SOUMHYA VENKATESAN

University of Manchester

Object, subject, thing:

Tamil Hindu priests’ material practices and practical theories
of animation and accommodation

A B S T R A C T
Tamil Hindu priests transform anthropomorphic clay and
stone statues into materially present gods who are alive,
aware, and corporeally active. These embodied deities are
humanlike but not human, which makes them both a rich
resource for human-divine interactions and a source of
discomfort, given their potency and uncanny
expressiveness. As a material practice, Hindu animation has
its own material logics and technologies, practical theories,
and ongoing practices of care. The embodied divinities of
Hinduism can thus be brought into conversation with
nonreligious animated things, such as humanoid robots.
Indeed, Hindu priests’ practices of animation and their
accommodations to their embodied divinities might open
up different modes of engagement with nonreligious
animated things. [animation, material transformations,
practical theories, human-thing accommodations,
embodiment, gods and priests, ritual, Hinduism, Tamil Nadu,
India]
I
am in Veera’s shed behind his house in a Tamil village in
South India.1 He is shaping a clay statue of a goddess. Some
plaster from the ceiling drifts down. “Dandruff!” he laughs,
casually brushing away the flakes. A few days later, the statue
is completed. Men from a neighboring village come and cer-
emoniously take possession of it. In their village, Veera’s father, Mari,
places a live bleeding chicken on its eyes. The chicken bleeds to
death. The statue is now a “living” goddess.
At another work space, this time Mani’s stone sculpture yard in
Mamallapuram, a worker sits astride a stone statue he is carving with
power tools. The dust rises around him, and he leans over and spits
on the ground right by the statue. A couple of weeks later, Mani, the
worker, and I accompany the statue to a temple. Here, after the work
of consecration by priests and other ritual experts, the statue is trans-
formed into the god Ganesha.
Both of these are projects of fabrication and animation: an “it”
(adhu) is transformed into a divine she or he (avan[r] or avall)—one
that is deemed aware, capable of independent action, and respon-
sive, yet beyond human comprehension and control.2 Such anima-
tion is the outcome of material practices, theoretical and practical
understandings, and attributions of humanlike qualities to things,
as became clear in my fieldwork in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
There, specialist sculptors (sthapathi), Potter village priests, and
Brahmin priests transform objects into embodied gods and man-
age relations with them. Three key features underpin my under-
standing of animation—first, that processes of animation create new
social beings that are both amenable to human projects and un-
canny; second, that animated things are recognized by those who
interact with them as humanlike but not human; and third, that
their other-than-humanness is what renders them both attractive
and disquietingly potent. Paying attention to Tamil Hindu priests’

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 447–460, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. © 2020 The Authors. American Ethnologist published by Wiley
Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12980

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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modifications or adaptations are made.
American Ethnologist ! Volume 47 Number 4 November 2020
transformation of things into materially present gods en-
riches the growing field of studies on material religion. It
does so by focusing on a setting where the divine and the
mundane are not sharply delineated, and where the actions
of materials and of beings are both deemed legitimate. Fur-
ther, Tamil Hindu priests’ practical theories of, activities
with, and feelings about their embodied gods can be pro-
ductively put into conversation with studies of other ani-
mated things, such as humanoid robots.
This is because the problem for these Hindu priests is
not the material thing that independently acts or produces
meaning; it is how best to productively generate and engage
such independent things, and how to manage their more
uncanny expressions. This insight brings Hindu animation
into conversation with robotics and robophilosophies, in
which similar questions arise. Roboticists, it appears, do
not worry about the ontological status of humanoid robots:
they are humanlike but not human (Wilf 2019). Rather, their
concern seems more to do with controlling the expressive
capacities of materials and things so that the robots do not
put off users. The animated things of Hinduism reveal that
it is possible to live with and engage uncanny material ex-
pressiveness in ways that recognize and accommodate the
active capacities of materials and technologies.
Bodying forth a god
Popular Hinduism does not distinguish between divinity
and the stuff of the material world. Any thing—rocks, trees,
people, statues—can be made temporarily or durably di-
vine through ritual (Ram 2013; Venkatesan, forthcoming;
Waghorne and Cutler 1996; Warrier 2005). The ensuing re-
lationship between divinity and thing is not one of equiva-
lence or representation but of identity—the thing is the god
(Fuller 1992, 30).
The two kinds of Tamil Hindu ritual experts with whom
I work—Brahmin and Potter—transform specially made
stone or clay statues, respectively, into materially present,
embodied gods that people worship in temples.3 That is,
the priests animate the statues—creating new beings with
which relations have to be forged and maintained (Silvio
2010, 434). While the underpinning theories of embodiment
and consequent practices vary significantly between the
two kinds of priest, as do the divinities to whom they minis-
ter, some key features remain the same. After finishing their
work of animation, or enlivening by installing divine pres-
ence, both kinds of priest describe the embodied gods as
alive (uyirudan) and aware/sensible (unnarchiyudan), and
as having preferences and the willingness to act not only on
the behalf of worshippers but also with reference to their
material bodies. Embodied gods are the product of ritual
work, and they exceed this work, becoming from the very
moment of animation powerful, active, and expressive in
their own right.
448
That is, the successful animation of statues into em-
bodied gods goes hand in hand with their fetishization,
meaning that people recognize the embodied divinities as
both fabricated and independently potent, as beings that
experience and act, and whose power partly comes from
the materials that make them up. Indeed, the priests were
very attentive to materials’ properties and thence to their
possibilities. It makes a difference to priests and, in their
accounts and practices, also to divinities whether a body
is made from stone or clay, is solid or hollow, and whether
language or something else is crucial to animating the de-
ity and maintaining its active presence. Even the makeup of
the deity is conceptualized in terms of the materials used
for embodiment.
In short, Tamil Hindu ritual experts recognize materi-
als as crucial in the work of animation, as substantively im-
portant, and as compellingly expressive. For them, materi-
als generate both concepts and consequent modes of un-
derstanding and working with divinity. Thus, Tamil Hindu
ritual experts are richly interesting to the burgeoning field
of material-religion studies. This is because their answer to
the question of what animates animated things neither dif-
ferentiates between an immaterial agency that acts and a
materiality that is acted on (as in certain Protestant under-
standings; Engelke 2005), nor does it ascribe a priori alive-
ness to material things (Merz 2017).
Rather, priestly expertise and work are crucial to ani-
mation; just as crucial are materials and techniques in the
animated thing’s potency and capacity to act. There are in-
appropriate materials, for sure, and they vary across the two
cases I discuss. The priests also recognize that although the
embodied deity’s expressive aliveness is not always com-
forting, it does not in itself cause a problem. In other words,
Tamil Hindu priests do not fundamentally worry about in-
appropriate materiality or fetishism. We can therefore pay
full attention to diverse materials and their substantive
roles in animated things because that is what priests do.
