Social Formations of Wonder: Anthropology and Awe

Social Formations of Wonder: Anthropology and Awe

by Jaap Timmer (Editor), Matt Tomlinson (Editor)

Synopsis

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 with anthropological explorations of wonder, responding to recent work by Michael W. Scott in order to bring the weight, colour, scent and sound of real ethnographic encounters to new ways of thinking about wonder. The question for contributors is how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true, and the real. The case studies reveal how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the formation of social institutions as various `modalities of wonder' destabilize old forms and articulate new ones. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of The Journal of Religious and Political Practice.

$141.52

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 150
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 04 Jan 2019

ISBN 10: 1138393843
ISBN 13: 9781138393844

Author Bio
Jaap Timmer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. His current interest is in the anthropology of the state, theocracies, and lost tribes in the Asia-Pacific region. Matt Tomlinson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of Asia and the Pacific, 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).