In conversation, and in the company of a new generation of scholars working in the field, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle re-explore the terrain and meaning of cosmopolitan studies now. This book offers a new survey and theorisation of cosmopolitan research, a burgeoning topic responding to increasingly complex patterns of human interaction in world society. It considers the question of cosmopolitan methodology: What are the methods needed for, or elicited by, studying cosmopolitan situations? And how are we to remain faithful to the heteronomous human interiority and intentionality from which cosmopolitan moments are constructed? The volume focuses on the open-ended moment of ethnographic fieldwork that generates the concepts and methods needed to understand contemporary cosmopolitanisation. The chapters cover a wide range of ethnographic situations and open up debate on what are the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its exploration of human difference and commonality.
Table of Contents:
1. What does a cosmopolitan anthropology hope to know, and how? An introduction
Huon Wardle and Nigel Rapport
Part I
2. Trembling Moments: Encountering the other (self) at the pier of Lampedusa
Alessandro Corso
3. Being Methodologically Cosmopolitan: On uncertainty, capacities and the stories that are still to be told
Simone Toji
Part II
4. Cosmopolitanism as an empirically grounded framework in urban ethnography
Silvia Binenti
5. Caliban’s Return: Afro-Cuban Cosmopolitics Between Politesse and Multiculturalism
Pablo D. Herrera Veitia
Part III
6. Anthropology upscaled: Cosmopolitan encounters with EU civil servants in Brussels
Seamus Montgomery
7. Rastafari Cosmopolitics: Reflections on an Ethnography of spiritual repatriation and the state of Caribbeanist anthropology
Shelene Gomes
Part IV
8. Interlocutors and anthropologist in and out of cosmopolitanism
Narmala Halstead
9. Social deeds, building, and the cosmopolitan moment: An ethnographic view on affective labour in late-socialist Poland
Tomasz Rakowski
Part V
10. We-ness: The universal nature of human sociation and its ethical recognition
Nigel Rapport
11. On the Structure of Cosmopolitan Encounters
Huon Wardle
12. Afterword
Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle
About the Author :
Nigel Rapport is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK, and Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies.
Huon Wardle is Senior Lecturer, former Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, and Editor of the Yearbook in Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK.
