PREFACE

This book was born from a course. It undoubtedly has the defects of one, that is to say a hasty character, caused by the necessity of having, at a fixed time, a firm opinion on a given subject. We would like it to also have the qualities that one expects from public teaching, that is to say clarity and precision.

The general idea of this teaching was the application to religious phenomena observed in North Africa of theories developed for half a century by ethnographers, and especially by the English anthropological school and by the French sociological school. These theories have at least provided us with a new grouping of facts. Perhaps it will be judged that we have sometimes placed these, a bit artificially, into the frameworks of modern sociology, or even that many of the proposed applications are, in sum, fragile. We will accept these reproaches, while excusing ourselves on the grounds of the undeniable utility of a provisional systematization. On the other hand, while it is not doubtful that many current theories will need to be verified in the near future, we think that they will be replaced by others proceeding from the same principles, inspired by the same spirit, and obtained by the same methods. We have, however, guarded ourselves, as much as we could, against exaggerations, and we have refrained from making use of theories which, like that of totemism a system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship with or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant, have been in constant reorganization for some years. Let us add, as far as this special case is concerned, that totemic explanations apply only to civilizations much less evolved than the one we are studying.

Until now, in studies of this kind, one has above all attempted...