Robert Hertz: the social triumph over death

Robert Hertz’ s foundational contribution to the sociology of death is as strikingly fresh today as when ® rst published in 1907 when Hertz, born in 1881 and killed in active service in 1915, was but 26 years old. It remained largely unknown to English speaking social science for some 50 years and increased in signi® cance only after its English translation of 1960. It now stands as a basic historical and key theoretical reference point for sociological work on death. It appeared ® rst in the Anne e Sociologique, a journal established to propagate the theoretical perspective of a small number of sociologists associated with Emile Durkheim, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Hertz. They emphasised `collective representations’ , i.e., patterns of ideas, values, beliefs and behavioural expectations that emerged from the interplay of many individuals over time and provided the distinctive domain of and for sociology. Because collective representations could not be reduced to any single emotion of individuals they could not be appropriately studied by psychology, only by sociology. This means that, while we may, quite legitimately, expect the Anne e scholars to refer to emotions, we will expect to ® nd the emotions interpreted sociologically, in terms of collective representations, and not psychologically. In other words, they are interested in what the emotions mean to people within a social world and not what the emotions mean within the private domain of an individual self. The way sociological and psychological disciplines relate continues to be discussed to the present day. Hertz focused on social values as they were grounded in the human body and, in a later generation, his work would have fallen under the broad category