Agent-Arena relationship

The agent-arena relationship refers to a configuration of organism and environment which makes the individual organism into an “agent” and the environment into an “arena”. Individuals assume identities to become agents, and assign identities to make their environment into an arena. What makes an individual an agent is that it acts intentionally with understanding of the meaningful consequences that such action entails. If an individual’s behaviour does not relate to its environment in a way that is meaningfully intelligible to it, we may say that its behaviour is absurd.

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Domicide disrupts the agent arena relationship

Parasitic processing is the agent, and reciprocal narrowing is the arena

Desire synthesis is the agent, and worldview synthesis is the arena

“An Arena is a place that’s organized such that you know how you can act in it. If you are a football player and you go into a football arena, things are organized in such a way that you know intimately how to be involved and how to interact.”

“To be an Agent is to be capable of pursuing your goals. It’s to be able to organize your cognition and your behavior so that your actions fit the situation. They fit the environment. So what you have, when you have a world view, is you’ve got this Agent and Arena coupling.”

To understand this, think about a football player on a football field. The football player’s physical actions are given cultural meaning by the context of the football field as an arena and all of its associated rules and norms. If the football players do the same things in a tennis court, for instance, their behaviour would seem absurd.

An agent-arena-relationship is characterized by a process of co-identification:

“The identity of the arena is determined by and determines the identity of the agent. And the identity of the agent is determined by and determines the arena.”

The example of the football player in the football field is very helpful for clarifying this. The football player’s physical actions are given cultural meaning by the context of the football field as an arena and all of its associated rules and norms. If the football player were to be doing the same things in a tennis court, for instance, their behaviour may be said to be absurd.

Vervaeke et al. coin and use this term as an elaboration of work done by Clifford Geertz, and later on by Brian Walsh and others. See: (Vervaeke, Mastropietro, Miscevic, 2017,  sec. 3.4.3)

In his anthropological work, Geertz described the manner in which cultures use a worldview, an account of the nature of the world, to justify an ethos, a particular way of living in the world, the success of which in turn justified the adjoining worldview.

(See “Religion As a Cultural System”, in Essays on The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz, 1973.)