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Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), xvii + 163 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0 55284816 8.
It is a masterstroke for the authors to have gone back to Durkheim's 1915 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Here the father of modem sociology was taking what he thought was some quintessential primitivity in Aboriginal religion-the sacred-to be one of the social forces making up any society, and potentially lacking in modem ones. The sacred is a force which unites a community. It is an energy released in ritual practices which are designed to create feelings of social belonging. We always knew that European civilisation was defined against the barbarians, now we realise that the forging of modem social theory also needed its primitive, and again, with...