We the Cosmopolitans: Moral and Existential Conditions of Being Human 9781782382775

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We the Cosmopolitans

We the Cosmopolitans Moral and Existential Conditions of Being Human

K Edited By

Lisette Josephides and Alexandra Hall

First published in 2014 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2014 Lisette Josephides and Alexandra Hall

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data We the cosmopolitans: moral and existential conditions of being human / edited by Lisette Josephides and Alexandra Hall. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-78238-276-8 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-277-5 (ebook) 1. Cosmopolitanism--Case studies. 2. Culture and globalization--Case studies. I. Josephides, Lisette. JZ1308.W42 2014 306--dc23 2013042950 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-276-8 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-277-5 ebook

Contents

Preface vii Introduction: We the Cosmopolitans: Framing the Debate Lisette Josephides

Chapter 1 Citizens of Everything: The Aporetics of Cosmopolitanism Ronald Stade

Chapter 2 The Capacities of Anyone: Accommodating the Universal Human Subject as Value and in Space Nigel Rapport Chapter 3 Cosmopolitan Morality in the British Immigration and Asylum System Alexandra Hall Chapter 4 Experiences of Pain: A Gateway to Cosmopolitan Subjectivity? Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

Chapter 5 Cosmopolitanism as Welcoming the Other and Imperilling the Self: Ethics and Early Encounters between Lyons Missionaries and West African Rulers Marc Schiltz

1

29

48

68

90

111

Chapter 6 The Cartoon Controversy and the Possibility of Cosmopolitanism Thomas Hylland Eriksen

135

Notes on Contributors

171

Conclusion Alexandra Hall 156

Index 173

Preface

This volume is theoretically experimental. It takes a distinct approach to cosmopolitanism, placing it within a context of existentialism and embedded within ongoing projects of human sociality. Its attitude is deliberately and challengingly universalist. Chapters by leading anthropologists explore what cosmopolitanism means in the context of everyday life, viewing it variously as an aspect of kindness and empathy, as tolerance, hospitality and openness, as a defining feature of pan-human individuality. The chapters thus advance an existential critique of abstract globalization discourse, turning to cosmopolitanism as a political and moral project with important lived effects. The book as a whole exemplifies a new trend to rediscover the philosophical anthropology tradition and use this as a key to re-describe certain kinds of social anthropological problems. While each chapter has a strong individual position, together these positions are complementary. As editors we discussed at length the division of labour in the writing of the Introduction and the Conclusion. We envisaged that the Introduction would begin with a backward glance at cosmopolitanism – its history, its provocations and potential – but with the main concern of outlining how cosmopolitanism speaks to the concerns arising from existentialism and the entailment of being human. The Conclusion, on the other hand, would draw out the synergies and complementary themes of the chapters in more detail, relating their distinct positions to some broader ethical and political issues. These well-laid schemes did not win over one reader, who suggested that we should consider reversing the Introduction and the Conclusion. The current Introduction, the reader commented, looked more like a complex and searching conclusion, while the Conclusion looked more like a comprehensive introduction, clearer about what is holding the book together; that is, an interest in reintroducing universal human, ‘moral and existential’ themes into the centre of anthropological and ethnographic discussion. The Introduction, on the other hand, cast out for further perspectives and dialogues, thus making it a more satisfying ‘view beyond the book’ once the chapters were read.

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We tried to envisage these two chapters reversed but in the end decided to leave it to the reader. Reader, please feel free to begin with the Conclusion and end with the Introduction. And let us know which order is more satisfying. We would like to thank our contributors and the editorial team at Berghahn, and the anonymous reader whose supportive and thoughtful comments gave us the final boost. Lisette Josephides Alex Hall

Introduction

We the Cosmopolitans Framing the Debate

Lisette Josephides

K

Introduction In Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s epic Second World War novel set in the Soviet Union, he introduces a character known as the ‘holy innocent’. Following his refusal to work on the building of the crematoria in the concentration camp in which he was held, the holy innocent is executed, but manages to leave behind a manifesto on what it is to be human. He singles out kindness as the quality that is most truly human: an everyday, private, thoughtless, senseless, unwitnessed, even stupid kindness, exemplified in the love and pity in the heart of ordinary people for any living thing (Grossman 2006: 393). Identified as ‘powerful only while it is powerless’, kindness is located outside any system of social and religious good (ibid.: 392–93), and this is the secret of its invincibility (ibid.: 394). Human history, Grossman’s character concludes, is not the battle of good trying to overcome evil; it is a battle ‘fought by a great evil struggling’ – ultimately unsuccessfully – ‘to crush a small kernel of human kindness’ (ibid.: 394). Instead of obliterating this kernel that defied evil, the flames of the crematoria had strengthened it. Of course, the man died, but with his human spirit intact. The personal and non-institutional character of kindness as a defining human quality is echoed in discussions by Derrida and Ricoeur. They link forgiveness – a ‘crazy act’ that should not be conditional on repentance – to freedom from the sovereignty of the state (Derrida 2001), and find it in ‘gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions’ (Ricoeur 2004: 458). Thus forgiveness designates

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‘the ineluctable space of consideration due to every human being’ (ibid.: 458). Together with kindness, from which it sprang, forgiveness constitutes a quintessential human quality. That these authors reach this conclusion, even while they speak from the gulags of inhumanity, can be understood only in terms of this insistence: that the quality of kindness and the ability to forgive are at the root of the distinction between the personal or individual (as possessing these qualities) and the political (which can use or abuse them for pragmatic or practical ends). How are these concerns relevant to a discussion of cosmopolitanism? This volume takes a very particular view of its subject. It approaches cosmopolitanism from a perspective that stresses the moral and existential conditions of being human, rather than political considerations to do with the state or global practices and institutions. The chapters are thus concerned with understanding the experiences and responses of persons, mostly individuals but also as members of identified groups, to specified conditions of living with others in the world. I begin below with some comments on the use of the concept of cosmopolitanism, followed by a brief overview of the aspects of existentialism that define the human as discussed here. Then I tackle the two perspectives on the sort of ‘human being’ at issue here: a transcendent being and a political person. Finally, I provide an overview of the chapters and their place in this debate.1

Cosmopolitanism: Origins and Usage Cosmopolitanism has been theorized as a concept and as a political reality. Historically it developed out of a philosophical investigation of what is a human being. Stade (this volume) suggests a different origin, appropriate to a discussion of the ancient period confined to the Greek Cynics. As he observes, among the Cynics the concept was used to deflate the overweening pride and pomposity of what was considered civilized society. Having sex in public, as Crates did, sent out the message that any place could be used for any purpose; it also played down ideas of the superiority of humans over animals. The Cynics treated ‘class, rank, status, national origin and location, and even gender’ as ‘secondary and morally irrelevant attributes’ (Nussbaum 1997: 29). Diogenes refused to be defined by the local origins of group membership so central to Greek males, defining himself instead in terms of universal aspirations springing from his humanity. The Roman Stoics developed the image of kosmopolites, arguing that we dwell in two communities, the local one of our birth and the larger one of ‘human aspirations’ in which we recognize the claims of others as the source of moral and social obligations on us (ibid.: 29). They insisted that we should ‘view ourselves as fundamentally and deeply linked to humankind as a whole’, and always consider ‘the good of the whole species’ (ibid.: 30). It made no difference to Marcus Aurelius where a person lived, provided that ‘he lives as a citizen of the world’ (ibid.: 31). Our first moral allegiance, for Cicero, was ‘to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings’, not to a mere temporal power (ibid.: 31).

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Moreover, to be a world citizen it is not necessary to give up local identifications and filiations (ibid.: 32); rather, these would become encompassed in Montesquieu’s model of concentric circles, with the first loyalty given to humanity as such, betrayal of which for a smaller grouping would be deemed a crime (Kristeva 1993: 28). Marcus Aurelius insists, like a later anthropologist, that we should ‘enter into the mind’ of the other and interpret his action with understanding (Nussbaum 1997: 33–34), holding it our duty to engage actively in the political affairs of the world as a whole ‘in a way that shows concern for all world citizens’ (ibid.: 34). These sentiments are echoed by Kant, who insists in his anthropology that we owe it to other human beings to understand their ways of thinking, ‘since only that attitude is consistent with seeing oneself as a “citizen of the world”’ (ibid.: 36). Kant focuses on ‘the moral imperative and its basis in reverence for humanity’, making morality supreme over politics’ (ibid.: 42). But as Stade (this volume) demonstrates, Kant’s utopian call for unrestricted access to the surface of the earth is reduced, by the proprietary divisions of nationalism, to rights to hospitality and asylum. In her plea to nations to shed nationalism, Kristeva’s (1993) analysis veers between historical movements and individuals as defining the spirit of cosmopolitanism. As individuals, cosmopolitans are that rare breed of intellectuals who transcend political boundaries, plumbing for ‘a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries’ (ibid.: 16). This positioning is a response to the ‘cult of origins’ (ibid.: 2), whose ‘hate reaction’ is to see difference as a personal affront. Psychoanalysis also calls us back to our origins, but in order to exorcize (transcend) rather than to glorify them. Five historico-mythical moments convey the meaning of the cosmopolitan person as Kristeva understands it. They demonstrate that ‘strangeness is universal’ (ibid.: 21); that the Christian Church as the original transnational community of ‘uprooted wanderers’ assimilated rather than respected difference (ibid.: 22); that the foreigner is absorbed and erased through marriage (ibid.: 25); that the work of the Enlightenment upholds the universality of humankind in the face of nationalist and religious fragmentation (ibid.: 27); and that Freud’s discovery of strangeness within ourselves is pivotal to our understanding of cosmopolitanism. This strangeness, known as the Unconscious, gave us the courage to recognize ourselves as ‘disintegrated’ beings who, rather than integrate foreigners or hunt them down, should welcome them to that ‘uncanny strangeness’ in which we all live (Kristeva 1991: 191). This is an invitation to ‘discover our disturbing otherness’ as the ‘projective apparition’ of the other ‘at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid “us”’ (ibid.: 192). ‘The foreigner is within me’, Kristeva concludes, ‘hence we are all foreigners’; ‘If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners’ (ibid.: 192). We are made up of a self-contradictory mixture such that exteriority and interiority do not define foreignness; rather, foreignness is a projection of a part of the self that is unknown and feared. In moments of crisis, as the ethnographies of Hall, Schiltz and Grønseth illustrate, we recognize and even acknowledge this externalized interiority as our mirror image.

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Two broad perspectives emerge from the scholarship on cosmopolitanism. One stresses its moral and humanistic aspects as a striving to attain a universalizing ethos that subsumes all humans as being somehow akin; the other takes the political form of the cosmopolis of the early modern European period, which integrated two different kinds of order: the order of nature and the order of society (Toulmin 1992: 67). Both perspectives fall victim to what Stade calls ‘the metaphysics of sociality’ for the same reason: the unresolved enigma of the Other, whose troubling presence may be hidden or revealed as oneself, an enemy unto death or bare life whose exclusion is the foundation of the political edifice of human social organization. In more recent writings, these perspectives have evolved into two main positions: cosmopolitanism as based on what is human, and cosmopolitanism as based on political choices. These positions fall into three themes. One considers cosmopolitanism as a question of international political and social theory (Appiah 2007; Benhabib 2008), another explores it sociologically as a social and political response to a globalizing world (Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Beck 2006; Fine 2007), while a third emphasizes situated practices. These first two themes are concerned with an abstract political, philosophical and sociological discussion of cosmopolitanism, expressed through international law (including human rights) and forms of global democracy or citizenship. In the second theme, Beck in particular is concerned with the risks of the ‘global village’ as potentially anomic and dangerous and having mushroomed out of all proportion (‘already existing cosmopolitanism’), while others consider cosmopolitanism itself as a new form of global governance (Douzinas 2007). Anderson describes this type of cosmopolitanism as endorsing ‘reflective distance from one’s cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity’ (Anderson 1998: 274). Robbins, on the other hand, describes it as ‘an ethos of macro-interdependencies’ and distinguishes between cosmopolitans (‘basically indifferent to where they lived’) and cosmopolites (‘habitants of a vast universe’), the latter ‘repudiating romantic localism’ (Robbins 1998: 3). Moreover, taking his cue from Mazzini’s comment that the individual is too weak and humanity too vast (therefore our nation mediates), Robbins argues that common humanity is ‘too weak a force to generate sufficient solidarity’ (ibid.: 4). But as will be seen below, this conclusion is questioned by case studies such as those by Hall, Grønseth and Schiltz. The third theme places increased emphasis on the vernacular and situated practices of cosmopolitanism, exploring cosmopolitanism as a matter of translocal political engagement or belonging, or connected to new and emerging identity politics (such as anti-racism or social inclusivity). It stresses non-Western, nonelite cosmopolitan formations (Nava 2007; Nowicka and Rovisco 2008; Werbner 2008). Developed mainly in anthropological and cultural studies, this perspective has moved the debate beyond abstract concepts to everyday lived experience. In her introduction to an edited volume from the first ASA conference on the topic, Pnina Werbner (2008: 5) identifies three strands of the new normative cosmopolitanism: those theorizing democratization (developed by Stuart Hall), those

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creating an alternative global public sphere (elaborated by Habermas), and those that treat it as an ethical response to globalization (as in the work of Beck). The niche occupied by anthropological research is established in Werbner’s edited volume, which begins the task of identifying and investigating vernacular and rooted cosmopolitan forms of political and social life. An unavoidable by-product of these timely enquiries is the birth of a multitude of cosmopolitanisms (spatial, social, political, structural, moral, essentialist). Yet this plurality is at odds with the understanding of cosmopolitanism as developed in the current volume. Here, we stress an existential and moral quality, a particular kind of sensibility or empathy, which works by enabling an understanding of the self from other possible perspectives. This focus is vital for grasping the critical potential of cosmopolitanism to work against forms of political and moral life that create and reinforce ideas of hierarchical difference. As an ethical horizon, cosmopolitanism is distinguished from globalization and cosmopolitics. In conclusion, is cosmopolitanism a category that describes the world, a category that describes persons, or a category to aspire to? If we set up cosmopolitanism as a political or educational training programme designed to change people, relations and political organization, does it mean that its putative qualities are not inherent in human beings and thus not part of the existential condition of humanity?2 If the other and her/his world are to be understood in a process of appropriation by means of an externalization of the self (Ricoeur 1992), this externalization must be possible also through the imagination: imagining ourselves as other possible selves. These possibilities must then be inherent in us, as part of our capacities. Anthropologists’ work is to produce particular ethnographic and theoretical analyses that might answer questions about aesthetic and experiential cosmopolitanism versus its political implications, and the role of the moral on both sides.

Existentialism for Anthropology In his paean to Lévi-Strauss (‘From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss’), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1974: 111–22) describes anthropology as the new science, opening the road blocked by theoretical and methodological prejudices that saw social facts as ideas. Anthropology, he notes approvingly, was ‘what sociology becomes when it admits that the social, like man himself, has two poles or facets: it is significant, capable of being understood from within, and at the same time personal intentions within it are generalized, toned down, and tend towards processes’ (ibid.: 111). Merleau-Ponty applauds Lévi-Strauss’s notion of structure, as being both ‘outside us in natural and social systems and within us as symbolic function’ (ibid.: 120). As Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘By showing us that man is eccentric to himself and that the social finds its centre only in man, structure enables us to understand how we are in a sort of circuit with the socio-historical world’ (ibid.: 120). The philosopher it interests is not the one who wants to explain or construct the world, but

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the one who seeks to deepen our insertion into being (ibid.: 120). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy would abolish the disjunction between ideas and facts (compare Latour, below), as each embodies the other. Reflection, then, ‘is no longer the return to a pre-empirical subject which holds the keys to the world’ (ibid.: 101). Rather than being the passage to a different order of present things, reflection ‘is a more accurate awareness of the way in which we are rooted in them’ (ibid.: 102). Historically, existential philosophies arose in reaction to dogmatic metaphysics. Rejecting the idea of first principles, they start instead from particular conditions of being and lived experiences in the world, with a view to bringing out their ‘essences’. As humanity is given neither in culture nor in nature, it must be achieved through constant striving. Attaining humanity in these circumstances requires separation from this provisional and incomplete world and its conventions. Human beings are the synthesis of the movement back and forth between experience and intellectual reconstruction; not being wholly contained in our culture is the source of our freedom. Our ability to throw our own experience out of focus, or abstract the eidetic from the particular, demonstrates that it is through our cultural experience that we have gone beyond our culture. Looking at another culture does not just give us another perspective; it enables us to repossess that part of ourselves that is unincorporated in our own culture (ibid.: 117). For Merleau-Ponty, this is what enables anthropologists to operate according to a ‘rule of reciprocal criticism’ (ibid.: 119) that treats psychoanalysis as myth and the psychoanalyst as a witch doctor or shaman, thus incorporating Freud and his Oedipus myth as one version among many. The tension that Merleau-Ponty sees in any perception or experience is the double requirement of absence and presence of the self, immanence and transcendence, the co-presence of the experiential and the external that may not be experienced. Individuals are both part of the world and apart from it, bound and free. Being cannot be domesticated as its essence lies in living the tension between the ideal and the actual. Human beings can always secede from the world; they do not have to accept values simply because other human beings have contributed to them. Yet there is a strong ethic of human solidarity in existentialist philosophies, in that the liberty of all is necessary for the liberty of each (see Rapport, this volume). As existential philosophy formulates a pre-reflective contact with the world, it posits human beings as metaphysical in their very being, and the metaphysical as part of empirical being. Jackson defines Existential Anthropology as ‘an anthropology whose object is to understand through empirical means social Being’ (Jackson 2005: xxviii). Thus he rejects the notion that ‘our humanity consists in our individual will-to-be’, arguing instead that most human action is a matter of opportunistic changes of course (ibid.: xii). But despite the situation of the individual, the question of being is universal (ibid.: xii). Human existence emerges as a struggle between contending forces and imperatives, and our humanness is the outcome of a dynamic relationship between these limiting conditions, which in turn are shaped by the ways in which we respond to them (ibid.: ix–xi). Being is precarious and against nothingness (ibid.: x; see also Sartre 1958), and human

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well-being ‘involves endless experimentation in how the given world can be lived decisively, on one’s own terms’ (Jackson 2005: xii). This perspective eschews such reifying notions as ‘having culture’ and ‘being oneself ’ – and by extension having life-projects (Rapport, this volume) – in favour of life-worlds and events as ‘moments of being’. Being human means we possess consciousness – have awareness, intentions and purposes – but can also be thwarted (ibid.: xviii–xiv), making our being competitive against others. Jackson explores ‘critical moments’ – moments that, in going beyond the local, ‘allegorize the precariousness of all human existence’ (ibid.: xx). While events befall particular persons, they have the opportunity to transform them into ‘moments of being’, scenarios of their own choosing. The possibility of our Being becoming thwarted and competitive towards others is relevant to Rapport’s notion of Anyone, who has a life-project but nonetheless safeguards the ‘moral space’ for other individuals to come into their own. Anyone is liable to suffer subjection within the worlds of others, Rapport tells us, but also to subject others to his or her own world. To paraphrase Jackson (ibid.: 37), if cosmopolitanism is achieved through intersubjectivity, the intersubjective is not apprehended directly but mediated by our reciprocal engagement in the organization of the object-world, which provides us with rough analogues of patterns of intersubjective experience. In this volume cosmopolitanism is examined through everyday relations with others, but as Jackson observes, these relations lead to recrimination and revenge (ibid.: 47) – Kant’s unsocial sociability. Personal and moral repositioning is then required to recover a sense of shared humanity and allow cosmopolitan ideas to flourish (ibid.: 48; my rephrasing of Jackson’s conclusions from Arendt). This repositioning is a somewhere, ‘an “elsewhere” within the world’, not a nowhere (ibid.: 49). While difference between self and other is the condition of social interaction, distance is abnormal, and requires that we reclaim understanding of how we are part of the same human condition (ibid.: 49). This question – of the basis of commonality – troubles Eriksen (this volume), who suggests that a ‘minimal cosmopolitanism’ might be achieved by the neighbourly shovelling of snow. Although this activity may not quite measure up to Jackson’s understanding of intersubjectivity, defined as the social lived ‘as a network of reciprocal relationships among subjects’ (ibid.: 50, n.1), it provides a start.3 Stade also flags up ‘sources of estrangement’ from community and cosmology as requiring more study. Rapport, by contrast, will not compromise a personal vision; his heroes’ lifeprojects are never world-views but individual attempts to make the world. He espouses Rorty’s ironism, the acceptance of the contingency of everything, but also the existential power of individuals to create personally meaningful and viable environments. Thus Rapport’s life-project is quite different from Jackson’s lifeworld. Taking on Rapport’s individual morality, I would argue that it is possible to show both that people are individuals, and that there are foundational elements of what is human.

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Transcendence as the Realm of the Human, Humans as Transcendent Beings The composite term cosmopolitan hints at another aspect of the ambiguity of human being: that between the immanent and transcendent, the finite and infinite. Immanence denotes the bounds of possible experience, while transcendence is a going beyond any possible knowledge of a human being. In phenomenology, it is what transcends our own consciousness, thus it is objective rather than a phenomenon of consciousness.4 In The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing, Maleuvre argues that the concept of transcendence is not inherently mystical; rather, it ‘underpins everyday human knowledge’ and designates ‘the second-guessing nature of human consciousness’: the fact that knowledge always pushes beyond its perceived objects and horizons (Maleuvre 2011: 3). Transcendence is thus ‘the mental experience that consists in regarding the plane of known reality as open-ended’ (ibid.: 3). But because our experience cannot transcend our consciousness, transcendence and immanence create a Deleuzean ‘disjunctive synthesis’ rather than a unity (Badiou 2007). This tension must be maintained if new horizons of knowledge are to continue to be opened up, in the ‘interminable balance between the known and the unknown’ (Maleuvre 2011: 5). Kierkegaard elaborates on this synthesis from a different perspective. Human beings, he writes, are ‘a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity’ (Kierkegaard 2008: 31). Since the self is a synthesis in which the finite is the confining factor and the infinite the expanding factor, ‘infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude’ (ibid.: 31) and ‘finitude’s despair is to lack infinitude’ (ibid.: 35). To become oneself is to become ‘something concrete’, in a development that consists in ‘infinitely coming away from oneself ’ in an infinitzing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the finitization’ (ibid.: 31) – a process not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s ‘decentring’ of the self. Kierkegaard outlines an argument on the necessity of actuality, in which ‘actuality is the unity of possibility and necessity’ (ibid.: 39–40). Without this synthesis, necessity would lack possibility and possibility would lack actuality, to the despair of both (ibid.: 41). For Kierkegaard, the synthesis requires a third term: God. This third term is a seductive mirage for Bruno Latour, for whom what is at stake is our view of reality. We really do make what makes us. The difficulty of distinguishing facts (thus knowledge) from fetishes (one’s own creations) (Latour 2010: ii) is akin to the conundrum of separating belief from knowledge. Belief depends on the distinction between knowledge and delusion, or rather between practical life – which does not make this distinction – and theoretical life, which does (ibid.: 11–12). Humans, from believing themselves dependent on divinities, came to see that the divinities were of their own making. What fetish and antifetishism together illustrate is that humans built something that went beyond them (ibid.: 16). We do not have to choose between constructivism and realism, as the laboratory brings fact-making into play: ‘Yes, it is true, I made it in the laboratory’ (ibid.: 19). The neologism ‘factish’ captures several senses or notions of what is at

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play here: that construction and reality or truth are synonyms (ibid.: 24, 28); that we are ‘the offspring of our works’ (ibid.: 22); but above all, ‘it allows practice to pass into action without the practitioner ever believing in the difference between practice and reality, immanence and transcendence’ (ibid.: 22). Thus the ‘factish’, as the relationship between fact and fetish, allows us ‘to pass continually from construction to autonomy without ever believing in either’ (ibid.: 28). This sly attribution of autonomy and human origins to the same beings (‘factishes’) makes of belief a sort of mystification enabling ‘anthropological agnosticism’ to smooth over any disjuncture between theory and practice (ibid.: 24). In allowing us to pass from fabrication to reality, the ‘factish’ bestows autonomy on us and our creations that neither possesses alone (ibid.: 35). Latour recycles the words fetish and worship, associated with pejorative meanings, to restore their value by showing that ‘Moderns’ also have them and may benefit from welcoming them back in the form of ‘migrants’ that may heal (ibid.: 61–66). The uncanny is within us, as Kristeva might say. Yet Latour also registers an actual loss, not just misrecognition. Where now is the ‘disconnect’ between the human and the sublime anthologized in the poetic paeans of earlier eras, seen then as characterizing our relationship to nature (Latour 2011)? From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, we moved from a restricted cosmos to an infinite universe, when nature lasted for ever, sublime and linked to infinity and the transcendent. But in the current period of the Anthropocene, when humans literally shape the Earth, how can we regain a feeling for the sublime if we are responsible for it? Has the sublime disappeared now that we are ‘post-natural’? (ibid.: 9). Sloterdijk (2009) describes the transcendence whose loss Latour laments as a series of misunderstandings: a misunderstanding of slowness – ‘the realm of the unobservable’, whether temporal or geographical, declared subject to the putative ‘otherworldly plans of some transhuman or divine intelligence’ (ibid.: 5); a misunderstanding of vehemence – the martial energy of the warrior attributed to inspiration from above such that fury constituted ‘the natural religion of the impassioned’ (ibid.: 7–8); a misunderstanding of the ‘inaccessibility of the other’, over-interpreted as unresponsiveness and thus superiority instead of being acknowledged as the ‘hygiene of proper distance’ necessary for the independence of the other (ibid.: 9–10); misattributing ‘conception of the world’ status to ‘immune function’ – by insisting that what functions as a cure must belong to an integral belief system making up ‘an ensemble of truths with claims to practical and theoretical validity’ (ibid.: 10–12); and the human tendency in cultures characterized by extreme ‘vassalic passivity’ to believe that a higher power chooses individuals at special moments as recipients of messages that are interpreted as revelations (ibid.: 15–16). Though Sloterdijk debunks ideas of transcendence as based on misunderstandings of the real, his exposition is not a deconstruction in the sense of pronouncing the concept a cultural invention without correspondence to reality. What Sloterdijk lays bare is something more like Latour’s passage, a series of ‘factishes’ that

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trace the realignment of human psychological traits and characteristics, beliefs and practices, to changing socio-political realities. Thus menis, the rage of the Homeric hero, becomes thymos, once the ‘impulsive center of the proud self ’ but now domesticated as bourgeois ‘manly courage’ (Sloterdijk 2010: 11, 12). Worse, thymos becomes dispersed in the current era, which lacks ‘rage collection points’ (ibid.: 183) for storing it as an asset that can be used like capital (ibid.: 59). Instead, rage is stockpiled in hate banks. The rage of the Homeric hero is akin to the anger of the Kewa warrior in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Josephides 2008: 63). One such warrior, Wapa, stated quite bluntly that there was little point in promising to curb his violent outbursts; his temper was part of his nature and he could not help it. Was this a misunderstanding of vehemence as divinely inspired? But thymos civilizes menis, in a movement towards the stoic ‘dismissal of wrathful and intensive impulses’ (Sloterdijk 2010: 23). Plato interprets thymos as the capacity for disapproval, including of oneself, for failing to exhibit expected levels of self-respect. This disapproval mobilizes self-control, which retools thymos as a civilized striving for recognition (ibid.: 23–24). Yet there is an unexplained slippage in Sloterdijk’s use of the word ‘rage’. From Homeric heroes to suicide bombers, what transformation had taken place in rage? Were ‘hate containers’ (ibid.: 57) unnecessary in Homeric times because the gods preserved or housed rage? Sloterdijk mounts a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis from the perspective of thymos. In basing its understanding of the human condition solely on the dynamics of the libido (‘the standpoint of eroticism’), the Freudian standpoint ignores the phenomena of ‘thymotics’ or else explains them in terms of neurosis and sublimation; yet they are manifestly key human characteristics. Psychology has nothing to say about the impulses of thymos (as seen in ‘pride, courage, stout-heartedness, craving for recognition, drive for justice, sense of dignity and honor, indignation, militant and vengeful energies’) that enable the individual to step onto the external stage and prove himself/herself before others in a manner benefiting both oneself and the community (ibid.: 13–16). To acknowledge the value of these qualities is to regain self-confidence and cease to characterize the human condition as constituted by lack (ibid.: 18–19). Sloterdijk’s insistence that human beings need a certain ‘internal level of self-esteem’ (ibid.: 21) recalls Heidegger’s comment that ‘Respect is the mode of the ego’s being-with-itself … according to which it does not disparage the hero in its soul’ (Heidegger 1988: 135). In my own fieldwork, the expectation of such acknowledgement led me to the formulation that resentment was a sense of self (Josephides 2005), thus exemplifying the form of rage ‘that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect’ (Sloterdijk 2010: 14). This recognition or according of esteem, Sloterdijk suggests, is a good way to describe inter-thymotic relationships. The relationships themselves might characterize what has gone under the term ‘intersubjectivity’ (ibid.: 22). (Latour’s alternative is the ‘factish’ cult.) Class consciousness functioned for a while as the ‘thymotization of the proletariat’ (ibid.: 127), a ‘collecting point’ (ibid.: 139) for rage that could be used as

Introduction | 11

capital rather than squandered (ibid.: 161). In contemporary times we no longer have ‘rage collection points’ (ibid.: 183) but are left with ‘major banks of hate’ (the politics and religions of extremism) that ‘waste their capital by spilling blood instead of investing it in promising culture and business companies’ (ibid.: 226). Rage, together with its siblings, pride (the need for recognition) and resentment, is a basic force in the ecosystem of affects even though it no longer gathers itself in universal collectives (ibid.: 227). The ‘theology of the wrath of God and the thymotic global economy of communism’ (ibid.: 228) found shelter in ‘fictitious beliefs’ and ‘sought to turn resentment into a positive emotion in order to keep awake the sense of the unacceptability of an unjust world’, thus giving birth to criticism (ibid.: 228). ‘Criticism’ is taken to mean ‘the spirit that has been fuelled by ingenious resentment of submission to mere facts, in particular facts of injustice’ (ibid.: 228). (Note that these facts are different from the ones Latour observed being made in the laboratory and the Church.) Having broken with the old European ‘monological conception of truth’ (ibid.: 187) after learning that ‘fictions can fail because of facts’, the intelligentsia turned away from criticism and towards ‘multi-egoistic’ pluralism (ibid.: 188), eroticization (ibid.: 191), and greed (ibid.: 200). In these dire straits, Sloterdijk proposes the following (partially paraphrased) ‘axiom’: ‘under conditions of globalization no politics of balancing suffering on the large scale is possible that is built on holding past injustices against someone’ (ibid.: 228). The ‘moral productivity of movements of accusation’ is limited, even if the complaints appear justified (ibid.: 228). The only way forward is for resentment and its ‘retributive metaphysics’ to give way to the calmer worldly wisdom of Lockean ‘basic rights to life, freedom, and property’ (ibid.: 228). This entails ‘learning to see oneself always through the eyes of others’, and thus connecting ‘the desire to be respected with the ability to see oneself in relative terms’ (ibid.: 229). Only this kind of ‘civilizational learning’ is capable of allowing the emergence of ‘a set of interculturally binding principles’ that could rightly be referred to as ‘world culture’ (ibid.: 229). This manifesto goes beyond Eriksen’s plea for minimal cosmopolitanism. But its implementation seems remote in a world in which xenophobic, sociophobic and misanthropic tendencies on both the Left and the Right rage against ‘the imposition of coexisting with whomever and whatever’ (ibid.: 212). This section started from a consideration of transcendence and the moulding of the self and ended with the crucial impact of different socio-political situations. What are the implications of Schmitt’s suggestion that the essence of the human is the political?

The Political as the Realm of the Human I began this chapter with the suggestion that kindness, as a quintessentially human quality, is at the base of the distinction between the individual and the political. Here I consider a diametrically opposed view: that the political is the realm of what is truly human (Schmitt 1996). For Carl Schmitt, the political defined what

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it is to be a human being in the modern world; thus an enquiry into the political was an enquiry into the order of human things ‘where the important word is “human”’ (Strong 1996: xvii). It follows from this that ‘those who would diminish the political diminish humanity’ (ibid.: xv). True politics, according to Schmitt, hinges on the distinction between friend and enemy – a formal distinction not based on moral qualities but tested by the readiness to die or kill in its defence. The friend/foe distinction ‘serves as the quasi-transcendental presupposition of the political’ (ibid.: xxvii); human society ‘in the absence of an adversary’ lacks a higher moral purpose beyond the satisfaction of individual desires (Schmitt 1996: 57). Schmitt’s view that it is possible to avoid an ethical universalism takes him beyond good and evil and passes into the realm of nature (Strong 1996: xviii); but despite his attempt to transcend the ethical, his concern with the meaningfulness of life identifies him as a liberal moralist, whose affirmation of the political being ultimately coincides with the affirmation of the moral (Strauss 1996: 117). The reference to ‘the realm of nature’, then, may denote no more than a belief in the intrinsic value of the life of the political community, which Schmitt assumes without an argument or demonstration beyond the claim that it is the repository of value and meaning (Vinx 2010). The claim to speak in the name of universal humanity derives, for Schmitt, from our stubborn refusal to accept limitations to our actions determined by the identity of the community to which we belong. The result is a disinclination to negotiate mutually beneficial group positions and leads to the dangerous stand that all those who oppose us are speaking against humanity and therefore must be destroyed. In this view, claims to human commonality must be shunned as potential carriers of the seeds of deep inequality. Schmitt insists on removing from politics the possibility of justifying action by reference to universal moral principles, lest all claims to good become limitless in their reach and lead to wars whose only outcome is to eliminate all difference (Strong 1996: xxii–xxiii).5 The major question that Schmitt asks is whether political liberalism (and by extension humanism) can meet the challenges posed by international politics. Is it possible to escape the hold of an ethical universalism when ethics by definition locks one in universalism? Schmitt considers this characteristic of ethics – to universalize itself – as a reason for suspecting it. The selfless loyalty to one’s group is beyond ethics; it is existential, communal solidarity as opposed to a cosmopolitan attitude. Thus Schmitt engages only one half of the concept that concerns us here: the political. The ‘cosmo’ part, in so far as it relates to the individual, is an inward turning towards one’s group, in a movement quite antithetical to the openness of cosmopolitanism, which faces in both directions.6 Transcendentalism as infinity, meanwhile, is the perpetuation of the community.7 Most chapters in this volume engage the relationship between the political and the personal; for instance, by identifying the false promise that the former will heal the latter (Stade), attempting to build bridges between the two through everyday practice (Eriksen), or by fashioning the figure of Anyone (Rapport). To the extent that the authors ground their analyses in the experiences of persons rather than

Introduction | 13

the pull of community, they deflect ideas of the primacy of the political. In her chapter in this volume, Hall in particular focuses squarely on the issues raised by Schmitt. The philosopher Agamben, a key reference for Hall, developed many of Schmitt’s theorizations, especially concerning crisis and states of emergency as not being exceptional moments in political life but the normal form of the life of modern nations. Agamben (1998: 1) reminds us that the Greeks had two words to express what we mean by the word ‘life’. Zoe denoted ‘bare life’ common to all living beings, while bios referred to a particular way of life proper to an individual or group. This distinction could be expressed as ‘natural versus qualified life’, or good or reflective life for Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics developed the idea of bios politicos. Following his argument that Western politics constitutes itself on the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of bare life (ibid.: 7), Agamben concludes that the fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy (as Schmitt would have it) but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios (ibid.: 8). This distinction exists because in language we humans oppose ourselves to our own bare life, while at the same time maintaining ourselves in that bare life ‘in an inclusive exclusion’ (ibid.: 8), since the state of exception or exclusion constitutes ‘the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested’ (ibid.: 9). Aristotle contrasts the ‘beautiful day’ of ‘simple life’ (zoe) with the ‘great difficulty’ of political bios: the first uses the voice that expresses pain and pleasure, the second must tackle the language (logos) of reason and judgement. But analogies are not so straightforward. Zoe or bare life does not map onto the simple life as pursued by cosmopolitan Cynics, who rejected wealth, fame, power and emotion, together with the false judgements these vanities may lead to. Their goals of virtue and moral freedom could not be achieved via a return to an easy and natural life, but required exacting and continuous training, mental as well as physical (see also Stade, this volume). Yet while cosmo/polites does not exactly correspond to zoe/ bios, in both pairs there is a disjuncture between the terms such that each extends the other, even when (as Agamben suggests in the case of zoe/bios) the exclusion of one from the other is included as the hidden foundation of the political system, and thus may be said to be contained or encompassed in an indirect or partial way. In using the term ‘political’, are we obliged to distinguish between the West and the Rest, seeing only Western politics as constituting itself through the inclusive exclusion of bare life (ibid.: 7)? Agamben writes that, ‘In the “politicization” of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence – the humanity of living man is decided’ (ibid.: 8). But he immediately adds that in assuming this task, ‘modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition’ (ibid.: 8). These observations call for two comments, on politics and on metaphysics.8 First, all societies have politics. Does bare life become politicized only in societies where sovereign states exist? Ethnographically it would be easy to demonstrate the contrary: that in all societies, including tribal ones, political sovereignty is exercised in the guise of the common good or inescapable religious fiat, in structures

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that (tacitly or otherwise) recognize the distinction between the political/social/ religious as a collective identity or inescapable force, and the individual strategies and emotions as personal pursuits that occupy the liminal ground of inclusion/ exclusion. (These distinctions also recall Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the decentring of the self.) Second, in recognizing ‘the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition’, Agamben cannot mean to limit to ‘modernity’ the necessity to comply with the logic of this structure, which may be seen as tracing the anatomy of what it is to be human in society, and is thus the only life humans know. But this is not the place for ethnographic demonstrations of the relevance of these concepts, beyond insisting that Agamben’s conceptualizations should be generalized. In extending them, the chapters in this volume show how, beyond the power of any sovereign state or political logos, human responses suddenly emerge as: empathy and fellow feeling (Hall, Grønseth), an imperilment of the self through the extension of hospitality towards the radical other (Schiltz), the individual Anyone who precedes and merges with Everyone (Rapport), the call for practical neighbourliness in minimal cosmopolitanism (Eriksen), and the human self ’s compulsion to explore a relationship with the world (Stade). Spurred on by the suicide of a detainee at an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), Hall embarks on an investigation into the depoliticized space of humanitarianism. In this space of ‘bare life’ that disqualifies detainees from being treated as fellow human beings, the effect of the suicide on an officer (Tom) allows Hall to uncover a basic and far-reaching truth: that ‘the possibility of moral encounters is never wholly effaced’. The argument about the relationship between citizens’ rights and exceptionalism – that the former relies on the latter and that without the arbitrary power of political sovereignty there would be no citizens’ rights, which consequently can be withdrawn at any time (Agamben) – is powerfully made. What is demonstrated is that political life in the West, though overtly based on the principle of inclusion (full political rights for all), can only operate if exceptions are made as deemed necessary. The logic operating in the IRC is thus not different from the logic governing inclusion; it is the underlying practical foundation of that logic, the ‘hidden’ practices that make overt practices possible. But even with this political background, Tom’s response is the act of a person, an individual human being. The question that may legitimately be posed here is: To what extent are politics and sociality a necessary aspect of humanity? When we lose the accoutrements of humanity, with their social, legal and political aspects, holding on to our humanity becomes difficult and our life unendurable, to the extent that we may be driven to suicide. How much of our humanity, then, is made up of social and political accoutrements? In this case, what retrieved an underlying humanity from the traumatic situation was not politics or feelings of loyalty for one’s own narrow community, but quite the opposite. When a moment of recognition occurred, which made it impossible to deny the humanity of the other who was not a member of one’s own community (a foe for Schmitt), vulnerability and responsibility appeared simultaneously in a relationship at the core of the ethical

Introduction | 15

stance. The unvoiced awareness of the potential reversal of conditions electrified Tom into action. The awareness that conditions may be reversed establishes vulnerability as a shared possibility, a mutual defencelessness. Politics had withdrawn from ‘bare life’, but the suicide re-politicized the body and called forth an empathetic response that re-established ‘common humanity’. The moment of recognition may pass leaving few traces, but for now Hall notes what its occurrence has demonstrated: the possibility of a space of mutuality drawing on shared fragility. This empathetic (or intersubjective) fragility unleashes responsibility, in a different argument from Rorty’s appeal to sentimentality (Rorty 1993). Tom experienced a call to responsibility from Levinas (1969), or was ‘enjoined’ by Ricoeur (1992), in a summons much stronger than the ‘systems of sovereign machinery’ in which the detainees and officers were caught up, showing that the state and the political ‘can never efface the ethical possibility of life’s contingency’. Tom’s reaction made him alone accountable in that moment. This is not to say that a cosmopolitan morality will always disrupt the logic of the IRC, but that a moral response that transcends cultural, social and political boundaries, based on a shared human ontology, sends out a call that cannot be denied (Josephides 2010). If morality is tied to a particular political persuasion, movement or party, or a mode of political organization of the state and the economy (liberalism, communism, democracy or whatever), then it is historical, partisan, ideological and temporal. But anthropologists above all should know that this cannot be the whole story; nor is it a matter of positing a ‘man who is by nature good’, as Schmitt (1996: 68) scoffs. Rather, it is a case of making a distinction between the idea of a universalizing morality and an existentially based morality. While the former is Bourdieu’s ‘theoretical’ or ‘fictitious universal’ (Dwyer 1997), the latter is based on grounding experiences and critical moments of being that can be universalized because they go beyond the local. As Jackson (2005: xx) outlines, persons can transform events that befall them into scenarios of their own choosing. This is what Tom did. The realm of humanity is beyond politics here, although political institutions have the power to dehumanize. It was not Schmitt’s ‘existential Hobbesianism’ (Strong 1996: xvii) that called forth Tom’s humanity, but a compassionate (or empathetic) self-recognition of what it is to be human and vulnerable, as part of a cosmopolitan ethic.9

The Chapters The chapters in the volume examine cosmopolitanism through a variety of milieux using a range of theoretical perspectives. They consider the meaning of the cosmopolitan historically and as a relationship between self and world; the nature of belonging and the perception of strangers from the viewpoint of those forced to confront the place of the other and thus the self; the limited case; the inevitable conflicts in the coexistence of diverse life-worlds; and the primacy of the individ-

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ual, the empathy of shared experience, the deliberate reaching out to the other in a self-imperilling act. Implicitly or explicitly, and to differing degrees, the chapters treat cosmopolitanism as an aspect of the moral and existential condition of being human, the impulse of human being and striving, and as a moral quality or imperative arising out of the human condition of sociality and linked through everyday practices to grounding experiences. In his spirited investigation of cosmopolitanism through five eclectic vignettes (reminiscent of Kristeva’s ‘moments’), Stade begins with a contextualized definition of the term. In antiquity, when kosmos signified the entire order of the universe and a polites was a man of wealth and privilege, ‘to be cosmopolitan was to be a privileged citizen of everything’ (cf. Latour 2004: 454). It is an anachronism to pit cosmopolitanism as ‘citizenship of the world’ against a narrower nationalism when nations had not yet been invented. Nor should any form of transcendence be attributed to Cynic philosophy, whose target was the artificiality of the Athenian way of life rather than its narrow reach. The relationship between self and world was the Cynics’ primary concern (though human nature, divine order, public opinion and social life, relationships between self and other and self and self were all entangled), and their satire was directed at human conventions that impeded oneness with this world. A second vignette shows how Kant’s cosmopolitanism of unrestricted access for all to the surface of the Earth foundered on an order of existing national divisions that impeded free movement, while a fourth vignette, the chapter’s ethnographic centrepiece, offers a fascinating analysis of the New Left in Berlin. In common with other European movements of the time, the New Left opted to ‘politicize the private’, an activity that included the ‘all-penetrating psychologization of everyday life’ and resulted in hypersensitivity. Stade sums up his vignettes: the cosmopolites of the ancient world saw their philosophy in terms of self-liberation requiring self-discipline and self-objectification with the goal of abolishing the self and becoming one with the world; by contrast, an Enlightenment-inflected anthropology views cosmopolitanism as a relationship between self and other, thus turning ‘the social’ and ethics into a first philosophy (a ‘metaphysics of sociality’). In their quest for authenticity, members of the New Left sought to retrieve a true ‘pre-social’ self, a utopian self that would emerge from the liberating ordeal of the socially constructed bourgeois self. But the ordeal by free-association analytic sessions compounded the problems and was soon overtaken by political events. How to proceed? In a world not of our making and ‘stained by enlightened false consciousness’, Stade outlines two options for anthropologists: either to continue with our ‘routine ethnography’ of comparing cultural universes, or else extending the sense of strangeness we already experience towards any community and cosmology, and engage the investigation of the nonsocial dimensions of self–world relationships. The second option is more urgent, as ‘the sources of estrangement from community and cosmology remain peculiarly uncharted’. Stade’s suggestion that anthropologists should investigate the ‘non-social dimensions of self–world relationships’ follows on his ultimate purpose to question

Introduction | 17

the sociological bias in anthropological usages of the cosmopolitan concept. (He would have support from Latour, who, though not in those words, also proposes to go beyond the ‘metaphysics of sociality’.) Following his discussion of a case when politics was made sovereign over the self, and the self was alienated from the self as it became policed by politics in a move towards total revolution, it is not surprising that Stade should find sociality oppressive and call for an exploration of non-social dimensions of self–world relationships (though Stade’s problem with ethics is less well articulated). But other aspects of self-to-self relationships, not based on politics, might lift that oppression; for instance, the Stoics’ development of cosmopolitanism focusing on the importance of understanding the other, or Levinas on the encounter with the other as not only a sociological fact but as the birth of ethics (see Schiltz, this volume). Here, too, hospitality is not defined (together with asylum) as the poverty of a reduced, nationalized cosmopolitanism, but the call of the empathetic self to bare life (Schiltz, Grønseth, Hall, this volume). Undoubtedly anthropologists would do well to focus on the relationship between self and world ‘through the prism of the cosmopolitan’. But it may be that such an exercise would include rather than exclude the metaphysics of transcendence. The contributions by Stade and Rapport play off against each other. While the first stresses the unstable contexts of secular modernity, where earlier shared principles that reified people into social categories have been undermined and replaced by the possibility of a complex cultural creativity, the second starts from the perspective of individuals’ lived experiences, almost out of historical space. Rapport’s chapter grounds its points in ethnographic snippets that create a world through selective yet convincing theoretical references and analysis. It asks: How might one from an anthropological perspective inscribe a morality for a universal ego whose capabilities and liabilities were construed in existentialist terms? Rapport sees human consciousness and activity as capable of creating worlds, liable ‘to suffer subjection within the worlds of others and to subject others to his or her own.’ Existential capacities of human being, he argues, go beyond the particularities of social, cultural and historical contexts. He insists on the universal immanence of the relationship between the microcosmic situation of everyday life (the individual as a member of a polis) and the macrocosmic nature of the human condition (the individual as a member of cosmos). But the individual is Anyone. Selfhood is neither externally predetermined nor necessarily internally consistent, but unpredictable and made over and again. Striking a similar note to Eriksen (below), Rapport cites E.M. Forster’s comments on a world appallingly full of people whom we cannot be expected to love, but should try to tolerate. ‘Mutual guesthood’ replaces hospitality and the right to roam all over the world. Instead, the statuses of hosts and guests alternate, and no individual is conceived of as absolutely ‘at home’ in a place. Social arrangements operate to safeguard a kind of ‘moral space’ needed for individuals to ‘come into their own’. Individuality itself is an ongoing collective project and individuals are ‘mutual guests’ because they are ‘at home’ in life-projects.

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This liberal or anarchic situation extends to social, cultural (and presumably legal) contexts: Anyone should live according to his or her own lights against ‘the despotism of custom’ and ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Like J.S. Mill, Rapport believes that the collectivity is itself ‘a collection of ones’, Anyone being ‘an instantiation of Everyone’. Thus Anyone exists as the universal human subject, not a cultural object. In dialectical engagement with existing conditions, Anyone has the capacity to create individual worlds as a kind of cosmopolitan space, universal yet individual, ‘a personal preserve, by rights private’. Cosmopolitanism predicates ‘the human’ as a condition over and against the particularities of social setting and cultural tradition: it intends for Anyone’s capacities for self-fulfillment to find accommodation in social science and social policy alike’. Anyone, the universal ego, becomes a morally inscribed individual ego in the existential process of pursuing a life-project. In this account, cosmopolitanism appears as a separate force with intentions and the capacity to act, rather than as an attribute and the existential condition of humanity. Not so in Hall’s chapter, discussed at greater length earlier. Moved by a suicide at an Immigration Removal Centre, Hall develops a debate on places of detention as sites of ‘abjection’ and ‘spaces of exception’, where human beings are stripped of everything that individualizes them: clothes and belongings, political opinions, the right to speak – and instead are made to wear their own likenesses around their necks. The guards quickly silence attempts by new arrivals to explain their own case: ‘If you’re all right with me, I’ll be all right with you’. This semblance of utter fairness and a clean slate is a euphemism for the reality: the guards have no interest in individual circumstances. Yet the ethnographic nugget of the suicide is a snapshot that Hall uses to demonstrate the recognition of shared vulnerability, a key epistemological requirement for compassion in human beings (Nussbaum 2001: 319). As part of the cosmopolitan ethic, empathy is connected to morality and what it is to be human. Grønseth’s chapter on Tamil refugees in Norway continues the theme of empathy. It sets itself the task of exploring the capacity of pain to create a complex agency, one that opens up the possibility of cosmopolitanism as intersubjectivity. Being linguistically challenged, Grønseth’s fieldwork methodology relied on ‘embodying the other’ by sharing experiences. As a result, Grønseth came to understand cosmopolitanism as an ethical, aesthetic, face-to-face and embodied relation experienced as intersubjectivity. It challenged and transcended distinctions between universalism and relativism, nationalism and ethnicity. Tamils in Norway lived segregated lives, shunned by Norwegians and some individuals at times ostracized by their own community. The loneliness and anxiety they endured in the face of existential challenges as they attempted to expand their lives often resulted in physical illness and loss of self. The sharing of experiences with new ‘others’, not only the ethnographer but also more marginal Norwegians, led to the mutual recognition of the other in the self and posed new challenges to established values and practices. Cosmopolitan intersubjectivity in these conditions was a humanism not based on one’s self, but on the recognition of a fellow being’s humanity. As

Introduction | 19

in Hall’s case study (though I suspect more momentarily there), distinctions and hierarchies were bridged in that recognition. In this embodied cosmopolitanism, the body suffers from restriction, fragmentation and confusion, but also experiences flashes of ‘meaning, recognition, joy and pleasure’. Thus moments of rupture interlock with moments of empathy. Being on the borders of two life-worlds, Tamils experience the uniqueness of being human as the need ‘to extend and involve oneself, and be recognized and mirrored by the others’. Thus in their ruptured and splintered lives, Tamils ‘learned something (true) about society and social relations’. Cosmopolitan subjectivity in this example responds to the difficult question of how cosmopolitanism can be the existential condition of humanity and at the same time need conditions in which to develop. Studying experiences of physical aches and pains as part of embodied social experiences and being in everyday life can give access to unspoken knowledge about social life, and go beyond the structures of indifference that Eriksen tackles in his chapter. Grønseth’s chapter shows that individuals can experience the ruptures of living on the borderlands quite differently. In the triad of Geetha, Aranthan and Kari (the last being an out-of-town Norwegian), a cosmopolitan awareness developed around common human needs and capacities ‘to resist, tolerate and connect to each other’. These cosmopolitan kernels, Grønseth argues, are capable of informing policy and ameliorating conditions of living with the neighbour next door. In an unusual study and incisive analysis of nineteenth-century missionary encounters in West Africa, Schiltz develops further the theme of imperilling the self by reaching out to others. He approaches cosmopolitanism as a human capacity for empathy and sociality and as a life project of self-discovery by welcoming the Other. His historical account, rich in detail, is informed by lengthy fieldwork preceded by and combined with missionary activity. Despite this personal background, Schiltz has not produced a theological paper but a critique of theology. Inspired by the philosopher Levinas, Schiltz argues that in the case of the Lyons missionaries and their African hosts, these first encounters signalled more than hospitality and goodwill; they were also animated by desire for the Other, an ethical relation prior to thought and conceptualization. Welcoming the Other entailed taking risks and imperilling the self, as hospitality assumes mutual trust, yet at the moment of the welcome it is impossible to foresee how this act will shape the future within and beyond one’s life span or the stretch of one’s influence. For this reason, as one welcomes the other, one imperils the self.10 For Levinas, human beings are constituted by their relations, and ethics begins in the encounter with the other and depends on an initial act of generosity and hospitality. As Schiltz puts it, ‘Even the self is possible only through the recognition of the other, a recognition that carries responsibility towards what is irreducibly different.’ Two issues arise for Schiltz: in their face-to-face encounters, how did these local rulers and missionaries appear to each other’s consciousness and desire, and how and why did welcoming the Other present them with existential dilemmas of physical and moral imperilment that transcended individual agencies. King

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Glele desired to be the missionaries’ friend, but he and his people had a duty to uphold the annual ‘grand customs’, involving human sacrifices in honour of his royal ancestors. Glele was fascinated by the ‘spirit double’ that may have empowered the missionary Borghero in his celibacy – whereas for Borghero being a missionary was a labour of love and readiness to suffer (that is, cosmopolitanism does not mean accepting everything). Schiltz welcomes Kristeva’s portrayal of Paul the cosmopolitan with an amendment on her understanding of the Apostle’s vision of Ecclesia. To follow Levinas, knowledge, presented as a thematization about Ecclesia, treats Ecclesia as a theology; and theology risks making Ecclesia into a dogma of power and authority to which the convert is beholden, rather than being beholden to the subject of this theology (that is, the Other, the fellow human or Christ). Was it a locus of sociality or a theology? As Schiltz tells us, for Levinas, ‘Ethics begins in hospitality, by first freely making a choice for generosity and communication, that is, for sociality’. But transcendence (and infinity) precisely refuses totality (that is, encompassment from the outside). If the notions of totality and being are notions that cover one another, the notion of the transcendent places us beyond categories of being (Levinas 1969: 293). In a chapter inspired by the global public debate over the Muhammad cartoon controversy, Eriksen argues that the issues uncovered there call for a more inclusive cosmopolitanism than that offered through the promise of a shared discourse. As he reminds us, Kant places considerable emphasis on hospitality as a key to peace and understanding, rather than consensus or ‘sameness’ (see also Stade, Schiltz, this volume). In Eriksen’s neighbourhood, people are not concerned about or interested in their neighbours’ religion, culture or political affiliations as long as they take their turn shovelling snow in the shared courtyard and remember to close the gate behind them. The insight from anthropology into cosmopolitanism, for Eriksen, is about shared structures of relevance ‘emerging from common activities and simple acts of reciprocity’. As long as these are handled correctly, ‘cognitive indifference is not a problem’. Everyday life provides opportunities for people to demonstrate some kind of ‘being with’ that might be cosmopolitan rather than entrench boundaries. The sharing of practical tasks achieves more than rational discourse. If secularized Danes were to take the religiosity of Muslims seriously, they would easily learn how to avoid offending them. But what does it mean to ‘take seriously’ or ‘treat with respect’? Should we be required to respect what others respect, even if we find their beliefs obnoxious and illiberal? The options are not promising: tolerance masking hypocrisy, indifference, or active intolerance. As Eriksen observes, it is ‘bogus equality’ for non-Muslims (presumably of a Christian background) to invite Muslims to respond in kind by making cartoons of Christian divinities, in the face of divergent beliefs of what constitutes blasphemy and desecration. Is the only solution a global ethics based on a set of common denominators ensuring that nobody is ever offended? If the decision not to publish The Satanic Verses in India was a victory for a cosmopolitan attitude of

Introduction | 21

respect, does it follow that publishing anything that may offend anyone is a defeat for cosmopolitanism? Eriksen raises the important question of what is incompatible with cosmopolitanism (freedom of the press) and what is compatible with it (‘mutual indifference’, the use of boycotts). An intractable problem like the cartoon controversy makes evident the difficulty of political life and of living with difference. We see the emergence of multiple, polarized political positions in the public sphere, but also the possibility or opportunity for a response that reaches beyond apparently irreconcilable differences. The more subtle point is that there are no easy solutions to political and moral problems. As the example shows, politics and ethics are about challenging positions, about uncertainty, and about dealing with difference. They present us with dilemmas. Cosmopolitanism is an ideal, but it also emerges through everyday experience of living with others; this is where it becomes tangible and thus not a ‘thing’ established outside everyday life, against which certain attitudes and practices can be measured. ‘Impossible’ political affairs like this one at once polarize but also provide opportunities to undertake something else. Eriksen provides a close reading of media coverage in which individuals express their experiences, grievances and claims, but also suggests how in their everyday lives they might respond to (or ‘manage’) difference. These accounts reveal multiple positions of indecisiveness which point to the indeterminacy of social life. Eriksen’s proposal of a ‘minimal cosmopolitanism’ speaks directly to the ethnographic method, to the ethics of being with others. It outlines a way through which cosmopolitanism might be rescued from the domain of globalization. The minimal cosmopolitanism he proposes implicitly critiques positions taken in other chapters, which look beyond structures to the personal risks of everyday existence entailed in our need of others and our being. Eriksen describes a frightening moment when the everyday techniques for living are swept aside by the stark entry of the other, bringing other attachments (see below, regarding Latour) and refusing to play along. Seeing both sides as uncompromising, Eriksen sensibly proposes a modus vivendi along the lines of a Lévi-Straussian bricolage to restore a neighbourhood where people can live peaceably side by side. All the chapters have had to negotiate the problem of the relationship between objective conditions, including wide-ranging historical and practical connotations of political realities, and subjective experience. This broader context in which individual experiences are played out enriches our understanding of the existential condition of the individual. It is not simply a question of analysis or choice of data, but about how we believe the world works. A focus on the subjective experience of boundary crossing or blurring must be combined with an understanding of objective conditions that influence this experience, or are part of its basis. Thus the chapters by Hall, Rapport, Stade, Grønseth and Schiltz all give ethnographically intimate accounts of human experiences, elaborating the existential predicaments of specific individuals in particular times and places. These experiences are further contextualized within their objective positioning as part of a politically identified social group.

