Anthropology As A (Cosmopolitan) Vocation?

 

VISTA 1: The changing scene for an Anthropological Cosmopolitanism VISTA 2: Cosmopolitan critique VISTA 3: What was ethnography again? VISTA 4: Ethnographies of cosmopolitanism and the Caribbean VISTA 5: Ethnographic retrenchment and cosmological closure VISTA 6: (pseudo-)communities and the anthropological imagination  

 

•  Cosmopolitanism: a fair weather philosophy? •  ‘Analytics of commonality’ are in question –

the pattern of risk has also changed. •  Common anthropos or plural subjectivities/

plural cultures? Herder and/or Kant?  

VISTA 1: the changing scene for Anthropological Cosmopolitanism

•  Between 1918 and 1990 anthropologists used ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in a new way to talk about the differences between people, but the meaning of C and S began to fragment from the mid-1980s on.

•  Cosmopolitan descriptions (e.g. Hannerz, Clifford, Appadurai) enter the scene, but these are strongly contested (e.g. Friedman ‘Tropes for Trippers’)

•  2000s Latour and Beck – post-national relativisms vs. post-national universalisms.

Ulrich Beck: Critique of ‘Methodological Nationalism’

“methodological cosmopolitanism implies a new politics of comparison…The monologic national imagination of the social sciences assumed that Western modernity is a universal formation and that the modernities of the non-Western others can be understood only in relation to the idealized Western model (2002:22). “The global context is varied, mixed, and jumbled—in it, mutual interference and dialogue (however problematic, incongruous, and risky) are inevitable and ongoing. The fake joys of incommensurability are escape routes leading nowhere, certainly not away from our intercultural destiny (2004:436).

(‘The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies’; ‘The Truth of Others’)

 

•  Latour – ‘Cosmopolitics’ (but not ‘Cosmopolitanism’)

•  subjectivity is not prior to, or ‘outside’, the social – no other/external view possible.

•  There are neither total cultures, nor is there universal human subjectivity (anthropos); hence there can be no subject-centred cosmopolitanism.

•  Cosmopolitics of/between plural techno-oriented worlds /cosmoses / ontologies

•  Cf. Karl Marx (but iconoclasm, teleology, eschatology, + iconophilia, augmentation)

•  N.b. role for ‘negotiation’.  

   VISTA 2: Cosmopolitan

critique

Kant – enlightenment politics of personal freedom and interpersonal recognition. Kant: “A community widely prevails amongst the Earth's peoples, [and hence] a transgression of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.

(‘Perpetual Peace’)  Kant: anthropology is study of humans as ‘free-acting beings’: “Physiological [Anthropology]… concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being”; Pragmatic Anthropology investigates what the human being “as a free-acting being makes of itself ”

(Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) Freedom should be regarded as the ‘faculty of beginning spontaneously a series of events’ (Critique of Pure Reason)

•  Critique and metaphor of (self-)building / self-education

»  architectonics  •  Self-reflective critique opens toward future/irrealis

potentials of world » ‘What can I know?’ » ‘What can I do?’ » ‘What should I hope for?’  (Kant CPR)

Hence;- a Cosmopolitan Anthropology focuses on the human capacity to remake itself spontaneously out of the materials to hand (including culture; categories, signs, symbols, gestus, body technique etc.). Thus;- Cosmopolitan Anthropology investigates cultural differences in the light of this capacity for conscious and spontaneous individual self-making/remaking within an unfolding world-community. Localised ‘culture’ is indicative (post hoc) of the context in which a particular life-course unfolds but is not the cause of that life-course which is directed by its own spontaneous engagement with world. Space for ‘ethnographies of cosmopolitanism’ as a revision of the task of ethnography.

Vista 3: What was ethnography again?  

•  Ethnography versus an ethnography - the ethnography as an ‘activity space’ (Meloe)

•  Foucault: ethnography provides – ‘an inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts’ [but also to a] ‘perpetual principle of… contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established’

•  Raymond Firth: ‘Social scientists are usually said to study a society, a community, a culture. This is not what they observe. The material for their observation is human activity. They do not even observe social relationships; they infer them from physical acts. The anthropologist as observer is a moving point in a flow of activity’.

•  Case studies: Jamaican Rastafarians in Shashamene, Ethiopia (Gomes); squatters in Maputo, Mozambique (Nielsen).

