Religious Rituals of Rurka Village

Rituals provide a tale in their ceremonial orders, the reading of which tells much about a society, its cultural heritage, what it values and what it believes. Émile Durkheim (1965) argued that because all human beings are creatures of society and dependent upon it, religious beliefs should therefore be interpreted as "collective representations" that express this dependent relationship between the individual and the collectivity. When we worship the gods or other sacred symbols, we are actually worshiping our social collectivity, whether we realize this or not. Durkheim's theory entailed an important innovation because he considered religiosity to be an attribute of the collective experience rather than a product of individual intellectual speculation or wish fulfillment. As long as human beings remained social creatures, they would have need of religious beliefs and representations, but the character of these beliefs and representations would change radically under the influence of science.