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    <i>Anyone</i>: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
    <i>Anyone</i>: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
    <i>Anyone</i>: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
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    Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

    By Nigel Rapport

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    The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone – the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2012
    ISBN9780857455239
    <i>Anyone</i>: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
    Author

    Nigel Rapport

    Nigel Rapport is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. His most recent book was Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).

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      Book preview

      <i>Anyone</i> - Nigel Rapport

      ANYONE

      Methodology and History in Anthropology

      General Editor: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

      Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too have its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technical developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate on the interrelationship between anthropology and other academic fields but also on the challenge that new intellectual and technological developments pose to anthropological methods, and the role of anthropological thought in a general history of concepts.

      Volume 1

      Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute

      Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen

      Volume 2

      Taboo, Truth and Religion

      Franz B. Steiner

      Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

      Volume 3

      Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization

      Franz B. Steiner

      Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

      Volume 4

      The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere

      Edited by R.M. Dilley

      Volume 5

      Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach

      Timothy Jenkins

      Volume 6

      Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanasia, 1870s–1930s

      Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert Welsch

      Volume 7

      Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research

      Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James, and David Parkin

      Volume 8

      Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social

      N.J. Allen

      Volume 9

      Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition

      Robert Parkin

      Volume 10

      Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual

      André Celtel

      Volume 11

      Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects

      Michael Jackson

      Volume 12

      An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology: Descent Groups and Marriage Alliance

      Louis Dumont

      Volume 13

      Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau

      Henrik E. Vigh

      Volume 14

      The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice

      Edited by Jacqueline Solway

      Volume 15

      A History of Oxford Anthropology

      Edited by Peter Riviére

      Volume 16

      Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence

      Edited by David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek

      Volume 17

      Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches

      Edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró

      Volume 18

      Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning

      Edited by Mark Harris

      Volume 19

      Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology

      David Mills

      Volume 20

      Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification

      Nigel Rapport

      Volume 21

      The Life of Property: House, Family, and Inheritance in Béarn, South-West France

      Timothy Jenkins

      Volume 22

      Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology

      Edited by Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

      Volume 23

      The Scope of Anthropology: Maurice Godelier’s Work in Context

      Edited by Laurent Dousset and Serge Tcherkézoff

      Volume 24

      Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

      Nigel Rapport

      Volume 25

      Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

      Edited by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

      Volume 26

      Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis

      Edited by Roy Ellen, Stephen Lycett and Sarah Johns

      Volume 27

      Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

      Edited by Sondra L. Hausner

      ANYONE

      The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

      Nigel Rapport

      First published in 2012 by

      Berghahn Books

      www.berghahnbooks.com

      © 2012, 2014 Nigel Rapport

      First paperback edition published in 2014

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the

      purpose 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

      Rapport, Nigel, 1956-

      Anyone, the cosmopolitan subject of anthropology / Nigel Rapport.

          p. cm. -- (Methodology and history in anthropology ; v. 24)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-85745-519-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-526-4 (paperback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-523-9 (ebook)

      1. Anthropology--Philosophy. 2. Human behavior--Philosophy. 3.

      Cosmopolitanism. 4. Globalization--Social aspects. I. Title.

      GN33.R35 2012

      301.01--dc23

      2011047723

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Printed on acid-free paper

      ISBN: 978-1-78238-526-4 paperback

      ISBN: 978-0-85745-523-9 ebook

      To my father and my mother

      I cannot tolerate the fact that a human being should be assessed not for what he is but because of the group with which he happens to be identified.

