Guanyin’s Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects

Abstract

How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human–icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal—teasing out worshippers’ contradictory discourses on whether the deity is present in the statue or in the mind of the worshipper. These ethnographic observations lead us to consider how anthropological debates about the nature of cultural objects as representations or as agents parallel Guanyin practices and discourses in Hong Kong. We suggest how the ambivalent status of Guanyin statues is negotiated for practitioners as “demi‐persons” and can be understood for anthropologists through the concept of the “dividuating object.” [material religion, animism, agency, personhood, icon, Hong Kong]