Entangled Ways of Knowing on a Damaged Planet

Guest lecture with professor Kocku von Stuckrad, University of Groningen.

A revolution is taking place in the sciences and the arts, but the public is barely aware of it. I call this revolution a “relational turn,” which no longer sees humans as masters of the world, but rather integrates them into a complex network of relationships with the more-than-human world. Rather than perpetuating the European tradition’s separation of culture from nature, subject from object, and mind from matter, I move beyond understandings of umwelt (“environment”) and develop the contours of a mitwelt ethic (literally, an ethics “with the world”) that considers human and nonhuman entities as equals in their knowledge and relations to the world. Within this framework, it will be possible to overcome what I call the “regimes of exploitation” manifested in patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism that have brought the planet to the brink of collapse. In overcoming the colonial plunder of the planet, Indigenous traditions of world relations take on particular importance, as do holistic European traditions such as Romanticism, which reject human fantasies of domination.

Against the backdrop of the relational turn, and applying a mitwelt perspective, I formulate concrete implications for the academic study of religion, both in its conceptual framework—with reference to recent naturalistic approaches to religion and worldview—and in terms of the institutional changes needed to ensure the participation (and not just the representation) of nonhuman agents. The academic study of religion can play a progressive role in this transformation, since the study of nonhuman agency has been a cornerstone of this academic field since its inception.

All are welcome (free).