ABSTRACT
Like the discipline itself, many of the most prominent members of the founding circle of modernist anthropology were immigrants, refugees, exiles or secular Jews, the archetypal cosmopolitans, and often all four. Unlike the intrepid anthropological traveller or the world citizen, cosmopolitans are normally associated with cosmopolitan spaces, and with the creation of a transcendent culture beyond the local. Contemporary research on international migration has parallels with earlier studies of circulatory labour migration in Africa: in South-Central Africa, for example, African migrant workers moved to multi-ethnic colonial cities from diverse ethnic hinterlands, crossing the radical disjuncture between cultural worlds. Trade unions in Africa were historically extremely important civil society organisations in the colonial era, mobilising different ethnic and even national groups in demand of basic rights, in unitary opposition to colonial regimes. This was made evident in early anthropological studies of miners on the Zambian Copperbelt, and on the railways in East Africa.
