Durkheim and Mauss argued cognitive categories derive from social relations

Evidence

The seminal text in which Durkheim worked out this part of his theory was that which he wrote with his pupil, Marcel Mauss: Primitive Classification . In it Durkheim set out to show how the cognitive categories and mental classifications which “primitives” used to think their world were in fact modeled on social relations. Society did not—as rather crude functionalists assumed—provide the content of social taxonomies. Rather, Durkheim believed, following Kant, that what society did was to provide the categories in which men “thought” their world. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 356

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This society-supplies-the-categories claim is the explicit bridge to Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralism discussed immediately after, and to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Related

• Society provides the categories of thought, not the content of taxonomies (similarity 0.84)
• Linguistics gave structuralism its scientific thrust while Durkheim and Mauss supplied its legitimacy (similarity 0.82)
• Durkheim founded social science by positing society as an objective order independent of individuals (similarity 0.80)