INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

oth persons and inanimate “things”. According to this theory, persons and objects
hold two interchangeable positions in a social relationship: an “agent” who exercises
“agency” and is thus invested with intentionality and causes action, while the counterpart
of an agent is a “patient” who is casually affected by the actions of the
agent. 296 Many of the devotional practices people are performing to religious objects,
such as offering food and drinkables, may appear irrational considering that objects
do not have a biological life. A fundamental question to pose in this context is how
can an entity be invested with subjectivity and intention without being biologically
alive? In his answer, Gell strongly emphasizes that “social agency” is never defined in
terms of biological qualities; the object is not ascribed a biological life or attributes,
and if it would demonstrate organic functions, like bleeding or crying, religious people
would most probably consider it to be a miracle. Religious people are more than
well aware of the categorical distinction between humans and a manmade thing, such
as a book. “Social agency”, on the other hand, is relational and what matters when
ascribing agency to an object is where “it stands in a network of social relations”. One
thing that is required for a “thing” to become a social agent is the nearby presence of
human agents, not that the “thing” is a human itself. 297
As anthropologists have demonstrated there are surely many processes by
which material objects can be invested agency to become socially alive. The strategies
Gell mentions involve internal and external aspects, both of which find expressions in
ritualized routines and behavior in the human environment surrounding the material
object. From a behaviorist standpoint the attribution of a “mental state” to things or
humans who people imagine as intentional can never be fully proved and only expressed
in outer actions of people. Still it remains that people ascribe a spirit, soul, or
a “mental state” to the inner part of an object. This makes them concerned with spatial
and “concentric” matters, that is, where and in which way objects should be preserved,
covered, hidden, or displayed. By ethnographic illustrations from different
cultures and time periods, Gell describes how people animate or impose “soul” and
agency on objects by making them a “patient” in the social exchanges of ritual practices:
the internal strategy is to place life-substances within the objects or wrap them
with clothes or various layers of “skins”, and the external strategy is to enmesh the
objects in daily routines and create spaces to emphasize their interior identity. From a
religious point of view, however, these practices are not held to be just symbolic acts
but are indeed believed to be real ministration of a deity or dignified person. 298
The Sikh tradition makes it clear that the Guru Granth Sahib is far from being a
spiritless object: the scripture allocates the intra-spirit which successively inhabited
the bodies of ten human Gurus in a line of transmission and was activated through
the ritual installation of the individual Guru. Through processes of objectifications
296
The artist of the object, the prototype used for creating it, the audience, and the object itself,
are all parts of what Gell terms the “art nexus”. The different parts of the art nexus can operate
as either “agents” or “patients” in numerous combinations.
297
Gell 1998: 123.
298
Gell 1998: 135 ‒ 136.
143
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008