Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives

by Pnina Werbner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474248075
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Series:	Association of Social Anthropologists Monographs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	396
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology, Keele University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology, Pnina Werbner

Section 1: Anthropology as a Cosmopolitan Discipline
Chapter 2. The Founding Moment: Sixty Years Ago, Elizabeth Colson
Chapter 3. The Cosmopolitan Encounter: Social Anthropology and the Kindness of Strangers, Pnina Werbner
Chapter 4. Central European Cocktails: Malinowski and Gellner vis-á-vis Herderian Cosmopolitanism, Chris Hann

Section 2: Feminist and Non-Violent Cosmopolitan Movements
Chapter 5. Gender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms, Maila Stivens
Chapter 6. Islamic Cosmopolitics, human rights and anti-violence strategies Indonesia, Kathryn Robinson
Chapter 7. 'A New Consciousness Must Come': Affectivity and Movement in Tamil Dalit Women's Activist Engagement with Cosmopolitan Modernity, Kalpana Ram

Section 3: Rooted Cosmopolitan, Public Cosmopolitans
Chapter 8. A Native Anthropologist in Palestinian Israeli Cosmopolitanism, Aref Abu Rabia
Chapter 9. Reaching the Cosmopolitan Subject: Patriotism, Ethnicity and the Public Good in Botswana, Richard Werbner
Chapter 10. Paradoxes of the Cosmopolitan in Melanesia, Eric Hirsch
Chapter 11. Cosmopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the State: The Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa, Dorothy Hodgson

Section 4: Vernacular Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitan Nations
Chapter 12. Cosmopolitan Nations, National Cosmopolitans, Richard Fardon
Chapter 13. Other Cosmopolitans in the Making of the Modern Malay World, Joel S. Kahn
Chapter 14. On Cosmopolitan and (Vernacular) Democratic Creativity, or: There Never Was a West, David Graeber

Section 5: Demotic and Working Class Cosmopolitanisms
Chapter 15. Xenophobia and Xenophilia in South Africa, Owen Sichone
Chapter 16. Cosmopolitan Values in a Central Indian Steel Town, Jonathan Parry
Chapter 17. Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora, Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner

Editorial Reviews

“These wide-ranging ethnographic accounts offer much-needed comparative perspectives on the possibilities of trans-local belonging and solidarity in a globalizing world. In the process, anthropology is re-imagined and renewed as a positioned cosmopolitan practice, among others. Genuinely provocative and destabilizing, the essays are an essential resource for any serious thinking about the varieties of cosmopolitanism today.” —James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism is a terrific addition to contemporary discussions about hope, cosmopolitanism, rootedness, patriotism, civility, and anthropology at its best! As a whole, it offers subtlety and power, nuance and surprise, provocation and breadth. It will be great to think with, through, and even against. A tour de force for the early 21st century.” —Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism is a timely volume that makes a significant contribution, beyond social anthropology, to the growing field of cosmopolitan studies. It adds to the growing voice which transforms cosmopolitanism from an elite western movement into a situated and vernacular, normative and political mode of mass participation in the global world, and posits it as one of the major modes of contemporary politics of belonging.” —Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London

From the Publisher

These wide-ranging ethnographic accounts offer much-needed comparative perspectives on the possibilities of trans-local belonging and solidarity in a globalizing world. In the process, anthropology is re-imagined and renewed as a positioned cosmopolitan practice, among others. Genuinely provocative and destabilizing, the essays are an essential resource for any serious thinking about the varieties of cosmopolitanism today.

James Clifford

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism is a terrific addition to contemporary discussions about hope, cosmopolitanism, rootedness, patriotism, civility, and anthropology at its best! As a whole, it offers subtlety and power, nuance and surprise, provocation and breadth. It will be great to think with, through, and even against. A tour de force for the early 21st century.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Virginia R. Dominguez

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism is a timely volume that makes a significant contribution, beyond social anthropology, to the growing field of cosmopolitan studies. It adds to the growing voice which transforms cosmopolitanism from an elite western movement into a situated and vernacular, normative and political mode of mass participation in the global world, and posits it as one of the major modes of contemporary politics of belonging.

Nira Yuval-Davis