“Write short note: Sacred and Profane.” (2012, 2002, 1991)
The sacred–profane dichotomy is the core of Émile Durkheim’s definition of religion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). He held that every religion divides the world into two heterogeneous, mutually exclusive domains, and that this division, rather than belief in gods or the supernatural, is religion’s defining mark.
Durkheim’s formulation
- Sacred: things “set apart and forbidden”, protected by interdicts and approached through rites. Anything can be sacred: a rock, a tree, a carved totemic churinga.
- Profane: the everyday, utilitarian world, which “should not touch and cannot touch with impunity” the sacred.
- Heterogeneity: the two are opposed in kind, not degree. Passing from one to the other needs rites of passage such as initiation.
- Two kinds of cult: the negative cult (taboos, abstentions that keep the domains apart) and the positive cult (sacrifice, communion).
- Source: sacredness is not intrinsic to objects. It is conferred by the collective, and sacred things are symbols of society’s moral power over the individual. Hence religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things” that unites a moral community.
Other readings
- Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957) kept the dichotomy but rejected its reduction to society. For him the sacred is an irreducible reality that manifests itself through hierophanies.
- Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy, 1917) described the sacred as the numinous, a mystery both awe-inspiring and fascinating.
Critiques
- W. E. H. Stanner (“Reflections on Durkheim and Aboriginal Religion”, 1967) found the dichotomy impossible to apply unambiguously to the very Aboriginal material Durkheim relied on.
- Jack Goody (“Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem”, 1961) argued that many societies, including the LoDagaa of northern Ghana whom he studied, have no such categories. The division is a projection of European religious thought.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard saw sacredness as situational: an Azande shrine could serve as a convenient rack for spears. Edmund Leach proposed a continuum rather than a binary.
Indian illustration: close, but not the same
Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) built caste on the opposition of pure and impure. The two schemes are not the same. Purity–pollution is a graded hierarchy within the social order, and even a Brahmin becomes temporarily impure at birth or death. Durkheim’s binary is absolute and marks off the religious from the non-religious. M. N. Srinivas (Religion and Society among the Coorgs, 1952) showed how ritual purity ranks groups. Contests over access to sacred space, such as the Supreme Court’s 2018 Sabarimala ruling (4:1) on women’s entry, show the sacred boundary being redrawn by law and public debate.
Conclusion
As a universal empirical law the dichotomy is contested, but as an analytic tool it endures. It captures the social act of setting apart, whether of temples, flags or constitutions. That act is where sociology of religion begins.