Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking

Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I (2017) Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle Foreword by Keith Hart 1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner 2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle 3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm 4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad 5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz 6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift 7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery 8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez 9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing 10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond 11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine 12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller 13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco

A year ago, in June 2012, I attended the RAI conference on 'Anthropology in the World' at the British Museum. Its aim was, in RAI director David Shankland's words, to 'explore and evaluate the position, role, and influence of anthropology outside academia'. There were 456 participants from 43 different countries, more than half of them not based at any British university. The organization had of course been particularly keen to attract anthropologists working outside academia. 1 Not surprisingly, there were many younger colleagues among them. They used their creativity and enthusiasm to craft their own niche in the wider world. Thirty-two panels presented a spectrum of different ways to engage with the world, ranging from diplomacy, education, security studies, museum work, and business to journalism, public health, law, tourism, and government. The keynote address was delivered by Gillian Tett, who entered the crowded BP Lecture Hall virtually, on a Cloud from New York City. This Cambridge anthropologist turned Financial Times journalist addressed the problems of remaining faithful to and proud of anthropology while doing journalism in high finance circles at a time when the arrogance and hubris of the financial sector still had no limits. She offered comfort and encouragement to the tribe in the auditorium. The speakers I heard were so devoted and passionate that almost all transgressed the strict time limits. Given the number of speakers and the conference's topic, the quality and relevance of the presentations were quite diverse. One of the most striking performances was a stand-up comedy act by Australian anthropologist Grant McCall, who, in lightweight suit with pith helmet, talked about anthropologists as characters in the movies and on TV from Charlie Chan to Tempe 'Bones' Brennan. His vivid and hilarious 'show' also ran out of time. Actually, the widespread overrun on time points to a problem within anthropology more generally: the inability of many of us to communicate what we know in a brief and accessible manner. To my mind, the rich diversity in topics and viewpoints reflected a healthy state of the art, but at the same time exposed the present-day weakness of the discipline: its lack of a centripetal force and common mission. It made me think of Eric R. Wolf, who appeared to me in a dream the night before the Sunday panels, and his

2011

With the Internet anthropologists are reaching new audiences and improving the dissemination of their work. Articles and books published through scholarly presses were once the best ways to disseminate academic research, but now with the Internet this isn’t entirely true. Open access publishing, self-archiving, and even self-publishing can disseminate research better than the most prestigious anthropology journals. Established journals, not blind to this issue, are changing the ways they generate revenue from publishing research. There are alternatives to the reader-pays model which restricts access to a select few. But the Internet, beyond transforming the ways anthropologists disseminate their work between each other, has had more profound significance for engaging anthropology outside its traditional audiences. For many anthropologists, new online spaces have reinvigorated the discipline, providing opportunities to reach new audiences, to incorporate new participants, and to pres...

The event aimed to explore a variety of perspectives concerning the production and the ownership of anthropological knowledge, including issues of authority and ethical responsibility. We also welcomed reflections on the opening of new interstitial fieldsites in between the structured components of anthropological research. Our interest focused on the dilemmas arising from the definition of the field itself, in the guise of the epistemological delimitation of its boundaries and how these affect the relational world within it. We focused on the co-dependence between these factors and on the influence of increasing interconnectedness through advanced and progressively widespread communication technologies (cf. Kelty 2009).

Durham anthropology journal, 2012

We find Danny Miller's recent article in Hau interesting and provocative (as ever in Miller's work) but it confuses several issues which are best considered separately. Miller advocates a model of openness in publication which sees a move away from commercial, profit driven organisations being in control of academic publishing. He argues that openness should not mean an abandonment of the peer review process. The issue of open publication is, however, far from simple. The ideal model espoused by Miller and roundly endorsed by most of the commentators to his discussion piece is one with which, in principle we suspect, few academics would care to disagree. Who would not welcome a world in which rigorously vetted, credible knowledge was made freely available to everyone? There are however real constraints on the model proposed by Miller, not least of which is the fact that open publication means a number of different things and Miller only touches on a small

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2012

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Daniel Miller. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) | F o r u m | Open access, scholarship, and digital anthropology Daniel MILLER, University College London

■ In this article, anthropology is seen as a Western cosmopolitics that consolidated itself as a formal academic discipline in the 20th century within a growing Western university system that expanded throughout the world. Like other cosmopolitics, anthropology reflects the historical dynamics of the world system, especially those related to the changing roles 'alterity' may play in international and national scenarios. Some of the most fundamental changes in anthropology in the last century were due to changes in the subject position of anthropology's 'object' par excellence, native peoples all over the planet. But, currently, there is another element which was never duly incorporated by previous critiques and is bound to impact anthropology: the increased importance of the non-hegemonic anthropologists in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Changes in the conditions of conversability among anthropologists located in different loci of the world system will impact the tension between metropolitan provincialism and provincial cosmopolitanism, increase horizontal communication and create more plural world anthropologies. Keywords ■ global diversity and anthropology ■ metropolitan provincialism ■ provincial cosmopolitanism ■ world system of anthropology À memória de Eduardo Archetti I view the issues that anthropologists address, their theoretical preoccupations, contributions to knowledge, dilemmas and mistakes, the heuristic and epistemological capabilities of the discipline, as embedded in certain social, cultural and political dynamics that unfold in contexts which are differently and historically structured by changing power relations. The main sociological and historical forces that traverse anthropology's political and epistemological fields are connected to the dynamics of the world system and to those of the nation-states, especially regarding the changing roles that 'otherness' or 'alterity' may play in such international and national scenarios.

Who plays host to whom intellectually in an Anthropological discipline without favoured sites or privileged genealogical matrices? Paper first published in 2009 republished here in a volume of collected OAC papers.