      —Primo Levi, letter to Heinz Riedt, 1961

      CONTENTS

      List of Figures

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction: Intent and Structure

      Part 1: Cosmopolitanism and Cosmopolis: Definitions and Issues

      1.1 A History and Overview

      1.2 A Cosmopolitan Project for Anthropology

      Part 2: ‘My Name Is Rickey Hirsch’: A Life in Six Acts, with Marginalia and a Coda

      Part 3: Anyone in Science and Society: Evidencing and Engaging

      3.1 Personal Truth, Subjectivity as Truth

      3.2 Generality, Distortion and Gratuitousness

      3.3 Public and Private: Civility as Politesse

      Afterword: Jewish Cosmopolitanism

      References

      Index

      LIST OF FIGURES

      1. Rickey, Andrew and Nigel

      2. Rickey’s narration

      3. Rickey’s narration

      4. Rickey’s narration

      5. Rickey’s narration

      6. In Rickey’s car

      7. Outside Rickey’s first apartment

      8. Outside Rickey’s restaurant

      9. Rickey’s mountain

      10. Rickey at the Middle Eastern café

      11. Stanley Spencer, The Beatitudes of Love: Contemplation (1938)

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      The writing of this book was greatly assisted by the British Academy and the provision of a Research Development Award. Equally supportive has been the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, affording the possibility to institute a Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. In this regard I would like to thank very much Anthony Cohen and Michael Jackson, Ulf Hannerz and David McCrone; also Brian Lang and Louise Richardson, Peter Clark and Katherine Hawley.

      Between 2004 and 2007 I held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice, and ran a centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at Concordia University of Montreal. For these opportunities I am especially grateful to Vered Amit and Christine Jourdan; also to Andrew Irving, Robert Paine, Katja Neves Graca, Max Forte, Kevin Tuite, Chantal Collard, Meir Amor, David Howes, Nelson Ferguson, Turid Satermo, Allen Young, Noel Dyck and Gerrie Casey.

      Intellectually I owe a debt to all of the above: I would hope that the book evinces what I have learned from them. Likewise, I have been fortunate to have been able to debate cosmopolitanism with Ronald Stade, Morten Nielsen, Huon Wardle, Lisette Josephides, Hideko Mitsui, Laura Jefferey, Helena Wulff, Nina Holm Vohnsen, Jonathan Skinner, Peter Collins, Susan Lewis, Amos Goldberg, Keith Hart, Karen Fog Olwig, Pnina Werbner, Christer Norström, Maurice Roche, Caroline Knowles, David Zeitlyn, Elitza Ranova, Michal Buchowski, Tomasz Rakowski, Helena Patzer, Katarzyna Kaniowska and Ewa Chomicka. (The Polish Institute of Anthropology were fine hosts.)

      Berghahn Books are what one would hope for from an academic publisher. I am indebted to Marion Berghahn and Ann Przyzycki, and also to David Parkin for a place in his series.

      Morten Nielsen argues for the value that imagining an ideal future state of affairs can vouchsafe to the individual: ‘inhabiting’ that imaginative space can validate and redeem a life-project in the present which might otherwise appear impossibly difficult. Andrew Irving argues, meanwhile, that seeking what is impossible can in itself personify an individual virtue. The human condition entails imperfect and unfinished doings and beings, and the individual constructs world-views as works-in-motion without a point of certainty or rest. Yet the effort to see things as they are and to imagine things-in-themselves remains a humane and just, necessary thing.

      Speculating upon cosmopolitanism as life-project and world-view, imagining the world of Anyone, I am especially lucky to have had Elizabeth, Callum and Emilie take me as I am.

      NJR

      St Andrews

      February 2012

      Introduction

      INTENT AND STRUCTURE

      A Cosmopolitan Project

      ‘Cosmopolitanism’ has a certain momentum, in politics and academia equally: a ‘growing intellectual movement’, cross-disciplinary, confident, liberal (R. Werbner 2007: x). In anthropology we are witness to a flurry of research, writing and conferring. We meet ‘plural discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ (Clifford 1998), occupational cosmopolitanism (Hannerz 2007) and ‘cosmopolitans’ as distinct from ‘locals’ (Hannerz 1990); pre-modern and modern cosmopolitans (Stade 2006), urban Caribbean cosmopolitans (Wardle 2000), diasporic Chinese cosmopolitans (Ong 1998), rural Togolese cosmopolitans (Piot 1999), upper-class cosmopolitan Cairene youth (Peterson 2011), middle-class cosmopolitan Indian families (Lamb 2009), working-class Pakistani cosmopolitan migrants (P. Werbner 1999), heretical cosmopolitan Muslim intellectuals (Kersten 2011), ‘instrumental, aesthetic, political and cultural cosmopolitans’ (Hannerz 2004), cosmopolitan dancers and choreographers (Wulff 2009), cosmopolitan patriots (Appiah 1998), cosmopolitan cityscapes (Rapport 2006a), cosmopolitan civilities (Anderson 2004), cosmopolitan imaginations (Meskimmon 2010) and cosmopolitan emancipation (Rapport 2012a). Cosmopolitanism appears commonly as a theme of conferences, academic volumes and research centres.

