INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

context of social relationships, within which the object transforms into a subject believed
to interact and respond to approaches made by other persons.
In a work titled Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Gell (1998) argues
that inanimate objects may indeed have a “personhood” and operate in the social
world as mediators of “social agency”. 292 Without relying on linguistic models and
symbolic interpretations, Gell proposes an action-centered approach that focuses on
the social relations in which people and objects interact and hold interchangeable
roles. An art object (or a religious object for that matter) does not have any “intrinsic”
nature or meaning outside its social and relational contexts, but is firmly settled
within a system of action “intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic
propositions about it”. 293 As Gell suggests, one should therefore focus on these social
relations in the vicinity of objects and approach the object as a material “index” that
allows for the cognitive operation, which he calls, “the abduction of agency” and
especially “social agency”. 294 An index is not simply like something (as an icon) but it
is something. People will treat a material object (or an “index”) as a social agent
who/which possesses will, character and ability to act on will. Gell’s clarification of
“agency” should be quoted, since he is careful to distinguish an anthropological understanding
of the term from that of philosophers and sociologists:
Agency is attributable to those persons (and things, see below) who
/which are seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that
is events caused by acts of mind or will or intention, rather than the
mere concatenation of physical events. …For the anthropologist ‘folk’
notions of agency, extracted from everyday practices and discursive
forms, are of concern, not ‘philosophically defensible’ notions of
agency. …The idea of agency is a culturally prescribed framework for
thinking about causation, when that happens it is (in some vague
sense) supposed to be intended in advance by some person-agent or
thing-agent. Whenever an event is believed to happen because of an
‘intention’ lodged in the person or thing which initiates the causal sequence,
that is an instance of ‘agency’. 295
Unlike anthropocentric standpoints that hold agency to be a permanent dispositional
characteristic of an (biological) entity, particularly that of living humans, Gell suggests
a relational and context-dependant view on agency, which can be attributed to
292
As Gell writes,”since the outset of the discipline, anthropology has been signally preoccupied
with a series of problems to do with ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and ’things’
which somehow ’appear as’, or do duty as persons.” Gell 1998:9. In the eighteenth century
Taylor’s skeptical study on “animism” ‒ the attribution of life to inanimate things ‒ and the
theory of exchange discussed in the works of Malinowski and Mauss hinted at this theme.
293
Gell 1998: 6.
294
Gell 1998: 13.
295
Gell 1998: 16 ‒ 17.
142
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008