I thought, What does that book look like? A bunch of photographs with regurgitated copy from local interest news items? I didn’t find that particularly interesting, but the idea stuck with me and I began poking around, and quickly became fascinated. As I’ve said many times, a friend presented the idea of a book about people seeing the Virgin Mary. Like everyone else, I’d heard about the $28,000 Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese, and I had some vague memory of an eccentric collection of potato chips spoofed on The Simpsons. When I first started researching the project in 2006 international media had disseminated the tales of people seeing Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mickey Mouse, the Pope and Bob Hope in unusual places and on unexpected surfaces. This is not just a new theory of the social but is filled with illustrations from the everyday experiences of India, including the diverse experiences of caste.Released in 2007, Madonna of the Toast was the first book of its kind. Finally, the authors explain how the ethics of the social is formed through the relationship of Maitri (drawn from Ambedkar) between the different socials that constitute a society. The everyday social also creates its sense of time, a social time which orders social experiences such as caste. Moreover, the social appears through the invocation of we-ness, suggestive of a social self. They then discuss the relation between experience of belongingness and the social, and show how the social gets authority in a way similar to how natural gets authority in the natural sciences.

Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ontology, they discuss in detail, and with many common examples, how the social is experienced through the perceptual capacities of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality.

Look! It's Jesus! by Harry Choron