Anthropologists are citizens of the world because they are able to manoeuvre in and out of different cultures. African migrants display similar competencies when they are away from home. But you can even be cosmopolitan without ever having left your home, anthropologist Owen B. Sichone told at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology:

If we want to understand the cosmopolitanism of global justice we may find the answer not in liberal constitutions or UN conventions but in the real lives of the world’s a dollar a day multitudes.

(...)

In my view we would do better to look to remote Africa villages and congested urban slums to find the woman who greets the stranger with a tray of food and this woman who has never left home lives her cosmopolitanism by welcoming the world. One does not need to be well travelled to be a polyglot, polymath or cosmopolitan if one is plays host to the world as the women of Cape Town have done since the Mother City was constructed.

European capitalism on the other hand is uncosmopolitan:

In today’s globalising world the political philosophers have defined cosmopolitanism in various ways. Whether we see it as based on liberal notions of human dignity, (Appiah, 2005 ch6), ‘obligations of justice to non-nationals’ or merely being ‘marked by diverse cultural influences’ (Sypnowich: 56) the European capitalist who has long offered himself as the ideal type fails the test. It is not just failure to protect strangers in Europe but the whole imperial episode of colonial oppression, i.e uncosmopolitan cosmopolitanism.

Sichone points to tougher immigration laws, that are limiting the mobility of the less affluent people outside the rich countries. Modernisation has in his opinion meant sedentarisation rather than increasing mobility for most Africans. :

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (...) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.

(...)

It is ironical that East Africans seem to have enjoyed greater freedom of movement during the colonial days than they do today. There was no real border at the time as East Africa was all-British territory, the same could be said for other parts of the continent.

Certain migrants, the sort that travel without passports or visas, challenge the system of global apartheid and make it possible for others who belong to the immobile 97 per cent of the global population that never leaves home, to connect with the world in ways that facilitate the transfer of resources between centres and peripheries. They sometimes impact upon the host population in dramatic and unpredictable ways that belies their small numbers, Sichone writes.

On the other hand, Cape Town (where his paper focuses on) is a quite xenophobic society. This may be the result of imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. Sichone found striking gender differences. Women are much more friendly to strangers than men. For the South African more strangers means less resources for everyone:

Xenophobia (...) is most pronounced in the world of the retrenched worker, the men who must blame their unemployability on foreigners and who see themselves in a zero sum battle for survival.
(...)
Many migrants in Cape Town would probably agree with the Congolese refugee who said, if it were not for the women, we would not make it. (...) My Tanzanian contact, Pascal referred to some of them as the ‘Xhosa mama’ who provide new arrivals with accommodation and counter the ill-treatment that makwerekwere suffer at the hands of South African men. The ‘Xhosa mama’ treats foreigners, strangers, aliens etc as fellow human beings from the beginning just as the xenophobic men are hostile to strangers even before they encounter them.

He concludes:

What we seek to do is not necessarily to denounce elite models of cosmopolitanism exemplified by the work of international scholars, global social movements or human rights activists but rather to demonstrate that for the dollar a day multitudes ultimate security lies in ubuntu.

His paper was for me one of the highlights of the conference. So I am glad that Owen Sichone gave me the permission to post his paper on antropologi.info. He welcomes comments. His email address: osichone AT humanities.uct.ac.za

>> read Xenophobia and xenophilia in South Africa. Africans migrants in Cape Town by Owen B. Sichone (90kb, pdf)

EARLIER POSTS ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:

What's the point of anthropology conferences? (general summary)

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Cosmopolitanism is like respecting the ban on smoking in the public

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

The second issue of the peer reviewed Open Access journal Ecological and Environmental Anthropology is quite unusual. The papers have titles like

"The Importance of Integrative Anthropology: A Preliminary Investigation Employing Primatological and Cultural Anthropological Data Collection Methods in Assessing Human-Monkey Co-existence in Bali, Indonesia"

or

"A Preliminary Review of Neotropical Primates in the Subsistence and Symbolism of Indigenous Lowland South American Peoples".

The new issue even includes two videos!

Concerning their interdisciplinary approach, the editors explain:

In this issue, we highlight interdisciplinary work from primatologists who combine cultural anthropology and primatology approaches to gain unique perspectives about the species that they study. From the discovery of a new species in Tanzania, to cultural primate symbolism and subsistence in Amazonia, and to the interactions of rural communities with local populations of monkeys in Bali and Sulawesi, Indonesia, ethnoprimatologists in our second issue demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary methods for primate conservation on three continents.

