Planetary dynamics affect humans and non-human species within specific localities. It is therefore imperative to reconsider the concepts of human beings and entanglement as integral discourse components within the intricate web of local-planetary dynamics, interrelationships, and interdependencies, as well as disentanglements and dependencies. This special issue on Power Dynamics and Local-Planetary Ways of Worldmaking contributes to the study of religions, cultures, and ecologies in the Capitalocene by offering novel approaches to describing local-planetary interconnectedness in worldmaking processes.
Worldmaking, a concept established by Nelson Goodman (1906â1998), mainly in his study Ways of Worldmaking (1978), is understood as an open-ended process. Worlds are âalready on handâ because âthe making is a remakingâ (Goodman 1992 [1978]:6), drawing on elements from existing worlds. Worldmaking is introduced by Joost M. Vervoort and others as âa framework for scenario developmentâ that âmay help operationalise âdiscordant pluralismâ in scenario practice, and [how it] may lead to more imaginative scenario practiceâ (Vervoort et al. 2015:63). They conceptualize worldmaking as making contrasts between present/future worlds. Additionally, the anthropologist Urmila Mohan emphasizes a focus on embodied belief practices. In this context, individuals âchoose to interact with certain entities over others and prefer certain techniques and materials over others because they believeâknow, feel, and perceiveâthat they are efficacious in worldmakingâ (Mohan 2024:5).
The approaches in the present issue are less focused on event history and worldmaking on major political stages from a top-down perspective (such as Getachew 2019). Rather, they center on communities and community formation. These communities are dynamically interwoven with a wider political, ecosystemic, and economic context. They are also generated by various feelings of belonging regarding lifestyle, a community of destiny, shared history, and organizational membership. On the one hand, the authors in this issue investigate worldmaking perspectives of communities and their members as agents and beings in complex local-planetary interrelationships with ecosystemic elements. On the other hand, the bodies of the study and the researchersâ bodies are both constructed by worlds and represent parts of world discourses. According to Judith Butler, material bodies and the realities associated with themâparticularly socially constructed genderâare positioned and constituted by social discourses and performative acts (see Butler 2015 [1990]).1
For example, the dynamic negotiation of performative positioning through bodily practices and transcorporealities in worldmaking can involve reconceptualizing constructions of nation, sexuality, and Spanishness. In his research on Komfa in Guyana, Jeremy Jacob Peretz found that ââ¯âthe Spanishâ is usually a woman, as are most practitionersâbut often a trans woman, an antiman or queer person, and generally one who engages in sex work. Within Komfaâs prismatic performances of âethno-eroticâ alterity, communities exchange knowledges and practices that convey self-respect and adoration through the sensual appeals of spirits within. Ultimately, acts of possession and mediumship are processual exchanges, continuous offerings that protect, heal, and revitalize Komfa communities by re-engendering social intimacies and revalorizing subjugated personhoodsâ (Peretz 2023:279).
In this way, bodies are always contested territories within the entangled worldmaking processes. These dynamic, power-laden processes entail ongoing negotiations with open and unpredictable outcomes. Stabilizations, transformations, and conditional dissolutions of worldviews occur within local-planetary power structures. Consequently, researchersâ bodies also make worlds and are positioned within world discourse(s)âand their ecosystemic-economic, -political, and -social entanglements and, simultaneously, disentanglements. In describing the worlds and ecosystems of which we are a part, we remain bound to our perspective and its limitations.
Thinking the planetary does not mean considering the entire planet Earth, but rather identifying wide-ranging dynamics, analyzing them, and constructing them for a positive future of diversity/ies. Nevertheless, the contributions refer to negotiations within the context of global differences, injustices, and imaginations of inequality (in German Ungleichwertigkeitsvorstellungen). In imagining the planetary, the global, and the local, the authors reflect on the local in terms of its connectedness and conditionality to larger contexts. Here, agents and beings not only act within these entanglements but are part of the dynamics generated in creating worlds.
Describing these changes as part of the imagined ecosystems goes beyond discourse-analytical considerations and addresses Joerg Riegerâs call for new materialists to contribute to rethinking the links between economic and ecological realities from an intersectional perspective. In the present special issue, this also includes an interest in worldmaking processes (for example, Rieger 2016 and 2019; on worldmaking see Lunkwitz 2022 and 2024). However, future studies on the Capitalocene and the study of religion and culture must move beyond a US-West-European Christian theological understanding of religion. The concepts of agency are, therefore, undergoing a reformation process, aligning with established forms of human resistance and critical new materialisms (Lunkwitz 2026a and 2026b).
