Social Formations of Wonder
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 Andr 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.
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 Gods Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (2009) and Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (2014).
Social Formations of Wonder
Anthropology and Awe
Edited by
Jaap Timmer and Matt Tomlinson
First published 2019
by Routledge
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2019 Taylor & Francis
Chapter 8 2017 Michael W. Scott. Originally published as Open Access.
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Contents
Jaap Timmer and Matt Tomlinson
Deborah Van Heekeren
Rachel Morgain
Nathan Bond and Jaap Timmer
Eve Vincent
Matt Tomlinson
Benjamin R. Hall
Paul G. Keil
Michael W. Scott
The following chapters were originally published in the Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Introduction
Introduction
Jaap Timmer and Matt Tomlinson
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 97103
Chapter 1
The wonder of cloacal creation from myth to MONA
Deborah Van Heekeren
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 104119
Chapter 2
Wonders and tremors in the aftershocks of high energy physics
Rachel Morgain
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 120135
Chapter 3
Wondrous geographies and historicity for state-building on Malaita, Solomon Islands
Nathan Bond and Jaap Timmer
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 136151
Chapter 4
Fear and wonder out bush: engaging a critical anthropological perspective on indigenous alterity
Eve Vincent
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 152167
Chapter 5
Try the spirits: power encounters and anti-wonder in Christian missions
Matt Tomlinson
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 168182
Chapter 6
Clearing curses and commanding crocodiles: observations of atypical events in rural Solomon Islands
Benjamin R. Hall
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 183195
Chapter 7
Uncertain encounters with wild elephants in Assam, Northeast India
Paul G. Keil
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 196211
Chapter 8
Getting more real with wonder: an afterword
Michael W. Scott
Journal of Religious and Political Practice, volume 3, issue 3 (October 2017), pp. 212229
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Nathan Bond is a PhD candidate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His main research interest is in how marginal peoples engage with the nation-state. Nathans doctoral project develops a historical ethnography of borderland peoples in northeast Borneo. His previous research has focused on bridewealth and Christianity in the Solomon Islands.
Benjamin R. Hall is an anthropological consultant for the University of Queensland Culture and Heritage Unit. He has written a PhD thesis on Christian politics in Isabel, Solomons Islands, and it was through this research that he became fascinated by human territoriality and how this concept relates to Christian thought and cosmology. His association with the island of Isabel, and Solomon Islands more broadly, came through research conducted for the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands.
Paul G. Keil is an Honorary Postdoctoral Associate and a subject coordinator at Macquarie University, Australia. For his anthropological PhD research, Keil investigated human-elephant relationships, conducting 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, among communities who live on the fringes of elephant habitat and must negotiate place with these animals. His interests include ethnographic research on sheepdog trialling, and experimental psychological studies on collaborative remembering in older couples.
