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- Convenors:
-
Huon Wardle
(St. Andrews University)
Nigel Rapport (St. Andrews University)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
If, to paraphrase Bentham, 'each one shall count for one, no-one for more than one' in our ethnography, what are the consequences of honest attention to each individual and their world for our analysis, when we might hope to make universal, cosmopolitan claims? How to cross the methodological gap?
Long Abstract:
If, to paraphrase Bentham, 'each one shall count for one, no-one for more than one' in our ethnography, what are the consequences of honest attention to each individual and their world for our analysis, when we might hope to make universal, cosmopolitan claims? How to cross the methodological gap? This panel offers a debate on the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its ethnographic exploration of human difference and commonality. It asks how anthropology can enrich the idea that we all live in the same world amidst our differences, recognising the responsibilities we hold in common. We will discuss ideas of human citizenship, imagination, aesthetics and moral sentiment, difference and commonness, the weight they may be given and their refiguration in a cosmopolitan anthropology. In particular, the panel takes stock of the cosmopolitanizing of contemporary human experience, and of the radical Kantianism and other cosmopolitan ideas emerging from these changes. It considers the interiority of the ethnographer and of their interlocutors as cosmopolitan actors who together try to give form to each other's worlds and in the process create something new.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I consider that encounters with Guyanese East Indians and related experiences demonstrate problems and challenges of ‘being cosmopolitan’ vis-à-vis overt forms of othering. In disentangling these forms, I also reflect on my positioned presences and certain knowledge debates.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on case studies from the field and other lived encounters, I consider how understandings of ‘cosmopolitan persons’ materialise or shift vis-à-vis specific voicing for and of others. These understandings occurring in tandem with the anthropological privileging of research participants’ voices are implicated in forms demarcating identities and othering. Such forms also relate to a symbolic violence suggestive in ‘our’ study of other humans and certain publicness of anthropology as exotic or less contemporary. That the ideas of voicing and violence are in tension – of empathy while traversing a boundary as one to be retained - upsets an embedded notion of anthropological ‘sameness’ with others to suggest that the messiness of field relations from joined vantage positions includes interlocutors’ dialoguing against particular located primary identities. This relates to how a notion of co-presence retains boundaries between anthropologist and participant as problems of othering. While various anthropological self-critiques and revisionist approaches mark the discipline – from interrogating the historical gendered ‘Western anthropologist’ in the remote single field location to examining the ‘entry’ and certain problematic defining of native anthropologists – the other remains invoked in and out of field-sites. The paper considers that certain exchanges, starting with some interlocutors questioning my project and linking anthropology with the colonial past, allowed for an overt focus on their cosmopolitan identities. This also related to positioned presences of anthropologist and interlocutors and provided for spaces to overturn implied views of cosmopolitanism as new or contrary to ‘being human’.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss the grammar of conducting research on Esperanto as an ethnographer and Esperanto speaker. Putting Esperanto into context as a historical movement and as a contemporary community enables understanding how striving for universality has mingled with expressions of individuality.
Paper long abstract:
Created in 1887 by the Jewish doctor Zamenhof as a way to overcome linguistic barriers and to counter nationalisms, Esperanto broke the utopian genre of universal languages into becoming the most widely spoken of them all. The idea of world citizenship through Esperanto has been developed along with Zamenhof’s philosophy ‘homaranismo’ (‘humanitism’), initially conceived as a solution to the Jewish question but soon extending its reach to humankind. Defending humanistic principles, the ‘homarano’ as ideal-type is a world citizen, who transcends borders, be they religious, ethnic, or political (Fians 2012; 2019). ‘Samideano’ (‘fellow-thinker’) emerged as a form of address to emphasize this commonality among Esperanto speakers – although it is more popular with the elderly than with Millennials. Is the focus shifting from community to individual actors? Gazing into Esperantujo (‘Esperanto-land’), we find it often referred to as a ‘virtual homeland’, ‘located wherever people are speaking Esperanto’ (Okrent 2005). Embraced by some anthropologists, ‘At home in the world’ may readily be as well the lemma of the Esperanto project. Writing from the perspective of an esperantologist at home – at home in the language –, I take a critical-reflexive approach to the tension between the temptation of a holistic endeavour to map a global Esperanto movement, and the acknowledgment of individualities and local particularities. Will Esperanto still be a subject of universal appeal if practices move from finding common ground to engaging diversity? What anthropology may take from the Esperanto case can help expand understandings of citizenship, belonging, and imagining.
Paper short abstract:
The frontier of irregular migration appears ethnographically as a transitional space where the borderline between self and other must be constantly negotiated. This entails the acknowledgment of ethical judgment, doubt, and self-doubt as endemic to the human condition and the ethnographic project
Paper long abstract:
This article is a provocation for academics, intellectuals, and lay people, whose interests lie in the quest for knowledge, and specifically, in the quest for some understanding of what it means to discuss the question – and the limits – of being human, which is to say, of being ethical (Lambek 2015). In conversation with recent debates on doubt (1992, Toren 2007; 2017, Pelkmans 2013), ordinary ethics (Das 2007; 2015, Motta 2019), and existentialism (Jackson 2005; Rapport 2010), all concerned with the question of humanness, I consider some moments of discomfort, uncanniness, and doubt that emerged during my fieldwork in Lampedusa, the southernmost frontier of irregular migration to Europe, in order to ask what does the anthropologists’ responsibility as witnesses of forced migration at the frontier entails, and to what extent such responsibility is importantly linked to an exercise of doubting – about the world, about oneself (Cabot 2019). This will sketch a picture of what anthropological knowledge looks like if we consider it from the lenses of a new poetics of Dasein (being-in-the-world), as an ‘alteration of focus’ and a ‘state of stepping back outside one’s own ordinary mode of seeing’ (Gosetti-Ferencei 2014: 7). A serious engagement and acknowledgment of doubt as intrinsic to knowing is necessary in such a quest (Pelkmans 2013). How does doubt emerge, or hide, or otherwise disguise itself, as we learn about others, and what does that entail in terms of our quest for knowledge?