1 Future Task: Methodological-Theoretical Frameworks
This special issue aims to expand the scope of power dynamics in worldmaking to encompass the study of environments, cultures, religions, politics, and economy, as well as human geography, sociology, history, sociocultural anthropology, and ocean studies. It seeks to formulate and begin addressing questions such as: What role does cultural studies research on religion play in destructive global-planetary dynamics? How can lost worldviews, religions, cultures, and ecosystemsâfor example, due to war, earthquakes, or climate changeâbe studied? These local-planetary and local-global challenges must be confronted through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.
The effects of rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, and population decline are already evident in some regions, and there is a genuine concern that more territories may be submerged and that island territories may become uninhabited and disappear from world maps and globes. In the foreseeable future, places of religious practice, lived religion, life worlds, and oral histories will be eradicated and transformed, for example, into water surfaces. Island states, including those of the Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and parts of the Solomon Islands, could potentially become extinct from global cartographic records (see Hutterer 2023 for further insights). These threats are linked to imperialist, capitalist, autocratic, and corrupt regimes and rulers, as well as inhumane global ideologies, primarily anti-Semitic, racist, and radical right-wing ones.
Contributions to the field of religion and ecosystems (beyond ecology as a subdiscipline of biology) have sometimes overlooked the ambivalences and inconsistencies present in the examined positions. For example, the promotion of indigenous epistemologies has been conducted in a one-sided manner, in dichotomy to the western world rather than demonstrating the entangled worldmaking(s) in power asymmetries. Such studies exoticize indigenous worldmaking without engaging with local-planetary dynamic entanglements. Portraying worldmaking through romanticized accounts that silence the people and communities most affected perpetuates hegemonic interests in academia.
Recent contributions further build on the approaches that criticize capitalist worldviews. These studies, mentioned above, integrate ecological and economic concerns into the study of religions and theologies, emphasizing the detrimental impacts of key concepts, such as exploitation, extractivism, intersectionality, and the planet (see Rieger 2024; Rieger and Rowe 2024; and the contributions in Rowe et al. 2025). The extraction of sand following the eruption of Mount Merapi, for example, represents the economic and social situation and reflects the worldmaking in the populationâs extractive activities, which involve individuals from different social status groups. In the study by Najiyah Martiam, edited by the US-American scholars Whitney A. Bauman, Richard Bohannon, and Kevin J. OâBrien, one might wonder about the interconnections between the âJavanese worldviewâ and the exploitation through extractivism (see Martiam 2017). Another topic for further studies in worldmaking and the economy is artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond the advantages of artificial knowledge discussed (see, for example, Rathmann 2023), the increasing energy consumption due to queries and the daily use and creation of AI-generated worlds represent a research question for cultural and religious studies and for understanding worldmaking today.
Moreover, the shift in academic interest from a global to a planetary perspective characterizes a different sensitization rather than a progression or an advancement. Instead, local-planetary power dynamics in worldmaking interrogate the global essence of capitalism and the economic system and critique concepts of religion that are exclusively concerned with global issues (see Abrahms-Kavunenko and Maud 2024; Stråth 2024; Agathangelou and Killian 2022; Chakrabarty 2021 and 2023; Bauman 2018 and 2025; Bauman et al. 2026; Rivera 2015; Moore and Rivera 2011; Taylor 2010). With a decolonial interest in concretions of interdependencies, entanglements, and disentanglements, as well as their ambivalences in worldmaking, critical focus on local-planetary dynamics, changes, and entanglements has the potential to facilitate overcoming dichotomies of Western/non-Western origin reproduced in international academia.
2 Approaches and Findings
The studies compiled in this special issue explore the infinite social production of space and time, as well as the concrete spatio-temporal overlaps of temporal becoming and spatial simultaneity, in the context of evolving worldmaking processes. Contributing new insights to the research field of environment and religion, these studies demonstrate the fieldâs significant potential for further development, particularly in the study of environmental history and religion focusing on local-planetary power dynamics and entanglements (see, for example, Griffiths and Robin 2022; Elverskog 2020; Mikhail 2017). The studies employ various methodological approaches to examine questions pertaining to lived religion, life worlds, agency, and affectedness while leveraging the concept of planetarity and the significance of localities.
