The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3929
Nel suo incisivo ed equilibrato commento su “cosa c’è di europeo nell’antropologia europea”, Thomas Hylland Eriksen sostiene che ciò sia il suo cosmopolitismo. Una antropologia cosmopolita, prosegue Eriksen, potrebbe andare oltre le gerarchie di lingua, paese e istituzione; potrebbe offrire un orizzonte alla frizione tra diverse tradizioni che produca uno scambio intellettuale globale; e potrebbe elaborare approfondimenti globali da confrontare, comparativamente, sulle questioni locali dell’economia politica. In questo modo Eriksen crea interessanti connessioni tra l’“antropologia europea” come idea o concetto e l’“antropologia europea” come insieme di studi etnografici. Leggo qui l’idea che, in virtù dei fatti empirici che la ricerca antropologica in contesti europei ha portato alla luce, possiamo oggi immaginare un modo di praticare l’antropologia che è “cosmopolita” nel senso precedentemente spiegato. Vorrei impegnarmi, ugualmente, in una antropologia cosmopolita e vorrei esplorare ulteriormente ciò che nella natura del cosmopolitismo come concetto gli consente di avere il suo potere intellettuale e morale.
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Nigel Rapport
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The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
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Nigel Rapport
2019/12/29
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The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
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                                         2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 225-232




The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and
the nature of human difference
Nigel RAPPORT
University of St Andrews




ABSTRACT: Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded comment on
“what is European about European anthropology” by advocating its cosmopolitanism.
Anthropology that is cosmopolitan might go beyond hierarchies of language, country
and institution, he urges; might provide the friction between different traditions that
sparks a global intellectual exchange; and might bring global insights to bear,
comparatively, on local issues of political economy. In this way Eriksen makes
interesting links between “European anthropology” as an idea or concept and
“European anthropology” as a set of ethnographic studies: I read him as saying that by
virtue of the empirical facts that anthropological research in European settings has
unearthed, we can now imagine a way of practising anthropology that is “cosmopolitan” –
as amplified above. I would invest equally in a cosmopolitan anthropology, and would
like to explore further what in the nature of cosmopolitanism as a concept enables it to
have its intellectual and its moral power.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Nigel Rapport
The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 225-232.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3929
226                                                                        NIGEL RAPPORT



   Cosmopolitan anthropology has a mission. It is encapsulated in this
asseveration from Michael Jackson:
      One would have hoped that by now we would have broken the habit of
      magnifying those traits which seem to make us ostensibly unlike others – the
      color of our skin, the language we speak, the food we eat, the beliefs we
      espouse – and come to terms with what all human beings have in common, for
      better or for worse, and seeing, beneath the surface of cultural differences,
      comparable imperatives, logics, and dispositions (2004: 153).

   And in this from Ernest Gellner:
      We are all human and should treat each other decently and with respect. Don’t
      take more specific classifications seriously. Is categorization between
      consenting adults to be allowed to all? (1993: 3).

   Allowing for the characteristic differences in individual style and tone,
Gellner and Jackson make common cause. Anthropology, they say, is the
elucidation of that commonality shared by all human beings as members of
the same species. Skin colour, language, dietary habits, cosmologies – these
are matters of cultural surfaces. But beneath these surfaces, animating these
surface manifestations of cultural difference, will be commensurate human
logics, imperatives and dispositions. Classifications more specific than the
human species – nationalities, religions, classes, professions, statuses, races,
even genders – should not be mistaken as having the same ontological status
as that species sameness. The symbolic differences that cultures make
between and among human beings – as “pious”, “modest”, “feminine”,
“alien”, “autochthonous”, “traditional”, and so on – are not be taken as
possessing the same truth, or as bearing the same moral weight, as
ontological truths of human nature that anthropology discerns. Symbolic
truths are constructed truths, truths that depend on human recognition and
maintenance; ontological truths describe the nature of a reality that is
independent of our assertions, a reality that goes on being real whether or
not we recognise it as such. Our human species-commonality, and the
individuality by which human embodiment expresses itself, are truths of this
latter order.
   Gellner and Jackson are equally assertive in terms of the moral
consequences of anthropological knowledge: this is not something of merely
academic interest but should impact upon the habits and procedures by
which we conduct ourselves in everyday social life. A certain ethos of
decency and respect, of “cosmopolitan politesse”, should follow from
anthropological insights, a certain level of human interaction that all in


