INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

their reasons and motives for engaging in these activities. At the same time the ritual
theory maintains that ritual acts are non-intentional and have no intrinsic meaning.
The point Humphrey & Laidlaw want to make, and which I will return to in the final
chapter, is that people individually and collectively construct meanings of rituals
from outside discourses in the tradition and society and the contexts in which the
action is taking place. Because ritual acts are regarded external to the actor “they are
‘apprehensible’, waiting to be acted out in different modes and given symbolic meanings
by the celebrants.” 73 Ritual action displays a readiness for assimilating divergent
meanings, whether these are personal motives and purposes for conducting acts,
representations of religious beliefs and ideas, collective interpretations expressed in
narrative accounts, conventionalized social functions of the performance, or sensations
and feelings which the acts are said to arouse in humans. People unite in the
enactment of ritual performances, but the meanings which they bring with them and
ascribe to the events are both culturally defined and shared as well as individually
disparate and changing, since people have their own experiences, understandings,
and desires for conducting ritual acts. This fragmentation of meanings, encountered
by fieldworkers including myself, is not an ethnographic problem to smoothen over
or erase, but a possibility that lies within ritual actions: the stipulated form of ritual
makes it open for the attribution of plural meanings and thus the ritual can become
“meaningful” in a many different subjective and collective ways.
SEARCH AND RESEARCH
The field work in Varanasi, which this study is based on, was conducted between the
years 1999 and 2001, and appended with shorter revisits in 2004 and 2005. In total the
length of my stays in India comprises about three years, out of which 25 months were
spent in Varanasi for field studies and collection of data. When I arrived in 1999 neither
city nor the Sikh community was new to me. Already in 1996 I made a two
month-long field study for my undergraduate studies at Karlstad University. The
initial weeks of this stay took care of the mandatory cultural shock for a European
visiting a crowded Hindu pilgrimage center. The first impression of the urban environment
‒ the vital religious life with ascetics and pilgrims along the riverbanks of
Ganga, the streets and bazaars thronged with salesmen, colorful shrines and temples
in endless variations, and the daily life with constant power cuts, water shortage, and
the smell of fire-smoke, diesel, incense, and cow-dung in a delightful mixture ‒ overloaded
the senses for a few days. My first experiences of Varanasi have remained an
amusing memory, but the perspection of time provided understanding of how one’s
own identity and perceptions of a culture are continually changing as one enters new
social fields and interacts with people. Ethnographic fieldwork can be likened to a
process of socialization. 74 The student goes through a personal process, from a
73
Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 227.
74
See e.g. Tedlock 2000: 458.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008