The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference

Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded insight to “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.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

Being undisciplined : doing justice to the immensity of human experience

This monograph has been an appraisal of the anthropology of Britain as a project. In this final piece, the volume is reviewed and an argument is made along Kierkegaardian lines. Human life is an inward, personal adventure, of each in the face of the other: life is individual and possessed of infinite depth. Conducting social-scientific research (whether ‘anthropological’ or ‘sociological’) in a language – verbal, gestural and conventional – with which the researcher is ‘at home’ enables that individual and inward life, and its public and social dimensions, to be apprehended with a subtlety and sophistication far more difficult to acquire in ‘foreign’ settings. Anthropology ‘at home’ is ideally placed to differentiate between the cultural forms of life, the social structures of life, and how these are individually inhabited and personally experienced. To do justice to human life – descriptive, analytic – is to apprehend an immensity – a complexity and contrariety – beyond the delimitings of partial labels and categories, even beyond particular disciplines of study.PostprintPeer reviewe

Shy and Ticklish Truths as Species of Scientific and Artistic Perception

To evidence the human condition must be to provide an account of the manifold modalities of experience: ‘Evidence’ must include different kinds of humanly experienced truths. However, the question is how does one extend the way in which the ‘evidential’ is broadly understood so that it encompasses the range of ways and kinds of knowing as practised in people’s everyday lives and as pertaining to those lives. Borrowing phrasing from Nietzsche, this article focuses in particular on species of human truth that might be described as being ‘shyer’ or more ‘ticklish’ than others, and that are only humanly accessible when ‘taken by surprise’, or ‘glanced at, flashed at’. Part I of the article explores the sense that might be made of the notion of ‘ticklish truths’. Part II then considers the wider implications of giving due to a panoply of modes of human knowing. The aim of the article is to recognize a ‘gay science’ (Nietzsche) not as an eccentric construction of merely poetic insights and expressions, but as a necessary part of the fundamentals of knowledge. It is a truth of the human condition that its truths are grounded in a personal embodiment of individuality, ontogeny, momentariness and situationality.Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 12, Special Edition July 201

Britain and Brexit : imagining an essentialist sense of “Britishness” and navigating amongst “the British”

In his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivations come to be “accidentally” actualised alike. Devereux’s insights are pertinent regarding the elective decision in Britain to leave the EU, and more broadly for a social-anthropological approach to stereotypes of “Britishness.” There are certain customary discourses by which social life in Britain is “ego-syntonically” conducted, whose competency represents both a sign of belonging and means to navigate everyday interactions. Six discourses of Britishness of this kind might be identified: class; ethnicity; nationality; islandness; privacy; and football. But one is careful to distinguish between such discourses of Britishness — how it is stereotypically, formulaically, to be “British”; how it is publicly, customarily, to express and take part in “Britishness” — and the diversity of individual identities that inhabit and animate those discourses. Equally, one is careful to distinguish between the kinds of violence or violation that the expression of individual worldviews by way of stereotypic collective discourses might embody: “democratic violence” as against “nihilistic violence.”PostprintPeer reviewe

Anthropology through Levinas (further reflections) : on humanity, being, culture, violation, sociality, and morality

The philosophy of Levinas poses a challenge to anthropology. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy of subjectivity’, the absolute incomprehensibility of one individual to another, is the fundamental fact of human being. It is also the foundation of morality, and ethical system, acknowledging the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality as preceding any claim to knowledge, any legislation of culturo-symbolic construction. This article outlines some of the major tenets in a Levinasian metaphysic. It traces their biographical origin in Levinas’s experience of the Holocaust, and their intellectual origin in a reading of the Old Testament where Abraham answers ‘Here I am’ to a divine presence of which he has no possible experience. According to Levinas, each owes to the human Other the same ‘inspired’ response as to the incomprehensibility of divinity. The article concludes by mooting a passable solution to the Levinasian challenge: a cosmopolitan anthropology that looks to write the individual life imaginatively while writing the human species systematically.PostprintPeer reviewe

The capacities of anyone : accommodating the universal human subject as value and in space

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Voice, History and Vertigo : Doing justice to the dead through imaginative conversation

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Discomfiture in time; and the future as birthright

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Sociality and uncertainty : between avowing and disavowing concepts in Anthropology

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