Proceedings of the 1st International Seminar on Cultural Sciences, ISCS 2020, 4 November 2020, Malang, Indonesia

Research Article

Making Sense and Making Self through a Pandemic: Religious Responses

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.4-11-2020.2308905,
        author={Roberto  Rizzo},
        title={Making Sense and Making Self through a Pandemic: Religious Responses},
        proceedings={Proceedings of the 1st International Seminar on Cultural Sciences, ISCS 2020, 4 November 2020, Malang, Indonesia},
        publisher={EAI},
        proceedings_a={ISCS},
        year={2021},
        month={6},
        keywords={religions multinaturalism covid-19},
        doi={10.4108/eai.4-11-2020.2308905}
    }
    
  • Roberto Rizzo
    Year: 2021
    Making Sense and Making Self through a Pandemic: Religious Responses
    ISCS
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.4-11-2020.2308905
Roberto Rizzo1,*
  • 1: University of Milan, Italy
*Contact email: roberto.rizzo@mail.com

Abstract

This paper investigates the challenges that the spread of the Covid-19 crisis has posed on the everyday practice of established religions and the responses that have been formulated therein. As a privileged site for the inquiry into notions of multinaturalism, religion has long been regarded as the domain par excellence in which ontological claims are made explicit and embodied, while at the same time articulating hunches about “ultimate things”. By scanning through several ethnographic examples from different religious fields, I re-cast religious experience in the spotlight of the manner in which many communities understand and cope with a sanitary and social form of distress and how it relates to dynamics of both inclusivity and exclusivity in the wider society.