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Far from reifying people’s experiences or reducing them to identical ones, this broader contextualization makes visible the space in which their experiences are constituted. Moreover, the descriptions of these experiences afford the possibility of overcoming the narrow political space in which they occur: the potential of existential power. As the grounds of existential experiences, these political spaces propel people towards new realizations of their existential positions, whether in their actions, their life-projects or their relations with others. There is movement here; these are not static accounts. The authors make space for those experiences whose existential effects ‘creep up’ on individuals – for the contingent, unexpected and ambiguous nature of life as it is lived. The individuals appearing in the ethnographies – whether hospital porters in Scotland (Rapport), asylum seekers in Britain (Hall), Tamil refugees in Norway (Grønseth), missionaries and kings in nineteenth-century West Africa (Schiltz) or Muslims everywhere in Europe (Eriksen) – all have to negotiate their lives in unstable conditions. As a reaching beyond boundaries and embracing difference in the encounter with the other, cosmopolitanism is grounded in sociality and the embodied experience of existence. It emerges from human capacities to respond, morally, to those who are different from us in everyday social life.

Conclusion In concluding I return by an indirect route to the question of transcendence and its possible links to the metaphysics of sociality, and consider whether in our era cosmopolitanism must be replaced by cosmopolitics. The latter is the position adopted by Bruno Latour, who argues that the cosmos of our ancestors is no longer available as part of our heritage (Latour 2004: 453). To call ourselves ‘citizens of the world’ requires that we construct a new politics of the cosmos, which must be done ‘brick by brick’ through cosmopolitics. Latour cites Stengers’s ‘reinvention’ of the word cosmopolitics (not unlike the old definition of cosmopolitanism): ‘Cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos’ (ibid.: 454, original emphasis).11 What is a politics of the cosmos? Latour proposes a radical route to a possible answer, which starts with the abandonment/abolition of naturalism as ‘the faith in a single natural world, comprehensible through Science’ and demanding the elimination of all other entities from the ‘pluriverse’ (ibid.: 458). While it is desirable eventually to live in a common world defined as naturalism defines it, this is a world we must first compose or forge through negotiation, with the awareness that it will require careful maintenance and constant repair (ibid.: 458–59). Cosmos, if it is to mean anything, must embrace everything, ‘including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act’ (ibid.: 454).12 The view held by Beck and others that cosmos means ‘culture, worldview, any horizon wider than that of a nation-state’ (ibid.: 454) limits the use of the term to human entities and assumes that the aim of wars is to defend different cultural views of the same world. It

Introduction | 23

takes for granted that one unified cosmos already exists, and one ‘nature’ as arbiter of our disputes, thus making any conflict (as Schmitt has argued) into a ‘police operation’ or a ‘pedagogical’ enterprise for correcting irrational people, rather than a war over real differences (ibid.: 455). But for a common world to exist, we will first have to build it, ‘tooth and nail’, together (ibid.: 455). The idiosyncratic use of the metaphor ‘tooth and nail’ does a double job here: it alludes to the competitive nature of the exercise but also its painstaking ‘brick by brick’ assemblage of a world not already in place or existence. In the epoch of the Anthropocene we do not inherit our world but must build it, not by waiting for the realization to dawn on people that they are citizens of the same world but by actually getting down to the work of composing it (ibid.: 457). Cosmopolitics means taking action, not building from scratch but by selecting good attachments and discarding bad ones. If we agree with Stengers that peace settlements are not made between people of good will who have left their narrow attachments behind but between people of ill will ‘possessed by super- and subhumans of ill will’ (ibid.: 456), the problem seems insurmountable. Real peace cannot be attained if negotiators leave their incompatible attachments behind, yet an overlarge retinue of such attachments (‘beings that make us exist’) makes it hard to pass through the conference door. Though for the Stoics ‘detachment is emancipation and attachment is slavery’, we must not disparage the ‘hero in the soul’ or neglect to pay heed to Kristeva’s exhortation (to some extent strategic) not to leave French culture to Le Pen. How do we decide if an attachment is good or bad? Attachments such as the cult of origin, defined by Kristeva as based on hatred, must be seen as bad – but only if we accept the prior premise that hatred is bad. There is no way to escape that first premise other than by buttressing it or preceding it with a mixture of empirical ethnographic findings and analyses drawing on the metaphysics of a first philosophy. Latour’s ‘factish’ is precisely such an explanatory device arrived at in this fashion, simultaneously demonstrating and arguing that ‘constructed’ and ‘real’ are not opposed terms (ibid.: 459). While not exactly Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘McGuffin’, the ‘factish’ performs a similar function by making itself available when the plot needs it.13 ‘Constructivism’ (that is, factish-making), Latour tells us, ‘is the attitude of those who make things and are capable of telling good from bad fabrications, who want to compare their goods with those of others so that the standards of their own products improve’ (ibid.: 461). This is a gift for anthropological encounters, which abound in comparisons of goods, whether during fieldwork when researcher and researched bring their wares to the intellectual marketplace of knowledge or in the process of ethnographic analysis and theorization. Many case studies in this volume present relevant materials, but here I refer to my own fieldwork in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Rimbu, a Kewa big man, culture broker and my classificatory brother, negotiated with me, in nightly ‘debriefing’ sessions, cultural understandings in exchanges which brought both our ‘attachments’ into question. Though Rimbu was not familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle, his evaluation of the best course of action

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in a case involving a potential conflict appeared to stem from an appreciation of grounding experiences and human flourishing (Josephides 2003). As Rimbu demonstrated on many other occasions, this appreciation was at the root of his capacity to differentiate between good and bad attachments. A notion of cosmopolitanism built on the above exchanges is not weak but on the contrary durable and powerful as it straddles cultural boundaries. Latour cautions us to beware of ‘cheap universals’ and varieties of relativism and multiculturalism that are used to keep at bay the threat of multiple worlds (Latour 2004: 455). He is referring to the Stoic (and more generally humanistic) view that attachments are defined along a line that runs between universalism and particularism, with local attachments considered less noble than humanity-wide ones, and proposes instead that we explore the gradient ‘running from “naturalism” to “constructivism”’ (ibid.: 456–57) – the ‘factish’. Latour assumes that a peaceful, constructivist encounter could not take place between ‘fundamentalist’ parties, and thus provide the basis for negotiation (ibid.: 459–60). Using the classic illustration of the Spanish cleric and Amazonian pagan, he asks about the possible stance of the priest Las Casas concerning the drowning of his fellow Spaniards. Would his view that his ‘Indian brothers’ were basically the same as himself have been reversed if he had witnessed their systematic drowning of his compatriots in the interests of a scientific experiment designed to determine if they had a body (ibid.: 452)? Yet comparable encounters did take place, and are recounted in this volume. In Schiltz’s account there is no indication that the missionary Borghero’s views concerning the humanity of Africans underwent modification when he witnessed their ‘inhuman cruelty’ (albeit directed at their own people). Latour’s stark contrast between fundamentalism and constructivism, with the former inverting all the assertions of the latter, does not describe the way of all or even most encounters. Elsewhere Latour argues that we do not have to choose between constructivism and realism. He might have extended this openness to the contrast between constructivism and foundationalism – and acknowledged the difference between foundationalism and fundamentalism. What sort of definition of cosmopolitanism does this volume offer? Despite considerable variations, most chapters see cosmopolitanism as an existential condition and moral quality that addresses what is fundamentally human about the person. Far from being just a Western concept or political philosophy, it recognizes that human beings everywhere are both transcendent and social: transcendent as individuals because only individuals engage in encounters with the other, and social because this is the condition of their everyday lives. The encounters at issue here are not of the Geertzian type of reading cultural texts over other people’s shoulders, but more of a Ricoeurian appropriation. Different from this individualto-individual understanding, the social relationship of polites is of this world; it extends to the other the intimate relationship and proprietary feelings I have over the world as mine – of being at home in the world. It describes the minimal cosmopolitanism that at times is the only one available, before the building, brick by brick, of a common world defined as nature defines it. Though not quite the

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labour of Sisyphus, this world-building is at the very least uncertain. In the meantime, cosmopolitanism on the personal level can be seen as a continuous opening out to the world. In this volume it is a paean to the individual; to Everyone and Anyone with life-projects; to tolerance through shared practical tasks; to bare life and the moment that is shocked into recognizing it; to the imperilment of the self; to the desire for the other; to hospitality across oceans; to relationships between self and world; to brave attempts to attain authenticity; to empathy and mutuality beyond words. As befits the existential condition of human being, it is human, all too human.

Notes   1. I wish to thank the readers for their incisive questions and comments to which many of the points in this introduction are a response.   2. I have argued this point elsewhere; see Josephides (2010).   3. According to Merleau-Ponty’s (1974: 104–5) definition, intersubjectivity is experiential. He calls experiential intersubjectivity an enigmatic formulation, which means that each person as a subject now knows others as subjects.   4. Deleuze rejects the distinction, while Kant’s transcendental a priori is concerned with our cognitive faculties: how we can know objects without experiencing them.   5. Given Schmitt’s support of Nazi policies, the notion of ‘enemy’ would seem far more in need of critique than universalism for its role in consigning people to destruction as ‘unpersons’.  6. Antiphilosophy comes to the aid of anthropology. Starting from the ‘readymades’ of the artist Duchamp, whose aim was to demonstrate that any ordinary object can be exhibited as a work of art, Boris Groys characterizes ‘readymade philosophers’ as those who transcend the limits of any particular cultural identity to produce a universal meta-discourse (Groys 2012: viii–ix). Husserl required the aspiring philosopher to overcome, through phenomenological reduction, a ‘natural’ attitude ‘dominated by the will to self-preservation’ and to take on an attitude ‘beyond an interest in one’s own survival in the world’ (ibid.: ix). In other words, to be an anthropologist! This antiphilosophy looks for ‘ordinary experiences and practices that can be interpreted as being universal – as transcending one’s own cultural identity’ (ibid.: xi). From an Aristotelian viewpoint, I would call these ‘grounding experiences’. Anthropologists ex officio must be readymades, as they ascribe philosophical dignity to the practices of everyday life, dispensing with the ‘heroic philosophical act’. We should not flunk the next step: to paraphrase Groys (ibid.: xi), that of separating the production of evidence from the production of anthropological discourses, with the result that any experience or practice can be used as evidence. For Groys, this reduction is what allows antiphilosophy to produce universal evidence as such, beyond universal self-evident texts and objects (ibid.: xiv). To some degree, this is what Jackson does when he shows how critical moments of being go beyond the local (Jackson 2005: xx).   7. Latour makes a comment on the modern secular community that might have irked Schmitt. The realization that humans make facts (Latour 2010: viii), and that the divinities were of their making (we really do make what makes us), should have ended human beings’ alienation, but instead one form of transcendence was exchanged for another: rather than the single individual regaining mastery, individuals must now share their existence with a crowd of actors, ‘a group, a multitude, a collective’ (ibid.: 10).   8. Metaphysics has become or perhaps always has been a bit of a bugbear for many people, including scholars. Bosteels outlines the options for philosophers: either they follow the

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discourse of metaphysics and see language as possessing a ‘univocal sense capable of capturing being in the discourse of ontology as the science of being qua being’, or else they replace ontology (as the discourse of metaphysics) ‘with a generalized sophistics, or logology, in which there is no being except what the fictions of language have the power to create’ (Bosteels 2011: 30).   9. Strauss reminds us that the state of nature is defined in different terms by Hobbes and Schmitt, being a state of war between individuals for the first but a state of war between groups, especially nations, for the second (Strauss 1996: 106). 10. In an argument similar to Schiltz, R. Werbner outlines three aspects of the public cosmopolitanism exemplified in his South African informant’s life: ‘the restless quest for the further horizon [involving risk and daring]’; ‘the imperative for moral recentring [imperilling of moral decentering]’; and ‘the construction and transcending of difference [humanity without frontiers]’ (R. Werbner 2008: 178). 11. See also Kierkegaard’s discussion of the infinite and the finite (above). 12. See also Stade’s call for an examination of self–world rather than just self–other relations (this volume). 13. A ‘McGuffin’ functions as a plot device in the form of a goal or desired object for which the protagonist is willing to sacrifice almost anything and yet which remains undefined and open to interpretation. Hitchcock illustrated the term with this story: ‘It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers “Oh, that’s a McGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?” “Well”, the other man says. “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!”’ (Gottlieb 2002: 48).

References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——— 1999. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, A. 1998. ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 265–89. Appiah, K.A. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Badiou, A. 2007. The Century. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. Benhabib, S. 2008. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bosteels, B. 2011. ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in A. Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy. London: Verso, pp.1–71. Derrida, J. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Douzinas, C. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. Dwyer, K. 1997. ‘Beyond a Boundary? “Universal Human Rights” and the Middle East’, Anthropology Today 13(6): 13–18. Fine, R. 2007. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. Gottlieb, S. 2002. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Grossman, V. 2006 [1980]. Life and Fate. London: Vintage. Groys, B. 2012. Introduction to Antiphilosophy. London: Verso. Heidegger, M. 1988 [1975]. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn.

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Josephides, L. 2003. ‘The Rights of Being Human’, in R. Wilson and J. Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements. London: Routledge, pp. 229–50. ——— 2005. ‘Resentment as a Sense of Self ’, in K. Milton and M. Svasek (eds), Mixed Emotions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 71–90. ——— 2008. Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity. Oxford: Berghahn. ——— 2010. ‘Cosmopolitanism as the Existential Condition of Humanity’, in N. Rapport and H. Wardle (eds), A Cosmopolitan Anthropology. Social Anthropology (special issue) 18(4): 389–95. Kierkegaard, S. 2008 [1849]. The Sickness Unto Death. London: Penguin. Kristeva, J. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— 1993. Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, B. 2004. ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Politics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge 10(3): 450–62. ——— 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——— 2011. ‘Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics’. Unpublished lecture delivered at the French Institute, London, November 2011. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Maleuvre, D. 2011. The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1974. Phenomenology, Language and Sociology, ed. J. O’Neill. London: Heinemann. Nava, M. 2007. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. Oxford: Berg. Nowicka, M., and M. Rovisco. 2008. Cosmopolitanism in Practice. London: Ashgate. Nussbaum, M. 1997 ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 25–57. ——— 2000. ‘Non-relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’, in C.W. Gowans (ed.), Moral Disagreements. London: Routledge, pp.168–79. ——— 2001. The Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1992 [1990] Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ——— 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robbins, B. 1998. ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.1–19. Rorty, R. 1993. ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality’, in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds), On Human Rights. New York: Basic Books, pp. 111–34. Sartre, J.-P. 1958 [1943]. Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen. Schmitt, C. 1996. The Concept of the Political, rev. edn., trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sloterdijk, P. 2009. God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— 2010 [2006]. Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. New York: Columbia University Press. Strauss, L. 1996. ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt’, in C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, rev. edn., trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 97–122. Strong, T.B. 1996. ‘Foreword’, in C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, rev. edn., trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. ix–xxx. Toulmin, S. 1992 [1990]. Cosmopolis: Hidden agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vertovec, S., and R. Cohen (eds). 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vinx, L. 2010. ‘Carl Schmitt’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Open access, accessed online). Werbner, P. 2008 (ed.) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

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Werbner, R. 2008. ‘Responding to Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Patriots, Ethnics and the Public Good in Botswana’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Berg, pp. 173–96.

Chapter 1

Citizens of Everything The Aporetics of Cosmopolitanism

Ronald Stade

K

Introduction Concepts have social lives and cultural biographies. The concept of ‘the cosmopolitan’ is no exception. It emerged from the shadows of history and underwent semantic shifts and adaptations. What the constituent parts that make up the word ‘cosmopolitan’ – that is, kosmos and polites – refer to has changed drastically over the centuries. To begin with, kosmos signified the entire order of the universe or of nature or of reality – in other words, everything that is. In antiquity, the polites (usually translated as ‘citizen’) would be a man of wealth who had been born into a privileged kinship group. The second part of the expression kosmopolites, in other words, referred to citizenship in the sense of distinction and privilege, not to modern notions of universal rights deriving from national membership.1 To be cosmopolitan was to be a privileged citizen of everything. Over the centuries, this connotation was lost. With the emergence of the nation-state as the chief principle for the political organization of territories and populations, the cosmopolitan came to be defined in terms that were derived from this principle. Political philosophy and the social sciences appropriated this nationalized concept of the cosmopolitan. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner (1957, 1958) and Robert Merton (1968) aligned the concept to organizational theory, which is how anthropologists found and came to use it. In what follows, I will present five vignettes, all of which address the just mentioned aspects of the cosmopolitan.2 Thereafter, I will connect the vignettes with

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one another in order to cast doubt on the contemporary use of the cosmopolitan concept. The ultimate purpose is to question the sociological bias in current anthropological usages of the cosmopolitan concept, and to suggest that the time has come to revisit the original meaning of the cosmopolitan as a relationship between self and world. There is no point in trying to conceal the fact that this chapter was written with subversive intent. Therefore it would make little sense to offer an excuse for the aporetic nature of my argument.

First Vignette: The Cosmopolitan as Dog The original formulation of the cosmopolitan was a frontal attack on social conventions. The word kosmopolites,3 ‘cosmopolitan’, reportedly was coined by Diogenes of Sinope in the fourth century BC. Diogenes, a contemporary of Plato and his harshest critic, was an immigrant to Athens who, it is said, chose a life in opposition to existing social conventions as a way of practising his Socratic philosophy. This earned him and his followers the name ‘dogs’, from which derives the expression Cynic, which is what their philosophical movement came to be called. In the eyes of their surrounding, their behaviour resembled that of stray dogs. The Cynics, it is said, used any place for any purpose. Allegedly, Diogenes masturbated in the agora and his disciple Crates had sex in public with his wife Hipparchia, who was a Cynic philosopher as well. Why did these dog philosophers refer to themselves as cosmopolitans? A profound misunderstanding of the original use of the cosmopolitan concept has been in circulation for a long time. The misunderstanding is of a presentist nature. It begins with the notion that the term kosmopolites should be translated as ‘citizen of the world’, and that such a citizen may be contrasted with the common ‘citizen of a nation’. The concept of kosmopolites is taken out of its historical and cultural context and inserted into the modern system of nation-states and its generic principles of citizenship. In Diogenes’ days, there existed no such system and no such principles. Citizenship was not tied to this or that nation – the concept of nation had not been invented yet – but to individual-social qualities like gender, wealth and which kinship group one had been born into. To be recognized as polites entailed privilege. It was not thought of as having something to do with general entitlements. What about the first part of the expression? What about kosmos, usually rendered as ‘world’ in conjunction with polites? In ancient Greek, the word kosmos would be used to denote order, for example the divine order of nature. It would definitely not be used in allusion to a totality of nation-states or a planetary political order. The natural order was inhabited by gods, spirits, human beings, animals and so on. It was akin to (yet different from) what we today would think of as ‘reality’. Kosmos was everywhere and everything. When Diogenes called himself kosmopolites, he thus meant to say that he was privileged to be a citizen of everything. Joining together the words kosmos and polites was an absurd play on words. It was in fact an oxymo-

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ron. The Cynics were famous for using satirical puns and insults to comment on serious matters.4 In this instance, Diogenes compared the human order of the polis with the natural order of cosmos. The former was, in his eyes, no more than an accumulation of arbitrary, contorted conventions and institutions. The natural order, in contrast, was straightforward and easy (rhaidion). The mouse, the ant, the dog: they simply do what they must with ease. They require no courts, no marriage, no formal education, no religion, no money – in short, none of the human fabrications – to be mice, ants and dogs.5 The Cynics flaunted social conventions because they considered them folly and gratuitous. That is why Diogenes cuttingly remarked that he is a citizen of everything. This implies that not even a metaphorical reading of kosmopolites – in which the cosmopolitan of antiquity is portrayed as someone who wants to escape the narrow confines of the polis, just like today’s cosmopolitan wants to transcend national identities – is adequate. The primary target of Cynic satire was not Athens as a bounded polis but the ordinary way of life with all its rules of propriety, honour, shame, respectability, politeness, refinement and so forth.6 That is why Athenians thought of the Cynics as dogs. The original cosmopolitanism was an invitation to explore one’s animal nature. This kind of exploration, however, entailed hard work. The Cynics had to endure adversities and deprivation as they turned to a mendicant life. Just like the Pythagoreans and Socrates, the Cynics walked barefoot and wore nothing but a tribon, a ‘rough cloak’, which they also slept in. The only possessions they had were a wallet and a staff. The Cynic had to abstain from the comforts of property, a secure life and social acceptance. The path to an easy animalistic life was rough. It demanded discipline. In order to liberate oneself from old habits and desires, one had to expose oneself to poverty and to the scorn of others. Historians and anthropologists are likely to observe similarities between the practices of the self among the Cynics and among Indian sadhus. It is reasonable to ask whether the original cosmopolitanism has Hindu roots. If cosmopolitanism grew out of Hindu practices, our stories might have to change. At the least, it would complicate the notion of cosmopolitanism as a narrowly Western tradition of transnationalism. Pythagoras (an important source of inspiration for Diogenes) is said to have visited India, and Socrates (the paragon not only of Plato but of Diogenes as well) reportedly met an Indian philosopher in Athens. There exist other accounts of encounters between Greek and Indian philosophers, none of which, however, is as well documented as that of Onesicritus’ discussion with a group of Indian sadhus.7 Onesicritus of Astypalaia was a disciple of Diogenes who accompanied Alexander the Great on his Indian campaign. At one point, Onesicritus claims to have sat down with a group of Indian naked philosophers (gymnosophists) and conversed with them with the help of three interpreters (probably with Persian as the mediate language between Greek and whatever Indic dialects the sadhus spoke). One of the gymnosophists stated that ‘the best teaching is that which removes pleasure and pain from the soul’, upon which Onesicritus remarked that this reminds him of

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Pythagorean ideas, as well as of the teachings of his own master, Diogenes. When asked by the Indian philosophers which Greek wise men most resemble sadhus, Onesicritus mentioned Diogenes, Pythagoras and Socrates. While we may not be able to judge the facticity of Onesicritus’ meeting with the sadhus in India, we can nonetheless infer that he, and through him other Greek philosophers, became aware of the similarities between Pythagorean, Socratic and Cynic traditions, on the one hand, and Indian philosophies, on the other. Both Indian gymnosophists and Greek Cynics engaged in onerous practices of the self that aimed at healing the world. The difference between Cynicism and Indian asceticism, however, is telling and lays bare crucial features of the original cosmopolitanism. Whereas the sadhus were on a quest for spiritual transcendence, the Cynics first and foremost engaged in a negative dialectics.8 The pièce de résistance for the Cynics was their challenging the conventions of their own social environment, not to denounce the world and receive social recognition for it. The Greek ‘citizens of everything’ did not renounce the world; they wanted to commit to it in the most radical fashion imaginable. They held human conventions to stand in the way of a oneness with the world. The original cosmopolitanism, then, concerned the relationship between self and world, of which the relationship between self and other was but an aspect.

Second Vignette: The Right to the Surface Contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism in political philosophy (and beyond) take Kant, and in particular his 1795 text Zum ewigen Frieden (‘Perpetual peace’), as a starting point. The focus in these debates is often on two of Kant’s cosmopolitan principles: on the one hand, the organization of international relations in the form of a global federation of republics; on the other, Kant’s discussion of the right to be treated with hospitality wherever one goes. The first principle corresponds to international law (ius gentium), which Kant holds to be essential to the project of perpetual peace, but which he clearly demarcates from cosmopolitan rights (ius cosmopoliticum). The latter treats human beings as ‘citizens of a universal (or global) state of humankind’ (Bürger eines allgemeinen Menschenstaats). In Kant’s cosmopolitan order, the individual is the citizen of a worldwide polis. Kant realized that he needed to dissociate this cosmopolitan vision from Europe’s colonial history and from the colonial transgressions of his own days, both of which he denounced repeatedly. Therefore he wanted to make clear that world citizenship cannot be used as an excuse for colonial practices of conquest, occupation and exploitation. On the other hand, he also considered the surface of the earth to be the common possession of all human beings – something he states on several occasions.9 Each human being has ‘a fundamental right to the surface of the planet’ (das Recht der Oberfläche).10 To begin with, nobody is more entitled to any portion of the planet than anyone else. For political and practical reasons, however, the right of global mobility must be limited to everyone having the right to visit any place and to enter into peaceful

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exchange relationships with others. In addition, anyone who is in danger of perishing must be given refuge. Seeking asylum is thus the only form of migration that Kant deems acceptable. For political philosophers like Katrin Flikschuh, Seyla Benhabib and Thomas Pogge, who see themselves as working in a Kantian tradition, the exclusion of emigrants/immigrants from Kant’s cosmopolitan vision has proven a tough nut to crack. Flikschuh (2000) and Benhabib (2004) extend Kant’s argument to fill in the blanks. Flikschuh, for instance, engages in a probing interpretation of Kant’s thoughts on property rights. Kant refutes John Locke’s notion that property rights arise from the labour we invest in objects. Kant argues that to take possession of a piece of land (apprehensio), for example by cultivating it, does not give a right of ownership, because that would violate the universal right of everyone else by shutting them out from using or occupying the land. Kant, however, concedes that it would be unjust (that is, not be in accordance with general principles of right) to occupy a piece of land already taken by someone else. In suggesting how Kant solves this dilemma, Flikschuh adopts Reinhardt Brandt’s (1982) interpretation of Kant’s lex permissiva: universal principles of right can be suspended out of practical necessity, for example in order to legitimate existing property relations. As Flikschuh explains, ‘The special authorization to take into empirical possession external objects of one’s choice counts as provisionally legitimate in so far as such acts might point towards a possible solution to this otherwise impossible situation’ (Flikschuh 2000: 140). In Brandt’s and Flikschuh’s view, Kant understood that an ideal cosmopolitan solution to the problem of unlimited movement across, and occupation of, the surface of the earth was not feasible. Only when a global cosmopolitical order had been established would it be possible to solve this problem. In the meantime, we need to accept the fact that the surface of the earth has been divided and that most of it is occupied by someone else who has the power to grant us permission to stay on the land in his or her possession. The exceptions to this provisional rule of property rights in the context of Kantian cosmopolitanism have already been mentioned: anyone should enjoy the right to visit any place and to enter into peaceful exchange relationships with others; anyone who is in danger of perishing must be given refuge. Kant’s cosmopolitan rights thus include the right to hospitality, the right to association and the right to asylum. When compared to his notion of a communio fundi originaria, the original position, in which the surface of the earth and everything on it are in common possession, Kant’s cosmopolitan rights appear limited and limiting. The reason for Kant’s backing down from the original cosmopolitan position, which he hopes will be realized in the future, is the empirical existence of an international system. He was unable to historicize this system and his own perspective on it, for instance by reflecting on the Enlightenment as a cultural system. Having the benefit of hindsight, we are at liberty to inquire into the historical context of Kant’s original cosmopolitan principle, which is ‘the right to the surface’ (das Recht der Oberfläche). A considerable part of Kant’s oeuvre is devoted to natural history. It is a part that philosophers, or to put a finer point on it, political philosophers concerned

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with Kant’s cosmopolitan legacy, tend to have little use for. There are good reasons for this: most of what Kant had to say on natural philosophy was written before his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which is a watershed not only in his but in global philosophy. Nonetheless, we may ask whether references to the topography of the earth in his writings on cosmopolitanism are purely accidental – and the answer is no. Kant grounds the right to the surface – that is, the original cosmopolitan position – in the physical characteristic of our planet: if the surface of the earth was a plane stretching endlessly in every direction, Kant believes that human beings would have spread out to such an extent that they never would come into contact with one another. It is because Earth is round (globus terraqueus) that humans cannot avoid being in proximity to one another.11 The original cosmopolitan right to the surface of the earth derives from the sphericity of our planet. The right to the surface should not be confused with Earth originally having been the common property of all. Property, in Kant’s view, is a social relationship, not a right. Rights, however, should be deduced from natural conditions or natural philosophy. In summary, Kantian cosmopolitanism grounds the original cosmopolitan right to the surface of the earth in the scientific fact of our planet’s sphericity. With Kant, the original cosmopolitan position is one of non-property, unrestricted movement across the entire planet and perfectly equal access to the surface of the earth and everything on it. This position, however, is conceived in relation to, and in tension with, an actually existing order of nations in which global space is divided and apportioned. The conclusion is that cosmopolitanism necessarily is nationalized. It is contained by the international system and property relations. Today, this contradiction grows apparent in the question of unrestricted migration.

Third Vignette: Insiders and Outsiders In the Soviet Union, Jewish citizens were charged with being ‘cosmopolitan’ during one of Stalin’s purges. Cosmopolitans were accused of being rootless and thus fifth columnists working for the external enemy. They were allegorized as foreign elements in the national organism. In his play, John Bull’s other Island, George Bernard Shaw lets one of his protagonists rail against ‘the modern hybrids that now monopolize England’: ‘Hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They don’t belong to the dear old island, but to their confounded new empire’. The ‘confounded new empire’ to which the ‘cosmopolitan riffraff’ belongs is a metaphorical rather than an actual one. The metaphor refers to the millions of people who are considered strangers in Georg Simmel’s sense: as opposed to the wayfarer who comes today and leaves tomorrow, the stranger is someone who comes today and stays tomorrow. The stranger is a potential wayfarer in whom come together the relationships to space and to other human beings. Spatial concepts of distance and proximity turn into social fantasies of foreignness: the stranger is from somewhere else even if she was born and raised next door (Sim-

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mel 1908: 509-512). Simmel approaches the same issue at a structural level when he relates individuation and dissent to social and cultural differentiation (Simmel 1890: 45–69). He takes cosmopolitanism to be an expression of extreme cultural and social differentiation (ibid.: 58). Simmel’s followers in sociology turned this constellation into a social typology of locals and cosmopolitans. The local is firmly rooted in, and oriented towards, her local environment. She is rich in the kind of social and symbolic capital that is generated through deep involvement with local affairs and networks. The cosmopolitan arrives from the outside. She is a stranger whose credentials have been obtained elsewhere. Her orientation is towards others like herself, regardless of where they are to be found (see Gouldner 1957, 1958; Merton 1968: 441–74; Hannerz 1990). The image of the cosmopolitan as a stranger or outsider has created two sorts of problems in anthropology (and in the social sciences more generally). On the one hand, the cosmopolitan, in terms of social analysis, became associated with social distance and aloofness, which may confirm political assumptions about cosmopolitanism as a matter of social class; on the other, the cosmopolitan was turned into a social type, with all the limitations in understanding that this entails. For the sake of sorting out these issues, we can begin by turning to the question of privilege. Wealthy elites are said to be able to afford a cosmopolitan lifestyle, whereas the poor masses, on the same score, appear to be condemned to a life in spatial, cultural and cognitive confinement. The privileged few are able ‘to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows’ (Reich 1991: 3). Everyone else is in stasis. Some anthropologists try to rid the concept of cosmopolitanism of its association with privilege. Much effort has gone into arguing that there is such a thing as working-class or vernacular cosmopolitanism (see, e.g., Werbner 1999; Diouf 2000; Wardle 2000).12 Usually, such endeavours at democratizing the cosmopolitan concept will have to fall back on the above mentioned earlier typology of locals and cosmopolitans. The dichotomies of stasis/mobility, inward-orientation/outward-orientation and local/cosmopolitan remain intact, only that more, less privileged groups are said to belong to the mobile, outwardoriented, cosmopolitan type. As for the second problem, that of social typology more generally, it originates in the notion that human existence is all but social, that the relationship between self and world, and the relationship of the self to itself, is nothing more than a social fact. Indeed, this appears to be the strongest card the social sciences can play: that the human condition is essentially social. A more truthful narrative will adopt a developmental point of view. Yes, human beings are born into a world not of their own making. And yes, to become an I requires a you. Sooner or later, however, the self faces a world, others and itself that are for itself – that appear as objects of practice and reflection. It can be argued that it is at this point that the cosmopolitan as perspective and practice enters the picture. In this sense, the cosmopolitan is more about human beings claiming their given place in the world than about a social typology. We will return to this argument below.

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Fourth Vignette: Self-liberation – the Case of Germany’s New Left Decolonization overthrew existing relations of property and political sovereignty. Kantian realism had expurgated cosmopolitanism as a right to the surface of our planet from the global system of international relations. The global movement of decolonization, of which the civil rights movement in places like the United States was a part, challenged the realist doctrine of imperialism and its cognate ideologies of colonialism and racism. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt recognized that European colonialism was at the root of fascism. In everything from dehumanization and extermination to population politics and racial studies, totalitarianism was a transfer of colonial theories and practices to the European continent. Colonialism travelled back to Europe and turned into totalitarianism. Similarly, the resistance to colonialism travelled back to Europe, where it turned into the New Left. Germany’s Neue Linke (henceforth New Left) was such an offshoot of a global movement. Leaders of the West German student movement like Rudi Dutschke, Bernd Rabehl and Dieter Kunzelmann identified with cultural heroes like Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon. Just like their comrades in other parts of Europe and North America, they were mobilized by the anti-colonial struggle in places like Cuba, South-East Asia and Africa. A prominent feature of the metropolitan avatars of this movement was the so-called generational conflict. The world into which the European and North American rebels of the 1960s had been born seemed appalling. The discrepancy between the self-righteous outlook of the parental generation and the injustices that made up the global situation seemed intolerable to those members of the younger generation who felt strongly about these issues. In Germany, the generational conflict had an added dimension. Had not the people who now ran the country, and insisted on the importance of fundamental democratic values, with equal fervour served the Nazi regime? The generational conflict gave rise to a logical dilemma. If the generation that came before, as well as the world they governed and reproduced, was deeply flawed, could that not also be said about the selves of the rebels, which, after all, were a product of the previous generation and their world? The core idea in all this will be familiar to anthropologists: Certain types of personality are reproduced in particular cultural environments. Culture and personality, if undisturbed by outside forces, constitute a closed system of perfect reproduction. Socialization equals cultural cloning. From this vantage point, it makes sense to ask whether the cultured self is capable of changing its social and cultural environment. Members of the New Left movement articulated this predicament as a tension between the private and the political. A key concern was whether to set aside one’s private life – that is, to push aside the self for itself – in order to devote oneself entirely to the political struggle or to politicize the private – that is, to make the self an object for itself. The SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, Socialist Student Association of Germany) and the city of West Berlin served

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as gravitational centres for the New Left.13 The heated debates within the SDS made apparent that so-called private matters – who made coffee and took care of dirty dishes (women) or silenced others during discussions by yelling at them (men) – had political dimensions. An inner circle of the SDS set about tackling these problems in more systematic fashion. For Germany’s New Left, a major source for these concerns can be traced back to a specific event. The inner circle of the student movement met in the luxurious summer residence of the father of one of its members to decide on the future of the SDS, and of political action in general. The discussants tried to determine whether the Vietnam War was the mythical moment of kairos, that is, a propitious moment for action, the dallying away of which could prove catastrophic. Only two options seemed to make sense in this situation: to work as agents of the Third World in the centres of imperialism; or to join the antiimperialist struggle in the global South itself. The group spent several days in discussion. Rudi Dutschke, by then the intellectual leader of the movement, arrived late because his parents had come to visit. This gave the subsequent debate a somewhat new direction. The relationship between private bourgeois existence and revolutionary political practice came under scrutiny. Some asked how Dutschke could prioritize his parents’ visit over a crucial meeting that could determine the future of the revolution. Already in this setting, Rabehl branded the attacks on his friend Dutschke as Psychoterror (‘psychological intimidation’, a word that quickly entered the German language). One of the outcomes of these discussions was an agreement, at least among some of the participants, to abandon what they called ‘recreational socialism’ (Freizeitsozialismus); that is, separating life into two closed-off domains: one for a conventional bourgeois existence in isolation, and one for collective political work. The two domains needed to be brought together and revolutionary change was to be directed inward and outward. All spheres of life and the bourgeois self had to be revolutionized. The tangible result was that a group of SDS members moved in together, creating a flat-sharing commune, the so-called SDS Kommune. At about the same time, another commune, known as Kommune I or K1, began living together, first in the attic flat of German writer Uwe Johnson, then in the spacious flat of author Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, whose ex-wife, daughter and brother were among the original members. The key figure in K1 was Dieter Kunzelmann, a member of the Situationist International. His influence, as well as the examples of the Provo movement in the Netherlands and the Hog Farm in the United States, shaped the character of K1, whose members involved themselves in happenings and ‘fun guerrilla’ (Spaßguerilla) campaigns. In the German public sphere, Kunzelmann was overshadowed by two of the other K1 members, Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans, who became the poster boys of the New Left. The media coverage intensified when Langhans fell in love with fashion model Uschi Obermaier, who moved in with Langhans and who subsequently, and on numerous occasions, posed topless for the media. The right-wing media corporation owned by Axel Springer, as well as magazines like Stern and Spiegel, turned Lang-

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hans, Obermaier and Teufel into household names, all the while titillating the public with speculations about ‘free love’, group sex and orgies in the commune. The SDS Kommune considered itself more ‘political’ than K1, which some dismissed as the Springer corporation’s court jesters. Nevertheless, personal ties linked the two communes together as a number of individuals, out of frustration, moved from one commune to the other. In the summer of 1967, however, the SDS Kommune was in a shambles. Two married couples, Gertrud (‘Agathe’) and Eike Hemmer and Lisbeth and Jörg Schlotterer, were on the verge of breaking up, and their internal fights rippled through the commune. The situation culminated when the wives had sex outside their marriages with male members of the commune. Gertrud and Eike split up, with Gertrud moving to K1, whereas Jörg and Lisbeth moved out altogether. Endless group discussions over relationships had drained the commune of all energy to act politically. A commune member called this state of affairs a ‘depressing communality of purposelessness’ (Bookhagen et al. 1969: 47). An attempt to piece everything together by taking a joint vacation on the Atlantic coast of France ended in disaster. On the road, Eike broke his leg and had to stay in a German hospital, and fights between love partners continued. Upon return to Berlin, the commune dissolved. Only two of the original SDS Kommune members, Eike Hemmer and Eberhard Schultz, were prepared to make a new beginning and start another Kommune. A new group formed, and after two months of trying to find the right flat they moved in together in an eight-room apartment in Berlin’s middle- to upper-class district of Charlottenburg. This was the inception of the Kommune II or K2. Looking back at life in K2, the cynic (in the sense of ‘cynical realist’) may notice many similarities with what has come to be known as ‘reality television’. Just as in reality shows like the Dutch Nummer 28, Britain’s Big Brother, MTV’s The Real World and the Swedish Expedition Robinson (produced in other countries as Survivor), a group of people were brought together in a confined environment and began arguing with one another. All the practicalities of everyday life – shopping for groceries, preparing meals, cleaning the house, taking care of the children and so on – had somehow to be organized, which gave rise to conflicts. In contrast to the commercial cynicism of reality TV, however, K2, in Berd Rabehl’s words, was to be a New Jerusalem. The purpose of coming together was not to win a sum of money but to change the world from the inside out. After a few months, the K2 members found that change must be brought about in a particular order. The bourgeois self is incapable of revolutionizing social life, therefore it was imperative to revolutionize the self first. For a better understanding of the connection between self and society, the communards turned to Wilhelm Reich’s Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (1936),14 which K2 came to use as an instruction manual for how to revolutionize the bourgeois self. Reich synthesized the teachings of Marx and of his mentor Freud. Like Freud, Reich believed that mental illness originates in the repression of sexual development, and that repression corresponds to, and reproduces, the norms of bourgeois

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society. Reich also adopted the Freudian view that experiences in early childhood are of critical importance in this context, and that the family is the key institution in all this. Reich was less ambivalent than Freud in judging the social function of the family. Bourgeois society relies on the nuclear family as its primary unit of production, reproduction and consumption. The nuclear family – ever authoritarian and inimical to pleasure – produces and reproduces ego-weak individuals who are impotent before authorities. Bourgeois society, the nuclear family and the self thus form a closed reproductive system. In the account of the K2 project, it says, ‘The average nuclear family produces individuals who are desperate for affection, mentally unstable and fixated on infantile needs and irrational authorities’ (Bookhagen et al. 1969: 70). To overcome repression, couples must be liberated from their fixation on one another and children must be liberated from their fixation on their parents. The K2 children became a focus of attention. Their liberation could provide the adult K2 members with valuable insights into their own predicament. It seemed clear that the children needed to be ‘uneducated’ – that is, to be freed from the repressive structures they already had internalized and which surfaced when they swept food off the table or urinated in one of the rooms. Un-education meant putting an end to sexual repression (as prescribed by Reich), which, in turn, involved not just tolerating the sexuality of the children but encouraging it. Encouraging infantile sexuality turned out to be difficult for the adults, who felt that they themselves suffered from sexual hang-ups. In one instance, a male K2 member, Eberhard, tried to meet the wish for erotic play that one of the children, a twoyear-old girl, seemed to express.15 The account of what happened next is contained in a log entry dated 4 April 1968 (ibid.: 91–92). According to this, the girl was reluctant to go to sleep and wanted to caress Eberhard’s hands and face, then his belly and ‘botty’, and finally his penis. The entry ends with her wanting to ‘put in’ Eberhard’s erect penis, noting with disappointment, ‘too big’. Eberhard writes that he felt extremely uneasy and that he had to exert self-discipline to overcome his own deep-seated repressions (Hemmungen is the word in German). He struggled hard not to stop the girl or exhibit any sign of disapproval. He felt ashamed to have tried to stave off the attempt of the girl to ‘put it in’. To Eberhard it must have seemed as if he had few choices. He had to overcome his inhibitions for the sake of the children. Hemmungen were considered bourgeois implants – alien elements within, so to speak – that one needed to get rid of.16 The second half of the jointly produced report on K2 depicts the often excruciating analytical sessions and discussions in which K2 members tried to free themselves (their selves) from inhibitions. The preferred method was serial analysis, in which each commune member would choose an analyst from within K2 and enter into a free-association type of analytical session in front of the entire collective, which afterwards would evaluate the session. As already mentioned, the guidelines for these exercises were derived from Reich’s writings on psychoanalysis, and in particular from what he calls ‘character analysis’ (Reich 1970).

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An individual’s character, according to Reich, is the chronic hardening of the ego. The incrustation consists of inhibitions and fixations and protects the ego from inner and outer threats. The character armour has a few atypical openings, however, which, in libidinous situations, grow wider or increase in number. (In alibidinous and anti-libidinous situations, the armour grows thicker and denser.) The purpose of the K2 analytical sessions was to break up the character armour of each individual member. If the individual regressed to a childlike state during sessions, it was taken as a sign of analytical authenticity and success.17 To begin with, the sessions very much improved the mood in K2. An atmosphere of exhilaration and erotic playfulness swept over the adult communards. They felt in touch with their libido and desires. A new sensitivity to the needs of others characterized all their relationships. Soon, however, cheerfulness gave way to an all-penetrating psychologization of everyday life. As one of the contributors to the K2 volume puts it, ‘Sensitivization had made us hypersensitive’ (Bookhagen et al. 1969: 271). Semiotic overload and notions of excessive agency pervaded everyday life in the commune. Every utterance and gesture seemed in need of analysis. It was a classic case of hammer and nails: the communards had been given the hammer of Reichian analysis and suddenly the world was full of nails, things that needed to be analysed. Then, something happened that brought everything to a halt: ‘The assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke ripped us like a giant fist from the increasingly impregnable net of mutual psychologizing relationships’ (ibid: 275). On 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke, the intellectual leader of Germany’s New Left, was gunned down by Josef Bachmann, a tragic figure who spent his entire life on the margins of society. In the middle of the day, in a street in central West Berlin, while crying out ‘dirty Communist pig’, Bachmann approached Dutschke and fired two bullets into his head and one into his left shoulder.18 Prior to Bachmann’s attack, Springer newspapers like Bild had led an aggressive smear campaign against Dutschke and the New Left. On 7 February 1968, for example, Bild declared that one must not leave all the ‘dirty work’ (of bringing down the New Left) to the police and their anti-riot water gun vehicles. A few days before the attempt on Dutschke’s life, Bild appealed to the public to apprehend the ‘ringleaders’ of the New Left.19 The shooting of Dutschke enraged the New Left. In Berlin, attempts were made to stop the dispatch of Springer newspapers by demolishing the delivery cars that stood parked next to the Springer headquarters. In the following days, thousands of protesters all across West Germany were involved in street battles with the police. Two people were killed and hundreds were injured in the most widespread public violence Germany had seen since the days of the Weimar Republic. For many, the so-called Easter riots were a turning point. The time for satirical provocation and erotic play was over; discussions within the New Left now focused on the use of violence: How much? When? Where? It was from this historical situation that the Red Army Faction emerged.

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Fifth Vignette: Cynicism The tension between the ideals of natural rights (that is, universal and individual rights) and the realities of political order (the limitation and communal contingency of those same rights), with which Kant struggled, live on in the regulation of rights that is at the core of modern cosmopolitanism.20 The regulation of rights produced a series of unforeseen consequences, the longest lasting of which may be the reformulation of the conflict between self and society, and between subject and object, in terms of a positive dialectic. The Hegelian concept of alienation – Entfremdung in German – connotes the separation of subject and object: the subject as self-consciousness is divorced from the object that is external reality. Inasmuch as external reality is man-made, the self is confronted with its own creation and alienation is a form of self-alienation. As could be seen in the case of the K2, self-alienation can also take the shape of the self rejecting the part of itself that is socially constructed. In the context of the European Enlightenment, the notion of alienation can be applied to what Peter Sloterdijk (1983) has diagnosed as rationalism turning sour. Secular rationalists believed to ‘see things as they really are’. Religion, metaphysics, idealism, morality, the construction of nature, selfknowledge and so on: they are all a matter of masking the truth, which is power. Francis Bacon’s phrase, Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (‘For knowledge itself is power’), though barely connected to this sort of cynical realism, can stand in as a symbol for what it was that overwhelmed the Enlightenment ideals of Kant. Cynicism is an ultimate form of realism. In Sloterdijk’s words, cynicism is ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (ibid.: 37); that is, the Enlightenment ripped off religious and ideological masks only to find that the face of truth was power and that one therefore had no choice but to accommodate oneself to this truth. This ‘false consciousness’ does not emanate from ignorance or misrecognition; it cannot be dissolved by a critique of ideology or deconstruction. Cynicism or cynical realism as enlightened false consciousness lays bare the limits of modern projects like science, social reform and representative politics: the naked truth will not change anything. The essence of cynicism is ‘knowing but doing anyway’.21 The impetus for the discussion of cynical realism comes from the writings of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In a collection of essays, Dialektik der Aufklärung, which they wrote in their American exile towards the end of the Second World War and was originally published in 1947,22 Horkheimer and Adorno, in one of the essays, examine whether the cynical philosophy of Donatien Alphonse François, Count of Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade, is a possible, or even natural, outcome of Kant’s Enlightenment ideals. Kant (1784: 481) defines enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’.23 Is not the work of de Sade the epitome of the Enlightenment spirit, ask Horkheimer and Adorno. The liberated self, using its mental faculties without dictation by someone else, is free to transvalue all values. Kant feared this abyss and tried to escape into an ‘isolated metaphysics of morals’ that is strictly scientific and procedural (and that, at the same time, goes beyond vulgar principles

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like material interests and violence). Horkheimer and Adorno are sceptical: ‘The moral teachings of the Enlightenment bear witness to a hopeless attempt to replace enfeebled religion with an intellectual reason for enduring society when self-interest fails’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988: 77).24 In de Sade’s novel Juliette, the heroine is a cruel, criminal, sexually indiscriminating libertine. The book is filled with descriptions of atrocities, which are committed in the spirit of l’art pour l’art. Horkheimer and Adorno do not consider Juliette a victim of an unsublimated or regressed libido. Her appreciation of regression is intellectual, amor intellectualis diaboli: the joy of defeating civilization with its own weapons. In Juliette, Kant’s Stoic ideal of apatheia, ‘indifference to passions’, turns into another kind of apathy, namely moral indifference, claim Horkheimer and Adorno. The lack of moral substance is covered up by bustling activity. The organization of the game, the plan, takes on a life of its own, and rationality indwells with it. The system is one of aimless instrumentality, of pure functionality, which turns emotional life into a cynically manufactured commodity.25 The result is a widening gap between official and unofficial versions, between the veiled Janus face and its naked counterpart. In this situation, many will accept the notion that the will to power is behind everything. When the first post-Second World War generation came of age in various parts of the world, some of its members wanted to break with cynicism by removing the divide between official and unofficial concepts and practices. This meant collapsing the public and the private into one another. As already mentioned, in Germany the so-called generational conflict of the 1960s had the additional dimension of the younger generation wanting to call their parents’ generation to account for their involvement or connivance with the Nazi regime. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, which was an attempt to understand fascism, was one of the books that circulated in Germany’s radical scene (in a pirate edition, of course). The Frankfurt School’s synthesis of Freudian and Marxian perspectives enabled members of the New Left to connect their private family histories to Germany’s Nazi past and to a structural critique of West German society. The problematization of the relationship between the private and the political became a hallmark of the New Left. If the theories of Marx, Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno were right, the naked truth was buried not just at the structural level of politics but at the level of the socially constructed psyche as well. The revolutionaries need to revolutionize themselves; the personal is political and politics are personal. From the previous vignette we could glean the limits of self-liberation under conditions of a self that is politicized. A nagging question, put by de Sade, Horkheimer and Adorno, is whether the fact that self-liberation is limited must lead to enlightened false consciousness. In the final part of this chapter, this question, as well as the threads from the other vignettes, will be connected with one another and with the topic of the cosmopolitan.

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Conclusion: Aporia To summarize: the origins of the cosmopolitan concept can probably be found in the ideological debates of Greek antiquity and not in Indian transcendentalism. These debates were political in an archaic sense. They turned on the relationship between human nature, divine order, public opinion and social life. In the debates of the time, the relationships between self and world, self and other and self and self were hopelessly entangled with one another. The ancient configuration of the cosmopolitan must be placed in this context; it must be understood in terms of self-liberation. The Cynic practice of self-liberation was pregnant with the paradox of self-objectification: self-liberation requires self-discipline, which splits the self into master and disciple, into subject and object. The self became an object for itself with a view to dissolving it in a cosmic order in which all animals – including human animals – exist in a state of perfect self-unawareness. The ultimate goal of the first cosmopolitans seems to have been to abolish the self in order to become one with the world. In the age of Enlightenment and international relations, the cosmopolitan was nationalized. Kant started from an original position in which the self claimed its place in the world, from which it was separated, in which it was not quite at home. This world, Kant interpreted in terms of natural philosophy: it was from the material conditions of our planet that one could derive the cosmopolitan right of ‘everything to everyone’. Kant thought it necessary, however, to subordinate this right to existing property relations. The cosmopolitan principle of the right to the surface of the planet was reduced to a right to hospitality, association and asylum. These limitations are also at the heart of the social typology that anthropology adopted from the sociologies of Simmel, Merton and Gouldner. Here, the cosmopolitan is encapsulated by a particular metaphysics of sociality. Human beings are said to fall into one of two categories: they are either cosmopolitans or locals. The cosmopolitan resembles Simmel’s stranger, who arrives from the outside and stays on the inside without relinquishing her outward-orientation. In Ulf Hannerz’s (1990) reading of this typology, the cosmopolitan is a collector of worlds, a connoisseur of cultural variation, whereas the local inhabits the cultural worlds which the cosmopolitan savours. This definition would seem to confirm the conviction that cosmopolitans are to locals as members of the elite are to subalterns. A number of anthropologists consequently tried to demonstrate that cosmopolitan engagements with the social world are not a matter of privilege but of aspirations and practices. Anyone is a potential cosmopolitan, so to speak. By and large, then, anthropology takes cosmopolitanism to be a relationship between self and other, not between self and world (in the sense of cosmos or planet) or self and self. With few exceptions (e.g., Rapport 1997, 2010), anthropologists work within a metaphysics that is essentially social. It would lead too far to try to disentangle the strands of this metaphysics. Suffice it to say that the European Enlightenment, by deposing the divine puppet master, turned the

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social (as well as ethics) into a first philosophy. The New Left was moved by this very metaphysics: human existence appeared to consist of social relations, in particular class relations or, rather, relations between socially defined groups. Eventually, however, critical thinking led to a quest for authenticity and social metaphysics developed into the relationship between a socially constructed self and a utopian self. Part of the New Left proceeded from the notion that, in order to change the world, one had to liberate the bourgeois self from itself. Inevitably, all the paradoxes of self-liberation surfaced as the members of K2 engaged in the knotty exercise of making one’s self an object for itself (and others) while at the same time attempting to be one’s true (more or less pre-social) self. The Marquis de Sade might have found pleasure in observing the K2 analytical group sessions. The combination of confessionalism and polymorphous perversion might have delighted him. Sade could have agreed with the members of K2 that to unfetter the self one needs to overcome socially instilled inhibitions. The difference between the romantic wing of the New Left, of which K2 was a constitutive part, and Sade is the latter’s creed that the will to power is everything and that we therefore should relish it. In a similar fashion, the enlightened false consciousness of cynical realism, far from being a statement of facts, which it pretends to be, exudes sadomasochistic pleasure in domination and subordination. Faced with the cynicism of contemporary public management doctrines – theorized by anthropologists in terms of ‘audit culture’ (e.g., Strathern 2000) – we, as anthropologists, public intellectuals and citizens, no longer can be content with deconstructing and unveiling power relations. A way forward may be to focus on the relationship between self and world through the prism of ‘the cosmopolitan’, rather than to carry on working within a web of social metaphysics. Social conventions and semantic structures are ‘naturally artificial’ (to use Helmuth Plessner’s phrase). Two contradictory conclusions can be drawn from this observation: on the one hand, human beings are, once and for all, thrown into a world not of their own making, and the only reasonable perspective we can adopt is one of comparing cultural universes; on the other, human beings are capable of feeling estranged from social conventions and cultural meanings, and they are able to cultivate this sense of strangeness towards any community and cosmology. While the former conclusion prompts us to stick with routine ethnography, the latter hints at the limits of community and cosmology. It may encourage us to venture beyond social metaphysics to an investigation of the non-social dimensions of self–world relationships. While the source of the human self is necessarily cultural and social (and biological), the sources of estrangement from community and cosmology remain peculiarly uncharted. The original cosmopolitanism of Diogenes can serve as a historical illustration of strangeness cultivated and of self-liberation’s paradoxes. In a world stained by enlightened false consciousness, the cultivation of cosmopolitan estrangement has the potential of becoming both a key research topic and a methodological perspective.

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Notes

This chapter has benefited from comments and suggestions by Ulf Hannerz, Gudrun Dahl, Naoko Miyaji, Nigel Rapport and the editors, none of whom should be held accountable for my errors and views. I wish to thank the Institute for the Study of Global Issues at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, for inviting me as visiting professor in the spring and summer of 2009, and for thus providing me with ample time to, among other things, write this chapter. I also want to acknowledge the financial support by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond that made my research on cosmopolitanism possible in the first place. All translations are my own.

  1. See Stade (2007a) for a discussion of the meanings of kosmopolites.   2. As will become apparent, these vignettes are inscriptions rather than ethnographic/historical accounts.   3. Greek words are written without diacritics throughout the chapter.   4. This genre is called spoudogeloion, ‘seriocomic’: see Kindstrand (1976: 47–48) on spoudogeloion.   5. Those familiar with Christian teachings will recognize this kind of Cynic spirit from sayings ascribed to Jesus: ‘Look at the birds of the air…Consider the lilies of the field’ (Matt. 6: 25–34) and ‘Consider the ravens … Consider the lilies’ (Luke 12: 24–27).   6. The Hegelian idea of ancient Greek culture’s ‘self-sameness’ or ‘true spirit’, in which individuality and morality (or the social order) are identical, is an unjustified philosophical and historical simplification.   7. The longest fragment of Onesiscritus’ writings depicts this particular encounter. It can be found in the standard collection of ancient text fragments (the Jacoby) as FGrH 134.   8. They always reckoned with the irreconcilable contradiction between word and world.  9. See, e.g., his Metaphysik der Sitten, § 16: ‘Alle Menschen sind ursprünglich in einem Gesammt=Besitz des Bodens der ganzen Erde (communio fundi originaria)’ (‘The territory of the entire Earth is originally the common possession of all human beings [communio fundi originaria]’). Kant clarifies that this statement should not be misinterpreted as referring to some myth of primeval communism (communio primaeva), which he declares to be an invention that presupposes the existence of an original contract in which everyone agreed to abandon any claim to property. If anything, it is taking possession (apprehensio) that is primeval, according to Kant. 10. Kant considers the world as a single place, which is a prime example of what Roland Robertson calls ‘globality’ (see, e.g., Robertson 1992, 2001, 2004). 11. See, e.g., Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten, § 43 and 62 on the natural conditions of cosmopolitanism. 12. See Stade (2007b, 2007c) for anthropological approaches to cosmopolitanism. 13. Germany’s SDS should not be confused with the American SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). 14. The full title of Reich’s work is Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf: Zur sozialistischen Umstrukturierung des Menschen (‘Sexuality in the cultural struggle: on the socialist restructuring of the human being’). The book was published in English as The Sexual Revolution (1945). 15. This episode is recounted in one of the primary historical sources for this time period, Bookhagen et al. (1969), a report on the K2 authored by its members that includes original log entries and media excerpts from the K2 period. 16. As a junior member of the New Left (at the time of the log entries I was fifteen and only loosely affiliated with one of the Berlin communes in my Kreuzberg neighbourhood) I was constantly made aware of my Hemmungen. I worked hard to overcome them by trying to emulate K.B., one of the adult male members of the movement. He would sit down and use the toilet with the door wide open, massage the breast of his girl friend while talking to me, and eat everything that he picked out of his nose in public. At one point he asked me if I could help him seduce my mother.

