Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism

Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives

Pnina Werbner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781847881977
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology¹

Pnina Werbner

In the Beginning …

Ten people met in July 1946 to found the professional Association of Social Anthropologists, joined by a score of other anthropologists the following year. In many ways, Elizabeth Colson (who was there) tells us,

those who came to London, as well as the absent members, were a cosmopolitan group. They had crossed disciplinary and territorial boundaries in becoming anthropologists … They came out of history, law, geography, psychology, economics, biology, and engineering. They drew on their reading in other fields as they dealt with what they regarded as anthropological questions. Those born in Great Britain were in the minority. The remainder of that first group of perhaps 30 members were born in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India, of parents some of whom had never visited Great Britain, while Nadel came from Austria and Peristiany from Cyprus. A cosmopolitan cohort, yet their subject matter was far removed from the cosmopolitan metropolis in which they gathered.

The New Cosmopolitanism(s)

Sixty years after the founding of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, the aim of this book is to reposition social anthropology in relation to an evolving new cosmopolitanism, theorised in political philosophy, sociology of globalisation and postcolonial cultural studies. Words like cosmopolitanism may seem remote from anthropology’s subjects, embedded in European liberal elitist ideas of world consciousness artificially imposed on the out-of-the-way locales that anthropologists mostly study. Yet it is remarkable that anthropologists have made significant contributions since the 1990s, and even before that, to contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. In inaugurating a new anthropology of cosmopolitanism, we argue in this book that both in practice and substantive terms a situated cosmopolitanism, broadly defined, may indeed today be at the heart of the discipline.

Cosmopolitanism, derived from the Greek conjunction of ‘world’ (cosmos) and ‘city’ (polis), describes a ‘citizen of the world’, member in a ‘universal circle of belonging that involves the transcendence of the particular and blindly given ties of kinship and country’ (Cheah 2006: 487). Against ‘globalisation’, a term implying the free movement of capital and the global (mainly Western) spread of ideas and practices, cosmopolitanism is a word used by the new cosmopolitans to emphasise empathy, toleration and respect for other cultures and values. Thus, at its most basic, cosmopolitanism is about reaching out across cultural differences through dialogue, aesthetic enjoyment, and respect; of living together with difference. It is also about the cosmopolitan right to abode and hospitality in strange lands and, alongside that, the urgent need to devise ways of living together in peace in the international community. Against the slur that cosmopolitans are rootless, with no commitments to place or nation, the new post-1990s cosmopolitanism attempts to theorise the complex ways in which cosmopolitans juggle particular and transcendent loyalties – morally, and inevitably also, politically.

Whatever the definition, and whether we are talking of rooted, vernacular or elite interpretations of the term, cosmopolitanism has to be grasped as an ethical horizon – an aspirational outlook and mode of practice. Cosmopolitans insist on the human capacity to imagine the world from an Other’s perspective, and to imagine the possibility of a borderless world of cultural plurality. We often label as cosmopolitan individuals with a certain subjective capacity to enjoy cultural diversity and travel; but because cosmopolitanism is itself a product of creativity and communication in the context of diversity, it must ultimately be understood not merely as individual, but as collective, relational and thus historically located.

The New ‘Normative’ Cosmopolitanism

The year 1990 was a watershed one for the new cosmopolitanism scholarship. The fall of the Berlin Wall, signalling the end of the cold war, coincided with an awareness of a ‘speeded up’ economic globalisation, the spectacular rise of extraterrestrial media during the 1992 first Gulf War, and increasing consciousness of the perils of a looming ecological planetary disaster. The new normative cosmopolitanism, heralded by David Held’s Democracy and the Global Order (1995), took up the vision of Immanuel Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ to argue for the apparently utopian possibility of cosmopolitan citizenship. Kant, it will be recalled, proposed that only a confederation of republics could guarantee peace and the cosmopolitan right of individuals to venture out as strangers and sojourn in other territories.

There were, originally, three discernible strands to this new normative cosmopolitanism. These have increasingly converged as empirical research reveals the complexity of the contemporary global public sphere. All three strands respond to the demise of the so-called Westphalian order, the sacralised, inviolable sovereignty of the nation-state. This inviolability was first questioned by the post-World War II Nurenberg Tribunal and UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed by a subsequent series of international rights conventions. National boundaries were also increasingly undermined by neoliberal economic globalisation and the lowering of trade barriers. Issues of rights and accountability within and among states, and limitations on state sovereignty, came however to dominate international policy in the aftermath of the cold war (Held 1995: 101–7).

The first strand in the new normative cosmopolitan relates to global governance. Daniele Archibugi, while acknowledging its critics and sceptics, phrases it optimistically as an ‘endless process’ of globalising democracy or democratising globalisation (2004: 438). The idea is that ‘democracy cannot be understood in static terms’ (ibid.: 439) and that the move is from local democracy to democratising the international arena, underpinned by treaties, alliances and binding international conventions. The basic Kantian assumption is that democracy within states favours peace between states (ibid.: 441–2).

