INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

shown that cosmologies and systems of religious beliefs underlying the ritual treatment
of sacred objects quite often depart from an anthropomorphic thought and practice:
religious objects, crafted or natural, are treated like social mediators, and sometimes
as independent persons, which are endowed with humanlike characteristics,
behaviours and attributes. 277 Religious people may root the anthropomorphic identity
of an inanimate entity in mythologies and beliefs of an original humanity shared with
human beings. 278 In other instances, anthropomorphism refers to the perceptions of
nonhuman beings, such as deities and spirits, which assume human form and behaviors.
279 Anthropomorphism, as the tendency to attribute human-like qualities to inanimate
objects or animals, sometimes operates merely on the basis of analogy, that
is, metaphorically people think or write about objects, animals, natural forces, etc., as
if they were having human-like characteristics. 280 The presence of efficiency and
power that religious people ascribe to anthropomorphized objects seem to be reinforced
by means of ritual enactments and a careful ministration of the objects. On
appropriate occasions the objects may be ritually activated or “awaken” to mediate
and establish relationship between the world of humans and the world of God, spirits,
or ancestors.
At first glance these general ideas evoked by the term anthropomorphism may
not appear applicable to the Sikh case, considering that the material body of Guru
Granth Sahib remains a book, and not a human, with an interior that manifests revealed
words of transcendent origin. Neither the material body nor the spiritual content
of the Guru Granth Sahib is considered human in any organic sense. In Sikh
literature that evolved from the eighteenth century onwards, however, the image of a
human body appears in narratives presenting the Guru Granth Sahib. Deliberate
attempts to alter or misuse the content of the scripture are thought of as serious in-
277
For case-studies on anthropomorphized ritual objects, see eg. Jeudy-Ballini & Juillerat 2002.
278
This type of anthrophomorphization seems to be typical of Amerindian cosmologies. In a
paper titled “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian
Ontologies” De Castro (2004) describes how Amerindian people perceive animals, spirits,
and other nonhumans in the world as persons ‒ anthropomorphic beings that experience their
habits and characteristics in the form of (human) culture and to whom humans have social
relationships. What is believed to be the original common condition for both humans and animals
is humanity, in other words, animals are ex-humans who share the same spiritual components
as humans. Comparing Amerindian worldviews with European, De Castro argues that the
Western evolutionary thinking has been and still is guided by an anthropocentric thinking,
whereas the Amerindian worldviews are anthropomorphic in character, in the sense that people
are attributing nonhumans personhood, consciousness, intentionality, and even cultural habits
similar to humans.
279
This application of anthropomorphism is fundamental to incarnation theories and characteristic
of icon-worship, such as Hindu gods, goddesses, and saints portrayed in humanized forms.
280
As Gell strongly purports, anthropomorphism or “the tendency to impute human attributes
such as will and agency to supposedly inanimate entities” is an inclination by no means typical
only of religious people but a prevailing feature of human cognition in general (Gell 1998: 121).
133
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008