cosmopolitan – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Cosmopolitan Imperialism: Obama Does Anthropology in Laos?

“Obama, the cerebral son of an anthropologist”—this is how the Associated Press touted soon to be ex-president Barack Obama on his visit to Laos this week. The AP went even further, declaring Obama’s approach “soft diplomacy”. One has to wonder where all of the “soft diplomacy” was in the seven brutal wars simultaneously fought by […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Cheb Khaled (خالد حاج ابراهيم), King of Raï (راي‎): Algerian Freedom, Fusion, and Fête

In his black jeans and striped shirt, Khaled resembles the stocky boss of some Algerian trucking company. You’d never guess that he is “the king of raï”, and one of the greatest celebrities of the Arab world. Khaled is the man who brought north-African music to a new audience in Europe, shaking up the pop […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Revenge of the Local, the Horror of the Provincial, and Western Cosmopolitanism at Risk

Anti-Globalization? What Madness Is This? John Jarratt in Wolf Creek (Australia) This is true Monday Morning Madness, though I never expected to start anyone’s Monday off with a dosage of horror, or as I argue here, the Western elites’ perceived horrors of anti-globalization and resentful localisms. Nowhere, I think, is this sentiment best captured than […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Anthropology’s Many Deaths and the Birth of World Anthropologies (1.4)

The longer version of the title might have been: How many anthropologies does the West need to produce before they become ‘World Anthropologies’? The tradition of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and abstract ideas has all of the shortcomings that we already know. Like “cultural extinction,” which suggests that cultures as ideas and practices can “die,” and […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

What do anthropologists care about cosmopolitanism?

On the last day of the [ASA 2006] conference [on cosmopolitanism and anthropology], Keith Hart declared (perhaps a touch harshly), Anthropologists don’t care for cosmopolitanism. It’s just an excuse to come together. We’re not engaging in the world. We don’t talk about Iraq and Iran. Our detached discourse lacks wider relevance. As I have since […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Methodological Cosmopolitanism in Anthropology

methodological cosmopolitanism in anthropology, is likely to invigorate the anthropological research agenda for some time. Methodological cosmopolitanism has been used as a critique of methodological nationalism. In anthropology, methodological cosmopolitanism can be a critique of an immoral methodology that treats the other as a specimen, as well as of theoretical provincialism (American anthropologists only quoting […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Cosmopolitan Anthropology as Responsibility to the Other

A cosmopolitan research method and agenda would need to reckon with the primordial otherness of the humans we encounter either face-to-face or indirectly. Thereby, it would have to internalize methodologically the ethical constitution of any form of subjectivity. In this perspective, it is unethical to turn the other into an object of knowledge. This means […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Ethics and the Other

One way of reconciling [the] project of a cosmopolitan anthropology with an ontology that is mindful of the social nature of the self is to turn the universal figure of Everyone into a someone, in particular into someone else, that is, into an other. The other, who never really can be reduced to an alter […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Scripting the Cosmopolitan

Checking on an author’s quotation from a dictionary defining the “cosmopolitan,” and running the term through a few online databases, I accidentally came across the word “cosmopolitan” as written in different languages. Somehow the result, part of which is shown below, superficially looks like the definition put into practice, and yet also seems to undermine […]