Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching. 2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

-ch. 5 – “here I am interested in reconstituting two crucial issues of colonial/postcolonial studies: identity and historicity. In this chapter, through a contextualized reading of the orphan of Asia, I argue that the reconstitution of consciousness offers a more historical and thus critical alternative in conceptualizing colonial violence than the politics of identity.”(176)

- the book argues that “the novel opens up a larger historical canvas that depicts the irreducible colonial-national-local triangulation between Japan, China, and Taiwan throughout the Japanese colonial period.  The orphan of Asia presents an allegory of Taiwan’s gradual ‘coming into being’ with the intensification of colonial rule and its disillusion with Chinese nationalism.”(176)

-“the difference between Chen and Sung is stark. For Chen, the ‘orphan mentality’ is an impediment to the channeling of a Taiwanese identity into a grander Chinese identity. For Sung, on the contrary, the orphan signifies the very essence of Taiwanese-ness, the signifier that severs itself from both national (China) and colonial (Japan) representations through the sentiment of rejection and abandonment.”(184)

Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching.2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

- ch. 3 – the historical significance of kominka was that for the first time in Taiwanese colonial history, the struggle over identity emerged as the dominant discourse for the colonized.  (96)

- the politics of identity in kominka represented the way which  the onus of becoming Japanese had shifted from state to the colonial subject. In doka, the making of colonized  subject into Japanese was predominantly a project of the colonial government.(97)

- “I have argued that doka, with its emphasis on cultural integration, conceals the fundament social and political inequality between the colonizer and the colonized.”(107)

- “it is precisely this ambivalent sameness, rather that racial difference, that Oguma Eiji characterized as the particularity of doka in Japanese colonial discourse. In the conclusion of his comprehensive study of the genealogy of the Japanese, Oguma argued that most sociological analyses of ethnicity and group identification are unable to account or the theory of Japanese doka for one simple reason.” (107)

-these analyses based on the assumption that the relationship between different groups was organized by recognized others as different. But the support for the doka ideology situated the colonized others in ‘blood relationship’ rather then in radical different. Oguma argued that the ‘adopted blood’ system was crucial in rationalized the emperor system in incorporating the colonies into the imperial family. (107-8)

- this incorporation, of courses begged the question as to why Japanese colonialism adopted the discourse of doka when most colonial policy had abandoned it. Oguma offered an explanation of the ambivalent in the Japanese version of doka. He observed that one distinctive character of Japanese imperialism was its near relationship to its colonized:  Korean and Taiwan were racially closer to the Japanese. As a result there was no clear exclusion; there was also no complete equality. (109)

- kominka was a condition of an ‘ambivalent identity’, when the self’s interior was invaded by a sense of ‘otherness’ at the moment of ‘becoming Japanese’ (124) “For if kominka, as I would like to argue, is predominately a cultural rather than a political or economic mode of colonial power, then cultural production themselves do not simply reflect the underlying colonial rule but constitute a kind of colonial policy.”(125) “In this regard, the struggle over identities is not merely a reflection of, or even a response to, the process of imperialization; rather, it is an integral part of the very logic of kominka itself.”(125) (c/f see double use of concept. Kominka generated struggle over identities, and that the colonial modernity generated Japanese or Japanese-ness, Taiwanese or Taiwanese-ness, aborigines or aboriginality, and Chinese or Chinese-ness, as mentioned at the introduction on page11).

- “the postcolonial reading of komin texts … fail to grasp the logic and affectivity of kominka. In short, contrary to the postcolonial critic’s assertion, the identity struggle is not the effect, but the very cause of kominka. Prior to the demise of the Taiwan political movements in the 1930s, and during the so-called rule by doka, ‘culture’ was an important form of political expression and social commentary”. (125)

-“only at this particular historical juncture does struggle over colonial identity emerge as the dominant discourse in colonial Taiwan, where the feeling that one ‘cannot be Japanese’ become an overwhelming existential anxiety and a political desire”.(132)