      Are these significant developments? Does ‘cosmopolitanism’ offer something new, distinct from ‘multiculturalism’, ‘globalism’, ‘diaspora’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘pluralism’ or ‘civil society’? Yes: cosmopolitanism usefully identifies a certain agenda in human science. Malcolm Bowie writes: ‘Humanism certainly needs an infusion of audacity if it is to stand its ground against superstition, bigotry and fundamentalist rant’ (Bowie 2000: 20); cosmopolitanism claims a particular history of inscribing the human, and a future project.

      The worth of this book depends on the case it makes for three related notions. First, that ‘humankind’ represents a phenomenon whose universal condition and whose set of singular characteristics an anthropological science should determine to know. Second, that Anyone is a human actor who is to be recognized as at once universal and individual. Third, that one may conceive of a set of norms which serves as a universal ethic of polite human interaction: ‘cosmopolitan politesse’. Here is a social medium which would everywhere afford Anyone the space to live according to the fulfilment of his or her capacities to author an individual life – individual world-views, identity and life-project – and the right and encouragement so to do; the right to be universally recognized and engaged as himself or herself, and not merely as a member of a social category or class. The ‘cosmopolitan project’ of the discipline of anthropology is, then, to provide evidence for treating humankind and Anyone as ontologies, as part of the nature of human being, a focus both of scholarly concern and of moral and political effort.

      The cosmopolitan project is to know Anyone in terms of a universal human nature and at the same time an individual embodiment: to do justice to his or her universal capacities as well as to their singular expression. Humankind can be defined as the objective context of individuality. Individuality owes its unique nature to its humanity: humankind is ever instantiated as individuality. The evidence a cosmopolitan anthropology would adduce concerns seeing this relation plainly so that it is not obscured or distorted by cultural prejudices, social structures or historical contingencies. A cosmopolitan anthropology works to elucidate this dialectical relation: individuality out of humanity.

      ‘Everyman’ and ‘Anyone’

      Everyman was the title of a Christian morality play written in English around 1500 (and closely related to a Flemish production, Elckerlyc) (Cawley 1970). In an allegorical dramatization of what was taken to be a global moral struggle for humanity, the play portrays Death visiting a character called Everyman and informing him of his impending demise. The audience is then witness to Everyman’s emotional journey from despair and fear to the final resignation that is a prelude to Christian redemption. We witness, too, a social journey as the play portrays Everyman being deserted by different false friends in turn: Kindred, Cousin, Fellowship and Worldly Goods. At first Everyman finds himself able to fall back on his own resources: Knowledge, Strength, Intelligence, Beauty and Good Deeds. In particular, Knowledge delivers the celebrated lines: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, / In thy most need to go by thy side’. Together Everyman and his resources proceed to draw up a Book of Accounts for his meeting with God and the adjudication of his eternal fate. In extremis, however, when Everyman must go to his grave, his resources too all but desert him: we bear witness to Everyman’s intellectual journey which leads him to the final realization that only Good Deeds can offer a faithful accompaniment to the soul. According to the play’s Christian doctrinalism, the universal truth which the audience is to appreciate, and the moral drawn, is that the human individual is to progress from mundane life to a divine accounting equipped with nothing that he has taken or received from the world, only what he has given.

