Robert Hertz . French ethnologist disciple of E. Durkheim. He was born in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, in 1881. From his student years until he met his death, leading his men, in the attack on Mar-chevil-en-Woërre, on April 13, 1915, in the age of thirty-three was perhaps the brightest of the young members of the Année Sociologique circle.
Biographical synthesis
Between 1904 and 1906 he lived in London where, thanks to funds from the British Museum, he gathered a vast ethnographic documentation that would form the basis of his works. Thus, in 1907 his essay on The Collective Representation of Death appeared in the Année Sociologique; later, in 1909, he published his most famous study, The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand, in the pages of the Revue Philosophique. From his London years, Hertz conceived the plan of an exhaustive work on sin and the atonement, whose materials, according to Mauss, had already been prepared since 1912, and which would become a work devoted entirely to the problem of impurity. It could not be, and only later, in 1922, in the form of an introduction, was it published in the Revue de L’histoire des religions.
As an ethnographer and folklorist, Robert Hertz distinguished himself with a study, published in 1913 in the Revue de L’histoire des religions, on the alpine cult of Sant-Besse in the Val d’Aoste ( Italy ); Likewise, finding himself at the front near Etain (Meuse), where his unit was stationed, he collected a series of tales and proverbs among his men “from the Mayenne and elsewhere” during the months before his death, which they were published posthumously in 1917 in the Revue des traditions populaires. Hertz moves, essentially, within the theoretical and methodological scope elaborated by E. DurkheimAnd thus, according to his teachings, who defined social events as “objective systems of ideas,” the notion of collective representation plays a decisive role in his work. The anthropology contemporary has benefited from its approaches and research, especially in studies of classification and ritual.
