Emile Durkheim, French sociologist, is, with Max Weber, one of the two principal founders of modern sociology. Durkheim became a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, where he founded and edited the very important journal L'Annee Sociologique. He is renowned for the breadth of his scholarship; for his studies of primitive religion; for creating the concept of anomie (normlessness); for his study of the division of labor; and for his insistence that sociologists must use sociological (e.g., rates of behavior) rather than psychological data. His Suicide (1897) is a major sociological classic that is still read today, not so much for its data, which are limited and out of date, but for the brilliance of his analysis of suicide rates and other data that had been initially obtained for administrative rather than scientific purposes. Durkheim's notion of community, his view that religion forms the basis of all societies, had a profound impact on the course of community studies. His work continues to influence new generations of sociologists.

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the 'classificatory function' in society. On the basis of an intensive examination of forms and principles of symbolic classification reported from the Australian aborigines, the Zuni and traditional China, they try to establish a formal correspondence between social and symbolic classification. From this they argue that the mode of classification is determined by the form of society and that the notions of space, time, hierarchy, number, class and other such cognitive categories are products of society. Dr Needham's introduction assesses the validity of Durkhiem and Mauss's argument, traces its continued influence in various disciplines, and indicates its analytical value for future researches in social anthropology.