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17. When a film, recording K2 sessions, was presented to a Swedish audience, everyone was certain that the K2 members were under the influence of drugs (Bookhagen et al. 1969: 265). 18. Dutschke’s life was saved, but he suffered brain damage and never quite recovered. Eleven years later he drowned in a bath tub during an epileptic seizure caused by his brain injuries. Bachmann, his attacker, committed suicide in his prison cell on 24 February 1970. 19. Today, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate is the global equivalent of Springer’s media empire. Jürgen Habermas’s first major work, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), published in English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), was a reaction to the subversion of German public culture by the Springer media. 20. See in particular Benhabib (2004) on the conflict between universal rights and political community. 21. See Navaro-Yashin (2002) on this paradox in the ethnographic context of the reproduction of the Turkish state in everyday life. The neo-conservative movement that was inspired by the writings of Leo Strauss is a recent historical example. It is important to note, however, that cynical realism is a widely diffused mode of analysis and governance. 22. The book was published in English as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). 23. What is translated as ‘immaturity’, here and in many other places, is in the German original Unmündigkeit, which refers to the state of being under legal age, that is, of not being mature enough to make one’s own decisions. 24. See the debate between Nigel Rapport and myself on, among other things, the issue of cosmopolitanism’s metaphysical foundations (Rapport 2007a, 2007b; Stade 2007b, 2007c). 25. This has been taken as a sign of continuity between Kant and de Sade (see Lacan 1966). In Žižek’s (n.d.) words, we do not only find sadism in Kant –‘the Kantian Law is a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands’ – but Kantian ethics in Sade (evil accomplished out of principle).

References Benhabib, S. 2004. ‘Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-determination and Cosmopolitan Norms’, Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Retrieved 19 November 2009 from: http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/volume25/benhabib_2005.pdf ——— 1999. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bookhagen, C., et al. 1969. Kommune 2: Versuch der Revolutionierung des bürgerlichen Individuums. Berlin: Oberbaumverlag. Brandt, R. 1982. ‘Das Erlaubnisgesetz, oder: Vernunft und Geschichte in Kants Rechtslehre’, in R. Brandt (ed.), Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung. Berlin: de Gruyter. Diouf, M. 2000. ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture 12(3): 679–702. Flikschuh, K. 2000. Kant and Modern Political Philosophy. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press. Gouldner, A. 1957. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles, I’, Administrative Science Quarterly 2(3): 281–306. ——— 1958. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles, II’, Administrative Science Quarterly 2(4): 444–80. Habermas, J. 1962. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hannerz, U. 1990. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society 7: 237–51. Horkheimer, M., and T. Adorno. 1988 [1947]. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kant, I. 1784. ‘Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung?’ Berlinische Monatsschrift, Dezemberheft.

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Kindstrand, J.F. 1976. Bion of Borysthenes: A Collection of the Fragments with Introduction and Commentary. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Lacan, J. 1966. ‘Kant avec Sade’, in Écrits. Paris: Seuil, pp.765–90. Merton, R. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rapport, N. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge. ——— 2007a. ‘A Cosmopolitan Turn?’ Social Anthropology 15(2): 223-226. ——— 2007b. ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Morality’, Social Anthropology 15(2): 230–32. ——— 2010. Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification. Oxford: Berghahn. Reich, R. 1991. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-first Century Capitalism. New York: Knopf. Reich, W. 1936. Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf: Zur sozialistischen Umstrukturierung des Menschen. Copenhagen: Sexpol Verlag. ——— 1970 [1933]. Charakteranalyse. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. ——— 2001. ‘Globalization Theory 2000+: Major Problematics’, in G. Ritzer and B. Smart (eds.), Handbook of Social Theory. London: Sage, pp. 458-71. ——— 2004. ‘Globality’, in N. Smelser and P. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 6254-–58. Simmel, G. 1890. Über soziale Differenzierung: Soziologische und psychologische Untersuchungen. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. ——— 1908. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Sloterdijk, P. 1983. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stade, R. 2007a. ‘Cosmos and Polis, Past and Present’, Theory, Culture and Society 24(7/8): 295–98. ——— 2007b. ‘Cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitanism in Anthropology’, Social Anthropology 25(2): 226–29. ——— 2007c. ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism in Anthropology’, Social Anthropology 25(2): 232–34. Strathern, M. (ed.) 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. New York: Routledge. Wardle, H. 2000. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. Lampeter: Mellen. Werbner, P. 1999. ‘Global Pathways: Working-class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology 7(1): 17–35. Žižek, S. n.d. ‘Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple’. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://www.egs. edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/kant-and-sade-the-ideal-couple/.

Chapter 2

The Capacities of Anyone Accommodating the Universal Human Subject as Value and in Space

Nigel Rapport

K

Introduction What is a human being capable of achieving, and what is he or she liable to suffer? I am determined to say a human being is capable of creating worlds; and he or she is liable to suffer subjection within the worlds of others and to subject others to his or her own. ‘Determined to say’, because this abstract formulation calls into question structuralist and post-structuralist tendencies in anthropology, and posits existential capacities of human being beyond the particularities of social, cultural and historical contexts. Philosophical voices have been less circumspect in this regard, as have literary ones. ‘A whole universe can be said to be destroyed each time a human being dies’, is how Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977: 3) sum up a metaphysic they see as essentially Kantian, while for Nietzsche, ‘The individual is something quite new which creates new things, something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own’ (Nietzsche 1968: §767). More personally phrased, William Blake knew of himself that, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s’ (Blake 1997: Plate 10, Line 20). I feel comfortable anthropologically, nevertheless, with formulations of this existential or ‘cosmopolitan’ kind. They seem both morally necessary and empirically justifiable and I want to continue outlining what might be known as the capacities of Anyone, the global human actor, the mortal individual. The chapter has four main parts. Having considered what might be understood to be the capacities of Anyone, I venture a depiction of goodness as it might be practised in a humane space: a refraining from visiting one’s desires on others such that Anyone might come into their own. In a third part, I explore a possible

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mathematics of morality founded on the number one: on the absolute value of Anyone’s individual life. Finally, I draw briefly on recent research among porters (orderlies) in a Scottish hospital, in particular aspects of the life story of Oliver, in order to give to the above an ethnographic colouration. ‘Ethnography’, in Lisette Josephides’s recent phrasing, may be depicted as a ‘sum total of life stories’ (Josephides 2008: 222). Ernest Gellner wrote that: ‘our moral crisis is also the fruit of our liberation from want and tyranny. Our predicament is to work out the social options of our affluent and disenchanted condition. We have no choice about this’ (Gellner 1995: 8). Gellner was directing his remarks primarily at social science. To take up that challenge is to imagine a cosmopolitan project for anthropology that recognizes the life of every individual human being as an end in itself. In every individual life is also instantiated the human: there is a universal relationship to be drawn out between the microcosmic situations of everyday life (individuals as members of a polis) and the macrocosmic nature of the human condition (individuals as member of a cosmos). This chapter is an engagement with Gellner’s ‘predicament’ inasmuch as it takes global morality to be a pressing and current anthropological concern. How best to allow for the emotional and intellectual life-journey of the individual actor in social milieux? How might one inscribe, within an everyday rule of law, the duties and dues, the humane norms and spaces, of the fulfilled individual life?1 A cosmopolitan ethic is one which would secure Anyone universal recognition.

Anyone’s Capacities A beginning is provided by Sartre’s aphorism: ‘existence precedes essence’ (1975: 348). This is such an important prescription because it contains a recognition that human consciousness and activity are never reducible to notions of givens, to preceding conditions or to extant social structures and identities – to that which, in other words, is often anthropologically supposed to determine the conditions of their possibility. Human consciousness and activity will always go beyond the essence or identity of what is or has been. Sartre’s thinking moved between more existentialist and more Marxist formulations, but notionally, to a Marxist thesis – ‘Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ – Sartre (1968: 87) responds that while individuals make their history on the foundation of prior conditions, it is they and not inhuman forces who do the making. Moreover, they do so in terms of their own relations with, their own attendances to and interpretations of, those conditions. Lived experience is characterized by a dialectical irreducibility, Sartre elaborates. Individuals are not determined by prior or extraneous conditions but are always in active relationship with them: the experiencing of these conditions is neither pre-

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conditioned nor passive. Indeed, the dialectic is such that the conditions and the experience achieve a certain form and meaning at one and the same time: the conditions are only what they are experienced to be, while the individual self emerges out of the act of experiencing the world. Ego and environing world are involved in a mutual becoming: ‘Without the world there is no self-ness, no person; without self-ness, without the person, there is no world’ (ibid.: 104). The individual amounts to a perennially unique interplay of the given and the experienced: a unique synthetic unity of experienced environment. This gives human life a characteristic form: an emerging and a going beyond. As Rollo May phrases it: ‘World is never something static, something merely given which the person then “accepts” or “adjusts to” or “fights”. It is rather a dynamic pattern which, so long as I possess self-consciousness, I am in the process of forming and designing’ (May 1958: 60). The interplay between the given and the interpreted thus has two paramount features: an openness at one time, and an openness over time. Since there is an indeterminate relationship between conditions and their being experienced, there is no saying how the individual interpretation will progress. Meaning is produced in the phenomenal context of particular lives, while the interpretation of context is itself individual in provenance; contextualization amounts to a ‘personalization’ of the world (Rapport 1999). Moreover, individuals may produce (interpretations of ) environing conditions which are multiple and transitory and find themselves acting in a shifting mosaic of realities, a diversity of identities and world-views (Rapport 1993). Self and world alike are never finished or brought to a close; they are always in the making. Just as there is no externally predetermined selfhood so there is no necessary internal consistency regarding future selfhood; there is, instead, a radical freedom to make selfhood over and again. One corollary of this is that any fixity, habit or routine in the world is something which has been achieved and which must continue to be worked at so as to be maintained. Even when the routine takes the form of socio-cultural institutions – social structures and systems of classificatory identity – there is no stability in the latter beyond their ongoing recognition and continuing employment by individual interpreters. A second corollary, however, is that even where such institutions are aspects of environment that are maintained alike by the acts of interpretation of different individuals, there is no saying that the meanings each draws from the experience of those institutions will show any consistency or commonality (Rapport 1997). There remains, as Michael Jackson phrases it, an ‘ambiguity at the heart of all social existence: the indeterminate relationship between the eventfulness and flux of one’s own life and the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition’ (Jackson 1989: 33). The habitual is an ambiguous achievement. In the making of their circumstances people imagine, interpret, negotiate with, protest against and endure prior conditions in complex and individual ways. And while part of their world-making and sense-making may involve the use by individuals of given and conventional cultural forms – languages, behaviours, institutions – still, these are properly viewed as ‘instrumentalities, not finalities’ (ibid.: 1).

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They are means towards individuals’ diverse, progressing ends: objects animated by diverse world-views and individual life-projects.

Capacities and Power The capacities of human consciousness and activity to determine individual worlds speak of power. Power can be conceived of existentially as an inherent attribute of individuals who, through their ongoing activity-in-the-world, create and recreate meaningful environments in which they live. On this view, individuals are discrete centres of energy. Their existential power is at once something metabolic, something pertaining to individuals as embodied physical organisms, and something intelligent, pertaining to the capacity to sense and make sense. It is a drive and an assimilation. The extant is taken up and animated as means to express individual interpretations; the givenness of the world is transmogrified into individual design. Already in the womb – the body developing and acting – individuals begin to become distinctly themselves, to accrete identities and personalities. Physical movement is key here, and interpretation of what the senses relay to be the results of this movement. What develops is a personal environment in which individual minds dwell, what James Fernandez refers to as our human ‘phenomenological subjectivity’ (Fernandez 1992: 127, 134–35). From the moment the individual energy source begins moving in its environment and becoming itself (its selves), a unique history of embodiment, of worldly engagement, unfolds and grows which compasses its own logics, its own habits, its own ways of doing and being, and its own purposes. Of course, the individual organism plus its environment is not alone in the world. It is discrete but not alone. It is embarked upon a distinct journey of activity-in-the-world (-in-its-world) and sense-making, but it is surrounded by a plurality of other things-in-the-world, inorganic and organic, some engaged in comparable journeys to its own. On this view, social science might be broadly described as the study of the effects that energetic individual things-in-the-world have upon one another. This is a far from singular or easily generalizable matter (which is why a respect for the individual case goes to the very heart of social science as a project). Since each individual centre-of-energy is driven by its own metabolism, within its own embodiment, along its own historical course of activity-in-the-world, how each will react to other things is not determinable; more specifically, it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict whether and how one human being will affect another human being with whom it comes into contact. This is so for three reasons: firstly, because each is set upon its own life-course, each is engaged in interpreting worldviews and in furthering life-worlds whose direction and logic have been distinct from the moment each began; secondly, because each engages with others from the position of outsider: each is dependent on bodily sense-making apparatuses which are discrete and distinctive to itself, which imbue it with its own perspective on the world and no other; and thirdly, because the sense-making procedures of each is

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characterized by a creativity – a ‘randomness’ even (Rapport 2001) – which makes their generation of perspectives unpredictable even to themselves. An appropriate way to conceive of human social life, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests, is a meeting between different individuals’ ‘native force’ as mediated by the habitual forms of social conventions, cultural traditions, physical conditions: ‘Life itself is a mixture of power and form’ (Emerson 1981: 280). A ‘prosperous’ social life, he offers, results from a ‘proportionate’ meeting between individuals’ intrinsic force and those surface conventions, traditions and forms which act as both buffers and points of contact between themselves and others: ‘We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them’ (ibid.: 280).

Interlude: Oliver in Conversation at Constance Hospital In a crowded porters’ lodge at Constance Hospital in the Scottish city of Easterneuk, orderlies Oliver and Ron, Dave, Arthur and others are relaxing between portering jobs, and enjoying some good-natured banter as they wait for the kettle to boil: OLIVER: So which slag are you seeing now, Ron? RON: It’s your mum, again, Ollie! [People laugh] DAVE: I remember phoning Ollie’s home once and I said: ‘Can I speak to “the bairn”?’ And straight off his mum shouts: ‘Oliver! It’s for you’! [More laughter] RON: So have you been back to the Eldorado [Nightclub] yet, Ollie? OLIVER: [embarrassed] ... I’m not allowed back! I’m known as ‘The one with the bitten ear’. And I’m not to be let in again. Banned! As if it’s my fault! [Oliver has recently recovered from a pub fight where a drunken assailant attacked his ear] RON: I remember not being let into Reilly’s, by this fat hunk of a bouncer: bald guy. Know who I mean, Dave? Fred? [People nod] I wasn’t drunk, as it happened, but the bald bastard said I was and I couldn’t come in. So I started going on at him: ‘Ya bald cunt!’; ‘Ya fat cunt!’; ‘Ya baldy!’; and then ran off down the street … Then recently I saw him in A and E [Accident and Emergency] – and he’s a really big bloke! [People grin] I was down there waiting for some job – someone in the Fracture Clinic – and I was really hoping Baldy didn’t spot me … Then, I sees him talking to Bob Hume and I think maybe he’s making inquiries about me. [He laughs] FRED: And? RON: No; nothing happened. I don’t think he remembered me. OLIVER: That’s the guy that wouldn’t let me into Reilly’s ’cos he said I wasn’t twentyfive. DAVE: And he was right! OLIVER: [laughing] Gut bucket! So I thought ‘Fuck it!’ and I went to the Eldorado where my friends were anyway. ARTHUR: This woman in the queue at Reilly’s asked Ollie how old he was and he said ‘nineteen’, and she said she had a son older than that and I told her she probably had knickers older than that – OLIVER: – Aye, and you’re probably wearing them! [People laugh] ARTHUR: She was not impressed!

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We shall return to Oliver and his workmates at a later point in the chapter and consider his life at Constance Hospital in more depth.

Anyone’s Space One way of summarizing what we have heard from Sartre and others, concerning a distinction between existence and essence, is to say that individuals are more than their particular membership of social and cultural groupings at particular times (cf. Rapport 2001: 205). They have an existence, a power and potentiality, which sets them apart from extant social arrangements – from all current habits and identities. Temporarily, superficially, they meet others by way of these latter; intrinsically, these meetings of the moment do not capture the true individuality of human life: its capacity to create meaningful environments for itself and to go on doing so. What rights or duties might be said to inhere to this individual life, lived amid and among others’ lives but intrinsically distinct from them? How might individuals’ capacities for world-making be best served by social arrangements – not now treated as determining conditions but as facilitators of individual passage? One would assure individuals freedom to enjoy the fruits of their creativity and to avoid subjection to others’ agendas. This is a very different starting point from a Durkheimian one, say, which ties the moral to the conventional: what is moral is synonymous with social reproduction and an eradication of social ‘pathologies’. One would rather conceive of the moral as a kind of space existing beyond social arrangements and cultural traditions and allowing for exit from them: a personal preserve which individuals are assured for themselves as (makers of ) themselves. Iris Murdoch (1970: 46–77) makes a good beginning, I find, when she suggests defining ‘goodness’ less in terms of ‘doing good to others’ than ‘refraining from doing others harm’: abstaining from visiting one’s desires upon them. If goodness per se were ‘sovereign’ – rather than goodness being something tied to existing social conventions – then a moral milieu would entail arrangements for facilitating individuals’ ‘coming into their own’. One cannot foresee what the latter phrase might entail in regard to another life – one does not even know it substantially in regard to one’s own – but one can hope to behave in such a way that each life is afforded the space it needs.

Goodness and Space Virginia Woolf (1963) famously campaigned for ‘a room of her own’, where a woman might find that space away from the demands of domesticity in which periodically to know herself, recreate herself. Stanley Spencer likewise, fleeing from the press of material demands and a censorious public, as well as the suffocation of marriage, insisted that in fulfilling the creativity that mediated his life: ‘My chief

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and only occupation is with my own thoughts. An empty room, a fire in the grate, are my chief need’ (quoted in Collis 1962: 15). The core issue here, however, is not physical space per se. In order to make an ethical argument concerning the sovereignty of a personal preserve in which individuals may come into their own, it should not be necessary to enter into a debate concerning material resources. At least not directly. One wants, rather, to consider that symbolic space – intellectual, emotional, even physiological – in which an individual can be ‘at home’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998). The notion of Lebensraum as a physical need or demand is, indeed, something one should expressly wish to avoid. The seventy years since the claims to institutional sovereignty of Nazism have seen an explosion in similar, collective identity politics and demands for sacrosanct (even ‘cleansed’) homelands – whether on the basis of ethnicity or religiosity. These years have also seen global demographic growth and movement to the extent that conceiving of one’s space in symbolic rather than extensive, physical terms has become as necessary for individuals as for nations, ethnicities or churches. We are witness to a ‘cultural compression’ (Paine 1992), a piling up of socio-cultural boundaries – ritual, residential, economic – within the ‘same’ time and space, to the extent that for individuals to travel within their ‘home’ territory is increasingly to encounter a confusion of claimed difference. As E.M. Forster reflected: The world is very full of people – appallingly full; it has never been so full before, and they are tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn’t know and some of them one doesn’t like; doesn’t like the colour of their skins, say, or the shape of their noses, or the way they blow them or don’t blow them … Don’t try to love them: you can’t, you’ll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate them. (Forster 1972: 55)

I like the physiological terms in which Forster framed notions of distaste and of toleration. What is called for, in part, it would seem to me, is a conceptualization of the space in which the individual is at home – the room one accords to oneself and to others as a personal preserve, a ‘home territory’ – and conceiving this in terms of bodily routines. Morally one attends to the sacrosanct sovereignty of the mortal individual body. Home is then mobile, and as compact as the individual’s body. Home is also fluid and as capable of variation and development as is that individual body: at exercise or repose, in different mood and dress, at different moments of the life course. John Berger nicely captures this theme when he finds home located in, ‘words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat’: ‘no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived’ (Berger 1984: 64). On this view, an individual’s home space is imaged as a kind of symbolic bubble: a subjective space of body-plus-habitus, encompassing world-views, bodily routines and ‘lifeprojects’ (Rapport 2003: 215–39). The bubble accompanies one as one moves – through space and through one’s life course – and it is an environment which one rightfully commands – over which one is recognized as retaining sovereign control.

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If home space is conceived of in this way as a kind of extended bodily sensorium, there is the opportunity to rethink physical locatedness as a kind of ‘mutual guesthood’. That is, one refrains from demarcating, in any permanent or absolute way, ownership of physical space, its ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. Instead one imagines a reciprocality and a seriality to these roles such that no individual need be conceived of as absolutely ‘at home’ in a place, or as absolutely ‘away’. Who is ‘at home’ or ‘away’ is a matter of the nature and purpose of particular conventional exchanges rather than absolute belongings. Alternatively, the social conventions are ‘at home’ in a physical location while their individual incumbents are transitory: the statuses of hosts and guests are situational and alternating. This is what George Steiner (1997: 327) describes as the dignified, humane return one may expect from investing one’s identity not in physical territory – or the fixity of any earth-bound relationship – but in the physical finitude of one’s being. It entails, he suggests mapping out the ‘native ground’ of truth in human life not in terms of space but of time. Home is a personal truth which one carries within, and whose identity one continues to fashion during the time of one’s life.

The Space of Social Life I have been arguing for the need to consider the sacrosanct space of a sovereign individual life in symbolic terms, and moral social arrangements as those that facilitate transitions (a ‘coming into one’s own’) whether in physical transit through space or through the life-course. Belonging is conceived of here not in terms of mutually exclusive, singular identifications with territory, nor in terms of absolute membership of certain social roles (insider and outsider, host and guest), but in terms of their serial adoption. Let me recall Emerson’s suggestion that one considers a ‘proportionate meeting’ between the forms of social life and the ‘native force’ of individuals that animates those forms: the surface conventions act as buffers and points of contact between individuals’ interpretive activity-within-the-world. The ‘prosperous’ social life, to repeat Emerson’s counsel, derives from artfully skating on the social surfaces. It is not far-fetched, I shall say, to consider this kind of superficial meeting the basis of a moral social contract. To begin to justify this claim let me rehearse the insights of Anthony Wallace (1961, 1970), which concerned social space as a kind of ‘organization of diversity’. Wallace’s opening premise was that a routinization of relations in a social milieu need not call for psychological uniformity, for individuals sharing a homogenous ‘cultural’ character: ‘threaded like beads on a string of common motives’ (1970: 24). Individuals may interact in a stable and mutually rewarding fashion, organize themselves socially into orderly and changing groupings in spite of their having radically different interests, habits, personalities, values and beliefs: despite there being no one cognitive map that members share. Indeed, cognitive non uniformity may be a necessary condition of making social coordination possible; if all participants were to share a common knowledge of their social arrangements,

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or indeed the burden of knowing their differences, then their routinization may not be viable. What was called for to maintain orderly relations was what Wallace dubbed ‘equivalence structures’ (1961: 153): sets of equivalent behavioural expectancies such that individual participants had a capacity for mutual prediction. Individual A knows that when she perpetrates action a1 then individual B, in all likelihood, will perpetrate action b1, which will lead to her doing a2, and so on. Meanwhile, individual B knows that when he perpetrates action b1, individual A responds with a1, which he follows with b2. But individuals A and B need not concur on when precisely the interaction begins and whose action is perpetrated first – on who acts and who reacts – never mind on what those actions mean.2 In short, individuals’ behaviours could be aggregated into reliable and joint systems by appreciating that under certain circumstances others’ behaviour was predictable and could be confidently interrelated with actions of their own. This formulation of social relations, Wallace suggested, fitted not only interactions between, for example, bus drivers and passengers whose interests in avoiding traffic jams may be very different, but also between different social groupings (bosses and workers) who may not share ideologies, and between different cultural groupings – Native Americans and Whites, trading and skirmishing for years without mutual comprehension. Nevertheless, what the bus driver, passengers and all the others did share was something very precise, Wallace was mindful, and something sturdy too. Their interests in keeping to timetables overlapped, their motives in riding the bus were complementary, and they possessed detailed, mutual behavioural expectancies. Moreover, the relations were standardized between any driver and any passenger within the urban, regional, national or global system. Wallace (1970: 24) called this a ‘contract’: something where the equivalent roles were specified and available for implementation to any parties whose motives made their adoption promising. And we might extend this to parents and children, spouses, lovers and friends, whose interactional routines, too, may be characterized by ‘beliefs and blindnesses’ (Compton-Burnett 1969: 30): whose cognitive worlds were uniquely private (Rapport 1993). Let me restate what is at issue here. We are considering social arrangements that might safeguard a kind of moral space that locates individuals beyond any existing relationship and identity such that they might be free to fulfil their capacities for self-creation, to ‘come into their own’. Here are individuals as ‘mutual guests’ (Steiner) of ‘behavioural contracts’ (Wallace), in social and physical spaces to which they do not lay absolute claims of ownership because they are ‘at home’ in bodily routines (Berger) and life-projects (Rapport). Here is the moral goodness (Murdoch) of granting sovereignty to individuals’ personal environments, their subjective phenomenologies (Fernandez). It is a paradoxical social creature whose form we are considering, then: one that will safeguard a moral vision (and give on to the space of individual lives) which exists always beyond itself. Is it a chimera? I believe not. Wallace (1970) is very down to earth in his description of social milieux as ‘organizations of

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diversity’: home to ‘equivalent structures’ which manage the coming together of radically different individual lives by way of superficially coincident expectations concerning each other’s behaviour. The ‘friendly ambiguities of language’ everywhere lends an ‘economy’ to interpersonal relations, in Edward Sapir’s (1956: 153) terms, such that interlocutors may interact routinely with one another even though the world-views each construes may be as different as though one were operating in a world of Turkish traditionalism and one an Italian. One social calculus can contain paradoxical dualities – indeed, multiplicities. Conventions are animated by contrariety. A seemingly collective project of habitual behaviours compasses any number of discrete and contrary, individual life-projects: social arrangements may, in short, facilitate lives beyond themselves, beyond what superficially seems to be their object. Finally, it is appropriate to be mindful of how longstanding a practice it has been to consider existing social arrangements as giving on to a moral space beyond themselves. It has been, indeed, a staple of modernist social science. In existing social arrangements – feudalism, capitalism – a Marxist dialectical materialism claims a necessary precursor to the radical otherness of the risen proletariat and communism. From existing social arrangements, Nietzsche plots a possible future which is home to the ‘overman’. The ‘honourable’ state of ‘homelessness’, he wrote, of living a ‘nomadic life’ between physical homes, material goods and relations, contains the promise of a general future culture of cosmopolitanism (Nietzsche 1994: §475). ‘Good Europeans’ can be ‘children of the future’ who see beyond present social identities of an absolute exclusionary kind – traditionalist, nationalistic – to an overman whose business will more explicitly entail the ongoing project of individual self-fulfilment (Nietzsche 2001: §377). In existing social arrangements, according to the liberal tradition – John Stuart Mill as well as Emerson and Forster – individual freedom and creativity, the gratuitous and the new can be made legally sacrosanct.

Anyone’s Value Some have argued that individuality can never exist as an ongoing collective project since this is a contradiction in terms. For George Kateb (1991), therefore, citizenship must remain an episodic state: ‘the polis’ of ‘a people’ must be regarded as an accidental, voluntary, temporary and purpose-specific aggregation if we are to avoid notions of social groups as continuous and natural, discrete, closed, certain and fixed. Nevertheless, Kateb continues, liberal governments can provide certain advantageous conditions: ‘democratic individuality grows … out of a culture in which individual personal and political rights are systematically recognized and appreciated (ibid.: 185). In other words, one can educate for a state beyond adherence and inhibition, for individual identities which are formulated and anchored beyond social and cultural absolutes, zealotry and bigotry. To educate for demo-

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cratic individuality would be to loosen the hold of ideologues who, ‘[take] an invented group reality for a natural reality and allow it to impose itself, to dictate a logic or pattern that must complete itself ’ (Kateb 1992: 210). The fruits of such an ‘education’ would be that ‘the People’ are only ever seen as a group connected by choice – not the past or blood or faith – in a series of contracts of mutual (but varied) gratification. If lives are admitted to ‘self-governance’, in Kateb’s phrasing, and are their individuals’ own to come into, then they might escape being held accountable to – made invisible or contemptible by – others’ systems of classification and interpretation. Kateb, like Blake before him, or Mill (‘[deny] the despotism of custom’) fears for the liabilities of an individual life enclosed by tradition, status, class, locality or ethnicity: ‘the whole suffocating network of ascribed artificial, or biological but culturally exaggerated, identity’ (Kateb 1991: 188). Kateb would describe selfgovernance as a right: a ‘moral status’ that ‘every individual deserves just by being’ (ibid.: 188). Anyone equally has a life to live and the right to live it, he claims, the right to say and do their own things and to be like others only after some thought and as a choice. Our theoretical discussion so far has dealt with the kinds of social arrangements that might do justice to an individual’s inherent capacities for such self-creation and assure them of symbolic space. There is, however, an ingredient missing. Or one that has not been made sufficiently explicit. Kateb admits as much. More is necessary, he says, for a ‘working society’ than simply claiming self-governance as a right (ibid.: 201). This more, it seems to me, is value: the system of values that raises self-governance, and an individual’s personal preserve, to supreme goods. For it is clear that Iris Murdoch’s definition of goodness, and all that has followed, are at the same time value judgements: estimations of ‘the good life’. This is true, too, of Kateb’s depiction of ‘democratic individuality’, and of his and other liberal critiques of the unreality of the organic collective, the commonweal, the community’s ‘greater good’.3 The liberal vision has been subject to critique in recent decades for a purported myopia in regard to its own ideological nature: its value judgements raised to universal truths. I would begin this section by deliberately drawing attention to liberal projects as values because I think that, notwithstanding, they deliver a way to evaluate the human condition that is universalizable: they recognize a universal truth of the human condition, namely its individual nature. Beginning as value, it is possible nevertheless to accede to truth (Rapport 2005). Liberalism contains a mathematics of value that, I would argue, accords with universal realities of individuality, and realities that morality might everywhere provide for.4 The kind of ‘mathematics’ I refer to can be found in Mill’s nineteenth-century deliberations on liberty (Mill 1963). Witness how Mill juxtaposes the one against the collective whole in the following propositions, and finds reason to furnish ‘oneness’, or singularity or individuality, with protection: The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their

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efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. (ibid.: 138) If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.… The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (ibid.: 142) Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called. (ibid.: 188)

I share the value that Mill espouses in these statements, that there is an intrinsic identity and capacity inherent in Anyone, and that a liberal society will promote the freedom of Anyone to live according to his or her own lights over and against ‘the despotism of custom’ and the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling: ‘the tyranny of the majority’. But my interest is especially in how Mill couches his arguments in a certain mathematical form. The one is to be protected because opinions which originate freely within itself and come to be pursued in its own way are the means not only by which that individual guards its own bodily, mental and spiritual health but also the means by which others – ultimately humankind – now and in future, might advance towards a truth beyond existing conventions. The one is protected because the collectivity is itself a collection of ones – nothing more – and in the nature of the one is lodged the hope of the whole: ‘The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it’ (ibid.: 240). If one values the state of health and progress of humanity then one cannot ignore that of individuals, of whom the whole is composed. Anyone is an instantiation of Everyone. The one represents an absolute value because it embodies the human truth. I find a commensurate mathematics in a tantalizing remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, some one hundred years after Mill: ‘No cry of torment can be greater than the cry of one person’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 45). Human suffering, Wittgenstein seems to say, does not lend itself to a calculus of mathematical aggrandizement. Suffering cannot be given over to a kind of utilitarian moral economy, nor to a massifying and collectivizing mathematics which would enfold the suffering of the individual within the matrix of his or her group, such as is common in communitarian rhetoric of ‘the general good’. The suffering of the individual being represents a kind of absolute, entire of itself. One cannot add together the suffering of

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two people – which would diminish the worth of each alone – because each is an absolute instantiation of the quality or capacity. In Anyone is the whole.5 The difference between Mill and Wittgenstein lies in discursive domain. Mill evaluates the individual amid a political discourse of liberal statehood; Wittgenstein evaluates amid an existential discourse of corporeal well-being. And the difference is perhaps instructive. For the century between Mill and Wittgenstein saw major advances in our understanding of the conditions surrounding the physical, mental and emotional health of the individual human being, in particular the individual nature of his or her biological consciousness (Edelman 1992). Anyone’s mortal embodiment, his or her capabilities for suffering and health, have represented a major part of the knowledge which the sciences of psychology, neurology, biochemistry and genomics have newly delivered to us. The nature of human-individual embodiment – and the false nature of so-called collective super-organisms (the Nazi or Stalinist or Islamist state) – have become ever more apparent. It is appropriate in this circumstance, then, that the focus of liberal effort is upon the individual’s physical embodiment as much as upon his or her political incorporation. A liberal, in Judith Shklar’s recent definition, is one who thinks that ‘cruelty’ is the worst thing that human beings perpetrate against one another (cited in Rorty 1992: xv). One erects a moral code based on the security of the individual’s physical embodiment: his or her being at home in secure bodily routines. Advances in technology now allow us to make interventions – medical, political – at this microsocial level. We pursue a mathematics of value which focuses upon the absoluteness of the individual’s corporeal (physical and mental) well-being as a route to political sovereignty. In what she calls a ‘tactical humanism’, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990: 138) would seem to arrive at a similar position regarding anthropological writing. One must write ‘against culture’, she argues, and other such generalizing, fundamentalist-essentialist conceptualizations – ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’ – and so produce ‘ethnographies of the particular’ (ibid.: 157). These would be precise accounts of the existence of particular individuals in particular times and places – retaining those absolute particularities – and which do not replace actual individualities with categorial objects. It is in the individual not the typical that the human is to be found: ‘we all live in the particular’ (ibid.: 157) and a humanistic anthropology will seek to do justice to the subjectivity of the individual life. The morality of the individual’s personal preserve is imbued with a mathematics of value which recognizes the supremacy of the individual case.

Oliver at Constance Hospital Oliver was 18 when we met, but he looked younger: short, with a spare frame. I think his apparent vulnerability was one of the things that attracted me to him when I, too, began working as a porter at Constance Hospital (see Rapport 2008).

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That, and his guileless manner: an open smile and cheeky remark was how Oliver deflected much of the teasing he attracted from more macho workmates. As a neophyte porter I was told to shadow Oliver on his rounds: he had worked here for two years already, since leaving school. Oliver was doing the specimens run, collecting body samples from all the hospital’s fifty-odd wards (spread along some thirty miles of corridor) and delivering them to the appropriate hospital laboratories for testing. He quite liked doing specimens, Oliver explained to me, because it meant he was his own boss, at least for the four, hour-long lengths of the run, and also he got away from the ‘buckie’ (porters’ lodge) which could get a bit much: ‘all the slagging’ (criticizing or teasing). Everyone got a slagging some time, Oliver hastened to add, as I should have noticed even in my first few days, and it could get a bit tedious being in the buckie all the time. Oliver’s story, however, as I witnessed its unfolding over the ensuing year of my fieldwork, was about him coming into his own in Constance Hospital and its portering sub-community: finding the space to become a far more confident personality – and a slagger himself. Constance Hospital is a large medical facility, part of the British National Health System; it is also one of the major employers in Easterneuk, a Scottish port-city with a history of male under-employment. Porters are medically unskilled, being employed largely for their physical aptitudes as they ferry patients and materièl across the hospital plant. Constance employs nearly 150 porters (all but two being male), ranging in age from 16 to 65. Their status is rather ambiguous in the context of the hospital, and their pay poor; liminal to the hospital’s hierarchy of medical expertise, porters can find themselves reliant on one another for moral support. Some days after Oliver and I have done the specimens run together, I find Albert doing the job. Oliver is off, Albert informs me: ‘He was jumped last night. He’s in Ward 32 with part of his ear bitten off! Waiting for surgery: been in since last night’. I am shocked, appalled, but Albert seems to find it more amusing than anything else. He suggests we go to visit him, as others have done, ‘and slag him a bit’. We soon find Oliver lying on top of his bed, in a hospital gown watching TV. He looks sheepish. Albert teases Oliver more than once about how the incident must have worried his mum, her being woken at 2 AM. ‘Oliver the bairn’, Oliver’s mother and the bitten ear, I soon realize form a triad in terms of which the porters repeatedly tease Oliver. At first I notice Oliver’s hurt and embarrassment. But the badinage is not ill-intentioned, and Oliver appreciates this. On his way home after surgery, Oliver and his mother even make an appearance at the buckie: she hovers at the door looking anxious and worn while he wears a smirk, walking among us, proudly displaying his extensively bandaged ear and inviting comment. The symbolic space which Oliver accrues for himself at Constance has a number of components. First is coming to accept, even enjoy, the public persona which is given him by his workmates: it is a kind of behavioural contract. They tease him about his ear, his size and age, his closeness to his mother; also his taste in clothes. He is a mere apprentice and a nuisance. For instance:

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ARTHUR: God. I’m gonna get eight more hours of shite from this fuckwit?!

Or DUGALD: Oliver could get a job as bouncer at Mothercare. [People laugh] DAVE: Wardy was teasing him before about still having no hair on his dick – Oliver threatened to take down his trousers and show him – and Kevin was saying it wasn’t that Oliver was sweating: he was still wet behind the ears from being born!

Or, as Oliver parades round the buckie in a new silk shirt before leaving for a disco: ARTHUR: No wonder he had his ear bitten off: I’d do it! JOHNSTONE: Poof!

It tends to be the same people who tease Oliver, and I realize it is a way of showing care, part of a relationship characterized by mutual gratification. Oliver likes the ‘Little Muhammad’ label when he puts in a lot of hours overtime; he likes that it is known he was ‘shagging a bird’ – even though she came from a neighbourhood renowned for being ‘full of Micks’. Alongside the teasing is a conveying of significant information: It was a bottle Oliver was hit with, Peter knows, and his skin graft was taken from behind his ear … Oliver won’t press for criminal injury, Albert has heard, because he knows the bloke who did it, but Dugald has already suggested to him he still does a claim for sick pay … Oliver is lucky not to have been bitten on the face, Ian comments, and there is general agreement: a scar there leads to more trouble as folks take it as a sign of your hardness, and always want to challenge you … Arthur wishes Oliver would only drink with people his own age: if he follows the example of older porters, the amounts will ruin his kidneys by the time he’s 30. Amid this caring atmosphere, Oliver comes to develop a routine at the hospital which he enjoys, and is keen to re-establish after his enforced break through sickness. This includes teasing others: long-haired Albert, who primps himself like a film star; Kevin with a gut big enough to dive into; Ron with an appetite for whores but no stamina. The hospital becomes a space in which Oliver feels at home. His mother and his grandmother work at Constance as cleaners, and this becomes not so much a shameful detail as a comfortable one: ‘The whole family’s here: its gonna be a family company!’ he jokes to me. His mother is handy to lend him money if he is ‘skint’; she can run him home after work and then back out to the pub (sometimes, they run into each other in city-centre pubs or taxi ranks). He buys his mother and sister black-market CDs from fellow porters at Christmas, and explains he will have a few days’ holiday with them, in Newcastle, before flying off with his mates to Spain. The space of the hospital, in short, brings together for Oliver the domestic or familial and the workaday. He extends his domestic life into the institution as a kind of appropriation.

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The hospital also becomes an extension of his friendship network and world of gossip. It is a place in which he finds friends (some he knew in school) with whom to play and watch football, to bet on the horses and to go boozing. There are the great pub crawls at Christmas, and on one’s birthday, and the weekly splurge after being paid (‘The Thursday Night Club’, as Arthur dubbed Oliver’s boozing circle). He may end up with only about £5 left for the rest of the week, when food and lodging are taken into account, but Oliver finds the pub crawls worth it: ‘As far as I can mind [remember]!’ He develops, too, a personal style of dress, at work and play alike: his portering polo shirt must be yellow, clean and not stretched tight; when drinking or discoing he likes to be fashionable and smart-casual, with a nice shirt and dress trousers, his hair short, his deodorant sweet. It is a style he has the confidence even to take abroad: I went to Benidorm for two weeks for my holidays this year. Came back whiter than when I went! ’Cos the pubs didn’t shut till 6.30 [AM] then I went to bed and hardly saw the sun! [We laugh] I went with eight mates. Great time. My first time abroad. First time I flew too. I had a few drinks before we took off, then I was fine once we were up, drinking away … We booked up last minute, by teletext. I slept on the floor: it didn’t matter … I even met two people from Easterneuk I knew! There I was walking down the street and someone calls ‘Oliver’ – and it’s a good pal! ‘What are you doing here?!’ It’s like meeting in Easterneuk city-centre!

Over the year that I knew him I feel that I witnessed Oliver come into his own. This symbolic space comprised a physical security of bodily routines. He knew the workings of Constance Hospital, its shortcuts, its history, and attaches this to a personal biography. A social network linked Constance to family and friends, school and recreation, city-centre pubs and Spain: here were a set of behavioural contracts. Constance Hospital was also something whose future in his life Oliver was considering: he wished me luck when he knew I was leaving and shook my hand, but he was not certain how long he would stay on himself: ‘There may be some new shift jobs coming up. And I’d go for one of them. Like Alastair McCreanor and Alastair Dent, on shifts. If I got one like them my pay would go up and that would be great’. Meanwhile, I was interested to see a new kind of firmness, even stubbornness, enter Oliver’s public persona. He would show his annoyance when he felt he was being taken advantage of, insist on his rights even against friendly sub-managers (Arthur, Dave) – much to their exasperation at ‘this cheek’. Not for too much longer, I had the impression, would Oliver accept a role of tea-making apprentice. In his novel, Howards End, E.M. Forster writes how: ‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another: the groping inquiry must begin anew. Preachers or scientists may generalize, but we know that no generality is possible about those whom we love; not one heaven awaits them, not even one oblivion’ (Forster 1950: 245–46). I am aware of this conundrum in my ethnography. I am a scientist, and I do wish to preach a message concerning the value of Anyone

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and the need to construe a space, both in scientific representation and in social policy, in which Anyone’s capacities for world-making may fulfil themselves, but my means for doing this is an irreducibly individual life. I would place an analytical weight on Oliver’s life story, and yet the juxtaposition of its recounting against my theoretical argument and terms (‘Anyone’, ‘mutual guesthood’, ‘mathematics of value’) is in the manner of a sharp differentiation. By what right do I encumber ‘Oliver’ so? I knew him as a workmate for a year, occasionally during our recreation. But in order to recruit him here it is almost as if I have to make him up (I pseudonymize him at least). Forster was aware of this, at one point describing fiction as ‘truer’ than social science for the way in which it allowed itself to go beyond the evidence of surfaces to deeper experiential truths (Forster 1984: 69–70; cf. Rapport 1994). In fact, there are two conundrums. I would have Oliver stand for general theoretical propositions when the particularity of individual lives (world-views, sufferings, death) is absolute. Also, I would argue for a particular interpretation of Oliver when other, less benign ones are available: ‘Oliver less came into his own at Constance than conformed to a culture of mutual deprecation (“slagging”)’; ‘the social institution that provided the benign backdrop to the hosting and guesting of expressions of porters’ selves actually paid them the pittance that sentenced porters to urban poverty’. I have one response to the two conundrums: ‘This is how I knew Oliver’. The fit between the details of his life and my analytical conclusions feels right to me. I do not seek to aggrandize Oliver’s life story. When I left him he was a hospital porter as when I first met him. The interactional routines in which he makes himself at home at Constance are peopled with the family and friendship figures and the elder role models one might anticipate for a teenager. Notwithstanding, Oliver’s life story was his own, the result of an intentionality that was his, an interpretation of environing structures and settings that was his, and whose effects was the creation of a context to his life for which he was responsible. I noticed how particular Oliver was with his appearance: the mousse in his hair, the crease in his canvas trousers. I noted that whenever he stood up in the buckie to go on a job, and whenever he got the urge in a corridor, he would make sure that his portering polo shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers, but with sufficient slack still to drape over the top of his trouser belt to the length of about two inches. Oliver was his own man, it seemed to me, and when he held out his hand to me as a farewell, it was as an equal: it was how I might meet Anyone.

Conclusion I have wanted this chapter to consider moral social relations: how might anthropology imagine social milieux that facilitate the passage of individual lives and value their unique self-fulfilment. It is within the capacity of Anyone, I have argued, to create individual worlds in dialectical engagement with existing conditions: a moral

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social arrangement might be where individuals are safeguarded the right to come into their own in terms of personal life-projects (Rapport 2003). The sovereignty and security of an individual’s bodily habitus possesses an absolute value. The paradoxical figure of social arrangements that always point beyond themselves – to where an individual’s life-project might alight next – have been imagined as kinds of voluntary, episodic contracts. These contracts maintain a structure – physical and constitutional – as individuals pass through them, serializing roles of hosts and guests. As ‘members’ to these contracts, individuals share mutual behavioural expectancies, but no more ascriptive or fixed a belonging. Individual members give one another mutual recognition, and they anticipate mutual gratification, but they do not demand mutual comprehension. Individuals honour the sovereignty of one another’s symbolic space: a kind of cosmopolitan space, universal and yet individual, a personal preserve, by rights private. Such social arrangements, behavioural contracts, as working relations have been explored in the context of a state-run British hospital. Constance Hospital has been portrayed as a caring institution both in its formal workings (as part of managerial policy) and informally (as part-and-parcel of a portering sub-community). Constance intends to provide for its employees’ lives as these extend in space and time beyond its boundaries: it hosts, at present, their needs and aspirations; its managers play host to its (more liminal) porters; its portering sub-managers play host to its neophytes (Oliver and me); all play host to its patients. In particular, Oliver is afforded the symbolic space in which his activities might give onto his own becomings, not inscribed in extant custom. His capacity to fulfil an emotional and intellectual life-journey that is his own and that represents an end in itself is allowed for by an institutional structure (Constance Hospital) on the one hand and, on the other, by informal social relations conducted in a spirit of mutuality. Anyone is a real human actor (the real actor). Anyone exists not as a cultural object but as the universal human subject. Cosmopolitanism predicates ‘the human’ as a condition over and against the particularities of social setting and cultural tradition: it intends for Anyone’s capacities for self-fulfilment to find accommodation in social science and social policy alike.

Notes   1. Cf. Gifford et al. (2003), which explores, from anthropological, philosophical and theological perspectives, the relation of a Judaeo-Christian heritage to a ‘fast-globalizing world’ in ‘the third millennium’.   2. Along similar lines, Georges Devereux describes all social processes from the highly conventional to the revolutionary as operating on the basis of ‘ego-syntonism’ (Devereux 1978: 126–29). In the ‘same’ collective act, individuals are able to find a common, socially acceptable behavioural expression for the (variable) gratification of possibly very different motivations.   3. E.M. Forster: It is not possible to define ‘a thinking mass’; it is not possible to estimate the worth of ‘a general feeling’; it is not possible to locate ‘the great world’ (Forster 1964: 67–8). And F.R. Leavis: What is the ‘social condition’ that has nothing to do with the ‘individual

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condition’? What is the ‘social hope’ that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the condition of each individual? Where is a condition to be located if not in individuals? (Leavis 1972: 53).   4. Richard Rorty (1986: 532) makes a similar intervention when he argues that liberal ideals – procedural justice, human equality – may very well be parochial, recent and eccentric cultural developments, but that does not make them any less worth promoting. Ideals that are local and culture-bound in provenance can still embody the best hope for the species as a whole.   5. Cf. Graham Greene: ‘Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel’ (Greene 1979: 183).

References Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘Writing Against Culture’, in R. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–62. Berger, J. 1984. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. London: Writers & Readers. Blake, W. 1997. Jerusalem. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collis, M. 1962. Stanley Spencer. London: Harvill. Compton Burnett, I. 1969. Mother and Son. London: Panther. Devereux, G. 1978. Ethnopsychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edelman, G. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Emerson, R.W. 1981. The Portable Emerson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fernandez, J. 1992. ‘What It Is Like to Be a Banzie: On Sharing the Experience of an Equatorial Microcosm’, in J. Gort, H. Vroom, R. Fernhout, A. Wessels (eds), On Sharing Religious Experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 125–35. Forster, E.M. 1950. Howards End. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 1964. The Longest Journey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 1972. Two Cheers for Democracy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 1984. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gellner, E. 1995. ‘Anything Goes: The Carnival of Cheap Relativism which Threatens to Swamp the Coming Fin de Millenaire’, Times Literary Supplement 4811: 6–8. Gifford, P., D. Archard, T. Hart and N. Rapport (eds). 2003. 2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the ‘Common Era’. London: Routledge. Greene, G. 1979. The Quiet American. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths Toward a Clearing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Josephides, L. 2008. Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the Self, Narrative and Modernity. Oxford: Berghahn. Kateb, G. 1991. ‘Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights’, in N. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 183–206. ——— 1992. The Inner Ocean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leavis, F.R. 1972. Nor Shall My Sword. London: Chatto and Windus. May, R. 1958. ‘The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology’, in R. May, E. Angel and H. Ellenberger (eds), Existence. New York: Basic Books, pp. 127–38. Mill, J.S. 1963. The Six Great Humanistic Essays of John Stuart Mill. New York: Washington Square. Murdoch, I. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Random House. ——— 1994. Human, All Too Human. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 2001. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, R. 1992. ‘The Marabar Caves, 1920–2020’, in S. Wallman (ed.), Contemporary Futures. London: Routledge, pp.190–207. Popper, K., and J. Eccles. 1977. The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer. Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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——— 1994. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——— 1997. ‘The “Contrarieties” of Israel: An Essay on the Cognitive Importance and the Creative Promise of Both/And’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(4): 653–72. ——— 1999. ‘Context as an Act of Personal Externalization: Gregory Bateson and the Harvey Family in the English Village of Wanet’, in R. Dilley (ed.), The Problem of Context. Oxford: Berghahn. pp. 187–211. ——— 2001. ‘Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual, Society and Anthropology’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 12(2): 190–220. ——— 2003. I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. ——— 2005. ‘The Moral Implications of Science for Democratic and Cosmopolitan Society’, in N. Rapport (ed.), Democracy, Science and the Open Society: A European Legacy? Anthropological Journal on European Cultures (special issue) 13: 1–32. ——— 2008. Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Rapport, N., and A. Dawson (eds). 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Rorty, R. 1986. ‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz’, Michigan Quarterly Review 25: 525–34. ——— 1992. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, E. 1956. Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1968. Search for A Method (trans. Hazel E. Barnes). New York: Vintage. ——— 1975 ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in W. Kaufman (ed.) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: New Arena Library, pp. 352–56. Steiner, G. 1997. No Passion Spent. London: Faber. Wallace, A.F.C. 1961. ‘The Psychic Unity of Human Groups’, in B. Kaplan (ed.), Studying Personality Cross culturally. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 129–64. ——— 1970. Culture and Personality, New York: Random House. Wittgenstein, L. 1980. Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell. Woolf, V. 1963. A Room of One’s Own. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Chapter 3

Cosmopolitan Morality in the British Immigration and Asylum System Alexandra Hall

K

Introduction At Locksdon Immigration Removal Centre one night in 2003, a man got up from his dormitory bed, walked along the corridor, locked himself in the toilets and strangled himself with his shoelaces. He had been a resident for some time at Locksdon, a secure detention centre in Britain that accommodates men subject to immigration law.1 Quiet, unassuming, inconspicuous and shortly due to be deported back to his country of origin, his behaviour had not raised any concerns with staff. He was reported missing by his roommate in the middle of the night and was unconscious by the time he was found. On the night of the man’s death, the prison officers on duty had conducted their periodic dormitory checks as usual, but their check was a general one for fires and disturbances, and they had not been required to look in the toilets; the man had lain undiscovered until his roommate raised the alarm. Tom was the first officer on the scene. He had clambered over the locked toilet door to support the man while the noose was cut. He had dragged the man from the cubicle and had attempted to resuscitate him while other officers called the emergency services. The officers had kept up the resuscitation techniques until the ambulance arrived. Despite their efforts, the detainee was pronounced dead when the emergency services arrived. Tom, although recounting the incident in self-deprecating and darkly comic tones, had found the incident disturbing: ‘It wasn’t pleasant. You could basically see he was dead before we’d even started. The resuscitator guard kept slipping. I couldn’t be sure. It was exhausting. His eyes were open, staring at me’. The other detainees had witnessed the whole incident. Tom told me, ‘It was good they saw that – us working hard like that’. As I was talking

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to Tom about the incident, a man entered the immigration office where we were sitting and asked about a fax he wanted to send. Tom answered his query and then addressed the man: ‘That was a tough business the other night, wasn’t it? Bad stuff, a bad evening. How are you feeling?’ The detainee, not quite understanding what Tom was saying at first, mumbled something, nodded and left. Tom explained that this man had acted as an interpreter during the incident when the police had asked the dead detainee’s roommate questions, and had witnessed the whole thing. ‘That guy was really good’, Tom told me. ‘He came up to me afterwards and asked me how I was, whether I was okay. I really appreciated that’. The detention centre is the site where the politics of immigration, citizenship and national belonging become fraught and contested, and where the consequences of the sovereign decision to exclude people who ‘do not belong’ work through the bodies, routines and daily lives of detainees and staff. The Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) transforms the national sovereign border between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. No longer a traversable line, the border becomes a liminal, inhabitable zone where people are held for days, months or even years waiting for a decision on their immigration case. In this border zone, there is much at stake in the work of distinguishing citizen and other, belonging and non-belonging, officer and detainee, and these politicized distinctions animate the prosaic circulations and encounters of the centre. After Agamben’s discussion of the camp (Agamben 1998), detention in the context of governing mobility and national security has been viewed through a lens which draws attention to the politics of the exception that underlies its use (see Walters 2002; Diken 2004; Diken and Lausten 2006; Nyers 2006). The detention centre has been conceptualized as an ‘abject space’, a site where people are treated ‘neither as subjects (of discipline) nor objects (of elimination) but as those without presence, without existence, as inexistent’ (Isin and Rygiel 2007: 184). In this way, the detention centre is viewed as the place where the biopolitical nature of the national political order is most starkly revealed: where political exclusions and divisions act in an unmediated way on individual bodies. I discuss these ideas below. What has been missing from this literature is a nuanced view of detention as a space of sociality, of politics and resistance, and of moral possibility. An ethnographic approach to the secure centre can unravel the mundane operations of sovereign power, its inconsistencies and the way that ‘day-to-day social interactions … are productive of both power and subjectivities’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004: 2–3). A ‘thick’ description (Geertz 1973) of life in detention is one that can reveal the detention centre in its specificity and can grasp the way that various forms of power are experienced and given meaning in social life, being transformed and constantly tested at their limits. It is moral possibility that concerns me most in this chapter. First, I will explore the nature of relations between staff and detainees at Locksdon as a way of examining the logic of exclusion upon which detention rests. I will then return to the suicide described above to ask, in a context where the briefest interaction must inscribe and reinscribe the difference between officers and detainees, between

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political inside and outside, what might a moral response look like? On what conditions might it rely, and what might its challenge be to the exclusionary politics of detention? I will argue that the possibility of moral response, which is never wholly effaced in the contingency of lived life, reconfigures the order of the IRC. This fragile moral response between officers and detainees is cosmopolitan in character, where differences are momentarily overcome, or else folded into a response that has mutuality and vulnerability at its core.