Perhaps the horizons of democracy are even greater than Archibugi suggests. David Graeber (Chapter 14) traces the provenance of concepts associated with ‘Western freedoms’ like democracy, and demonstrates that they are the product of ‘endless entanglements’ within and beyond the West, to the extent that, ironically, ‘[o]pposition to European expansion in much of the world, even quite early on, appears to have been carried out in the name of “Western values” that the Europeans in question did not yet even have.’ Put simply, notions of rights to popular self-governance and autonomy have been widespread in many quite separated societies. The US constitution, particularly its federal structure, Graeber reminds us, was inspired in part by the Iroquois Six Nation Confederacy. Democracy could be and was invented in widely separated places: from pirate ships to African assemblies. Democratic practice, whether defined as procedures of egalitarian decision-making, or government by public discussion, tends, Graeber argues, to emerge from situations in which communities of one sort or another manage their own affairs outside the purview of the state, while democratic innovation, and the emergence of what might be called democratic values, has a tendency to spring from what he calls ‘zones of cultural improvisation … in which diverse sorts of people with different traditions and experiences are obliged to figure out some way to get on with one another.’ He concludes that in the contemporary world ‘the endless elaboration of new cosmopolitan spaces, and the retreat of states in so many parts of the globe, suggests that there is the potential at least for a vast outpouring of new democratic creativity.’

Perhaps surprisingly, Graeber’s suspicion of the coercive aspects of democracy is one that was shared by Immanuel Kant. In Perpetual Peace Kant rejects a world superstate as inevitably ‘despotic’. A state, Kant says,

[is] not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. … to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing (Principle 2).

With this organic image of nations and cultures Kant attacks the senseless ‘plunder’ by the ‘civilised’ of the remote corners of the earth. ‘The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths,’ he says,

[u]nder the pretence of establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.

In the face of this violence, he maintains,

[s]ince the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion (Third Definitive Article).

What distinguishes the ‘league of peace’, then, is not the obliteration of difference, but procedural universalism: the rule of law, the separation of the executive from the legislative and judicial (which he terms republicanism), the rights of citizens (in a ‘kingdom of ends’), and the right of strangers to temporary abode.

Reflecting on the popular roots of democracy and cosmopolitanism, Hall (Chapter 17) says:

I don’t think we can march around the world and make people cosmopolitan. On the other hand, the more people can begin to hope and aspire in a cosmopolitan way, the less we will be driven to ethnically cleanse people who are not like us, to murder people who won’t convert to us, people who won’t subscribe to the western way of life, etc.

Terms like cosmopolitan, he confesses, make him uneasy, evoking for him colonial claims to bring enlightenment to the natives. At the same time, he admits,

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think the one good thing the Enlightenment did understand was, it required a big argument, it required a row, it required a lot of talking … Not stabbing them in the street … It is quarrels that created the enfranchisement of women. Or that gave the majority of people the vote.

Hence, if the first strand in the new normative cosmopolitan is to theorise the democratisation of a new international order, the second strand is often attributed to Habermas’s revisioning of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Habermas argues that international non-governmental organisations have created an alternative ‘global public sphere’ of debate and advocacy (Habermas 1999: 176). Listing UN-sponsored world conferences on global issues which took place in the 1990s – human rights (Vienna), ecology (Rio), women (Beijing), population (Cairo), poverty (Copenhagen), global warning (Berlin),² Habermas points to the central role played by non-governmental actors which ‘confront states from within the network of an international civil society’ (ibid.: 177). Nevertheless, he also recognises that the possibility of global peace is undercut by international inequalities, leading to civil wars and autocratic regimes in the developing world. In the post-cold war period ethnic conflicts – in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, several African countries (Ruanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia), South East Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand) and the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq) – and the apparently inviolable persistence of autocratic regimes, like Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe, threaten world peace and expose as hollow claims of international human rights.

The third strand in the new normative cosmopolitanism is perhaps best defined by Ulrich Beck when he distinguishes between globalisation, on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism as an emerging ethical response (‘vision’) to it on the other. Beck’s ‘banal’ or ‘latent’ cosmopolitanism is, arguably, very close to what we normally call globalisation. Against that, the interest in his work lies in his theorisation of what may be termed ‘reflexive’ globalisation;³ his insight that ‘What is new is not forced mixing but awareness of it, its self-conscious political affirmation, its reflection and recognition before a global public via the mass media, in the news and in the global social movements of blacks, women and minorities’ (2006: 21). For Beck this constitutes a new process – cosmopolitanisation. It involves a move from globalisation, to consciousness, to institutionalised normative cosmopolitanism, from principle to practice. ‘Under what conditions’, he asks, ‘subject to what limits and by which actors are certain cosmopolitan principles nevertheless translated into practice, and thereby acquire an enduring reality?’ Conscious recognition creates the grounds for ‘cosmopolitan solutions’ (ibid.: 22).

While Beck’s stress on consciousness makes a critical advance, his argument has to be qualified in the light of anthropological analyses of rooted or vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism. In these, the salient move is from cosmopolitan practice to cosmopolitan consciousness or conviction. Whereas Beck posits a simple denial of nationalism, for anthropologists, cosmopolitanism is as much a local engagement within postcolonial states – with cultural pluralism, global rights movements, ideas about democracy and the right to dissent – as beyond their borders. Consciousness of cosmopolitan values may emerge where in the past a taken-for-granted de facto cosmopolitanism flourished, as in Sarajebo, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology
• Section I Anthropology as a Cosmopolitan Discipline
• Section II Feminist and Non-Violent Cosmopolitan Movements
• Section III Rooted Cosmopolitanism, Public Cosmopolitans
• Section IV Vernacular Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitan National Spaces
• Section V Demotic and Working-Class Cosmopolitanisms
• Index