Emile Durkheim in his text The Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912) after studying most primitive aboriginal tribes wrote , religion to be understood in two absolutely opposed categories, the sacred and the profane. Both these categories reflect the sort of attitudes human beings have towards these entities. They reflect the classification of human experience, the world, the cosmos and all the entities surrounding them.
According to Durkheim, the profane is the realm of routine experience. It deals with mundane activities and is transcended by religion. It is the sphere of adaptive or utilitarian behavior on the other hand , Durkheim states that the sacred is superior to the profane in dignity and expresses a superior seriousness. Thus, he defines religion as “Unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things” . The attitude elicited by the symbols that represent the sacred is one of intense respect. It is one of awe. This may be seen not simply in human behavior in the presence of such symbols, but also in the fact that sacred things are always set separate or isolated by ritual practice. Durkheim defines sacred things as set apart from the profane and forbidden. The reason lies in the fact that profane entities will damage the purity of sacred if they are allowed to intermingle. In order to approach the sacred entities, one must attain a degree of sacredness through religious rites; Durkheim further says, religious rites are not performed primarily to achieve something but to express an attitude. Thus, there arises in the experience of the sacred an attitude and a set of practices.(example from Hinduism: Purity and Pollution of caste system)
Characteristics of sacred
- Durkheim regards the sacred-profane dichotomy, as of universal validity. In all the religions, certain objects, precepts, maxims and symbols are regarded as sacred. The source of sacredness does not lie in the intrinsic properties of the object. Nor is sacredness a result of some kind of revelation. Sacredness is not imposed on an object because of the exterior dimension but as a result of the “collective conscience”. The society attributes sacredness to certain objects.
- Sacred is an aspect of what is experienced by human beings, involves recognition of, or a belief in power or force. Powers or forces lie at the roots of the religious attitude.
- Sacred is characterized by ambiguity – it is a matter of ambiguous power of powers. Sacred things and forces are ambiguous in that they are physical and moral, human and cosmic or natural, positive and negative, favorable and unfavorable, attractive and repugnant, helpful and dangerous to man.(Doma in Kasi)
- Sacred is non-utilitarian. Utility and everydayness are foreign for the sacred, while work is the prominent form of profane activity.
- Sacred is non-empirical in the sense that it is not an aspect of the object but is super-imposed upon it.
- Sacred does not involve knowledge. The sacred is not a matter of knowledge based on the experience of the senses.
- Sacred is supportive and has strength-giving character. Sacred forces act on believers and worshipers to strengthen and sustain them. The religious attitude exalts the believer and raises him above himself.
- Sacred makes a demand on the believer and worshiper. It impinges on human consciousness with moral obligations.
Origin of sacred :
To trace the origin of religion Durkheim examines just one type of religion, Australian totemism(Arunta tribe). In totemism, tribes are divided into clans whose solidarity derives not from kinship, but from a religious relationship between its members. As Durkheim understands it, this relationship is based on a sacred association between the clan, its members and a totemic entity, usually a local animal or plant species. Essential to Australian totemic belief, in Durkheim’s view, was the idea that the totemic emblem, a design representing the clan’s totemic entity, was sacred. Its sacredness lay in the fact that it conferred ; sacredness on whatever was marked with it. The totemic emblem was used to mark certain objects used in rituals: stones, pieces of Wood etc. Among the Arunta these objects were known as churingas. The sacredness conferred on them by their being marked with the sacred totemic emblem .the one hand, they had to kept separate from profane. They had not touched or looked by profane persons , might be forbidden to profane noninitiates—foreigners, but also women and children—on pain of death. The relatively abstract nature of such representations made them particularly appropriate symbols, concrete manifestations of an abstract idea, just as the flag represented the nation; indeed, Durkheim noted, the “totem is the flag of the clan” . When not in use , they were hide in special locations. On the other hand, they had powers: they could cure illnesses, confer strength in battle, assure the continuing fertility of the totemic animal or plant etc. Not only were the totemic emblem and the ritual objects sacred: so top were the totemic entity and the human clan members. Where the totemic entity was an animal or a plant, its sacredness was a matter of it being prohibited as ordinary food to clan members, though it might be obligatory to consume it in ritual situations; it was believed that deviation of this rule would cause death. Durkheim points out that to regard animals as sacred in this way is not the same as to regard them as divine. Clan members did not worship the totemic animal as a god, but felt ties of close kinship with it. The sacredness of clan members themselves was manifest most importantly in the use of their blood in rituals in order to confer power. Thus clan members’ blood might be used to paint the totemic emblem on the ground or poured over a rock believed to represent the totemic entity; it was used in initiation rituals. Durkheim notes also that hair and other parts of the human body might be seen as sacred and also that the old men of the clan were regarded as more sacred than the younger persons.