•  Fallacy of concreteness in ethnography (Bateson): tendency toward timeless, ‘sedentary metaphysics’ (Malkki)

•  Ethnography needs to show – » Centring and peripheralizing » Homely (canny) and unhomely

(uncanny) » Closure and openness » Soc ia l pat t e r n and sub jec t i ve

divergence •  Need for ‘ethnographies of cosmopolitanism’.

VISTA 4: Ethnographies of

cosmopolitanism and the Caribbean    

  Ethnography of cosmopolitanism as evocation of ‘localised’ imaginative engagements with the extraterritorial / supranational. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston Jamaica (2000).   •  Aunt Erica

‘Look, I am not a Jamaican. Twenty years ago I have a passport say that I am a citizen of Britain and the Commonwealth. Now I have a green card. When I am in America they call me an American; when I am in Jamaica, I am a Jamaican — I don't let those things worry me at all’

•  Cosmopolitan orientation relevant not just to those who emigrate but to those who remain in the Caribbean.

•  tactical ‘homing of freedoms’ by people on the move (Crichlow).

•  Cosmopolitan modernities in the Caribbean.

‘Jamaican’ and ‘Barbadian’ migrations – 1880-1914 – Harlem

Panama workers – Epstein ‘rock drill’

Workers

Classification of worker ‘types’ in U.S. led projects

West Indian migration as a total social fact / class for themselves - Garvey

The whole world is run on bluff. No race, no nation, no man has any divine right to take advantage of others. Why allow the other fellow to bluff you? Every student of political science, every student of economics knows that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation; and that the race can only be saved through political independence. Take away industry from a race; take away political freedom from a race, and you have a group of slaves. Peoples everywhere are travelling toward industrial opportunities and greater political freedom…

Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

John Brown as focus and counterpoint

How did the ‘Barbadians’ come to be in the Putumayo?

Into this situation arrives: Captain Thomas Whiffen

‘cannibal tribes’

Friendship – ‘Trinidadian bearer’ – colonial imposture / bluff

Andoke shaman and his wife

‘cannibal tribes’

Dressing up

Full length JB

VISTA 5: Ethnographic retrenchment and cosmological closure

•  Latour: anthropology shows how there are ‘many radically different

modes of inhabiting the world’

•  Latour paraphrasing Viveiros de Castro – “Amazonian Indians are already globalized in the sense that they have no difficulty in integrating “us” into “their” cosmologies. It is simply that in their cosmic politics we do not have the place that “we” think we deserve’

•  Viveiros de Castro – “anthropology is consistently guided by this one cardinal value: working to create the conditions for the conceptual, I mean ontological, self-determination of people. Or peoples to be more exact’

•  Do anthropologists study people or peoples?  

VISTA 6: (pseudo-)communities and the anthropological imagination

•  Methodological and Epistemological cosmopolitanism add up to a change in the way we imagine ourselves and others in the world.

Hannah Arendt: “Imagination… is the only inner compass we have, we are contemporaries only as far as our imagination reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the expense of being at home in this Century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with its essence.

(Understanding and Politics)  

•  Milton Rokeach - The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. •  We all belong to/partake in ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson) – i.e. – communities of our own imagining. •  hedge fund traders, Dobuan sorcerers, wake singers. •  In opening ourselves to others ethnographically we are opening ourselves to

their ‘common sense’ – to their imagined communities (of people, non-human agents, significant entities).

•  Kant; humanity best understood as “a multitude of persons, existing successively and side by side, who cannot do without being together peacefully and yet cannot avoid constantly being objectionable to one another”

•  Cosmopolitanism as the search for adequate forms of human community

»  As an (algorithmic) ‘regulative’ principle »  and as a ‘vocation’

Ulf Hannerz: [O]ur methodological inclination toward ethnography, toward open-ended encounters with a potential for serendipitous discoveries, should be of particular value in studying what is emergent. Rather than engaging with diversity mostly by looking backward, anthropology can be in the avant-garde of describing what is growing and what may be coming. (‘Diversity is our Business’, 2010:547)   Thomas Piketty: Information must support democratic institutions; it is not an end in itself. If democracy is someday to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again.  (Capital in the Twenty-First Century 2014:570)