Wonder in South Asia

Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at Emerson College. She is the author of The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder and Winged Faith: Rethinking Religious Pluralism and Globalization through the Satya Sai Movement, and the coeditor, with Krishnendu Ray, of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsWondering about Wonder: An IntroductionTulasi SrinivasSection 1. Histories of Wonder 1. Wonders Never Cease: An Ethnographic PanoramaAnn Grodzins Gold2. Weird Tales: Ganesh, Idolatry, and the Golden Age of American Pulp FictionWilliam Elison3. Did the Masters of Disenchantment Ever Wonder? India in the Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical ImaginaryMary HancockSection 2. Aesthetics of Wonder 4. Wonder: Spirit Mediumship and Devotional Music at a Mumbai Shrine of the Sidi Ancestor-Saints Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne5. Wonder as Affect on the Kuchipudi StageHarshita Mruthinti Kamath6. In the Vicinity of Wonder: Thirunangai Devotees of Angalamman and Narratives of Moral Astonishment Aniruddhan Vasudevan7. Wonder in the Cremation Ground: The Affective and Transformative Dimensions of an Urban Tamil Festival Amy L. Allocco8. Economies of Wonder: The Production of Spectacle at the Kumbh Mela Amanda LuciaSection 3. Ethics of Wonder 9. Scarcity, Abundance, and Money at Muslim Saint Shrines in North India Quinn A. Clark10. On Wondrous Moments as the Basis for a Swaminarayan Ethics of Sociality Hanna H. Kim11. "Guruji Rocked... Duniya Shocked": Wondertraps and the Camerawork Guruship of Dera Sacha Sauda Guru Dr. Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji InsanJacob Copeman and Koonal Duggalavailable via OpenAccess here Conclusion The Worlds of Wonder Tulasi SrinivasList of Contributors Index

"…an important and welcome contribution to approaching wonder as an analytic for anthropological studies on religion in India, and South Asia more broadly … By foregrounding how wonder is evoked, produced and captured, the book makes it both amenable to, and a tool of, anthropological enquiry. The volume provides us with a fresh perspective to understand contemporary South Asian religiosities as to their creativity, ethics, politics and the possibilities of individual and collective transformations." — Contributions to Indian Sociology"Exploring manifold manifestations and encounters of wonder in various regions and religions of South Asia, this volume refines scholarly engagement with wonder both as a theoretical category that expands our understanding of South Asian religion and as a meaningful, affective constituent of the religious and ethnographic experience. The strength of the collection lies in the breadth of its case studies, which range across the subcontinent, and its depth of application within each of the chapters." — Caleb Simmons, author of Singing the Goddess into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad