2023 Volume 88 Issue 3 Pages 452-472
The aim of this study is to investigate how things obtain agency through their interactions with other things. Recent research has shown that agency of things arose from their relationships with human. However, from the perspective of material religion theory, this paper examines how the network of things, such as the material setting surrounding the deity statues, feng shui, offerings, paper money, incense, other deity statues etc. makes the certain deity statue acquire its agency, and through which the statue becomes "lingyan" in Chinese. These ethnographic observations lead us to consider the possibility of the correlations among things themselves generating agency before any human interaction, which is referred as "potential of things acting as agents before human" in this paper.