>> Frontpage of the journal "Ecological and Environmental Anthropology"

Security has come to be the overriding issue in every debate about development and immigration issues - and it's part of a worldwide trend which in fact does the complete opposite and helps to create insecurity. That's according to anthropologist Rema Hammami, a US national with Palestinian roots, working at Birzeit University. (At a seminar in Oslo on security we came to the same conclusions) Last week, she gave her inaugural address in The Hague (Netherlands) on accepting the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity, reports Radio Netherlands:

Hammami claims that a quarter of the Palestinians have lost their jobs as a result of Israel's security regime, adding that growing poverty leads to frustration and ultimately to an insecure situation. She says that the recent past in this part of the world demonstrates that too much emphasis on security issues achieves exactly the opposite:
"During the interim period of the Peace Process, what you had was an ongoing policy by the various Israeli governments that kept making everything secondary to Israeli security. For Palestinians this meant a checkpoint everywhere they turned, inability to get into East Jerusalem […] Ultimately all of those Israeli security policies led to the outbreak of the uprising. People found the situation unbearable."

She criticizes the immigration policy in Europe and the United States: Migrants are seen as enemies until proved otherwise, and this reflects the increasingly sharp division in the world:

"It [this dominance of security policy] becomes blind to seeing that all human beings need some basic, similar types of things. Instead what it does is say that 'There is us and there is you, and what we have and what we need and want to preserve, is different from what you want, and just the fact that you want to be part of this is a threat to us.' While, in fact, people the world over basically just want the same thing."

>> read the whole story at Radio Netherlands

Rema Hammami is a truly engaged anthropologist and has published extensively on these issues, among others in the Middle East Report. See also her texts Waiting for Godot at Qalandya: Reflections on Queues and Inequality and On Suicide Bombings. A longer text, published in the Jerusalem Quarterly: On the Importance of Thugs. The moral economy of a checkpoint

The first issue of "Practicing Anthropology", the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology Goes Palestinian deal with the topic THE COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ACTION IN PALESTINE: PROGRAMS AND PRACTICE. But of cource, none of the articles are available online, not even to subscribers.

SEE ALSO:

Ethnographic Research: Gated Communities Don’t Lead to Security

Book review: Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

Tabsir - Blog on the Middle East

PS: One of my favorite journalists on Palestinian issues is Mohammed Omer. He got known with his website Rafah Today. Now, his articles are published in the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet. There's also a a blog about Omer and Rafah where most of his articles are published.

(LINKS UPDATED 20.8.2020) Recently, the terms "Western civilisation" or "Western values" have been used in opposition to regimes mainly in the Middle East. But how fruitful is this notion of "the West"? In his keynote speech at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology, David Graeber showed that this idea is a kind of Othering: It makes artificial gaps between people that have more in common than supposed.

His deconstruction of the West resembels earlier deconstructions of the National (what traditionally has been considered as "typical Norwegian" is rather the result of migration and influences from other countries).

In his paper that he presented on the conference, Graeber writes:

If you examine these terms more closely, however, it becomes obvious that all these “Western” objects are the products of endless entanglements. “Western science” was patched together out of discoveries made on many continents, and is now largely produced by non- Westerners. “Western consumer goods” were always drawn from materials taken from all over the world, many explicitly imitated Asian products, and nowadays, most are produced in China.
(...)
As European states expanded and the Atlantic system came to encompass the world, all sorts of global influences appear to have coalesced in European capitals, and to have been reabsorbed within the tradition that eventually came to be known as “Western”.
(...)
Can we say the same of “Western freedoms”? The reader can probably guess what my answer is likely to be.

The idea of a superior "Western civilisation" is a product of colonialism. But as he says:

Opposition to European expansion in much of the world, even quite early on, appears to have been carried out in the name of “Western values” that the Europeans in question did not yet even have.

Graeber mainly used the notion of democracy as a Western concept as an example:

Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a "Western" concept begins its history in ancient Athens, and that what 18th and 19th century politicians began reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same thing.

(...)

Democratic practices-processes of egalitarian decision-making-however occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given
"civilization", culture, or tradition.

We should according to Graeber treat the history of “democracy” as more than just the history of the word “democracy”:

If democracy is simply a matter of communities managing their own affairs through an open and relatively egalitarian process of public discussion, there is no reason why egalitarian forms of decision-making in rural communities in Africa or Brazil should not be at least as worthy of the name as the constitutional systems that govern most nation-states today-and in many cases, probably a good deal more so.

(...)

Rather than seeing Indian, or Malagasy, or Tswana, or Maya claims to being part of an inherently democratic tradition as an attempt to ape the West, it seems to me, we are looking at different aspects of the same planetary process: a crystallization of longstanding democratic practices in the formation of a global system, in which ideas were flying back and forth in all directions, and the gradual, usually grudging adoption of some by ruling elites.