- ch. 4 – a colonial subject that was recognizably the same, but never quite the same. Is this not the textualization, or the discursive process, of what Homi Bhabhi had called the ‘ambivalence of mimicry?’ For Bhabhi, the ‘mimic man’, by virtue of his or her partial and never complete representation for the colonizer, ‘returned as the displacing gaze of the disciplined.’(134)

[to see foot-note on mimicry: Homi Bhabha, the location of culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. Bhabha defines mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”]

-“as long as the Musha incident is interpreted and debated within the arena of colonial administration and policy making, any attempt at interrogating the fundamental contradiction between the colonizer and the colonized, the Japanese and the aborigines, is necessary disavowed and foreclosed, we must turn to literature in order to catch a glimpse of an attempt to reconcile and reveal the constitute relationship between civility and savagery.”(148)

-“as Kawamura Minato correctly points out, in the earlier historical moment, at the dawn of Japanese imperialism, the ‘discovery’ of ‘savages’ in the exterior substantiated Japan’s ‘identification’ with ‘civilization’ as a modern nation-state.”(148)

-“in the wake of the Musha incident, Japanese colonial attitudes toward the aborigines underwent a conspicuous shift whereby the ideology of imperialization, rather than military subjugation or economic servitude, emerged as the dominant form of colonial control.”(152)

- “I now consider two popular representation of aborigines form the 1910s, and the 1930s, ‘the story of Goho’ and ‘the Bell of Sayon’ that best delineated the shift of  aboriginal representation from ‘natural savages’ to ‘national subjects’”.(153)

- “Goho is the Japanese adaption of a Chinese folktale that tells of the benevolence and self-sacrifice of Goho, a Ching official who supposed convince the aborigines to give up their head hunting practices”.(153-4)

-“in a valiant effort to reveal the Japanese colonial hypocrisy of ‘universal brotherhood’, Kato Kunihiko devoted a chapter in his book to the plight of the aborigines who became ‘volunteers’.” “Kato is especially intrigued by his encounter with Aui and aborigines who despite having lost his father at the hands of the Japanese police during an uprising, enlisted for the Sixth Takasago Volunteer Army.”(168)

- “similar reservation and incredulity at the contradictory position of the aboriginal volunteers is expressed by Hayashi Eidai.” “Hayashi rightly points to ‘imperialization through education’ as responsible for the transformation of aborigines to volunteer.”(170)

-“Kato and Hayashji’s incredulity and frustration can perhaps be interpreted as their inability to escape the working of the ‘regime of nationality’. For them, the identity of the aborigines, hence their difference, is incommensurable with loyalty to the emperor.” (171)

-“what is being played out here is a politics of identity in which the aborigines are perceived perpetually and solely in their ‘difference’ by the Japanese, despite the fact that they ‘were’ Japanese and imperial subjects during the colonial period.”(171)

-“the claim of patriotism and loyalty to the Japanese nation is a present-day strategy of protest against the ‘betrayal’ of the former colonizer…. Positioned at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy and deprived of any political and economic possibility, becoming ‘Japanese soldiers’ was perhaps the only avenue to perceived equality and agency for most of these ‘volunteers’.”(172)

(to be continued)

Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching.2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

- ch. 1 – in this chapter, the book argues first of all, against the particularization of Japanese imperialism and colonialism as somehow different and unique. (19) Second, it argues that the lack of the decolonization process in the breakup of Japanese empire had prevented both Japan and Taiwan from addressing and confronting their particular colonial relation and legacy. The abrupt dissolution enabled Japan to circumvent and disavow its colonial question. (20)

- in Japan, a new postwar national identity based on singularity and exclusivity was construed by the effacement of memoirs of war and empire, instead of a vast imperial landscape , Japan is now enclosed and delimited within the border of an ‘island country’.(33)

- ch. 2 – there were two primary yet divergent tendencies of anticolonial struggle in Taiwan form the early 1920s to the late 1930s. It was a period marked by coalescing and conflicting political ideas that entailed the ‘official’ inauguration of doka, or assimilation policy. It also led to the emergence of what could be called ‘neo-nationalist’, or a ‘proto-nationlist’ thought.(51)

