Invisible Agents. A Non-Secular Approach to World- and Sensemaking in Pandemic Times

Outline

1. Introduction

2. Human-Environment Relation
2.1 Constructing Nature and Environment
2.2 The Merging of Dividing Lines: The Human and the Non-Human
2.3 The Merging of Dividing Lines: The Natural and the Supernatural
2.4 Coming Towards a Radically Inclusive Ecology

3. Agency
3.1 Agency of Non-Humans
3.2 Agency of the Supernatural

4. Religion and Health
4.1 Characterizing Religion
4.2. Characterizing Christian Religion
4.3. Religion and Health

5.Summary

6. Researching Religious Actors
6.1. Frame, Design and Methods
6.2. Interviews and Findings

7. Conclusion

8. Bibliography

1. Introduction

Toward the end of 2019, a tiny entity given the name SARS-CoV-2, overpowered the world with a relentless ferocity that sharply exposed the vulnerability of modern human civilization. A belief in the superiority of our species, in the progressiveness of modern social systems, in the achievements in technology and medicine, could not save us from the power of “one of nature's most miniscule members” (Blume 2022: x). With the ongoing spread and unpredictable mutation of the COVID-19 virus, a global war has been declared¹ on something biologically not even classified as a living being, and states mobilize all resources to regain control.

This ‘invisible agent' challenges our personal lives and state action just as much as the postulated separation between humanity and ‘nature'. Not only must we acknowledge the virus as a more-than-human global actor in contrast to humans as being the only forceful agents “acting upon a passive world” (Bubandt 2018: 4), its assumed origin in zoonosis also marks a point of fusion between human and non-human realms, and therefore can be seen as a reinforcement of entanglement that transcends nature/culture dichotomy.

Re-thinking our interdependent planetary system and the agency of ‘natural' other-than-human beings as co-creators of our world who participate in assembling “more-than-human socialities” (ibid.: 8), I want to inquire on the inclusion of other ‘invisible agents' belonging to a magical, ‘supernatural' ecology. Gods, spirits, and ghosts are frequently subjectively and collectively identified as shapers of world and owners of agency and are thus thought into the “assemblage of the social” (Latour 2005). Might the destabilization of boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, life and nonlife, material and immaterial allow to integrate ‘supernatural' agents into concepts of environment, more-than-human agency and worldmaking (ibid.: 7)?

Based on the topic of human-environment relation, I am going to delve into the question of who is subjectively identified as a ‘supernatural agent' and what type and scope of agency is attributed. In the context of the seminar that also asks about the connection to COVID-related healing practices, I will then link the concept of supernatural agency with phenomena of health. Thereupon I want to present the methods and findings of my research following the guideline question: How do religious actors in Germany and Indonesia connect their belief with medical action against the Covid-19 pandemic?, focusing on Christian actors in Germany.

2. Human-Environment Relation

2.1 Constructing Nature and Environment

‘Nature' is commonly referred to as a non-human realm detached from society and human intervention (Großmann 2022: 14; DWDS). It's a sphere opposed to ‘culture': a separation deriving etymologically from the Latin words natura (birth) and cultura with the meaning of ‘care, processing' (DWDS), creating a dissociation between a pristine ‘humanless' naturality and a humanly manufactured and processed world. Nature is what is ‘other' to the human or culture (Nikolic 2017: 39).

Yet, despite appearing pristine and separated from humans, constructing nature is in fact a deeply anthropogenic, historical, and political process with its imagery changing according to the needs and purposes of a society (Merchant 1980: 5). In the course of Western history, nature has been constructed from being a nurturing mother to a “virgin, mythic wilderness” which can be conquered (Alaimo 2000; in: Nikolic 2017: 40) to a mindless object, a “blank, silent resource for exploits of culture” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 12), envisioning a space prone for use, extraction, and possession with the growing needs of an industrialized society. Großmann thereby states that, although corresponding to certain phenomena, nature does not exist by itself: It only “comes into being by being imagined, shaped and administered by society” (2022: 14). Arguing to dismiss the concept of ‘nature' therefore altogether, various theorists favor a focus on human and nonhuman relationships in existing environments instead (Latour 2004: 9; Morton 2010: 3). Entities and their environments are inseparably linked, as there can be “no organism without an environment” and “no environment without an organism” (Gibson 1979; in Ingold 2000: 20), mutually developing in an interactive entanglement. Understanding that a being is bound in its existence to other beings, “the distinction between environment and nature corresponds to the difference in perspective seeing ourselves as being within a world and as beings without it” (ibid.; emphasis in original). Examining the ways organisms and their surroundings interrelate, the science and philosophy of ecology deals with profound co­existence, including “all the ways we imagine how we live together” (Morton 2010: 4). While a world as nature thus only exists for those who do not belong to it and are not influenced by it, ecology as the science of relations describes precisely those forms of mutual influence and worlds which entities create together (Ingold 2000: 20).