Practices of Detention Detention became a key pillar of the UK immigration and asylum system under New Labour’s swingeing border reforms, a trend which is mirrored internationally (see Bashford and Strange 2002; Welch 2003; Pratt 2005; Welch and Schuster 2005). The power to detain persons subject to immigration law was first codified in the UK in the 1920 Aliens Act, with the 1971 Immigration Act giving authorities the power to detain asylum seekers. The last two decades have seen the heavy politicization of immigration and asylum, and subsequent moves to ‘clamp down’ on a system deemed out of control (Gibney 2004). Over the last ten years, there has been a steady development of an immigration and asylum system that has sought to facilitate ‘beneficial’ economic migration while squeezing legal entry routes for clandestine entrants (including those seeking asylum). As part of these developments, detention has become a normalized and widespread mode of control in the UK. During this time, mobility and asylum (and efforts to control them) have also increasingly become blurred with the politics of security, crime and counter-terror under the ‘war on terror’ (see Bigo 2001). Sovereign state power has become invigorated in this ‘war’ through various measures to intervene on risky, threatening or dangerous mobilities. The law has undergone a series of technical adjustments in the name of counter-terrorism, with the power to detain emerging as one of the most controversial emblems of these adjustments. Detention for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, as well as people deemed threats to national security, is justified as a measure to order, contain and control undesirable and threatening mobilities. The danger of these technical adjustments, and the ability to suspend normal law in the name of national security, lies in the expansion of what Butler (2004: 54–55) describes as discretionary ‘prerogative power’ by executive and managerial officials to detain, a power which threatens to become arbitrary and unaccountable. The expansion of detention for people subject to immigration law in the UK is officially related to the expulsion of ‘failed’ asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. While asylum applications are at a fourteen-year low, the proportional use of detention has increased seven-fold in this time (Birnberg et al. 2008). In May 2008, the UK Border Agency announced plans to increase immigration detention capacity for illegal immigrants, creating 1,500 more places and allowing 4,500 people to be detained at any one time. According to Home Office statistics, 6,100 people

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entered detention in the second quarter of 2010, 48 per cent of whom were asylum detainees (Home Office 2010). At the end of March 2003, at the time of my fieldwork at Locksdon, there were 970 people in detention who had sought asylum at one stage, 71 per cent of all immigration detainees (Home Office 2003). The UK Border Agency Enforcement Instructions and Asylum Process Guidance, officially state that there should be a presumption in favour of temporary admission or release for those whose immigration status is pending (see UKBA 2008). Detention is deemed an ‘appropriate’ measure to: effect removal; establish a person’s identity or basis of claim; or where there is a perceived likelihood of a failure to comply with the conditions of temporary admission or release. In the case of asylum seekers, people may be detained to enable quick decisions on ‘straightforward’ claims. The administrative decision to detain someone, then, is officially linked to deportation, the risk of absconding, and the failure or fasttracking of a person’s claim to remain in the UK. In practice, immigration officers detain people for multiple (subjective and logistical) reasons, including deterrence and punishment (Weber and Gelsthorpe 2000). While administrative immigration detention is distinguishable from imprisonment, the use of prison facilities to accommodate detainees held under immigration law blurs administration with penal logic, not only in the symbolic criminalization of detainees but also in the prison practices which persist in detention centres.2 There is no limit to the period of custodial detention under the Immigration Act in the UK (as opposed to people accused of crimes), though a detained person can apply for bail. The controversy of immigration detention rests on its arbitrary and indefinite nature. For those whose claim for asylum has been deemed ‘straightforward’ or rejected, it appears to constitute a punitive denial of freedom under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (a key pillar of international codes of protection), so undermining the spirit of this agreement and international obligations to protect refugees (see Harvey 2000: 188; Amnesty International 2005). Detention crystallizes the West’s ‘schizophrenic’ response to asylum seekers and refugees (Gibney 2004: 2) and the escalating culture of suspicion surrounding ‘illegal’ immigration in contexts of securitization. In addition to asylum seekers, IRCs also detain foreign ex-prisoners awaiting deportation, people who have been found to be entering or living in the UK with false or no papers, and those whose immigration status has yet to be determined.

The Politics of Abjection At stake in decisions to detain and to expel is the sovereign power of exclusion. Agamben argues that sovereign power is the form of power which manifests itself through the exception: ‘sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception’ (Agamben 1998: 11). In other words, sovereign power reveals itself (and can be identified as such) through the ability to be at once inside and outside the juridical order, in the ability to ‘suspend the validity of the law’ while at once appearing

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to remain part of it (ibid.: 15). Sovereign power decides when the normal rule of law applies, and what constitutes an exceptional or emergency situation, when this norm can be suspended. Agamben discusses the limits and form of the exception in relation to the ancient legal category of homo sacer. This is the person who has been abandoned by sovereign power after some infraction, from whom sovereign power (and its protections and rights) withdraws, because this figure may be killed with impunity. Inhabiting a zone of indistinction between law and violence – cast out from politics, yet still retained within the political sphere in being vulnerable to power – this person is rendered ‘bare life’. Agamben, then, revisits the classical separation of political life from simple ‘bare’ life: political life in the West appears to have been constituted through the exclusion of bare life, but this is not a straightforward exclusion but rather an ‘inclusive exclusion (an exceptio)’ (ibid.: 7). Against Foucault’s view that biopolitics emerged in the modern era, Agamben argues that the investment of natural human life at its most fundamental level with politics has always been at the heart of sovereign power – bare life ‘gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion, inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction’ (ibid.: 9). For Agamben, this coinciding is through the exception and the ban, which excludes bare life while at once capturing it within the political order and so is, ‘in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system is built’ (ibid.: 9). That is, the possibility of political life, of inclusion, of rights and protections for those who are included, operates only through this capacity or mechanism of ‘taking of an outside’, where exceptions are made if sovereign power finds it expedient to do so, and where rights and the norms of law withdraw from those who do not count in the terms set out by sovereign power. The relevance of Agamben’s arguments for a consideration of immigration detention lies in his discussion of ‘the camp’ (he uses the Nazi extermination camp as his example), which he sees as the spatial manifestation of the exception. The wartime camp, Agamben argues, revealed clearly the workings of modern politics and sovereign power. In the camps, people were stripped of their political status, rights and identity within a ‘stable spatial arrangement inhabited by bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order’ (ibid.: 175). Agamben argues that the paradigm of the camp as permanent space of exception – a ‘localisation without order’ (ibid.: 175) – has not disappeared but, rather, has spread and is now part of the way we are all governed (Diken and Lausten 2006). In other words, we might all become abandoned ‘bare life’ within the conditions produced by sovereign power. For Agamben the ‘machine’ of sovereign power in the camps operates to generate a threshold between politically qualified life and bare life, but also between life that is human and not fully human (see Edkins 2007). Sovereign power, then, is most of all concerned to make distinctions, to ‘draw lines’ between forms of life (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004). Sovereign power may not always be reducible to the identifiable agencies and organizations of the territorial sovereign state (see Butler

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2004). Indeed, the sovereign authority that is wielded to designate the exception and the exclusions to be taken in its name has become increasingly dispersed within fields of expertise and vigilant citizenry, away from recognized juridical formations (Amoore 2008). Notwithstanding the dispersal of ‘the state’, the sovereign power wielded in the context of the border consistently invokes the territorial sovereign ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). The creation of the status of ‘detainable’ or ‘deportable’ has always been a matter of determining the limits of political inclusion and the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1951). At the border, sovereign power may not be separated from the ‘moral cosmology of belonging’ of the national order (Malkki 1995; Nyers 2006) which creates an overarching geopolitical framework and ‘moral cartography’ through which political and ethical horizons are shaped, and which produces the ‘radical circumspection of the kinds of persons and groups recognized as worthy subjects of moral solicitude’ (Shapiro 1999: 61). Viewed in this way, the person ‘outside’ political limits – without the protection of a state, for example, or designated a national security risk – becomes a ‘figure of political abjection that is integral to the political subjectification of political modernity’ (Dillon 1999: 95); that is, the ‘other’ against whom the political and moral order of nation-states and the limits of political life constantly reasserts itself (in fact, requires in order to take an inside). The refugee, particularly, emerges as a ‘political excess’ and ‘limit concept’ (Nyers 2006: xiii–xv) against which modern accounts of the political draw their sense, and yet simultaneously are made precarious. Indeed, the ‘scandal’ of the refugee lies in his or her ‘reproach to the formation of the political order or subjectivity that necessarily gives rise to the refugee’ (Dillon 1999: 95). The refugee, by ‘breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality… throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1995: 5), becoming both the ‘constitutive outside of sovereignty and the element that threatens its disruption from within’ (Edkins 2007: 86). Without the protection of a state, without membership of a national community, the refugee exposes the limits of ‘universal’ citizen rights and protections, revealing them to be unevenly applied and based on exclusions. Framed within a crisis vocabulary that construes them as a problem to be solved, refugees and asylum seekers find themselves relegated to a depoliticized space characterized as humanitarian. As Nyers (2006: 38–40) argues, this space works to capture those inside as speechless, emotional, inaudible, abject; they form a kind of absence, and are understood as all that the citizen as ‘proper’ political subject is not. In sum, Agamben’s philosophical arguments about the exception and the camp call attention to the way in which contemporary detention is related to the ‘taking outside’ of certain categories of person – from political life, from moral solicitude, from the possibility of public engagement, from the norms of the juridical order. His camp paradigm, however, has been described as ‘crushingly dismal’ (Walters 2002), leaving no space for resistance. More specifically, William Connolly (2007) argues against the ‘tight logic’ that Agamben attributes to sovereignty, and for an

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appreciation of the ‘littered, layered and complex’ realities of sovereign politics and cultural life. The call for a more specific, grounded knowledge of detention and its practices has been made by Isin and Rygiel (2007), who argue that contemporary holding zones, frontiers, refugee camps and camp-like spaces work differently to Agamben’s camp. Contemporary camps, holding zones and detention centres do not aim to eliminate people reduced to bare life and stripped of political status, but to interrupt, curtail or disrupt the possibility of being a political being – of acting politically and of claiming rights of citizenship – by rendering people inaudible and invisible through spatial exclusion, for example, or measures preventing people from reaching sovereign territories to claim rights, or literal confinement. These spaces are abject: ‘spaces of inexistence’ where people are ‘condemned to inexistent states of transient permanence in which they are made inaudible and invisible’ (ibid.: 198). Isin and Rygiel call for attention to be paid to the precise processes enacted in various camp-like places, and for knowledge of the efforts and practices through which a politically abject state – cast out, unworthy, lowly, unwanted, excluded – is inscribed and resisted. Agamben’s philosophical tools, then, provide ways of thinking about the hidden practices at work within detention, practices of exclusion that underpin and make possible universal and ‘inclusive’ rights for citizens. These occluded practices of exceptionalism are matched by the literal invisibility of the detention centre and those held there. Detention centres are frequently located at the margins of public space and detention is shrouded by secrecy and speculation; it is subject to multiple claims and counter-claims when it does appear in the public domain: a necessary protection and reasonable administrative measure, or a brutal and punitive excess. As a ‘way into’ thinking about detention and its exclusions, Agamben’s diagnosis of sovereign power and exceptionalism is provocative: it draws attention to what makes detention politically possible and what it makes possible in turn. However, ethnographic knowledge of the lived experience of detention might contribute to interdisciplinary discussions of the politics of the camp by examining the way in which the sovereign decision on exception and exclusion infuses, emerges from, and become contested in the lived textures of detention regimes in their specificity. The daily routines of the IRC are invested with the ‘drawing of lines’, which takes place within the uncertainty and ambiguity of social life. Ethnographic knowledge of detention, with a focus on contingency, context and practice, works against the sense of finality and completeness which accompanies philosophical accounts of detention’s logic and the camp, and opens a space for considering the IRC as a place of contestation, inconsistency and contradiction.

Drawing the Line Locksdon has an operational capacity of over one hundred male detainees at any one time. It is run by the Prison Service for the immigration authorities and is staffed by approximately forty fully trained prison officers who wear prison uni-

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form and have previously worked in mainstream prisons.3 The establishment is enclosed within a wall and a high wire perimeter fence topped with razor wire. Inside the secure enclosure there is an administrative building, a Visits Centre, a Multifaith Centre, a sports field and the main building (‘the Centre’), which comprises the reception area, dormitories, gymnasium, dining hall and kitchen, education department, health department and offices for immigration officers who work with the detainees and Locksdon staff. Moving around the establishment entails unlocking and re-locking a series of gates, some on a time delay lock, and staff have keys attached to a key chain on a pouch around their waist. Officers tend to come from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. Few of the officers at Locksdon have been to college or university, and many have skilled manual trades aside from their prison work. The majority of officers that I came to know had served in the armed forces. A career in the Prison Service is a well-trodden route for men and women leaving the forces, although Prison Service recruitment initiatives in recent years have favoured a more inclusive mix of backgrounds (see Liebling and Price 2001). More than anything else, the officer at Locksdon is concerned to ‘keep the initiative’ in the establishment. The authority that officers embody and wield is the limit of the sovereign relationship over those in the indistinct zone of inside/ outside that marks detention. Detention ‘makes sense’ as a place of boundaries that must be upheld – between authoritative officer and pliable detainee, between active citizen and passive outsider. From the moment a detainee enters Locksdon, he becomes the target of a range of practices and procedures which seek to render him at once wholly visible, knowable and controllable, yet also invisible. In line with other ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1961) or ‘austere institutions’ (Foucault 1977), Locksdon assumes complete responsibility for the people accommodated there: a diverse, troubled and anomalous set of men must be reduced to a pliable, manageable and relatively homogeneous population of detainees. ‘Reception’ is where these techniques are most heightened, where the newly-arrived individual becomes the focus of a series of formalized and ritualistic procedures through which he is incorporated into the detainee body. Reception is where a new detainee first encounters the set of practices which will seek to make him visible and known to the officers. Indeed, Locksdon’s regime (understood as the set of routines, timetables, habits and procedures which order the day) is experienced by officers as a confrontation with men around whom there are dangerous gaps in knowledge. The lack of formal identification which accompanies new men (who have no passport, perhaps, or one which has been identified as fraudulent), the frequent failure of immigration papers to accompany arrivals, the haunting notion that a person’s proclivities and truthful identity may only ever be partially known. These are the concerns which the officers, at the limit of the relationship with those ‘outside’, experience as an existential vulnerability, a sense that, as one officer put it, ‘these people could be anyone’. This unknown-ness must be carefully managed. A man must be identified to the regime, although this identification is understood to be incomplete. The routine practices of the detention

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regime require that a man must be registered within the establishment’s archives, his particularity inscribed via documents and records. Any available documentary evidence of his past conduct (in police custody, for instance, or in another IRC) must be collated in order to assess the possible risks a man might demonstrate. The man’s body and comportment become crucial sites of visual knowledge: it is through a measured and detailed consideration of his demeanour and his bodily conduct that clues of his true capacity may be discerned. The Reception process involves the methodical and meticulous logging of a detainee’s details: a man’s data are recorded on a series of forms by two officers working together. The new arrival is identified in his physical singularity: he is measured, photographed and his eye colour, face shape, hair shade and distinguishing body marks (tattoos, scars and birthmarks) are logged on the establishment’s documentary forms and database. A man’s fingerprints are digitally recorded and a series of photographs is taken for Locksdon records.4 A man’s possessions are searched, sifted and logged, and his money and valuables are securely deposited. He is issued with a set of establishment rules in his own language, a detainee ID card, a phone card and a set of standard-issue clothes and toiletries if he needs them. The body is rendered wholly visible within reception: men are strip-searched behind a curtain to ensure they are not carrying a concealed weapon and to document unique scars and tattoos.5 The ‘optical paradigm of power’ of incarceration, as Feldman notes, is one which involves the ‘stratification of sensory capacities and sensate subjects’, whereby ‘vision is denied the observed object’ (Feldman 1991: 205). The enforced nakedness of the detainee marks his initiation into the layered visual economy of the IRC. At the core of Reception is an enforced compulsory visibility: it is an examination in Foucault’s terms, related to the disciplinary regime of Locksdon and its intolerance of anomaly. It is a normalizing scrutiny, a calculative observation, a process which ‘manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected’ (1977: 185). Reception posits the detainee’s body and behaviour centrally within a set of normative ideals, and the visual extraction of knowledge which becomes central to the exercise of power: The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalising judgment … It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why in all the mechanisms of discipline the examination is highly ritualised. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. (ibid.: 184)

Reception, then, brings into focus the anomaly and efforts to contain it via its comparison with the norm. The repetitious nature of the procedures, which become precisely choreographed with experienced officers, means that staff can focus on a new detainee’s reaction, identifying the man who might be ‘trouble’, the man whose ‘attitude’ is wrong and who needs to be ‘kept an eye on’. Aggressive men who ‘kick off’ are pulled instantly into focus, and their punishment is the delib-

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erately meticulous and pedantic application of the rules – of being made to wait until last, for example. Yet the gaps in knowledge which open up around the detainees are far larger than those of populations of convicted criminals, with whom the officers are trained to deal. Convicted prisoners arrive with a history of psychological reports, ‘expert assessments’ and sentence procedures. The convicted criminal is imprisoned after a judgement in law, proceeding from the presentation of various evidence and testimony, which is logged, shared and constantly updated. Many detainees literally have no verifiable identity beyond their name and rudimentary documentation, as I have mentioned. This is what makes the identity check via documentation fallible.6 The detainee, then, is subsequently reduced to a ‘body’; he is literally referred to as a ‘body’ in procedural documentation, formal and informal instructions and conversations among staff. For example, a Reception officer might ring the Centre Office and announce that he has ‘two bodies to locate’, meaning two men are ready to be taken to the dormitories. Here, the term ‘body’ designates a dual importance: the body as object within the IRC, to be tracked and traced, surveilled and located, but also the body which might provide some fuller account of the unknown man if watched carefully enough. It is this body that the officers are trained to attend to: to follow actively with the eyes, and scrutinize. In the frequent absence of authoritative documentation and assessment, the officers’ own expertise fills the lacunae. It is their watchful vigilance, experienced gaze and sense of judgement that marks the limits of risk, threat or acceptability within the detention centre, which draws the line within the zone of indistinction. As the detainees circulate around Locksdon, the officers train a mistrustful and precautionary scrutiny upon them. This gaze follows the detainees as body-objects and is concerned with their spatio-temporal placement in accordance with the regime: men are tallied as they move around the centre, for instance, and are counted at roll check and at lock up. The awareness of bodies in time and space, then, solidifies into a disciplinary scopic regime that pays attention to every detail: which ‘allows nothing to escape’ and which takes up ‘[t]he smallest infraction … with all the more care for it being small’ (Foucault 2007: 45). The officers’ gaze must also take notice of each individual in his specificity. Within this visual mode, the officers do not glance over men on the move, but their attention hones in on particular individuals in their comportment and demeanour. Every encounter, passing glance or chance glimpse provides an opportunity to notice something specific about a detainee: something anomalous, suspicious or out of place. The normalizing, surveillant watchfulness blurs into a precautionary, anticipatory and pre-emptive mode of vision, where ‘seeing becomes an act of foreseeing, pre-empting or anticipating’ (Amoore 2007: 145). The officers understand, or experience, this looking ahead as ‘keeping the initiative’, ‘staying one step ahead’, of anticipating trouble, and using the myriad clues gleaned from their everyday practices of watching to act upon emerging moods, indiscipline and ‘toxic’ mixes of men to intervene before these threats come to fruition.

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The visual habits of detention produce a series of thresholds between acceptable and risky, detainee and officer, security and insecurity. This, then, is one of the ways in which the politics of sovereign exclusion are worked through the prosaic practices of the IRC. The relegation of people deemed ‘outside’ politics to a place of detention places them in an uncertain and vulnerable zone. Yet within detention too, technologies of otherness come to mark the difference between citizen and abject, inside and outside, officer and detainee in the most mundane of encounters. Visual differentiation within detention is infused with suspicion and mistrust, and takes the detainee’s body as the locus of risk, and the point at which knowledge might be gained of intent, proclivity and risk. The objectifying and distantiated gaze which Foucault (1977) placed centrally within his analysis of disciplinary confinement, when unhinged from its originary aims of subjective penal rehabilitation and reform, becomes inside Locksdon productive of bare life in everyday lived experience. For the officers, this ‘bareness’ is captured in their use of the term ‘body’ to refer to the detainees in the establishment’s routines – for example, officers speak of ‘locating bodies’ in dormitories, or checking ‘bio-facts against the body’. Detention produces the detainee as a set of physiological abstractions: he becomes a mouth to be fed, a physical entity to be deported, transported and scrutinized, a set of physical energies to curtail. This, then, is how the officers confront and understand the detainees for most of their work at the centre. In the daily routines of detention, the uncertainty, or ‘bareness’, of the detainees (unqualified or unknown within systems of verifiable identification) becomes for the officers a problem of knowledge, security and control. The solutions are to be found in an ordered regime, which imposes its own banal violence upon the men who find themselves detained. The detainees inhabit a world of doubt and existential uncertainty. Yet the problem of the unknowable detainee produces the experience of uncertainty among the officers also. Embodying as they must the very limit of the sovereign relationship – where biopolitical control becomes a pat-down search, a restraining hand, an eye scrutinizing a moving body – the officers are made vulnerable in their encounters with the detainees at this limit. They must be prepared to ‘roll around on the floor’ (as they put it) and physically restrain violent or distressed detainees. They must constantly be vigilant for signs of indiscipline, which might mean loss of authority, or even control of the IRC. They must use their own bodies to inscribe and re-inscribe the sovereign lines marking exclusion, and in the detention centre as liminal space they must take responsibility for securing the men deemed anomalous. At Locksdon, the anomalous detainee within the disciplinary regime calls forth a cautious and precautionary regime which must constantly work to prevent and pre-empt ‘trouble’. The broad but undefined fear or anxiety that is said to characterize the securitized domains of contemporary everyday life (see Massumi 2005) crystallizes into an embodied experience of insecurity and trepidation that is particular to the detention centre. The idea that the detainees ‘might be anyone’ – that they are unknown and unknowable – draws forth the regime as a mode of managing this uncertainty, producing the detainees as abject, object bod-

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ies. Despite the excessive vulnerability which detention produces for those who are detained, it also instigates unease for the officers, a sense of occupying a place of uncertainty and vulnerability.

Bare Life, Vulnerability and the Possibility of Cosmopolitan Morality Locksdon, then, is a social space where the ‘outside’ of the detainee’s status is not a settled and fixed state, but a matter instead of constant effort, or techniques, strategies and programmes which impress the difference between citizen/other, political/abject, officer/detainee at every turn. The visual efforts of the officers are one aspect of this. Locksdon as I have described it is a rationalized, bureaucratic institution, in which tasks are broken down and administered in a spirit of formalistic impersonality, ‘without hatred or passion and so without affection or enthusiasm’ (Weber 1947: 330). This bureaucratic organization with its seductively transcendent and ordered procedures produces a ‘floating’ responsibility where ‘no one can reasonably and convincingly claim (or be charged with) the “authorship” of (or the responsibility for) the end result’ (Bauman 1993: 18). As de-individualized bodies in time and space (and as part of a transient and constantly shifting population), many detainees are barely known to the officers and fail to make their mark on the establishment as they pass through. For the officers, the threat of possible violence among this mass of men can be pre-empted by applying the rules, but the constant surveillance of detainees encourages a view of them as mere objects to be processed, and the regime produces a situation where speech, protest and complaint among detainees is disallowed as the ‘wrong attitude’ and ‘trouble’. Detainees, through the practices of the IRC, ideally become silent, invisible and ‘inexistent’: the ideal detainee is unobtrusive, compliant and inconspicuous, and a smooth-running establishment inscribes these qualities upon detainees. Locksdon is a place where there is a constant social investment in distance and difference. So, what are we to make of Tom’s gruff concern for the detainee after the suicide described at the beginning of this chapter? Or of the detainee’s enquiry about Tom? I want to argue that these small acts contain within them a qualitatively different form of engagement, a moment of moral cosmopolitanism that disrupts the logic of the IRC. The Locksdon regime, embodied in officers’ habitual working practices, aims to produce a manageable state of invisibility and inaudibility among the detainees. That is, the regime forecloses the recognition of detainees as individuals and full persons. Hannah Arendt (1951) long ago argued that the refugee exposed the failure of ‘universal’ rights to recognize, reflect and protect bare humanity. Only those with political status within the national sovereign order (that is, citizens) enjoy the possibility of having their humanity recognized and protected legally, socially and politically. Those without a place within this order, those with only their humanity, struggle to find a way to be recognized. As Costas Douzinas argues, rights thus become ‘both the expression and terrain on which the distribution of people into

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positions of power and subjugation operates’ (2007: 100). Arbitrary and indefinite detention reflects and imposes the precarious position of detainees. Detainees, through their immigration cases, are engaged in various legal struggles to have their experiences of trauma, suffering and persecution recognized, to have their humanity acknowledged within the strict codifications and abstractions of immigration and asylum law. This legal struggle is coupled with other struggles for recognition within the immigration and asylum system: to find a political voice, a social visibility, to be seen, heard and acknowledged. To reiterate, detention intervenes in the possibility of recognition at multiple levels. Just as the language of rights can only recognize a person’s humanity through a series of abstractions (Douzinas 2002), so detainees find themselves subject to reductive social and political practices at the prosaic level. Within Locksdon, as I have described, men are literally reduced to a body, to a set of biological minima that can be sustained through a checklist of requirements for food, exercise and activities. Progressively stripped of the political, social and legal possibility through which their humanity may be recognized and protected, detainees find themselves ‘bare’, as Agamben argued: exposed and vulnerable. For the man who committed suicide, this situation was unendurable. The uncertainty of his future, the knowledge of what awaited him in his country of origin, the trauma of detention, these could only be ended by a paradoxical embracing of the bareness of his life. The suicide, then, was a desperate response to the intolerable conditions in which the man found himself, and the sovereign exclusion brought to its final logical materialization. The detainee’s quiet, determined strangulation in the dormitory toilet – perhaps hearing the officer passing by outside the toilet block and the other detainees moving in their sleep – did not seek to activate a delay to an interminable immigration process, to negotiate better conditions, or to aid a petition to remain. It was simply the only means of escape for this individual. The aftermath of the suicide saw a series of political struggles within Locksdon. The death of the man was a spur for action that the other detainees used to remonstrate with the Home Office and the immigration system; they became angry and restless. Graffiti appeared in the dorms – ‘The Home Office killed X’ – and there was a spate of suicide threats, self-harm incidents and food refusals, which the officers largely interpreted as attempts by individuals to be moved to better facilities. The officers felt a qualitative change in the atmosphere of the establishment: a bubbling of ‘trouble’ and indiscipline. The fallout provided openings for other men to stake claims through their own bodies, but there was another aftermath, however, to the detainee’s death: the interchange between the witness detainee and the officer Tom, who found themselves in a precarious space of mutuality that forced a distinctive cosmopolitan type of engagement. Cosmopolitanism is often associated with a kind of ‘openness’ to cultural difference and orientation to otherness, a dabbling in difference, and expertise in negotiating the unfamiliar or a political engagement beyond local or national frontiers (see Hannerz 1990). As a moral stance, however, cosmopolitanism can trace its roots backs to the Stoics. Refuting the superiority of the polis, the Stoics saw

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the basis of human community to be the shared capacity for reason. Allied to the human capacity for reason is our shared (bodily) vulnerability, our capacity for suffering and our shared fear of death (see Nussbaum 2001, 2004). Given this shared capacity, it makes no sense to differentiate on the grounds of class, locality, nationality or ethnicity, and our moral and political life, they believed, should reflect this. It is Kant who has been associated most with the secularization of cosmopolitanism in its modern guise. Kant argued that our equal humanity locates us in a ‘global polity’. He placed the idea of free rational beings (equal in humanity and each to be treated as an end) at the heart of moral and political life, eschewing politics based on local community or narrow patriotism. Kant based his moral vision on practical reason and asserted that all people, by virtue of their reason alone, are ‘well able to distinguish, in all cases that present themselves, what is good or evil, right or wrong’ (Kant 1948: 69). We are called to obey the moral law and do our duty from a sense of respect for the personhood of others, but also our own personhood. We obey the call of moral duty, the ‘morality in me’ (Bauman 1993: 35), from a sense of respect and reverence for the worth in others and ourselves. At the core of Kant’s morality was his advice to act ‘in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’ (Kant 1948: 91). In many ways, the philosophy of Levinas stands in contrast to Kant, whose association with the liberal subject of modernity places rational individuals centrally in his moral vision. While Kant emphasized respect, duty, freedom and autonomy, Levinas saw this modern approach to morality to have contributed to barbarism and evil (Campbell 1994). He proposed a moral vision that privileges responsibility, heteronomy, spontaneity and contingency. For Levinas, the Other produces a kind of repugnance ‘for the unknown within the psyche of the Other, for the mystery of its interiority … for the pure proximity of the other man, for sociality itself ’ (quoted in ibid.: 31). Nonetheless, the approach of the Other unleashes responsibility – an awe-inspiring, unending responsibility that constitutes my own subjectivity. This is why Levinas calls ethics the first philosophy. This responsibility is not like that of the autonomous moral agents of Kantian concepts, but is incalculable, ‘as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself ’ (Levinas 1989a: 83–84). The subject’s freedom is after the obligation to the Other, not sequentially, but in terms of determination: ‘Ethics defines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom’ (Levinas 1989b: 27). What emerges in Levinas’s description of the moral is the impossibility of escaping responsibility: ‘It is impossible to free myself by saying, “It’s not my concern”. There is no choice, for it is always and inescapably my concern’ (ibid.). For those interested in the banal ‘moral grammar of everyday life’ (Critchley 1992: 27), Levinas urges us to think about the pre-eminence of the inter-human relationship within everyday contexts, to consider the existential and the moral, or ethical, urge that is shaped by the basic existential demand to reach beyond what norms, convention and rules might dictate. As Bauman argues, Levinas draws a radical conclusion from Kant’s solution to the mysteries of the ‘moral law inside me’ – but

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only this radicalism may give justice to Kant’s conception of morality as a posture guided solely by the concern for the other for the other’s sake, and the respect for the other as a free subject and the ‘end in itself ’ (Bauman 1993: 49). It is precisely the ultimate inability of the Locksdon officers to state ‘it’s not my concern’ that characterizes the ambiguity of their work within the detention. As I have argued, the routine tasks, visual habits and social interactions of detention at the mundane level are concerned with producing distinctions, divisions and distance. The ideal detainee is a type of non-presence – a featureless, reduced and abstracted ‘body’. The decision to detain, like the decision to deport or ‘remove’, is made by officials upon these featureless bodies. The officers, however, work in close proximity to the detainees, and must deal with the daily consequences of decisions taken by officials elsewhere. Despite their investment in the divisions of the regime, it is the officers who must arrange for a special phone call to a detainee’s family member, who must monitor a depressed man, who must help a detainee retrieve his lost possessions, or who must break the news of an impending deportation. Confronted with a crying, angry or depressed detainee, the ‘floating responsibility’ of the immigration system comes to rest with the officer, and despite frequent efforts to the contrary, this responsibility cannot be easily shirked. We may now return to the episode between Tom and the detainee. Rather than abject and officer, detainee and guard, citizen and outsider, we have two agents whose implication in a larger drama draws them into a space of mutuality. The battle to save the detainee’s life saw all the players grappling with the effects of the demarcations of sovereign power; the distracted and frantic struggle on the cold floor of the toilet block cast officers and detainees alike into a zone of indistinction where it became unclear what separated them. Tom, the other officers and the detainees experienced life at its very limit. Rather than providing some evidence for the sovereign lines of exclusion, this victim, poised between life and death, simply revealed the fragility of life itself, a fragility that is shared and unavoidable. In the act of resuscitating the detainee, the responsibility that Levinas speaks of called to the officers, and to Tom particularly. The systems of sovereign machinery within which the detainees and officers are caught up, the logic of which they embody and experience, can never efface the ethical possibility of life’s contingency, of the difficulty of responsibility. Tom’s presence made him alone accountable in that moment: the exclusionary moral and political limits drawn through the officers and detainees came to crystallize in this moment, but also to be exceeded. Within this newly configured space of mutuality, the witness detainee was moved to reach out to Tom, to enquire after his well-being, as an end in himself, a person who may have been shocked, upset and horrified by the death, but who still assumed responsibility and tried his best, despite knowing the man was dead. Tom, in return, reached back to the detainee in a passing comment that, despite its banality, transcended the boundaries that gave Locksdon its sense. A consideration of the social nature of this moral call may expand philosophical delineations. Indeed, anthropologists have generally aimed to discern the link

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between values which are derived from a larger metaphysical whole and actual behaviour and practice, exploring the dynamic relationship between moral ideals and practice. Philosophy leaves unaddressed the way in which situations present themselves to people in challenging and ambiguous situations, amid the confusions of muddled sociality. Life in detention, and the example of Tom and the detainee, show that while political, legal, social aspects of humanity can be stripped away, our shared vulnerability, mutual defencelessness and bodily exposure persists. This undeniable vulnerability periodically imposed itself upon detainee and officer, who were forced to acknowledge the humanity of the other. Recognition of this shared vulnerability, of humanity, is folded into the ethical relation, which is responsibility for the other. It was the simple vulnerability and fragility of life made bare that Tom and the detainee witnessed in the death of the suicide victim, and which forced them to a fragile acknowledgement of mutuality. To be clear, the Locksdon regime was littered with multiple moments of recognition like the one described after the suicide, and the enforced ethical responsibility that accompanied such moments worked alongside, against and in between the daily practices that inscribed distinctions between officer and detainee and which refused mutuality. Detention reflects, creates and enforces the political divisions of inside and outside, citizen and abject, but detention paradoxically provides a space where evidence can be found of the inclusive and unavoidable cosmopolitan nature of ethical responsibility. While Kant denigrated emotions and affect in the moral sphere, viewing them as capricious, fickle and untrustworthy, the character of morality argued by Levinas captures something of the non-rational way we respond to others: as Bauman argues, ‘morality is endemically and irredeemably non-rational – in the sense of not being calculable, hence not being describable as following rules that are in principle universalisable’ (Bauman 1993: 60). The sensibility of Levinas’s response, this non-calculable urge, is echoed in Nussbaum’s discussion of empathy and the liberal subject. Empathy in Nussbaum’s (2004) terms is the imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience, an inter-subjective engagement that grasps the plight of the other through the self ’s experience. Nussbaum separates empathy and compassion: compassion is the emotion most closely linked to morality, involving an awareness of another person’s undeserved misfortune (Nussbaum 2001: 300–1). Compassion rests on a belief that another’s person’s suffering is serious and undeserved, and a belief that the possibilities of the person who experiences the emotions are similar to those of the sufferer (ibid.: 306). This is the ‘eudaimonistic’ nature of compassion. Humans attach themselves to others through what is already of concern to them. The recognition of one’s related vulnerability is an important epistemological requirement for compassion in human beings (ibid.: 319). Not all emotions, then, lead us to treat others as means to our own ends as Kant feared: empathy emerges as the most moral of emotional engagements, facilitating a moral response and acting as a criterion of moral judgement (Josephides 2003a).

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Of course, empathy can be inaccurate or crude, and compassion can be inconsistent and may exclude certain kinds of people (Nussbaum 2001: 300–1, 327–8, 336). Compassion (at heart involving a notion of common humanity) can become sidetracked by local loyalties and rivalries, and all kinds of social barriers (structured by gender, race, ethnicity, class, age) can erode the imaginative link to other people and thus impede compassion (ibid.: 316–17). Those who wish to foster cruelty remove the conditions for the imagination of similarity – through disgust as well as abjection, fear and shame. Yet, Nussbaum argues, people who refuse empathy or compassion to others are self-denying and under the illusion that social, cultural and political distinctions are meaningful. It is clear that the conditions at Locksdon seek to impose abjection and otherness on the detainee population – the regime renders the detainees a-political, object-like, speechless, invisible. Yet the aftermath of the suicide reveals the way that sovereign power holds at its core a ruse – one that is refused in the everyday politics of immigration and asylum systems – that those who would be construed as different, excludable as outsiders, unworthy abjects are just like us. Or rather, they share with us a position of existential vulnerability and exposure. Understood as Levinas’s Other (whose difference must be respected and whose call to us cannot be avoided) or as the Kantian fellow (with whom we are united in reason and humanity), the detainee and officer share a bodily and existential defencelessness that transcends the differences between them. The recognition of bare life, then, can confound the grammar of sovereign power, by opening up the possibility of an existence held in common; not in the sense of being the same, but giving access to ‘something that humans are and have to be’ (Agamben 1993: 88). Locksdon appears to be the epitome of a bureaucratic rationalization of an ethical impulse, where the individual conscience would seem to be rendered silent. However, as the banal interchange between Tom and the detainee demonstrated, ‘the gnawing worm of self-distaste’ (Bauman 1993: 53) that drives the moral imperative to ‘reach beyond’ can never be wholly effaced.

Conclusion Dillon argues that the ‘scandal’ of the refugee, with whom we have no political, communal or national ties, is the way in which it poses the question of ‘we’ – that is, the ‘insecure, enigmatic and opaque’ human way of being that is always inescapably ethical – and forces us to reformulate it (Dillon 1999: 118–19). I have explored this idea of ‘we’ in relation to politics and morality within an Immigration Removal Centre. The detention of some people, I have argued, is an exclusionary practice that underpins the very idea of inclusive politics. The way that human mobility is governed relies on the distinctions made by sovereign power between abject bare life and political life, citizens and others. This is never more the case than in the ‘zone of indistinction’ that is Locksdon, where there is most at stake in drawing the lines. Yet it is in places like Locksdon that the co-ordination between

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physical and social and cognitive proximity is broken (Bauman 1993: 152): officers cannot ignore the social proximity of the stranger who does not belong but yet is present and who won’t go away. I have shown this particular ‘camp’ to be a space of political process, where the state of abjection is constantly impressed – I have discussed here the disciplinary regime and visual practices – but where there is also constant ambiguity and incompleteness. Exceeding expectations, Locksdon emerges as a place where ethical engagement is not wholly removed, and where the cosmopolitan character of moral responsibility is exposed. The policies of separation and isolation that characterize the current reception of people into the UK point to a general ethos of ambivalence and fear, which fuels measures to maintain the other in positions of ambiguity and abjection. Despite the techniques and practices enacted at Locksdon to keep the detainees as others, the simple fact of their existence, and of shared vulnerability, refuses to be effaced. Anthropology has done much to explore the multiplicity and plurality of moral discourse and practice. The ethnographic method is well placed to reveal the plurality, contestation and negotiation within moral action by considering moral agents in concrete social situations (Howell 1997: 14). Yet it would seem imperative that anthropologists address themselves not only to what counts as good behaviour in particular contexts but also to sketching what might be understood as a cosmopolitan morality, a moral response that transcends cultural and social boundaries, a morality based on what is shared ontologically by all humans (see Josephides 2003a, 2003b). As Edkins (2007: 84) comments on Agamben, political practice rather than philosophy might lead us out of the impasse which Agamben argues characterizes sovereign power. Attention should be paid, then, to the way in which ‘[t]he line-drawing strategies of sovereign powers are themselves failing all the time’ (ibid.: 90). Such an endeavour may do worse than begin with empirical investigations of the emergence of ethical recognition and responsibility, or the manifestation of empathy and compassion, as universal human capacities that urge us to reach out to the Other. It is through such an exploration that the practical, pragmatic nature of cosmopolitanism as a moral stance to difference in everyday life can be revealed. As a remedy against the indeterminacy and ‘imaginary utopianism’ of many studies of cosmopolitanism, Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward (2004: 120–1) make a call for more empirical studies of mundane existing cosmopolitanisms, activities that people are engaged in within everyday social life. Describing the emergence of empathy and compassion, and exploring their links to moral responses to the stranger (as well as the refusal to share similar worlds of possibility) could be at the heart of this endeavour, moving the issue of a cosmopolitan morality from an abstract realm towards an everyday aspect in mundane social life, featuring in the least hospitable of contexts. Our engagement and dealings with the other are always fraught with uncertainty, and if things were easy it would not be politics. The same is true for the possibility of ethical engagement. We can see at Locksdon the opening up of a

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gap between the decisions taken to exclude and the acknowledgement of the futility of the lines drawn. The politics of the national order produces abjection, but bare life itself can form the basis of the urge to acknowledge the other. What is at issue, though, is how the inhabitants of places like Locksdon can be recast from their status as constitutive outsiders ‘to beings that matter’ (Dillon 1999: 112). The refugee, Dillon argues, exposes how belonging together politically has become belonging together at the production of the spectacle of politics, including that of the abjection integral to it. Yet, as I have shown, this political spectacle itself contains the seeds for alternative engagements, which at every turn undo the sovereign decision and reveal the distinctions it would make as arbitrary.

Notes   1. I have used pseudonyms for the Immigration Removal Centre and those who worked at and were detained there.   2. IRCs may be run privately for profit (see Bacon 2005) and the Prison Service operates a number of centres for the immigration authorities. IRCs hold populations of mixed immigration status, with a growing population of foreign-national ex-prisoners. As the London Detainee Support Group (2009: 10) have demonstrated, foreign nationals who have been convicted of crimes in the UK (often in direct consequence of being rendered destitute by a rejected claim for asylum, for example) have increasingly found themselves facing indefinite detention at the end of their criminal sentence, with the Home Office operating a tacit presumption of detention for those who are subject to a deportation order following criminal conviction.   3. There are also administrative and training workers, estates staff, four nurses, four permanent on-site immigration officers, a chaplain and five education staff from a nearby adult education college, as well as two physical exercise instructors.   4. A copy of the photograph is passed to the establishment’s police liaison officer for checks with criminal databases.  5. Paragraph 7 of the 2001 Detention Centre Rules outlines the statutory instruments for searching detainees. Searching is ‘[f ]or reasons of security and safety’, and should be undertaken ‘in as seemly a manner as is consistent with discovering anything concealed’; strip searching should never be ‘in the sight of another detained person, or in the sight or presence of an officer or other person not of the same sex’. At the time of my fieldwork (2002 to 2003), this strip search took place for all new detainees, and was performed behind a curtain. It involved the officer asking the detainee to pull down his trousers and pants, and take off his shirt and socks (not at the same time) to locate concealed weapons and note any distinguishing tattoos or scars, which were called out to the other officers for documentation. When I was at reception, officers would ask me to go into a side office for the process to make sure the detainees’ privacy was protected. Towards the end of my time at Locksdon, the practice of strip searching all detainees at reception was abandoned. It belonged to the Prison Service set of rules and was not performed in other IRCs.   6. Biometric identification systems aim to lock down identity to the materiality of the body, but were not in widespread use in 2002.

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References Agamben, G. 1993. The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— . 1995. ‘We Refugees’, Symposium, 49(2), Summer: 114–19. ——— . 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Amoore, L. 2007. ‘Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror’, Security Dialogue 38(2): 139–56. ——— . 2008. ‘Consulting, Culture, The Camp: On the Economies of the Exception’, in L. Amoore and M. de Goede (eds), Risk and the War on Terror. London: Routledge. Amnesty International. 2005. ‘Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime: Detention of People Who Have Sought Asylum’. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ EUR45/015/2005. Arendt, H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Bacon, C. 2005. ‘The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies’, Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper No. 27. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers-folder_contents/ RSCworkingpaper27.pdf Bashford, A., and C. Strange. 2002. ‘Asylum Seekers and National Histories of Detention’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 48(4): 509–27. Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bigo, D. 2001. ‘The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies)’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–136. Birnberg Peirce and Partners, Medical Justice and the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. 2008. ‘Outsourcing Abuse: The Use and Misuse of State-Sanctioned Force During the Detention and Removal of Asylum Seekers’. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://www.libertysecurity.org/IMG/pdf_outsourcing_abuse.pdf. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life. London: Verso. Campbell, D. 1994. ‘The Deterritorialisation of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida and Ethics After the End of Philosophy’, Alternatives 19: 455–84. Connolly, W. 2007. ‘The Complexities of Sovereignty’, in M. Calaraco and S. Decaroli (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: California University Press. Critchley, S. 1992. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell. Diken, B. 2004. ‘From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the End of the City’, Citizenship Studies 8(1): 83–106. Diken, B., and C. Lausten. 2006 ‘The Camp’, Geografiska Annaler B 88(4): 443–52. Dillon, M. 1999. ‘The Scandal of the Refugee’, in D. Campbell and M. Shapiro (eds), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 92–124. Douzinas, C. 2002. ‘Identity, Recognition, Rights or what Hegel Can Teach Us About Human Rights’, Journal of Law and Society 29(3): 379–405. Douzinas, C. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge Cavendish. Edkins, J. 2007. ‘Whatever Politics’, in M. Calaraco and S. Decaroli (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: California University Press. Edkins, J., and V. Pin-Fat. 2004. ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, in J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat (eds), Sovereign Lives. London: Routledge. Feldman, A. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. ——— . 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic.

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Gibney, M. 2004. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday. Hannerz, U. 1990. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 7(2): 237–51. Harvey, C. 2000. Seeking Asylum in the U.K.: Problems and Prospects. London: Butterworth. Home Office. 2003. ‘Home Office Asylum Statistics, First Quarter 2003, United Kingdom’. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http:/ rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/immigration-asylum-publications.html. ——— . 2010. ‘Control of Immigration: Quarterly Statistical Summary, United Kingdom, April-June 2010’. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20110218135832/http:/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/immigration-asylum-publications. html Howell, S. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in S. Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Isin, E., and K. Rygiel. 2007 ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps’, in E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds), The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Josephides, J. 2003a. ‘Being There: The Magic of Presence or the Metaphysics of Morality?’ in P. Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 55–76. ——— . 2003b. ‘The Rights of Being Human’, in R. Wilson and J. Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements. London: Routledge, pp. 229–50. Kant, I. 1948. The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. 1989a. ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader. Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 75-88. ——— . 1989b. ‘Ideology and Idealism’, in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader. Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 235–48. Liebling, A., and D. Price. 2001. The Prison Officer. Leyhill: Prison Service Journal. London Detainee Support Group. 2009. Detained Lives: The Real Cost of Indefinite Immigration Detention. Retrieved 13 August from: www.detainedlives.org. Malkki, L. 1995. ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. Massumi, B. 2005. ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’, Conference Proceedings: Genealogies of Biopolitics. Retrieved 13 August 2013 from: www.radicalempiricism.org. Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— . 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nyers, P. 2006. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. London, Routledge. Pratt, A. 2005. Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Shapiro, M. 1999. ‘The Ethics of Encounter: Unreading, Unmapping the Imperium’, in D. Campbell and M. Shapiro (eds), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Skrbis, Z., G. Kendall and I. Woodward. 2004. ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture and Society 21(6): 115–36. UKBA. 2008 ‘Enforcement Instructions’, UK Border Agency. Retrieved from: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/policyandlaw/guidance/enforcement/. Walters, W. 2002. ‘Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalising the Border’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 561–80. Weber, L., and L. Gelsthorpe. 2000. Deciding to Detain: How Discretion to Detain Asylum Seekers Is Exercised at Ports of Entry. Cambridge: Institute of Criminology.

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Weber, M. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, trans. A.M. Henderson and T. Parsons. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Welch, M. 2003. Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding INS Jail Complex. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Welch, M., and L. Schuster. 2005. ‘Detention of Asylum Seekers in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Italy’, Criminal Justice 5(4): 331–55.

Chapter 4

Experiences of Pain A Gateway to Cosmopolitan Subjectivity?

Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

K

Introduction Since our lives are increasingly lived in a tension between global and local forces we are regularly confronted with frictions between universal solidarity and local identity. When unfamiliar others ever more often come to live next door, issues of sameness and difference, us and them, and inclusion and exclusion become precarious. To avoid splitting and fragmentation that easily leads to stigma and persecution, there is a need to explore moments of experience that open up spaces for practices, meanings and social relationships that bear the qualities of cosmopolitanism. This is not an instrumental cosmopolitanism that makes us all alike as global consumers of similar foods, trademarks, symbols and broadcasting from a global market. Rather, it is a cosmopolitanism that refers to an ethical, aesthetic and embodied relation based on face-to-face experience and intersubjectivity. Beck (2006) uses the term ‘cosmopolitan realism’ to indicate these developments that have become part of the human condition and affect individuals’ everyday lives, particularly in the form of global risks and threats of terrorism. Thus cosmopolitanism is a concept peculiarly suited to the era of reflexive modernity, in which national borders and differences are dissolving but simultaneously must be re-negotiated from a new perspective (ibid.: 2). Furthermore, cosmopolitanism challenges and transcends the distinctions between universalism and relativism, as well as nationalism and ethnic identity politics, as it is meant to affirm the other as different and yet the same. While Beck discusses cosmopolitanism departing from the politics of otherness, social inequality, modernity, nation-states and globalization, I expand on a phenomenological and ethical perspective highlighting the

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perceptive body (Merleau-Ponty 1962), intersubjectivity (Jackson 1989, 1998) and an ethical responsibility for the other (Rorty 1989; Levinas 2003). In this chapter I focus on the ways in which Tamil refugees in a small fishing village on the northernmost coast of Norway, here called Arctic Harbour, experience bodily, social and existential pain that is here conceived as generating knowledge about society and opening up the possibility for a cosmopolitan subjectivity.1 It is suggested that pain and suffering can extend and cross social and cultural borders, and thus create moments of mutuality and an emotional moral inclusion that recognizes a human commonality between local Norwegians and Tamils. Hierarchies and borders between natives and strangers, national and diasporic belonging, cultural identity and race can be diminished to allow instances of empathy, intersubjectivity and a cosmopolitan awareness. Experiencing suffering and pain as part of ruptured, fragmented and difficult social relations forces people to create social room and agentive moments that generate new meanings and practices. Customary practices and values are confronted and give way to cosmopolitanism as a flexible recognition of a common humanity. Meanings and practices based on cosmopolitanism are not necessarily dominant or hegemonic. Rather, I argue that they allow a ‘relational humanism’ that recognizes meaning as a process generated by difference and as a way to recognize one’s self. In what follows, I introduce the field site, some features of Tamil social life, and two case-studies. Then I present two sections of analysis. First, I address cosmopolitanism as something that happens within and between self and other, and which includes an experience and recognition of the other as a relational part of oneself. Second, I draw attention to the ways in which pain creates a certain kind of complex agency related to an acknowledgement of a human need and capacity to engage in social relations. I conclude with a call for an exploration of stigma and degradation that goes beyond structural and systemic power.

Fieldwork Context The study is based on fieldwork among Tamils who have sought refuge from the civil war in Sri Lanka,2 and who have re-established themselves in the fishing village of Arctic Harbour, Finnmark County, northern Norway.3 Recognizing that few of the Tamil refugees I met spoke fluent Norwegian, and I spoke only fragments of Tamil, fieldwork methodology was tuned in on participant observation with an emphasis on ‘embodying the other’ by being with and sharing experiences with the Tamils (see Grønseth 2010c). The Tamil population in Arctic Harbour was offered safety, well-paid jobs and good housing. They were all employed as ‘cutters’ (kuttere) in the fishing industry, a low-status job traditionally associated with women. The cutters use a small, sharp filleting knife to form the fish fillet into a delicate piece by cutting off parts that contain bones and other unclean, inedible parts. The job requires skill, speed and efficiency.

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Arctic Harbour lies in a small fjord near the Barents Sea and the open arctic ocean. The buildings and houses of Arctic Harbour surround the interior of the fjord and are mainly stretched along one main road and several side streets. The village extends to approximately three kilometres. The great windswept mountains rise along the shore behind the settlements leading to the Finnmarksvidda Plateau.4 Here, there is not a tree in sight, only a few bushes firmly secured between cracks providing shelter from the storms that sweep the area. On a lovely summer’s day it is still below 20 degrees Celsius, and the air may be thick with swarms of mosquitoes. The sun shines both day and night, never dipping below the horizon from May until July. Then between November and February, the sun gradually descends, and disappears altogether. During winter blizzards, the roads are closed and covered by snow and ice. Finnmark and Arctic Harbour became a testing ground for a national strategy relating to refugees. Never before had a group of refugees been asked to settle in the far north of Norway. In the mid 1980s, Arctic Harbour experienced a dramatic shortage of labour. Knowing that Tamil refugees needed a community to settle in, the municipality made a request to the Governmental Refugee Secretary (GRS) to use refugee labour in the fishing industry.5 The GRS answered that it was not wise to send refugees to the cold outskirts of Norway. This official statement offended community members, as well as Finnmark County as a whole. If Arctic Harbour was good enough for them, it ought to be good enough for refugees as well. In 1987, after some negotiations, an agreement was reached and five married couples and a single young man were sent to Arctic Harbour. Since then, Tamil refugees have been invited to Arctic Harbour as wage-workers in the fishing industry and have proved themselves to be a necessary resource for the local economy. Not only in Arctic Harbour, but also in most of Finnmark’s fishing villages, Tamils have settled and found work in fish-processing plants. The community of Arctic Harbour prepared itself for the arrival of the Tamil newcomers. The municipality wanted to introduce them to Norwegian values and local traditions through six ‘friendship families’ who would take special care of their designated Tamil family, and introduce the Tamils to the ways of life that were considered essential for establishing a sense of well-being by the residents of Arctic Harbour. The Tamils were invited to dinners of typical local foods, and were taken on drives to see the landscape. They were also introduced to the Norwegian custom of hiking and cross-country skiing. The Norwegians took pride in introducing the newcomers to the local ‘good life’ and local food customs, and encouraged an appreciation of the area and its physical environment. This initial hosting of the Tamil refugees was meant to integrate them into Arctic Harbour social life. This did not succeed. The Tamils did not respond by incorporating Norwegian and Arctic Harbour traditions and values into their lives, nor did they forge ties of friendship and other kinds of social relationships with Norwegians. In general, they politely withdrew from contact with Norwegians and sought relations with other Tamils in Arctic Harbour.6 They established a wellfunctioning local Tamil Association that organized a broad spectrum of activities,

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including sports, religious ceremonies, a Saturday Tamil school that offered culture and language lessons for the children, as well as other social gatherings. Although the Tamil population was well-integrated into the local (and national) economy, they were in fact socially and culturally segregated.

Tamil Social and Existential Experiences in Arctic Harbour Traditionally, Tamil social relations are governed by principles of kinship and caste, a hierarchy of distinct categories and groups into which one is born.7 Living in Arctic Harbour, the patterns of social relations and experiences of personhood familiar to Tamils were ruptured, and only fragments were attainable. Initially the Tamil refugees were offered inclusion by way of assimilation into Norwegian and local ways of living. Exposing them to Norwegian practices and core values (as mentioned above) did not prove effective. Even though they wished to be included in local social life, they did not aspire to become like the local Norwegians. They sought rather to re-establish a Tamil community, uphold Tamil identity and retain Tamil social gatherings (see Grønseth 2001). They invited colleagues from the fish-processing plant and people they met at different public arenas, such as the kindergarten, primary school, office of refugees, offices of health and social welfare, local library and shops. In the beginning, some Norwegians turned up, but their number rapidly declined and only a very few maintained an interest in Tamil arrangements. Some locals used their experiences of being with the Tamils against them, mobilizing what they perceived as the Tamils’ ‘strangeness’ and ‘otherness’ in constructing symbolic stereotypes with moral connotations (see Grønseth 2010a). Not only were the Tamil refugees stigmatized to a degree by the Norwegians, but this also happened amongst themselves. Traditional patterns of loss of respect and social exclusion came into play in the new context of Arctic Harbour. Among Tamils, stigma and social exclusion is a customary response to persons who display a condition or conduct that infringes on or threatens accepted patterns of social interaction. When the hierarchy of kinship and caste groups was fragmented and rendered incomplete in Arctic Harbour, the Tamil residents’ social relations became vulnerable and insecure. In exile the refugees were left without familiar and habituated patterns for how to be together. As a consequence, Tamil individuals explained that they felt insecure about how to interact and deal with each other, and experienced a profound sense of having no one to trust and confide in (Grønseth 2006a, 2006b). When caste and kinship relations could no longer regulate with whom, where, when and how people should interact, I suggest that achieved individual and personal attributes and qualities became more vital when negotiating and establishing social relations. Being challenged and confronted by unknown Norwegian ways of life made Tamil residents in Arctic Harbour even more bewildered and anxious about social life and identity. From an analytical viewpoint, which will be expanded below, I suggest that when Tamil individuals reached out in the world and searched for ways

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to experience themselves as selves and persons, they lacked arenas in which they could engage themselves. When some of the young single Tamil men visited the local pubs, they were repeatedly called names and occasionally street fights broke out. As most of Arctic Harbour social life took place within private homes and arrangements, the refugees found few opportunities to engage on common ground. Local Norwegians participated in customary outdoors life, like fishing, hunting, gathering berries, hiking and riding snow scooters. Since the Tamils, as they explained, felt insecure and afraid of the landscape, and uncertain about the Norwegians, they did not participate in such activities. Thus they missed opportunities for the self-extension and social recognition needed to provide a reflective relation and voice to their experiences and pain. Finding neither room nor occasion to give voice to their stories, Tamil individuals visited the health centre and pointed to their body and the pain it contained. From this perspective, they lacked sufficient room for what Sartre referred to as ‘reflective consciousness’ (Sartre 1987). As they struggled with this deficiency, pain became identical to the body. Tamil people in Arctic Harbour had lost spaces in which they could carry out intentional movements and actions, and thus their ability to reflect on and give meaning to their world. When they lost motivation, intention and ways to extend themselves into the social world, they suffered and carried a bodily pain caused by their inability to create a meaningful life-world.

Bodily Expressions of Social Life In spite of their successful integration into their new lives in certain areas – the above-mentioned organization of a local Tamil Association, and integration into the economy and job market – individual Tamils frequently visited the local health centre for consultations about various and diffuse aches and pains. It appears that the Tamils’ pain expressed embodied social experiences (Grønseth 2006a, 2006b). My study (Gronseth 2010a) does not reject the possibility that the troubles and pains of many individual Tamils may be symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to the civil war in Sri Lanka,8 or of the very hard and monotonous work that Tamils undertook at the fish-processing plants.9 Nevertheless, I argue that their experience of resettlement in Arctic Harbour challenged and confronted familiar and taken-for-granted social relations and their identity in ways that were perceived and expressed by the body and self living in a new and unfamiliar social world and physical setting (Grønseth 2001, 2006a, 2006b). Furthermore, these expressions can be seen to reveal a certain knowledge and meaning related to social practices and relations in the everyday life of Arctic Harbour (see below). Illustrative and frequent pains reported to me during fieldwork among the Tamils in Arctic Harbour were referred to as headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nightmares, loss of appetite, ‘uncertainty’, ‘aloneness’, ‘loss of self ’, and ‘no peace of heart’. The aches presented during consultations at the local health centre were com-

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monly focused on physical pains, and included painful breathing, hair-loss, stomach aches and various muscular bodily pains in the shoulders, back, legs and arms. Considering that the health personnel found it difficult to diagnose and treat the presented symptoms, I suggest an interpretation that sees the Tamils’ aches and pains as related to a wider social and existential world. I propose an analysis where Tamil refugees are seen as being forced to reorient themselves and negotiate in a radically new social and cultural (and climatic) world, one which produces a deep insecurity in personal as well as group identity. Thus, I explore an approach that collapses the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind and I argue that the Tamils I encountered embody ongoing social processes, which tend to produce diffuse enduring pains and fatigue. Personal, social, political and cultural experiences may be seen as ‘written’ into bodies, such as the Tamil body, and thus produce different bodily pains (Bourdieu 1977; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; Jackson 1989; Csordas 1994; Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997). The question, then, is how such processes of embodiment are to be understood. Understanding suffering as embedded in social relations, a somatization that refers to an individualized psychology, is no longer sufficient. Rather, I suggest a more complex understanding that admits of a body that has a direct and active perception of its surroundings. The body, then, is perceived not as an object for technological medicine and conventional biological science but as a subject of sensation, experience and the world (Csordas 1994: 8). Taking the perspectives of embodiment and a phenomenology of ‘being-inthe-world’, Merleau-Ponty (1962) highlights social and cultural processes as part of perception, existential experiences and human capacities. By attending to these frames and concepts, a revisiting of the empirical material on Tamils in Arctic Harbour demonstrates not only characteristics of segregation, stigma and exclusion (see Grønseth 2010a), but also moments of emotional compassion, empathy and solidarity. This is also to be understood as a turn towards a cosmopolitan ‘being-in-the world’. Before I turn to the analysis, I present two case studies that illustrate how Tamils and local Norwegians, under certain circumstances, can experience a bridging empathy and mutuality that extends across gaps between selves and others.

