[Linganth] Brad Wigger on his book, Invisible Companions

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Laura Murry helps CaMP anthropology feature Brad Wiggers' new book, 
Invisible Companions this week.
Check it out:https://campanthropology.org <https://campanthropology.org>

Best,
Ilana


Press blurb:
 From the US to Nepal, author J. Bradley Wigger travels five countries 
on three continents to hear children describe their invisible 
friends—one-hundred-year-old robins and blue dogs, dinosaurs and 
teapots, pretend families and shape-shifting aliens—companions springing 
from the deep well of childhood imagination. Drawing on these 
interviews, as well as a new wave of developmental research, he finds a 
fluid and flexible quality to the imaginative mind that is central to 
learning, co-operation, and paradoxically, to real-world rationality. 
Yet Wigger steps beyond psychological territory to explore the religious 
significance of the kind of mind that develops relationships with 
invisible beings. Alongside Cinderella the blue dog, Quack-Quack the 
duck, and Dino the dinosaur are angels, ancestors, spirits, and gods. 
What he uncovers is a profound capacity in the religious imagination to 
see through the surface of reality to more than meets the eye. 
Punctuated throughout by children's colorful drawings of their 
see-through interlocutors, the book is highly engaging and alternately 
endearing, moving, and humorous. Not just for parents or for those who 
work with children,/Invisible Companions/will appeal to anyone 
interested in our mind's creative and spiritual possibilities.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20210302/5c5b3be6/attachment.htm>