The main interest of functional sociology has been culture as norms, values and a way of lifestyle rather than culture as high culture. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of the functional approach, addressed some basic questions about how culture came into being in his work, Primitive Classification (1903), written with Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), his nephew and the most important student. According to them, culture only became possible when human communities began to separate and classify things in their environment. Humankind cannot classify what they see when they are born and therefore cannot separate one from the other.