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.
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.
Note: There is no arena with only one agent and there is no agent in only one arena!
(See “Religion As a Cultural System”, in Essays on The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz, 1973.)
Related terms: Domicide, Co-Identification, Participatory Knowing, Worldview Related Videos: Ep. 7 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Aristotle’s World View and Erich Fromm (yy47YzvGniQ) Understanding the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon in the Light of Meaning Crisis - YouTube