Making Sense and Making Self through a Pandemic: Religious Responses

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.