Also important is the combination of well-known
and more experimental techniques that priests employ
in producing animated things that are both tractable and
independently active. As experts, they want to produce
things that work for the deities, themselves, and their con-
gregations. This work is carried on in light of their practical
experience, theological understandings of divinity, and the
wider socioeconomic milieu. In their work, Tamil Hindu
ritual experts generate and enact what, following Göran
Goldkuhl (2006), I call practical theories. Originating in
information and communication studies, the term des-
ignates conceptual frameworks that are oriented toward
ensuring desired outcomes. Practical theorists, Goldkuhl
(2006, 4) argues, conceptualize what things exist, identify
or seek patterns pertaining to how things work, work with
normative criteria about the goodness of things, and gen-
erate design principles to create good things.4 As practical

theorists, priests and ritual experts are less interested in ab-
stract discussions about divinity and more in how they can
make divine embodiment work by productively deploying
what there is. Such theories incorporate the fact that ani-
mated things remain unpredictable and uncanny, even to
those who are responsible for manufacturing them and who
are committed to making them work in all their complexity.
In 1998, Gell wrote about “vehicular animism,” that
is, how we half-jokingly treat our cars as morally culpable
beings (Gell 1998). Anthropologists, he suggested, need
ways of thinking about how things are or are perceived
as social agents, that is, as authors of actions that make
a causal difference. Today, there is a growing number of
things that seem to have components of mind, such as
memory and learning ability, as well as humanoid bodies,
such as anthropomorphic robots with interactive respon-
siveness (e.g., Wilf’s [2019] jazz-playing robot, discussed
below). These, like the animated and fetishized embodied
divinities of Tamil Hinduism, are manufactured to certain
specifications and are definitely and avowedly material.
They also, by their very design, challenge the alive–not
alive distinction because of their appearance, their inter-
active responsiveness, and their sometimes uncanny and
unpredictable expressiveness.
Anthropologists are increasingly interested in these
new kinds of animated things. But there is little crossover
between a nonreligious focus on animation and the equally
burgeoning interest in material religion, with its founda-
tional assumption that materiality is crucial in people’s ex-
periences and even their definitions of the divine (Houtman
and Meyer 2012, 7; see also Miller 2005; Engelke 2012b).5
This is because animation and its twin, fetishization, are
deeply problematic in many Protestant traditions, discus-
sions of which have dominated studies of material religion.
Here, the divine is defined in opposition to the material,
which is then treated as a mere effect of something invisible
yet more fundamental (Pels 2012, 32). Important contribu-
tions to the study of material religion from Protestant per-
spectives have focused on the centrality of material objects
in religious practice, which perforce go hand in hand with
attempts to keep these things firmly in their place (e.g., En-
gelke 2005; Keane 2014). As the focus on material religion
shows us, materials are not quiescent; indeed, material-
religion studies are part of larger, multifaceted anthropolog-
ical projects to pay attention to or emancipate materiality,
or at least go beyond relegating it to a merely utilitarian sig-
nificance (McLean 2015).
Approaches that refuse to place any prior constraints
on what a thing should or can be include those inspired by
the “ontological turn” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007;
Holbraad 2011). Key tenets of this include “taking things too
seriously” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 291), that is, as se-
riously as our ethnographic interlocutors take them. Claims
about the aliveness of things or the materiality of divinity
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
pose no problems, only opportunities. My material raises
two further questions: How are ontological claims (“This
statue is god”) actualized through expert material practices
of transformation (“This statue is a god because we do x, y,
and z”)? Further, even where ontological assumptions are
shared, how does one kind of expert practitioner question
the other’s theories, and practices, and thus the efficacy of
animated things?
While both the ontological turn and studies of material
religion have inspired my thinking, my work gives prece-
dence to processes of fabrication and to an aliveness that
is produced rather than given, drawing it into conversa-
tions with the field of animation studies. While the priests’
and therefore my concern is with embodying divinity, the
focus on priests’ practical theories, which are oriented to-
ward making animated things that work, speaks to other
deliberate projects of animation. Such an approach pays at-
tention to materials, techniques, and forms without losing
sight that these animate things can exceed their makers’ in-
tentions and control.
Different deities, different materials: Theories
and practices
Tamil Potter and Brahmin priests minister to different kinds
of deity, respectively: village and Sanskritic. Both are im-
portant in the religious landscape of Tamil Nadu. While not
so clear-cut in practice, the generally accepted distinction
between them is that village deities, “amongst other linked
features, are almost always served by non-Brahman priests,
have mainly lower-caste devotees, are worshipped in the
vernacular and are often offered animal sacrifice” (Fuller
1988, 22). Sanskritic gods, by contrast, “are almost always
served by Brahman priests, draw their devotees from high
as well as low castes, are mainly worshipped with a San-
skrit liturgy, and are given only vegetarian food offerings
and never animal sacrifice” (22).
Caste logics rank Sanskritic deities and their priests
higher than village deities and their priests. Homologically,
village deities are described as quick to anger (vekuli; ko-
vam) and action, in contrast to calm (amaithi) Sanskritic
gods. These characterizations affect the popularity of dif-
ferent deities. People assess, usually by word of mouth, the
potency of a particular deity’s embodiment and what he or
she can and will do in response to their needs or desires.
This potency, priests aver, results partly from the particular
materials and practices they employ to achieve and main-
tain the gods’ active embodiment.
What follows is a synthetic description, based on sev-
eral consecrations I attended, of how Brahmin and Potter
priests respectively transform stone and clay statues into
embodied deities. In both cases, the priests pay close atten-
tion to materials, some of which remain important, while
others fall away once the work is done.
449
American Ethnologist ! Volume 47 Number 4 November 2020
Figure 1. Priests shower a newly installed temple deity with flowers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 2009. Only a few hours before, the statue was not a god.
Consecration priests have spent three days performing the ritual that has transformed a carved stone image into the embodied god. (Soumhya Venkatesan)
[This figure appears in color in the online issue]
Consecration priests of the Brahmin Sivacharya sub-
caste, who minister to the Sanskritic god Siva and his family,
invite immanent divinity into a number of temporary bod-
ies before transferring them into a durable stone body.
Expert sculptors make this stone body in their workshops
and bring it to the temple on the appointed auspicious
day. This is usually done with some fanfare (Venkatesan
2013). One of the sculptor’s final tasks is to ritually “open
the [statue’s] eyes” (kann thirakkal). This makes the statue
alive and aware of itself and its surroundings (Ganapathi
Stapathi 2002; Harvey and Venkatesan 2010). Even though
the temple is closed for worship during the consecration
period, it is a hive of activity as various tasks are performed
by the temple priests, patrons, sculptors, and helpers.
Throughout, specialist consecration priests feed a sac-
rificial fire with a number of substances while chanting
Sanskrit words of power (mantras).
Specific mantras are associated with specific deities:
naming a deity’s qualities using the right Sanskrit mantra
makes the deity present in the space of the fire sacrifice.
Priests identify these mantras as the Sanskrit body of the
deity (Davis 1991, 33). The sonic deity enters pots of wa-
ter placed around the fire altar. Threads smeared with aus-
picious turmeric and vermilion connect the pots and the
fire altar to the stone image awaiting divine presence. Other
threads crisscross the exterior of each pot. This wrapping,
according to a priest at one consecration, forms the de-
ity’s nerves (narambu). The pot is the deity’s skin; the wa-
ter within is the deity’s blood. A coconut placed on top of
the pot corresponds to the head, and the three indentations
on the coconut, to the eyes. The prepared pot as a whole, or
a group of pots for a major god, then, also constitutes the
deity’s body.
