered by’ the type of intoxicant sanctioned by its members. While certain are ceremonially authorized, others are banned because of their cultural ‘unholiness’ (Szasz, 2003).

The directional legitimacy of intoxicants was managed ritually within traditional societies – as illustrated by the Bimin-Kuskusmin who varied the drugs used during initiation in terms of their capacity to facilitate highs congruent with the cultural journey they assisted participants in undertaking – but became a modern preoccupation. Alcohol consumption in early modern Puritan communities in the United States, for example, was condemned when it altered the individual's orientation towards their body and religion. Exclusion from the church marked the individual as having become abnormally intoxicated, separated from God, and concerned to live for immediate pleasure, rather than future righteousness (Jay, 2000: 229; Wale, 2001: 58, 68). As the differentiation of societies reached a stage when control escaped any single community, the modern West turned not only to legislative means, but also to the expansion of consumer culture predicated upon the stimulation of excitement, desire and intoxication for productive purposes (Foucault, 1988; Szasz, 2003: 49; Coomber and South, 2004: 14).

Whether such attempts to harness intoxication to the promotion of an energised body/productive self will succeed raises more questions than can be answered here. In highlighting the continued relevance of the Durkheimian framework explicated in this article, however, it is useful to explore one of the most socially significant forms of embodied intoxication to develop in recent decades, the resurgence of religious revivalism. This focus is important since Durkheim viewed religious and social intoxication as inextricably related in traditional societies, yet traced a growing dislocation between religion and society that rendered modern society vulnerable to abnormal forms of intoxication. Durkheim remained bleak with regard to the prospects of modern institutionalised religion, but argued that religious intoxication is a basic human need and also that new religious forces would emerge when economic transformation was complemented by an appropriate moral framework (Pickering, 2009). In this context, the resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism raises important issues relating to the compatibility of this form of intoxication with the energised body/productive self of the contemporary era. In exploring whether this constitutes a renewed consecration of the social by the religious, moreover, this returns our analysis to Durkheim's (1995) concerns in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Within or without society? Intoxicating religious revivalism

In exploring the resurgence of religious revivialism, we focus on those ecstatic forms of worship central to Pentecostal, Evangelical and Charismatic forms of Christianity that enjoyed huge growth during the late twentieth century. This religious movement includes at least a quarter of a billion people, exists at the core of those ‘massive religious mobilizations’ occurring globally over the last few decades, and makes previous sociological assumptions about secularisation appear partial (Martin, 2002: 1; Antoun and Hegland, 1987; Berger, 1999). Christian revivalism serves as a particularly pertinent case for our purposes, moreover, as its growth mirrors in certain respects, and contains affinities with, the international spread of capitalism (Poloma, 2003: 17). Having expanded from the West across the world, among peoples dissatisfied with traditional modes of existence, aspiring to improved living conditions, it continues to influence strongly Christian worship in North America, resonating with economic developments based upon possessive individualism and the rationalisation of social life (Martin, 2002).

Building upon long standing ‘seeds of individualism’ evident in Christianity (Louth, 1997: 126–7), Pentecostalism and associated forms of Charismatic worship parallel Durkheim's (1952) assessment of Protestantism as a faith focused on individuals, rather than communities. In contrast to Durkheim's (1952: 158–9) comments on the paucity of religious effervescence associated with Puritanism, however, this revivalism involves an emotive form of sacred intoxication; an embodied intoxication individuated at an experiential level, yet able to promote strong patterns of community. Characteristic forms of worship are minimally structured. Recognising the individual as the voluntary recipient of God's love and joy, the body of the worshipping subject is at first glance ‘marked’ collectively in this-worldly terms only through its recognition as a potential recipient of this experience; a marking that would appear to enable the energy of the intoxicated believer to be harnessed to a variety of this-worldly goals and purposes, even though a strong sense of religious community is evident, as well as to society as a whole.