By focusing on power asymmetries and emphasizing interconnections and elaborating on dis-entanglements, dis-connections, and dis-ruptions of relationships, the contributions extend beyond the New Materialism debates, which primarily concentrate on creating and revealing kinships and entanglements. Critical examinations of correlations regarding imaginations and constructions of ecosystemic-economic, political, and rural spatialities are conducted with multifaceted approaches, encompassing long-term studies with an ethnographic method, material analyses with a religious-historical or religio-geographical framework, and a meticulous analysis of power ambivalences. In doing so, the focus is on questions of reconceptualizing ecosystemic thinking, humans, and being human in times of extractivism (see Jeremy Jacob Peretz as well as Annalisa Butticci and Osiris Garcia Cerqueda). Exploitation and consumerism are prompting a rethinking of established ways of life in the industrialized world, including the adoption of new lifestyles characterized by self-imposed deprivation. Reconsidering the ideas of poverty and voluntarism for the part of the earthâs population that consumes the most becomes necessary for more-than-consumer relations (see Joachim Rathmann and Sean McGrath).
Questions of political and societal belonging are also being renegotiated. Planetary-territorial and national affiliations intertwine with racializing and ecosystemic factors, as well as historical factors in worldmaking (see Carrie B. Dohe). In times of imagined, constructed, and life-threatening uncertainties and instabilities, fundamental questions of meaning seem to become urgent. For radical right-wing ideologies in particular, âspaces in connection with time and nature have long been central elements of their origin myth and their understanding of themselves and the worldâ (Terra-R 2025:16, trans.). The Terra-R researchersâ discussion of territorialization (on the part of/vonseiten and in relation to/bezüglich) the radical right further contributes to the development of worldmaking as an approach in the dimensions of territorial practices, incorporating performative, affective, imaginative, and infrastructural dimensions. Furthermore, in addition to the spatial dimensions of multiscalarity for analyzing territorialization processesâsuch as body/corporeality, the local, the regional, the national, the transnational, and the planetary (Terra-R 2025:236)âquestions of transcultural and transworldly interrelationships in worldmaking studies of religion and ecology, environment, and nature must be examined more closely.
How do the ambivalent interactions, ruptures, and dynamics in worldmaking and lived religion relate to specific ecosystemic contexts? When faced with life-threatening environmental elements such as wind, water, and the ocean, people feel exposed and partly powerless. Their reactions are based on experience, seeking out and redesigning what has proven effective. For example, seamen were depending on the situation in local-planetary dynamics. Their worldmaking was contested and renegotiated at sea (see Brooke Grasberger). Entangled forces are in play and in conflict, leading to the shifting and repositioning of perspectives and human- and non-human-made entities, like a ship on the high seas in the 19th century.
All of the authors demonstrate that imaginations of the planetary are linked to the local in constructed world and sensemaking processes. They are dedicated to exploring the transforming dynamics of religion in times of local-planetary change; rethinking economics, consumerism, alliances, and religion for the planetary future; discussing capitalism, neocolonialism, and the (enforced) dynamics of lived religions; and rewriting the environmental history of religion(s) in planetary dis-entanglements.
Carrie B. Doheâs article, entitled âBoundaries of the Sacred: The Politics of Belonging in Religious Ecological Imaginaries in Germany and Canada,â demonstrates how actors with various religion-related worldviews are reconsidering their relationships with others in the face of the interconnected challenges posed by climate change and its consequences (see also Dohe 2023). These current challenges reveal the dynamics of the planet and the interconnectedness and fragility of lives. Realignments become apparent in new practices, including questions of belonging related to territoriality and sovereignty over territories (see biocentrism and ethnonationalism). Ecologically oriented worldmaking is inseparable from constructions of national belonging and determinations about it. Interest in researching the conditions under which claims to planetary belonging mobilize national claims; when planetary worldmaking is mobilized to justify claims to national belonging; and when assertions of national belonging are used, is more pressing than ever. Analyzing these conditions and factorsâsuch as embodied, ethical, and spiritual onesâin worldmaking processes and, according to Dohe, in newly emerging cosmologies, is essential for theorizing religion as a planetary force that can either promote or hinder biodiverse and multispecific communities on Earth. The following articles also address how worldmaking and religion can be analyzed and described as/in local-planetary powers, as well as the role of belonging negotiated in positioning people as and with earth beings.