Yet why have these procedures not been considered as "democratic." The main reason in Graebers view: In these assemblies, things never actually came to a vote! Rather, they preferred "the apparently much more difficult task" of coming to decisions "that no one finds so violently objectionable that they are not willing at least assent". It is this form of participatory democracy that social movements around the world are trying to revive!

Graeber also discusses the "coercive nature of the state" and the contradictions that democratic constitutions are founded on. He refers to Walter Benjamin (1978) who pointed out "that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means, by acts that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before it".

And about Ancient Greece and democracy:

It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely surprising they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms.

UPDATE: The whole text is now available in The Anarchist Library: There Never Was a West Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between

SEE ALSO:

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn't 'Western' this text was also debated on Savage Minds

Amartya Sen: Democracy as a Universal Value (pdf) (Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17)

David Graeber: Reinventing Democracy

Review of Graeber's book: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology - What's the point of anthropology conferences?

Is there life after a PhD? and Internet Nicknames – what’s in a name? are the titles of the first entries in a new anthropology blog by Denise Carter.

She has recently completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull, UK. Many might know her as frequent poster in anthropology email-lists. She's particularily interested in internet and its effect on our daily lives. Her doctoral research is an ethnographic account of my three years living and working in a virtual community.

>> continue to Denise Carter's blog

Her blog is included in the overviews over anthropology blogs http://www.antropologi.info/blog/ and http://www.antropologi.info/feeds/anthropology

I'm back from the conference Anthropology and Cosmopolitanism at Keele University (1h from Manchester, UK). As I've learned from entries on Savage Minds, job hunting and networking are a main point of anthropology conferences arranged by the AAA (American Anthropological Association). Luckily, this wasn't the case with the conference I've attended last week: The main purpose seemed to be socialising - without ulterior motives: The participants were very friendly and open people. It seemed to be that I've talked at least to the half of all participants.

The topic - cosmopolitanism - seemed to have attracted a certain kind of people. "There are nearly no Americans here", one delegate wondered. Usually, lots of Americans attended conferences arranged by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. What I found most striking: The largest part of all delegates were migrants!

Nearly none of them is working at a University in the country they were born. I met an anthropologist from Sri Lanka who's working in the USA, another anthropologist working in Canada, originally from Turkey but - as she said - "a product from Norway". There were quite a lot of German anthropology migrants living in the UK, and from Switzerland and Italy. A woman wore a badge with "Aberdeen University" on it. Of course, she told me that she's from Malta!

Many participants appreciated the social events. In contrast to other conferences, nobody left the venue after the day's final lecture. There was nowhere to go as the University of Keele is a kind of academic ghetto, located far away from the nearest village. And the lectures actually lasted until 11 o'clock at night! I especially enjoyed these less formal after-dinner lectures - held by Elizabeth Colson (see picture to the right), by Andre Beteille and a debate on Robert Hayden’s ‘Shared Shrines, Syncretism and Tolerance’ in the old library (see image below), published in Current Anthropology.

But concerning the topic of the conference, I wonder if I might have learned more if I had stayed at home and read the papers on my own. There were many very weak presentations: Most paper-givers read their papers monotonously and went over time. There was never enough time for discussion. Furthermore, generally three or four papers were read one after another without any breaks in between! It reminded me of the worst seminars during my first year at university.

Several participants left these panels before they ended. After a short walk in the sun, I met a young PhD-student. He was as frustrated as me: "It's my first and probably my last conference", he told me.

I wondered: Is the main purpose of a conference to deliver a paper in order to get it listed on one's CV as John McCreery supposes while we discussed the topic How To Present A Paper?

"If you want to be considered a serious academic you have to read your paper. That's standard and just the way it is", one of the elder anthropologists informed me.

Some papers haven't even had much to do with the topic of the conference (a few paper-givers admitted it openly!).

On the last day of the conference, Keith Hart said (maybe too 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've found out afterwards, Keith Hart had said something that many delegates agreed with. The organisers had asked great questions about cosmopolitanism, but we haven't heard many concrete answers. I missed debates about moral and ethical issues: Recently, several magazines and newspapers have discussed cosmopolitanism as an answer to the growing polarisation between socalled Western values and the socalled Islamic world. After the controversy around the Mohammed-cartoons, mainstream-media loved talking about culture and religion wars and Huntingtons clash of civilisation. But maybe we should have talked more about cosmopolitanism? Is this correct? Is cosmopolitanism a better alternative than multiculturalism? If yes, how could anthropologists contribute to a more peaceful, just, cosmopolitan world?