Case 1: Thevenesan and Vesantha During his adolescence, Thevenesan was active with the youth radio in his local community in Sri Lanka. He was good with sound technology and production. As time passed he gained respect and built a good reputation. When the conflict increased it became difficult to make radio programmes. Thevenesan said he had never been interested in politics. Nevertheless, he was constantly accused of political activity by the army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He had been imprisoned and interrogated a few times, but luckily his friends and contacts had been able to stop further prosecution and he was set free. His parents

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begged him to stop his involvement with the radio and turn his interest more to the temple. Thevenesan joined his father to work on the farm and accompanied his family to the temple. However, the police and army still kept an eye on him, and again he was imprisoned for three days. Thevenesan decided that to protect his family and himself he needed to flee the country. With help from his family and friends he managed to escape. When I met him he had succeeded in rebuilding a life in Arctic Harbour. He was reunited with his wife Vesantha, whom he had married in Chennai (Madras) five years after his escape. They both worked at the fish-processing plant as cutters. Thevenesan and Vesantha had a son of about three years. When I spent the evening with them, Thevenesan occasionally brought old radio tapes out of the cupboard and played them for me. He stressed that the programmes were not political but about themes in everyday life, like school, music and social events. He had also made some special programmes about animal life, and liked to listen to one of the tapes of animal sounds. He missed the sounds of the monkeys and birds at his home in Sri Lanka. He also had a tape with temple songs and music. Listening to it, he felt closer to his family and was reminded of the sense of togetherness that he used to feel when visiting the temple. Thevenesan said that in Norway and Arctic Harbour he always felt alone. He was comforted by establishing a small nuclear family and appreciated the fact that Vesantha engaged the family in Hindu worship. But he missed the temples and the gatherings there. In Arctic Harbour, ritual life was mostly practised within the household. Vesantha said that she was frightened by the landscape at Arctic Harbour and did not like to go outside. She felt uneasy with the ‘empty landscape’ and insecure; she did not trust the Norwegians. When she visited the stores, she felt the store-assistants following her with suspicious eyes. She preferred Thevenesan to do the daily grocery shopping. Vesantha said that she did not like to walk in the street. Everything was so quiet; there were no flowers, no bushes, no birds, and no people greeting her as she passed by. She felt that Norwegian faces were stern and incomprehensible. The only place that she felt embraced in joy together with the Norwegians was at the kindergarten. There she enjoyed listening to the children’s voices and their laughter, and she liked their temperament. She could sense the smell of the children’s bodies in the room and felt the warmth from their bodies as they ran by her in intensive play. Vesantha enjoyed watching her son being part of the play and sounds. Sometimes the children threw a ball to her and looked at her with shining eyes. Being with the children, Vesantha told me that she also exchanged glances and a laugh with the staff. At such moments, Vesantha said she could feel a sense of joy and togetherness. Vesantha prayed to the gods to protect her family from misfortune in this unfamiliar and ‘empty place’. Thevenesan said that sometimes he felt terrified that he would ‘vanish’. He felt overwhelmed by responsibilities and the challenges of making choices and decisions. He felt a pain in his chest and sometimes went into fits of hyper-ventilation, or he would find it difficult to draw breath. He was so confused and lonely, he said, that he almost lost all sense of himself. Thevenesan

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said he was scared, and confided that he was haunted by a desire to harm himself. He told me about episodes when he had hammered his head against the wall, leaving him dizzy and close to unconsciousness. A few times he had cut himself with a knife. Less dramatically, he had put crumbs and small sharp items into his clothing to feel how they itched and cut into his skin when he moved and sat down. He had thoughts of committing suicide. He said that one of the reasons why he did not go through with it was the respect and love he felt for his mother. He also acknowledged his responsibility towards his wife and son. Having his own family not only overwhelmed him with responsibility but also gave him comfort and security, which attenuated his thoughts of self-harm. But even so, he explained that he felt as if his head was about to explode and he felt an immense anger. He woke up during the night feeling scared and lonely. He felt that there was no place for him to be. He said: No one cares. I feel like the dirt they [the Norwegians] kick and shuffle away. They want me to cut their fish, but they do not want to see me. They say that I lie, and that I cheat on the weight.10 Next summer we move to Oslo. There are many Tamils there. They have a Tamil cultural school and temple. I want to get an education. I want to make a future for my son. The war took my future. It is not me who is important, it is my family. I must learn Norwegian ways so as to support my son. I must earn money to support my family at home [in Sri Lanka]. Maybe one day we can return to Sri Lanka.

Thevenesan told me how he had raised the issue of his troubled sleep, the pain in his chest and headaches at the local health centre. He had undergone several blood tests and X-rays, but they had found nothing to explain his pain and troubles. Eventually, he received a prescription of pills to help him relax and was encouraged to consult the local psychiatric nurse. Thevenesan felt humiliated and uncomfortable by the suggestion that he needed psychiatric treatment. He said: The Norwegian doctors do not understand. There is nothing wrong with me. I need my family. I have no one to guide me or to confide in. Without family I feel afraid. There is nothing left of me. I feel alone and cannot confide in anyone here. Norwegians do not care about family. They will never understand us [the Tamils]. We Tamils need to be together. Norwegians are alone. How can you [the Norwegians] live alone?

Now it was me who felt overwhelmed. I felt challenged by his despair and by what I sensed as an emotional battle in realizing and dealing with crucial aspects of his existential being. It seemed to me that his bodily pain related to an experience of profound confusion and uncertainty in how to deal with social relations in his new life in Arctic Harbour.

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Case 2: Geetha and Kari Geetha and Aranthan had experienced how, among their new fellow Tamils in Arctic Harbour, fortunes and misfortunes in life were related to social status and respect. When Geetha arrived in Arctic Harbour to join her husband, it was not long before Aranthan became severely ill and was hospitalized. Other Tamils retreated from contact with them and saw Geetha as a ‘bearer of bad luck’. Geetha felt the disgrace and stigma attached to Aranthan and her family during breaks at work at the fish-processing plant and when she was not included as a participant in Tamil social events. When Geetha became pregnant and gave birth to her first child, a son named Bala, the Tamil women offered her no companionship or comfort. Geetha felt very lonely and turned to the gods for guidance and support. She prayed for Aranthan’s recovery and for a healthy baby. She took vows of loyalty and purity in the name of the gods. Gradually, Aranthan recovered and regained his strength. After a difficult delivery, Geetha was very weak and in need of assistance and support, but only one Tamil woman offered her friendship and visited when she had time. The other Tamils kept a distance as they did not dare to run the risk of being contaminated by her bad luck. Geetha felt uncomfortable walking in the streets of Arctic Harbour. She did not feel welcome, and did not like to ask for anything in the shops. Sometimes she felt a ‘suspicious look’ from the locals, but more often she felt she was ‘invisible’, ‘overlooked and ignored’. Tamil stigma was something she was familiar with, but Norwegian ways were strange and unfamiliar. Geetha suffered from fatigue, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite; her body ached and her feet felt very heavy. She had terrible headaches and sometimes she had to stay in bed. During this period Geetha and her baby visited the local health centre for consultations. She was worried that her baby was not gaining enough weight. She was concerned about a rash on his back, and the baby’s crying at night. Geetha did not know how to deal with small babies and could not consult her family as she would have done in Sri Lanka. Geetha felt that the health-centre personnel did not respond to her worries about her baby and told her to ‘give it time’ and ‘trust herself ’; then it would ‘work out fine’. In response to her suffering, the doctor had taken blood tests, but nothing was found to explain her pain and physical symptoms. Geetha felt confused and ‘not understood’ by the health-centre personnel. She said they were only concerned ‘about my blood, they do not see me as a person’.11 When visiting the health centre, Geetha met Kari, a woman she recognized as having participated in some of the open Tamil social celebrations. Once, after a consultation, Geetha told me that she had felt numbness in her body while waiting in the hallway to receive her prescription. Kari was in the waiting room and gave Geetha a friendly look accompanied by a discreet smile, something that made Geetha aware of herself again, and she said she felt better. On this occasion they did not speak, but they recognized a kind of mutual compassion and the two women developed a habit of exchanging small talk whenever they met. As time passed, Geetha had a second child. Again there were complications related to the

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delivery and Geetha needed to stay at the hospital for a few weeks. While Aranthan supported Geetha and the new baby at the hospital, their first son Bala stayed with Kari and her husband Per. Geetha said: ‘We [Geetha and Aranthan] trust Kari. We needed someone to take good care of Bala. She did that. We knew that she would. She reached out her hand and we needed it’. Kari was born in Finnmark. For much of her youth she had lived with her family in Finland. She decided to return to Finnmark and get a job in Arctic Harbour. Speaking both Norwegian and Finnish, she used to take it upon herself to interpret at the local health centre. She established a family with Per, a local man. In spite of being born in Finnmark and having in-laws in Arctic Harbour, she said she always felt like an outsider, or someone ‘in between’. She liked to have contact with the Finnish people in Arctic Harbour and enjoyed sharing a laugh with them. When the Tamils came to Arctic Harbour she was curious and found it interesting to visit their open social gatherings. Kari and Per became friendly with several Tamils and did them favours and gave them support. When in need of a comforting chat, some single young men had visited Kari and Per. Kari said: Many Tamils, especially young single men, did not have anyone to talk to or confide in. I know. I have been alone myself. I have moved from here to there and I have learned new languages. One can feel very lonely, not knowing what to do. A few times Tamils [men] have shown up on my doorstep in need of discussing a problem. My husband and I used to listen to them. There have been occasions when we accompanied them to the hospital for examination. Or we helped out with more practical things; like when they did not know how to deal with the food in the freezer.

Kari was amazed by what the Tamils had achieved. Simultaneously, she saw their struggle in ‘not finding a place in Arctic Harbour’. It is a bit like me. I do not belong in Arctic Harbour, even though my husband is local. Also, I do not belong with the other Finnish people. I cannot stay with them since I am married to a local. I remain in between. Sometimes I feel very lonely. I visit family in Finland. That is good. But then I am no longer Finnish. I feel compassion for the Tamils. I see that they are not comfortable. No one cares about them. Also, they do not trust each other. In daily life, they are together. But not when something is precarious. Like me, they have no one to turn to.

In time, Kari decided to divorce her husband. There were circumstances related to her decision to divorce that Kari experienced as shameful but that she needed to deal with. She went through a very difficult time. Kari said that at this point she did not feel a connection to anyone except her Tamil friends. Then, when she was going through her divorce, she felt that many Tamil friends turned away from her. She experienced what she had seen happening among the Tamils when someone was in trouble. No one would help or comfort her. Considering the help Kari had

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offered them and knowing Kari’s troubles, Aranthan decided to support Kari and risk the additional stigma to his family. Geetha approved of the decision and told me how she felt a deep compassion for Kari. Having experienced how it felt to be left alone and stigmatized, Aranthan and Geetha sensed the troubles that Kari was dealing with. They opened their door to her. They made a bed for her and Kari spent some time in their household until things calmed down and she found a new place to live. Today, Geetha and Aranthan consider Kari a family member. They include her in social and religious celebrations and she is always welcome in their house. Geetha said: We see less of Kari these days and miss her company. She is busy and does not visit as often. Before the divorce, she used to be with the Tamils. After the divorce the other Tamils did not want to be with her. Kari was very lonely. She does not have family here. We [Geetha and Aranthan] know Kari is a good person and we support her. Many Tamils did not like us to support her. But we know her loneliness and need to lend her a hand. We cannot live with Tamils only. It is good to make new relationships. We learn from them.

Embodied Cosmopolitanism: An Experience Between Self and Other? In dealing with the challenges of everyday living we confront moments and situations that we experience as uncertain and painful. This is not the pain from a physical injury or pathology but from an existential challenge to expand one’s life into something or towards someone unfamiliar and new. In this endeavour, I suggest, lies an opportunity for cosmopolitanism. It is an embodied cosmopolitanism in which being in the face of the other offers not just ethical rules and answers but an ethical source (Levinas 2003). It is a cosmopolitanism which offers a potentiality and hope, or a wishful thinking; not about being, but about ‘should-being’. It is a cosmopolitanism that comes from intersubjective moments in which the self arises and is shaped by continuously changing modes of embodied social practices, from the interplay between object and subject, self and other (Jackson 1998). Following Jackson (ibid.: 5–16), I see intersubjectivity as shaped by unconscious, embodied and doxic dispositions as much as conscious intentions and world-views. Crucial to the cosmopolitanism addressed in this chapter is how intersubjectivity highlights the empirical person and abstract generalities such as society, class, gender, nation and ethnicity. This appears as intersubjectivity between singular persons, but also between persons and a world of ideas and objects held in common. The intersubjective thus emerges across the great social inequalities between self and other and demonstrates that each is essentially dependent on and obliged and indebted to the other. Moreover, it is a cosmopolitanism that comes from entering ‘between’, from human vulnerability and sensitiveness, from sensing and recognizing a trace on the face of the Other (Levinas 2003), and acknowledg-

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ing a heartfelt responsibility. This is a humanism not based on the self but on a fellow human being’s humanity. Solidarity does not necessarily imply an acknowledgement of the totality of human kind and shared humanity but appears as a contingency generated from an increased sensitivity for details in other unknown persons’ suffering and humiliation (Rorty 1989). Being confronted with descriptions of others, and more forcefully, I suggest, from being face to face and embodying the other, generates a certain doubt (ibid.) about one’s self and about the ability of current social institutions to handle pain and humiliation. Experiencing this doubt and an enhanced sensibility for features and aspects of the other, it becomes difficult to distance one’s self from people who are different from oneself. Thus a sense of existential solidarity appears in which cultural and social differences are increasingly tolerated and morally irrelevant. As such, experiences of solidarity remind us to try to expand ‘us’ to include as many as possible. Thus, cosmopolitanism is understood as encapsulating an experience generated in certain face-to-face contexts and moments of intersubjectivity in which social and cultural distinctions and hierarchies are bridged and the other appears as ‘one of us’, as a fellow human being for whom the self has responsibility. In this view, cosmopolitanism does not refer to actions or politics as such but to perspectives, perceptions and experiences that come from relations among self, other and in between. This argument is based on an understanding that our being – as humans, bodies and persons – is not a fixed and closed entity but rather an open and flexible cluster that is ready to connect with its environment and other people (see Peirce 1932; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Daniel 1984; Csordas 1994). Such a view implies a certain agency derived from the realm of intersubjectivity, understood as shared experiences that take place within and between self and other (see also Grønseth 2010b, 2010c). This agency is intersubjective because the individual self cannot simply be reduced to the other (Jackson 1998: 8). Each self not only embodies and expresses this agency, it also transgresses and alters it in everything the self does, feels and thinks. When self contains and embeds general attributes of culture, class, gender and history, the life of that self not only gives these things form but also subjects them to its own will and by its own choice (Sartre 1968: 97–100). As Jackson (1998) and Rapport (2003) point out, though all persons seek to belong to a world of others, they simultaneously strive to make their own world. This appears in how intersubjectivity is imbued with paradoxes and ambiguities in which constructive, deconstructive and reconstructive interactions take place. Sharing experiences and engaging with unfamiliar and new others challenges already established values, practices and social relationships. In moments of rupture and ‘out of the ordinary’, one can experience an empathetic and bodily connection and recognize a common humanity despite the unfamiliarity of cultural and social differences. To experience empathy and mutuality across individual, social and cultural distinctions does not necessarily imply harmony and complete wholeness, but often includes friction and fragmentation. Furthermore, in moments of engaging and connecting to unfamiliar others, doxic, habituated and familiar values are

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contested.12 The embodied level is disturbed, generating an experience of bodily pain. Such moments of ‘painful dispute’ can trigger a transgression of established perspectives, and thus open up spaces for new perceptions and actions. This agentive and creative moment offers the potential for cosmopolitanism as it is here understood: a response to the recognition of the other as a mutual and relational part of oneself. It is through the difference of the other that the self negates and asserts itself. Experiencing life as it is lived on the borders between us and them, and self and other, provides an opportunity for a bodily sensation of transcending differences and an embodied kind of cosmopolitanism. I suggest that the body not only suffers from social restrictions, fragmentation and confusion, but it also experiences moments of meaning, recognition, joy and pleasure. The case of Geetha and Vesantha demonstrates how bodily sensations – related to exchanges of glances, smiles, small talk and perceptions of children’s play and laughter – create bodily experiences that connect Tamil individuals to their new social world. Such bodily experiences, I argue, enhance sensitivity to features and dimensions in the other which can lead to a turn from a particular Tamil way of ‘being-in-the-world’ towards an embracing and solidary cosmopolitan ‘being-in-the-world’ (MerleauPonty 1962). It is not only a question of coming to know one’s self, but also the other. Otherness and selfhood are not something given by merely existing. Rather, they are both an outcome of intersubjective engagement as it refers not simply to a dialectic of conceptual intentions but is lived as intercorporeality and through the senses as introceptivity (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 114–15, 121). Metaphorically speaking, Tamil refugees in Arctic Harbour lived in a border zone between two life-worlds. This zone is the space between the rupture of the Tamil life-world – with its principles for regulating social and religious relations, as well as the sense of personhood and self – and the confrontation with the new local Norwegian home-world. Living on the edge or the border between two different life-worlds, the Tamils in Arctic Harbour experienced a confusion that imperilled their sense of personhood and the body. In a sense, the Tamils also challenged the Norwegian (local) life-world. As a response to the challenges of being confronted with someone different, Norwegians invited Tamil refugees to assimilate into the community. The flip side of assimilation is that whenever locals feel challenged (for instance, by a shortage of resources) they can hit back to mark out difference by way of stigma (see Bauman 1995). The two cases above demonstrate Tamil individuals’ experiences of ‘being out of place’ and ‘not fitting in’. The case of Thevenesan and Vesantha illustrated how Tamil refugees felt they lived in a frightening and ‘empty place’, treated with ‘suspicion’ and seen ‘as dirt’. The case of Geetha and Kari further demonstrates this sense of confusion and of becoming ‘invisible’. From this position, living on the limit, or ‘on the borders’ between two life-worlds, the refugees experienced and expressed some of the uniqueness of being human (see Lacan 1992). In my understanding, this refers to the human need of being able actively to extend and involve oneself, and be recognized and mirrored by others, which together provide

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a space for reflection and the creation of meaning. When being forced to lead a life in exile on the border between two life-worlds, of which one is ruptured and splintered and the other accessible only in fragments, I suggest that the Tamils in Arctic Harbour learned something (true) about society and social relations. In this light one can understand some of the Tamil individuals’ pains as suffering a kind of acknowledgement of social circumstances. The Tamils experienced pain in being confronted with the deep and embodied patterns for social relations, from lacking vital relationships governed by kin and caste. Living in Arctic Harbour, kin and caste were thrown into a new light and needed to be dealt with in new ways. The refugees experienced the depth of such relations and the pain of not being able to practise them in ordinary everyday life. This painful experience and truth about (Tamil) social life, I suggest, also led to an experience and recognition of cosmopolitanism. Dealing with their pain from the borderlands, of ‘not having anyone to confide in’ and a deep sense of ‘aloneness’,13 the Tamils needed to transgress habituated and doxic patterns of social relations and reach out for relations deriving from their new social and cultural circumstances. When Geetha and Aranthan were drawn to a relationship with Kari, when Thevenesan wished to enter Norwegian education and social relations, and when Vesantha felt connected to the kindergarten, these experiences were not formed according to habituated expectations but in response to events, contexts and moments, allowing them to recognize common humanity and morality. Furthermore, this response shows a movement away from social relations based on a culturally defined collectivity into which one is born, and towards relations that spring from individually achieved experiences based on a bodily sense of commonality, and which open up, I suggest, the possibility for a cosmopolitan subjectivity. This cosmopolitan experience emerges as the self engages with the other and perceives the other as sharing human vulnerability, suffering and joy. In the following section I argue further that pain and suffering do not only enable a kind of knowledge about social relations; they also create a certain kind of complex and embodied agency.

Pain as Creating a Complex Agency Suffering can be seen to contain a kind of knowledge about human life that the intellect cannot sufficiently grasp (see Nussbaum 1986: 46). Consequently, and on an interpretive level, the Tamils were at a loss to find words, for instance when visiting the health centre, to describe their difficulties in their new life world.14 Rather, they pointed to a body that ached and suffered, not only from the vast violence and trauma of the civil war in Sri Lanka, but from everyday life in their new surroundings. It was not only their intellect and verbal statements but also their bodies and pain that expressed how they experienced social relationships, and reflected a lack of sufficient recognition and meaningful wholeness in their lives. When interpreting these bodily expressions, the Tamil refugees offered a (true and) meaningful

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narrative about society and relationships (see also Das 1995). By transforming their pain into a voice, they also put words and meaning on social structures and relations that were otherwise not heard or acknowledged. Recognizing that knowledge and the meaning of suffering are attained and embodied by living in an everyday world on the limits and borders, between fractions and portions of social life and meaning, a complex agency appears. It is, I suggest, a bodily experience of intersubjectivity, made up of paradoxes, ambivalence and agency. This is also how intersubjectivity opens out to the cosmopolitan perspective of appreciating togetherness in spite of and including differences. Since intersubjectivity refers to a force field of human interactions with competing needs, values and ideas which are forever adjusted and never completed, any conclusions about human relations must acknowledge the presence of paradoxes and challenges, but also of tolerance. However, persons can only be in their world and feel it to be true when it is conceived to be ‘the world’ (Jackson 1998: 15). Thus it becomes irrelevant whether there actually is a common human psychic unity. In this notion of a singular commonality lies the possibility of crossing social and cultural boundaries and entering intersubjective relations. There is always something of oneself that corresponds to practices and convictions one conceives in others. Distinctions designated to culture are not essentialities but put to the front and given legitimacy at a particular place and time. As cultural forms dissolve, they in turn feed back into the domains of intersubjectivity (ibid.: 16) and provide the potential for an embodied cosmopolitanism of empathy and heartfelt compassion. Through their pain, the Tamil individuals I have discussed gained a new knowledge and made new relations with their surroundings. This is seen in the case of Geetha and Kari. As Geetha was growing numb from confusion and uncertainty related to her health consultation, Kari appeared as a person that offered support. Kari said she sensed Geetha’s (and Tamil refugees’ more generally) bewilderment at ‘not fitting in’ and living on the borders between two different life-worlds. Kari sensed and empathized with aspects of Geetha’s life, thus recognizing Geetha as ‘distinct’ but the ‘same’. Suffering a different but similar pain from not being recognized as a full social person, Kari stretched out and offered companionship in the form of a friendly look and smile. This gesture made Geetha aware of herself, and as a result the numbness subsided and she felt better. Also, Geetha became aware of Kari. When they met again they exchanged glances, a nod and gradually engaged in conversation which led them into a social relationship. Kari’s first bodily gesture served as an act of recognition and mirroring, making it possible for Geetha to connect and extend herself into an engaged social relation. It was not (only) the intellect but their intentional bodies with their passions and pains that enabled them to create a new and cosmopolitan social relation, which also implied new practices and meanings. Aranthan and Geetha transgressed customary Tamil patterns of social relations by maintaining a friendship with a Norwegian woman who was divorced. Having suffered from experiences of exclusion and stigma both from Tamils and Norwegians, Aranthan and Geetha had learned a truth about social life that made it possible for them to transgress Tamil values and respond to a human

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need and capacity for connecting and engaging with other humans. As such, they had entered intersubjective and embodied moments in which they experienced empathy or a trace of the other’s suffering that led them to expand their sense of ‘us’ and respond to solidarity across distinctions. The case of Thevenesan and Vesantha also demonstrated a need to engage in a new kind of social life. Even though Thevenesan experienced a feeling of being invisible and without a future, he recognized the need to engage himself in the new and unfamiliar life-world. He acknowledged a call to participate in Norwegian ways, such as education, for the sake of his son. Here I suggest that Thevenesan is to be understood as empathizing with his son when he imagines a future for him. Having suffered from his own experience of being excluded and treated as second rate, he wanted to see his son better off. Drawing on his embodied social and existential suffering and empathetic identification with his son, Thevenesan, I suggest, achieves motivation and agency to create new practices and meanings within his new life-world. Habituated cultural forms are challenged and put back, while Thevenesan strives to enter intersubjective relations of here and now. On an interpretative level, Thevenesan can be seen to bear a vision of a future for his son that entails an embodied cosmopolitan approach to being-in-the-world, and relating to self and others. Simultaneously, Thevenesan can be seen to sense and empathize with an existential suffering among Norwegians. As he pointed out, ‘Norwegians do not care about family … Norwegians are alone. How can you live alone?’ At the time I felt overwhelmed. Reflecting on this, I suggest I was overwhelmed not only by Thevenesan’s pain but possibly my own pain of ‘living alone’; a shared human existential issue. The two case studies demonstrate in distinct ways how pain and suffering is part of intersubjectivity and offer new knowledge and meaning in the understanding of social surroundings. It is the body that intentionally communicates about its being-in-the-world, and addresses what Lacan (1992) and Nussbaum (1986) refer to as a certain unspeakable or suffering knowledge about society, values and social relations. I suggest that this is the experience that comes from the perspective of being on the borders, as mentioned above. In this zone, distinct phenomena and their identity appear not as a stable and fixed essence, but as resulting from a process in time and space, and, as mentioned in the previous section, ready and open to connect with others. Taking openness and readiness to connect to others into consideration, it is shown how meaning and practice do not spring from one single individual but from interaction between several others. We do not only speak and interact with others, but also ‘through others’ (Jacques 1982: 188). This implies that the others are not only witnesses to the self. The others are also the condition for communicating its meaning. In other words, it is when and if they understand me that I understand myself. This is illustrated when Geetha feels confused to the point of becoming numb and ‘losing’ herself. By sharing experiences with Kari, Aranthan and Geetha come to new understandings of themselves as participants in the new life-world of Arctic Harbour. From their suffering, Geetha and Thevenesan express and learn about Tamils’ social position in Arctic Harbour, but also

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about differences in meaning and the constitution of social relations. Experiencing bodily pain from a deep existential aloneness that threatens to diminish their sense of self and person, they learn about a human need to engage in social relations. As we acknowledge that individuals and selves are not closed entities and that meaning is an interactive process, we can also understand practices and symbols as open-ended and having an inclination for creativity. For actions and signs to have a public existence and conviction they must create meaning, social relations and inspiration. Such practices and symbols can assert their value as powers to govern, which leads to domination, or they can be recognized as powers to inspire. The former leads to a substantive unity, whereas the latter can (it is hoped) lead to a ‘universal relational humanity’. Moreover, this is a difference of symbols and practices that seek to generate power, rights and well-being to a certain group or population (like ethnic groups, cultural minorities or indigenous peoples), or to humanity as relational universal being. Following the ideals of cosmopolitanism, practices and symbols should hold a universality that asserts its value and meaning from an intersubjective relation, the interest in which lies neither in self nor other but as a relation between us as human beings.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter I have demonstrated how Tamil refugees in Arctic Harbour experience aches and pains that can be understood using the perspective of embodiment, which collapses the dichotomy of body and mind. By taking such an approach it is revealed how pain can express a kind of knowledge about social relations and exert a complex agency derived from the realm of intersubjectivity. From these shared experiences I have argued that one can experience empathy and mutuality across individual, social and cultural differences. It should again be noted that such mutuality is not necessarily smooth and harmonious; rather, it often includes friction and conflict. However, I propose to see in the Tamil case a cosmopolitan solidarity generated from an intersubjectivity in which the body perceives and senses a kind of common quality that is recognized by and through cultural and social differences between self and other. When the Tamils came to live next door to Norwegians in Arctic Harbour, both groups can be seen to have initially rejected each other. The Norwegians tried to make the Tamils become part of ‘us’ through assimilation, thus not accepting the Tamils as distinct but still a part of ‘us’. The Tamils, I suggest, were overwhelmed by their losses and uncertainty about the new climatic and social surroundings, and struggled to uphold their own identity. Considering power distinctions, such that the local Norwegians belonged to the majority native population and the Tamils belonged to a refugee minority population, there were critical issues that separated the two groups in a hierarchical ranking, with the Tamils occupying the lower social and moral position. While Tamil individuals embodied and recognized this painful social order there appeared a complex agency that simultaneously opened

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up perceptions and empathy for the other’s vulnerability, suffering and also joy. In such moments of entering in between self and other, into the realm of intersubjectivity, the other could become one of ‘us’ and be appreciated as a mutual although distinct human being. Calling upon an embodied cosmopolitanism of aesthetics, ethics and empathy generated from the realms of face-to-face relations and intersubjectivity can run the risk of a naivety that avoids dealing with structural power and systemically asymmetric relations. Rather, I propose that studying experiences of physical aches and pains as part of embodied social experiences and ‘being in everyday life’ can give access to often unspoken knowledge about social life. Relations of power, stigma and degradation are thus addressed on a level that does not dismiss, but rather goes beyond, structures of indifference, so as to capture the ways in which groups and individuals experience, express and negotiate their pain and agony within a life project of seeking community, recognition and well-being. By exploring this quest for a cosmopolitan awareness and togetherness, I suggest that we can learn more about common human needs and capacities to resist, tolerate and connect to each other in ways that can inform our policy actions and make it possible to live with the neighbour next door.

Notes   1. My fieldwork in Arctic Harbour (a pseudonym) comprised a one-year stay in 1999 and a few short visits prior to that time. The first stage of research was conducted while a member of the Regional Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress, Northern Norway (previously the Psychosocial Team for Refugees). I then received funding from the Northern Norwegian Psychiatric Research Centre with three months’ salary in 1997. In 1999 I was granted a fouryear university scholarship by the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.   2. The complexities of the inter-ethnic conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka are beyond the scope of this chapter. In brief, since Sri Lankan independence in 1948, the Tamil minority situation has been a political issue. One can understand the population of Sri Lanka as being divided into three ethnic communities: the Sinhalese majority (74 per cent), Tamils (18.2 per cent) and Muslims (7.4 per cent) (figures cited in Tambiah 1991: 4). Traditionally, the Tamil population has been the majority in the north and east of Sri Lanka, but it is represented in smaller numbers in every district. After liberation from British colonization, the Tamil population experienced a policy of increasing discrimination by the Sinhalese majority and a polarized ethnic climate. In 1956, Sinhalese became the official language, leading to increased political tension and discrimination of the Tamil population. By June 1983, there were upheavals, and many were killed or had to flee their homes. Among different political and guerrilla movements, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been the most aggressive in pursuit of its aim, an independent state of Tamil Eelam. The civil war has continued for more than twenty years, and thousands of people have been killed on both sides. The traditional Tamil-majority areas of Jaffna in the north and east of Sri Lanka have been declared war zones, and most Tamil people live in exile or as refugees in their own country. In May 2009 the Sinhalese government claimed victory over the LTTE. After the LTTE defeat, the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance dropped its demand for a separate state in favour of a federal solution. One year later, in May 2010, the Sri Lankan president appointed the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) to assess the conflict between the time of the ceasefire

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  3.

  4.   5.

  6.

  7.   8.

  9. 10. 11.

agreement in 2002 and the defeat of the LTTE in 2009. The Sri Lankan government has since denied that its forces committed any war crimes and has opposed strongly any requests for international investigation. However, in response to political and international pressure, in July 2012 the Sri Lankan government fixed a time line for investigating alleged war crimes by its army during the final stages of the war with the LTTE in 2009. The thousands of Tamils captured or driven from their original homes in Sri Lanka, the military actions leading to the defeat of the LTTE, and the millions of Tamils in diaspora, are still disputed and politically charged questions. Arctic Harbour is one of several fishing communities along the northern coast of Norway, where there is a substantial settlement of Tamils; there were about 200 Tamils in a population of approximately 2,500 inhabitants during 1999/2000. The numbers vary as the population as a whole is shifting, mostly due to fluctuations in labour needs in the fishing industry. My fieldwork involved participant observation and I conducted interviews among the Tamil population and among staff employed at the local health centre and in regional services. During the total research period I sat in on about 50 health consultations, and I interviewed about 25 different health personnel (physicians, psychologists, nurses and social workers) and 160 Tamils. The interviews included both sexes and different age groups. The youngest interviewee was 14 and the eldest was 45, while most were between their early twenties and mid thirties. Some interviews were done with individuals and some were conducted with married couples. With a few exceptions, the individuals had no more than primary schooling. Most had experienced a rupture in their plans for education and future careers due to the civil war and their flight. The inhabitants of Finnmarksvidda are mostly indigenous Sami, and traditionally make a living as reindeer herders. Along the coast there is a more mixed population consisting of Sami peoples who combine fishing and reindeer-herding and non-Sami Norwegian inhabitants. To my knowledge there are two different accounts of how the first Tamils actually settled in Arctic Harbour. The one presented here has an official status as it refers to a verbal account by the local refugee consultant employed at the time. An owner of one of the fish-processing plants told a slightly different story to me. He stated that he himself contacted GRS, which resulted in some Tamils arriving before the municipality organized a settlement schedule. There were two Tamil men who set up households with Norwegian women. Both couples described serious difficulties with being accepted by both communities. For reasons of confidentiality I cannot reveal further details about their situation. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, and with the exception of the case presented later, there were no Tamils that maintained longstanding social relations with Norwegian residents. On caste, see Barnett (1975), Dumont (1980), Pfaffenberger (1982), Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma (1994), Fuller (1996), Bayly (1999) and Deepa (2005). Core symptoms of PTSD include persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event, numbness and avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and autonomic hyperarousal. Dissociative disorders, somatization disorders and affective disorders are among other possible consequences of exposure to traumatizing events (van der Kolk et al. 1996). Typical work-related symptoms are muscular aches, tension and inflammation in the arms, shoulder and back, sometimes also the legs and feet. When standing side by side cutting fish on the production line, it is possible to cheat on your neighbour and steal fillets which make the weight of fish that a worker has processed heavier, thus earning them a bonus payment for good and quick work. Such a tendency is not only present in meetings between Norwegian health-carer workers and Tamils. Other groups of migrants and refugees, as well as ethnic minorities such as the indigenous Sami, and many ethnic Norwegians, express complaints leading to a similar analysis. An increasing demand for alternative treatment and healers among various groups of patients is often explained as a response to the Norwegian health-care workers’ neglect in treating their patients as whole persons.

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12. ‘Doxa’ refers to issues that are not part of discourse, not questioned or reflected upon, but that are instead seen as ‘natural’ (Bourdieu 1977). 13. Daniel describes a similar sense of being alone, using the phrase ‘aloneness’, which is referred to as: ‘not being alone, in the strict sense. It is being disconnected from other human beings with whom one ought to be connected’ (Daniel 1989: 78). 14. This does not mean that they were literally without words. They spoke some Norwegian and had access to an interpreter. However, they did not succeed in bringing forth the story related to their pain.

References Barnett, S.A. 1975. ‘Approaches to Changes in Caste Ideology in South India’, in B. Stein (ed.), Essays on South India. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, pp. 149–80. Bauman, Z. 1995. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bayly, S. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, U. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, T. (ed.). 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniel, V. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 1989. ‘The Semeiotics of Suicide in Sri Lanka’, in B. Lee and G. Urban (eds), Semeiotics, Self and Society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 67–100. Das, V. 1995. ‘Voice as Birth of Culture’, Ethnos 60(3/4): 159–79. Deepa, S.R. 2005. ‘The Ethnicity of Caste’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(3): 543–84. Dumont, L. 1980 [1966]. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, rev. edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, C.J. (ed.). 1996. Caste Today. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Grønseth, A.S. 2001. ‘In Search of Community: A Quest for Well-being among Tamil Refugees in Northern Norway’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(4): 493–514. ——— 2006a. ‘Experiences of Illness: Tamil Refugees in Norway Seeking Medical Advice’, in H. Johannessen and I. Làzàr (eds), Multiple Medical Realities: Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 148–62. ——— 2006b. ‘Experiences of Tensions in Re-orienting Selves: Tamil refugees in Northern Norway Seeking Medical Advice’. Anthropology and Medicine 13(1): 77–98. ——— 2010a. Lost Selves and Lonely Persons: Experiences of Illness and Well-being among Tamil Refugees in Norway. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. ——— 2010b. ‘Introduction’, in A.S. Grønseth and D.L. Davis (eds), Mutuality and Empathy: Self and Other in the Ethnographic Encounter. Guildford: Sean Kingston Publishing, pp. 7–21. ——— 2010c. ‘Sharing Experiences with Tamil Refugees in Northern Norway: Body and Emotion as Methodological Tools’, in A.S. Grønseth and D.L. Davis (eds), Mutuality and Empathy: Self and Other in the Ethnographic Encounter. Guildford: Sean Kingston Publishing, pp. 143–61. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——— 1998. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacques, F. 1982. Différence et subjectivité. Paris: Aubier. Kleinman, A., V. Das and M. Lock (eds). 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Lacan, J. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Vol. 7, ed. J.A. Miller. New York: Morton. Levinas, E. 2003 [1972]. Humanism of the Other. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——— 1964. The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nussbaum, M. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, C.S. 1932. Collected Papers, Vols. 1–6, eds C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pfaffenberger, B. 1982. Caste in Tamil Culture: The Religious Foundations of Sudra Domination in Tamil Sri Lanka. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School and Foreign and Comparative Studies. Rapport, N. 2003. I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1968. Search for a Method, trans. H. Barnes. New York: Vintage. ——— 1987. Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans B. Frechtman and H. E. Barnes. New York: Citadel Press. Scheper-Hughes, N., and M. Lock. 1987. ‘The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1: 1–36. Searle-Chatterjee, M., and U. Sharma (eds). 1994. Contextualising Caste: Post-Dumontian Approaches. Oxford: Blackwell. Tambiah, S.J. 1991 [1986]. Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van der Kolk, B.A., Pelovitz D., Roth S., Mandel, F,. McFarlane, A. and Herman, J.L. 1996. ‘Dissociation, Somatization and Affect Dysregualation: The Complexity of Adaptation of Trauma’. American Journal of Psychiatry. 153(7): 83–93.

Chapter 5

Cosmopolitanism as Welcoming the Other and Imperilling the Self Ethics and Early Encounters between Lyons Missionaries and West African Rulers

Marc Schiltz

K

A calling into question of the [self ] – which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the [self ] – is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Introduction In this chapter I approach cosmopolitanism as a human capacity for empathy and sociality, and as a life project of self-discovery by welcoming the Other.1 My examination of these issues takes me on a journey to the nineteenth century, to the first meetings between Lyons missionaries of the Society of African Missions (SMA) and West African rulers in Dahomey and Yorubaland. How to recognize such ‘grass roots’ cosmopolitanism in historical records does however raise problems. Not only are there many gaps and biases in the records, but also the accounts were written predominantly by missionaries without African input. Fortunately, Lyons pioneers on whose journals and letters I draw offer a wealth of information not only about themselves – as men who looked at African worlds with empathy and curiosity – but also on the African ‘others’ who had welcomed them, and whom

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they portrayed so vividly, as strategizing agents and moral persons in their own right. Nonetheless, such an actor-focused cosmopolitanism, with its inherent partisan (nineteenth-century Catholic) scope and subjective views and aspirations, requires a broader and more impartial contextualization than its own records allow. Thus my account is heavily indebted to Father Patrick Gantly’s invaluable account of the SMA in the nineteenth century (Gantly 1991, 1992). Unlike many mission apologias, Gantly’s scholarly work, drawn from the vast SMA archives, does not shrink from a critical stance on the missionaries and their superiors, including the Vatican ministry Propaganda Fide in Rome.2 Among SMA historians I must single out Mandirola and Morel as well as Bob Hales, and among the pioneer chroniclers, Borghero, Holley, Chausse and Coquard. Aside from these missionary sources my account also draws on a rich West African library of Dahomean and Yoruba studies, to which I bring my own insights as a former White Father, missionary and belated convert to anthropology in Yorubaland (Nigeria) in the 1960s and 1970s.3 I begin with a rereading of the historical record of early Lyons missionary contact with West Africans. My aim on this journey, which takes me through the war-torn West African hinterland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is not the historian’s, who seeks to reconstruct a true narrative of the past. Instead, I proceed with an eye to what the accounts disclose about cosmopolitanism, understood broadly as the ethical impulse and striving for shared humanity between missionaries and their African hosts. This requires a phenomenological approach which seeks to recognize intimations of a cosmopolitan ethos in the pioneering phase of the Lyons mission. In my attempt to articulate this ethos I turn to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose phenomenology of ethics aimed beyond the ethically neutral tradition of ontology. As Howells comments: ‘For Levinas ethics is not a secondary subsection of philosophy, dealing with the question of how human beings should relate to each other and the world about them; human beings do not pre-exist their relation with each other, they are rather constituted by them’ (Howells 1999: 123–24). For Levinas, ethics precedes ontology (Levinas 1969: 103, 218, 293 et passim), just as for Plato ‘the good lies beyond being’ (quoted in Wild 1969: 17). Levinas begins with an ethical ‘I’ rather than a Cartesian rational ‘I’.4 Even the self is possible only through the recognition of the other, a recognition that carries responsibility towards what is irreducibly different (Steinfels 1995). The recognition of transcendence implied by this separation between self and other (indicated by the use of the upper case in Levinas: Other) can be captured in the simple observation: ‘there is more to the other and the face I meet than what meets the eye’. Or as Levinas put it: ‘The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face … The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me … [This] is not achieved by … knowledge that thematises, but precisely by “thematisation” turning into conversation’ (Levinas 1969: 50–51). For Levinas, ethics begins in the encounter with the other. This observation does not deny that a great part of

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our speaking and thinking is systematic and bound up by logic of some kind, as well as by belief systems, cultural norms, status-role attributes and other modes of objectifying the Other. What Levinas is interested in showing is that prior to these systems, which are required to meet many needs, and presupposed by them, is the existing individual and his or her ethical choice to welcome the stranger-Other and share his or her world by speaking to him or her (ibid.: 27). However, there can be no such free interchange without something to give: communication depends on an initial act of generosity and/or hospitality. We become systematic and orderly in our thinking, Levinas reasons, by first freely making a choice for generosity and communication, that is, for sociality (ibid.: 120–21). Opposed to this is totalitarian thinking, which accepts vision (horizon, thematization) rather than language as its model. Totalitarian thinking aims to gain an all-inclusive, panoramic view of all things, including the other, in a neutral, impersonal light, like the Hegelian Geist (Spirit) or the Heideggerian Being (Wild 1969: 14–15); or, one might add with reference to this enquiry: totalizing visions such as those of European racial, cultural and religious superiority in relation to African others. Two issues then arise for this historical case study. First, in their face-to-face encounters in the pre-colonial war-torn West African hinterland, how did the two categories of protagonists – local rulers and missionaries – first appear to each other’s consciousness, and affect/desire? Second, how and why did the question of ‘welcoming the Other/the Face’ present both of them with existential (political, economic, or mystical) dilemmas of physical and moral imperilment, which transcended their individual agencies? This last inference, of imperilling the self as the liability of hospitality, is not one which Levinas pursues empirically in his philosophical writings. I raise the issue of self-imperilment as one which missionaries or anthropologists (for instance) experience as outsiders living among indigenous peoples, and to which Michael Taussig has drawn attention in his discussion of ‘mimesis’ (copying, sympathetic magic, aping) as ‘the nature that culture uses to create second nature’ (Taussig 1993: xiii–xiv). Indeed, in the (ethnographic) encounter, Taussig writes, ‘something crucial about what made oneself was implicated and imperilled in the object of study, in its power to change reality, no less’ (ibid.: 253). Reflecting on her fieldwork among the Kewa of the New Guinea Highlands, Josephides (2008: 219) was reminded of this power, which Taussig describes as a ‘yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unknown, of thought in its object’ (Taussig 1993: 45). In everyday life, though, she noticed that such acts of mimesis were pervasive, and people in the village also engaged in them all the time: ‘making copies is part of a strategy of self and world creation’, including I would add, of gaining purchase on the world – including the world of the missionary or anthropologist. Following on from this, and considering how mimesis is in fact a two-way street, Josephides summarized this dialectic in the following words: ‘if you want to make others into a copy of yourself, that is imperialism, but if you want to make of yourself a copy of others that is an imperilling of the self ’ (Josephides 2008: 219–20). As for the first alternative, we

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shall see that in the kingdom of Dahomey the rulers rightly feared that their kingdom would disintegrate if their subjects copied the missionaries and converted. With regard to the second alternative, of the missionary copying or yielding to the (pagan) African, the Church’s fear was that he might imperil his soul and compromise the mission project. But with empathy – as this enquiry will suggest – he might also try, by copying the African, to strive for a cosmopolitan sociality. It is in light of this antinomy between welcoming the Other and imperilling the self that I begin my account. My reflections on the Lyons mission founder Marion Bresillac’s view of the missionary vocation are informed not only by his writings, but also by the example he set as a leader who led from the front.

Marion Bresillac: SMA Founder, Anti-colonial Churchman and Tragic Visionary The story of the Lyons Society of African Missions began in 1856 – a year after Pope Pius IX had accepted Marion Bresillac’s resignation as bishop of the South Indian diocese of Coimbatore. During the previous twelve years of his missionary work with the Missions Etrangères de Paris in British-ruled India, Bresillac had gained experience as a pastor, rector of a seminary and finally a bishop. His progressive views, favouring a more welcoming and humane policy towards non-Christian cultures and caste practices, and an acceleration of the ordination of local priests and bishops, had led to mounting controversy in Indian dioceses among missionaries and bishops who viewed such objectives as unrealizable at that time. When Rome chose not to arbitrate in the Indian missions’ controversy, Bresillac offered to resign from his episcopal see in order to avoid confusion and dissent, or as he put it, ‘for the good of the Indian mission’ (Gantly 1991: 21–25). After much soul searching and prayer, the 42-year-old Bresillac then set his sights on Africa. He singled out the kingdom of Dahomey, ‘notorious’, he had read, ‘for slave trading and human sacrifice, a kingdom which offered obvious challenges but had the attraction of being truly African and unaffected by European colonial rule’ (Gantly 1991: 24–26). But Cardinal Barnabo, head of Propaganda Fide, intervened. Instead of barbaric Dahomey, Barnabo offered him the Vicariate Apostolic of Sierra Leone, regarded as a safer ecclesiastical jurisdiction because of the British naval presence in Freetown (ibid.: 24–26). Bresillac accepted graciously, but privately he wrote to his brother in France: ‘we shall be a prey [there] to all the miseries of a European colony as well as to those of the pagans. In Dahomey we should have to deal only with pagans who might very quickly cut off our heads, but who might also be responsive to the preaching of the truth’ (ibid.: 30).5 Having gathered a first group of priests and seminarians and set up his headquarters in Lyons, Bresillac and a vanguard party of five missionaries departed from Cherbourg to West Africa in March 1859. On arrival in Freetown they immediately set about the task of establishing a mission and exploring their new surroundings – even though the town was then in the grip of an epidemic of yel-

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low fever. Sadly the epidemic caught up with them, killing all but one, including Bresillac, who succumbed on 25 June 1859, after only four weeks in Sierra Leone. Bremont, a French trader in Freetown who had attended Bresillac on his death bed, wrote this testimony: The illustrious patient … became very agitated but remained lucid in mind until about an hour before death. At this moment he raised his eyes to heaven and whispered in a tone of voice that I will never forget: ‘Faith, Hope, Ch…’ ‘Charity’, I said. ‘Thank you’, he replied very feebly. He died at 1.20 p.m. [25 June, 1859] in profound peace but after a half-hour of terrible agony. (ibid.: 34)

It is in perfect character that the final words from Saint Paul’s ‘hymn to charity’ (1 Cor. 13: 13) would have come to Bresillac’s dying lips. He had on numerous occasions written and spoken of the missionary vocation as a labour of love, not only when counselling seminarians about the dangers and privations which the missionary must be prepared to endure, but because, he insisted, only charity, empathy and love, rather than colonial conquest and the mystique of Western civilization, would touch the heart and soul of the pagan and make for true Christians. Significant in this respect were the ‘Fundamental Articles’ which Bresillac had drafted for his new Lyons Society’s Constitution before setting out for Sierra Leone. From his previous experience in India, Bresillac had learnt that not all priests were suitable for the missionary task: The missionary vocation is unique and somewhat rare: a vocation, to be clearly distinguished from that of the parish priest or [monk]. The priest, who exercises a very fruitful ministry among his own people in his own country, might prove to be a failure in the foreign mission. For the missionary has to abandon home and country; he has to undergo a kenosis [i.e., an emptying of one’s prejudices, egoism and selfishness] in order to settle among a people of a different language, race and culture, seeing the good in them, loving them and, if at all possible, liking them. (Gantly 1991: 78–79)

Bresillac draws a striking distinction between the vocation of the priest, whose ministry is directed at his own people in a Christian land, and the missionary’s, who is an outsider-pioneer in a non-Christian culture, where he must present himself as the emissary of a religion calling itself Catholic (that is, universal, from the Greek katholikos). When face to face with paganism, the missionary must first settle in – learn the people’s language, customs and so on – and build on what he (subjectively) perceived was good in the people and in their culture. All this was part of what might be called ‘the techniques of conversion’. What mattered most, however, was the missionary’s love for the people and his total commitment to, ‘witness unto [Jesus] … even unto the uttermost part of the world’ (Acts 1: 8). Up to this point we may recognize in Bresillac’s Fundamental Articles a vision of mission which called on each candidate for a total commitment to reach out to the African Other in a love for one and all. As a vision of intersubjectivity or shared humanity

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in the phenomenological sense of experiencing another person as a subject rather than an object, and being perceived as a subject by the other, Bresillac’s was also a theological-Eucharistic vision: the person of the risen Christ was the transcendent image in which missionary and African subjectivities were to become united in love. ‘Seeing the good’ in the Africans and ‘loving them’ referred, then, to the divine commandment to ‘love thy God’ and ‘love thy neighbour’ (Mark 12: 30–31). But when Bresillac followed up on his admonition of loving the African by coyly adding ‘and, if at all possible, liking them’, he was not offering a synonym for ‘loving them’. On the contrary, he was introducing a radical reversal of perspective on what was in all other respects a de facto unequal and culturally diverse relation between pagan Africans and European missionaries. What he wanted to convey was a ‘welcoming of the Other in all his or her otherness’; what a century later the philosopher Levinas elucidated by the core tropes of ‘separation’, ‘transcendence’ and ‘desire’ in relation to the human Other (Levinas 1969: 109–10, 251, 299– 300 et passim). In his discussion of the radical separation between the self and the other, despite people’s relentless efforts to subsume or objectify the Other under their own categories, Levinas notes that: the relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense … Here the alterity of the other does not result from its identity, but constitutes it: the other is the Other. The Other qua Other is situated in a dimension of height and of abasement – glorious abasement; he has the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, and, at the same time, of the master called to invest and justify my freedom. (ibid.: 251)

The novelty entailed by such a welcoming of the Other at the core of cosmopolitanism is never risk free in life – whether physically, emotionally or ethically – in so far as hospitality assumes mutual trust, and no one ever knows what the Other thinks, feels and intends. Neither does one know, as mentioned earlier, to what extent welcoming or internalizing the other (as mimesis) will transform, exceed, or worse, imperil the self. As Yoruba proverbs warn, ‘excessive love for her husband causes the she-goat to grow a beard’; ‘we know whom we love, but we don’t know who loves us’. Even under conditions of mutual trust and love, one never knows how the act of welcoming the Other will shape the future, least of all the distant future beyond one’s own life project. Bresillac’s resignation from his episcopal see in colonial India as a result of his hospitality in welcoming Indian culture and Indians for the presbyterate is one such case that illustrates how, at that time in Rome, his cosmopolitanism was perceived as an imperilling of the Catholic, universalizing, globalizing mission project.

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Relaunching the Mission to Africa: Borghero the Pioneer and Planque in Lyons News of the Freetown disaster dealt a hard blow to the fledgling band of missionaries in Lyons. But as Gantly notes, ‘however devastated they may have been, they appear to have had no hesitation that they must shoulder the responsibility passed on by the Founder’ (Gantly 1991: 37). At the age of thirty-three and without missionary experience, Father Augustin Planque was the most senior priest in Lyons, where he was director of the seminary. His seniority, and the fact that before departing for Sierra Leone Bresillac had entrusted him with the care of his estate in case of his death, made Planque the obvious choice to succeed the founder as SMA Superior General and relaunch the mission to West Africa. But this time, following Bresillac’s original wish, it would be in the notorious kingdom of Dahomey. The leader of this expedition was the 31-year-old Italian priest Father Francesco Borghero, a native of Genoa – classicist, polyglot and polymath – who since his student days had dreamed of becoming a pioneer missionary in distant lands. He had met Bishop Bresillac in Rome in 1858 and at once decided to follow him to Lyons. On 5 January 1861, Borghero, with two newly ordained missionaries – the Frenchman Edde and the Spaniard Fernandez – set out from Toulon for Dahomey. We learn from Borghero’s journal that during the three-and-a-half month journey along the West African coast, the two young priests were horribly seasick, a malady no doubt compounded by anxiety about what Dahomey might have in store for them. Edde would never find out, as he died at a stop in Freetown.6 Borghero and Fernandez arrived in Whydah on 18 April 1861, on board the French warship d’Estaing. Whydah was well known for centuries to every slave trader in Europe,7 though legitimate trade had also started and French, English and other European merchants had factories there. For the missionaries, the sight of the notorious ‘slave coast’ evoked very contrasting emotions. While Fernandez looked on with dread, Borghero confided to his journal: ‘I felt overwhelmed by a deep emotion when, from out on the sea, I spotted black men on the beach, the very Blacks to whom we had come to announce the Word of God’ (Borghero 1997: 42).8 As an emotional expression of desire, Borghero’s black/white contrast seems incidental and devoid of the nineteenth-century evolutionist connotations of that colour antinomy. Rather, the fact of having already welcomed the Word suggests his eagerness to proclaim it for the salvation of the Dahomeans.9 After the missionaries had disembarked, the captain introduced them as white men under French protection to the Jevogan (viceroy) and the chiefs of the town.10 Whydah, once a small coastal kingdom, had in the previous century been conquered by Dahomey, whose king lived in the capital of Abomey, about sixty miles inland. For the Dahomeans, Whydah was the ‘town of whites’, not only because of the European traders but also because of the many Portuguese-speaking blacks, former slaves from Brazil who, after buying back their freedom, had returned to the West African coast.

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The Jevogan warned Borghero that the king forbade the missionaries to proselytize among the native population and allowed them only to minister to the whites. He also advised the missionaries to repair and occupy the dilapidated Portuguese slave fort which had been vacated in 1825. Only its chapel was still serviceable. Among the returned slaves from Brazil, Borghero wrote to Planque, many were baptized Catholics – but he added that not much could be expected from these Christians who ‘are all polygynists … they don’t know what it is to confess and receive Holy Communion … they practise a mixture of Christianity and paganism’ (quoted in Gantly 1991: 56). The only thing the missionaries could do for them, he wrote, was to set an example of true Christian living, visit people in their homes, open a clinic and start a school for their children.

