1st Edition

Social Formations of Wonder Anthropology and Awe

Edited By Jaap Timmer, Matt Tomlinson Copyright 2019
150 Pages
by Routledge

150 Pages
by Routledge

150 Pages
by Routledge

What can wonder engender in terms of religious, political, and broader social practice? Thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis; surrealists such as Andre Breton and Pierre Mabille; and most recently the religious philosopher Mary-Jane Rubenstein have all explored the ways that wonder is not articulated once and for all, but continuously worked upon. This book engages... Read more

Introduction  1.The wonder of cloacal creation from myth to MONA  2.Wonders and tremors in the aftershocks of high energy physics  3.Wondrous geographies and historicity for state-building on Malaita, Solomon Islands  4.Fear and wonder out bush: engaging a critical anthropological perspective on indigenous alterity  5.Try the spirits: power encounters and anti-wonder in Christian missions  6.Clearing curses and commanding crocodiles: observations of atypical events in rural Solomon Islands  7.Uncertain encounters with wild elephants in Assam, Northeast India  8.Getting more real with wonder: an afterword

Biography



Jaap Timmer is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Research program in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of Living with Intricate Futures: Order and Confusion in Imyan Worlds, Irian Jaya, Indonesia (2000). His current interest is in the anthropology of the state, theocracies, and historicity in the Asia-Pacific region.



Matt Tomlinson is Associate Professor in the Departments of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He is the author of In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (2009) and Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (2014).