450
The deity’s sonic body, generated by the chanted
mantras, pervades the prepared “pot body,” traveling via the
sacred twigs of darbha grass that stick out of the water pots,
“like a television antenna,” said one priest in English. This
water, poured over the stone image (vigraham), transforms
it into the embodied deity (murti). The sonic bodies also
move along the threads that connect the water pots to the
image, “like wires” (again in English). Once the rituals are
complete, only Brahmin priests may touch the murti (see
Figure 1).
Most of the materials used in the fire sacrifice are dis-
carded after the deity has been installed in the statue. This
includes the thread through which divine power has passed
from the fire sacrifice to the statue. I have, however, been at
a consecration where the priests’ lay helpers sold lengths
of this thread for worshippers to tie around their wrists,
claiming that “divine energy [shakti] is in it.” The priests
neither supported not decried this sale. As far as they were
concerned, the thread had done its job; so too had the
empty water pots, which were disregarded after the divinely
charged water had been poured. All the materials and ma-
terial forms deployed in the consecration led to one goal—
installing divine presence in what became the murti.
Village-deity consecrations differ from Sanskritic ones
in that they usually involve animal sacrifice. As with the
Sanskritic pantheon, there is a plurality of village deities.
When a village decides to embody a particular deity (cho-
sen for what may be a number of different reasons), they
commission a Potter to make an iconographically fitting im-
age. On the appointed day, people from the village ceremo-
niously take the image to the site it is to occupy. The Pot-
ter accompanies them. Both before the image is taken and
once it is placed on-site, the village’s various deities possess

their regular mediums, or “god dancers” (sami-adi). That is,
they all take on human bodies before the deity for whom the
specific clay body has been made takes possession of it. This
indicates that all the village’s territorial deities support the
installation.6 After the gods leave their dancers, the Potter
cuts a chicken’s leg and holds the bleeding part against the
statue’s eye. The chicken is then killed. The chicken’s blood
opens the god’s eyes; its life enters the god, making him or
her alive. The god is now self-aware and corporeally aware
of his or her surroundings. While some priests and worship-
pers describe the chicken’s life as an offering to the deity as
he or she wakes to embodied power, most draw on the logic
of “a life for a life,” that is, the dying chicken gives its life to
the statue, enlivening it.
The divine body does not fully contain or circumscribe
divinity, which always exceeds the body—the divine is both
present in and beyond it. Both Sanskritic and village deities
can simultaneously inhabit many things in different places
without losing any of their power. But they differ in their
relationship to place. Sanskritic deities, while materially
present in particular locations, transcend territories and are
universal. Village deities, by contrast, are territorial, pervad-
ing the very soil (Mines 2005, 130, 134–35). People relocat-
ing to a new area scatter a handful of soil (pidi mannu) from
their original place in their new settlement, thus taking their
gods with them (Daniel 1987, 99–100). A Potter making a
clay image for a village will take a handful of soil from the
village, or from the temple site where older images have
broken down into soil (Inglis 1984, 229), and mix it in with
the clay he is using. The particulate and mixable qualities of
soil, then, are drawn into projects of mobility and belong-
ing. One way to think about this is that village deities are
dispersed in soil; when water is added to the soil to make
clay, a particular named deity is given form and, ultimately,
a body. This body is animated through a blood sacrifice,
awakening the deity to life, awareness, and the capacity to
act as an embodied being. In the case of the Sanskritic deity,
it is the potent Sanskrit mantras said while feeding the sac-
rificial fire that inculcate divine presence in water, which is
then poured over the images.
Hindu animation, then, is not simply a case of adding
“spirit,” “soul,” “life,” or some other external agency to inert
matter. As the descriptions above reveal, priests work with,
rather than on or despite, materials, eliciting and managing
their expressive potential. Soil, water, threads, stone, fire,
human and animal bodies, blood, sounds, gestures, or any
other tangible or intangible substance—all these constitute
potent materials that priests use to make divinity present.
Indeed, key materials are already conceptualized as active
in ways that make a difference to projects of animation.
In other words, animation and fetishization are built
into the systems of methods, principles, and rules that in-
form priests’ approaches to materiality. They are method-
ological, in Peter Pels’s (1998) sense; that is, they con-
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
stitute particular approaches to things deliberately made
and then are seen as independently potent and alive. As I
will now show, turning to specific priests and their deities,
priests’ methodological animism finds expression in their
foregrounding of ritual expertise in transforming things
into gods, but their methodological fetishism leads them
to yield, on occasion, both to what they understand as the
embodied deity’s desires and to the capacities of materials
that make up divine bodies. Indeed, divinity itself can be
material.
The god needs space: The advantage of hollow
clay bodies
“The clay gods we make are hollow [vetru]—like human be-
ings, like a cage [koonndu]. Blood flows around in the space
inside us. Like that, when we invite spirit [aavi] to come into
the hollow image, it comes and it stays inside because there
is room for it.”
These words were said by Mari, an elderly Potter whom
I met in the temple of the famous village goddess in Pot-
tur. Pottur village’s adult male Potters, all of whom belong
to the same patrilineage (pangalli), take turns performing
priestly duties in the temple. Mari is an important man in
Pottur, being the goddess’s medium. She regularly possesses
and speaks through him. Long before I met him, his fellow
Potters had selected him for the role, and the goddess had
agreed. This also signals the goddess’s ongoing acceptance
of the Potters as her priests (Inglis 1996, 94). Veera, Mari’s
son, makes clay statues for village deities on commission
for temples throughout the region. I spent my time in Pot-
tur in the goddess’s temple and in Mari and Veera’s house
and work shed, and I traveled with them to other temples as
they delivered and consecrated clay statues.
Clay temple images made by Tamil Potters are always
hollow. This is because Potters shape sections on the wheel
and join them together to make iconic images. Whether
fired or just painted, the sculptures have to be fully dried.
Hollow shapes dry more quickly and reliably. But Mari, as
the quote above shows, had a different order of explanation
for the hollowness of clay images—one that posits divinity
as having certain spatial requirements.
The word aavi is translated as “vapor,” “gas.” or
“smoke.” Described as aavi, Mari’s gods are material. They
occupy space. Many Potters have told me that spirit cir-
culates within closed hollow images. But Mari was going
further than most Potters. In his conception, the vaporous
deity needs a hollow clay body. He was also forcefully mak-
ing a point about how hollow bodies, unlike solid ones, ren-
der divinity permanently present:
With solid stone images, there is nowhere for the spirit
to dwell. That is why those gods need Brahmin priests
and mantras.7 Stone sculptors [kal-achari] cannot say
these mantras—they do not know them, and, anyway,
451
American Ethnologist ! Volume 47 Number 4 November 2020
Figure 2. Clay statues in various stages of deterioration, alongside more recently embodied deities, at an open-air village-deity shrine in Pudukottai District,
Tamil Nadu, 2010. Few people come to this kind of shrine because these deities are deemed fierce and unpredictable. Once the images are brought to the
site and consecrated, they are left alone. When possible or necessary, a village or caste group may commission new images to give the deities new bodies.