      In terms which Hannah Arendt (1959) borrowed from Classical Greek philosophy, the allegory of Everyman turns on the difference and the tensions between zoë and bios. Zoë is bare life, a state of being alive common to all animals; bios is elaborated human experience, the bringing to zoë of consciousness and world-view. What makes a human life more than mere animal life, Everyman asks? Where does the intrinsic nature of human elaboration fundamentally lie? Not in kinship or friendship or property, nor even in wisdom, strength, intelligence or beauty. The key to a human life (bios), a humane life, that which fits it for a passage to heaven, is the doing of good deeds. The key is to recognize in human life the spiritual microcosm of Christian divinity.

      A more recent meditation on the tensions between zoë and bios comes in the work of Giorgio Agamben, in particular his celebrated text, Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998). Homo sacer was an obscure figure in the law of Ancient Rome: a person who could be legally killed without retribution being levied but who could not be sacrificed. In other words, his death was not defined as a human death: it was not that of a social being surrounded by safeguards, and occasioning a sense of loss if lost. Agamben’s argument is that the victims of the Nazi’s Final Solution were reduced to mere embodiments of animal life: on their journey to Auschwitz, the Jews, Gypsies and others had their social and legal humanity officially rescinded by the Nazi state. More generally, Agamben depicts the concentration camp – whether that of refugees instituted out of humanitarian motives or the death camps of a totalitarian regime – as the paradigmatic space of modern life. Bare life is a human condition which many are forced to suffer: a kind of naked existence beyond the securities and elaborations of social being. We are witness to an expanded zone of ‘irreducible indistinction’ such that the bare life of the concentration camp becomes the ‘hidden matrix’ at the centre of our world (Agamben 1998: 166). Or, in the terms Walter Benjamin earlier made famous: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (Benjamin 1969: 257).

      For Everyman and Homo Sacer alike, the key question concerns what it is to be human: Where does the particular dignity of humanity reside (cf. Redfield 2005)? According to Everyman it is in the practising of Christian virtues; according to Homo Sacer it is in a socially recognized life, a life accorded the opportunity of conventional engagement with others.

      ‘Anyone’ is distinct from both ‘Everyman’ and ‘homo sacer’ in that it collapses the distinction between zoë and bios. The human individual does not need to be or do any particular thing – whether engage in conventional exchanges or do good in conventional ways – in order to accede to a full humanity. Being human is Anyone’s birthright. It is not the place of others to define what activities or what ideologies Anyone needs to practise in order to exhibit human dignity. Nor, indeed, can anyone else define for Anyone what dignity feels like or how it is to be interpreted; this is something that Anyone must know for himself or herself. Anyone’s humanity precisely is this capacity to feel, interpret and come to know for himself or herself. Anyone’s birthright, it might be said, is his or her futurity: the capacity to define the human in the context of his or her individual life. The tie between Anyone and humankind – microcosm to macrocosm – is immanent and irreducible.

      Singular Values

      That difference is an individual property, something that inheres ontologically in individual human embodiment and consciousness, has been the key insight I have drawn from my own ethnographic work (e.g., Rapport 1987, 1993, 1994, 2008), and which I have determined to privilege in the theoretical and analytical modelling of human social life. Cosmopolitanism is imbued with a comparable recognition of the intrinsic and irreducible individuality of human embodiment. But at the same time it trumpets the unity of humanity: all individuals can be recognized as manifestations of the same potentiality possessed by the species for self-expression and self-fulfilment. As an anthropological project, cosmopolitanism is concerned above all with this tension. What does it imply, ontologically and morally, that ‘everyone is both identical and different’ (Jackson 2008: 29)? How is it that individual human beings are irreducibly themselves and absolutely human? What are the moral implications of the fact that individuals are intrinsically different from each other and yet absolute examples of human capacities for self-expression? Each human being is capable of making sense of self and world – and does do so – and capable of effecting a life-project that manifests a personal version of self-and-environment – and should be free to do so. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ calls on ‘anthropology’ – both were words made anew and contemporaneously by Immanuel Kant – to furnish it with data concerning both the nature of the species and the specificities of individual expression. Indeed, anthropology dwells in this tension: What is it to be human, the capabilities and liabilities of the species? And how is it to be individual human beings, construing world-views and effecting a unique being-in-the-world?