Meeting the King of Dahomey Whydah was important for Dahomey as a seaport and link with the outside world, but Borghero knew that without the goodwill of King Glele in Abomey, he could achieve little. When he first sent word to the king asking for an audience, Glele was busy with the elaborate annual ‘grand customs’ in honour of his royal ancestors. European visitors would be expected to come laden with gifts for this festivity. They would also be made to witness the ritual immolation of war captives, and walk over the blood-soaked ground where these wretches had been beheaded (see Burton 1893, ii: 12–18, 113, 222–45; Forbes 1966, ii: 63–64; Gantly 1991: 60). In mid November 1861, not long after Borghero had recovered from the first of several near fatal bouts of tropical fever, King Glele at last sent word that he was ready to receive the missionary. Borghero was delighted with the invitation and sent on valuable presents in advance. But he also took a firm stand with regard to the ritual killings: he would not attend these as other Europeans had done, nor would he come near any ‘fetish’ ceremony or contribute alcohol for the festivities. He even demanded that fetishes should not be on display during his visit and neither would he countenance the sight of gibbets with rotting corpses. Having laid down these conditions, Borghero set off from Whydah with a few Christians and carriers and reached Abomey by the end of November. On arrival he was given a house where he could rest and make ready for an audience the following day. Having come this far, Borghero wanted to make an impression on the king and his people. He arranged his party in processional order, wearing his finest liturgical vestments, while the Christians who accompanied him were apparelled in white albs and red sashes. The group included a bell-ringer followed by a young man carrying an ivory statuette of Christ, flanked by another one with an effigy of the Virgin. Behind them followed the group of carriers from Whydah and a growing number of local sightseers (Borghero 1997: 65). King Glele welcomed Borghero and enquired after the health of his people in Europe, the emperor of France and the king of Portugal. But when he welcomed Borghero as the emissary of the Emperor Napoleon III, the missionary corrected

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him and replied that he had been sent by the Pope, ‘so great a personage’, he said, ‘that even kings were honoured to be received by him’. Glele then asked, ‘how big an army has the Pope?’ When Borghero spoke of the purpose of his presence in Dahomey, the king pretended not to understand. ‘Surrounded as he was by fetishers, he did not dare’, Borghero explains, ‘to display any interest in the preaching of Christianity’ (ibid.: 71–76). Consistent with this interpretation, Gantly mentions another report by Borghero in which he had argued that the strength and cohesion of the kingdom were founded on the fetish (vodun) religion and on military might. It was essentially a military kingdom, he had stated (Gantly 1991: 58). This observation implied that as a warrior-king Glele could not waver before his warlords and his personal Amazon regiments (of women warriors), or seem to relent on slave raiding and trading by engaging instead only in ‘legitimate trade’ with Europeans. From the welcoming ceremony on his arrival in Abomey, Borghero had gathered that Glele wanted to convey the impression to his people that this white man was an important person from Europe who wanted to honour the king of Dahomey. For entertainment and also as a display of his military might, Glele called on his elite corps of some 3,000 Amazon warriors, fully armed with muskets and swords, to stage a mock battle (Borghero 1997: 77–78; Alpern 1998: 13–15). After this spectacle, the missionary returned to the guest house where he was attended by servants who, he soon learnt, also reported on him at the king’s palace.11 Borghero’s aim was to have a private audience with the king and gain some concessions for the mission. As nothing happened for a few weeks, the missionary began to worry and enquired if the king wanted to keep him a prisoner under house arrest. So he began to talk to the servants about the evils of slave raiding and human sacrifice. The king, he told them, bore a heavy responsibility for such barbarous practices. In no time at all word came from the king that the missionary should realize that he owed such freedom of speech to his position as head of the white people’s religion; anyone else would have been arrested and imprisoned. ‘Moreover’, the king reminded him through his messenger, European governments had always favoured slavery, including the English and the French who were now trying to stop it. As for Dahomey’s customary festivities, these were necessary to the preservation of the kingdom. White people had their own customs and blacks had theirs. As for his military campaigns: did white people want to interfere? He had the power to attack even the English and drive them from the African territories which they had occupied. (Gantly 1991: 61–62)

It may not have helped Borghero’s cause to have spoken so freely, as he was kept waiting and began to feel weary and sick with fever and dysentery. Finally, on 5 January 1862, a message came from the palace: the king would see him. But as Borghero hurried out, a second message arrived announcing that the audience was set for later. Then the charade of messages and counter-messages was repeated. Borghero finally refused to play this game and threatened to leave the capital with-

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out permission. Palace officials came out to meet him then, apologizing profusely and promising that his majesty would see him soon. ‘This time’, Borghero wrote, ‘I went back without saying anything because I realized that this performance had to be endured to satisfy custom’ (ibid.: 62). After further prevarication, Borghero eventually obtained a three-hour private audience with King Glele on the night of 15 January 1862 (ibid.: 90–93). Whatever royal custom might have been played out during the previous six weeks, the missionary’s account of his nocturnal tête-à-tête with Glele sounds unrehearsed and unlike the accounts of visits by other European travellers. One cannot fail to sense curiosity on Glele’s part and a genuine desire to know the missionary as a person, even though the king neither would nor could countenance his message of Christian conversion. This is Gantly’s summary of the audience: Borghero explained who he was and what his mission was. The king, he felt, understood, but he found the idea of celibacy absolutely incredible. When Borghero had failed to convince him, he challenged Glele to call the two servants who had waited on him since his arrival in Abomey, forty days earlier, to testify to the truth of what he was saying. ‘I would never have believed’, the king told Borghero, that this sort of life was possible. I admire you but I must tell you that we would not be able to imitate you’. But he was pleased, the king said, to have the missionary in his kingdom. Borghero could continue to occupy the old Portuguese fort in Whydah and work among the ‘whites’ there. When the meeting ended well after midnight, the king took the missionary by the hand and accompanied him into the clear moonlight as far as the palace guard house. (Gantly 1991: 62–63)

Borghero was soon on his way back to Whydah, with much to ponder on in regard to the future of the Lyons mission in West Africa. It was clear that the kingdom of Dahomey itself was closed to missionaries and would remain so for the foreseeable future. But his prolonged stay in Abomey had taught Borghero much about the kingdom, its king and people, just like Glele and his entourage had cause to ponder on this strange white missionary. Borghero doubted that what he had tried to convey about celibacy and God’s grace and love for the world had made much sense to the king. Nor could Glele have made sense, he thought, of the difference between the Lyons mission and the Methodists who had preceded them in Whydah; though he gathered that their African pastor, Reverend Bernasko, had been telling many untruths about the Catholic mission even before their arrival. On this question, Borghero added: Glele told me that as a sign of his love for us, he wanted me to know the following words: ‘if ever again I hear something said against you, it will be to you, and not to the others that I shall address myself for finding out the truth’. Then he assured me that we could safely continue to stay in Whydah or even in Abomey if we so wished, and that he wanted to be our friend. But on the question of religious freedom he reiterated what the fetishers had told me before, namely, that his Dahomean subjects were

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not allowed to embrace Christianity … otherwise the kingdom would be finished. (Borghero 1997: 92–93)

This ‘otherwise’ raised a moral dilemma: on one hand, Glele ‘desired’ to be the missionaries’ friend; on the other, he and his people had an overriding duty and ‘need’ to uphold the annual ‘grand customs’, including the human sacrifices in honour of his royal ancestors. Notwithstanding this express need, Borghero’s account intimated that he had been convinced that Glele’s desire to be friends had been sincere. Intersubjectively, such expression of trust on the king’s part (who always had to be on his guard against flatterers and traitors) also reflected well on Borghero, and portrayed him as trustworthy and a ‘man of God/Spirit’ in Glele’s eyes. From a mystical point of view, the crediting of a person ‘with spirit’ – whether the Holy Spirit for Christians or vodun and ancestors in Dahomey – always evoked both a sense of transcendence and power, either to bless and empower or to punish. By the same logic, a person endowed with great power whether for good or for evil would, in West Africa, have been thought of as one endowed with spirit. Viewed in this light, Glele’s decision to grant Borghero a private audience after weeks of spying on him may well have been prompted by curiosity about the missionary’s spirit double that perhaps had empowered him in his celibacy. In this Borghero would not deceive him, firm as he was in his own belief that it was by the power of his priestly ordination, under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, that he had been guided to venture without military escort into Dahomey’s heart of darkness. In the spirit of Bresillac’s Fundamental Articles, Borghero too believed that being a missionary was not a state one had chosen in order to become empowered, in the sense of being ‘effective’. Being a missionary, Borghero had written to the seminarians in Lyons, was a labour of love and a readiness ‘to suffer in the depths of one’s soul’ (Gantly 1991: 64). As desire, such readiness to welcome the Other is – in a Levinasian sense – ‘affective rather than effective because affectivity is recalcitrant to the categories of activity or will and of being [a being that acts] and thought’ (Llewelyn 1995: 17). Following up on this distinction between affect and being effective in order to satisfy needs, Levinas elaborates: The other metaphysically desired is not ‘other’ like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell … I can feed on these realities[/needs] and satisfy myself … The metaphysical desire tends towards something else entirely, towards the absolutely other. The Desired does not fulfil[/satisfy] it, but deepens it … understands the remoteness, the alterity and the exteriority of the other. (Levinas 1969: 33–34)

Or put differently, ‘desire is an aspiration that the Desirable animates: it originates from its “object”; it is revelation[/epiphany] – whereas need is a void of the Soul; it proceeds from the subject’ (ibid.: 62).

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Given the historical evidence of Glele’s overriding concerns with meeting his royal forebears’ needs for human sacrifice, and his kingdom’s for prisoners of war (slaves) and booty, what signs – or mere glimpses – of his alleged desire to be friends could the young king then have offered to Borghero? Perhaps Glele’s desire for friendship had been purely pragmatic and self-interested. Evidence in support of this interpretation seems overwhelming when we follow his long reign as a warrior-king who, until his death in 1889, continued to lay waste the towns and villages of western Yorubaland, killing and enslaving entire communities. Even a century later, when I revisited several of these long abandoned sites, not even the peace and quiet of the bush, or birdsong, could make one forget the past atrocities still evident in scattered potsherds, clay pipes or slag heaps from long extinct forges. Rather than deliver the judgement of history on whether King Glele’s expressed desire to welcome Borghero had been sincere or a mere charade of hospitality, I now turn to subsequent developments in these men’s careers which give cause for further reflection. At issue here, as before, are these men’s cosmopolitan dispositions of shared humanity in light of vignettes that bespeak moments of empathy, compassion or joy.

Borghero on Tour and Welcoming the ‘Slave’ By the time Borghero returned to Whydah in January 1862, three new missionaries had arrived from Lyons and more were expected in the years ahead. Since Dahomey remained closed to missionaries, Borghero soon went on tour to explore other sites in West Africa where he hoped missionaries might be welcome. The most promising place he saw on his return from Liberia and the Gold Coast – and also nearest to Dahomey – was the new colony of Lagos, which Britain had annexed in 1861. To Planque he described the sea port as both ‘a gateway to the vast Yoruba hinterland and the natural headquarters of the Vicariate’ (Gantly 1991: 72). He estimated the total population at around 30,000. This number included hundreds of returned slaves from Brazil, and most urgently, he added, up to two hundred Catholics clamouring for missionaries. In Lagos Borghero also heard the news that – barely one month after his visit to Abomey – King Glele with an army of around 80,000 had sacked the Yoruba town of Ishaga near Abeokuta. This war had been an act of filial duty to avenge the defeat of his father, King Ghezo (1818–1858), at Abeokuta in 1851.12 Among the 4,000 captured, 3,000 were taken to Whydah to be sold as slaves. It was understood that unsold captives would be taken to Abomey for sacrifice (Alpern 1998: 181). To save some unfortunates from that fate, Borghero ransomed several children and ten adult men. He reported in his diary in September 1862:

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When the slaves were paraded for inspection by us and the Viceroy, they felt so euphoric with joy at the announcement of their freedom that they broke into a dance, even before a blacksmith had cut them free from their chains. But, the emotions we experienced by having to watch our fellow creatures, chained together, almost naked and starved, were utterly unbearable. Then I said to Father Lafitte and he to me at the same time: ‘let’s get out of here, this spectacle is heartbreaking’. So we rose at once and asked the Jevogan to send us the men without further delay. (Borghero 1997: 113–14)13

Did Glele’s war on Ishaga prove that his earlier show of hospitality to Borghero had been a mere pretence? So it seemed to Father Courdioux, one of the newly arrived priests. In a letter to Planque he was critical of some of Borghero’s ideas and methods, including his request that all fetishes be removed from sight during his welcoming reception in Abomey (Gantly 1991: 70). ‘Every European’, Courdioux declared, ‘who comes to Dahomey, ought to know that he is in the power of the great King’. Gantly, however, takes issue with this criticism and comments that ‘Courdioux had yielded to the tendency of the newcomer to draw hasty conclusions after listening to criticisms by the French traders’, and had underrated Borghero (ibid.: 71). In support of Gantly’s corrective, suffice it to recall that from his first arrival in Abomey, Borghero’s principled stance in defiance of the kingdom’s glorification of human sacrifice had been intended as an agonistic, public statement addressed to the crowds and powers behind the Dahomean throne. By contrast, during his valedictory nocturnal tête-à-tête with the king, Borghero’s and Glele’s tone, as noted earlier, had been dialogical, probing, but also evincing a desire for amity: ‘[Glele] wanted to be our friend’, Borghero had written in his diary. Neither did Borghero fail to note how after their tête-à-tête Glele had taken him by the hand from the darkened palace into the moonlit night where they had bid each other farewell. Should one not assume, by the same token, that the midnight encounter had similarly imprinted itself on Glele’s memory? As a memento of their encounter, Borghero noted in his diary, the king had even asked him for a chasuble from his Mass kit (Borghero 1997: 76). The question of whether Borghero’s encounter with Glele in 1862 had made an impact on the king’s subsequent emotions or actions must remain speculative. But an eye-witness account at the following year’s ‘grand customs’ in Abomey offers a unique insight. He describes the joy that Glele felt as he set free two young Ishaga captives, only minutes before they were to be beheaded. The first he presented as a gift to the visiting Commodore Wilmot of the British Navy Squadron in West Africa, the second he gave to the Dahomean chief who was Wilmot’s friend and interpreter. In his report to the British House of Commons, Wilmot duly commended Glele for his clemency and hospitality. Quoting the king, he also conveyed the emotional impact of his words on himself, his companions and the crowds of onlookers:

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I love you as my friend; and, you have shown that an English man like you can have sympathy for the black man. I now give you your share of the victims as I present you with this young man. Do as you please, educate him and take him with you to England. Not a sound escaped from the boy’s lips, but the eye told what the heart felt. Even the King participated in the joy, and the Chiefs cheered me as I left with the boy. (Wilmot 1893: 246–47)

Could Glele’s clemency for the prisoners and his hospitality towards abolitionist emissaries of Queen Victoria’s government have imperilled him in the eyes of his hard-line fetishers, war chiefs and slave traders? A positive answer to this question, I suggest, finds support in light of Glele’s subsequent career, which depicts him as a ruthless warrior-king. At the time of Wilmot’s mission, the young Glele was still basking in the victory he had won the previous year in Ishaga, as a first step in avenging his father. But when in 1864, the year after Wilmot’s mission, Glele returned for the biggest prize of all, the city-state of Abeokuta, the Egba defenders once again routed the Dahomeans and their king. This major military defeat, and the ferocity with which Glele soon afterwards resumed Dahomey’s wars against the western Yoruba, gives credence to the belief that his 1864 failure to avenge his father came to haunt him until his death in 1889 (see also Burton 1893, ii: 192; Alpern 1998: 187–90).

Universalizing versus Welcoming the Other: Borghero’s Self-imperilling In August 1863, Borghero informed Planque in Lyons that he had often thought of asking Propaganda Fide in Rome to relieve him of his post as mission superior in West Africa and allow him to satisfy his only ambition: to work as a simple missionary (Gantly 1991: 108). Emotional fatigue also prompted this request, especially after he learned that a visitor from Lyons had complained to Planque that his leadership in Whydah was not ‘strict enough, and allowed all his men to express their views freely’ (ibid.: 99). This freedom was something Borghero believed in passionately, whereas for nineteenth-century churchmen like Planque what was sacrosanct was the ecclesiastical tradition that all authority comes from God. The pioneer Borghero, by contrast, was a leader who, like Marion Bresillac before him, had chosen to lead by example and welcomed the views and concerns of the men in his charge. Consistent with this approach, Borghero again ventured from Lagos through war-torn Egba country to Abeokuta, intent on opening the road there for other missionaries after his departure. He even undertook an exploration to the mosquito-free Cameroonian mountains as a future site where his fellow missionaries might go for rest and recuperation, away from the harsh climate of the coast (Borghero 1997: 189–218). Borghero finally set sail for Europe in January 1865. Having gained four years of invaluable experience in West Africa, he intended to bring this first-hand

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knowledge to bear on the final drafting of the SMA Constitution. He wanted it to be true to Bresillac’s spirituality and vision of mission, before being submitted for approval to Propaganda Fide in Rome. As mentioned earlier, he himself had no ambition to exercise authority over others or be consecrated a bishop (as several in Whydah had hoped). But he strongly resisted moves by Planque in Lyons and Cardinal Barnabo in Rome for a centralization of authority in the SMA Superior General, a move which would wrest authority from the mission superiors in Africa (Gantly 1991: 117). By late December 1867, when Barnabo convoked Planque and Borghero to Rome, the Cardinal had already made up his mind. It was there that, to his great astonishment (so Planque told Father Courdioux afterwards), ‘Borghero heard it said that his views were spreading discouragement among the missionaries, and that he must consider using his zeal elsewhere rather than with the SMA’ (ibid.: 142). Yet Gantly’s comments on the unravelling of Borghero’s remarkable career with the SMA reads like a belated eulogy for a pioneer who would remain an inspiration for subsequent generations of missionaries: It was not the fall of an arrogant man, but the loss of a humble, submissive one, who passionately believed in the need for a long-term, enlightened and humane strategy of evangelisation, the only one, in his belief, which would produce good results at a reasonable cost of missionaries’ lives … [He left without rancour and remained on friendly terms with Planque.] Borghero died in Italy in 1892. (ibid.: 142)

In Borghero’s Footsteps: Encountering Yoruba Rulers during the Colonial Scramble At the time of Borghero’s return to Europe in January 1865, the Lyons mission had only two residential mission stations, Whydah and Porto Novo, plus five outstations in other coastal locations. Of the latter, the Lagos station became the new headquarters of the SMA Vicariate of the Benin Coast in 1867. Inland, the kingdom of Dahomey remained closed to all Christian missions, while in Yorubaland – where Protestant missionaries had first begun evangelizing as early as the 1840s (see Peel 2000) – internecine wars had escalated among the successor kingdoms in the former Oyo empire. Warfare had led also to road closures to the hinterland. Only Borghero among the Lyons missionaries had ventured as far inland as Abeokuta in 1864. But after his departure it would be another sixteen years before one young missionary, Father Holley, decided to emulate Borghero and see with his own eyes the famous Egba city-state. Together with his Lagos mission superior, Father (later Bishop) Chausse, the two French priests made their way to Abeokuta where the warlord Ogundipe, Borghero’s old friend and de facto ruler and power behind the Alake’s throne, offered them a ready welcome in the face of strong opposition from the influential pro-British and anti-French Protestant town faction. This inter-denominational strife for local influence between Catholics and Protestants should be viewed in the broader

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geopolitical context of the 1880s colonial scramble, with Britain and France as the major contenders for access to Yorubaland and Dahomey (Newbury 1961: 124, 134–35; Hales n.d.; Coquard n.d.). Early in 1884, when Holley had already gathered a sizeable congregation of converts to his Abeokuta mission, the warlord Ogundipe sent word to Chausse in Lagos that the routes to Ibadan were open should he wish to travel there. Chausse accepted at once and returned to Abeokuta, from where he and Holley set out on their exploration into the Yoruba heartland. Rather than going directly eastward to Ibadan, they decided – at their peril and against Ogundipe’s wish – to go northward and visit the warlord’s old-time antagonist Alaafin Adeyemi I, king of Oyo, before proceeding to Ibadan. In his report to Planque, Holley even added with panache how they and their carriers had outwitted Ogundipe’s customs men at the town of Iberekodo on the border between Egbaland and the Oyo country. The warlord’s men, he wrote, had received orders to send them back, but when they saw their demijohns (intended as presents for the Alaafin) they helped themselves to the wine until they were drunk. The caravan then quietly proceeded on its way to the town of Iseyin and then to Oyo four weeks later. On their arrival in the Yoruba capital in February 1884, Chausse and Holley were welcomed with unprecedented hospitality by Alaafin Adeyemi. Although Protestant missionaries first came to Oyo in 1858 (Peel 2000: 132) and settled on land outside the town walls, Adeyemi was adamant that the Lyons missionaries should build a mission on land just across from his palace. The reason why Adeyemi was determined to adopt the French missionaries as his own has so far eluded the attention of historians. One Oyo source claimed that it was thanks to a sister of the king, Juliana, who had been kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Brazil, where she had been baptized. After her liberation and return to Oyo she urged her brother, for the salvation of his kingdom, to invite the Paadi, the Roman Catholic Fathers (see Hales n.d.). There can be no doubt that the Alaafin at the time of the Lyons missionaries’ visit had become an embattled king. Holley reported in his journal how during their stay in Iseyin a huge Oyo army had passed through on its way to Iganna to repulse Glele’s advancing Dahomean army (quoted in ibid.). Later, during their stay in Oyo, they learnt that an assassination attempt on the Alaafin by a group of Ibadan conspirators had been foiled by the king’s ‘secret police’. What mattered most for the missionaries was how best to respond to King Adeyemi’s plea for a mission station in his capital, and how to secure the personnel and resources for such an undertaking. What was most notable in Chausse’s reports to Planque was the undisguised expression of human affect and desire in the Alaafin’s exchanges with the French missionaries (especially with Chausse): ‘This journey completes’, Chausse wrote, the knowledge which we should have about this Vicariate. Alaafin Adeyemi received us in princely fashion, overwhelming us with presents and royal attentions. ‘My ancestors

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and my father’, he said, ‘did not have the happiness of seeing the Aguda priests and I have now this inestimable favour. I thank God, I thank God’! Many a time we were invited into the immense royal palace (which is by no means lacking in architectural taste) and had long and familiar talks with this worthy king, renowned for his justice, loyalty and probity. We spoke directly without an interpreter – which was no small recommendation in his eyes. And we did not forget to say (it always pleases people), ‘if we know Nago it is because our mother was born in Yorubaland’, which in the idiom of the country means that we love them. And the king would exclaim, ‘Yes, you love the black man, I can see that. You must be men of God. For I must warn you, my people are sly and deceitful. But stay here in my Capital. My people are not wicked, they will do you no harm. In any case, nobody but God could snatch you from the protecting hand of the Alaafin; and I am all for you … Go now with my men. Go over the whole town. Whatever land you choose, it is yours…’ And what was said was done … How not accept such an offer? (ibid.)

Two years later, in April 1886, Chausse and two companions returned to Oyo for the official opening of the mission. Father Holley had died suddenly the year before, according to rumour as a result of ingesting poison mixed in his food. Suspicion fell on the notorious Ogundipe, Holley’s one-time Abeokuta patron and belated nemesis. The warlord made no effort to deny the rumour, even alluding to Holley’s fate when Chausse called on him on his way to Oyo: ‘If a man wants to climb a ladder, he should make sure that it is well placed, and the rungs are solid’ (Coquard n.d.). The veiled threat in the proverb did not stop Chausse from proceeding to Oyo, where he met King Adeyemi near the city walls. He wrote in his diary: The Alaafin had tears in his eyes of mingled joy and sorrow as he gazed at me a long time without speaking a word. Then he said with deep emotion: ‘what a terrible loss of Father Holley! I know the poison that killed him. But never fear that any of your men will die like that here … Then he said simply: ‘k’a lo ‘le’ [let’s go home]. Inside the palace we discussed the building plans for the mission. We also had visits from all the big men of the land to congratulate us on our safe arrival: ‘these are the king’s own white men’, they said to one another, ‘see how happy he is’! They did not know I could speak their language; which was another subject for delighted exclamations. (ibid.)

Cosmopolitanism and Imperilling the Self: Chausse, Adeyemi and Vermorel Like Borghero before him, Chausse was the type of mission superior who led his fellow missionaries from the front, by example and consultation. In 1891 he became the first Lyons missionary since Bresillac to be consecrated a bishop. However, at the 1893 General Assembly of the SMA in Lyons he argued in vain – again like Borghero – for a representative system of governance, against Planque’s

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authoritarian system. Before returning to Lagos, Chausse went to Rome to discus his views with Pope Leo XIII. On his return to Lyons he suddenly fell ill with pneumonia and died aged forty-seven (Gantly 1992: 95). Chausse’s death coincided with the beginning of colonial rule by France in Dahomey, and by Britain in Yorubaland. Whereas France subdued the kingdom of Dahomey by brute military force at the cost of some 8,000 casualties (Alpern 1998: 206), peace in Yorubaland came after Governor Carter from Lagos had succeeded among the warring kingdoms to negotiate peace treaties to which the local rulers put their signatures. So initially it would have seemed to many Yoruba that British rule and customary rule could coexist. But this was not how Britain envisaged the future. In November 1895 in Oyo, Captain Bower – Governor Carter’s Commissioner – wanted to make it known who really ruled the land. The pretext for this lesson was an incident of a man punished by castration following a charge of aggravated adultery, in accordance with Oyo law (Atanda 1973: 56–77). For this ‘barbaric’ punishment, Bower requested that the Alaafin ask forgiveness by prostrating himself before his people. Adeyemi refused to comply, and Bower and his company of Hausa soldiers prepared to bombard Oyo. At that critical moment, a Lyons missionary and confidante of the Alaafin, Father Vermorel, intervened by placing himself in front of the guns and imploring Bower to hold his fire. Inside the palace he persuaded King Adeyemi to order his people not to fight back so as to avoid a massacre. The delay also allowed the king and his entourage to escape to the countryside before Bower’s cannons destroyed the palace. In an ironic twist we also learn how after the event Governor Carter sent his thanks and high praise to Bishop Pellet in Lagos; and when Father Vermorel fell ill with fever the following year, Captain Bower brought the English army doctor from Ibadan to attend to the French missionary. But all was in vain. ‘Brave Father Vermorel died on 10 April 1896’ (Coquard n.d.; Hales n.d.).

Looking Back from Afar: Cosmopolitanism, Ethics and Intimations of Infinity From Bishop Bresillac’s dying words, when he whispered the Apostle Paul’s hymn to charity, or Borghero’s letters to Planque admonishing the seminarists in Lyons to meditate on the epistles of Saint Paul, one gathers how iconic a missionary Paul – the last of the Apostles – was for a Church that called itself universal (katholikos). Julia Kristeva (1991: 77–83) also credits Paul, not only for his universalism in founding churches throughout the Greco-Roman region between the years AD 45 and AD 60, but also for being a cosmopolitan: he changed the small Jewish sect called primitive Christian Church into an Ecclesia [from the Greek ekklesia assembly, church]. Adapting the word of the Gospels to the Greek world the Ecclesia apposed to the community of citizens in the polis a community

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that was other: a community of… foreigners who transcended nationalities by means of a faith in the Body of the risen Christ. (ibid.: 77)

In order to understand the power of the ecclesiastical community, Kristeva states, ‘one must ponder the unit made up of Church, risen Christ, and Eucharist … in that [transcendent] image there is no room for distinction between Greek, Jew … slave or free man’ (ibid.: 81); ‘there is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything’ (Col. 3: 9–11). What Kristeva elucidates is Paul’s vision of Ecclesia as a locus of sociality where all share in a common humanity, and by partaking in the Eucharist are united in the eternal love of Christ. This is the intersubjective, transcendent and unifying image of Christ – an intimation of infinity which Paul describes in his celebrated hymn to charity: ‘Now we see as in a mirror; but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known’ (1 Cor. 13: 12). Kristeva’s perceptive reading of the Pauline sources highlights how this one-time Jewish Pharisee and belated Apostle had succeeded in turning the sect of Jesus’ (Jewish) followers into an ‘exportable’ Ecclesia for the multicultural Greco-Roman world. For my enquiry into the meaning of cosmopolitanism, her portrayal of Paul the cosmopolitan invites two provisos: First, what defined Paul’s cosmopolitanism for Kristeva was the Apostle’s vision of Ecclesia as a locus of sociality. Yet in knowledge, presented as a thematization about Ecclesia, namely as a theology, there also lies a danger of making Ecclesia into a dogma of power and authority to which the convert is beholden, rather than being beholden to the subject of this theology, namely the Other (the fellow human, Christ). One may go further and consider a theology of power as the unavoidable liability, or ‘default factor’, of any theology and thematization of sociality. Tylor’s definition of animism as belief in spirits (Tylor 1871) invites this further step. The reason is that all spirits and personified superhuman powers, whether Dahomean vodun or Yoruba orisa, or the supreme spirit (be it God, Allah or Yahweh) of monotheistic religions, invariably stand in people’s minds for power (to bless or punish). Therefore, when we return to Kristeva’s perception of the Pauline Ecclesia we should not lose sight of the fact that historically, as a locus of superhuman spirit power vested in Popes, clerics or even Christian emperors and kings, the Ecclesia or Church was all too often the very negation of sociality and infinity.14 My second proviso about Kristeva’s portrayal of Paul as a cosmopolitan concerns the moment of epiphany. While she infers the image of cosmopolitanism from Paul’s theological vision, as if reason alone makes sociality possible (Paul had been trained in the Rabbinic tradition), she fails to mention Luke’s account (in Acts 9) of the defining ethical-affective moment or epiphany of Paul’s conversion: from persecutor of the early Christians to Paul the Apostle, ‘chosen to carry [Jesus’] name before the gentiles and the kings and children of Israel’ (Acts 9: 15): ‘And suddenly a light from heaven shone round about him. And, falling on the ground, he heard a voice saying to him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you Lord?”

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he asked. And he: “I am Jesus whom you persecute …” And he, trembling and astonished said: “Lord, what is it that you want me to do?”’ (Acts 9: 4-6). In this early Christian text of Acts (written long after the Apostle’s conversion), Paul’s ethical moment of compassion and sorrow is already depicted as a life-changing epiphany prior to any thematization theology of the Ecclesia (Levinas 1969: 46). Blinded by the light from heaven, the questioning voice which Paul heard confounded him as it called him by his given name in the voice of the very Christians he was supposed to drag away in chains from Damascus: ‘Saul, why do you persecute me?’ For Paul it signalled his moment for welcoming his erstwhile objects of hatred in the person of the suffering Jesus: ‘Lord, what is it that you want me to do?’ The accounts of Paul’s subsequent missionary travels in the remaining twenty chapters of Acts, together with the epistles he wrote to the churches which he had founded, would then begin a life of their own as the story of Paul, the untiring missionary-theologian to the Gentiles and founder of the Ecclesia that Kristeva identifies as a locus of cosmopolitan sociality. Luke’s narrative of Paul’s conversion is pertinent to my account from the Levinasian perspective. This perspective posits that ethics begins in hospitality, by first freely making a choice for generosity and communication, that is, for sociality. For instance, in following Borghero on his visit to King Glele in Abomey, we noticed how fraught with suspicions the welcoming of the Other was for both men. Yet, when after some forty days of mind games the king at last welcomed Borghero inside his private room in the palace in the dead of night, their reciprocal desire for an as yet inchoate cosmopolitanism was palpable. Poignantly, when after their tête-à-tête Glele led Borghero by the hand to the moonlit palace entrance, both men had reached the point where they could look each other in the eye as they bid farewell. In this encounter, Glele and Borghero had apparently come to a better understanding or ‘intimation’, beyond their respective cultural horizons, of what transcended the other and thus what separated them. For his part, Glele understood that Borghero’s God was a jealous god who rejected Dahomean vodun, while the missionary understood that without the vodun and royal ancestors the kingship and the kingdom itself would disintegrate (Gantly 1991: 64). As intimations of infinity, vodun, orisa ancestors and spirits associated with the environment and powers of the universe were all personalized as named forces of life or death that – since time immemorial – controlled the destiny of every man, woman and child. By contrast, Christian monotheism had from its inception theologized about infinity as an eschatology of each person’s future state, when after death the saints will ‘see God face to face’ in Heaven and the wicked will suffer the fires of hell. In either case, the devotee vodun or orisa as well as the Christian believer aspires to transcendence and infinitude of one kind or another, albeit not necessarily in terms of a monotheistic God or Heaven. But as Levinas remarks: [Such a] theology imprudently treats the idea of the relation between God and the creature in terms of ontology. It presupposes the logical privilege of totality, as a concept adequate to being. Thus it runs up against the difficulty of understanding

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that … a free being would send its roots into the infinity of God. But transcendence precisely refuses totality [i.e., encompassment from the outside] … If the notions of totality and being are notions that cover one another, the notion of the transcendent places us beyond categories of being. (Levinas 1969: 293)

This conundrum of transcendence and ‘being with’ which theologians ever since Augustine and Aquinas have struggled with is one that anthropologists also have addressed through functionalist, symbolic, psychological and other rationalist and scientific interpretations of peoples’ beliefs and practices – such as Durkheim’s notion of society transcending the sum-total of its individual members as being the key to interpreting social phenomena as diverse as suicide rates and religion. Levinas seeks his answer to this conundrum in the Platonic idea of the Good lying beyond Being (thematization) (ibid.: 293). This beyond, or ‘infinity’, he notes, ‘is not the object of cognition (which would reduce it to the measure of the gaze that contemplates) but is the desirable, that which arouses Desire … It is Desire that measures the infinity of the infinite, … whereas need is a void of the soul; it proceeds from the subject’ (ibid.: 62). From an anthropological perspective, this positing of the primacy of the good, of ethics no less, before and beyond being, thematizing, theologizing (including African mythologizing and divining) has proved useful for my account of the Lyons pioneers’ early contacts with West African rulers. For Borghero, it was his desire to reach out to the humanity of the Dahomeans, as well as his desire to welcome them, that urged him into the heart of the blood-drenched capital of Abomey and the royal palace, ending in his face-to-face encounter with King Glele. From a missionary perspective, Borghero’s endeavours had failed to open the kingdom to the Ecclesia, but the life stories of pioneers in his mould, such as those of Holley and Chausse, intimate how their encounters with the African ‘Others’ who had welcomed them had also been life-changing epiphanies of shared humanity in ways unknown and unimaginable to churchmen such as Planque in Lyons or Cardinal Barnabo of Propaganda Fide in Rome. The pioneers in my account impressed me from the perspective of the late Bresillac’s Fundamental Articles, in which he had recommended them not only to extend out to the African Other in a love of one and all, but also to ‘like’ (desire) them, that is, welcome them. This not only implies an imperilling of the self but also the aforementioned ‘cosmopolitan project of self discovery in and through another’ which, as Levinas reminds us, is ‘the presence of the Face, the infinity of the Other, [which] is a destituteness, a presence of a third party, namely, of the whole of humanity which looks at us’ (ibid.: 213).

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Notes   1. I thank Father Patrick Thompson for his forbearance during my prolonged perusal of his SMA literature. I also thank Father Edmund Hogan, SMA historian and archivist. In Nigeria, Father Bob Hales, SMA, first introduced me to the stories of the Lyons pioneers.   2. The Vatican ministry named Sacra Congregatio de Propagada Fide was instituted in 1622 under the papacy of Gregory XV (Mulders 1957: 261).   3. My first encounter with the Yoruba people of south-western Nigeria was in 1962, when as a newly ordained priest with the White Fathers, Missionaries of Africa, I was seconded to the diocese of Oyo. In the early 1970s I enrolled at University College London, where I read social anthropology, followed by doctoral fieldwork in north-western Yorubaland. I resigned from the White Fathers in 1976. The order of the White Fathers was founded by Cardinal Lavigerie in North Africa in 1868 and first seconded missionaries to Oyo in the 1940s, following the shortage of SMA mission personnel in Nigeria during the Second World War.   4. Levinas concedes that as first certitude, the Cartesian cogito (in the Third Meditation) already subsumes or rests on the existence of God, that is, on transcendence (Levinas 1998: xii-xiii; 2002: 92, 210–12).   5. Bresillac’s prose ostensibly expressed the Catholic triumphalist overtones typical of his time, including the missionary’s readiness to suffer martyrdom. But the spirituality that underpins his journals and letters (see Bresillac 1989, 1991) indicates that ‘preaching the truth’ for him also held the ethical connotation of uprightness, as when Jesus responded to an agnostic Thomas at the last supper, ‘I am the truth’ rather than ‘I have/know the truth’ (John 14: 6).  6. Though the exact cause of Edde’s death remains unexplained, it confirmed West Africa’s notoriety as ‘the white man’s grave’. Father McLaughlin cited the staggering statistic that, ‘until 1902 the average life of a missionary was two years and ten months … [P]ractically all were young men at the average age of twenty seven’ (McLaughlin 1973).   7. Estimates vary for the total number of slaves transported from Africa to the Americas from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century. While Kuczynski (1968: 351) gives a figure of 15,000,000, Thomas (1997) puts the total at 10,000,000 plus. All researchers concur that the trade peaked during the eighteenth century.   8. All translations from Borghero’s journal are my own.   9. Gantly notes: ‘unlike Borghero who looked out with curiosity and admiration on the great wide world, Fernandez continued to look back with nostalgia to his home and country’. He never got over his depression it seems, and died within two years of his arrival in Whydah (see Gantly 1991: 66, 68 n.30). 10. It was Planque who had requested the minister of foreign affairs in Paris to ensure that the missionaries were offered free passage on a warship. He had also requested that on arrival the captain should introduce them to the viceroy (Jevogan) and chiefs of Whydah. Borghero himself objected to being closely identified with European powers and traders, and his relations with the latter were at first fractious (Gantly 1991: 53–55). 11. Royal spying on foreign visitors as well as on the king’s own chiefs and officials by the planting of ‘moles’ (whether as servants or wives) was a well-established custom in Dahomey (Ellis 1890: 175; Lombard 1967: 79) and, as Father Holley noted, also in the kingdom of Oyo (Hales n.d.). In Borghero’s case, King Glele had given him one of his young relatives to wait on him. The boy was almost crippled by tropical ulcers to his feet, despite the attentions of Glele’s medicine men. Borghero cleaned and dressed his ulcers twice a day, and by the time of his final audience he returned the boy to the king completely cured (Borghero 1997: 91). 12. King Ghezo, who had planned a surprise attack on Abeokuta in 1851, promised to spare the nearby town of Ishaga if its king did not alert the Abeokutans. When Abeokuta proved to be fully prepared for war and routed Ghezo’s army, the Dahomeans accused Ishaga of treachery. 13. In their introduction to Borghero’s diaries, Mandirola and Morel stress how the horrors of slavery and their everyday banality had touched the missionary to the very depths of his soul

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(Mandirola and Morel 1997: 12–13). Perhaps the strongest expression of compassion (pitié) in coming face to face with slavery is to be found in Borghero’s diary of 20/21 October 1862, when he came across a slave caravan and could only watch in silence the spectacle of men, women and children, chained by the neck, on their way for embarkation for Havana (Borghero 1997: 116–17). 14. Historically one is reminded of epochs when Popes, churchmen and temporal rulers were instrumental in ordering or sanctioning the slaughter of heretics and infidels, as well as in condoning and conniving in the slave trade (Thomas 1997: 9, 72 et passim). Even during the nineteenth century missionary renewal, evolutionary theories of human progress were conveniently appropriated to justify colonial conquest and the spread of Christian civilization. Consistent with such theories is the biblical theory that black Africans were the descendants of Cham, Noah’s youngest son, cursed to serve his Caucasian senior brothers (Genesis 9: 25).

References Alpern, S. 1998. Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. London: Hurst. Argyle, W. 1966. The Fon of Dahomey: A History and Ethnography of the Old Kingdom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Atanda, J. A. 1973. The New Oyo Empire: Indirect Rule and Change in Western Nigeria 1894-1934. London: Longman. Borghero, F. 1997. Journal de Francesco Borghero, Premier Missionnaire du Dahomey, 1861-1865, eds R. Mandirola and Y. Morel. Paris: Karthala. Bresillac, M. 1989. Souvenirs, vol. 2, trans R. Hales. Rome: SMA. ——— 1991. Souvenirs, vol. 3, trans R. Hales. Rome: SMA. Burton, R. 1893 [1864]. A Mission to Glele, King of Dahomey, 2 vols. London: Tylston and Edwards. Coquard, J. n.d. ‘History of Abeokuta and the Catholic Mission, 1880–1932’. Cork: SMA Archives. Ellis, A. 1890. The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. London. Forbes, F. 1966 [1851]. Dahomey and the Dahomans, 2 vols. London: Longmans. Gantly, P. 1991. Mission to West Africa: The Story of the SMA, 1856-1907, vol. 1. Cork: SMA Publications. ——— 1992. Mission to West Africa: The Story of the SMA, 1856-1907, vol. 2. Cork: SMA Publications. Hales, R. n.d. ‘Notes on the First SMA Missionaries in Dahomey and Yorubaland’. Cork: SMA Archives. Howells, C. 1999. Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Josephides, L. 2008. Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the Self, Narrative and Modernity. Oxford: Berghahn. Kristeva, J. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press. Kuczynski, R. 1968. ‘The Peopling of America with Blacks’, in R. Collins (ed.), Problems in African History. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp.350–52. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ——— 1998. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Llewelyn, J. 1995. Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics. London: Routledge. Lombard, J. 1967. ‘The Kingdom of Dahomey’, in D. Forde and P. Kaberry (eds), West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 70–92. McLaughlin, P. 1973 ‘Notes on the Early History of the Catholic Missions in Dahomey and Nigeria’, Catholic Independent (Ibadan), 18 November. Mandirola, R., and Y. Morel. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in Journal de Francesco Borghero, Premier Missionnaire du Dahomey, 1861-1865, eds R. Mandirola and Y. Morel. Paris: Karthala, pp. 5–17. Mulders, A. 1957. Missie geschiedenis. Antwerp: ‘t Groeit. Newbury, C. 1961. The Western Slave Coast and its Rulers. London: Oxford University Press. Peel, J. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Steinfels, P. 1995. ‘Obituary: Emmanuel Levinas’, New York Times, 27 December. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thomas, H. 1997. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870. London: Phoenix. Tylor, E. 1871. Primitive Culture. London. Wild, J. 1969. ‘Introduction’, in E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, pp. 11–20. Wilmot, A.P.E. 1893. ‘Report of Commodore Wilmot’s Visit to the King of Dahomey, Dated June 16, 1863’, in R. Burton, A Mission to Glele, King of Dahomey, vol. 2. London: Tylston and Edwards.

Chapter 6

The Cartoon Controversy and the Possibility of Cosmopolitanism Thomas Hylland Eriksen

K

The so-called cartoon controversy, which developed during the autumn of 2005 and erupted early in 2006, only to fizzle out a couple of months later, could have a deep significance for any discussion of cosmopolitanism. Some of the several thousand online and offline commentators worldwide talking about it in January and February 2006 compared it to the Salman Rushdie affair of 1988 onwards, but the more recent drama was simultaneously less and more significant than the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie: this conflict reached its climax within weeks and waned afterwards (although it has arguably had long-term repercussions, feeding – as I shall argue – into existing othering discourses in schismogenetic ways); and it involved governments and companies in a more comprehensive way than the Rushdie affair, which remained focused on a single person for over a decade. The controversy showed not only that messages can be quickly, easily and somewhat unpredictably globalized in the information era, but also that the statements and views which get the most attention need not be representative of substantial groups; that symbolic power discrepancies inform reactions to public statements involving inter-group relations; and it also indirectly showed that mere religious differences are not sufficient for igniting serious conflict. The impasses reached during the controversy also suggest the need for a more inclusive cosmopolitanism than that offered through the promise of a shared discourse. This chapter discusses the implications of the cartoon affair for the anthropological theorizing of cosmopolitanism. The recent academic literature on cosmopolitanism reveals no shared definition of the term, notwithstanding its intellectual debts to Kant’s late writings on world

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society (Hart 2003). While some speak of cosmopolitans as individuals who are open to diversity and tolerant of difference (Hannerz 1996; Appiah 2006), or – less charitably – as a disembedded elite with a transnational class habitus (Calhoun 2002; see also Friedman 1997), others (e.g., Beck 2000) see cosmopolitanism as a political world-view competing with, and possibly ultimately replacing, nationalism. Rapport posits a contrast between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, in an argument with both empirical, methodological and ontological implications, which claims that cosmopolitanism as a theoretical perspective, ‘would liberate individuals from the collective and the categorial … as ascriptions’ (Rapport 2007: 225, original emphasis). As pointed out by Stade, in a comment on Rapport’s article, anthropologists have ‘made the cosmopolitan either a defining quality of a particular research method or an object of study’ (Stade 2007: 227). In the former case, cosmopolitanism becomes a way of looking at the social world as composed essentially of relationships between individuals rather than bounded groups; in the latter case, what emerges is an anthropology of cosmopolitanism rather than a cosmopolitan anthropology (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). An anthropology of cosmopolitanism would study empirically existing forms of cosmopolitan ideas and practices, while a cosmopolitan anthropology would, at the level of epistemology, view the world as being essentially seamless and composed of persons rather than bounded groups. In political philosophy, views of cosmopolitanism tend to be less sanguine than in anthropology (Douzinas 2007; Adelman 2008). Partly, this is because some political philosophers define cosmopolitanism not primarily as an openness to difference but, quite the contrary, as the emergence of a ‘shared global language’; partly because they have analysed the discrepancy between governments’ touting the term and inhuman practices. As Costas Douzinas puts it: ‘Cosmopolitan sovereignty … claims the garments of value (freedom, dignity, emancipation), but is realized in the ubiquitous violence of economic competition, war as police action and empty but ever-present legality’ (Douzinas 2007: 290). Many anthropological studies of cosmopolitanism, conceptualized either as discourse or as practice or both, have been undertaken during the last few years, and they draw on a different understanding of the term and a different (everyday, often small-scale) set of empirical data from that of the political theorists who criticize it for being either ethnocentric, hypocritical or both. As a rule, following thinkers like Habermas in criticizing the implicit claims of multiculturalism which divide humanity into peoples or delineated groups, anthropological studies of cosmopolitanism document commonalities and sharing across assumed boundaries, with a focus on social life in a particular setting. In this kind of context, cosmopolitan ideas and practices may be described as ways ‘of living based on an “openness to all forms of otherness”, associated with an appreciation of, and interaction with, people from other cultural backgrounds’ (Hiebert 2002: 212); but studies of everyday cosmopolitanism can also lead to counterintuitive findings, as in Alexandra Hall’s research on an immigrant removal centre in the UK (Hall 2005), which identifies cosmopolitan practices among people who other-

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wise exhibit xenophobic views. In these ways, anthropological approaches to cosmopolitanism differ from those typically discussed in political theory, and through a focus on practices and everyday discourses such studies may come closer to an understanding of the existential and moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism than a focus on law and state practices might. I shall return to this point. This chapter outlines the main events and controversies surrounding the Muhammad cartoon affair before moving to an analysis of its implications for thinking about cosmopolitanism.1 Mainly, I have looked at public discourses about the affair in Denmark and Norway, with a view to explore the possible positions and their relationship to a cosmopolitan outlook. The conflict focus is deliberately chosen. There is no reason to assume that cosmopolitan conviviality in the present and near future is easily achieved, and research on cosmopolitanism ought to reflect the conflict potential in a world where people of diverse backgrounds, in Charles Taylor’s famous words, ‘have to live together more and more, both on a world scale and commingled in each individual society’ (Taylor 1992: 72). The pragmatic question raised in most of the literature dealing with cosmopolitanism concerns the prerequisites for and practices of conviviality, which is the problem addressed here. In concluding, I consider the possibility of non-discursive forms of cosmopolitanism and their relationship to cosmopolitan discourse.

The Danish Context Tensions surrounding the relationship between entities commonly described as ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ have surfaced (or perhaps resurfaced) regularly in Europe and elsewhere since the early 1970s, with controversies around hijabs, sharia courts, ritual slaughter and gender relations developing recurrently in many West European countries, punctuated by a series of dramatic events fuelling a sense of ‘civilizational conflict’, notably the Rushdie affair, the 2001 terrorist attack on the USA (and later attacks in London and Madrid), as well as the so-called war on terror begun by the Bush administration (2001–2008) and, apparently, continuing in a somewhat diluted form under the current regime. Denmark, for many years considered a beacon of liberal tolerance in northern Europe, went through a fairly dramatic political transformation in 2001, when a newly elected right-of-centre government, depending on support from the rightwing Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish People’s Party), began to introduce a string of new, strict policies aimed to curb ‘uncontrolled immigration’ into the country and to accelerate the ‘integration’ of existing immigrants into mainstream Danish society. This shift was, and is, perceived in Denmark as the outcome of a struggle for discursive hegemony where the cultural radicals associated with Copenhagen, permissiveness and positive views of cultural difference were dethroned by ‘the other Denmark’ of Jutland, tradition, Christianity, ‘common sense’ and, some would add, petit-bourgeois conformism (Lykkeberg 2008).

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The largest subscription newspaper in Denmark is the conservative JyllandsPosten, based in the second-largest city of the country, Aarhus, in the centre of Jutland. In the summer of 2005, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the newspaper (described by the influential literary critic and commentator Christopher Hitchens as a newspaper ‘nobody had heard of ’), discovered that a Danish author called Kåre Bluitgen had written a children’s book about Muhammad but was unable to find an artist willing to illustrate it. Like elsewhere in Europe, the public sphere in Denmark had been shaken by the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam a year earlier, and the ban on depicting Muhammad in Sunni Islam was well known. The book was, incidentally, published in 2006, beautifully illustrated by an anonymous artist (see Bluitgen 2006). Rose had an idea. He decided to invite the leading newspaper cartoonists of the country to make cartoons depicting the Prophet, ostensibly in order to demonstrate that the freedom of expression was non-negotiable and absolute in liberal Denmark, or in his own words, to ‘find out how far the self-imposed censorship had gone’. Twelve of the forty cartoonists contacted gave a positive response, and the resulting twelve cartoons were published in the weekend edition of JyllandsPosten on 30 September 2005. In the commentary accompanying the cartoons, Rose justified their publication by stating, in no uncertain terms, that: ‘modern secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. This is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule’ (Rose 2005).

Bluitgen’s book, published by Høst and Søn in 2006

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The possibility of a semantic slippage from the phrasing ‘some Muslims’ to the interpretation ‘Muslims’ has been commented upon by many (e.g., Hervik, Eide and Kunelius 2009), and may have been known to Rose. Moreover, Rose reveals a particular view of liberal society which illustrates what John Gray (2000), elaborating on Isaiah Berlin, has spoken of as ‘the two faces of liberalism’. On the one hand, liberalism preaches the right of individuals to choose their own forms of belonging. On the other hand, it implicitly represents a particular societal model, namely liberal society. Within the framework of liberal tolerance in its strong form, there is thus no space for forms of personhood, or of identification, which do not posit the right of the individual to choose, to criticize and to ridicule, as a non-negotiable value. The implications of Rose’s comment, which appeared true from a common-sense perspective to many who read it, are thus wider and deeper than it might seem at a first glance from a liberal point of view. His view is that liberal society is normal, while a political ethics based on any other concept of personhood, rights and duties requires ‘special consideration’. This may be a valid description of a hegemonic discourse in Denmark, but as will be clear below, this kind of position was not necessarily an effective starting point for resolving the dilemmas encountered later.

The Cartoons The twelve cartoons were diverse in their intentions and capability to enrage (although the general ban on depicting the Prophet in Sunni Islam must be kept in mind, indicating that any drawing of Muhammad might in principle be seen as offensive). One of the cartoonists used the competition as a pretext for criticizing Jyllands-Posten’s antagonistic approach to religious pluralism in Denmark. His cartoon depicts a dark-haired schoolboy called Muhammed (from class 7a, Valby school), and the text on the blackboard reads (in Persian, with Arabic script): ‘The journalists at Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary agitators’. Several of the others could be seen as inoffensive, if mildly blasphemous, from a religious point of view, such as the cartoon where a bedraggled group of suicide bombers arrive at heaven’s gate, only to be met by an apologetic Prophet who says: ‘Sorry boys, we’ve run out of virgins’. Yet another somehow anticipates the reactions to the cartoons: some angry, armed men appear, ready to go out and kill, when the Prophet, holding up a sheet of paper, raises his hand and says: ‘Easy friends, when all is said and done, it’s just a feeble sketch made by an infidel from southern Jutland’.2 A few of the cartoons appear to be less benign in their intentions. The most infamous one is the depiction of Muhammad wearing a bomb in the shape of a turban on his head. Yet the message is ambiguous; the cartoon does not necessarily claim that Muhammad was a terrorist, but it could also be an oblique way of stating that the religion he founded was about to be desecrated by terrorists who gave it a bad reputation (the person about to blow up, after all, is Muhammad himself ). Arguably, the least ambiguous and most overtly critical of the twelve cartoons is

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the one depicting Muhammad with a lifted dagger, his eyes concealed, apparently with the missing piece of fabric from the burka worn by the women standing behind him. This is an unambiguously negative comment on gender relations and the concept of jihad in Islam. Alhassan (2009) has produced a detailed interpretation of the individual cartoons, seeking to find ambiguities and pointing to diverging interpretations as well as clearly divergent intentions on the part of the authors. It is nonetheless a fact that many Danish Muslims, and eventually Muslims in other parts of the world, were deeply enraged by the Danish cartoons, and that their publication led to diplomatic crises and a souring of the relationship between Denmark and a number of Muslim countries.

The Making of an ‘Affair’ Soon after the publication of the cartoons, and following a petition from Danish imams, the ambassadors of eleven Muslim countries requested a meeting with Prime Minister Rasmussen on 12 October 2005. The Prime Minister declined, simply responding by letter that it was not the Danish government’s business to interfere with the freedom of expression and the press. Subsequently (in December 2005), two Danish imams travelled to Egypt and Lebanon, carrying with them a dossier which not only contained the cartoons, but also several other pieces of alleged evidence of discrimination against Muslims in Denmark. They met with politicians and religious leaders, asking for support in protesting to the Danish state, and were able to present their case at the summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Mecca. In Denmark, the Muslims who went to the Middle East were roundly denounced as traitors by some, including the leader of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 151). Following the plea from the Danish imams, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League issued a statement which strongly condemned the ‘desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad’ (Independent, 10 February 2006). Unverified stories began to circulate in Muslim countries about the cartoons forming part of a Zionist conspiracy (Guardian, 7 February 2006). A senior regional minister in Uttar Pradesh (India) announced that he would award 51 crore rupees ($11 million) to the person who beheaded ‘the Danish cartoonist’ (Times of India, 18 February 2006). Two of the cartoonists had by then received death threats (RWB 2005). In January 2006, an obscure publication in Norway – unlike Jyllands-Posten, which is among Denmark’s most important newspapers – called Magazinet, republished the cartoons. This magazine has a modest circulation and is published by a conservative Lutheran organization, and it was in fact a publication relatively few had heard about, even in Norway, before it reprinted the Danish cartoons.

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As a result of this, however, Norway was clearly perceived by some groups in the Middle East as being complicit with Denmark in a conspiracy against Islam, since demonstrations were now directed against Norwegian as well as Danish embassies and offices in the region. By the beginning of February 2006, protests in a number of countries had turned violent. Embassies were burnt down in Damascus and Beirut; Libya closed its embassy in Copenhagen, armed men stormed the EU offices in the Gaza Strip, and there were angry demonstrations in many countries with substantial Muslim populations. During the riots in early February, people were killed in Gaza, Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere (but, ironically, not in Europe); in Nigeria alone, thirty-eight people were reported killed during anti-cartoon riots (Hervik, Eide and Kunelius 2009: 34). At the same time, the cartoons were reprinted as an act of solidarity in several other countries; Die Zeit, The Times of India, France-Soir, La Stampa, El Periodico and El Mundo, to mention a few, printed them – even the BBC showed the cartoons on TV. This transnationally coordinated publication could be seen as a defence of the freedom of expression, but it could equally well be seen as an oblique critique of Islam and Muslims, the cartoons thus being used as a proxy for other issues, such as (in the case of India) Kashmir, (in France) the veil or (in Germany) adolescent crime. Of course, very many newspapers, including the New York Times, Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, did not publish the cartoons. Also at the same time, however, Danish and Norwegian authorities were feeling increasingly uneasy. The Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, made a public apology to Muslims on a trip to Palestine in January 2006, stating that the freedom of expression was a strongly held value in Norwegian society, but that this did not mean that one was justified in insulting others. As things got out of hand, even Jyllands-Posten apologized on 30 January 2006 ‘for having offended many Muslims’. The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, also apologized following the growing boycott of Lego, Bang & Olufsen and Danish dairy products in the Middle East. Even the conservative Protestant who edited the Norwegian fundamentalist magazine had a reconciliation meeting with leaders of the Norwegian Islamic Council. By this time, however, the affair had gained momentum, and the rioters in the countries with substantial Muslim populations did not closely follow developments in northern Europe. Judging from contemporary press reports, many of the protesters had not even seen any of the cartoons. The public debates, the demonstrations, the accusations, the riots and anger flared up suddenly, and vanished in the same way. By early March 2006, the cartoon controversy appeared to have died down, and in spite of temporary effects such as the cancellation of a Danish state visit to India in April because the Indian government felt Mr Rasmussen had ‘become too controversial’, there were no indications that Denmark’s international reputation has suffered. Indeed, in April 2009, Mr Rasmussen was appointed as NATO’s new general secretary.

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Polarization Some additional contextual information may be necessary to shed light on the analysis that follows. First of all, it should be noted that the Egyptian newspaper El Fagr actually reprinted six of the cartoons on 17 October 2005. The question of a boycott of Egyptian goods was not, to my knowledge, raised at the time. A Jordanian weekly, Al-Shihan, published three of them in February 2006, along with the rhetorical question: What harms Islam the most, these pictures or images of violent hostage-takers in Iraq? (The editor was dismissed, the newspaper removed from the kiosks.) It may also be of some interest that Jyllands-Posten was offered some comic drawings of Jesus Christ in 2003, made by the Danish artist Christoffer Zieler. The newspaper’s Sunday editor wrote, in his reply to Zieler: ‘As a matter of fact, I do not think that the readers of Jyllands-Posten will enjoy the cartoons. Actually, I think they will lead to an outrage. Therefore, I will not publish them’ (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 264). One may suspect that quite a few Danes, in spite of their suddenly vehement support of the freedom of expression, would have been annoyed if a Muslim cartoonist had made a few such caricatures and had them published in a leading newspaper – even if there is no ban on depicting Jesus in Christianity. Yet the main point here is that caricatures of Jesus in a secularized, liberal and individualist society do not have the same connotations as caricatures of Muhammad in a religious setting where the principle of the freedom of expression does not trump piety. It should also be kept in mind that the actual number of demonstrators was very modest: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, even fewer in Damascus. In other words, a limited number of persons – some radical imams and their followers in Denmark, a few hundred youths in Muslim countries, a couple of editors who disliked Islam – proved themselves capable of setting political and civil society agendas in large parts of the world for weeks and months, and also arguably contributed to the growing polarization between Muslims and others in several countries. A factor which most of the non-Scandinavian commentators did not take into account is the heightened tension between Denmark’s Muslims and mainstream Danish society following the aforementioned change in government in 2001. Denmark’s new, by many seen as ‘draconian’, policies on minority issues have affected both the extent and form of new immigration and dominant conceptualizations of ‘integration’ into Danish society for immigrants. The reactions to the cartoons among many Danish Muslims must, in this way, be seen as a pretext for addressing other problems they experience in Danish society. These problems are arguably, mainly, of a different kind and pertain to perceived discrimination in the labour and housing markets, the introduction of stricter legislation regarding family reunification, and other social issues. The Muhammad cartoon affair, although it dealt with issues of a different order (namely to do with cultural values and personhood), highlighted the disrespect and lack of recognition experienced by Danish Muslims in other contexts.