-it was important to note here that these political movements were short-lived. With the exception of the more moderate journals and newspaper, the political movement left only scant documentation of their activities. (53) “Liberalism and Marxism were the two dominant tendencies that intersected with Taiwanese anticolonial movement of this period.”(53)

- “the historian Wang Hsiao-po has argued that although, historically, Taiwan consists of several ‘secondary communities’, the ‘Taiwanese consciousness’ of the various immigrants from the mainland took on the ‘consciousness of the Han people’.”(62)

- “as an example of the Taiwan faction’s repress China-consciousness under the colonial rule, Wang describes in great length the life work and attitude of … Lin Hsien-tang. Wang cites Lin’s political pragmatism, his refusal to speak Japanese or wear Japanese clothes.”(63)

-“the debate over whether the so-called ‘Taiwanese consciousness’ should be regarded either as an appendage to a larger Han Chinese ethnonational consciousness or as an autonomous historical product of Japanese colonialism is a distinctively postwar and postcolonial attempt at negotiating the cumbersome problem of Taiwanese/Chinese identity that has its roots in the colonial period.”(76)

- “through this contradicting between class interest and colonial oppression, we can see that the notions of ‘Taiwan factions’ and ‘China factions’ in political and cultural discourse were not opposing forms of ethno-national or cultural identification. Rather, they represent the diverging tenets of political imagination and practical feasibly within a class.”(88)

-“similarly, the formal split of Taiwanese neo-nationalist movement into the reform-oriented liberal faction and the radical-mined Marxist faction in the late 1920s should not be regarded as simply the manifestation of ‘foreign’ political influence.”(88)

-“various discourse and policies under the rubric of doka, or assimilation, and later kominka, or imperialization, were implemented and constructed as the dominant Japanese colonial ideology in countering the growing demands of the Taiwanese neo-nationalist movements.”(88)

(to be continued)

Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching. 2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

-  introduction – on February 24, 1979 some Taiwanese aborigines representing the Takasago people  visit Yasuguni jinja. They demanded compensation from Japan, and to have the spirits of Takasago people who had died as Japanese soldiers and being offered in the jinja be returned to them. (1-2) “This episode describes a telling encounter between the (ex)colonizer and the (ex)colonized in the so-called postcolonial conditions. It is a condition marred by the former imperial nation’s refusals to come to terms with its colonial passes.”(4)

- “becoming ‘Japanese’ conceals the inequality between the ‘natural’ Japanese, whose political and economic privilege as citizen are guaranteed, and those ‘naturalized’ Japanese whose cultural identities as Japanese are required, but whose political and economic rights as citizen are continuously denied.” (6)

-“the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperial Japan, and nationalist China formed the terrain where contradictory, conflicting and complicitous desire and identities were projected, negotiated, and vanquished.” (8)

-“colonialism, however, is never only about the external process and pressure of economic development or political annexation. It is also about the ways in which the colonized internally colluded with or resisted the objectification of the self that was produced by the colonizer, as Frantz Fanon has remarkably documented in Black Skin, White Masks.”(10)

-“to insist on the predicament of Japanese colonialism, this book puts forward a series of arguments on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan coalescing around the problematic identity formations and the positions and politics of such analysis in the so-called postcolonial conditions. Its premise rests on the assumption that cultural and political identify, be they metropolitan or colonial, do not exist prior to the process of colonialism.”(11)

“I argue that Japanese or Japanese-ness, Taiwanese or Taiwanese-ness, aborigines or aboriginality, and Chinese or Chinese-ness – as embodied in compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories – do not exist outside the temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it.”(11) (i.e. they were generated by the colonial modernity)

-“chapter 1 argues that decolonization, as opposed to post colonialism … offers a better understanding of Japan’s continuous disavowal of it war crimes and coloniality”.(12)

