In order to define and explain the paired concepts of sacred and profane, it is important to look at these concepts as developed in the influential work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
In his last great work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim set out "to study the simplest and most primitive religion that is known at present, to discover its principles and attempt an explanation of it" (p. 1) in order to uncover universal properties of religion. But first he needed to define religion, or else "run the risk of either calling a system of …
It is helpful to contrast Durkheim's concept of the sacred to that of the holy in the contemporary work of the noted German theologian Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1917). The holy, for Otto, derived from a sense of the "numinous" (a word Otto coined): the experience of awe, of the transcendent majesty, energy, and mystery of the wholly other. For Otto, the holy was gr…
Durkheim's analysis centered on what he considered to be the simplest and most primitive known religion, namely Australian totemism, and rested on the consideration of what the Australians held sacred: "totemism places figurative representations of the totem in the first rank of the things it considers sacred; then come the animals or plants whose name the clan bears, and finally th…
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 deat…
Despite the profound influence of Durkheim on the structural-functionalist school of British anthropology, many of its practitioners were highly critical of the pertinence of his antithesis between sacred and profane. E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed "a test of this sort of formulation …: whether it can be broken down into problems which permit testing by observation in field research,…
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 …
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was the founder of academic sociology in France and a thinker whose contribution to the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, continues to be fundamental. Born into a family of rabbis in Lorraine, he studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his fellow students included the future philosopher Henri Bergson…
Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." In Religion in America, edited by William G. McLoughlin and Robert N. Bellah, 3–23. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. …
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments Add a comment…