This combination of individualism and collective religious intoxication is depicted in Poloma's (2003) study of the epicentre of charismatic revival in the 1990s, the Toronto Blessing. International in scope, attracting Christians from dozens of countries, yet lacking even shared hymnals or prayer books, the physical posture of worship was a matter of personal preference and changed as individuals responded to their spiritual yearnings (ibid.: 41). In the same service individuals manifest their embodied intoxication by succumbing to the ‘sacred swoon’ of God's presence, by laughing hysterically, weeping uncontrollably, arms aloft and standing up, or by sitting down with a radiant smile during ‘a time of both great interiority and divine connection’ (ibid.: 2, 41; Miller, 1997: 91). Respectful of the individual as a unit of agency, the experience of being overwhelmed by God's presence revivified those who opened themselves. Emboldened as individuals, in their individual relation to God, these worshippers returned with renewed enthusiasm to their workaday lives, but also with a powerful sense of being part of a moral community (Poloma, 1996, 1998).

In Durkheim's terms, the widespread appeal of this revivalism, coupled with the experience of individually cathartic ecstasy, could be viewed as a form of ‘normal’ religious embodied intoxication ideally suited to the vitalisation of capitalist societies. The issue remains of coordinating its effects with the instrumental orientation of, and prescriptions against intoxication within, the workplace. In contrast to the ‘abnormal’ forms noted above, however, this religion overcomes tendencies towards anomie, reattaching individuals to community through a creative rather than corrosive embrace of excess, while the individual, aspirational, and flexible model of religiosity it promotes promises to overcome separations between the religious and the social in modernity.

In reality, however, the delirious intoxication stimulated by Christian revivalism in many contexts across the globe has made it an object of suspicion and, sometimes, opprobrium, even in the US, where Pentecostal, charismatic and evangelical forms have their greatest numbers in the West (Noll, 2001: 269; Cox, 1995: 147; Coleman, 2000: 68; Bolce and De Maio, 1999). Why? In the light of Durkheim's framework, the following appear significant. First, despite its apparent ‘fit’ with the energised body/productive self of modernity, its embrace of intoxicated excess and embodied commitment to God ultimately threatens the prioritisation of instrumental utility. Second, intoxication through religion undercuts the division of the religious from the social central to the modern world. Third, as a global phenomenon nurturing its own, distinctive set of bodily techniques, dispositions and habits, above and beyond particular societal forms, it rivals as much as it complements global capitalism in the form of embodied intoxication with which it is associated.

These factors are evident in the other-worldly orientation of this religious form. The marking of the believer's body within Pentecostalism may appear minimal, simply positioning the individual as a potential recipient of God's love, but this positioning seeks to join the body of the individual with a wider, transcendental body through a process of rebirth uniting individuals ‘together within the one body of Christ’ (Paul, 1 Cor. 1: 12–15). This religious revivalism is not, then, focused towards the consolidation of this-worldly individualism, but the realization of other-worldly community; an argument reinforced by suggestions that a ‘core spirituality’ underpins the diverse manifestations of religious intoxication in revivalist worship (Albrecht, 1999: 28–9; Poloma, 2003: 21). The power of these experiences, moreover, comes in part from their intoxicating, multi-sensory impact; an impact that overrides the mind/body split dominant in Western philosophy and often cited as capturing modern Western lived experience (Leder, 1990).

Thus, the individualism apparent in revivalism does not leave the subject untouched in terms of a possible commitment to the possessive individualism key to capitalism. Instead, it is one that predisposes the ‘spirit-filled believer … to see the transcendent God at work in, with, through, above, and beyond all events’, viewing all space, time and activity as phenomena subject to sacred guidance (Poloma, 2003: 23). In this respect, following prominent themes within New Testament teaching, the form of embodied intoxication common to believers involves them being called out of the world (John, 15: 19), and changing their bodies so they walk, talk, feel, and think in a manner at odds with their previous existence (Philippians, 3: 21; Ephesians, 4: 22, 5: 1). Studies of the contemporary global spread of Pentecostal Christianity highlight not just a religious endorsement of individualism, then, but ‘rituals of rupture’ that reconfigure an individual's habitus, provoking profound experiences of life-transformation (Martin, 1990: 163; Robbins, 2004: 128). There is, of course, some room for individuals to experience or translate this transcendence in distinctive ways: while being ‘called out’ of this world may result in a predominantly emotionally inspired transformation for some, others may be even more affected by the sense of certainty and truth provided by religion operating in a world more characterised by doubt than knowledge. Both are related to a rupture from this-worldly priorities and preoccupations, though, irrespective of the specific form they take.

