Cosmological Visions, Multispecies Practices, and Planetary Health in Pandemic Times

The cosmovisions of the so-called world religions are based on assumed divides between nature and culture, nonhuman and human, man and God, and these divisions have long been reproduced by the social sciences. Only recently, a radical interrelatedness has been thematized and acknowledged by certain scholars, and indeed, the current pandemic reminds us of zoonoses and the manifold relationships that humans have with other forms of life. At the same time, local or folk religions offer alternative ontologies including transgressions between humans and animals or spirits. Thus, they indicate that there is no “above” or “outside of” nature. Perhaps future multispecies practices will be shaped by a new awareness of such relatedness and symbiosis, as offered by the Planetary Health approach: a relational health concept that will prepare for future challenges by focusing on the interrelationships between human health, political, economic, and social contexts as well as the biodiversity of our planet

Passages of culture: Media and mediality in African societies

How do African cultures transform when they appropriate new media? This introduction to the following five articles raises and reflects basic questions related to the many transformations that African societies currently go through when they are faced with new media. It situates the concept of mediality in the social practice of those who deal with and experience media. As instances of the in-between, as bridges between actors and their life-worlds, media reveal specific aspects of social life and hide others. They simultaneously nourish curiosity and suspicion and thus, the users transform their life-worlds through media. What media do to culture depends as much on their specificities as on the actors and their agency: their habits, judgement and imagination. Studying media and cultural transformations in Africa hence calls for thorough empirical research that analyses how the use of media has affected sensory experience and the sense that the actors make of their experience in new meaningful practices. Media in Africa also call for new research methodologies. The findings presented in this collection are the outcome of an international research network that allowed African and European scholars to cooperate and to share their experiences with new media in the field sites

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