Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens.

The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it

through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hi, everyone. This is Josh. Today on The Emerald, we're going to dive a little further into the topic of wonder.

Not wonder as just a fleeting feeling, but rather wonder as a state of consciousness

deliberately architected through creative ritual. Wonder that is pursued systematically,

stoked, as our interviewee says, in order to break open our day-to-day experience and get us to something deeper. In this way,

wonder becomes a form of resistance to the current state of the world. Join me today for an

interview with Professor and author Tulasi Srinivas as we discuss her book The Cow in the Elevator, an anthropology of wonder, today on The Emerald.

Music Tulasi Shrinivas is professor of anthropology, religion, and transnational studies at Emerson College.

She is currently a loose A-C-L-S fellow in religion and international affairs and a world economic

forum expert in the study of religion. We talked about her book, The Cow in the Elevator,

An Anthropology of Wonder, which I found to be a fascinating look at how wonder is a bridge from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and how it helps communities navigate the precariousness of modern capitalism and urban development.

Professor Srinivasa did years of fieldwork in modern-day Bangalore, a city which

has changed dramatically over the past decades, and is straining under the burden of rapid

development. As part of her fieldwork, she observed rituals and rights at local temples throughout

the city. As she documented ritual practice within this changing environment of Bangalore,

she began to see that people were putting a modern spin on ancient rituals in order to invoke

a very primal feeling, the feeling of wonder. And that propelling people into this state of wonder

is a way to reclaim and reconfirm our basic interconnectedness with each other

...