2.2 The Merging of Dividing Lines: The Human and the Non-Human

Thinking and perceiving ecologically, the dualist dividing lines between a passive, usable, controllable nature and a fully agentive culture-creating human become blurry, leaky, and merging, instead creating a “vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge” (Morton 2010: 8). This radically questions who or what is recognized as an entity and defined as part of environment or nature:

“At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and non-environment: The atmosphere? Earth's gravitational field? Earth's magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn't be alive at all?” (ibid.: 10)

If we understand environment as a co-constitutive and entangled process, ‘nature' becomes an “active, signifying force; an agent in its own term; a realm of multiple, inter- and intra-active cultures” (Alaimo and Hekmann 2008: 12), acknowledging both organic and inorganic nonhuman entities in their world-making ability. ‘The social' therefore is not limited to human­culture spaces but can be re-defined as “a confluence of forces and associations” and an “assembly of human and non-human interactions” (Großmann 2022: 21), congregating in “more-than-human socialities” (Bubandt 2018: 8) that include nonhuman species as well as the ‘natural' and the artificial, the visible and the invisible, the living and the inanimate, the corporeal as well as the amorphous, immaterial or intangible.

2.3 The Merging of Dividing Lines: The Natural and the Supernatural

What is considered supernatural is inseparably linked to what is considered natural, and therefore is a culturally and sociohistorically specific product. Some societies and individuals interpret all perceptions as natural (McClenon 1995: 107), and for some supernatural events are not only regarded as ‘normal' but are even expected to occur (Walker 1995: 2). In the emerge of Western science, however, non-measurable parameters were excluded from scientific discourse, and ‘nature', seen as “governed by immutable, physical laws” (ibid.: 108), became the domain subject to empirical investigation, banishing supernatural forces and experiences “to a putative elsewhere - to the exotic other, to the naïve and uneducated or to our own pre­Enlightenment ancestors” (Bubandt 2018: 11). Yet, supernaturality has an undeniable social reality with “real effects on all human cultures” (McClenon 1995: 107), as “beliefs about souls, spirits, ghosts, gods and demons are found everywhere and seem to form a recurrent pattern within and across cultures”, time and space (Pyysiäinen 2009: 9; c.f. Waardenburg 1986: 17). Murken therefore states that the idea of a reality that goes beyond the sensually perceptible world is an anthropological constant of the human being and human societies (1998: 11). If the relationship to the ‘supernatural' thus seems to be so fundamentally inherent in ‘human nature', how can we deny its ‘naturalness'?

2.4 Coming Towards a Radically Inclusive Ecology

As shown in the previous chapters, the categories of nature and culture as well as the natural and the supernatural are socially constructed and contingent. What we consider as a co- constitutive agentive force with world-making abilities is linked to our historically and culturally shaped understanding of nature, environment, and its assigned elements as active/passive, acting/reacting, subjective/objective, animate/inanimate, etc.

I would argue that the acknowledgement and inclusion of ‘natural' nonhuman entities such as animals, plants, fungi, and micro-organisms in the formation of interdependent networks has long been part of the academic and non-academic consensus. Yet, I assume, the extent of bewilderment displayed when being confronted with the global efficacy of a tiny non-living virus, traveling across species and along provided human infrastructure, can be taken as a testimony to how safe we still have felt within our bodily, territorial, and intraspecies boundaries.

Re-thinking and re-sensing preconceived categories in the light and experience of human­nonhuman entanglement, I want to inquire on the inclusion of magical ecologies and more- than-human entities in our common world-making project:

“Might we learn to take both kinds of magic - the magic of the natural world and the magic of what is erroneously called ‘the supernatural world' - equally seriously? To think critically and curiously across the realities opened up by each of them?” (Bubandt 2018: 8)

Gods, spirits, and ghosts have shaped our world throughout the ages both collectively and individually. Can we thus attribute agency to those mostly incorporeal, invisible, and intangible entities?

3. Agency

3.1 Agency of Non-Humans

Dividing the world in silent objects and acting subjects creates separate ontological zones, in which an ‘I' intervenes in ‘it' (Nikolic 2017: 125): An external reality with objects serving as a “frame, background or instrument” for subjective action (Altmeyer 2021: 18). The denial of a holistic agentive life to nonhumans can be traced back to Aristotle who distinguished between the realm of zoé, ‘bare life', which is usable, extractable, and killable, and human life in the realm of bios “with legibly biographical and political lives” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 545). Influential thinkers like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway question this agentive separation by pointing towards hybridity, alliances and “the mingling of creative agents” (ibid: 546):

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¹ C.f. eg. António Guterres (“We must declare war on this virus”, Guterres 2020) and Emmanuel Macron (“Nous somme en guerre”, Macron 2020)