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sacred and profane space Sacred spaces are
sites imbued with a transcendent spiritual qual-
ity. They are characterized by the rituals people
practice at the site, or direct towards it. Mircea
Eliade, the scholar of comparativereligion
most closely associated with the concept of
sacred space, proposed that it is with sacred
experience that sacred space is marked out from
profane space. Whereas profane experience
maintains the homogeneity ofspace,thesacred
disrupts that, creating non-homogeneous space
(which is why sacred space figures so promin-
ently in discussions ofurban origins).
Eliade (1959, pp. 26–7) identified three ways
in which sacred places are formed: when there is
a hierophany (an ‘act of manifestation of the
sacred’, such as a voice proclaiming the sacrality
of a place); an unsolicited sign indicating the
sacredness of a place (as when something that
does not belong to this world manifests itself); or
a provoked sign (e.g. using animals to help show
what place or orientation to choose in setting up
a village). Sacred places may also be made
through the relics of holy beings.
Sacred places may occur in bio-physical or
in built form. Animists, in particular, believe
that some form of the divine exists innature,
though this is true too of some world religions.
Thus, rivers, trees and mountains are reli-
giously interpreted, and invested with sym-
bolic meanings. For example, the bodhi tree
is a sacred tree for the Buddhists, while the
Ganges River is venerated by the Hindus. In
built form, perhaps the most visible and obvi-
ous sacred spaces are the ‘officially sacred’
(Leiris, 1938) religious buildings, such as
churches, temples and synagogues, though
roadside shrines and home altars constitute
other examples of sacred spaces too. In
advanced technological societies, techno-
religious spaces such as radio and television
broadcasts andinternet-based communica-
tion also contribute to the making of sacred
experiences through live telecasts of prayers
and religious gatherings, for example, thus
creating new conceptions of sacred space.
Chidester and Linenthal (1995, p. 6) argue
that ‘nothing is inherently sacred’. Sacred
space is contested space. It is ‘not merely
discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is
claimed, owned, and operated by peopleadvancing specific interests’ (ibid., p. 15),
involving ‘hierarchical power relations of dom-
ination and subordination, inclusion and
exclusion, appropriation and dispossession’
(ibid., p. 17). In thesepowerrelations, four
kinds of politics are apparent (van der Leeuw,
1986 [1933]): a politics of position whereby
every establishment of a sacred place is a con-
quest of space; a politics ofpropertywhereby
a sacred place is ‘appropriated, possessed and,
owned’; a politics of social exclusion,
whereby the sanctity of sacred place is pre-
served by maintaining boundaries; and a
politics of exile, which takes the form of a
modern loss of or nostalgia for the sacred.
Sacred spaces need not always be sacred.
The same space may be sacred at one time
under one set of circumstances, but not sacred
at other times and circumstances. For example,
a house is ordinarily considered functional
space, but in its design and the rituals prac-
ticed within, it may become sacralized. lkSuggested reading
Dunn (2005); Kong (2001a,b).sampling Sampling involves selection from
a greater whole and can be contrasted with
a full enumeration or acensus. However,
even when a census has been undertaken, the
outcomes can still be regarded as a sample of
what could have occurred (another stochastic
realization) – for example, on other than cen-
sus day – so the concept of sampling has even
wider applicability. It is an essential part of
extensive research designs and survey
analysis, but is also important when qualita-
tive data are collected and interpreted (King,
Keohane and Verba, 1994). The most com-
mon reasons for sampling are the costs of
measuring an entire population and the uneth-
ical intrusiveness of doing so.
Any sampling strategy is concerned with
estimating an unknown parameter (such as
the proportion inpoverty, the mean income,
or the total number in poverty) and its likely
error, and involves trade-offs among:. Representation: the ability to generalize
from the sample to the (carefully defined)
wider population.
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