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possession of a mature competency (“consenting adults”) should espouse.
We do not enslave, we abide by a rule of law, we treat the Other as an end in
themselves (not a means) – and we do not seriously believe in the symbolic
classifications that our different cultures have traditionally suggested for us.
We might enjoy these cultures and classes at one level, as aesthetic
preferences – one prefers, say, Arsenal to Tottenham Hotspur, Judaism to
Islam, lager to ale, jeans to suits – but we are sufficiently mature, humane,
to take an ironic stance towards these aesthetic preferences also (Rapport
and Stade 2014). That is, we recognise that cultural symbologies do not
necessarily describe or respond to the ontological truths of the human
condition. They are language-games and they are not fit necessarily to guide
practice or morality in the serious business of human interaction (whether
the micro-socialities of interaction between neighbouring individuals, or the
macro-socialities of interaction between global populations) (Rapport 2010).
   What is the context of the asservations from Jackson and Gellner? It is
twofold. First is a longstanding historical debate – as old as the discipline of
anthropology itself – on the foundational nature of human difference. When
Immanuel Kant first used the word “anthropology” to outline the possibility
and the propriety for an enlightenment science, he envisaged the focus as
being on the nature of humankind as such: on human being beyond and
beneath the merely conventional and contingent ascriptions of an ancien
regime that had insisted on differences of wealth, status, nationality,
religion, race and gender being deemed actual differences in biological
make-up and moral worth. But then Kant’s student, Johan Herder,
repudiated the claim that there was such a thing as humanity, as against
there being Germans and French (and so on): humans ensconced in natural
communities of language and custom and Volk. Was it not pathological to
imagine a deracinated human being outside the context of a land, a race and
a soil? The history of anthropology as a discipline, according to George
Stocking (1992: 347), may thus be viewed “as a continuing (and complex)
dialectic between the universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism
of “ethnos”: it is anthropology’s “recurrent dilemma”. In Clifford Geertz’s
(1973: 22) phrasing, how ought the discipline to square a generic human
rationality and the biological unity of mankind with the great variation of
cultural forms? Are we human over and against our cultural differences – by
virtue of our universal capacity to create and recreate culture – or is it by
way of distinct enculturation that we come to embody a specific variant of
human-ness? A cosmopolitan anthropology, as I would know it, is firmly of
the opinion that a common humanity is ontological while cultural
diversitarianism is symbolical, political and aesthetic. The latter
symbolizations do not speak to the foundations, the fundamental realities,

                                     2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 225-232
228                                                                 NIGEL RAPPORT


of a human condition; they speak rather to political investments in
discourses of sameness and difference, of tradition and convention, and
hierarchy and regimentation, investments which will simply serve the
furtherance of certain interests or tastes.
   A further context for the asservations of Jackson and Gellner is a
contemporary popular “culturalism” and politics of identity. Paradoxically,
this is a revisiting of that ancien regime which assigned individuals to
membership of certain communities, traditions and statuses on the basis of
their “heritage”. The politics of identity peddles an essentialistic and
ascriptive version of cultural belonging, of cultural boundaries and
traditions, that is as pernicious as it is erroneous. “Cultures are not options”,
proclaims Bhikhu Parekh (1998: 212). Cultural differences are equivalent to
species differences, asserts James Tully (1995). Again, a cosmopolitan
anthropology firmly states that cultures are options in any moral society,
and that cultural differences are of an absolutely different quality to species
differences: they pertain to a discursive surface only (Rapport 2011).
                                           ~
   The proximate context for my outlining a version of a “cosmopolitan”
anthropology, of course, and for drawing on Jackson and Gellner in the
process, is the debate that this volume highlights on what might be the
meaning of the notion of “Europe” in such appellations as “The European
Association of Social Anthropologists”. (Currently I happen to be Chair of
the Association of the Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and
Commonwealth (ASA), for whose membership the valence of “United
Kingdom” and “Commonwealth” are no less of an issue.) This is how
Francisco Martínez has described the issue in his editorial introduction: To
ascertain the self-understanding of contemporary anthropologists working
in different European countries in regard to the notion of “Europe”. Are
there particular empirical subjects that an “anthropology of Europe” would
illuminate? Is there a European way of practising anthropology as opposed to
different national ways? Is there a global way, or rather multiple local ways or
transnational ways? The answer would appear to be that the contributors to
this collection offer case studies that exemplify an emergent “European
anthropology” possessed of a transnational character. Instead of there being
a dynamics of centre-and-periphery — whether a “Western-canonical”
positionality on “Europe”, or a positionality that reflected different
national-traditional versions of anthropological practice and expertise –
what we instead find today are anthropologists across the continent of
Europe participating in a “transnational dynamics of anthropological



