Sacred and Profane?
by Rudolf Otto introduced the delineation between the sacred and the profane. But this was never compatible with the cultural set-up of Oriental psyche.
Look at the picture below. This is a typical calendar-poster that is being distributed by tobacco companies in the Philippines. (Liquor companies, you bet, are doing the same.)
These kinds of stuff come with different images – some with different pictures of Mary, others with Jesus, still others with various saints – and in different sizes. Well, Filipinos especially in the rural areas are simply receiving this kind of stuff and hanging it on their wall. In some occasions, I even saw this poster transformed into stuff for home altars along side lighted candles.
This is a clear sign of exploiting religious images – or symbols of religion – for marketing purposes. This is a clear testament that even religion can also be at the behest of capitalistic operations. Of course, we can leave that to the professional marketers, who we would like to believed do not have the entirety of their conscience calloused.
Aside from reason of pragmatism, what could explain the patronizing acceptance of our people to this stuff? For, who would refuse to accept a glossy poster that does dual function: a calendar and a thing to remind them of the “sacred.”
Having written the word “sacred,” I am reminded of Rudolf Otto. In his book, On the Idea of the Holy, he introduced the category that proved helpful in delineating between the “sacred” and the “profane.”
But the same time, I am lent with a probable reason for my people’s behavior. It must be because Filipinos do conceive of the reality in holistic fashion. That is, essentially, it is not part of the Filipino psyche to be think of dualism (at least, philosophically), or to think along the divide of transcendentalism and immanent-ism (theologically).
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