(c/f decolonization was an abrupt and sudden process happened in 1945)

-“ch. 2 analyzes the formation of a debate over Taiwanese conscious and Chinese consciousness, their respective political movements since the 1920s”.(12)(c/f the debate centered around of ‘Taiwan factions’ and ‘China factions’)

- ch. 3 attempts a theoretical analysis of the Japanese colonial discourse of doka and kominka. Ch. 4 extends the analysis of kominka to the Taiwanese aborigines in relation to the Musha rebellion of 1930. Ch. 5 returns to the triangulation between colonial Taiwan, imperialist Japan, and nationalist Chinese. Through a reading of The Orphan of Asia, the book argued that the work was an allegory of Taiwan’s gradual ‘coming into being’ with the intensification of colonial rule and it disillusion with Chinese nationalism. The Pacific war precluded any voluntary or reformist corrective to Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism no longer provided a clear and viable alternative to Taiwan’s emancipation. (12-13)

(to be continued)

A history of Anthropological Theory

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Paul Erickson and Liam Murphy.2003. A history of Anthropological Theory. Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, c1998.

Main points:

-conclusion – generally speaking, at the dawn of the 21st century, the adherent of anthropological postmodernity and globalization theory arise form a camp of ‘human scientist’ whose proverbial tents are pith alongside those who defend narrowly materialist vision of their discipline. (174)

-we believed that there has continued to exit general agreement about the unity of anthropological theory and this unity remains largely intact. (176) for one thing, Boas, Geertz and Levi-Strauss remained firmly enshrined with an anthropological pantheon. This may reflect a significant defect in the postmodern critique: namely that it only succeed at throwing the historical baby out, questioning the work of ancestral generations but offer little substance to replace them. (176)

- we can speculate to a limited extent about trends of the future. We believe that one implication of the diversity encountered in this book is that anthropologist will continue to consider consensuses regarding the best theories and method the ‘holy grail’ of our discipline; this longing might well prove utopian. (178)

- we are living in and passing through a ‘Janus-faced’ moment, in which we are looking both to the past and to the future for inspiration.(178)

- equally important is that the history of anthropological theory is really a history of anthropological theory. We must allow for other anthropologies’, or other tales of discovery and cross-cultural encounters – other methods and context in which knowledge is formed. (179)

- it seems that the history of theory is defined not so much by ‘facts’, as by the tendency of different anthropological historians and the changing consensus that develop around one or another perspective. Only the most novice readers will conclude that theory is ‘out there’, ready to be plucked from the air by a fortuitous ‘discoverer’.(180)

A history of Anthropological Theory

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Paul Erickson and Liam Murphy.2003. A history of Anthropological Theory. Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, c1998.

Main points:

- part III – the later 20^th century and beyond -  early 20^th century was under the sway of Emile Durkheim and his intellectual progeny (Mauss, Levi-strauss and Radeliffe-Brown). (113) In North America anthropological knowledge was shaped by Franz Boas. (113)

- in the later decades of the 20^th century, a tension between the particular and general emerged as a central problem on both side of the Atlantic. Boas’ descriptive approach suffered from a need for explanatory theory. In filling the blank, one school that came out was from sociologist Max Weber. In part III we studied his work and thought and others. (114)

- in the latter half of the 20^th century, Durkheimean-based structuralism and structural-functionalism had showed signs of strain. Meanwhile in American, Boasian-inspired framework was found inadequate. These concerns surfaced in the 1970’s with the discovery of the theories of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, known as interpretive anthropology. (131)

- in the 19^th century Durkheim employ an organic analogy to understand how social group cohere, and Marx understood the control of material conditions of life to be the engine driving human history. Both theorists believed that forces exited outside the individual acted to condition cultural meaning and structured social relations. (132) Such a formulation left little room for the creative agency of individuals. (132)

- in contrast Max Weber was credited with viewing the holistic individual – acting, thinking and feeling, all were as central to the social and cultural forms. His work was thought as idealistic, contrasted with materialism of Marx. Weber had been influential with the rise of political economy and postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s. (132) In his work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” his ideas were evolutionist, different from the unilineal theories (from primitive to civilized) of his contemporaries. (131)

