Studying Chinese Christianity

Prayer as an actant: Freedom and sociality in the subject formation of a Catholic nun in Kerala, South India

“…Furthermore, one sees prayer not merely as a perspective of power and institutions or in relation to these (Giordan and Swatos, 2011) but also as constituting one node in a transactional relationship (the one where often the individual praying, the individual prayed for and God are involved) as will be elaborated shortly. While he has not focused on prayer, Chambon (2020) has recently made a similar argument drawing on Latour’s actor–network theory to conceptualise how Chinese Christians identify and construct a set of networks through their interactions with each other and a variety of non-human material objects such as buildings, pews, offerings, and blood in particular. Here, the understanding of prayer as an actant stems from an approach that declines to see it only as a dimension of the interior world of spirituality that cannot somehow be comprehended by a sociological or anthropological lens.…”

“…In this sense, God is active in these transactions. The concept of actant helps us to place this relationship, which includes God, in sociological conversations by allowing us to bring out the reality for the nuns of the interaction between human and non-human entities (see also Chambon, 2020). In Latour’s (2005) sense, prayer acts as a mediator between the nun and God, or the nun, the social world outside the convent, and God.…”