The form of embodied intoxication associated with revivalism, in other words, is not an unproblematic endorsement of this-worldly structures and priorities, but propels worshippers to inhabit the other-worldly imprinting of their bodies on the basis of transcendent priorities, truths and the single community of those united in God's body. The experience of repentance and divine healing was prominent among those attending services in Toronto, for example, together with the determination to live according to the emotional inspiration and word of God; experiences that possess only a contingent relationship with current economic priorities (Poloma, 2003: 30–2, 89–91, 95; see also Csordas, 1988). Thus, while Christian revivalism might be seen initially as a ‘normal’ form of embodied intoxication in abstract terms, its effects are highly ambiguous in relation to those forms of excitement that would function as directionally normal in relation to modern capitalist society. In this context, it is understandable why those located in the core of modernity may perceive this form of worship as ‘abnormal’, dangerous or freakish.

Concluding comments

In this paper we have argued that Durkheim's approach to society and religion may be reinterpreted and developed as a theory of the relationship between collectivities and embodied intoxication. At its most apparent in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim's (1995) suggestion that collective life develops through the bodies of members being marked, but also being intoxicated sufficiently to inhabit their physical being as a social or religious body, is also explored in his other writings in terms of its relevance to modernity. It is disappointing that a theoretical framework of this scope should not have been made more visible by existing commentaries on Durkheim. However, Durkheim's reputation as a positivist methodological analyst of ‘social facts’ continues to marginalise certain of the more creative elements of his oeuvre. Furthermore, the significance of intoxication for understanding his writings remains unaddressed by the vast majority of his interpreters.

Having explicated Durkheim's analysis – an analysis that highlights to sociology the importance of embodied intoxication – we embarked on our own explorations of those ‘abnormal’ forms that threaten the integrity of collectivities through the modern circumscription of intoxication that risks anomie, individuated asocial engagements with delirious excess, or aberrant collective encounters with excess that threaten to corrode modern culture. From this, we highlighted the continued relevance of a Durkheimian approach by exploring his analysis in relation to Christian revivalism. This follows Durkheim's (1995) productive example of exploring through case-studies how it is that society can be analysed as a form of embodied intoxication. His framework helps account for the contemporary importance of Christian revivalism, and the ambiguity with which it is regarded in Western society today, a case that illustrates the continued utility of his approach for modernity. In this regard, while, as we have indicated, there may be no contemporary shortage of body markings and examples of individual and collectively focused intoxication, Durkheim's account of how ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ these may be raises important questions about their implications for the strengthening or corrosion of modern society.

There has in recent years been a tendency among sociologists to turn their back on the accomplishments of the ‘founding figures’ of the discipline, and to advance instead the case for either appropriating the methods of alternative disciplines, or for pursuing novel, cultural approaches to the study of social phenomena (see Rojek and Turner, 2000; Shilling and Mellor, 2001; Runciman, 2008; Ossewaarde, 2009). Few would disagree that sociology, like any other discipline, needs to advance theoretically and methodologically if it is to retain its analytical purchase on new developments in social life, yet it does not follow from this that early contributions to the subject have become irrelevant to this challenge. In this article we have sought to show how the writings of one of the most important figures in the sociological tradition can be explicated and crucially developed in a way that enables us to achieve new insights into issues of central contemporary social and cultural significance. Embodiment and intoxication have been written about as discrete subjects inside and outside sociology, yet returning to the writings of Durkheim also makes it possible to appreciate their central importance to society. When examined from outside the sociological tradition, it is too easy to view them simply as passing manifestations of consumer culture, in the case of the body, and as a pathological social problem in the case of intoxication. Viewed from the perspective of Durkheim's enduring contribution, in contrast, we can understand how these phenomena are central to the production and reproduction of collectivities, and vital to questions about social fragmentation and religious revivalism facing the world today.