Introduction to special issue "Social Formations of Wonder"

Abstract

What generates wonder, and what can wonder engender in terms of religious, political, and broader social practice? Thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis as well as surrealists such as André Breton and Pierre Mabille, and most recently the philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein, have explored the ways that wonder is not articulated once and for all but continuously worked upon. In anthropology, a leading voice in theorizing wonder and, most usefully, giving ethnographic substance to its analysis, is that of Michael W. Scott, whose work has inspired this special issue.