In a highly secularized context such as Belgium, the decline of religious orthodoxies and the development of conceptions of a cyclic afterlife, especially among young people, raises issues for contemporary religious and symbolic dynamics. The structural analysis of 35 semi-structured interviews of young French-speaking men and women from various social strata in Wallonia and Brussels leads the author to define four types of life-after-death symbolism, each type including a variable number of modes. Inviting a critical dialogue with Karel Dobbelaere’s theory of secularization, Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s sociology of ‘religious modernity’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, the potential and limits of the author’s contribution claim to be within the scope of contemporary debates in the sociology of culture and religion.

In light of the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism, the epistemological foundations of sociology and the legacies of classical sociologists have certainly become controversial. Postcolonial critiques of sociology’s Eurocentrism have denounced the “parochial” nature and limitations of the theoretical contributions left by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, the reductive and stereotyping orientation of the “primitivist” and/or “orientalist” representations of non-Western peoples that can be identified in their work, and the incomplete and misleading accounts of the Western processes of modernization that we have inherited from them, which fail to fully address and satisfactorily account for the realities of modern Western forms of colonialism and imperialism. However, the nature and consequences of Durkheim’s specific sociological Eurocentrism raise opposing views within postcolonialism. This article aims to evaluate the pertinence of the divergent and sometimes contradictory postcolonial appraisals of Durkheim’s Eurocentrism by focusing particularly on the controversies generated by his sociological approach to religion. Placing Durkheim’s sociological project within both the academic field and the socio-political context in which it took shape, this article highlights the shifting relevance and the implications of his evolving sociological approach to this object of study in his science of morals. Although it is not exempt from inconsistencies and Eurocentric assumptions, Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion leaves an invaluable legacy for a non-dualistic sociological understanding of the rituals through which humans (re)create their social identities and their forms of belonging and solidarity. In line with the priorities of some postcolonial agendas, it can fully reveal its explanatory potential in the sociological investigation of modern and contemporary interethnic and racial conflicts and forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism.