“Give an assessment of the Durkheimian notion of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in sociology of religion.” (2017)
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim argued that every religion presupposes a classification of things into the sacred, set apart and forbidden, and the profane, the ordinary world. This division, not belief in gods, became his defining mark of religion. Its value lies in its analytical reach; its weakness in its rigidity.
The notion
- The two realms are heterogeneous: opposed in kind, not degree. Contact is dangerous, and the sacred is contagious.
- A negative cult of taboos keeps them apart, a positive cult of sacrifice and communion links believers to the sacred, and rites of passage move people between them.
- Sacredness is conferred by the collective, not intrinsic. The Arunta totem is sacred because it is the clan’s emblem, so the sacred is society transfigured.
Strengths
- Non-theistic: the definition covers Buddhism and totemism, which god-centred definitions exclude.
- Sociological: it explains the force of the sacred through collective life and grounded the functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
- Extends to secular life: flags, constitutions and war memorials are “set apart”. Robert N. Bellah’s “Civil Religion in America” (1967) built on this insight.
- Lasting vocabulary: Mircea Eliade and later scholars kept the pair, even while rejecting its social reduction.
Criticisms
- Empirical fit: W. E. H. Stanner (1967) found the dichotomy impossible to apply cleanly to the Aboriginal material Durkheim relied on.
- Collective is not sacred: Bronisław Malinowski noted that a regatta or a village brawl is collective but not religious, and that revelation often comes in solitude.
- Situational, not absolute: E. E. Evans-Pritchard showed that the sacred and the everyday intermingle in practice.
- Dichotomous thinking: Steven Lukes (Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, 1973) traced the problem to Durkheim’s habit of forcing reality into sharp oppositions.
- Consensus bias: in plural or unequal societies, what one group reveres another may profane, a conflict the model hardly addresses.
Indian assessment
- Louis Dumont’s pure–impure opposition resembles the dichotomy but is a graded hierarchy within society, not an absolute binary.
- Sacred groves fit the negative cult closely: in Rajasthan’s orans tradition forbids felling trees. The Supreme Court’s December 2024 direction to map orans and classify them as forests shows sacred space being re-coded in secular law, confirming that sacredness is socially conferred and open to renegotiation.
Conclusion
As a universal empirical law, the sacred–profane dichotomy is too rigid. As a tool for seeing how groups set apart what embodies their collective values, from groves to constitutions, it remains indispensable to the sociology of religion.