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knowledge-production”. This can also seem to accord with the conclusion of
Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s comment where he welcomes anthropology in
Europe for its “cosmopolitan Eurocentrism” (Alessandro Testa): a
cosmopolitan anthropology that affirms the possibility of mutual
understanding between members of a disciplinary conversation while shying
away from positing any necessary or ultimate convergence, consensus or
uniformity.
                                            ~
   But in missionising for a cosmopolitan anthropology, I think I would want
to go further. In the name of human freedom: of emancipation from
nescience and from merely conventional cultural ascriptions of human reality
(Rapport 2012b). And this is also to take a lead from the editorial
introduction by Francisco Martínez.
   Martínez suggests this issue be seen as a mission statement of “an
emerging transnational field” of anthropology, a “field of practice” that
privileges an auto-ethnographic appreciation of its “epistemic and political
location”. “European anthropology” represents “specific kinds of relation
between localities and practitioners”, but also a discipline that might
“exceed its conditions of possibility”. I am not sure that “field” is the most
apposite word, with its implication of boundary and closure, but I like the
emphasis on auto-ethnography and the “excessive” knowledge to which it
gives rise (cf. Rapport 2014). Ethnography is a methodology that is unifying,
universalizing and convergent, I would suggest, and cosmopolitan. Any
human being can potentially practise ethnography on any other, can know
them as an ethnographic subject. Ethnography is universally applicable
because both the practitioners of that methodology and the subjects of that
methodology share a common nature: they are human beings.
   Moreover, ethnography is universally applied, I would argue. The
anthropological methodology is an exaggeration of an everyday, auto-
ethnographic practice: human beings everywhere making “ironic”
assessments of who their consociates might be, what they might mean and
want, and, given those assessments, how they themselves should act for the
furtherance of their own desires. Is “anthropology at home” of only limited
provenance and relevance, Marilyn Strathern once famously asked: a
discipline “carried out in the social context which produced it”, as faux
knowledge (1987:17)? Ironic practice would suggest that “techniques of self-
knowledge” constitute a universal class of phenomena: all social actors are
ethnographers (whether or not they may be social theorists; Giddens 1984:
335). In the words of Victor Turner:


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230                                                                          NIGEL RAPPORT

      There were never any innocent, unconscious savages, living in a time of
      unreflective and instinctive harmony. We human beings are all and always
      sophisticated, conscious, capable of laughter at our own institutions (cited in
      Ashley 1990: xix).

