Social Anthropology

I draw out four kinds of cosmopolitanism called on in this volume – as a perceptual ability, as an identity politics, as a pan‐human ontology and as a transformative personal capacity. The possibility of ethnographic practice presumes cosmopolitan perceptual abilities. As an identity politics, cosmopolitanism falls into place as an object of mainstream theorising. As an ontology, it becomes the cornerstone of a future‐directed anthropological ethics. As a transformative capacity, it signals that cosmological enclosure is only ever a partial condition. We need ethnographies of cosmopolitanism to explore the compatibility of these framings and to test the paradoxes of scale they foreground.

Cosmopolitanism as the existential condition of humanity refers to the view that human beings are both transcendent and social. This is argued through another pair of concepts, commonality and difference. If humans are moral, it is because they recognise each other as sharing a basic ontology. But this morality is expressed in the sort of regard that separates ‘me’ from ‘you’. Two aspects of difference are elaborated: foreignness feared as alien but also found in oneself, and alterity as irreducibly other. How can these differences keep us both individual and social?

This article explores forms of social relatedness among peri‐urban residents in Maputo, Mozambique, which have as their premise that social interaction occurs in a world that is both unknown and potentially dangerous. As I show, reciprocal encounters are therefore based on creating distance rather than approximation. Although people acknowledge the crucial importance of social others, it is important to maintain appropriate distances in order to avoid awakening unwanted desires. I consequently introduce the notion of contrapuntal cosmopolitanism to designate the production of viable (reciprocal) distances in unfamiliar milieux peopled by important but also capricious others.

In this paper I concentrate on cosmopolitanism's ‘protean quality’ (Hannerz), its elusiveness and flexibility both as analytical tool and as experience. I explore the life of Agata González, a Gitano (Gypsy/Roma) woman from Madrid, tracing the emergence of a cosmopolitan subjectivity. In this ethnographic context, cosmopolitanism appears and disappears from view; changes in character, intensity and effect; and is at some times an ideal, even a day‐dream, and at others an unavoidable and fully practical way of dealing with the world. The paper demonstrates the potential fragility of cosmopolitan orientations and argues the need to acknowledge the anti‐heroic qualities of emergent cosmopolitan subjectivities.

This essay examines the idea of traitorhood and how it contributes to the formation of cosmopolitanism in Japan. Specifically, it traces the biographies of two historical figures from wartime Japan who have been remembered as traitors or heroes at different historical time periods in post‐war Japan. Then it discusses the shifting interpretive frames that informed the specific modes of remembering their biographies, demonstrating the processes through which the figure of a cosmopolitan becomes visible and recognisable in a given society.

On the basis of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines three ‘cosmopolitan’ traditions in the Caribbean. It shows that, while the first tradition derives from the universalist intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment, the other two are linked to vernacular, local Caribbean traditions. These cosmopolitan traditions, however, should not be seen to involve mutually exclusive understandings and practices. Rather, they offer mutually constitutive sources of (self)knowledge and frameworks of social interaction that can be evoked for various pragmatic and intellectual purposes as individuals and communities reflect on, and engage with, inequality in social life.

Focusing ethnographically on the Creole festivals in Mauritius, this article examines coexisting cosmopolitan and localising processes in a non‐elite and rooted context. It outlines the marginalisation of Creoles in Mauritius before elucidating three processes evident in Afro‐Creole collective identification: cross‐continental inspiration from the ‘Creole world’ of the African diaspora; regional ethnic identification as Indian Ocean island Creoles with overlapping histories and shared cultural traditions; and the localising identity politics of differentiation of each ‘Creole culture’ as unique and rooted in a particular island or state.

This article argues that for a truly cosmopolitan anthropology to come about, we need to reflect critically on the conditions of our knowledge production. Using the example of women's under‐representation within anthropology, and the marginalisation of the Caribbean, I argue that we need to think more about the social ground beneath our feet and recognise the differential access that anthropologists across the globe and at home have to the ongoing larger conversation that constitutes the discipline. We like to think that universities are republics of letters in the Enlightenment spirit, in which free‐flowing conversations take place between equals. Yet like other domains of knowledge production, academia is embedded in hierarchical structures imbued with power. We need to situate our ongoing conversation and our commitment to a cosmopolitan anthropology in this broader context.

Emergent world society the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. A close reading of Kant's leads to an emphasis on anthropology as a form of education for subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed from above. Anthropology might then be a self‐learning tool for anyone who cares about making a world society fit for humanity as a whole.

The recent growth of interest in cosmopolitan studies in a range of disciplines is linked to globalisation generally, and not least to the end of the Cold War. A large part of the anthropological contribution to this emerging body of research has been devoted to ethnographies of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, and thus to demonstrating that cosmopolitan orientations and competences have been more widespread in the world than has been conventionally assumed. The field of cosmopolitan studies has tended, however, to be segmented along disciplinary lines. These comments conclude by drawing attention to the growth of cosmopolitanism by way of the media, and its complexity and contradictions.

Cosmopolitanism and liberty