ABSTRACT
The methodological benefits of coding data as nodes is perhaps best understood, then, as a 'dialogic aesthetics' established between authors, themes and ethnographic data. A global cosmopolitan order needs to be founded on a universal law of hospitality allowing us to 'venture out as strangers and sojourn in other territories'. A cosmopolitan perspective is grounded in a negotiation of and with otherness, then, surely, this must include elements of 'reflexive self-distantiation' whereby individual agents momentarily seek to position themselves as their primary contrapuntal other. Contrapuntal cosmopolitanism is thus about finding the appropriate distance to capricious others through ideational, communicative and physical media so that reciprocal exchanges can be realised without simultaneously being attacked by malevolent or greedy counterparts. Ethnographic moments that the already known may be transcended by establishing new connections between the understood and the need to understand. The ethnography served as the analytical argument for engaging with a theoretical debate rather than vice-versa.
