Social Formations of Wonder

This book reveals how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true and the real. The case studies show how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the union of social institutions. 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 God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (2009) and Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (2014).

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