Jeremy Jacob Peretzâs ââ¯âAdvice of a jumbie/umbrellaâ: Revaluing Jumbiecologies as Antidote to Extractivismâ is a compelling argument for the relevance of reevaluating the worldmaking of collaboration with jumbies. This collaboration is practiced by Komfa Spiritualists in their resistance against (neo/post)colonial, local-global exploitation of their livelihoods and ecosystemic territories in present-day Guyana. In this context, different worldmakings collide, resulting in consequences that range from health and life-threatening risks for some to financial capitalist profits for others. The opposing imaginations of spaces in power asymmetries characterize the intertwining and differentiations in entangled worldmaking, which produces new negotiated forms of resistance linked to suppressed knowledge. According to Peretz, Komfa practitioners construct transspecies social topographies of land and water, critically reevaluating suppressed transcorporeal knowledge/memory. Komfa Spiritualists invite local residents through practices and narratives, thereby fostering a sense of belonging to the land and soil. Peretzâs study provides significant motivation for further consideration of the temporal-spatial colonial present and forms of resistance to the commercialization of entire ecosystems in religious studies and related fields.
Annalisa Butticci and Osiris Garcia Cerquedaâs contribution, âFrom Agents to Earth-Beings: Sacred Mushrooms and New Extractivism in the Sierra Mazateca,â develops the key analytical concepts of insurgent eco-spirituality and withdrawal, drawing on the Niños Santos (Holy Children) mushrooms in Mexico as a case study, including theoretical considerations. In this region, (neo)extractive economic forms and dynamics are contributing to the decline of mushroom populations, which serve as an important indicator of healthy relationships in worldmaking. This decline is interpreted as resistance and refusal to actâwhich requires humans to respond. Butticci and Cerquedaâs article indicates that communication between healers and mushrooms frequently becomes absent even during the veladas. According to their study, the earth beings respond to the disrupted and destroyed relationships in the ecological crisis of the Capitalocene with silent resistance, which also takes place in ecological, spiritual, and political ways. This non-human agency, in turn, refers to current challenges as a product of the colonial past (as the present), in which living beings act in processes of irreversibility.
Brooke Grasbergerâs article, âFluid Faith and Oceanic Interaction in the Nineteenth Century,â examines seafarersâ interactions with marine ecosystems in their worldmaking processes over the last two centuries. Social, ecological, and technological interconnections, as well as certain ecosystemic elements and living beings (see Grasberger 2025 for further insights), have shaped and reshaped belief systems. Conversely, Grasberger underscores that diversity in the realm of seafaring should be characterized by fragmentation rather than uniformity. Grasbergerâs analysis of local-planetary dynamics in religion-environment-related worldmaking cautions against oversimplified conclusions about the worlds of meaning of individuals and groups, in this case (predominantly) male seafarers. Consequently, the common practices of seafarers from diverse national backgrounds on board do not appear to reflect a shared national identity and should not suggest a conceptualization of a common national belonging in the reception. In both the destruction of a web on which a faith relies and the confirmation, planetary and local conditions must be analyzed and considered mutually.
Joachim Rathmann and Sean McGrath finally examine a promising way of life for addressing todayâs ecological polycrisis in their article âThe Ethics of Voluntary Poverty: The Return of an Ascetic Principle in the Age of Total Consumption.â According to Rathmann and McGrath, the concept of voluntary poverty, as an ethical and spiritual practice, can lead to environmental relief by reducing material needs. This practice would involve lower resource consumption and enable greater empathy, particularly toward those affected by involuntary poverty resulting from global injustice. In addition to demands for accountability from the super-rich, if this principle of individual responsibility were to become a global trend, it could signal the end of the global economic growth model and the beginning of a stationary economy.
Acknowledgments
The colleagues contributing to this special issue are all experts in their respective research fields. I would like to express my sincere gratitude for our fruitful collaboration and eagerly anticipate the continuation of our discussions on local-planetary approaches to worldmaking processes within the context of power dynamics.
In the context of the anti-Semitic eliminatory attack on people in Israel by Palestinian terrorist groups on October 7, 2023, the guest editor condemns Butlerâs deeply inhumane statements.
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