- Weber sought a theory that placed existing beliefs and structures in particulars historical context (i.e. a particular period). Therefore he was often thought as multilinear evolutionist whose theory accounted for the great diversity of human life. (133)

- his schema was that: Complex society gave rise to stratified hierarchy of social. The urban artisan experienced alienation and economic marginalization (including the merchant class). Their expectations was embodied and expressed through an explicitly religious framework. (133) (c/f the rise of Buddhism - human worldly suffering) Weber view religion as the engine that drove social transformation through time. (133) (i.e. idea led to changes)

- for Weber, the most significant example was Calvinist Protestantism, an urban merchant religion that rationalized a new relationship between human being and god. (134) Under a new covenant ‘revealed’ to Calvin, individuals were direct to recreate heaven on earth through hard work. Through this, merchant and artisans now were elevated to a position of ethical superiority, no longer dominated by ruling elicits. Material prosperity was a sign of god’s grace. This new system ultimately resulted in the global triumph of industrial capitalism. (134)

- Weber’s idea about social evolution (new idea, new system) was useful to anthropologists who were reluctant to view society and culture as static organisms as suggested in the Durkheimian theory. (134)

- the essential premise of structuralist theory (in its various guises) was that culture constrained, or controlled people more than it served, or enabled them. It was as if people were simply the vehicle for social and psychical structures. (135)

- in Britain, the most influential and respected symbolic anthropologist was Victor Turner. Whereas Turner derived his insight from Durkheim, Geertz’s intellectual linage originated with Weber, who emphasized on meaning, as opposed to structure. Weber had given Geertz’s work a very different orientation. Geertz’s theory incorporated the idea that culture was a set of moral values. For Geertz, epistemology was grounded in the assumption that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significant that he themselves has spun’. The study of culture was ‘an interpretive one in search of meaning’. (140)

- for many anthropologist working in the 1960s and 1970s the most influential social theory were development and underdevelopment theory, and the world-system theory (I. Wallerstein). They became the foundation for the generally called (anthropological) political economy. (148)

- in the 20^th century, the political and economic disparity between the ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ world growing apace since the break of colonialism following WWII.(149) Andre Gundar Frank began to criticize modernization. He believed that global capital agenda was the systematically extracting surplus good and labor. Under-development in many nations was the result of progressive capitalist exploitation. (149) The most detailed exposition of this kind emerged in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. He identified the bourgeois capitalist in the core nation of Europe and America who appropriated the profits in the periphery.  Euro –American economically exploited the external population and their produce, in a world-system of unequal exchange. (149)

- the precise meaning of the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernity’ were still further obscured by another adjective ‘post-structural’. Strictly speaking, the term post-structural and poststructuralism referred to the growing malaise and increasing uneasiness with structuralism that erupted in the 1970s. (157)

- the initial flood of interest in deconstructing mental, cultural, and social structures, as manifested in literary and philosophical discourse, was notably the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.(156)

- writing in the 1970s, Foucault viewed social institution and relationship as being grounded in discourse of power that shape relation between people at all levels in a society. (158)

- the different roles played by the individual bore the stamp of certain kinds of people’s relation (dominate/dominated). Whoever dominated these relations would control the economic and ideological conditions under which ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ was defined. (158) In this way, beginning with the enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state, discourse of science, sexuality, and humanism preserved their power through mechanism of control such as prison, hospital, asylum. Foucault’s contribution to postmodern social theory had been in showing how power determined different social forms through history.  (159)

- “Foucauldian theory redefines the concept of ‘knowledge’ itself. No longer is a reference to real or objective understanding, knowledge is primarily a way of naming and ordering the world that favors the powerful and seek to maintain the status quo.”(161)

- addressing similar issue relating to power and domination form another angle was Pierre Bourdieu. (161) For Bourdieu, social structures and cultures were not to be compared to machines or organism, because culture and society were ultimately not things but system of relationship – or fields.

