EMILE DURKHEIM’S CONCEPT OF THE SACRED & THE PROFANE:
- The Sacred is ideal and transcends everyday existence; it is extra-ordinary potentially dangerous, awe-inspiring, fear inducing.
- The sacred refers to things set apart by man including religious beliefs, rites, duties or anything socially defined as requiring special religious treatment.
- Almost anything can be sacred: a god, a rock, a cross, the moon, the earth, a king, a tree, an animal or bird.
- Once established as sacred they become symbols of religious beliefs, sentiments and pratices.
- Eating the totemic animal or plant is usually forbidden and as a sacred object the totem is believed to have divine properties.
Émile Durkheim and Joseph Ward Swain. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (George Allen & Unwin, 1915).
- The profane is the realm of routine experience.
- The profane or ordinary or unholy embraces those ideas, persons, practices and things that are regarded with an everyday attitude of commonness, utility and familiarity.
- It is that which is not supposed to come into contact with or take precedence over the sacred. The unholy or the profane is also believed to contaminate the holy or sacred.
- The attitudes and behavior toward it are charged with negative emotions and hedged about by strong taboos.
EVANS-PRITCHARD’S CRITIQUE:
“Surely what [Durkheim] calls ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are on the same level of experience, and far from being cut off from one another, they are so closely intermingled as to be inseparable. They cannot, therefore, either for the individual or for social activities, be put in closed departments which negate each other, one of which is left on entering the other.”
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 65. See also, Jack Goody, “Religion and ritual: A definition problem”, British Journal of Sociology 12 (1961): 143-164.
AFRICAN CONCEPT:
“The physical and the spirtual are but two dimensions of one and the same universe. These dimensions dove-tail into each other to the extent that at times and in places one is apparently more real than, but not exclusive of the other. To African peoples this religious universe is not an academic proposition: it is empirical experience, which reaches its height in acts of worship.” Mbiti, African religions and philosophy, p.57
GORDON LYNCH, The Sacred in the Modern World:
- “The central values system around which a particular society is formed, and also to the values held sacred by specific revolutionary, ideological, and religious groups” (p. 35).
- Difference between the sacred (i.e. ‘good’), profane (i.e. ‘evil’) and mundane (i.e. everyday life) is cogent and informative.
The Sacred in the Modern World. Gordon Lynch. Oxford University Press. February 2012.
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