Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Anthropology and Environment Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Technology

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(3-0765) Anthropology and Wonder

One of anthropology’s crucial epistemic contributions has been to let wonder proliferate as a disposition towards the world. Scholars have attended to how wonder seeps through our interlocutors worlds. They have also opened up wonder as a space from which to think anthropologically, while acknowledging wonder’s colonial legacies. Wonder is an affective register, mixing enchantment and awe with uncertainty and fear. Wonder enables curiosity about other worlds. Wonder is passion and thing, mood and object. This panel opens up wonder for critical and sympathetic exploration in order to stretch its conceptual purchase. That is, rather than highlighting what the papers share in their understanding of wonder we want to focus on the new corners and dimensions each contribution illuminates. We focus our attention on how this simultaneously pre-modern, modern, and a-modern concept can be stretched in the present. The panel brings together scientific instruments, sonic inscriptions, legal typologies, worldly thoughts, and modulating transformations to explore anew the conceptual reach of a fraught and exciting concept. To do so the contributions in this panel ask:
• What are the affordances and risks of an anthropological practice from wonder?
• How do we think and write in ways that maintain curiosity and a sense of wonder about emergent worlds in times of profound loss?
• What is the relationship between loss and wonder?
• How does wonder figure in the search for worlds in potentia?
• How can we attend to the dark side of wonder?
• How do we thrive in wonder while avoiding its fetishizing?
• What kinds of tricksters, border crossers, and future-makers do we discover when we remain open to wonder?

Presenter(s)

• Kathleen Stewart

  Professor
  The University of Texas at Austin

• Sienna Craig

  Associate Professor
  Dartmouth College

• Michael Scott

  Associate Professor
  London School of Economics & Political Science

Organizer(s)

• Laura Ogden

  Dartmouth College

Presenter(s)

• Laura Ogden

  Dartmouth College

• Stefan Helmreich

  Professor
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Organizer(s)

• Andrea Ballestero

  Rice University

Chair(s)

• Andrea Ballestero

  Rice University

Presenter(s)

• Andrea Ballestero

  Rice University

Discussant(s)

• Naveeda Khan

  Associate Professor
  Johns Hopkins University

Presentations:

• 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

  wonder's worldly thinking
  Kathleen C. Stewart – The University of Texas at Austin
• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Wondering in Black and White: Negative Space and Resonance between Photography and Ethnography
  Sienna R. Craig – Dartmouth College
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Wonder, Religion, and the Moderns
  Michael W. Scott – London School of Economics & Political Science
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  Sounds of Loss and Wonder
  Laura A. Ogden – Dartmouth College
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  The Sideways Ship
  Stefan G. Helmreich – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Water, Wonder, and Libertarian Ice Cubes
  Andrea Ballestero – Rice University
• 3:30 PM - 3:45 PM

  Discussion
  Naveeda Khan – Johns Hopkins University