      Cosmopolitanism concerns, too, a philosophy of freedom. It is to be cherished, celebrated, that humanity is as it is, that individuality is as it is. One is to nurture those general conditions in which individuals might be so emancipated as to fulfil their capacities for making sense; one is to reckon their self-expression and creativity as a right. As a philosophy of freedom, cosmopolitanism can be said to compass a very particular and apparently paradoxical ‘mathematics of value’, focused on the one. Humanity is one. And the individual is one. The latter is how the singularity of the former manifests itself. Yet each individual instantiation of the human is unique: irreducible and unrepeatable, with a consciousness capable of encompassing an infinite set of potential connections, insights and realizations.

      This is what I understand to be the meaning of the Talmudic judgement which might also have served as an epigraph to this book: ‘Whoever destroys the life of a single human being – it is as if he had destroyed the entire world. And whoever preserves the life of a single human being – it is as if he had preserved the world entire’ (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4: 8 (37a)). Each life is absolutely valuable: to consider the masses of human population is not to discover something of greater value or an overarching entity in which the individual existence is subsumed. The human population is a conglomeration of ones, an aggregation but not an integration. Nothing has greater value than a human individual because he or she is a ‘perfect’ embodiment of the human whole.

      ‘No cry of torment can be greater than the cry of one person’, supposes Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980: 45) for philosophy. For the novel, Graham Greene writes similarly: ‘Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel’ (Greene 1979: 183). And not only suffering: the same may be said for happiness or a sense of beauty or fulfilment. These are qualities that pertain to, inhere and remain in, the individual body; there is nowhere but bodies that these qualities – the qualia or experience of life – can inhere. Hence, to claim that adding bodies in a social field causes suffering or happiness to be taken to another level is a category mistake: suffering or happiness cannot belong to a multiplicity, a society, community, culture or tradition. Individual experience represents a kind of absolute, entire in itself, whose nature does not lend itself to mathematical aggrandizement. ‘Humanity’ appears before us always and only as ‘a man’, F.R. Leavis concurs: ‘Only in living individuals is life there, and individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way’ (Leavis 1972: 53). The difficulty of such truths for a human science and a human society – apprehending subjectivity in objective terms, making policy for individual well-being in universal terms – gives on to the anthropological work of this book.

      The argument to be made is that the only fundamentally real relationship is between individual and species. Differences of cultural convention and classification, and of social structuration and affiliation – differences of community membership, of nation, ethnicity, class and religion – are epiphenomenal, symbolic and rhetorical constructions as distinct from ontologies. The individual body, its species-wide capabilities and liabilities, provides both a beginning and an end both for a human science and a liberal society: What might the individual body be able to achieve, and what is it liable to suffer from (cf. Rapport 2003: 215–39)?

      A ‘cosmopolitan body’ is that which practises a particular, localized life – including joining, making and leaving local relations and communities – and yet which continually embodies global entitlements and continues to be recognized as bearing universal capacities. The cosmopolitan project is to provide space for the flourishing of individual-human capabilities and to offer succour for its potential liabilities.

      Cosmopolitanism and Liberalism

      I deem cosmopolitanism to be a species of liberal virtue. ‘The defining feature of a liberal’, according to Brian Barry, is ‘someone who holds that there are certain rights against oppression, exploitation and injury to which every single human being is entitled to lay claim; and that appeals to cultural diversity and pluralism under no circumstances trump the value of basic liberal rights’ (Barry 2001: 132–33).

      The defining features of cosmopolitanism as a political and philosophical programme, meanwhile, are amply set out by Martha Nussbaum:

      Whatever else we are bound by and pursue, we should recognize, at whatever personal or social cost, that each human being is human and counts as the moral equal of every other … The accident of being born a Sri Lankan, or a Jew, or a female, or an African-American, or a poor person, is just that – an accident of birth. It is not and should not be taken as a determinant of moral worth. Human personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth, and this worth is equal … Make liberty of choice the benchmark of any just constitutional order, and refuse to compromise this principle in favour of any particular tradition or religion. (Nussbaum 1996: 133, 136)

      Nussbaum’s conclusion coincides with Barry’s: cosmopolitanism recognizes ‘every single human being’ as an instantiation of ‘human personhood’, an embodiment of human capacities, such as reason, and entitled to human respect. Cosmopolitanism regards the freedom of Anyone to choose a form of life and to form a world-view in accordance with his or her own lights as ‘the benchmark of any just constitutional order’. It comes down to a question of the relationship between culture or community or tradition, and freedom.

