INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

non-perceptible beings to play a role and interact with people in the human world. 743
In other words, religious language practices involve the construction and attribution
of a certain agency which is believed to provide practitioners access to supernatural
powers. This partly explains why religious people pay great attention and care to the
proper uses of words held sacred.
Speech act theory can, however, be useful to analyses of the more conventional
aspects of verbal and non-verbal religious activities. Applying speech act theory to
the study of rituals, Rappaport (1999) notes that “[R]ituals are full of conventional
utterances and acts which achieve conventional effects” and there exists a special
relationship between rituals and performatives. 744 The formal characteristics and
correctness that is typical of ritual performances enhance the weight and success of
performatives. The faults which could make performative acts invalid (e.g., reciting
the wrong religious text in a liturgy) are unlikely to happen in rituals “because the
formality of liturgical order helps to insure that whatever performatives they incorporate
are performed by authorized people with respect to eligible persons or entities
under proper circumstances in accordance with proper procedures.” 745 The ritualized
form makes it possible to create meta-messages that are not necessarily informative in
a lexcial sense but convey a special type of information that can bring about stipulated
messages and conventional effects among participants. As Ray (1973) correctly
remarks, “the ‘performative’ approach enables us to see not only that language is the
central mechanism of these rites, but also how the belief in the instrumentality of
words (their causal ‘power’) may be intelligibly understood without consigning it to
the sphere of the ‘primitive’, the ’magical’, or the ‘symbolic’, as so frequently done.” 746
We cannot grasp the meanings of Sikh worship acts without recognizing both the
identity of words and what is being done through the performative acts involved.
5.2. ANALYTICAL REFLECTIONS
In the search for meanings of religious worship acts, linguistic and paralinguistic, one
must necessarily have to look at the single ritual performance. There will always be
particular ways by which acts and texts contextualize in situational settings, to which
people bring with them a number of individual and socially shared ideas about the
meanings and effects of the performances. The following sections of this chapter will
illustrate a few means by which Sikhs contextualize and assign their worship acts
conventional and situational meanings that are derived from broader social events
743
Keane 1997a.
744
Rappaport 1999: 114. He distinguished between “factives” which “bring into being the state
of affairs with which they are concerned”, and “commissives” which “merely bring into being
the commitment of those performing them to do so sometime in the future” (Rappaport 1999:
115).
745
Rappaport 1999: 116.
746
Ray 1973: 17.
464
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008