Mark Coeckelbergh

Usually contemporary technology is understood to belong to secular modernity. But how ‚secular‘ and ‚modern‘ are our technological practices and culture? In this essay I argue that if we want to better understand technology, thinking in terms of a rupture between modernity and pre-modernity is inadequate. I show that Judeo-Christian forms of thinking still pervade modern technological visions and could help us think about what I call the ‚delegated spirituality‘ of the artefact, but that our encounters with particular technological artefacts make possible other kinds of spiritual experiences which we can make sense of by referring to non-modern religion such as animism. I also argue that ‚transfigurations‘ are only possible if we assume the radical instability of meaning. I conclude that all cultures, including ours, can be described as ‚techno-religious‘ forms of life which have a spiritual-material history. The rather exceptional idea of secularization is itself part of such a particular history, and does not exclude breakthroughs of the sacred into technological worlds.

Risk analysis and risk management are ways for humans to cope with natural disaster risk. This chapter connects discussions about risk with reflections on nature, technology, vulnerability, and modernity. In particular, it raises questions regarding the natural/human distinction and how human societies and cultures cope with risk. How “natural” are hazards, given human interventions inand interpretations of events, and what are the limitations of “objective” modernapproaches to risk? The chapter argues that coping with risk related to naturaldisasters should be sensitive to the social and cultural dimensions of risk. For thispurpose it proposes the concept of “vulnerability transformations”. It focuses on the experience and phenomenology of natural hazards in relation to existential vulnerability, and, taking a cross-cultural perspective, shows that apart from modern scientific thinking there are also other, less modern ways to cope with natural hazards.