ABSTRACT
Distinguishing the sacred from the profane is a time-honoured philosophical activity. It is also one that political practitioners have often emphasized in many different societies. American anthropologist Ruth Benedict remarked that:
The striking fact about [the] plain distinction between the religious and the nonreligious in actual ethnographic recording is that it needs so little recasting in its transfer from one society to another. No matter into how exotic a society the traveler has wandered, he still finds the distinction made and in comparatively familiar terms.1