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In a detailed empirical account of the cartoon controversy, Larsen and Seidenfaden (2006) argue that the sharp turn to the right in Danish politics, where the conservative government depends on support from the right-wing populist Dansk Folkeparti, explains much of the dynamics of the affair: Danish Muslims felt disenfranchised, and leading Danish media had for years taken a hard line on political Islam and in general focused intensively on problems with Muslims in Danish society (see also Hervik 2006). As a result of the polarization resulting from the cartoon affair, Danes critical of Islam and militant Islamists were given ample media space, at the expense of almost everybody else. The most prominent spokesman for political Islam in Denmark at the time, Ahmed Abu Laban, said to a German journalist in February 2006: ‘I have to thank the government for its stubbornness’. His formerly modest congregation grew rapidly in 2006. Neither adherents of a militant, politicized form of Islam nor the Dansk Folkeparti and its sympathizers see it as being in their interest to depict Danish Muslims as ordinary Danes. In the interview quoted, from Die Zeit, Abu Laban says that a Muslim could never be a normal citizen of a Western state. He makes a ‘security contract’ with the secular state, but as a true believer he can never accept secularism – the separation of religion and state. He must always remain loyal to the highest religious law, the sharia. ‘We Muslims must use freedom of speech’, says the imam, ‘to the extent that it serves the goals of Islam’. (Lau 2006)

However, Abu Laban is also quoted as having said, in the same period, that ‘I condemn every violent act against the Danish military or others’ (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 142). Der Spiegel’s Henryk M. Broder, thinking along similar lines as Lau, states that ‘Unfortunately, the paper [Jyllands-Posten] apologized for the Muhammad-critical cartoons, and democratic values lost out to totalitarian ideology’ (Der Spiegel, 1 February 2006). By this, he seems to imply that apologies are an indication of weakness; or, perhaps, that there is only one world, namely a liberal individualist one: other cultural worlds may perhaps exist, but they lack legitimacy. There was thus nothing to bridge as there was no ‘other side’ deemed an equal conversational partner. In brief, these commentators imply that there is no cultural difference worthy of recognition unless it conforms to liberal individualism.

Civilizations Clash More complex positions are possible and were indeed pursued during the affair, and several of them are relevant to a discussion of cosmopolitanism. We may provisionally divide the positions on the cartoon affair in two: the confrontational and the conciliatory. As shown already, the cartoons were not published merely as a matter of principle: Jyllands-Posten had refused to print caricatures of Jesus,

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and they did by no means violate the principle of the freedom of expression by doing so, since this principle does not entail a duty to print anything in particular. The newspaper is, incidentally, supportive of the government, unlike the liberal left-of-centre newspaper Politiken (which is, ironically, owned by the same media group). The editor of the Norwegian Magazinet was, until the cartoon controversy, a staunch supporter of a law against blasphemy which still exists but has been dormant for many years in Norway, but he subsequently changed his views. In other words, a principled defence of the unlimited freedom of expression does not, in this case, sound convincing. (Moreover, the freedom of expression is already limited in every country.) On the other side, Muslims who reacted with violence against the caricatures were also clearly not interested in promoting cosmopolitan values since the latter presuppose mutual respect. One might say that they reacted to perceived verbal disrespect with a different, physical form of disrespect. Empirically, there can be several reasons for rejecting the middle ground, just as there can be different middle grounds. If for now we concentrate on Danish (and, to a lesser extent, Norwegian) society, leaving the problems as seen from the Arab and Muslim worlds aside for now, it may be said a priori that those who defended the view that the controversy proves the existence of an insurmountable gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’ demonstrated limited faith in the possibility of a society based simultaneously on shared values and different values; in other words, they rejected a cosmopolitan ideal of dialogue and mutual understanding which does not mechanically lead to agreement and similarity. A few examples of this kind of attitude follow as illustrations. In late January 2006, the Norwegian Progress Party (a large right-wing populist party) demanded that the government should cease to have contact with the Norwegian Islamic Council, since the latter was opposed to printing the cartoons. On 2 February 2006, Mullah Krekar, a controversial Kurdish religious leader who has spent much time in Norway, said to the liberal tabloid Dagbladet that the publication of the cartoons was tantamount to ‘a declaration of war against Islam’. The social scientist Johan Galtung said on the following day, to the left-wing newspaper Klassekampen, that one must expect terrorist attacks in Norway and Denmark now. He saw the publication of the cartoons as an insensitive use of freedom of expression, and compared it to publishing a cartoon which depicts sex between the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. (And yet it must be pointed out that such cartoons doubtless exist, but as they have been produced within the largely secularized, individualist West, direct comparison would ultimately be misleading.) The Danish government’s refusal to meet ambassadors from Muslim countries could equally be seen as an indication of an attitude precluding the possibility of mutual understanding. (In this context, it appears to be somewhat inconsistent that the Danish government at one point requested Arab governments to apologize for the burning of the Danish flag.)

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Middle Grounds All of these views seem to deny the possibility of a middle ground. Yet alternative perspectives do exist, though they are even more diverse than the antagonistic ones. On 10 February 2006, a Norwegian NGO, Antirasistisk senter, organized a demonstration promoting freedom of expression and respect, and rejecting violence. Their position, which did not attract much attention from the media, was complex in that it argued that a condition for practising the freedom of expression in a culturally diverse society would be mutual respect. It goes without saying that it is impossible to legislate for or against respect as such. The influential Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, writing in the International Herald Tribune, elaborates on the same position: What we need now on both sides is an understanding that this is not a legal issue, or an issue of rights. Free speech is a right in Europe and legally protected. No one should contest this. At the same time, there should be an understanding that the complexion of European society has changed with immigrants from diverse cultures. Because of that, there should be sensitivity to Muslims and others living in Europe. (Ramadan 2006)

Note his use of the term ‘sensitivity’. Compare this with the influential critic Christopher Hitchens, writing on the website Slate. He first reminds the readers that Arab newspapers routinely print anti-Jewish cartoons, and adds, in the climactic segment of the brief article: ‘I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a “holy” book. But I will not be told I can’t eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis’ (Hitchens 2006). This is another complex position. Hitchens concedes that synagogues and mosques may be a special kind of building for certain people, but argues that he is not required to respect them any more than faithful believers can be expected to respect him. This position, veering towards mutual indifference, may in fact, given certain conditions to which I shall return, express a cosmopolitan view. For now, it should be pointed out that Hitchens’s position on the one hand equates Muslim anti-Semitism with Western anti-Islamism, which seems accurate given that the context is that of the press. On the other hand, he also accepts the existence of cosmologies and notions of personhood other than his own, but refuses them entry into his life-world, thereby accepting that judgements of difference have a situational component. His position qualifies as a complex one. Most of the lengthier commentaries that were published in the Danish and Norwegian press about the controversy may be classified as ‘conciliatory’ or ‘ambivalent’ in their attitude. Although there was disagreement over the good sense in publishing the cartoons, few believed that this kind of thing should be banned. There was also disagreement over the use of boycotts as a way of expressing disgust; but boycott has been used by liberals and socialists in the North Atlantic

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part of the world in the recent past as well, most famously in the international campaign against apartheid, during various attempts to isolate Iran, and even today there are people who will not buy Israeli goods. This kind of disagreement may well express a cosmopolitan attitude on both sides, provided there is agreement on the terms of disagreement. A Muslim writing in a Norwegian newspaper pointed out that there exists a set of ethical guidelines for the Norwegian press, known as the ‘Be Cautious Poster’ (Vær varsom-plakaten), where (in paragraph 4.3) it says that one shall show respect for people’s personal peculiarities, private life, race, nationality and religion. Within (Sunni) Islam, the writer adds, it is an absolute and incontestable sin to depict Muhammad. Thus, he argues, it was a breach of this set of ethical guidelines to publish the cartoons. The Danish liberal MP Naser Khader, who describes himself as an ‘ultra-light Muslim’, called for the establishment of a network of ‘cultural Muslims’ and pragmatic Muslims who saw their religion as just one of several identities, and founded the organization Democratic Muslims. In an interview, Khader said: ‘The Muhammad cartoon dispute also has a positive side. Now we know where the radicals stand. It’s up to us moderates to develop an alternative. What is at stake is no less than the soul of Islam’ (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 134). It is fair to point out that although Khader has exerted some influence in Danish public life, it is debatable whether many Danish Muslims see him as their spokesperson. In fact, in 2009, Khader joined the Conservative People’s Party, one of the governing parties frequently criticized from the left for being too strict regarding integration policies. According to Khader himself, about half of the threats he receives come from right-wing Danes, the other half from Muslim extremists (ibid.). In fact, a trilingual (Arabic, Danish and English) website was set up by ‘moderate Danish Muslims’ under the heading, ‘It’s enough now!’ (Nu er det nok!), with a mission statement saying that, ‘everything can now be discussed and criticized’, adding that the Muhammad cartoons were a provocation, but that one cannot prohibit such statements in a liberal society. In this, they accepted the liberal view of personhood, individualism and the freedom of expression. Substantial segments of the Danish and Norwegian populations believed that it was ‘unwise’ to publish the Muhammad cartoons, while others think that it is exactly for this kind of purpose the freedom of the press exists. As I shall argue, the latter position may be incompatible with cosmopolitan reasoning. Interestingly, some prominent North American reactions were more in line with Egyptian columnists than with Danish members of the government. Bill Clinton commented, at a conference in Qatar in February 2006: ‘None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions … There was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark, … these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam’ (New York Times, 3 February 2006). Notwithstanding the predominance of nuanced and complex positions on both sides – for example, the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Saniora, said, in a com-

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ment on the destruction of the Danish consulate in Beirut, that ‘this is absolutely not the way we express our opinions’ – the debate took place chiefly on the terms laid down by the antagonists (Phillips 2009), and the controversy might easily be invoked by enemies of cosmopolitanism as evidence that societies can only be cohesive if they are based on sameness. The rapid escalation of the conflict from December to the beginning of February may appear like a classic instance of symmetrical Batesonian schismogenesis (Bateson 1972), a model of escalating, self-reinforcing conflict. As is well known among anthropologists, Bateson applied the concept of schismogenesis to phenomena as diverse as alcoholism, gang violence and arms races. Convinced that the cause of some of the most widespread forms of schismogenesis was an error in the dominant Western mode of thought – the error of individualism – Bateson wrote that if, for example, boasting is an element in the relationship between group A and group B, then, ‘it is likely, if boasting is a response to boasting, that each group will drive the other to an exaggerated emphasis on this pattern, a process which – if it is not checked – only can lead to more and more extreme rivalry and, in the final instance, to enmity and breakdown in the entire system’ (ibid.: 68). In Bateson’s view, conflicts of this kind could be mitigated, and possibly resolved, with the right kind of intervention by a third party with no personal interests in the issue at hand and an ability to frame it in an alternative way. The limitations of classic system theory are evident here. There was no shortage of ‘rational’ third instances or alternative framings of the situation in the cartoon affair. Quite the opposite: hardly a chauvinistic or antagonistic statement was made in the European public spheres (outside the unruly and ungovernable blogosphere) without immediate counter-statement adding nuance, correcting mistakes and making appeals to dialogue, respect and tolerance. What we need to understand, before considering the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, is why certain views and statements become so much more powerful and pervasive than others. Batesonian or other system theory cannot answer this question. Now, as I have argued in a polemical book about the European image of Islam (Eriksen 2001), in order to understand the disappointment and occasional rage encountered in Muslim societies it is necessary to look not at the relations of production but at the relations of communication. Humiliation, a result of disrespect, is a key term here (cf. Taylor 1992). It is a common view among Muslims that they are not taken seriously, not listened to, not treated as equals. That is certainly a widespread perception in contemporary Denmark. Uneven relations of communication result in one party feeling that it is not being heard. Thus Danes may tell Muslims that ‘you can say whatever you like about our gods, and we say whatever we like about yours, and we then have equality’. Quite apart from the fact that Danes are generally secular and Muslims are generally religious, and that there is a religious ban on depicting the Prophet in Sunni Islam, Muslims know that this is a bogus equality intended to parade the superiority of a certain liberal and unrepentantly European world-view and conceptualization of personhood.3 This inequality partly accounts for the violence in the reactions of some, and the calls

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for moderation in the use of the freedom of expression among others. An image that comes to mind, reported in the press in 2005, concerns a demonstration in Afghanistan following a rumour that American marines in Guantánamo had urinated on the Koran. The report led to a public enquiry, and in fact the soldier who had done the urinating admitted it, but explained that he had really just urinated on a prisoner, and that a few drops accidentally fell on the Koran. This is the kind of world inhabited subjectively by many Muslims. Whether it is considered more disgraceful to urinate on the Koran than on a prisoner or vice versa is beside the point; what is interesting is the intended humiliation on the part of the soldier, in other words the exact opposite of a cosmopolitan approach which assumes a shared world as its point of departure and equitable terms of communication as a goal. Historically, caricatures have usually been ‘a weapon of the weak’ used to humiliate and shame powerful groups, but it can also be a weapon of the strong, as in the case of anti-Semitic caricatures in Germany before and during the Second World War. In this context, given the geopolitical situation and the situation of Muslims in Western Europe (and perhaps in Denmark in particular), there can be no doubt how the cartoons were generally perceived by Muslims there. Using humour or claiming to do so can be a way of pre-empting criticism, because humour and irony are by definition ambiguous; the funniness of a joke or a skit lies in deliberately wrong contextualization. In this way, however, satire can also be used to ridicule contexts held dear by others, such as a particular religious world-view.

Practice and Discourse In the real world, sameness cannot be achieved. Given the fact that a newspaper feature in a small North European country could lead to riots and violence as far afield as Nigeria and Afghanistan, it is clearly not sufficient for cohesion and harmony, following the logic of sameness, that the members of ‘a society’ have the same views about this and that (which they never do anyway). If fundamental disagreement is dangerous, then it would seem that the only solution is a global ethics based on a set of common denominators ensuring that nobody is ever offended. Logically, this could be the ultimate result of the position Hitchens attacks, where ‘respect’ and ‘consideration’ lead to massive self-censorship, and where the tolerant are instructed to respect the intolerant. In such a world, where offensive messages are globalized as easily as e-mails, many essential debates would become private and might even go underground, for fear of offending the sensibilities of others. It would be reminiscent, on a huge scale, of the dinner party organized by Mr Fielding in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where our good Englishman worries about the menu – the guests have different religions and are subject to various food prohibitions. The scope of debates taking place in the public sphere might be limited under such a regime, yet Mr Fielding’s insistence on the virtues of hospitality need also be noticed. Another option would consist in exploring the

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possibilities of living with difference – serving different food to different guests, in the Forster case. Within the project of cosmopolitanism, as it has been discussed in Europe certainly since Montaigne, but especially since Kant wrote his late essay (in 1795) about eternal peace (Kant 2005), these appear to be the main options: differential treatment on the basis of cultural difference, or common denominators as a platform for shared communication. In ongoing social life, a balance between these strategies is often sought. Hospitality is universally recognized as a means to create emotional commitment and mutual respect between strangers, but one has to accommodate difference in the way one treats one’s guests. Kant does not see consensus or sameness as an aim, but significantly emphasizes hospitality as a key to peace and understanding, giving a string of examples from contemporary (late-eighteenth-century) colonialism to underpin the virtues of hospitality and the futility of refusing either to offer or to receive it (ibid.: 19–20). This, as pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, represents a different view of cosmopolitanism than that criticized by Douzakis (2007) and Calhoun (2002), who, in different ways, see cosmopolitan rhetoric as a ‘flattening’ device ensuring support for liberal democracies while simultaneously justifying systematic material inequalities. On the contrary, the cosmopolitanism expressed through most of the complex positions on the cartoon affair acknowledges, indeed takes as its premise, the facts of cultural differences which are not just cosmetic (aesthetic, commercial or based on political competition) but entail different views of the person and his or her rights and obligations. Let us assume that secularized Danes were to take the religiosity of Muslims seriously and treat it with the respect that may come with familiarity. In that case, they would easily know how to manoeuvre in order not to offend them. Not even trying to manoeuvre indicates a strong inclination not to live in the same society even if one physically lives next door to each other. The kind of cosmopolitan attitude leading to restraint can be compared to the underlying reasoning behind the ban on smoking in public, which has in recent years been implemented in many parts of the world. A Swede who lives part of the year in Cairo, part of the year in Göteborg, and who enjoys having a cigarette with his pint, told me that in Göteborg he can have his beer any time anywhere, but he has to go outside to smoke; in Cairo the problem is the opposite. The point is, however, that supposing I smoke and you do not, and we are in a room together, I might just tell you that if I smoke and you don’t, we both enjoy our liberal freedom. This is, in a nutshell, the problem of the cartoon controversy and the unreflected liberal responses to the offended reactions among some Muslims. Muhammad cartoons to them are like tobacco smoke to an asthmatic. To them, the cartoons are a way of ‘doing things with words’ (and images), not mere utterances in a jungle of opposing and diverging statements. Just as my smoking may affect your physical health adversely, it may be argued that Muhammad cartoons pollutes the air to some Muslims. However, it may also be argued that just as nonsmokers can avoid socializing with unrepentant smokers, offended Muslims may avoid exposure to offensive cartoons.

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Cosmopolitanism presupposes the acknowledgement of living in the same world, which confers not only rights but also responsibilities. When Salman Rushdie’s Indian publishers were offered The Satanic Verses, they were uncertain as to what to do, given the already controversial reputation of the book, and they asked Khushwant Singh for advice. Singh is known as an unrepentant liberal in Indian public life, having written a very great number of satirical and sometimes serious books, articles and columns all over the country since just after the Second World War. He rejects all forms of sectarianism and enjoys his whisky in a very public way. Surprisingly perhaps, Khushwant Singh recommended that Rushdie’s book should not be published. His reasoning was that the few members of the Indian cultural elite who would really enjoy it could get it from England anyway, and if it were to be published in India the result was likely to be riots and unnecessary deaths (Waldrop 1999). And so the book was not published in India, a decision that may be seen as a victory for a cosmopolitan attitude that transcends mere liberalism and acknowledges that difference necessitates respect. How can this be? In other words, how can censorship, that is the curtailing of the freedom of expression, serve as a means to build a cosmopolitan society? In order to adjudicate on this question, some of the reactions in countries like Lebanon and Nigeria to the Muhammad cartoons should be kept in mind. Small but very vocal groups staged violent demonstrations, ‘showing rather than telling’ their opinion about cartoons that they might not even have seen. There are two points to be made here. First, Singh predicted similar riots in India, judging the right to life a higher value than the right to ridicule religion. This was a pragmatic judgement. However, secondly, cosmopolitan conviviality means more than ‘speaking the same language’. It means sharing a life-world in a wider sense than merely talking together. During the Oslo peace talks between Arafat and Rabin in 1993 (leading to the ultimately ill-fated Oslo Accords), it was rumoured that the ice broke not because the parties suddenly saw each other’s point of view but because the Norwegian foreign minister’s four-year-old son came into the room and went to sit on Arafat’s lap. It then transpired that both men were grandfathers. Whether this story is true or not is not the point; rather, the anecdote indicates that cosmopolitanism is a question not only of discourse, but also of shared practices, a dimension which tends to be underestimated by intellectuals and policy-makers, whose reliance on (verbal) dialogue may lead to the neglect of other ways of creating community. Singh’s advice not to publish The Satanic Verses, accordingly, could be seen as a recognition of the significance of those fragile webs of community being created and recreated on a daily basis in Indian society across caste and religion (see Frøystad 2005 for a recent analysis), not by talking together, but by acting together – not through literal dialogue, but through non-verbal dialogue. To this theme I now turn in my concluding remarks.

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Conclusion In a review of Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006), John Gray states that: ‘As a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is distinct from relativism and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual understanding between adherents to different moralities but without holding out the promise of any ultimate consensus’ (Gray 2006). In other words, fervent missionary activity is not, according to this view, compatible with a cosmopolitan outlook, nor is an ethical position which assumes that there is but one good life. These two initial principles are, incidentally, in line with Kant’s views, which consistently emphasize the need to communicate across cultural and political boundaries, to accept hospitality when offered (an anthropological theme par excellence, incidentally), and to respect the difference of the other. A question asked by liberals may be: Why should they tolerate intolerance? The answer is that they are not asked to do so. They are only asked to coexist with, and if need be, to collaborate with people of different persuasions or differing life-worlds. Most conflicts involving immigrants in Oslo, where I live, are of a practical nature and require practical solutions. For example: Why do the parents of immigrant children active in sports so rarely take part in the community work – organizing lotteries and jumble sales, selling hot dogs on match days and so on – which is essential to raise money for the children? Why do immigrant parents let their children play noisily outside late in the evening? Why do Norwegians so rarely invite their immigrant neighbours in for a cup of tea? It is this kind of everyday problem that contributes to creating coldness and distance between natives and newcomers, along with – admittedly – more dramatic events involving gang violence, friction between school values and home values, and diverging views of gender and sexuality. However, interestingly, in the light of the huge significance attributed in the media to the Muhammad cartoon affair, I have yet to hear of a single conflict between ethnic Norwegians and immigrants that directly involved differences in religious beliefs. In a study of ethnic Norwegians in areas where the majority are immigrants or children of immigrants, Anders Vassenden (2008) found that the main yearning and complaint among ethnic Norwegians consisted in what we could call a lack of cultural intimacy; sharing implicit frames of reference based on common experiences and an embodied world-view. The main flaw in many accounts of cosmopolitanism accordingly consists in their reliance on dialogue, verbal exchange, mutual cognitive understanding and so on. Lived cosmopolitanism has more in common with Baumann’s ‘demotic discourses’ (Baumann 2002), where the motley population of Southall pragmatically adjust to each other situationally, than with Calhoun’s (2002) frequent travellers, whose cosmopolitan outlook is contingent on their detached lives. Where I live, we don’t really care which political party the neighbour votes for, and we don’t know if they have any religious beliefs or if they love European classical music as much as we do, nor do we care, as long as they take their turn shovelling snow in our common courtyard in the winter months, and take care to

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close the gate when entering or leaving the courtyard to ensure that the smaller children do not run out into the street. Whether the activity in question consists in hot-dog service, cups of tea, snow-shovelling or other communal activities, is beside the point. The insight from anthropology into questions of cosmopolitanism is not an insight about intellectual agreement or agitated discussion; it is about shared structures of relevance emerging from common activities and simple acts of reciprocity. Professed cosmopolitanism may turn into missionary liberalism, but it may also turn into indifference; the former may create problems regarding social cohesion, but the latter need not do so. As long as there are practical tasks at hand, which need to be handled collectively, cognitive indifference is not a problem. If anything, it is the lack of such tasks that prevents cosmopolitanism from developing in North Atlantic societies, not the lack of things to disagree or agree about in the media. Principled liberal individualists like Christopher Hitchens can perfectly well live in a cosmopolitan society without approving of other people’s beliefs and religious practices, but only in so far as he engages in common activities with them and accepts that they are going to retain their beliefs and practices notwithstanding. ‘Rational discourse’, in which both Hitchens and Ramadan believe, can only get you so far. There is nothing like getting your hands dirty together. It can be said, and is often said, that violence begins where language ends, but it may just as well be said that violence begins where peaceful, cooperative interaction ends. The mutual misunderstandings, suspicions and hostilities between Muslims and Danes reaching the surface during the cartoon affair, by now amply documented (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006; Eide, Kunelius and Phillips 2009), find resonance in the everyday experiences of Muslims in Denmark, but also in the struggle for hegemony characterizing the currently polarized Danish public sphere. Similar events cannot be prevented unless it becomes a matter of general acceptance that difference and similarity are two sides of the same coin, that face-to-face relationships imply back-to-back relationships, that the ability to listen to others is a scarce resource in the contemporary world, and that people who live in the same society are all in the same boat, divided as they may well be by their shared destiny. In order to understand such projects, both cosmopolitan anthropology and an anthropology of cosmopolitanism are needed; but in order for these intellectual projects to be achieved, the everyday cosmopolitanism of shared practices is an underlying condition. Its significance should not be underestimated. In Mauritius, a poly-ethnic Indian Ocean island-state which has by and large escaped from ethnic violence since independence in 1968, the public debates about culture, human rights and cosmopolitan values usually take on questions regarding the relationship between group and individual, and the power of each ‘community’ relative to its numbers (see Eriksen 1997). These debates, part and parcel of robust Mauritian democracy, presuppose zero-sum games, agreements over coveted resources, groupbased competition and an individualist understanding of personhood. In this, they resemble the debates, intellectual as well as political, about power in plural societies and liberalism.

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However, during ethnographic research in Mauritius I often came across apparently self-contradictory situations: people vociferously denounced other ethnic groups due to their clannishness, fanaticism or backwardness, yet worked cooperatively and shared jokes and tea with people belonging to these groups. Others praised the virtues of multiculturalism, yet were never seen with anyone of an ethnic identity other than their own. In other words, there is a discrepancy between what people say and what they do; or rather, discursive statements and actions are social facts of different orders. This in turn implies that cosmopolitanism may be expressed by ‘saying’ but it is embedded in doing. The transnational turmoil caused by the Danish cartoons was a result of an overly discursive handling of cultural differences which could not be resolved, or even tolerated, across the divide through mere discourse; the differences expressed could only be made irrelevant by abandoning hope in common discursive denominators and engaging instead in common practices. It also revealed, through the diversity of positions taken in civil society, the importance of building cosmopolitan practices through ongoing interaction rather than state legislation – in the words of Adelman, ‘a meaningful cosmopolitan future can only be constructed through grinding, time-honoured forms of struggle for solidarity from below against cosmopolitan sovereignty’ (Adelman 2009: 13). These ‘struggles … from below’ are the main focus of anthropological approaches to cosmopolitanism.

Notes   1. I would like to thank Elisabeth Eide and the editors for their thorough, knowledgeable and useful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.  2. All the cartoons can easily be found on the internet; the original newspaper page can be downloaded from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy.   3. See Asad (2003), Taylor (2007) on the Protestant history of secularism, and also Bangstad (2009).

References Adelman, S. 2008. ‘Between the Scylla of Sovereignty and the Charybdis of Human Rights: The Pitfalls of Development in Pursuit of Justice’, Human Rights and International Legal Discourse 2(1): 17–36. ——— 2009. ‘Cosmopolitan Sovereignty’. Unpublished paper presented at the conference ‘Cosmopolitan Justice and its Discontents’, University of Oslo, 15–16 October. Alhassan, A. 2009. ‘The Twelve Cartoons: A Discursive Inquiry’, in E. Eide, R. Kunelius and A. Phillips (eds), Transnational Media Events. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 39–58. Appiah, K.A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bangstad, S. 2009. ‘Secularism and Islam in the Work of Talal Asad’, Anthropological Theory 9(2): 188–208. Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.

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Baumann, G. 2002. ‘Collective Identity as a Dual Discursive Construction: Demotic Discourses of Culture and the Negotiation of Historical Memory’, in H. Friese (ed.), Identities: Time, Difference and Boundaries. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 189–200. Beck, U. 2000. ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology 15(1): 79–105. Bluitgen, K. 2006. Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv [‘The Koran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad’]. Copenhagen: Høst and Søn. Calhoun, C. 2002. ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 86–109. Douzinas, C. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Routledge. Dworkin, R. 2006. ‘The Right to Ridicule’, New York Review of Books, 23 March. Eide, E., R. Kunelius and A. Phillips (eds). 2009. Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Eriksen, T.H. 1997. ‘Multiculturalism, Individualism and Human Rights: Romanticism, the Enlightenment and Lessons from Mauritius’, in R. Wilson (ed.), Human Rights, Culture and Context. London: Pluto, pp. 49–69. ——— 2001. Bak fiendebildet: Politisk islam og verden etter 11. september [‘Behind the enemy image: political islam and the world after 9/11’]. Oslo: Cappelen. Friedman, J. 1997. ‘Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of De-hegemonisation’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity. London: Zed, pp. 70–89. Frøystad, K. 2005. Blended Boundaries: Caste, Class, and Shifting Faces “Hinduness” in a North Indian City. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gray, J. 2000. The Two Faces of Liberalism. Cambridge: Polity. ——— 2006. ‘Easier Said Than Done’, The Nation, 30 January 2006. Hall, A. 2005. ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven? Suspicion and Humanity in the British Immigration and Asylum System’, Ph.D. diss. Belfast: Queen’s University. Hannerz, U. 1996. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Hart, K. 2003. ‘Epilogue: Studying World Society’, in T.H. Eriksen (ed.), Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology. London: Pluto, pp. 217–27. Hervik, P. 2006. ‘The Emergence of Neo-nationalism in Denmark, 1992–2001’, in M. Banks and A. Gingrich (eds), Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 92–106 Hervik, P., E. Eide and R. Kunelius. 2009. ‘A Long and Messy Event’, in E. Eide, R. Kunelius and A. Phillips (eds), Transnational Media Events. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 29–38. Hiebert, D. 2002. ‘Cosmopolitanism at the Local Level: The Development of Transnational Neighbourhoods’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 209–23. Hitchens, C. 2006. ‘The Case for Mocking Religion’, Slate, 4 February. Retrieved 9 August 2013 from: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/02/cartoon_ debate.html. Kant, I. 2005 [1795]. Perpetual Peace. New York: Cosimo. Larsen, R.E., and T. Seidenfaden. 2006. Karikaturkrisen: En undersøgelse af baggrund og ansvar [‘The cartoon crisis: an investigation of background and responsibility’]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Lau, J. 2006. ‘Allah und der Humor’, Die Zeit, 1 February. Lykkeberg, R. 2008. Kampen om sandhederne [‘The war of the truths’]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Phillips, A. 2009. ‘Who Spoke and Who was Heard in the Cartoons Debate?’ in E. Eide, R. Kunelius and A. Phillips (eds), Transnational Media Events. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp.99–116. Ramadan, T. 2006. ‘Free Speech and Civic Responsibility’, International Herald Tribune, 5 February. Rapport, N. 2007. ‘A Cosmopolitan Turn?’ Social Anthropology 15(2): 223–26. Rose, F. 2005. ‘Muhammeds ansigt’ [‘The face of Muhammad’]. Jyllands-Posten, 30 September.

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RWB. 2005. ‘Death Threats against Two Cartoonists’, Reporters without Borders, 17 October. Retrieved 9 August 2013 from: http://en.rsf.org/denmark-death-threats-made-againsttwo-17-10-2005,15316.html. Stade, R. 2007. ‘Cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitanism in Anthropology’, Social Anthropology 15(2): 226–29. Taylor, C. 1992. Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, ed. A. Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——— 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vassenden, A. 2008. ‘Flerkulturelle forståelsesformer: En studie av majoritetsnordmenn i multietniske boligområder’ [‘Multicultural forms of understanding: a study of majority Norwegians in polyethnic residential areas’], Ph.D. diss. Oslo: University of Oslo. Waldrop, A. 1999. ‘Gud, og jeg vet ikke hva: Samtale med Khushwant Singh’ [‘God, and I don’t know what: a conversation with Khushwant Singh’], Samtiden 5/6: 112–22.

Conclusion Alexandra Hall

K

In Tommy Lee Jones’s film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Jones 2005), the deserts of the US–Mexican border form the backdrop for a drama about brutality, friendship and redemption. Melquiades Estrada is an undocumented Mexican immigrant working in Texas. When he shoots at a desert coyote to protect his goats, watching Border Patrolman Norton believes he is under attack and fires his gun, killing Melquiades. When Norton realizes what he has done, he buries the Mexican man’s body in a shallow grave and keeps quiet. The body is subsequently discovered and reburied by the local sheriff, who ignores evidence that the Border Patrol may have been responsible for the man’s death. It is Melquiades’ best friend, Texan ranchman Perkins, who discovers Norton’s identity and takes it upon himself to exact retribution, and to fulfil his promise to return Melquiades’s body to his family in his home town across the border. Perkins kidnaps the brutish Norton and forces him to dig up Melquiades’s body. Evading the sheriff, Perkins embarks on a dreamlike journey across the borderlands into Mexico, with Norton tied captive to a horse and Melquiades’s decomposing body strapped to a mule. As they travel through the desert, Perkins and Norton have a series of extraordinary encounters. They spend an afternoon with a lonely and elderly blind American man who asks them to shoot him, and they share liquor with a group of Mexican cowboys watching American soap operas in the open air. Norton is bitten by a rattlesnake during an escape attempt and is discovered by a group of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally. Perkins finds a healer to treat Norton, but she turns out to be the same woman that Norton had assaulted during a patrol arrest some weeks previously. The woman heals Norton, but then breaks his nose in vengeance for her own injury. As Norton becomes increasingly exhausted and

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disturbed by his journey, and Melquiades’s corpse starts to rot in a darkly comic fashion, we learn, via flashbacks, about the two men: Norton’s selfish existence and Melquiades’s gentle friendship with Perkins. When Perkins and Norton finally arrive near the place that Melquiades claimed was his home, it transpires that no one has heard of the town. Moreover, while Perkins is able to track down the woman and children from a family photo that Melquiades had shown his friend, the woman maintains she has never heard of Estrada. Melquiades, it would seem, had no wife and no family, and his dreams of a return home to a family were to a mythical place of his imagination. Perkins determinedly presses on in search of the place that Melquiades described – a ‘place filled with beauty’ – and the unhappy trio finally comes across a ruined house. After repairing the house, Norton and Perkins bury Estrada for the third time and Perkins insists that the stubborn Norton repent. It is only when Perkins fires his gun that Norton finally breaks down and begs forgiveness, awash with misery and anguish. At the end of the film, Perkins rides away, leaving the bewildered Norton a horse and referring to him as ‘son’. Norton, suddenly free and alone, calls out to ask whether Perkins will be alright. The fortified US–Mexico border setting of Three Burials is a region plagued by drugs- and gang-related violence, and an increasingly risky terrain for undocumented migrants. The US Border Patrol mounts operations in the region to hunt would-be border crossers across the harsh desert landscape. Illegal immigrants find themselves in a vulnerable position, such that ‘the illegality of their being opens the possibility of a violence sanctioned by the law’ (Doty 2007: 18). Hundreds die trying to cross the border, victims of the desert climate, and those that make it occupy a shadowy and exploitative informal economy in the USA. The character of Melquiades represents thousands of people living a precarious life at the social, political and economic margins, and his killing threatens to become just another unmourned death. Patrolman Norton, on the other hand, embodies the indifference, anxiety and fear that crystallizes in the bureaucratic enactment of border protection programmes in rich western countries (for more, see Heyman 1995; Herzfeld 1992). He shoots the Mexican man because he believes he is under threat, and he does not report the death because he is cowardly and Melquiades does not matter in his eyes. Three Burials is a contemporary confrontation with, and subversion of, the classic themes of the western – frontier heroism, a clear moral terrain, a distinct other. As an examination of contemporary border politics in the region, it shows the distance between Norton and Estrada to be as unassailable as the desert that separates Mexico and the USA. The film is also about Perkins’s refusal to let his Mexican friend’s death go unpunished and unmourned. It is about friendship, respect and holding Norton accountable. The epic journey that Perkins undertakes with Melquiades’s body is a dogged mission to reinstate Melquiades as a person and human being within a series of events which threatened to obliterate and ignore his humanity. Perkins is determined to force Norton to take responsibility for his actions. The final scenes of the film convey many messages. Norton’s breakdown is an anguished demon-

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stration of sorrow and remorse – it appears he at last recognizes the gravity of his actions – but, with Perkins’s gun shots raining down around him, we cannot be sure that Norton’s conscience has not been reawakened from fear. Is his regret born of true responsibility, or self-pity? The patrolman’s final words, however, are spontaneous and unprompted. Norton – whose wife has deserted him, whose ignorance and egotism have isolated him, and who seems wholly unresponsive to the plight of those around him – finally demonstrates concern for someone other than himself when he calls to Perkins to ask whether he will be all right. What are we to make of the repentance shown here? Or of the forgiveness that Norton is granted? Norton’s final call to Perkins is an act of recognition and moral concern: it is an unsolicited act of goodness that treats Perkins as an end in himself. Through this expression of moral concern, and in the apology that he offers at Melquiades’s grave, Norton assumes responsibility for his wrongdoing towards the Mexican man, and for the welfare of his kidnapper. His arduous journey has led to this: the acceptance of a responsibility ‘that is part of being human’ (Josephides n.d.). For Derrida (2001), it is the act of pure, unconditional forgiveness which constitutes and expresses our humanity, whether the perpetrator shows contrition or not. Paul Ricoeur, as Josephides (n.d.) demonstrates, argues that it is the admission of fault and the acceptance of responsibility which makes us human: it is because actions can be attributed to us, and because we can be held accountable, that we are moral. For Ricoeur, forgiveness unbinds the agent from the imputed action, and he or she is ‘considered capable of something other than his offences and his faults’ (Ricoeur, quoted in Josephides n.d.). In this case, then, Norton is held accountable by Perkins. He accepts responsibility – for Melquiades and for Perkins – and so shows his humanity. He is forgiven, and this forgiveness releases him towards an uncertain future where his awakened conscience, we hope, might manifest itself in more humane action. What might be gained from a consideration of one man’s moral transformation? Against the backdrop of the political, economic and social inequalities of the US–Mexico borderlands, the ending of Three Burials may appear overly hopeful, even naive. For me, this film encapsulates prominent themes that resonate with the chapters of this book. Collectively, the chapters argue that we might gain much from the methodological, theoretical and moral consideration of the individual. In every individual life, as Rapport argues, is ‘instantiated the human’, a claim that has several layers to it. The everyday contexts of people’s lives – the social relations within which they are entangled, the ethical dilemmas they confront, the responsibilities they bear, the existential condition they embody, the lives they pursue – contain something of ‘a human condition’. The hospital porter or detention centre guard, the Tamil refugee or African missionary or New Left commune member, then (in the words of Rapport) is Anyone and Everyone, a being who is undoubtedly embroiled in particular socio-cultural contexts, but whose capacities are transcendent and universal: cosmopolitan. Norton’s transformation matters, then, because his journey is Anyone’s, and through it we might understand what is human in Everyone. Norton’s experiences

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expose the gaps between politics and morality, between the political and social organization of our relations with others, and the existential experience of life in its complexity. We have seen, throughout the volume, that the cultural codes which order social and political life never fully capture the experience of life as it is lived. Certainly life as it is lived throws up situations where we cannot retreat to familiar, comfortable categories and classifications. We see this clearly in the bureaucratic administration of the rule of law, for instance, where abstract, rational, universal principles become in their enactment indifferent to the plight of the individual, frequently unable to address the unique singularity of a person’s life and experience, providing an excuse for inaction rather than the justice to which it aspires (Herzfeld 1992; Bauman 1993; Douzinas 2002: 13). In the case of Three Burials, the rule of law is embodied by local sheriffs, who are more concerned with pragmatics and smoothing relationships with the Border Patrol than with pursuing justice for a Mexican immigrant. Norton inhabits a world where indifference and fear shape the norms of response to immigrants. Melquiades, like countless immigrants, becomes a subject from whom rights and the protection of law withdraw, exposed as ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). Norton is simply ignored by those who could have legally held him to account and punished him: the crime is not even seen as warranting the pragmatic forgiveness that Derrida (2001) associates with state-run procedural justice. Yet as Norton sobs over Melquiades’s grave, he embodies the ‘loneliness of the moral person’ as Bauman (1993: 52) puts it. The responsibility that constitutes us as moral, as Bauman argues (after Levinas), is not to be found in the ‘already-existing norms and already followed rules’ that outline ‘the limit of my duty’: ‘I am always the one who carries the straw which will break the back of the camel of moral indifference’ (ibid.: 52, 51). It is this terrible responsibility which finally descends on Norton, and which, by being accepted by him, restores his humanity. The film, offered as an entry point to thinking about the themes of this volume, brings to the fore a range of issues: what is worthy about a human life; the encounter with the other and the moral responsibility this brings forth; the transformative capacity of empathy; and the relationship between the individual and the sociopolitical context into which he or she is thrown in life. These themes, the chapters in this volume collectively argue, are universal and have something to say to us all. They are not identical or fixed across time, place and context, of course, but they are confronted anew within each life. The chapters have collectively sought what Wardle terms ‘cosmopolitanism-as-a-pan-human-ontology’, seeking ‘knowledge concerning capacities of mind and body shared by all human beings as individuals; and the shared existential predicaments that arise from this’ (Wardle 2010: 384). This volume, as part of burgeoning debates within anthropology about the meaning of cosmopolitanism, the methodologies of cosmopolitanism and the relationship of anthropological enquiry to cosmopolitanism, speaks directly to ‘the multiplex pragmatic experiences through which the abstraction [of cosmopolitanism] gathers meaning’ (Wardle 2010: 384). More than this, the chapters, through distinctive ethnographies and analyses, have investigated cosmopolitanism as an

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embodied, intersubjective and empathetic capacity; as an urge to strive outwards and beyond; as a hospitable and ethical engagement with the other; as a paradigm for ethical social relations and as a process of estrangement and transformation. Each of the chapters has explored cosmopolitanism, existentialism and morality from a different stance, but the perspectives unite to point to underlying themes.

Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Estrangement Our chapters, via a range of ethnographic evidence, collectively point to the human capacity to reach beyond what is given. The individual, Rapport argues, embodies an existential energy that is transcendent, manifested in the tendency to strive ‘beyond the essence or identity of what is or has been’. The individual, in this view, is a being which is self-surpassing, a being which ‘exists before it can be defined by any conception of it’; a being ‘which encounters himself, surges up in the world’ and which ‘propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so’ (Sartre 1975: 349). This is an individual able ironically to distance him- or herself from the particulars of social and cultural conditions, and to push beyond the limitations he or she encounters. People, wherever we find them, are able to reflect on the contexts which undoubtedly shape (limit, facilitate) them, and they contest, negotiate, exceed, accept, tolerate and construe those contexts in turn. This capacity or drive to go beyond is, we have collectively argued, a cosmopolitan capacity. The chapters variously attest to the dynamic relationship between the individual and the social conditions in which he or she is placed. In the case of the Tamil refugees in Norway, described by Grønseth, the trauma of being ‘out-of-place’ in a new and disorienting social world is experienced as a physical and psychic pain. Experiencing acute loneliness and dislocation embodied as discomfort, the Tamil refugees ‘learned something (true) about society and social relations’ from which they had become alienated. For these people in a strange land, and for the native Norwegians who befriended them, customary practices and values were confronted and gave way, in the cases that Grønseth describes, to a cosmopolitanism ‘as a flexible recognition of a common humanity’ without dissolving difference. The experience of dislocatedness involved in the emergence of cosmopolitan subjectivity might be painful and disorienting (see Gay y Blasco 2010). In the Tamils’ case, the experience of bodily pain became the ‘gateway’ to intersubjective experiences of mutuality across social and cultural divides. The refugees were forced to transgress ‘habituated and doxic patterns’ and reach out ‘for relations deriving from the new social and cultural circumstances’. Grønseth argues that, in so doing, a cosmopolitan subjectivity opened up. The painful embodied experience of displacement described by Grønseth produces, she argues, a disturbed and ruptured experience of embodiment capable of producing an ‘empathetic and bodily connection’ that recognizes a common humanity despite cultural and social differences. This recognition does not equate the pain or experience of self and other. Rather, it produces an ‘agentive and creative

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moment through which the other is recognized as a mutual and relational part of oneself ’. This notion of a bodily sense of rupture accompanied by the shattering of established judgements and perspectives resonates with the encounter between prison officer and ‘illegal’ immigrant described in Hall’s chapter. In this case, the shared witnessing of a death and the struggles to save a man’s life produced a new moral space within the immigration detention centre, inhabited by an officer and detainee who showed one another concern and responsibility rather than indifference and suspicion. For Grønseth the physical experience of pain can create ‘moments of mutuality and an emotional moral inclusion that recognizes a human commonality’. For Hall, the shared aftermath of a man’s death threw officer and detainee into a ‘fragile acknowledgment of mutuality’. The intersubjective experience of embodied vulnerability that emerged in the wake of the suicide was agentive and creative in precisely the way that Grønseth describes, producing the possibility of new perspectives and actions towards others. In both cases – Grønseth’s and Hall’s – the shared existential experience of bodily vulnerability, pain and being in the world provides the conditions of possibility for a cosmopolitan subjectivity, one that is able to recognize (simultaneously) difference and commonality. The traumatic estrangement experienced by refugees may be placed alongside the self-imposed alienation of young German activists, as described by Stade. In his exploration of the paradoxes and contradictions of cosmopolitanism, Stade presents us with the original formulation of Cynic cosmopolitanism as a ‘frontal attack on social conventions’. He describes the efforts of members of the German New Left to make a better world via transformative practices of self-liberation through which a despised, socially constructed, bourgeois self could be freed from itself. In exploring the ‘paradoxes of self-liberation’, Stade concludes that human beings are ‘thrown into a world not of their own making’, but he adds that they are also capable of estrangement from social conventions and cultural meanings. This is a self-conscious and achieved alienation as a project of self-transformation. Stade’s concern is with cosmopolitanism as ‘strangeness cultivated’, a stance which has a critical, transformative quality, at odds with the prevailing conventions, inhibitions and norms of social and moral life. Stade concludes that the cosmopolitan as perspective and practice ‘is more about human beings claiming their given place in the world that about a social typology’. The instantiation of the human in every individual life, then, is the capacity to ‘create worlds’, as Rapport has it, to experience estrangement and to ‘sense and make sense’ of existing conditions in a way that is unique and unpredictable. When Sartre describes an existential ‘human universality of condition’, he points to ‘the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there’ (Sartre 1975: 362). The human is to be found in these necessities – in our shared embodiment, for instance. Both Hall and Grønseth, as I have described, place the body and its frailties centrally in relation to moments of cosmopolitan experience. Rapport, in his invocation of cosmopolitan space as that where an individual’s bodily integrity is protected, centrally places the physical rhythms and routines through which we

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claim a home space in the world: ‘morally one attends to the sacrosanct sovereignty of the mortal body’. What Sartre reminds us is that the fundamental situations of people’s lives (like embodiment) may well be ubiquitous, but they are also lived and experienced. To be human, in this perspective, is to encounter limitations, which we share but which are not fixed, but also ‘to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else deny or to accommodate oneself to them’ (ibid.: 362). What, then, follows from the notion that in the individual is instantiated the human, and that the human may be estranged from the conditions which might appear to constitute the conditions of his or her existence? For Sartre, what follows is that ‘every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value’ (ibid.: 362). That is, in claiming a place in the world through the choices, actions and projects he or she pursues, the individual creates that world and what it is to be human, what it is to live a life anew. This is a moral project, associated with a ‘complete and profound responsibility’ because the actions and choices individuals make are creative of ‘an image of man such as he believes he ought to be’ (ibid.: 350). The life project of Anyone, then, is a moral project that concerns us all and has, for Rapport, an absolute value. A cosmopolitan project, then, might (should, for Rapport) attempt to arrange social, political and economic relations such that the capacities of the ‘non-indexical individual’ (Rapport 2010) can be protected, for ‘in the nature of the one is lodged the hope of the whole’. This ‘humane space’ is a moral milieu where Everyone is afforded the space to come into his or her own beyond the particulars of socio-cultural context: where we refrain from doing others harm and abstain from oppressing others. Rapport’s vision of a cosmopolitan space resonates with Eriksen’s search for a way beyond the ‘confrontational and conciliatory’ stances that emerge in relations with the other in a globalized world. Lived cosmopolitanism, Eriksen argues, involves ‘pragmatically adjust[ing] to each other situationally’. The kind of cosmopolitan space that is argued for here is associated with a social ‘skating upon the surface’ (Rapport), or a kind of benign indifference tempered by ‘shared structures of relevance emerging from common activities and simple acts of reciprocity’ (Eriksen). For Eriksen, what saves the vision from descending into coldness and apathy is the necessity of practical shared tasks and collaborations within civic life. For Rapport and Eriksen alike, a cosmopolitan and humane social world involves a kind of abstinence towards others. As the individual strives within life projects to realize his or her capacities, he or she must refrain from oppressing others. Yet the extent to which this humane space can really be seen to be ‘afforded’ by each striving individual to every other is always under question, especially in polarized and divisive contexts like the Mexican borderlands, to return to Three Burials. The uneven successes of ostensibly cosmopolitan global projects, such as human rights, to protect the sacrosanct sovereignty of the individual (Douzinas 2007) are clearly revealed in the relegation of non-citizens to a political and moral ‘outside’. ‘Skating across surfaces’ might be a way of organizing a benign and tolerant cosmopolitan space, but it might threaten to become a way of dismissing or ignoring the approach of the other. Yet as Hart (2010: 446) argues, the apparent conflict

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between being ‘self-interested and mutual’ should not be seen as inevitable. Our ability to be ‘self-reliant’ and yet ‘to belong to others’ is ‘often inseparable in practice’ (ibid.: 446). More than this, our journey ‘outward into the world and inward into the self ’ (ibid.: 445) is a moral project that constitutes us even as we struggle to find our way in the world. We might turn at this point to perspectives developed in other chapters in this volume, which have found and described a lived cosmopolitanism as a moral stance to the other. This is a stance which does not abstain or withdraw from the other, but which actively engages the other, recognizes the other as part of the self and assumes moral responsibility for him or her. In sum, the chapters in this volume advance the notion that to ‘be human’ is unquestionably to be social. People come into their own, feel at home, achieve a sense of self and are moral within social milieux and within relations with others – whether it is the boisterous banter and familiar rhythms of a Scottish hospital workplace, or in the revived cultural activities of refugees, or in despised bourgeois families. Yet to understand the human within ‘a web of social metaphysics’, as Stade puts it, is to ignore the ‘cosmopolitan estrangement’ that is part of the existential experience of life as it is lived. As Stade notes, ‘while the source of the human self is necessarily cultural and social (and biological), the sources of [cosmopolitan] estrangement from community and cosmology remain peculiarly uncharted’. This estrangement constitutes the transcendence of the individual and is transformative: it is what propels us all forward, in the sense of individual life projects but also in the sense of striving afresh for a new world.

Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Moral Responsibility In his chapter about the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005/6, Eriksen deftly portrays the political and ethical dilemmas that arise from our globalized, mediasaturated world. Ours is a world where ‘cultural clashes’ and a perceived lack of respect have violent repercussions, which reverberate and are replayed within global communications. Eriksen is concerned in his discussion with the ‘prerequisites for, and practices of conviviality’ that might adhere to ‘getting along’ in this bustling melee, and his conclusion is that lived cosmopolitanism cannot be found in ‘dialogue, verbal exchange, mutual cognitive understanding’; rather, it is grounded in ‘peaceful cooperative interaction’ in everyday activity. We may never fully understand other people and we may disagree wholeheartedly with the choices and actions made by those from different life-worlds, Eriksen argues, but cosmopolitan coexistence is perfectly compatible with this. Eriksen’s chapter points directly to the difficulty of living alongside the other, and to the divisions and boundaries which are associated with social and cultural difference. His chapter leads also into a different sense of the ‘complete and profound responsibility’ that Sartre saw as being part of the existential condition: the moral demand that the other places upon me. So, while the instantiation of the human in individual life implies a life project that is mine alone, but also Everyone’s, the recognition of the human in

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others and myself calls forth an ethical stance that is fundamentally the acknowledgement of that humanity. As Josephides puts it, ‘[i]f humans are moral, it is because they recognize each other as sharing a basic ontology, and morality refers to this recognition’ (Josephides 2010: 389). The chapters in this volume collectively give a sense of people’s moral actions within uncertain and ambiguous contexts, where doing the right thing towards others is not always clear and where norms of moral behaviour retreat. Bauman (1993), after Levinas, argues that the moral impulse is irrational, contradictory and non-calculable – a ‘brute fact’ from which human co-habitation is made. The chapters in this volume have explored ethnographically the manifestation and emergence of this ambiguous impulse – whether it is between missionaries and African pagans, between immigration detainee and prison officers, or refugees and their ‘hosts’. There is much to say here, of course, but one of the threads taken up by several authors is the way in which our moral responsibility is constitutive of the self: how being moral makes us human and how being human is about being moral. Hall, Schiltz and Grønseth all draw on Levinas to understand how the approach of the other – as that which is strange, different and apart from me – calls the individual to ethics. As Josephides (2010: 389) argues, it is encounters with the other as ‘relations of exteriority’ which call forth an ethical stance. This is what makes the individual transcendent. While the moral, for Rapport, is (after Murdoch) less about doing good than about refraining from doing others harm so that they might come into their own, goodness, in Josephides’ view, is about treating others like persons, with respect, ‘an unmediated and pre-reflective recognition of the other’ (ibid.: 390). Of course, the encounter with the other might cause fear and anxiety (Kristeva 1993; Nussbaum 2001). The other might pose a danger to us, or wish us harm, and suspicion and hostility might saturate our engagement or disengagement, leading to misrecognition, indifference, even violence, as Norton’s shooting of Melquiades demonstrates. Levinas argues that in living our lives with other people we may either subsume the other within familiar categories and manipulate the other for our own purposes (this contains a kind of violence), or else confront the difficult question of how to live alongside the other in his or her difference and strangeness. Wild describes vision as the mode of engagement with the other which seeks an ‘all-inclusive, panoramic view of all things, including the other, in a neutral, impersonal light’ (Wild 1969: 15). Vision captures as it distances; as a way of understanding engagement with the other, it implies detachment and lack of interest. The immigration detention centre described by Hall in this volume demonstrates precisely this mode of engagement. Officers’ embodied practices of vision, among other things, are a means of achieving security, but they objectify the detainees and work against the kind of ethical ‘unmediated recognition’ that is associated with humane treatment. The engagement between officer and detainee in this inhospitable environment – the interaction after the suicide – is unexpected and transformative. This is because, as Josephides argues, ‘radical alterity may be overcome by conversation as it achieves understanding … I will always retain a part

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of the other in me, and the other a part of me, as externalized in that relation we created between us’ (Josephides 2010: 394). Schiltz describes the interaction between nineteenth-century missionaries and their African hosts, relationships which did not seek to objectify or distance, but which drew the other into a dialogue in a way that attempted to ‘pay attention to the other and take account of him and the strange world he inhabits’ (Wild 1979: 15). The initial act of generosity or hospitality in reaching out to the other is an act of sociality, Schiltz argues, one that does not seek to reduce the other. The dialogue between the European missionaries and Africans that Schiltz describes was empathetic and curious, oriented towards welcoming the Other in his or her difference. This dialogue is a perilous projection of the self beyond boundaries of difference as a means of reaching towards the other. As Wild argues: ‘real conversation with an other cannot be exhaustively planned. I am never sure just what he will say, and there is always room for reinterpretation and spontaneity on both sides’ (ibid.: 14). As a stance towards otherness and as a moral disposition, empathy can be understood as the intersubjective engagement with another person’s experience (see Nussbaum 2004). Empathy as a (universal) capacity features in the mutual relationships between native Norwegians and Tamils in Grønseth’s account and in Hall’s description of (an almost grudging) mutual concern between officers and detainees in the immigration detention centre. In Schiltz’s case, empathy produced a distinctive kind of knowledge of the other, knowledge that was not concerned with imperial possession but with a ‘project of self-discovery’. This retention of the other, as Schiltz demonstrates, is never risk free: the intersubjective relationship entered into via empathetic engagement will ‘transform, exceed, or worse, imperil the self ’. The risks posed by engaging with the other have many levels – from social stigma (Grønseth) to physical threat (Hall) or an ethical self-imperilling (Schiltz). Hospitality, then, perfectly captures both the extension of trust and the risks that are involved in that extension. The relationship between cosmopolitanism and hospitality, one which Kant placed centrally, has been revisited within the chapters in this volume, as a difficult and perilous lived experience. Hospitality, for Derrida, contains a central paradox and violence. He argues that there is ‘[n]o hospitality in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home’ (Derrida 2001: 55). That is, the classic relationship between host and guest sets up uneven power relationships that threaten to entrench sovereign power and make true hospitality impossible. Welcoming the other is always risky because ‘[t]his other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage’ (ibid.: 55). This is clearly demonstrated in national debate about immigrant ‘outsiders’ and host nations in Europe (Eriksen, Hall, Grønseth). Rapport invokes hospitality differently when he describes the moral project of protecting the ‘sacrosanct sovereignty of the mortal individual body’: physical location, he argues, might be imagined as ‘mutual guesthood’ characterized by mobile positions of reciprocality and seriality. In this sense, the risks of hospitality as an encounter with the other are constantly shifting and are shared.

