How might the anthropological study of cosmologies illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings

Introduction: The cosmological frame in anthropology - Allen Abramson and Martin HolbraadPart I: Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole?1. To be a wonder: anthropology, cosmology, and alterity - Michael W. Scott2. A new man: the cosmological horizons of development, curses, and personhood in Vanuatu - Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen3. Auto-relations: doing cosmology and transforming the self the Saiva way - Soumhya Venkatesan4. Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology - Don Handelman5. Coordinates of body and place: Chinese practices of centring - Stephan FeuchtwangPart II: Cosmological constitutions: economies, politics and the cosmos6. Stranger kings in general: the cosmo-logics of power - Marshall Sahlins7. Transitional cosmologies: shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia - Morten Axel Pedersen8. Portioning loans: cosmologies of wealth and power in Mongolia - Rebecca Empson9. Maize mill sorcery: cosmologies of substance, production, and accumulation in Central Mozambique - Bjørn Enge BertelsenPart III: Embedded modernities: cosmos, science, and the movies10. A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia - Caroline Humphrey11. Facebook and the origins of religion - Daniel Miller12. Don't yell fire! The origin of humanity goes to the movies - Gregory Schrempp13. Cosmology and the mythic in Kubrick's 2001: the imaginary in the aesthetic of cinema - Bruce KapfererIndex

How is the ethnographic study of ‘cosmologies’ relevant to contemporary anthropology? How might such an orientation, understood as a focus on the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged, illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses these questions by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. In doing so, the book also placed the comparative study of cosmologies in relation to broader trends in contemporary anthropological thinking. The book includes contributions by such leading anthropologists as Don Handelman, Caroline Humphrey, Bruce Kapferer, Daniel Miller, Marshall Sahlins, and Gregory Schrempp, as well chapters by a range of exciting younger scholars. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.