(Soumhya Venkatesan) [This figure appears in color in the online issue]
they are not of the right caste. So the Brahmin priest
takes over. Our gods do not need any Sanskrit chants—
we can say them if we like, but they do not need these.
Once the spirit comes in, it stays. It does not need to be
called every day. In the case of the stone gods, it goes
away and has to be called anew each time, which is
what the mantras do.
The vaporous village deity within its hollow clay body,
Mari avers, is self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Unlike
stone-bodied Sanskritic deities, it requires no further rit-
ual action beyond its enlivening. Indeed, many clay gods
are left alone after the installation ritual (see Figure 2). An-
imated and fetishized, they are alive and can act on their
own behalf. Characterized as quick to anger, village deities
are often best respectfully avoided. In the words of a Potter,
“He is there and will do his work. Why unnecessarily attract
his attention?”
I will return to the affective dimensions of priests’ in-
teractions with village deities. For now, let us remain with
Mari’s argument that Brahmanic rituals and the Sanskrit
liturgy are not only unnecessary but also useless to hollow-
bodied village deities. This has to be seen in context. Mari
knows of villagers who call in Brahmin priests to perform
rituals in village-deity temples. He also knows that increas-
ing numbers of village-deity temples are choosing to install
stone rather than clay images. Both these developments
threaten Potters’ incomes and influence.
As I have written elsewhere (Venkatesan 2015), Mari
once installed two village deities for whom Veera made clay
452
bodies. I will not repeat the discussion; suffice it to say that
the villagers, unsatisfied with the benefits that the deities
had brought, called in a Brahmin priest to perform some ad-
ditional rituals. When Mari heard of this, he was distressed.
Brahmin priests, he says, cannot quicken (vegam) village
deities to action; if anything, their work makes the deities
calm (amaithi) and more like Sanskritic gods.
Mari is also dismissive of the temple in another village
where, for the past 20 years, the village deity has had a stone
(rather than clay) body. A temple patron described this to
me as a matter of convenience: stone does not need to be
frequently replaced.8 In the same temple, a couple fulfilling
a vow to build a horse for the deity chose cement, for its
longevity compared to clay’s. The local Brahmin priest
performed a ceremony of purification and pacification.
Once he had left, the cement mason performed the animal
sacrifice to enliven the horse. The village’s Potter, albeit
present throughout, was definitely a minor character who
followed rather than issued commands.
Mari, who knew I had attended the ritual and asked
about it, was unsurprised that the Potter had been relegated
to an assistant role. He said the village’s Potters should not
have permitted a cement horse or the inclusion of a Brah-
min priest in the ritual. “This is what happens when you
replace clay with stone,” he said. He also explained why
the temple could not be popular or the embodied deity
powerful: “Stone images have different needs—what we do
is not enough, but the Brahmin also cannot do much with
them.” More people flock to village deities that are known
to be potent, and indeed the income from this particular

temple, unlike Mari’s, is small. Priests barely make a living
from it. Almost all the village’s male Potters have left to
work as migrant laborers elsewhere, leaving one man who
cannot migrate for personal reasons to act as the sole
Potter-priest.
As a practical theorist of village-deity embodiments,
Mari is clear that this is not just a problem of diminished
income or importance. A stone body for a village deity sim-
ply cannot work; the deity cannot be vaporously present
in that body—there is no space. Further, desired goods do
not flow from performing Brahmanic rituals, since village
deities derive little satisfaction from these rituals, which
eschew spilling blood or animal sacrifice. It is these that
arouse village deities. As he asked, “Can Brahmins stand
and cut [heads off ] goats and chickens? They cannot do
these things.”
Again, this is only partly about putting Brahmanic prac-
tices and thus Brahmin priests in their place. It constitutes
a practical theory about the potency of specific materials.
Potter and village-deity priests say that blood “quickens”
(vegam kallappum) the embodied deity; it makes him or her
receptive to the pleas of worshippers. Blood is associated
with heat, action, and awakening. It is dangerous, inauspi-
cious, and polluting, but when deployed in certain ways, it
is positively powerful.
Mari’s analogy between the deity’s circulation within
the “cage” of the statue and the circulation of blood within
the “cage” of the flesh-and-blood human or animal body
is an important aspect of his conceptualization of what the
village deity is and how to move it. When an animal is sacri-
ficed and its blood spills out, this rouses the village deity and
causes it to spill out of its own body; that is, sacrifice makes
the deity act in the world. Here, the potency of the embod-
ied village deity draws from the body of the god made from
hollow fired clay, the vaporous circulating nature of the em-
bodied god, the correspondence between different circulat-
ing substances within “cages,” and the willingness of the
priest to perform animal sacrifice. In other words, Mari’s
is a practical theory that brings together diverse relations,
capacities, and natures to generate a potently working em-
bodied deity. This practical theory is, however, rejected by
Brahmin priests, who have their own ways of working out
and with divine embodiment.
Vibrations and saturation
I was in the town of Poolur’s small Sanskritic Siva tem-
ple with its two Sivacharya Brahmin priests. Arya, the tem-
ple priest, had inherited the post from his wife’s father; his
son Putra helps in the temple and serves as a consecra-
tion priest, having received formal training in consecration
and other temple rituals. Arya, who knew I had recently
been in Pottur, asked what the Potter had said. I recounted
Mari’s theory about vaporous divinity and the advantages of
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
hollow clay bodies over solid stone bodies and the implica-
tions for potent divine presence.
Arya was dismissive:
When we take the mud [mannu] and purify it, then that
mud has power [English word]. That power remains
when we give that mud form. You take good mud, and
you knead it with water. Then you fire it. The air in the
fire goes into the statue and settles. It is the proper com-
bination of these elements according to the prescribed
codes [sastram] that gives the statue power. What he
is saying is nothing more than that. He is right in a
way, but bringing divine presence [saanidhyam] is only
in our [Brahmanic] practices and in the wholehearted
worship we offer. In any statue [bimbam], there is no
such thing as circulating or not circulating.
Arya was drawing on a common Brahmanic under-
standing of the five key elements (panchabhuta) that make
up the phenomenal world—earth, fire, air, water, and space.
To paraphrase him, the Potter brings four of these elements
together, in the right manner, and thereby creates an ani-
mated artifact, one that occupies space and that draws its
power from the materials mobilized in its manufacture. Its
power is that of appropriately worked matter. But this power
does not last. It seeps back into the earth, from whence
it came. Importantly, this power is not the same as divine
presence, which is the product of rituals.
Arya’s use of the word bimbam is telling. While sculp-
tors and priests generally use it to refer to unanimated stat-
ues of Sanskritic gods, the word means “reflection,” as in a
mirror or lake. As a reflection, the image resembles but is
not the deity. Only Brahmanic ritual action can transform
the bimbam into the deity. Putra balked at his father’s cer-
tainty that the clay statues do not contain divine presence.
“It might,” he said, “but it is not strong enough for those
people’s needs.”