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What might be concluded, then, from these perspectives? If we can claim that in every individual is instantiated the human in the sense of existential capacities and tendencies, we might also say that the recognition of those capacities and tendencies in others draws forth a moral stance (for Kant, this was rationality). The chapters in this volume point in different ways towards the complex lived experience of ethical life, and the fundamental relationship between being human and being moral. This is a cosmopolitan relationship that recognizes what is shared and experienced in human lives. Our ethical life, argues Levinas, and as the volume’s chapters variously show, takes place within our social relations with others, and these relations (social and ethical) constitute us. We are, in this sense, ‘both transcendent and social’ (Josephides 2010: 389): engaged in social relations, but also in ‘relations of exteriority’ which are individual-to-individual and ethical in character. The ‘profound responsibility’ that accompanies the existential condition and life project, then, must be reconciled with the responsibility of being fully human in relation to the other. It is not simply that ‘the other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself ’ (Sartre 1975: 13), but that the ‘choice’ for sociality is also an ethical choice to be responsible for the other. To return to Three Burials, it is the responsibility that Norton bears for Melquiades – for his own actions towards the Mexican, for the welfare of Perkins, but also for the wider injustices meted upon the Mexican man – that dawn on him and cause him such distress, but which make him moral, restore his humanity and set him on the path to redemption.

Anthropology and the Moral and Existential Conditions of Being Human In Rapport’s chapter, we are given glimpses into the lives of porters in a Scottish hospital. More specifically, we learn about Oliver, a young man making his way and coming into his own within his workplace and beyond. Oliver is about as far removed from Hannerz’s (1990) influential formulation of the social-type of ‘the cosmopolitan’ as one can imagine. The point is not only that anthropology finds ‘the cosmopolitan’ in ever more diverse and locally grounded contexts – a stance ‘acquired perhaps more or less by any people encountering diversity in their habitat’ (Hannerz 2010: 449; see also Werbner 2008). Rather, Rapport states that he ‘would have Oliver stand for general theoretical propositions when the particularity of individual lives (world-views, sufferings, death) is absolute’. There is, for Rapport, a ‘universal relationship to be drawn out between the microcosmic situations of everyday life (individuals as members of a polis) and the macrocosmic nature of the human condition (individuals as members of a cosmos)’. This is what enables him to find the capacities of Anyone in the young porter. Wardle (2010: 384) notes that ‘cosmopolitan’ currently refers to a universalist anthropology, but also, increasingly, to the ‘ethnography of cosmopolitanism’ found in diverse locales and interactions. In the case of the present volume, this

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would seem to point to an issue at stake in drawing out ‘the universal relationship’ Rapport describes. If, as Josephides (2010) puts it, cosmopolitanism is the existential condition of humanity, what is its relationship to particular political situations? To what extent can the emergence of a cosmopolitan moral responsibility transform intractable political circumstances? Does the existence of empathetic encounters between Africans and missionaries challenge our understanding of colonialism? Does a fragile concern and recognition between officer and detainee improve conditions in a detention centre? To return to Three Burials, is it not the case that the US border and its exclusionary effects remain unchanged by Norton’s encounters? What does acquiring knowledge about emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities and responsibility within everyday social life actually do? A first tentative answer to these questions might invoke what Wardle calls the ‘critical potential of ethnography’ (Wardle 2010: 383). It is through the detailed ethnographic study of individuals in social settings that anthropology (as a reflection on humanness) proceeds. While philosophical accounts of what it is to be human are general and prescriptive, anthropology has to take a less abstract approach, exploring the social characteristics of human life and the actualities of relations of power and ethics (see Humphrey 2004). It is this focus on the particular that gives ethnography its critical potential, but which also allows it to uncover knowledge of the universal. Ethnography, Hart argues, shares with great literature a capacity to achieve ‘universality through going deeply into particular personalities, relations and places’ (Hart 2010: 446). So, an emerging cosmopolitan responsibility or subjectivity manifested in social life and interaction (a prison officer’s concern, a commune member’s experimentation, a missionary’s journey) becomes the chance to reflect on ‘human universality’, not as static or ever known in advance, but as something ‘being perpetually made’ (Sartre 1975: 62). So cosmopolitanism as the existential condition of humanity is a moral quality (Josephides 2010) and suggests a view that seeks out, via ethnography, both the objective conditions which people everywhere encounter and their lived experience and ‘existence in relation to them’. We are, Josephides argues, ‘united by things that are different’. The task is not to posit in advance a common humanity, but to look at the way life as it is lived ‘entertains again and again’ (Sartre 1975: 350) what it means to be human to one another, what it means to be responsible and accountable, how the ‘cosmopolitan’ is manifested in social and political life, institutionalized and exceeded anew. A second answer might point to the way in which the present volume’s chapters have considered afresh the relationship between the freedom and experience of an individual life and the social conditions and forces which ‘determine’ that life (see Wardle 2010: 383). We have collectively argued that a focus on the cosmopolitan individual and his or her existential experience of life in engagement with others might act as a critical counterpoint to the abstracting tendencies of globalization discourse and global governance. The cosmopolitan study of cosmopolitan individuals exposes the gap between political life and moral experience. Political and legal institutions work through abstractions, but the complex, contradictory

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experiences of life exceed abstract legal and political principles (Douzinas 2002; Amoore and Hall 2009). Knowledge of ‘the cosmopolitan’ might address exactly these gaps, showing how people’s understandings of justice, accountability and morality are ‘united in their diversity’ – how they remain the same, and how they alter within existentially lived conditions. It is not new to suggest that anthropology has a distinctive contribution to make to the understanding of what forms and potentials the category of ‘a human life’ embodies. It is also not new to suggest that the ethnographic record provides a critical counterpoint to generalizing and abstracting modes of global governance and many academic disciplines’ accounts of them. According to Hannerz (2010), anthropology could do more to reach beyond disciplinary borders when it comes to understanding cosmopolitanism (beyond classic philosophical accounts and key social and political theorists like Beck). At the same time, debates in other disciplines are increasingly concerned with how apparatuses of governance both recognize, misrecognize and occlude the singular human life from which abstractions are made and the kind of ethical response that this singular life draws forth (see, e.g., Edkins 2011 in the field of politics and international relations). Certainly, as Eriksen argues, anthropological knowledge of cosmopolitanism in its existential and moral sense may be contrasted to those from political and legal studies, for instance, which have focused recently on the failure of cosmopolitan ideals as they are embodied in global rights discourses (Douzinas 2007). Hannerz calls for anthropologists to ‘reach out more toward opportunities for studying the ever-changing conditions of cosmopolitanism in time, as linked to conjunctures and events, openings and closings, in varied contexts’ (Hannerz 2010: 450). Art, for example, has the capacity to transform public space in such a way as to disrupt ‘what we thought we knew about the world’ and leave behind familiar and wellrehearsed judgements about others (Amoore and Hall 2010), producing a civic engagement that is more open, enchanted, curious and cosmopolitan in character. The chapters in this volume point to areas of future research that should be, can only be, post-disciplinary. If cosmopolitanism can be described as the universal existential tendency to reach beyond what is given – our chapters have ethnographically demonstrated this claim – and if cosmopolitanism also describes the kind of social and political arrangements that might best safeguard this optimistic, hopeful capacity, then there has never been a more important time to advance the critical potential of examining the existential and moral conditions of being human. As part of an effort to ‘focus on whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a more equal world fit for everyone’ (Hart 2010: 446), anthropological knowledge in the sense advanced in this volume takes a distinctive place. Grønseth offers a quiet reply to those who might doubt the impact of such a project: exploring the possibility and instantiation of cosmopolitan awareness and togetherness, as the chapters gathered here have done, might teach us about ‘common human needs to resist, tolerate and connect to each other in ways that can inform our policy actions and make it possible to live with the neighbour next door’. Our shared inhabitation of an emergent world society, in Hart’s (ibid.:

Conclusion | 169

446) words, is already being lived. More humane modes of engagement with one another are constantly being brought into existence, not in ways that flatten difference, as the chapters in this volume show, but which achieve some kind of community through them. To return to Three Burials: the film is based on the real-life 1997 shooting of American teenager Esequial Hernandez Jr by US Marines on drug patrol in the Texan borderlands. The Marine who killed the boy escaped charge, and the violence of the drugs wars raged by cartels has killed thousands in the region. The inequality, injustice and brutality of life is undeniable, and the film attests to the human cost of global economic inequality. Yet there are messages conveyed in the film that point to other experiences: friendship and curiosity, the stirring of a moral conscience, redemption and remorse. The film leaves us with no easy answers: its narrative is fragmented, we remain to the last unsure about the connections between the characters, and the mystery around Melquiades’ dream to return to a home and family that does not exist. As Norton watches Perkins riding away, many questions still remain, not least about the patrolman’s future. The film offers a critique in the sense that Foucault outlined: ‘For Foucault, critique is not that which seeks out resolution, reconciliation or the smoothing out of difficulty, but rather that which discomforts and unsettles one’s sense of certainty’ (cited in Amoore and Hall 2010: 301). A firm sense of the region’s border politics is unsettled by the film: the roles of victim and perpetrator shift between the characters, we are required to revisit the notion of a clearly divided region and we are asked, ultimately, to believe in the possibility of Norton’s redemption, to empathize with him. Like Three Burials, the chapters of this volume have advanced a critical pursuit of the value of arguing how things could be otherwise via studies of actual, lived instances of a more equal, just and humane world being brought into being.

References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Amoore, L., and A. Hall. 2009. ‘Taking People Apart: Digitized Dissection and the Body at the Border’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(3): 444–64. ——— 2010. ‘Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and Resistance’, Cultural Geographies 17(3): 299–319. Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, J. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Doty, R. 2007. ‘Crossroads of Death’, in C. Masters and E. Dauphinee (eds), The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 3–24. Douzinas, C. 2002. ‘The End(s) of Human Rights’, Melbourne University Law Review 23: 445–65. ——— 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge Cavendish. Edkins, J. (2011) Missing: Persons and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gay y Blasco, P. 2010. ‘The Fragility of Cosmopolitanism: A Biographical Approach’, Social Anthropology 18(4): 403–9.

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Hannerz, U. 1990. ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 7(2): 237–51. ——— 2010. ‘Afterthoughts: World Watching’, Social Anthropology 18(4): 448–53. Hart, K. 2010. ‘Kant, “Anthropology” and the New Human Universal’, Social Anthropology 18(4): 441–47. Herzfeld, M. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. New York: Berg. Heyman, J.M. 1995. ‘Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy’, Current Anthropology 36(2): 261–87. Humphrey, C. 2004. ‘Sovereignty and Ways of Life: The Marshrut System in the City of Ulan-Ude, Russia’, in D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. New York and London: Blackwell. Jones, T. L. (dir.). 2005. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Sony Pictures. Josephides, L. 2010. ‘Cosmopolitanism as the Existential Condition of Humanity’, Social Anthropology 18(4): 389–95. ——— n.d. ‘Being Held Accountable: Responsibility as an Attribute of Humanity’, Anthropology Today. Kristeva, J. 1993. Strangers to Ourselves. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rapport, N. 2010. ‘Apprehending Anyone: The Non-indexical, Post-cultural and Cosmopolitan Human Actor’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(1): 84–101. Ricoeur, P. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, J.P. 1975. ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in W. Kaufman (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Plume, pp. 345–69. Wardle, H. 2010. ‘A Cosmopolitan Anthropology’, Social Anthropology 18(4): 381–88. Werbner, P. 2008 (ed.) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Wild, J. 1969. ‘Introduction’, in E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, pp. 11–20.

Notes on Contributors

Alexandra Hall is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. Her research interests include the international securitization of mobility and contemporary border politics in the West. She has conducted research into the everyday production and experience of security within immigration detention, and the rise of ‘smart’ e-border targeting systems in the UK and Europe. She is the author of Borderwatch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control (2012). Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project entitled ‘Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalization’. Previously he was Research Director of the project ’Cultural Complexity in the New Norway’. His books in English include Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993), Small Places, Large Issues (1995), Common Denominators (1998), Engaging Anthropology (2006) and Globalization: The Key Concepts (2007). He is currently writing a biography of Fredrik Barth. Lisette Josephides is Professor of Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, having previously taught in Papua New Guinea, and at the London School of Economics and the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the International Advisory Group of the Nordic Network for Philosophical Anthropology and Fellow of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at St Andrews. Two books based on her fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, The Production of Inequality (1985) and Melanesian Odysseys (2008), trace the development of her interests from politics to theories of the self and moral philosophy. She is currently editing two volumes on the ethics of knowledge. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His recent books include Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012) and he has co-authored,

172 | Notes on Contributors

with Vered Amit, Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality (2012). He also recently edited the collection Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification (2010). Marc Schiltz is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast, having previously taught at the University of Papua New Guinea and Gustavus Adolphus College. He has conducted lengthy fieldwork in Nigeria, where he first worked as a missionary. His research interests are in narratives and life stories (including missionary encounters), politics and oral history, current religious practices in West Africa, and cosmopolitanism, ethics, art and music. His work has been published in Anthropos, the Journal of Religion in Africa and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Anne Sigfrid Grønseth is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology in the Faculty of Pedagogy and Social Science at University College Lillehammer, Norway, where she directs the Health, Culture and Identity Research Unit. She is also affiliated to the Research Centre for Child and Youth Competence Development and recently held a position at the Norwegian Centre for Minority Health Research. She is the author of Lost Selves and Lonely Persons: Experiences of Illness and Well-Being among Tamil Refugees in Norway (2010) and has edited the collection Being Human, Being Migrant: Senses of Self and Well-Being (2013). Ronald Stade is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, especially Anthropology, at Malmö University, Sweden. He is also a Research Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, and has been a guest professor at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. His research interests include the future of humanism, wanderlust, research methodology and ethics. His publications include Pacific Passages: World Culture and Local Politics in Guam (1998), and he has published work on cosmopolitanism in Theory, Culture and Society and Social Anthropology.

Index

A

Abeokuta, mission at 122, 124, 125–6, 127, 132n12 abjection, politics of 71–4, 84 Abu Laban, Ahmed 143 Abu-Lughod, Lila 60 actor-focused cosmopolitanism 112 Acts 9: 15 129 Acts 9: 4-6 129–30 Adelman, S. 136, 153 Adorno, Theodor 41–3 affect and being effective, distinction between 121 Agamben, Giorgio 13–14, 69, 71–2, 73–4, 80, 84, 85, 159 Al-Shihan 142 Alaafin Adeyemi I, king of Oyo 126–7, 128 Alhassan, A. 140 alienation estrangement and 161 Hegelian concept of 41 aloneness (or loneliness) 18, 94, 100, 103, 106, 109n13, 159, 160 Alpern, S. 119, 122, 124, 129 Amazon regiments (of women warriors) 119 Amnesty International 71 Amoore, L. 73, 77 Amoore, L. and Hall, A. 168, 169 Anderson, Amanda 4 animism 129 Anthropocene, epoch of 23 anthropology 49, 60, 112, 151, 167, 168 anthropological agnosticism 9 anthropological encounters 23–4 antiphilosophy and 25n6 audit culture 44 cosmopolitan anthropology 136–7, 152 cosmopolitan as stranger in 35 debates about cosmopolitanism in 159–60 and embodiment of ‘human life’ 168–69 Enlightenment-inflected 16

Eriksen’s shared structures of relevance 20–21 existentialism for 5–7 generational conflict 36 individual lives and self-fulfillment, anthropological perspective on 64–5 Kant’s anthropology 3 and moral and existential conditions of being human 166–69 moral discourse and practice, studies of 85 moral ideals and practice, exploration of relationship between 82–5, 85 philosophical anthropology tradition vii post-structuralist tendencies in 48 relevance, shared structures of 152 schismogenesis, concept of 147 self and other, cosmopolitanism as relationship between 43–4 self-world relationships, suggested investigation of 16–17 social anthropology vii social typology 43 transcendence, conundrum of 131 universalist anthropology 166–7 vernacular cosmopolitanism and 4–5, 35 antiphilosophy 25n6 Anyone capacities of 49–52, 59, 60, 64–5, 162 Everyone and 25, 59, 158 Rapport’s notion of 7, 12, 14, 17, 18, 43, 48–9, 158, 162 space of 53–7 universal ego 18 value of 57–60, 63–4 apatheia, Stoic ideal of 42 aporetics of cosmopolitanism 29–44 Appiah, K.A. 4, 136, 151 Arab League 140 Arafat, Yasser 150 Arendt, Hannah 7, 36, 73, 79 Aristotle 13

174 | Index Asad, T. 153n3 assimilation of Tamil refugees in northern Norway 99–100, 106–7 flip-side of 102 Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) 4–5 asylum, mobility and 70 Atanda, J.A. 128 attachments 21, 23–4 audit culture 44 Augustine 131

B

Bachmann, Josef 40, 46n19 Bacon, Christine 86n2 Bacon, Francis 41 Badiou, A. 8 Bangstad, S. 153n3 bare life 4, 13, 14, 15, 17, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 159 Barnabo, Cardinal of Propaganda Fide in Rome 114, 125, 131 Barnett, S.A. 108n7 Bashford, A. and Strange, C. 70 Bateson, Gregory 147 Bauman, Zygmunt 79, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 102, 159, 164 Baumann, G. 151 Bayly, S. 108n7 BBC TV 141 Beck , Ulrich 4, 5, 90, 136, 168 behavioural contracts 65 Benhabib, Seyla 4, 33, 46n21 Berger, John 54, 56 Berlin, Isaiah 139 Bigo, D. 70 Bild 40 biological consciousness 60 biometric identification systems 86n6 biopolitics and human life 72 Birnberg Peirce and Partners 70 Blake, William 48, 58 Bluitgen, Kåre 138 ‘body,’ terminology of 77 Bookhagen, C. et al. 38, 39, 40, 45n16 Border Agency (UKBA) 71 Borghero, Francesco 112, 117–18, 118–22, 124–5, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132n8–9, 132n11, 132–3n13 on tour and welcoming the ‘slave’ 122–4 Bosteels, B. 25–6n8 boundaries, drawing the line on 74–9 Bourdieu, Pierre 95, 109n12 Brandt, Reinhardt 33 Bresillac, Bishop Marion 121, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132n5 anti-colonial and tragic visionary 114–16

Broder, Henryk M. 143 Burton, Sir Richard F. 118, 124 Bush, George W. (and administration of ) 137 Butler, Judith 70, 72–3

C

Calhoun, C. 136, 149, 151 Campbell, D. 81 camps, Agamben’s notion of exceptionalism and 71–4, 85 capacities of humans 48–65 Anyone, capacities of 49–52, 59, 60, 64–5, 162 behavioural contracts 65 biological consciousness 60 creativity 52 cultural compression 54 democratic individuality 58 demographic growth and movement 54 diversity, organization of 55–6, 56–7 duties, rights and 53 existential power 51 goodness and space 53–5 home, location of 54–5 human life, characteristic form of 50 identity, accretion of 51 liberty, Mill’s deliberations on 58–9 life for orderlies in a Scottish hospital 49, 52–3, 60–64 lived experience 49–50 mathematics of value 57–60 metabolism 51 moral space 56, 57 personal preserve, sovereignty of 54 personality, accretion of 51 personalization 50 power and 51–2 rights and duties 53 Sartre’s thinking on 49–50 self-consciousness 50 for self-fulfillment 18, 57, 64–5 self-governance 58 self-world relationships 50–52 sense-making 51–2 social life, space of 52, 55–7 socio-cultural institutions 50 space and 53–5, 55–7 suffering, Wittgenstein on 59–60 symbolic space 54, 58, 61–2, 63, 65 tactical humanism 60 value and 57–60 caricature, historic use of 148 Carter, Governor in Lagos 128 cartoons see Muhammad cartoon affair castration, punishment by 128 categorical alignment of cosmopolitanism 5 censorship and self-censorship 138, 148, 150

Index | 175 Chausse, Father Jean-Baptiste 111, 125, 126–7, 127–8, 131 Cicero 2 civic engagement 168 civilizations clashing 143–4 clemency, hospitality and 123–4 Clinton, Bill 146 collectivity and individuality 57–8, 162–3 Collis, M. 54 Colossians 3: 9-11 129 communication hospitality and 113 relations of 147–8 compassion 83 empathy and, manifestation of 85, 95, 104 Compton-Burnett, I. 56 Connolly, William 73–4 constructivism 23–4 convicted criminals, populations of 77 Coquard, J. 112, 126, 127 Corinthians I, 13: 12 129 Corinthians I, 13: 13 115 cosmology community and 7, 16, 44, 163 moral cosmology 73 cosmopolis 4 cosmopolitan anthropology 136–7, 152 cosmopolitanism actor-focused cosmopolitanism 112 African missions, cosmopolitan ethos in pioneering phase of 112–13 alternative global public sphere and 5 and animal nature, exploration of 31 anthropology and, cosmopolitan as stranger in 35 aporetics of 29–44 approach to 2 categorical alignment of 5 cosmopolis and 4 cosmopolitan morality 79–84, 85 cosmopolitan realism 90–91 cosmopolitan space 18, 65, 161–3 cosmopolitan subjectivity 19, 91, 103, 160, 161, 167 cosmopolitanisms, multitude of 5 cosmopolitics 5, 22, 23 cosmos (kosmos) 9, 16, 17, 22–3, 29, 30 cultural boundaries and 23–4 cynicism and 38, 41–2, 44 debates in anthropology about 159–60 decolonization and 36 definition of, sorts of 16, 22, 24–5, 43, 135–6 democratization and 4–5 Diogenes of Sinope, dog philosophers and the cosmopolitan 30–32 empathy and vii, 104, 111–12

Enlightenment and 3, 16, 33, 41–2, 43 and estrangement, experience of 160–63 ethnography of 166–7 everyday life and 21, 85 existential condition and 18–19, 24, 25, 158, 167 as flexible recognition of common humanity 160 globalization, ethical response to 5 gymnosophists 31–2 as human capacity for empathy and sociality 111–12 humanity, future prospects and 168–9 and imperilment of self 127–8 insiders and outsiders 35–5, 55 international political and social theory 4 Kant’s cosmopolitan order 32–4, 43 kosmopolites 2, 29, 30, 31, 45n2 and moral responsibility, experience of 163–5 multiculturalism and, contrast between 136 multiplex pragmatic experiences and meaning of 159–60 origins 2–3, 29, 43 polites 13, 16, 24, 29, 30 in political philosophy 136 professed cosmopolitanism, effects of 152 property rights and 33 scholarship on, perspectives from 4–5 secularization of 81 self and the cosmopolitan experience 103 self-discovery, cosmopolitanism and welcoming of 19, 111–14, 116, 121, 130, 165 self-liberation, New Left in Germany and 36–40, 42, 43–4 spirit of, Kristeva’s perspective on 3 as ‘strangeness cultivated’ 161 strangers, outsiders as 34–5 translocal political engagement and 4 and understanding of the Other 16–17, 19, 43–4, 100–103, 163 universalizing ethos of 4 vernacular cosmopolitanism 4–5, 35 world citizenship 2–3, 4, 30, 32 Cosmopolitanism (Appiah, K.A.) 151 cosmos (kosmos) 9, 16, 17, 22–3, 29, 30 Crates of Thebes 2, 30 creative capacities of humans 52 Critchley, S. 81 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, I.) 34 Csordas, Thomas J. 95, 101 cultural boundaries 23–4 cultural compression 54

176 | Index cultural intimacy 151 customary practices and values 91 cynical realism 41–2, 44, 46n22 cynicism, cosmopolitanism and 38, 41–2, 44 Cynics 2, 13, 16, 30–32, 43, 45n6, 161

D

Dagbladet 144 Dahl, Gudrun 45n1 Dahomey 111, 114, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132n11 meeting with King of 118–22 Daniel, V. 101, 109n13 Das, V. 104 decolonization 36 Deepa, S.R. 108n7 Deleuze, Gilles 8, 25n4 democratic individuality 58 democratization 4–5 demographic growth 54 Denmark context for Muhammad cartoon affair 137–9 Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) 137, 143 deportability, creation of status of 73 Derrida, Jacques 1, 158, 159, 165 Descartes, René (and Cartesian thought) 95, 112, 132n4 despotism and individuality 59 Devereux, Georges 65n2 dialectic positivity 41 Dialektik der Aufklärung (Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.) 41–2 Diken, B. 69 Diken, B. and Lausten, C. 69, 72 Dillon, M. 73, 84, 86 Diogenes of Sinope 2, 44 dog philosophers and the cosmopolitan 30–32 Diouf, M. 35 dislocatedness 160 displacement, embodied experience of 160–61 diversity, organization of 55–6, 56–7 Doty, R. 157 Douzinas, Costas 4, 79–80, 136, 149, 159, 162, 168 Duchamp, Marcel 25n6 Dumont, L. 108n7 Durkheim, Emile 53, 131 duties, rights and 53 Dutschke, Rudi 36, 37, 40, 46n19 Dwyer, K. 15

E

Eccles, John 48 Ecclesia, Paul’s vision of 20, 128–9, 130, 131 economic inequality, human cost of 169

Edelman, G. 60 Edkins, J. 72, 73, 85, 168 Edkins, J. and Pin-Fat, V. 69, 72 Eide, E., Kunelius, R. and Phillips, A. 152 Eide, Elisabeth 153n1 Ellis, A. 132n11 embodied cosmopolitanism 100–103, 106–7 embodied social experiences 19 embodiment of the Other 18–19, 91, 100–103, 106–7 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 52, 55, 57 emotion, affect and 83 emotional commitment 148–49 empathy 14, 18–19, 91, 105, 107, 114, 115, 122, 165 compassion and, manifestation of 85, 95, 104 cosmopolitanism and vii, 104, 111–12 immigration and asylum system in Britain, cosmopolitan morality in 83–4 intersubjective engagement and 165 mutuality and, experience of 101–2, 106–7 Nussbaum on 83–4 self-understanding and 5 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 91, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 106–7 transformative capacity of 159 Enforcement Instructions and Asylum Process Guidance (UKBA) 71 engagement and dealings with others 85–6 in encounters with others 22, 24–5, 103, 159–60, 164–5 engaged social relations 104 Enlightenment 3, 33, 41–2, 43 Enlightenment-inflected anthropology 16 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus 37 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 7, 11, 12, 14, 17, 22, 135–55, 162, 163–4, 165, 168, 171 shared structures of relevance 20–21 eroticism 10, 11, 39, 40 estrangement, experience of 160–163 ethics ethical universalism 12 hospitality and 20, 130 immigration and asylum system in Britain, cosmopolitan morality in 81–2 and intimations of infinity, cosmopolitanism and 128–31 the Other and 19–20, 90–91, 100, 164 ethnography 3, 5, 13–14, 16, 17, 18, 21–2, 23, 44, 46n22, 69, 159–60, 164 of cosmopolitanism 166–7 critical potential of 167

Index | 177 detention, ethnographic knowledge of 74 ethnographic encounters 113–14 ethnographic method 85 ethnographies of the particular 60 Mauritius, ethnographic research in 153 Rapport’s conundrum 63–4 as ‘sum total of life stories’ 49 everyday life vii, 25n6, 46n22, 103 cosmopolitanism and 21, 85 embodied social experiences in 19 and encounter with the Other 21 mimesis in 113–14 moral grammar of 81–2 opportunities in 20 practicalities of 38 psychologization of 16, 40 securitized domains of 78–9 social practices and relations in 94–5, 107 themes in 96 universal relationship between microcosmic situations 17, 49, 166–7 Everyone Anyone and 25, 59, 158 Rapport’s notion of 14, 18, 163–4 space of 162 exceptionalism Agamben’s notion of camps and 71–4, 85 occluded practices of 74 existential condition 2, 5, 16, 21 anthropology, the moral and the 166–9 cosmopolitanism and 18–19, 24, 25, 158, 167 ‘profound responsibility’ accompanying 163–4, 166 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 93–4 existential power 51 existential uncertainty, doubt and 78–9 existential vulnerability 75–6, 84 existentialism 5–7 externalization of self and Other 5

F

face-to-face encounters 113–14 ‘factish’ 8–9, 10, 23, 24 El Fagr 142 Fanon, Frantz 36 Feldman, A. 76 Fernandez, James 51, 56 fetish (vodun) religion 119, see also factish Fine , R. 4 fishing community life 91–2, 108n3 Flikschuh, Katrin 33 ‘floating’ responsibility 79, 82

Forbes, F. 118 forgiveness 1–2, 128, 157, 158, 159 Forster, E.M. 17, 54, 63–4, 65–6n3, 148–9 Foucault, Michel 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 169 foundationalism 24 France-Soir 141 Frankfurt School 42 free-association 16, 39 freedom of expression 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150 Freetown, Sierra Leone 114–15 Freud, Sigmund 3, 6, 38–9, 42 psychoanalisis of, Sloterdijk’s critique of 10 Friedman, J. 136 Frøystad, Kathinka 150 Fuller, C.J. 108n7 Fundamental Articles of Lyons Mission, Constitution and 115, 121

G

Galtung, Johan 144 Gantly, Father Patrick 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119–20, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 130, 132n9, 132n10 Gay y Blasco, P. 160 Geertz, Clifford 24, 69 Gellner, Ernest 49 generational conflict 36 Genesis 9: 25 133n14 Germany Easter riots in 40 Nazi regime in 25, 36, 42, 54, 60, 72 Neue Linke (New Left ) in 16, 36–7, 40, 42, 44, 45n17, 158, 161 see also Socialist Student Association of Germany (SDS) Ghezo, King of Dahomey 122, 132n12 Gibney, M. 70, 71 Gifford, P., Archard, D., Hart, T. and Rapport , N. 65n1 Glele, King of Dahomey 19–20, 118–19, 120– 21, 122, 123–4, 126, 130, 131, 132n11 Global Issues, Institute for the Study of 45n1 globalization vii, 11, 21, 90–91, 167 ethical response to 5 Goffman, Erving 75 goodness 48–9, 60, 158, 164 space and 53–5 Gottlieb, S. 26n13 Gouldner, Alvin 29, 35, 43 Gray, John 139, 151 Greene, Graham 66n5 Grønseth, Anne Sigfrid 3, 4, 14, 17, 18–19, 21, 22, 90–110, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 172 Grossman, Vasily 1 Groys, Boris 25n6 Guardian 140, 141

178 | Index Guevara, Ernesto (‘Che’) 36 gymnosophists 31–2

H

Habermas, Jürgen 5, 46n20, 136 Hales, Bob 112, 126, 132n11 Hall, Alexandra vii–viii, 3, 4, 13, 14–15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 68–89, 136–7, 156–70, 171 Hall, Stuart 4 Hannerz, Ulf 35, 43, 45n1, 80, 136, 166, 168 Hart, K. 136, 162–3, 167, 168–69 Harvey, C. 71 Hegel, Georg W.F. (and Hegelian ideas) 41, 45n7, 113 Heidegger, Martin 10, 113 Hemmer, Gertrud (‘Agathe’) and Eike 38 Hernandez Jr, Esequial 169 Hervik, P. 143 Hervik, P., Eide, E. and Kunelius, R. 139, 141 Herzfeld, M. 157, 159 Heyman, J.M. 157 Hiebert, D. 136 Hipparchia 30 Hitchcock, Alfred 23, 26n13 Hitchens, Christopher 138, 145, 148, 152 Hobbes, Thomas 15, 26n9 Holley, Father Theodore 112, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132n11 home, location of 54–5 Home Office, UK 70–71, 80, 86n2 Homeric heroism 10 The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (Maleuvre, D.) 8 Horkheimer, Max 41–2 hospitality vii, 3, 14, 17, 19, 25, 122, 123–4, 126, 165 acceptance of 151 emotional commitment and 148–9 ethics and 20, 130 mutual trust and 116 peace and understanding, key to 149 right to 32, 33, 43 self-imperilment and 113 Howards End (Forster, E.M.) 63–4 Howell, S. 85 Howells, C. 112 human commonality 91 human condition, humanity and 158 human life biopolitics and 72 characteristic form of 50 forms and potentials of 168 individuality of 53, 168 social characteristics of 167–8 suffering and 103–4 truth in, ‘native ground’ of 55 worthiness in 159 human sacrifice 20, 114, 119, 121, 122, 123

humanity anthropology and embodiment of ‘human life’ 168–9 cosmopolitanism and, future prospects 168–9 cosmopolitanism as flexible recognition of common humanity 160 human condition and 158 human universality of condition 161–2 of the Other 14–15, 83 politics and the realm of the human 11–15, 22–3 transcendent beings, humans as 8–11 humiliation, feelings of 97 Humphrey, C. 167 Husserl, Edmund 25n6

I

identity social life and, anxieties about 93–4 identity, accretion of 51 immanence 6, 8, 9, 17 Immigration Act (UK, 1971) 70, 71 immigration and asylum system in Britain, cosmopolitan morality in 68–86 abjection, politics of 71–4, 84 asylum, mobility and 70 bare life 4, 13, 14, 15, 17, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 159 ‘body,’ terminology of 77 Border Agency (UKBA) 71 boundaries, drawing the line on 74–9 camps, Agamben’s notion of exceptionalism and 71–4, 85 compassion 83 convicted criminals, populations of 77 cosmopolitan morality, possibility for 79–84, 85 deportability, creation of status of 73 detention, expansion of 70–71 emotion, affect and 83 empathy 83–4 Enforcement Instructions and Asylum Process Guidance (UKBA) 71 ethics 81–2 exceptionalism, occluded practices of 74 existential uncertainty, doubt and 78–9 existential vulnerability 75–6, 84 ‘floating’ responsibility 79, 82 Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) 14–15, 18, 68–70, 71, 74–9, 79– 84, 84–6, 86n1, 86n2, 86n5 incarceration, power and 76 indistinction, zone of 72, 77, 82, 84–5 inexistence, spaces of 74 invisibility and inaudibility, production of manageable state of 79–80 knowledge, visual extraction of 76

Index | 179 mobility and national security, government of 69 modernity and cosmopolitanism 81–2 moral possibility 69–70 moral stance, cosmopolitanism as 80–81 national sovereignty 69 the Other, engagement and dealings with 85–6 outsiders, detainability of 73 physiological abstractions 78 politics of immigration, citizenship and national belonging, contestation of 69, 84–5 practices of detention 70–71 pre-emptive vision 77 procedural choreography 76–7 reception procedures 75–6 secularization of cosmopolitanism 81 security, politics of 70 sovereign power 69, 71–3, 74, 82, 84, 85, 165 spatio-temporal placement of bodyobjects 77 subjection 76 subjugation, power and 79–80 suicide and aftermath 68–9, 80, 82 surveillance 79 transient permanence 74 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 71 unknown-ness, management of 75–6 values, derivation of 82–3 visual habits of detention 77–8 vulnerability 71, 75–6, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85 incarceration, power and 76 Independent 140 indistinction, zone of 72, 77, 82, 84–5 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 102–3 individuality vii, 17, 45n7, 53 collectivity and 57–8, 162–3 democratic individuality 58 despotism and 59 of human life 53, 168 individual, instantiation of human in 162 individual lives and self-fulfillment, anthropological perspective on 64–5 oneness of 58–9 inexistence, spaces of 74 infinity 9, 12, 20 ethics and intimations of, cosmopolitanism and 128–31 monotheism and theologization of 130 of the Other 131 information era 135

inhibitions 39–40, 44, 57–8, 161 insiders and outsiders 34–5, 55 instrumentality 42 inter-ethnic conflict, complexities of 107–8n2 International Herald Tribune 145 intersubjectivity 7, 10, 15, 25n3, 90–91, 106–7, 129, 160–61 cosmopolitanism as, possibility of 18–19 intersubjective engagement 102, 104–6, 165 and the Other 115–16 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 100–101 intolerance, toleration of 151 invisibility and inaudibility, production of 79–80 Ishaga near Abeokuta, sacking of 122–3 Isin, E. and Rygiel, K. 69, 74

J

Jackson, Michael 6–7, 15, 25n6, 50–51, 91, 95, 100, 101, 104 Jacques, F. 105 Jesus Christ 45n6, 129, 130, 142, 143–4 Jevogan (viceroy) 117–18, 123, 132n10 John 14: 6 132n5 John Bull’s other Island (Shaw, G.B.) 34 Johnson, Uwe 37 Jones, Tommy Lee 156 Josephides, Lisette vii–viii, 1–28, 49, 83, 85, 113, 158, 164–5, 166, 167, 171 Juliette (de Sade, A.F.) 41–2 Jyllands-Posten 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143

K

Kant, Immanuel (and Kantian philosophy) 7, 16, 20, 25n4, 135–6, 149, 151, 165, 166 anthropology of 3 aporetics of cosmopolitanism 36, 41–2, 45n10–12, 46n26, 50 cosmopolitan morality 81–2, 83 cosmopolitan order 32–4, 43 Kateb, George 57–8 Kewa of Papua New Guinea 10, 23–4, 113 Khader MP, Naser 146 Kierkegaard, Søren 8, 26n11 kindness vii, 1–2, 11–12 Kindstrand, J.F. 45n5 Klassekampen 144 Kleinman, A., Das, V. and Lock, M. 95 knowledge power and 41 visual extraction of 76 kosmopolites 2, 29, 30, 31, 45n2 Kristeva, Julia 3, 9, 16, 20, 24, 128–30, 164 Kuczynski, R. 132n7 Kunzelmann, Dieter 36, 37

180 | Index

L

Lacan, Jacques 46n26, 102, 105 Langhans, Rainer 37–8 Larsen, R.E. and Seidenfaden, T. 140, 142, 143, 146, 152 Latour, Bruno 8–9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 21, 22–3, 24, 25n7 Lau, J. 143 law, bureaucratic administration of 159 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 23 Leavis, F.R. 65–6n3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 5–6, 21 Levinas, Emmanuel 15, 17, 19, 20, 81–2, 83, 84, 91, 100, 111, 112–13, 116, 121, 130–31, 132n4, 159, 164, 166 liberalism 12, 15, 58, 60, 139, 150 missionary liberalism 152 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 95, 107–8n2 liberty, Mill’s deliberations on 58–9 Liebling, A. and Price, D. 75 Life and Fate (Grossman, V.) 1 life-world capacities of humans, lived experience and 49–50 for orderlies in a Scottish hospital 49, 52–3, 60–64 Tamil engagement in new kind of 105 Llewelyn, J. 121 Locke, John 11, 33 Lombard, J. 132n11 London Detainee Support Group 86n2 loneliness (or aloneness) 18, 94, 100, 103, 106, 109n13, 159, 160 Luke, narrative of Paul’s conversion 130 Luke 12: 24-7 45n6 Lykkeberg, R. 137 Lyons Missionaries in West Africa 19, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124–5, 126, 127–8, 131, 132n1 Abeokuta, mission at 122, 124, 125–6, 127, 132n12 affect and being effective, distinction between 121 Amazon regiments (of women warriors) 119 Barnabo, Cardinal of Propaganda Fide in Rome 114, 125, 131 Borghero on tour and welcoming the ‘slave’ 122–4 Bresillac, anti-colonial and tragic visionary 114–16 castration, punishment by 128 clemency and hospitality 123–4 communication, hospitality and 113 cosmopolitan ethos in pioneering phase of mission 112–13

cosmopolitanism and imperiling the self 127–8 Dahomey 111, 114, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132n11 King of, missionaries meeting with 118–22 Dahomey, meeting with King of 118–22 ethics and intimations of infinity, cosmopolitanism and 128–31 ethnographic encounters 113–14 face-to-face encounters 113–14 fetish (vodun) religion 119 Freetown, Sierra Leone 114–15 Fundamental Articles, Constitution and 115, 121 human sacrifice 20, 114, 119, 121, 122, 123 Ishaga near Abeokuta, sacking of 122–3 Jevogan (viceroy) 117–18, 123, 132n10 mission to Africa, relaunch of 114–15, 117–18 priest and missionary, vocational distinction between 115–16 prisoners of war (slaves) 122, 123, 124 Propaganda Fide (Vatican) 112, 114, 124, 125, 131, 132n2 self-imperilment 113–14, 124–5, 127–8 slavery, European perspective on 119 Society of African Missions (SMA) 111–12, 114–16, 125, 127–8, 132n1 thematization 112–13 transcendence, conundrum of 130–31 universalizing versus welcoming the Other, self-imperilment and 124–5 welcoming of the Other 116, 130 Whydah, Portuguese fort at 117, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 132n9 Yoruba rulers during colonial scramble, encounters with 125–7 Yorubaland 111, 112, 122, 125–6, 127, 128, 132n3

M

McLaughlin, Father P. 132n6 Magazinet 140–41, 144 Maleuvre, Didier 8 Malkki, L. 73 Mandirola, R. 112 Mandirola, R. and Morel, Y. 112, 132–3n13 Marcus Aurelius 2, 3 Mark 12: 30-31 116 Marx, Karl 38, 42, 49, 57 Massumi, B. 78 Matthew 6:25-34 45n6

Index | 181 ‘From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (MerleauPonty, M.) 5–6 May, Rollo 50 Mazzini, Joseph 4 menis 10 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5–6, 8, 14, 25n3, 91, 95, 101, 102 Merton, Robert 29, 35, 43 metabolism 51 metaphysics 6, 11, 13, 14, 23, 25–6n8 of sociality 4, 16, 17, 22 Mexico-United States border 156–8 middle grounds 144, 145–8 migration 33, 34, 157 economic migration 70 see also immigration and asylum system in Britain, cosmopolitan morality in; Tamil refugees in northern Norway Mill, John Stuart 18, 57, 58–9, 60 mimesis in everyday life 113–14 minority issues, Danish policies on 142–3 mission to Africa see Lyons Missionaries in West Africa Miyaji, Naoko 45n1 modernity, cosmopolitanism and 81–2 Le Monde 141 Montaigne, Michel de 149 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, Baron de 3 moral and existential conditions of being human 166–9 moral conscience 169 moral discourse and practice, studies of 85 moral experience, political life and 167–8 moral grammar of everyday life 81–2 moral ideals and practice, exploration of relationship between 82–3, 85 moral possibility 69–70 moral responsibility 85, 159, 167 experience of 163–5 moral space 56, 57 moral stance, cosmopolitanism as 80–81 moral transformation 158–9 loneliness of the moral person 159 Muhammad cartoon affair 20, 135–6, 137, 142, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153n2 Arab League 140 caricature, historic use of 148 cartoons, diverse in intentions and capability to enrage 139–40 censorship and self-censorship 138, 148, 150 civilizations clashing 143–4 classic system theory, limitations of 147 communication, relations of 147–8 conflict, escalation of 147 cosmopolitanism, missionary activated and 151 cultural intimacy 151

Danish context 137–9 everyday cosmopolitanism of shared practices 152 freedom of expression 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150 information era 135 intolerance, toleration of 151 making of an ‘affair’ 140–41 middle grounds 144, 145–8 minority issues, Danish policies on 142–3 mutual hostilities 152 Norway, complicity with Denmark in 140–41 Norwegian Progress Party 144 Organization of the Islamic Conference 140 peace and understanding, Kant’s view of hospitality as key to 149 polarization 142–3 practice and discourse 148–50 rights and responsibilities, cosmopolitanism and 150 self and other, creation of ‘coldness’ between 151 self-contradictory situations 153 semantic slippage 139 social cohesion, professed cosmopolitanism and problems for 152 solidarity, cartoons as act of 141 transnational turmoil 153 Mulders, A. 132n2 Mullah Krekar (Kurdish religious leader) 144 multiculturalism 24, 153 cosmopolitanism and, contrast between 136 El Mundo 141 Murdoch, Iris 53, 56, 58 Murdoch, Rupert 46n20 mutual compassion 98–9 mutual hostility 152 mutual trust, hospitality and 116 mutuality 91, 95 empathy and, experience of 101–2, 106–7

N

Napoleon III, Emperor of France 118–19 national sovereignty 69 natural artificiality 44 Nava, Mica 4 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 46n22 Neue Linke (New Left ) in Germany 16, 36–7, 40, 42, 44, 45n17, 158, 161 New York Times 141, 146 Newbury, C. 126 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 13

182 | Index Nietzsche, Friedrich 48, 57 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 141 Norway complicity with Denmark in Muhammad cartoon affair 140–41 Governmental Refugee Secretary (GRS) 92, 108n5 Progress Party in 144 Nowicka, M. and Rovisco, M. 4 nuclear families 39, 96 Nussbaum, Martha 2–3, 18, 81, 103, 105, 164, 165 on empathy 83–4 Nyers, P. 69, 73

O

Obermaier, Uschi 37–8 obligation to (and responsibility for) others 81–2, 83, 166 Oedipus 6 Ogundipe (Abeokuta warlord) 125–6, 127 Olso peace talks (1993) 150 oneness of individuality 58–9 Onesicritus of Astypalaia 31–2, 45n8 openness to others 105–6 opportunities in everyday life 20 Organization of the Islamic Conference 140 organizational theory 29 origins of cosmopolitanism 2–3, 29, 43 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, H.) 36 the Other 20, 111, 129 cosmopolis and 4 cosmopolitanism and understanding of 16–17, 19, 43–4, 100–103, 163 embodiment of 18–19, 91, 100–103, 106–7 engagement and dealings with 85–6 engagement in encounters with 22, 24–5, 103, 159–60, 164–5 enigma of 4 ethics and 19–20, 90–91, 100, 164 everyday living and encounter with 21 externalization of self and 5 generosity and sociality towards 165 humanity of 14–15, 83 inaccessibility of 9 infinity of 131 interpretation with understanding of 3 intersubjectivity and 115–16 objectification of 116 obligation to (and responsibility for) 81–2, 83, 166 otherness as ‘projective apparition’ of 3 reaching out to 85–6 self and, relationship between 15–16, 91, 100–103, 105, 160–61, 162

self-discovery, cosmopolitanism and welcoming of 19, 111–14, 116, 121, 130, 165 universalization as opposed to welcoming of 124–5 unknown in, repugnance for 81 outsiders deniability of 73 or ‘out of place,’ experiences of 102–3

P

pain, suffering and creation of complex agency 103–6 Paine, R. 54 El Pais 141 parental fixation 39–40 A Passage to India (Forster, E.M.) 148–9 Paul the Apostle 20, 115, 128–30 peace and peace settlements 23 hospitality and 20, 149 negotiation and 24 Oslo Accords 150 peaceful exchange relationships 33, 163 perpetual peace, Kant’s perspective on 32, 149 in Yorubaland 128 peace and understanding, Kant’s view of hospitality as key to 149 Peel, J. 125, 126 Peirce, C.S. 101 El Periodico 141 Perpetual Peace (Kant, I.) 32–3 personal preserve, sovereignty of 54 personality, accretion of 51 personalization 50 Pfaffenberger, B. 108n7 phenomenology 8, 25n6, 90–91, 95, 112, 116 phenomenological subjectivity 51 Phillips, A. 147 philosophical anthropology tradition vii physiological abstractions 78 Planque, Father Augustin 117–18, 122, 123, 124–5, 126, 127–8, 131, 132n10 Plato 10, 30, 31, 112, 131 Plessner, Helmuth 44 Pogge, Thomas 33 polarization in Muhammad cartoon affair 142–3 polites 13, 16, 24, 29, 30 political philosophy, cosmopolitanism in 136 politics humanity and 11–15, 22–3 of immigration, citizenship and national belonging, contestation of 69, 84–5 Politiken 144 Pope Gregory XV 132n2 Pope Leo XIII 128 Pope Pius IX 114

Index | 183 Popper, Karl 48 post-structuralism 48 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 94, 108n8 power capacities of humans and 51–2 cynicism and will to 42 existential power 51 incarceration, power and 76 knowledge and 41 power relations 44, 165 sovereign power 69, 71–3, 74, 82, 84, 85, 165 subjugation, power and 79–80 Pratt, A. 70 pre-emptive vision 77 priest and missionary, vocational distinction between 115–16 prisoners of war (slaves) in West Africa 122, 123, 124 procedural choreography in detention 76–7 procedural justice 159 professed cosmopolitanism, effects of 152 ‘profound responsibility’ accompanying existential condition 163–4, 166 Propaganda Fide (Vatican) 112, 114, 124, 125, 131, 132n2 property rights and cosmopolitanism 33 Prophet Muhammad 20, 138, 139–40, 142–3, 146, 149, 150, 151 see also Muhammad cartoon affair protective prayer 96–7 psychic unity 104 psychoanalysis 3, 6, 10, 39–40 psychologization of everyday life 16, 40 Pythagoras 32–2

R

Rabehl, Bernd 36, 37 Rabin, Yitzhak 150 Ramadan, Tariq 145, 152 Rapport, N. and Dawson, A. 54 Rapport, Nigel 6, 17–18, 21, 22, 45n1, 46n25, 48–67, 101, 136, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166–7, 171–2 Anyone, Rapport’s notion of 7, 12, 14, 17, 18, 43, 48–9, 158, 162 Rasmussen, Prime Minister Anders F. 140 reality of detention 18 ethnographic encounter and power to change 113 external reality 41 group reality 58 intercorporeality 102 kosmos and 29, 30–31 political reality 2 ‘reality’ television 38 transcendence and 8–10

Reich, Wilhelm 35, 38–40, 45n15 Ricoeur, Paul 1–2, 5, 15, 24, 158 rights and duties 53 to hospitality 32, 33, 43 and responsibilities, cosmopolitanism and 150 Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 45n1 Robbins, B. 4 Rorty, Richard 7, 15, 60, 66n4, 91, 101 Rose, Flemming 138–9 Rushdie, Salman 135, 137, 150

S

de Sade, Alphonse François, comte 41–2, 44, 46n26 Saniora, Prime Minister Fouad 146–7 Sapir, Edward 57 Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 53, 94, 101, 160, 161–2, 163, 166, 167 capacities of humans, Sartre’s thinking on 49–50 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie, S.) 20–21, 150 Scheper-Hughes, N. and Lock, M. 95 Schiltz, Marc 3, 4, 14, 17, 19–20, 21, 22, 24, 26n10, 111–34, 164, 165, 172 schismogenesis, concept of 147 Schlotterer, Lisbeth and Jörg 38 Schmitt, Carl 11–13, 14, 15, 23, 25n5, 26n9 Schultz, Eberhard 38 Searle-Chatterjee, M. and Sharma, U. 108n7 secularization of cosmopolitanism 81 secular rationality 41 security politics of 70 securitized domains of everyday life 78–9 self-alienation 41 self and other cosmopolitanism as relationship between 43–4 creation of ‘coldness’ between 151 experience between 100–103, 106–7 relationship between 15–16, 91, 100– 103, 105, 160–61, 162 self-consciousness 41, 50, 161 self-contradiction 153 self-discovery, cosmopolitanism and welcoming of 19, 111–14, 116, 121, 130, 165 self-fulfillment, human capacities for 18, 57, 64–5 self-governance 58 self-imperilment 113–14, 124–5, 127–8 self-liberation New Left in Germany and 36–40, 42, 43–4 transformative practices of 161 self-understanding, empathy and 5

184 | Index self-world relationships 44 anthropological investigation of, suggestion for 16–17 capacities of humans 50–52 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 95, 105–6 semantic slippage 139 sensation, body as subject of 95, 102 sense-making 52–2 sexual repression 38–9 Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (Reich, W.) 38–9 Shapiro, M. 73 shared experience 16, 101–2, 106 Shaw, George Bernard 34 Shklar, Judith 60 Simmel, Georg 34–5, 43 Singh, Khushwant 150 Sisyphus 25 Situationist International (SI) 37 Skrbis, Z., Kendall, G. and Woodward, I. 85 slavery, European perspective on 119 Sloterdijk, Peter 9–11, 41 social anthropology vii, 132n3 social characteristics of human life 167–8 social cohesion, professed cosmopolitanism and problems for 152 social conditions, individuals and 160 social exclusion 93, 104–5 social experience 93–4, 102–3 social life bodily expressions of 94–5 identity and, anxieties about 93–4 space of 52, 55–7 social metaphysics 44, 163 social practices and relations in everyday life 94–5, 107 social typology in anthropology 43 Socialist Student Association of Germany (SDS) 36–39, 45n14 Kommunes K1 and K2 37, 38, 45n17, 45n18 Society of African Missions (SMA) 111–12, 114–16, 125, 127–8, 132n1 socio-cultural institutions 50 socio-political context 10, 11, 159 Socrates 30, 31, 32 solidarity Muhammad cartoons as act of 141 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 90, 95, 101, 105, 106 sovereign power 69, 71–3, 74, 82, 84, 85, 165 Soviet Union, Jewish ‘cosmopolitans’ in 34 space capacities of humans and 53–5, 55–7 spatio-temporal placement of bodyobjects 77 symbolic space 54, 58, 61–2, 63, 65 Spencer, Stanley 53–4

Der Spiegel 37–8, 143 Springer, Axel 37–8, 46n20 Sri Lankan Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) 107–8n2 Stade, Ronald 2, 3, 4, 12, 14, 16–17, 20, 21, 26n12, 29–47, 136, 161, 163, 172 La Stampa 141 Steiner, George 55, 56 Steinfels, P. 112 Stengers, Isabelle 22, 23 Stern 37–8 stigmatization 93, 98, 99–100, 104–5 Stoics 2, 17, 23, 42, 80–81 strangers, outsiders as 34–5 Strathern, Marilyn 44 Strauss, Leo 12, 26n9, 46n22 Strong, T.B. 12, 15 subjection 7, 17, 48, 53, 76 subjugation, power and 79–80 suffering as embedded in social relations 95 embodiment of knowledge and meaning 104 human life and 103–4 pain and, experiences of 91 Wittgenstein on 59–60 suicide and aftermath in immigration and asylum system 68–9, 80, 82 suicidal thoughts 97 surveillance 79 symbolic space 54, 58, 61–2, 63, 65 system theory, limitations of classic theory 147

T

tactical humanism 60 Tambiah, S.J. 107–8n2 Tamil refugees in northern Norway 90–107 aches and pains, reports of 94–5, 97, 98, 106 aloneness (or loneliness) 18, 94, 100, 103, 106, 109n13, 159, 160 assimilation 99–100, 106–7 flip-side of 102 bodily expressions of social life 94–5 case studies rebuilding lives, experiences of 95–7 social status and dealing with misfortune 97–100 community re-establishment 93 cosmopolitan realism 90–91 cosmopolitan subjectivity, possibility for 91 customary practices and values 91 embodied cosmopolitanism 100–103, 106–7 empathy 91, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 106–7 engaged social relations 104

Index | 185 existential experiences 93–4 fieldwork context 91–3, 107n1 fishing community life 91–2, 108n3 health professionals, experiences with 98 human commonality 91 humiliation, feelings of 97 indistinction, zone of 102–3 inter-ethnic conflict, complexities of 107–8n2 intersubjectivity 100–101 landscape, anxieties about 96 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 95, 107–8n2 life-world, engagement in new kind of 105 meaning, interactive process of 106 mutual compassion 98–9 mutuality 91, 95, 101, 106 openness to others 105–6 outsiders or ‘out of place,’ experiences of 102–3 pain, suffering and creation of complex agency 103–6 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 94 protective prayer 96–7 psychic unity 104 self and other, experience between 100–103, 106–7 self and the cosmopolitan experience 103 self-world relationships 95, 105–6 sensation, body as subject of 95, 102 shared experience 101–2 social exclusion 93, 104–5 social experiences 93–4, 102–3 social life and identity, anxieties about 93–4 solidarity 90, 95, 101, 105, 106 stigmatization 93, 98, 99–100, 104–5 suffering as embedded in social relations 95 embodiment of knowledge and meaning 104 pain and, experiences of 91 suicidal thoughts 97 Taussig, Michael 113 Taylor, C. 137, 148, 153n3 Teufel, Fritz 37–8 thematisation 112–13 Thomas, H. 132n7, 133n14 Thomas Aquinas 131 Thompson, Father Patrick 132n1 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones film) 156–9, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169 thymos 10 Times of India 140, 141

tolerance vii, 20, 25, 76, 104, 137, 139, 147, 151 totality 20, 30, 101, 130–31 Toulmin, Stephen E. 4 transcendence conundrum of 130–31 transcendent beings, humans as 8–11 transient permanence 74 translocal political engagement 4 transnational turmoil 153 truth in, ‘native ground’ of human life 55 Tylor, E. 129

U

Unconscious, Freud’s concept 3 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 71 United States border protection programs 157 exploitative economy of 157 universal ego 18 universal relationships 17, 49, 166–7 universalist anthropology 166–7 universalization 4, 124–5 unknown-ness 75–6, 81

V

value of Anyone 57–60, 63–4 derivation of 82–3 mathematics of 57–60 van der Kolk, B.A. et al. 108n8 van Gogh, Theo 138 Vassenden, Anders 151 Vermorel, Father (Lyons missionary) 128 vernacular cosmopolitanism 4–5, 35 Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. 4 Vinx, Lars 12 visual habits of detention 77–8 vulnerability in detention 70, 75–6, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85

W

Waldrop, A. 150 Wallace, Anthony 55–7 Walters, W. 69, 73 Wardle, H. 35, 159, 166, 167 Weber, L. and Gelsthorpe, L. 71 Weber, Max 79 Welch, M. 70 Welch, M. and Schuster, L. 70 Werbner, Pnina 4–5, 35, 166 Werbner, Richard 26n10 Whydah, Portuguese fort at 117, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 132n9 Wild, J. 112, 113, 164, 165 Wilmot, A.P.E. 123–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 59–60

186 | Index Woolf, Virginia 53–4 world citizenship 2–3, 4, 30, 32 worthiness in human life 159

Y

Yorubaland 111, 112, 122, 128, 132n3 rulers during colonial scramble, encounters with 125–7

Z

Die Zeit 141, 143 Žižek, Slavoj 46n26 Zieler, Christoffer 142