Performing the Sacred in a Community Building

Ever since Rudolf Otto declared ‘the sacred’ a central category in Religious Studies and defined it as fascinosum tremens, as pious awe in the face of the overwhelming experience of the numinous, ‘the sacred’ has remained a category that proves very difficult to grasp – especially as far as material culture studies are concerned. How could something ‘totally different’, an emotional experience ‘wholly of its own kind’, as Otto put it, in the end be detected, described and compared without losing its very essence? ²