Clearly, both Brahmin priests hold that there are infe-
rior and superior ways for material forms to gain and ex-
press vitality. While the constituent materials and the mode
of an artifact’s manufacture may animate it, the power that
ensues is weak and not as desirable as that which comes
from installing divine energy and presence through Brah-
manic ritual procedures. So sure are they of their rituals’
animating powers that the artifact, they claim, needs no in-
dependent vitality before the installation rituals. Arya said,
The sculptor [shilpi] beats out the statue [bimbam] ac-
cording to the texts pertaining to the work of sculptors
[Shilpa sastra]. After that, with mantrams, according to
each part of the body we give power—the power of the
face to the face, that of the heart to the heart. Like that,
one by one, it is we who produce [urpathi pannaradhu]
the power. Only after that does light [prakasham] de-
velop [yerpadarathu]. What we call the murti, its power
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is created [uruvaakka padarathu] only by what we do.
The statue does not have any of its own.
Further, Sivacharya Brahmin priests claim that because
a transcendental god like Siva takes immanent forms for
the sake of people, he is not wedded to particular material
forms. “Like water taking the shape of any container into
which it is poured, he will come into anything. He comes for
our sake,” said Putra. Once the god has been invited to take
a body, priests work on the assumption that he has done so.
There is, as several Brahmin priests have told me forcefully,
no distinction between swami (god) and murti (embodied
god). A murti can, however, contain more and more divine
presence; that is, presence in a murti is changeable, while
swami neither reduces nor increases. It just is.
Putra’s comparison of divinity with water, while not
conceptualizing divinity as material, is instructive. Divin-
ity can be likened to an inexhaustible supply of water, and
the murti to a sponge that can never be fully saturated. This
model strongly differs from Mari’s, in which the hollowness
of the image serves to hold a finite amount of vaporous ma-
terial presence.
Part of Arya and Putra’s refutation of Mari’s claims un-
doubtedly stems from their desire to elevate their own prac-
tices above those of village-deity priests, thus maintain-
ing the hierarchical ordering of priests and deities in Tamil
Nadu. While generally of mid to low economic status, the
priestly Brahmin subcaste enjoys high ritual status thanks
to its monopoly over priestly duty in Sanskritic temples. The
vocation runs in families; boys learn relevant mantras from
an early age, and priests often inherit their jobs (Hüsken
2011). Some attend priestly school and spend hours learn-
ing to pronounce Sanskrit mantras correctly. Putra told me
that, as a student at a priestly school, he had to repeat each
mantra a hundred times until he was word- and sound-
perfect. Like many Tamil Brahmin priests, he does not un-
derstand Sanskrit.
Sanskrit is both a material and the deity incarnate. The
form of the deity that Brahmin priests deem animate from
the outset is the deity’s sonic body, which is produced by
uttering the relevant Sanskrit mantras. Carelessly or badly
pronounced Sanskrit mantras, priests say, can harm both
speaker and ritual. Every Sivacharya Brahmin priest with
whom I worked emphasized the centrality of the sound (not
the meaning) of Sanskrit in inviting, installing, maintaining,
and enhancing divine presence.
In physics, sound is a form of energy produced when
something vibrates. This is also how Brahmin priests talk
about the sound of Sanskrit. According to them, the res-
onant sounds of words of power uttered in the divine
language, Sanskrit, create divine energy (shakti) that causes
vibrations (athirvu) in air, grass, water, threads, and stone.
This is how the deity, invoked first as a body of sound, passes
from the air into water, along threads and into stone during
454
consecrations. Vibrating effects are much greater in densely
packed solid stone. Further, solid objects reflect sound,
causing reverberations. In other words, sound energy
affects solid stone and is also returned by it. Regularly wor-
shipping a murti, using the Sanskrit liturgy to enumerate
the deity’s qualities, not only “tops up” the god’s presence in
the murti but also charges the entire space with benevolent
divine presence. Indeed, priests and devotees insist that the
more rituals accompanied by Sanskrit mantras performed
in a temple, the greater the embodied deity’s power and the
more resonant vibrations they feel in their own bodies.
This too is a practical theory, one whose contours dif-
fer greatly from Mari’s but produce the same effect of a po-
tent embodied deity. Brahmin priests’ conceptualization of
the embodied Sanskritic deity’s presence and power is af-
fected by the solidity of stone, which responds to sound en-
ergy, and the divinity’s liquid ability to saturate any form. In
similar fashion, hollowness affects Mari’s conceptualization
of the vaporous village deity.
Care
Embodied gods require care, but such care takes different
forms depending on the type of deity, ranging from sus-
tained and regular attention to respectful avoidance. Focus-
ing on care reveals the ongoing dimensions of priests’ prac-
tical theories about embodiments of divinity.
Brahmin temple priests say the embodied deity should
be treated like an honored guest or a beloved child. They
offer the murti oblations of milk, oil, and water, and they
present flowers, fruits, and other good things. Every day,
priests worship the murtis with camphor flames, a hand-
bell, and Sanskrit mantras. This is part of their responsibil-
ity as temple priests. They must carry it out even if there are
no worshippers present, as is often the case in many small
temples, including the one in Poolur. One priest said, “Wor-
ship is for swami, and it should not matter whether there is
anyone else present or not.” The murti is owed hospitality
and honor.
Putra told me that once when he was away, Arya un-
expectedly had to leave Poolur on urgent business. As the
time for the evening worship at the temple drew close, his
mother began to get worried. With both father and son
absent, who would perform it? A knock on the door an-
nounced a cousin, also a priest, who had suddenly de-
cided to visit. This cousin lives miles away. “Swami himself
brought him to do the worship ritual [puja]!” exclaimed Pu-
tra. As he understood it, the deity was both ensuring that
there was no shortfall in the attentions he was owed, and
protecting Arya and Putra from the consequences of being
derelict in their duty to him. The deity actively occupies his
body and looks after it, as well as those who minister to it.
Unlike Arya and Putra’s temple, Mari’s village-deity
temple is popular. The goddess is well known throughout

the region for helping people who solicit her aid when they
are sick, need to find lost valuables, or have been cheated
by others. They secure her help by making offerings to
her and promising more if their pleas are successful. On
Tuesdays and Saturdays, designated as special to the deity,
supplicants bring black goats and hens to sacrifice to the
goddess and her companion god.9 Worshippers throng
the temple on these days, and temporary stalls spring up
outside, dispensing anything from lemons to soothsaying.
All this activity seems to be at odds with Mari’s claim that
clay gods do not need regular rituals—they are present as
vaporous entities within the boundaries of the image, and
that is that.
Sitting with Mari when he was performing his priestly
duties, I noted that (unlike Brahmin priests) he did not
tend to the deity. Rather, two tasks occupied him. First, he
accepted offerings on behalf of the deity. These included
money, gold, animals, and sacks of produce. If someone
did not make an offering, he would demand it: “Kaannikkai
kodukkannum” (You must make an offering). As the day’s
priest on duty, Mari would collect a major share of the of-
ferings. Second, he zealously excluded polluting elements
from the temple. Thus, when a village child came up to the
shrine, he told her to leave immediately because there had
been a death in her family. “You know you must not come
here for 30 days,” he said.
