The Sacred and the Profane

Abstract

The opposition between the ideas sacred and profane as developed by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, an opposition I have attempted to apply in order to understand Waropen religion, has brought us in contact up to now with rites which concern the group rather than the individual. The ritual of the saira and of the munaba clearly belongs to the “système solidaire de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des choses sacrées, c’est à dire separees, interdites, croyances et pratiques qui unissent en une même communauté morale, appelée Eglise, tous ceux qui y adhèrent”.¹⁷⁴ Even if occasionally in the saira hardly anybody but the initiandus and his mother’s brother are concerned, both parties still represent the group and even the whole of the community, because in a mythical sense brother and sister occupy the central place in the mythical view of the world.