Nobody addressed these questions. Rather, extreme relativism prevailed. French anthropologist Benoît de L'Estoile for example, argued, we shouldn't define the term cosmopolitanism by its moral qualities (openness to the world, empathy etc). It is in his view problematic to define some people as good (cosmopolitans) or bad (non-cosmopolitans).

Nevertheless, there were many interesting papers (among others by David Graeber, see image to the left). I'll have a look at them during the following days and weeks, (I hope) and will try to summarize some of the discussions.

See also my earlier post For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism.

UPDATE 2: A heavily edited version of this text was published in Anthropology Today august 2006. You can read the text here on my personal homepage

UPDATES

Summary of David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Cosmopolitanism is like respecting the ban on smoking in the public

Anthropology News April focuses on the topic anthropology and human rights. Both anthropologists and non-anthropologists have been asked to answer the question: Do anthropologists have anything useful or relevant to say about human rights?

In Gerald F Hyman's view (Director, USAID Office of Democracy and Governance), anthropologists contribute little to the development of human rights themselves or a human rights regime because anthropologists are skeptical of normative claims.

Sheila Dauer from amnesty international makes a similar point, criticizing the idea that human rights are a Western idea and than introducing them might even be a neocolonial act:

When anthropologists support the idea that the changes the changes people are working for on the ground that are based on human rights standards are “Western” or “neocolonial,” they are using the same argument used by governments and others in power to repress less powerful sectors of society—ethnic and racial minorities, women and other groups. Within the human rights movement, conceptualizing human rights standards as universal is now thought of as bringing local meanings into dialogue with human rights standards to mutually reinterpret them and to find ways they can apply locally—a kind of cultural negotiation.

(related see Democracy Isn't 'Western' by Amartya Sen that also was debated on Savage Minds)

Victoria Sanford calls for "activist scholarship":

It is not uncommon within the academy for lived experience to be dismissed as unscientific or not relevant to real, objective scholarship. This is completely backwards because it is the academy that needs to be relevant to the reality of lived experience.

Advocacy and activism do not diminish one’s scholarly research. On the contrary, activist scholarship reminds us that all research is inherently political—even, and perhaps especially, that scholarship presented under the guise of “objectivity” is often little more than a veiled defense of the status quo. Anthropologists can do better than that. We can and should use our expertise to support rights claims in the communities where we work.

She has a nice homepage with lots of pictures and several articles about her conflict and peace research in Guatemala and Colombia.

Veena Das is sceptical. Institutional transformations in the universities in the US and elsewhere are threatening the kind of free inquiry on which critical understanding rests:

I see a far greater threat to anthropology’s capabilities for engaging politically difficult questions based upon good evidence from everyday practices that govern research in universities than from direct censorship.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News (removed, no longer available)

UPDATE (9.10.06):
The October 06 issue of Anthropology News asks the question Do Anthropologists Have an Ethical Obligation to Promote Human Rights? (removed)

SEE ALSO:

Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights Committee for Human Rights by the American Anthropological Association

"We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from"

Annelise Riles: Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage

Sally Engle Merry: Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way)

Links updated 12.5.2018

On the recent conference by the Society for Applied Anthropology, Mary Odell Butler from Battelle suggested that anthropologists ought to quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible, according to Judd Antin at Technotaste who writes:

"The larger and more interesting point she made, is that talking about culture instead of more specific perceptions or processes, is a scapegoat. It relieves us of the burden of talking about specific ideas, habits, and histories. She gave an example that I remember well. Contrast these two statements:

Many African-American women have developed a culturally-based perception that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

vs.

Many African-American women have learned through their experience and that of their friends and family that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

Culture, in other words, is too often a gloss for actual perception and practice. Why not call a rose a rose?"

>> read the whole post on TechnoTaste

Judd Antin has written two more posts about the conference: Wednesday Morning at SfAA and SfAA 2006: To Start. There was no press coverage (no surprise). Jen Cardew at anthroblogs did some conference blogging, but the notes aren't especially reader-friendly.

Jen made an interesting remark about getting in touch with people at conferences. It's an advantage to be a smoker:

I would like to note that the only people who have approached me, or that I have approached at the conference thus far have been smokers outside on a smoke break. I am actually thankful that I am a smoker right now, what a wonderful social tool! I'm kind of shy, so it is not too often that I approach people to chat.

Jen has also written about Smokers as a Subculture

SEE ALSO:

Emphasis on ‘culture’ in psychology fuels stereotypes, scholar says

The Culture Struggle: How cultures are instruments of social power

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Savage Minds: An old warhorse revisited: Do we need another book about culture?

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Why culture should be brought back in

The Secret Society of Anthropologists