      Category-thinking and Politeness

      In his study of the language of the Third Reich, written as a journal following his expulsion from the position of university philologist, Victor Klemperer noted the Nazi predilection for stereotypical labels, categories and classes. This language functioned, Klemperer observed on 12 December 1940, to ‘strip everyone of their individuality, to paralyse them as personalities, to make them into unthinking and docile cattle in a herd driven and hounded in a particular direction, to turn them into atoms in a huge rolling block of stone’; ‘the Jew, the Englishman – nothing but collectives, no individual counts’ (Klemperer 2000: 21).

      Symbolic collectivization – or as one might phrase it, the predominance of thinking and acting in categorial terms – is a deindividuating and hence dehumanizing practice with potentially tragic effects. At the conclusion of what he subtitled an ‘alternative anthropology of identity’, Anthony Cohen wrote how ‘we must make deliberate efforts to acknowledge the subtleties, inflections and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the categorical masks which we have invented so adeptly’ or else we ‘deny people the right to be themselves’ (Cohen 1994: 180). Lisette Josephides concurs: beyond ‘persons’, those entities denominated from outside in terms of culturally ascribed characteristics, are the ‘selves’ that universally human beings know themselves to be (Josephides 2008: 23). The way selves practise a physical and spiritual individuality is the existential testimony anthropology should provide.

      Cohen’s and Josephides’ remarks are aimed at the social analyst but they apply on a number of levels, including that of politician, policy maker and fellow-citizen. Categorial masking includes the state’s formal incorporation of its citizens as well as those citizens’ mundane dealings with one another. The language of the Third Reich was not an isolated incident, merely an extreme one. Reducing individual identities to ‘camp dust’ also characterizes Stalinism and radical Islamism at one pole to communitarianism and ‘identity politics’ at the other (Amit and Rapport 2002).

      If cosmopolitanism is a philosophy of freedom, then this entails working towards the delegitimatization of category-thinking so that the individuality of Anyone is never legitimately confounded by classificatory, collective identifications or stereotypes. Public identities and affiliations are to be treated as achievements not ascriptions, seen to be voluntary and situational, and not to equate to – or subsume, or exhaust – the identity of the individual as such. No categorial placement is absolute, and rights inhere in the individual, in Anyone, not in any particular affiliation: one cherishes the human capacity to create and to go on creating self, society and world – creating ‘essence’ out of ‘existence’, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1956) phrased it – and not any particular manifestation of that capacity.

      But how does one go about construing social and cultural exchange beyond the categorial? For Georg Simmel (1971), famously, society is only possible by way of typical judgements and collectivistic cultural forms. One cannot know a multitude of individuals in and as themselves and therefore one relies on formalism and standardization and the expectability these bring. In public life it is unavoidable that the particularity of individual consciousness will be represented (and misrepresented) by way of general categories and classes, of persons, relations, situations and events. In this judgement, Simmel looked back to Hegelian conclusions concerning the agonistic nature of the human condition; in particular, concerning the strictures of statecraft and the necessary distance between a normative, ‘Prussian’ public sphere and a private home of personal exceptionalism (Hegel 2008). The conclusion also looks forward to what anthropologists have described since as the ‘indifference’ of modern ‘rational’ society: the ways in which bureaucratic structures, whether of large-scale governance or merely of impersonal, non-partisan incorporation, manifest themselves inevitably in a reliance upon the stereotypical and classificatory which is indiscriminate, alienating and even inhumane (Herzfeld 1993; Gupta 1995). Seeking an end to category-thinking, cosmopolitanism must nevertheless come to terms with the need for a public discursive style, of address and exchange.

      In Ronald Stade’s formulation, the project is to presuppose the individuality of interacting citizens but not to presume an intimacy with them (Stade 2007). One can anticipate

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