then the profane defined as non-sacred, that is, as the every-day or ordinary, is
a necessary condition for the concept. It is impossible to imagine a world in
which some things are set apart, but nothing is ordinary. However, the profane
as ‘anti-sacred’, that is, as acts against the sacred, is not a necessary condition
for the concept of the sacred. While the sacred as ‘set apart and preserved by
taboos’ requires rules to establish the sacred as a social fact, it does not require
anyone to break those rules. It is possible to imagine a world in which there are
things that are sacred, but that no-one ever breaks the rules. However, it is not
necessary that we do define ‘the sacred’ as that which is set apart.
In his fieldwork, Jack Goody found that the Lo Dagaa of northern Ghana make
no recognisable distinction between the natural and the supernatural. He wrote:
‘But neither do the Lo Dagaa appear to have any concepts at all equivalent to
the vaguer and not unrelated dichotomy between the sacred and the profane’.32
The fact that the sacred is not universal should not surprise us, as different
cultures also understand the world in different ways. The ways in which the
different groups and people explain the world, and the relationship between
the spiritual and natural world, will affect the usefulness of the term. If you
think that God, or the spirit of the world, is immanent, you will have a world
in which the entire world is endowed with spiritual importance. If you describe
this idea of ‘spiritual importance’ as the sacred, everything will be sacred,
however, the conception of the sacred you will be using will be nothing like
that which Durkheim uses, because there is nothing that distinguishes it from
the ordinary. However, as we will argue in the next section of this paper, this
does not mean that your usage cannot have normative force, merely that the
normative force of the claim will be nothing like Durkheim’s sacred-profane
distinction. In the next section of the paper we intend to analyse some of the
common uses of the term, and the norms associated with their use