ABSTRACT

A glaring absence in the growing corpus of work in the anthropology of ethics is any serious engagement with the new anthropology of cosmopolitanism. Englund's essay on poverty in the collection notes the centrality of the 'relational' person in an anthropological study of cosmopolitan ethics. This chapter suggests that anthropologists studying beyond the West must be on the contexts in which cosmopolitanisms develop and flourish. Along with the view that cosmopolitan elites are necessarily rootless and corrupt, a second false assumption the new anthropological cosmopolitanism rejects is the idea that cosmopolitanism is only and singularly elitist. Vernacular cosmopolitanism belongs to a family of concepts all of which combine in similar fashion apparently contradictory opposites: cosmopolitan patriotism, rooted cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan ethnicity, working class cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism. The deconstructive critique of social anthropology in the mid-1980s challenged the discipline's claims to be cosmopolitan in practice and in social theory.