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Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. It examines the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitanism is not, and never has been, a 'western', elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North--in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico--juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.
The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone – the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.
Globalization has dislocated community relations, and yet notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are. This book examines the changing nature of community through an exploration of mobile subjects, such as migrants and business travelers, and the tension between culturally specific notions of identity and a universal sense of humanity. The authors develop a "cosmopolitan anthropology" which engages with both the specific and the universal. Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality offers a new perspective on community through a dialogue between two eminent anthropologists, who come from distinct, but complementary, positions.
As the final installment of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet, Cosmopolitanism assesses the pasts and possible futures of cosmopolitanism—or ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society. With contributions from distinguished scholars in disciplines such as literary studies, art history, South Asian studies, and anthropology, this volume recenters the history and theory of translocal political aspirations and cultural ideas from the usual Western vantage point to areas outside Europe, such as South Asia, China, and Africa. By examining new archives, proposing new theoretical formulations, and suggesting new possibilities of political practice, the contributors critically probe the concept of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism may be taken to promise a form of supraregional political solidarity, but on the other, these essays argue, it may erode precisely those intimate cultural differences that derive their meaning from particular places and traditions. Given that most cosmopolitan political formations—from the Roman empire and European imperialism to contemporary globalization—have been coercive and unequal, can there be a noncoercive and egalitarian cosmopolitan politics? Finally, the volume asks whether cosmopolitanism can promise any universalism that is not the unwarranted generalization of some Western particular. Contributors. Ackbar Abbas, Arjun Appadurai, Homi K. Bhabha, T. K. Biaya, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ousame Ndiaye Dago, Mamadou Diouf, Wu Hung, Walter D. Mignolo, Sheldon Pollock, Steven Randall
The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism’s possibilities, aspirations and applications—as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents—so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.
Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people. Caroline Humphrey is a Research Director in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities. Vera Skvirskaja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. She has worked in arctic Siberia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Her recent research interests include urban cosmopolitanism, educational migration in Europe and coexistence in the post-Soviet city.
Since its inception, anthropology's authority has been based on the assumption that it is a unified discipline emanating from the West. In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current status of their practice and its mutations across the globe. World Anthropologies is the first book to provoke this conversation from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden Western discourse. Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the 'provincial cosmopolitanism' of alternative anthropologies and the 'metropolitan provincialism' of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting 'world anthropologies' challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight - and hence more power - than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and provide the outline for a veritable world anthropologies project.
The provocative title of this book is deliberately and challengingly universalist, matching the theoretically experimental essays, where contributors try different ideas to answer distinct concerns regarding cosmopolitanism. Leading anthropologists explore what cosmopolitanism means in the context of everyday life, variously viewing it as an aspect of kindness and empathy, as tolerance, hospitality and openness, and as a defining feature of pan-human individuality. The chapters thus advance an existential critique of abstract globalization discourse. The book enriches interdisciplinary debates about hitherto neglected aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism as a political and moral project, examining the form of its lived effects and offering new ideas and case studies to work with.
This book explores the analytical and practical value of the notion of "rooted cosmopolitanism" for the field of cultural heritage. Many concepts of present-day heritage discourses - such as World Heritage, local heritage practices, or indigenous heritage - tend to elide the complex interplay between the local and the global - entanglements that are investigated as "glocalisation" in Globalisation Studies. However, no human group ever creates more than a part of its heritage by itself. This book explores an exciting new alternative in scholarly (critical) heritage discourse, the notion of rooted cosmopolitanism, a way of making manifestations of globalised phenomena comprehensible and relevant at local levels. It develops a critical perspective on heritage and heritage practices, bringing together a highly varied yet conceptually focused set of stimulating contributions by senior and emerging scholars working on the heritage of localities across the globe. A contextualising introduction is followed by three strongly theoretical and methodological chapters which complement the second part of the book, six concrete, empirical chapters written in "response" to the more theoretical chapters. Two final reflective conclusions bring together these different levels of analysis. This book will appeal primarily to archaeologists, anthropologists, heritage professionals, and museum curators who are ready to be confronted with innovative and exciting new approaches to the complexities of cultural heritage in a globalising world.
In academic descriptions of cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction often recurs. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists whose ethnographic studies reveal many different expressions of cosmopolitanism, this distinction between aspiration and practice can often be quite ambiguous. This book therefore brings together five contributions from anthropologists who are reporting on encounters and aspirations that reveal different forms of spatial mobility, scales of commitment or risk, and are often transient, ambivalent and precarious. These are circumstances in which cosmopolitanism emerges as uneven and partial rather than as a comprehensive or unequivocal transformation of practice and outlook. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.