Durkheim, religion is about the separation of the sacred from the profane. The sacred refers to those collective representations that are set apart from society, or that which transcends the humdrum of everyday life. The profane, on the other hand, is everything else, all those mundane things like our jobs, our bills, and our rush hour commute. Religion is the practice of marking off and maintaining distance between these two realms. Rituals, for example, reaffirm the meaning of the sacred by acknowledging its separateness, such as when religious devotees pray to a particular statue or symbol.
The sacred–profane dichotomy is a concept posited by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who considered it to be the central characteristic of religion: “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” In Durkheim’s theory, the sacred represents the interests of the group, especially unity, which were embodied in sacred group symbols, or totems. The profane, however, involves mundane individual concerns. Durkheim explicitly stated that the sacred–profane dichotomy is not equivalent to good evil, as the sacred could be either good or evil and the profane could be either as well.
Durkheim’s claim of the universality of this dichotomy for all religions and cults has been criticized by scholars such as the British anthropologist Jack Goody. [3] Goody also 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.”[4] As Tomoko Masuzawa explains in The Invention of World Religions (2005), this system of comparative religion privileged Christianity at the expense of non-Christian systems. Any cosmology without a sacred–profane binary was rendered invisible by the field of religious studies, because the binary was supposed to be “universal”.
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