Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Practice?

Abstract

This article advances the case for both an anthropology of cosmopolitanism and, at the same time, a cosmopolitan anthropology. Illustrated by means of a case study of apparently traditional Minangkabau domestic authority structure, the article seeks to sketch in the parameters of an anthropological contribution to the recent attempts to recover a notion of cosmopolitanism, mainly by social and political theorists. One anthropologist who has made out a case for a cosmopolitan anthropology has been Adam Kuper. But unlike Kuper’s piece, this article argues that we need to locate all such arguments more firmly within the modern intellectual tradition within which they are formed. This means also that we must seriously engage with those critiques of that tradition that suggest that all such universalizing logics are Eurocentric, based on highly problematic notions of universal human reason, and thereby exclusionary of other races and other cultures.