Critique
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard never found that the dichotomy of sacred and profane was of much use for either purpose” . He argued that among the Azande of central Africa, sacredness might be situational. Shrines erected for the purposes of ancestor worship in the middle of a compound might serve as a focus of ritual offerings on some occasions but on others, might be a convenient place for resting spears.
- W. E. H. Stanner found that the distinction was impossible to apply unambiguously in studying Australian religion, the very example on which it was ostensibly based.
- Jack Goody noted that many societies have no words that translate as sacred or profane and that ultimately, just like the distinction between natural and supernatural, it was very much a product of European religious thought rather than a universally applicable criterion.
The Ambiguity Of The Sacred
The sacred was not in any simpleminded way reducible to “the good.” Mourning rituals pointed the way to another dimension of the sacred, connected with “[any] misfortune, anything that is ominous, and anything that motivates feelings of disquiet or fear” (p. 392). The domain of the sacred also included “evil and impure powers, bringers of disorder, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege” (p. 412). Just as the sacred and the profane could be defined only in terms of one another, so the pure and the impure constituted two inextricably linked modalities of sacredness. After all, both holy and polluting things need to be kept separate from the profane realm of everyday reality.
In some cases, Durkheim suggested that the same object could easily pass from one state to another. The impurely sacred, according to Durkheim, was necessary in order to represent inevitable negative facets of social reality. “[The] two poles of religious life correspond to the two opposite states through which all social life passes. There is the same contrast between the lucky and the unlucky sacred as between the states of collective euphoria and dysphoria” (p. 417).
Sacred And Profane Since Durkheim
The American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, after conducting ethnographic research in Australia, turned in the 1930s to field work in a New England town that he called “Yankee City.” He published a series of monographs about American life through the lens of a small town, the last of which, The Living and the Dead (1959), focused on symbols and symbolism. The central chapter of the book, the one that most closely reflects the title of the book, was an analysis of Memorial Day rites, which “are a modern cult of the dead and conform to Durkheim’s definition of sacred collective representations” (p. 278). These rites transcended the division of the community in terms of class, ethnicity, and religion, uniting it around sacred symbols, including the cemetery, and national heroes—Lincoln, Washington, the Unknown Soldier. “The graves of the dead are the most powerful of the visible emblems which unify all the activities of the separate groups of the community,” whereas the celebration of the deaths of men who sacrificed their lives for their country “become powerful sacred symbols which organized, direct, and constantly revive the collective ideals of the community and the nation” (p. 279).
The sociologist Robert Bellah explicitly built on Warner’s analysis of Memorial Day rites to elaborate a concept of “American civil religion”—”a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity” (p. 10). Examining various presidential addresses on ceremonial occasions, from the founding father down to Lyndon Johnson, he notes the strategic invocation of “God” and the complete absence of mentions of “Christ,” which he argued signaled the transcendent, sacred nature of the nation while acknowledging the separation of church and state by avoiding references to any particular institutionalized religious faith. Ultimately, these analyses of American civil religion developed the analogies that Durkheim had suggested by stressing the identity of “flag” and “totem” and demonstrated the extent to which this conception of the sacred could not be opposed in any straightforward way to the secular.
More than any other contemporary anthropologists, Mary Douglas has made Durkheim’s distinction between sacred and profane a central focus of her work. In Purity and Danger (1966), she proposed a sweeping cross-cultural analysis of rules concerning purity and pollution that stressed Durkheim’s central thesis that religious ideas depended on the active separation of antithetical domains, a separation that in turn implied a system of classification. The central premise of her analysis