Brahmin priests say that polluting elements have a bad
effect (dosham) because they make the temple less suitable
for the embodied deity. Many Potter priests hold pollut-
ing elements to be positively dangerous—rousing the de-
ity to anger and vengeance against the responsible person
or against the population of the deity’s territory, usually in
the form of epidemics. Mari once told me about a Dalit
(“untouchable”) man who had publicly insisted on his con-
stitutional right to enter the temple. He died soon after in
a road accident, but Mari was convinced that the goddess
had killed him for his temerity. The news of his death, Mari
said, had brought more people flocking to the temple as
they became even more convinced of the goddess’s power
and wanted to tap into it. This popularity has its benefits—
more worshippers equate to more glory for the goddess and
higher income for the priests. But it makes Mari fearful—
how is he to know enough about strangers to exclude them
if necessary from the temple? Might his failure bring down
the goddess’s wrath on himself and the village?
Putra’s and Mari’s confidence in their practical theo-
ries of effective embodiment is clear from how they in-
terpreted the unexpected yet timely arrival of the cousin
and, more controversially, the death of the potential rule-
breaker. They cite these as evidence that deities care about
their bodies and will act to protect their interests and in-
tegrity. But Mari’s worries about his inability to ensure that
this integrity is not breached expose the dark shadow of this
confidence. If a village deity is properly embodied, that is,
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
in a hollow clay body, and is roused with blood, it can solve
people’s problems when approached properly. But such a
deity can also create problems if she becomes enraged.
The next two sections focus on what might be de-
scribed as embodied divinities’ uncanny actions, with a fo-
cus on materials and their potency. Before I turn to these, I
want to reemphasize that, by and large, both kinds of priest
accept that the other’s work does result in animation and
in some form of acting divine presence. What they disagree
on is what this presence can or is willing to do, and whether
the other’s techniques can productively channel the deity’s
actions. In other words, neither divine presence nor ani-
mation is the problem. In question, rather, are the materi-
als and techniques deployed in animation and the capaci-
ties of animated things. But claiming that one’s techniques
and materials are powerful in and of themselves can ham-
per one’s ability to intervene by ceding decision-making to
the potently embodied deity.
Bodily power
A priest of a village deity, whose open-air temple is near
Mari and Veera’s house, came to them for advice. The deity’s
clay image was chipped and stained with bird droppings. He
wanted to give the god a new body, but
I have asked [the deity] eight times in different ways,
and he always refuses.10 I am afraid to do anything, but
I am also afraid not to do anything because he might get
angry that he is not being treated properly. What should
I do? Will you make me a new image?
Veera was sympathetic but firm. “Keep asking him,” he
said. “When he agrees, come and tell me, and I will make a
new image. Until then nothing can be done.” The man left. I
was intrigued—Veera had just turned down a remunerative
commission.
Veera turned to me and said, “He is a very powerful
god. He will protect you, but if he becomes angry, he will
destroy you.” Recalling a ritual I had attended, I told Veera
how Brahmin priests tie strings from the murti to pots of
water and, in an inversion of the Sanskritic installation rit-
ual, remove divine presence from the murti to the water
in the pots (for a fuller description, see Venkatesan 2013).
What remains, Brahmin priests say, “is just a doll” (bom-
mai). Veera was interested but unconvinced that such tech-
niques would work for clay-bodied village deities:
It can’t work for us because our gods do not need
mantras—once the god comes in, he stays. Further-
more, this particular god is very powerful. The image
is very old, and the clay in those days was very dense
[katti] and firm [adarthi]. It holds the spirit [aavi] well.
This is why the god does not want to leave this image—
the clay we use now is not so strong.
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Many sources of clay that they once used are now pro-
hibited to Potters, mainly because of governmental controls
on extraction of natural resources. Mari and Veera have to
resort to illegal clay-collecting missions, and they find it im-
possible to maintain the old practice of mixing clay from
five different sources to make images: hence their claim that
the clay is no longer as strong.
As discussed above, village deities inhere in the soil
of their territories. When this soil is mixed with water and
added to clay, the particular deity being embodied pervades
the entirety of the clay. After the rituals of invitation and in-
stallation, the deity also occupies, as a vaporous entity, the
hollow space in the center of the image. It is obvious to Mari
and Veera that a powerful deity would want a fittingly strong
body.
Powerful deities are like a double-edged sword—they
protect priests and worshippers, but they also hamper ritual
experts’ confidence about how to properly relate to them.
This can leave priests feeling helpless and uneasy. As the
village deity’s priest said, “I am afraid to do anything, and
also afraid not to do anything.” A less forceful deity might
simply be given a new body or even a stone body, but such
a deity would, by accepting a different body, reveal itself as
less potent or render itself thus.
Mari and Veera’s village is dominated by Potters and by
one agricultural caste. Brahmanic practices do not hold as
much sway here as they do in other parts of Tamil Nadu,
such as Mamallapuram, where I also conducted fieldwork
among stone sculptors who work closely with Brahmin
priests. Some of these sculptors adopt “purer,” and there-
fore superior, Brahmanic ritual techniques and practices,
such as vegetarianism. One such sculptor, Muthu, took me
to see a village deity toward whom he professed particu-
lar affection (piriyam). A few years earlier he had decided
to build a new shrine for her and to make her a new body
of stone in lieu of her old clay body. I asked if he had got-
ten the goddess’s permission to carry out his plans. “People
did say I should ask,” he replied, “but if all the proper ritu-
als are performed, then there is no problem.” Being a town
leader (naataar), and offering to work for free, Muthu pre-
vailed over people’s doubts. By the “proper rituals,” Muthu
meant those performed by Brahmin priests using the San-
skrit liturgy.
When we arrived at the shrine, the priest reported that
some boys had been throwing stones into it. Muthu was dis-
turbed. “You must stop them,” he said. The priest seemed
doubtful that he could. More crucially, he seemed unsure
that the goddess would. It is rare to see this uncertainty
about the willingness of a powerful village deity to take
vengeful action against transgressions. Indeed, I have come
across it only when such deities have been given stone bod-
ies or when Brahmin priests have been called in to sup-
plement the work of the deities’ own non-Brahmin priests.
Mari once described such village deities and their temples
456
to me as “neither one type nor another.” Muthu seemed re-
signed when we left, saying only that he might replace the
grills in front of the shrine with a solid door. Clearly there is
a cost to making such a deity tractable by changing both her
body and the rituals.
Mari might question the potency of Muthu’s deity in
the first place, but Muthu’s confidence comes not from as-
suming some weakness in his goddess, but from his convic-
tion that Brahmanic rituals are the “proper ones” and from
the affection and respect that motivate his actions. Good in-
tentions are important. Even a “calm” Sanskritic deity might
take umbrage if it suspects willful disregard. Another sculp-
tor in Mamallapuram told me of an order for stone statues
he had fulfilled for a new Sanskritic temple in the United
States. The head priest phoned to confirm that he had re-
ceived the statues, but reported that one statue had been
slightly damaged in transit. Although the sculptor asked
that he wait for a replacement, the priest refused to delay
the temple consecration:
He said that in America, unlike India, punctuality was
important. You cannot simply postpone arrangements.
The consecration went ahead. A few weeks later the
head priest’s son died in a road accident. The god was
showing his anger at being invited into a damaged
body. The priest phoned and said he should have lis-
tened to me. I sent them a new statue.
