Abstract

What is a sacred place? What is the difference between any social space and a sacred place? Is it possible to identify features common to any sacred place, despite the variety of forms they take today? The paper tries to reflect on these issues from a Durkheimian perspective, drawing from the literature on these issues consistent with the Durkheimian tradition. Above all, the paper tries to reconstruct a «deep grammar» of sacred places capable of grasping the basic functioning of conventional and unconventional sacred places in our postsecular societies. The relationship between space, ritual, and the sacred is taken as one of the topics (especially after the «spatial turn» in the social sciences) that make the most of Durkheimian categories, one hundred years after the publication of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.