- within fields, the total imposition of one group’s set of taxonomies (hierarchy, good and bad taste) upon another’s results in the production of a ‘natural’ order, or doxa.(162)

- throughout 1980s and 1990s, Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s ideas had a dramatic impact on anthropological theory. Suddenly there seemed no center, no firm ground from which student of human life could gaze objectively at their subject matter. Henceforth, no ‘truth’ would be taken for granted. Deconstruction became a new watchword for anthropologist. Positivism to explain the world was no longer seen as a possible. (163)

- a latter-day heir to world –system theory and anthropological political economy was the study of globalization, or the ‘globalization theory’. (168) Among the better know text were Arjun Appadurai’s “Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity”, and Roland Robertson’s “Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture”. (168)

- it was the emphasis on the production of the wholly new social and cultural form and “systems” that distinguished globalization-oriented anthropology from their predecessor in the world-system theory. The globalization perspective insisted that, local culture were not passively overwritten by the unstoppable, global steam roller known as western industrial capitalism (i.e. individual nation’s people had the agency). (171) The formerly peripherals themselves becoming the base for global cultural practices. (c/f Japanese pop music, sushi cuisine etc.)(171)

(to be continued)

A history of Anthropological Theory

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Paul Erickson and Liam Murphy.2003. A history of Anthropological Theory. Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, c1998.

Main points:

Part II – the early 20^th century - 20^th anthropological theories represented a sharp break from that of the 19^th century. Anthropologist sought to distance themselves from the uni-lineal evolutionary and hereditation doctrines of their predecessors. (73) Under the influence of Franz Boas, anthropology in the US involved the cultivation of a distinctively holistic, ‘four-field’ approach to the study of human life. They helped to set the burgeoning field apart from its British and French counterparts as a distinctive expression of anthropological knowledge. (73)

- Ruth Benedict was interested in the relationship between culture and personality. According to her, each culture had its own personality configuration or gestalt. By studying three different cultures, she explained how the three cases illustrated the power of culture to shape divergent normative personalities. In typical Boasian fashion, she concluded that because what was deviant in one culture could be normative in another. Deviance was not determined by nature. (82)

- Sigmund Freud was a clinical psychologist who tried to help his patients overcome psychological disorders. He began to speculate on the origin of these disorders. (83) His central insight was that people in the present experience conflicts because humanity in the past experienced conflict. (84)

- for Freud, civilization was opposed to human biological nature because it tried to tame the animal instincts of people.(85) The story began with the primeval family, which, for Freud, was patriarchal and characterized by unrestricted sex. In the primeval family, sons desired their mother sexually, but their authoritarian father had priority of sexual access. (85)

- the theoretical foundation of 20^th century French anthropology could be found in Emile Durkheim. He influenced A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and his theory of structuralism. Durkheim was considered as the forerunner of French structural anthropology. (90) His theory developed in progression with the publication of four books. In his book ‘Division of Labor in Society’, Durkheim explored the diversification and integration of culture. (90)

- Durkheim’s central insight was that social solidarity could be achieved in two different, organizationally opposite ways. (90) His vision of society was very different from that of Karl Marx. For Marx, the state would wither away. For Durkheim, the government was necessary to regulate socially interdependent parts. (91)

- for Durkheim social facts were collective representation of the collective consciousness. Using suicide as a case study, he explained a particular social fact: suicide was an act that seemed to individualist yet, explained sociologically, could be shown to have a strong social dimension. (91)

- Durkheim in his fourth book, “The Elementary forms of the religious Life”,  exposed the societal origins of religion. For him the origin of something had its source in the group mind. (91)

- the intellectual transition from Durkheim to Claude Levi-Strauss was accomplished by Marcel Mauss. The most well-known elaboration of idea of the total social fact was expressed in his essay “The Gift”. One of the most important contribution was to shift focus from Durkheim’s’ ‘mind’ of group to the minds of individuals. (93)

(to be continued)