A sound practical theory takes into account all possi-
ble relations when trying to design a good outcome. Here,
the priest had failed to consider the relationship between
the deity and his body, privileging instead the timely com-
pletion of the ritual. As the sculptor and, retrospectively, the
priest saw it, a price had to be paid.
Leavings
What should happen to the damaged statue that was re-
placed in the American temple, or indeed to the old bodies
of village deities who are given new bodies? In both cases,
temples are left with remains that people no longer see as
embodiments. Entification is the term used for the action
of giving objective existence to something—but what to do
with a material remnant when the entity to which it has
given objective existence should no longer be present in it?
How certain can one be that the divine is no longer present?
An embodied deity is a subject, that is, it has a dis-
tinctive point of view (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 469). People
have to regard this point of view in their attempts to make
relations with it. A subject differs from an object, which
does not challenge subjects’ cognitive abilities or their ca-
pacities for action. The object, for example, a functioning
computer, does what one needs it to. When the computer
breaks down or does something unexpected, it reveals it-
self as a “thing.” Things, unlike objects, are not contained

within subject-object relations, as Bill Brown (2001) argues.
They exceed them. We use the object, but we encounter the
thing, shadowed as it is by an unknowable otherness—what
Peter Schwenger (2001, 101), following Heidegger, calls the
“x.” There is something within, beyond, or behind the thing
that defies easy containment or categorization.
Before divine presence has been installed, the statue
of a god is an object. As an embodied deity, it becomes a
subject. As a redundant godly body, it confronts priests as a
thing.
Brahmin priests insist that permanently empty bodies
must not remain in the temple but be disposed of in a body
of water. This is not always easy. Priests and worshippers
become attached to godly bodies on which they have lav-
ished attention (Parker 2009, 123; Venkatesan 2013). The
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) often prohibits older
temples from removing images. Samuel Parker (2009) re-
produces a newspaper article about how villagers in North
Arcot, Tamil Nadu, left some redundant images from their
Sanskritic temple at the boundaries of the neighboring vil-
lage. These villagers in turn left the images at the bound-
aries of the next village and so on until the images reached
the sea, into which they were “carelessly dumped” (Parker
2009, 125). But many such images nonetheless remain ma-
terially present in temples and therefore lurking at the edges
of priests’ consciousness.
In a neglected corner of Arya and Putra’s 10th-century
temple complex, there stands an iconographically and
iconometrically fitting statue of Siva’s consort. Putra thinks
it once served as the goddess’s body. When the temple was
renovated in early 2000, the statue was found in some rub-
ble. The ASI ruled that it should remain in the temple com-
plex. This causes Putra unease. “The bimbam should not be
here,” he says, “but what can we do? This is not right.”
At another Sanskritic temple, the priest paid obeisance
to an image that had been temporarily divested of divine
presence because of restoration work in the shrine. Pres-
ence had been provisionally moved into a drawing of the
deity on a wooden board. In response to my query, the de-
ity’s priest said, “Yes, it is just a statue [English] because we
moved the power. But one cannot know for sure.” Notwith-
standing his conviction that following ritual procedures
correctly would do the needful, he was uncertain about how
much control he and other priests had over divinity and its
embodiments.
In both cases the problem seems to be the potency
of Sanskrit mantras chanted near the redundant statue. If
deinstallation rituals work as they should, divine presence
should be removed. But if the sound of Sanskrit works as
it should, then how can a possibly vestigially present di-
vinity not respond? Hence priests’ discomfort in the pres-
ence of things that should not be meaningful but, willy-
nilly, remain so because it is unclear whether they are
animate.
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
Similar issues attend the discarded bodies of village
deities. When the body of a village deity is renewed, the
old body is either ignored or moved elsewhere on-site, and
the rites of invitation and installation are performed for the
new body. Over time, old bodies disintegrate through sun
and rain exposure, freeing people of the unease that their
presence causes. But as long as these redundant bodies re-
main, they confront people as things—shadowed by what
they once were and might continue to be.
I was visiting an open-air village-deity temple and
saw some broken clay bodies. The priest and some other
men told me the bodies were no longer needed (thevai
illai). “Could I photograph them?” Normally, village-deity
priests do not permit photographs of embodied divinities,
but these were clearly superfluous.11 The priest initially
agreed, but then decided to ask the current embodiment,
describing him as capricious and angry (salana buddhi,
kovakkaran). He found two petals, one red and one white,
and wrapped each in a leaf. He cast these in front of the
deity, saying, “If you agree to her request, let me pick up
the red petal.” He picked up the white one. The god had
refused. Half-apologetic and half-proud, the priest told me
the god was very powerful and was, clearly, still attached to
his old bodies.
Fabricating and accommodating animated things
All makers of things, especially animated things, work with
materials and material forms. Their approaches are under-
pinned by ontological and semiotic ideologies, that is, prin-
cipled understandings of what there is, how to mobilize it,
and how to appropriately make it meaningful. They deploy
and generate practical theories, that is, conceptualizations
of what exists, and use-oriented attention to make diverse
elements work together, to enact goodness as normatively
defined, and to minimize bad effects. As practical theorists,
priests bring several considerations to bear in their work,
producing an embodied divinity that they animate and that
is independently potent by design. They make judgments
about the various materials they use (what matters, why,
and how), they reflect on established procedures, and they
are willing to experiment to achieve their desired results.
This might involve changing a deity’s body from clay to
stone or performing a different set of rituals. In such cases
what results is a qualitatively different being, one with dif-
ferent desires, responses, and modes of engagement. Im-
portantly, hardly any priest questions the divinity of statues
worshipped as embodied gods. Bringing together materials
and techniques in specific ways, they say, will result in an
animate thing: an embodied divinity. What they question,
rather, is a given deity’s potency, responsiveness, and will-
ingness to act. They also think critically about materials and
techniques used to embody and manage divinity. In other
words, the questions and challenges are about not what the
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thing is, but what it can or will do, how to move it to re-
spond, and what to do when it cannot be productively man-
aged. And it is here that the animate things of Hinduism
have something to offer animation studies, especially with
regard to humanoid robots.
Eitan Wilf (2019) writes of a robotics lab in the United
States where researchers enjoy the “uncanny” ways that
their music-playing humanoid robot, Syrus, begins per-
forming random gestures. Syrus’s lack of coordination,
which stems from glitches in its material makeup, gives the
illusion of independent, albeit uncontrolled, aliveness. The
robotics engineers find this funny, but they know that Syrus
must not behave this way if it is to be acceptable to end
users.
Syrus is interesting because, like the embodied deities
of Tamil Hinduism, it is treated as humanlike but is def-
initely not human. Syrus’s unscripted responsiveness
challenges what Wilf identifies as the dominant semiotic
ideology of the post-Enlightenment West, which suppresses
or denies expressive materiality. Here, animated things be-
come uncanny when they exceed their remit by virtue
of their material qualities. They challenge semiotic and
ontological ideologies by occupying subject positions while
revealing their manufactured and material aspects. More
generally, the uncanny appears when something reflexively
points to its own materiality in ways that call attention to
its uncategorizability; it is neither an object nor a subject.
It is a “thing.” It cannot be contained within subject-object
relations.