   Significantly, ethnography also illuminates the difference between
sociocultural realities and ontological ones. While some “conditions of
possibility” (Martínez) pertain to particular social and cultural milieux –
“What is it possible for a “woman” or a “refugee” to know at this time or
place?” – other conditions are ontological: it will never be possible for a
human being to know the consciousness of their consociates or their
research subjects. A cosmopolitan anthropology has, for me, the ultimate
project of knowing and acting upon the absolute distinction between those
conditions of knowledge and facts that pertain to “Europe” as a time and
place, and those that pertain to the nature of human ontology. In other
words, a cosmopolitan anthropology compares how it is to exist as a human
being and individual in Europe with elsewhere. More than this, it would –
after Kant’s originary vision – seek to marry such knowledge to a morality.
Given the nature of humankind – its universal capacities for pleasure and
pain, for gratification and suffering, for creativity and individuality – how
are those ontological conditions reflected in the social and cultural
conditions in Europe and elsewhere? Ethnography as the practice of a
cosmopolitan anthropology has as its ultimate end the establishment of
optimal social and cultural conditions for individual fulfilment: for the
individual substantiation of his or her universal human capacities, both in
Europe and elsewhere. This is the individual’s human birthright (Rapport
2012a).
                                            ~
   Our specificities – as anthropologists in or of “Europe” – sit within, are
contained by, our underlying and overarching uniformities as human beings
who research human being. A cosmopolitan anthropology traverses this arc
between the universal and the specific in such a way that epistemologically,
and hopefully morally, the latter can be made to accord with the former.
   In supporting Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s assertion that a “European
anthropology is cosmopolitan or it is nothing”, I would read into the
phrasing the understanding of “cosmopolitan” outlined above. European
anthropology must be “cosmopolitan” in refusing to conflate the ontological
realities of our humanity, and the individuality with which that humanity is
universally embodied, on the one hand, and the symbolic realities of social
and cultural difference on the other. How do we, as individuals and as
collections of individuals, construe “Europe” and “European”, in what

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contexts, to what ends, and with what consequences? A word, a concept,
cannot of itself cause anything to be – “Theory is all well and fine”, Jean-
Martin Charcot observed, “but it does not stop things from existing” (cited in
Freud 1989) – only human actors have this kind of agency, but how has that
individual human agency been put into effect by recourse to the term
“Europe”?


REFERENCES
Ashley, Kathleen, 1990, Introduction, in Victor Turner and the Construction of
      Cultural Criticism, Kathleen Ashley, ed, Bloomington, Indiana University Press:
      ix-xxii.
Freud, Sigmund, 1989, The Freud Reader, New York, Norton.
Gellner, Ernest, 1993, The mightier pen? Edward Said and the double standards of
      inside-out colonialism, Times Literary Supplement, February, 19: 3-4.
Jackson, Michael, 2004, In Sierra Leone, Durham, Duke University Press.
Parekh, Bhikhu, 1998, Cultural Diversity and Liberal Democracy, in Democracy,
      Difference and Social Justice, Gurpreet Mahajan, ed, Oxford, Oxford University
      Press: 202-227.
Rapport, Nigel, 2010, Apprehending Anyone: The Non-Indexical, Post-Cultural and
      Cosmopolitan Human Actor, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16,
      1: 84-101.
Rapport, Nigel, 2011, The liberal treatment of difference: An untimely meditation
      on culture and civilization, Current Anthropology, 52, 5: 687-710.
Rapport, Nigel, 2012a, Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology, Oxford,
      Berghahn.
Rapport, Nigel, 2102b, Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: A vision of the individual
      free from culture, custom and community, in Handbook of Cosmopolitan
      Studies, Gerard Delanty, ed, London, Routledge: 101-114.
Rapport, Nigel, 2014, Auto-Anthropology, in Social and Cultural Anthropology: The
      Key Concepts, 3rd edition, London, Routledge: 24-35.
Rapport, Nigel, Ronald Stade,2014, Debating irony and the ironic as a social
      phenomenon and a human capacity. Social Anthropology, 22, 4: 443-478.
Stocking, George W., 1992, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History
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Strathern, Marilyn, 1987, The limits of auto-anthropology, in Anthropology at
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Tully, James 1995, Strange Multiplicity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.




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 Nigel Rapport, MA (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester), is Professor of Anthropological
 and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is Founding Director
 of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has held a Canada
 Research Chair (in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice), and been elected Fellow
 of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW).
 His recent books include: Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
 (Berghahn, 2012); Distortion and Love: An Anthropological Reading of the Life and
 Art of Stanley Spencer (Routledge, 2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical
 Engagement Beyond Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).
 rapport@st-andrews.ac.uk




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Nigel Rapport
The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 225-232.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3929
