ABSTRACT
Because it demands an awareness of not only the holistic pattern of a social setting but also how holistic qualities are transformed – how they open out across physical and cultural-imaginative boundaries – the ethnography of cosmopolitanism constitutes an outer edge of the interpretive potential of ethnography (Wardle 2000, 2010, 2011a). Ethnography can make, and has already made (Besson 2002; Carnegie 2002; Olwig 2007 inter alia), a vital contribution to rethinking the current Caribbean condition as culturally open, mobile and transmigrant. However, adding ‘cosmopolitanism’ as an object of ethnographic study has further effects. On the one hand, our understanding of cosmopolitanism is particularized; cosmopolitanism becomes an embedded potential of human predicaments and social situations. In addition, though, by particularizing cosmopolitan capacities, the ethnography of cosmopolitanism presents as much a challenge to strong relativistic claims as it does to universalizing ones.
