the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups’ (Durkheim, 1995: 9). It is this collective and somatic constituent of rites which brings about the experience of the sacred and which functions as a binding force for the group, an experience Durkheim calls ‘collective effervescence’. For example, commemorative rites have the capacity to revitalise the most important values and beliefs of any group and bind them together with