Syrus is disturbing because its unscripted actions
disrupt a generally held distinction between vitality and
inert materiality. Other humanoid robots, which look and
act like humans, are products of similar material processes
but of different ontological ideologies. Thus, Japanese
engineers of humanoid robots follow the Shinto-derived
understanding of life as “the most essential quality of
something whether a living thing or a made object, such as
a puppet” (Robertson 2007, 377). Indeed, many people cite
Shinto as key to Japan’s “robot-friendliness” (377n29). Here,
the uncanny does not hinge on confusion about whether
something is alive; the question is how such an animate
thing should act. As both Jennifer Robertson (2007) and
Selma Šabanović (2014) show in their work with Japanese
robotics engineers, Shinto ideas do not straightforwardly
translate into robot designs and understandings. They are
filtered through other kinds of concern—what a robot is for,
how its form can optimize its purpose, and how to produc-
tively manage and care for it. These are familiar concerns:
as revealed in the contrast between the clay and stone
gods, very different animate beings can be derived even if
a common ontological understanding holds that a thing
can not only possess life (uyir), but can also be a materially
present god that can act in meaningful and intentional
ways.
458
Hindu embodied divinities can illuminate debates in
robotics about form, function, and anthropomorphization
because they, like robots, are designed “to evoke a high level
of co-operation from humans while creating an ontologi-
cal uncertainty as to their nature and intentionality” (Vidal
2007, 918). This uncertainty stems not from any category
confusion between humans and divinities, but from “sub-
anthropomorphization”—the embodied divinity is human-
like but not human. Indeed, its other-than-human capaci-
ties are what bring people to divinities—they have abilities
and capacities that humans lack.
While Vidal focuses on the similarities between
human-robot interactions and human-embodied divinity
interactions and the question of skepticism, my own focus
is on how priests materialize these divinities in the first
place. Thus I have focused on the expert work of fabricating
and animating things to be social agents and partners.
Remarkably, materials are crucial—both to processes of
fabrication and to conceptualization. Even divinities be-
come material—vaporously held in hollow clay or sonically
reverberating in stone. This focus on fabrication lends a
different perspective to animation. Each kind of priest, as
we have seen, understands that the potency of the embod-
ied divinity is a product of his expertise, the cooperation
of the deity, and the potency of materials. Their problem is
not the identity of the animated thing—it is the god. Rather,
the question is how to make the materially present god
amenable to human needs and intentions and how to live
with its recalcitrance.
Paying attention to practical theories about what
makes a material difference to projects of animation allows
us to focus on animation and enlivening as processes that
create beings with which social relations can be made and
which have a say in the forms that these relationships can
take. It lends nuance and differentiation to anthropological
understandings of animation.
In the same way that I have compared the discourses
and practices of Brahmin and Potter priests and their re-
spective projects, we might compare the practical theories
of different robotics engineers as they make animate things,
and also explore resonances between religious and nonreli-
gious projects of animation. For example, since 2014, India
has developed seven humanoid robots (Sinha 2018), and we
might ask to what extent there is a crossover in the practical
theories of Indian roboticists and Hindu priests. Such an ap-
proach would not put aside ontological questions; rather it
would ask how particular ideas about the nature of things
(including whether they possess life) inform the manufac-
ture of animated entities, and conversely, how particular
animate things reshape ontological certainties. This may in-
clude rethinking the uncanny because materials are fully
implicated in action. Indeed, the priests’ practical theories
can turn even embodied divinities’ recalcitrance to good ac-
count, and not just as an in-joke (contra Wilf’s roboticists). It

indicates to them that their efforts have created something
that divinity does not easily abandon.
Vernon Cronen (2001, 26) identifies practical theories
as heuristic, activity oriented, and designed for use in
joining with others. Such others may, as shown by my
work with the priests, be embodied divinities. As practical
theorists of divine embodiment and creators of animated
beings, each kind of priest conceptualizes, combines, and
deploys different materials to produce physically present
yet qualitatively different gods with whom one can engage,
again in fundamentally different ways. Their practical theo-
ries can bring animation studies into more productive con-
versations with discussions from material religion precisely
because materials play such a crucial role in projects of an-
imation (enabling or thwarting them) and subsequent pro-
ductive engagements with animated thing-beings. Tamil
Hindu priests’ accommodations with the uncanny can pro-
vide fresh ways for other producers of animated things to
work with rather than iron away these things’ excessive ac-
tions. If we are to live more and more closely with animated
things, Hindu priests can offer us some ways to make room
for both their productive and disturbing actions.
Notes
Acknowledgments. My thanks go first and foremost to the priests
and sculptors for their patience and generosity, and to Rani Rama
Devi and Rajkumar Vijaykumar Thondaiman for their hospitality. I
am grateful to Niko Besnier, Matthew Engelke, Penny Harvey, Mar-
tin Holbraad, Webb Keane, Jamie Saris, Chika Watanabe, and Peter
Wade for their careful and stimulating feedback. I presented ver-
sions of this article at the anthropology seminars at SOAS Univer-
sity of London, the London School of Economics and Political Sci-
ence, the University of Helsinki, and the National University of Ire-
land, Maynooth. I thank the participants for thoughtful questions
and comments. The editors of American Ethnologist and reviewers
have been critical in the best possible ways—my thanks to them.
My thanks also to the copyeditor for his care. Fieldwork was made
possible by a Wenner-Gren grant (GR7417) and a Leverhulme Re-
search Fellowship.
1. All names of people and villages are pseudonyms. The names
of larger, well-known places have been retained.
2. For the sake of readability, I have withheld diacritics from
transliterated Tamil and Sanskrit.
3. I conducted fieldwork mainly in 2009–10 in Tamil Nadu state,
India, with several shorter stints from 2008 to 2011. I spent time
with priests in temples and accompanied them to consecrations. I
also conducted fieldwork at sculptors’ and Potters’ work spaces. All
translations from Tamil are mine.
4. Goldkuhl’s (2006) final constituent of practical theory is the
creation of models or crystallizations of illustrative theory. This
does not hold in the cases that I am explicating and analyzing.
5. For a rich comparison of Brahmanic Hindu and Protestant ap-
proaches to materiality, see Engelke 2012a.
6. For a more detailed discussion, see Venkatesan 2015.
7. Mantra is one of the few Sanskrit words that Mari used in his
conversations with me. Unlike Brahmin priests who often use San-
skrit or Sanskritized Tamil words when speaking about their ritual
work, Mari and other Potters almost exclusively use Tamil words. I
will not specify the language in each instance when quoting.
Object, subject, thing ! American Ethnologist
8. Norman Cutler (1996, 162) also distinguishes between clay
and stone images, according to these different materials’ relative
durability.
9. Potters describe him as the goddess’s older brother, who was
invited into the temple long ago to tame her demand for human
sacrifice.
10. The usual form when requiring a direct answer from a deity
is to ask a yes-or-no question and then specify a sign for either re-
sponse (e.g., the chirping of a gecko).
11. Figure 2 is an exception. The Potter who took me to this
open-air temple encouraged me to take photos, perhaps because,
by his own account, his spiritual attentions (aanmigam) were fo-
cused on the god Siva and not so much on village deities.
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Soumhya Venkatesan
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
soumhya.venkatesan@manchester.ac.uk