INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

itual acts and that they actually provide a model which can explain the tendency
among religious worshippers to give multiple explanations to ritual performances.
Contexts
Purposes
Motives
ACTION
Functions
Effects
Figure 26.
Consider for a while the Sikh man who arranges a reading of Ardas in the
gurdwara. He may verbally state it is for the purpose of having his newly opened
shop blessed by the Guru and because he is the head of the family responsible for
public worship. His prior motive may be to run the new business at a profit and earn
money so that he can eventually afford to buy a new home for his family. His stated
purpose may include religious ideas about the Guru’s power and agency, that is, the
purpose contains ideas of expected functions and concrete effects that a reading of the
Sikh prayer is belived to accomplish in the social world. Irrespective of his motives
and purposes the actual performance of Ardas is yet conducted in a stipulated manner.
If the man says he performs the Ardas to have his new shop blessed by the Guru,
the same purpose could also apply to other worship acts, like an unbroken recitation
of Guru Granth Sahib or other types of gurbani recitations. The religious actor may
attribute both personal and collective purposes and motives to stipulated acts that are
derived from a variety of contextual elements (See Figure 26). The prior intentions
and motives of religious action should not be analytically confused with the consequences
of the act, even if the expected effects and results of action often conflate and
are a part of the prior purpose by pointing to one and the same thing. When the Sikh
man states he reads the Ardas to gain the Guru’s blessings for his shop, both his purpose
and desired results from the reading is that his business will actually be blessed
with success in the future. Just as socio-linguistics have looked for meanings of
speech in conventions and motivations outside the utterances, meanings are thus not
a treasure to be found if we just dig deep enough into the ritual structure. Rather,
meanings are contextual constructs that lie in human discourses on the outside of
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008