Contemporary Cosmologies, Critical Re-Imaginings

Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

ABSTRACT

How far is the ethnographic study of cosmologies relevant to contemporary

anthropology, and how might it illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? In
this article we argue for a renewed anthropological interest in matters cosmological, by
seeking to disentangle the study of cosmology from the concomitants with which it was
associated in earlier periods of anthropological research. In particular, we argue that an
orientation towards cosmology continues to be of prime importance to the discipline
insofar as it can be freed from its associations with holism and exoticism. Indeed, as we
go on to show, such research may at present be more apposite than it has ever been.
The shift from High Modernity (in which orientations towards cosmos are variously
constrained and circumscribed) to the flattening effects of the fluid modernity of neoliberalism, we argue, has tended to thrust concerns with cosmic orders and dynamics
back onto the forefront of peoples lives. We end the article with a series of
programmatic observations of how anthropologists might respond to these shifts, both
ethnographically and analytically.

The cosmos has become cool again.

The Guardian, 21 January 2012

Introduction
Addressing the Cosmology Group, an informal reading group that we run with our
graduate students in the Anthropology Department at UCL, a few months before she
died, Mary Douglas expressed surprise that in this day and age anthropologists might still
be interested in such a topic. Cosmology is the kind of thing the Lele possessed when she
studied with them in the 1950s, she said, and no doubt that they and other groups like
them still live with its cultural remnants (see also Douglas 1963). But hasnt the
urbanisation of the developing world together with the concerted repatriation of
anthropology to the metropolis in recent decades rendered our traditional concern with
indigenous cosmologies well-nigh anachronistic? For astride the complexity of the
modern world, Douglas ventured, surely people no longer share a cosmology, as the Lele
and others may have done in pre-modern times. Notwithstanding the prestige enjoyed by
professional cosmologists working in departments of theoretical physics and their popular
appeal when through the media they address the wider public with their phantasmagoric
findings, the plain fact is that the contemporary world is just too complicated to sustain
the kinds of unified and collective cosmology encountered by earlier generations of
anthropologists amongst primitive peoples. At any rate, Douglas concluded, the kinds
of isomorphic correspondences between social organization and cosmological reckonings
from which anthropologists drew such theoretical mileage throughout much of the
twentieth century are now probably nowhere to be found. So what interest could the
study of cosmology possibly hold for anthropologists today?

Somewhat paradoxically given her anthropological age-set, Douglass comments

expressed exactly the kind of weariness towards cosmology against which we felt we
were working in our research and in the Cosmology Group. So, inevitably, coming from
an anthropologist whose own work had for so long been so deeply invested in the study
of cosmology (e.g. Douglas 1963, 1996), Douglass cosmo-weariness was particularly
poignant (not to say, untimely!), adding a sense of urgency to the questions on which our
group had already for some time been deliberating. What is the relevance of the study of
indigenous cosmologies to contemporary anthropology? Can one think cosmology
beyond outmoded assumptions about tribal societies and the like? What might the role of
cosmology be in modern society? And, in the end, what is cosmology? While in no way
purporting to represent the breadth of our on-going conversations on these topics within
the Cosmology Groupi (let alone the groups participants diverse thoughts), the present
article sets out some of the perspectives we have developed as a result of these
discussions. In a necessarily brief and ultimately programmatic way, our aim is to
articulate what we take to be the relevance of cosmologically-oriented approaches in the
anthropology of contemporary social relations everywhereour answer to Mary
Douglas, albeit posthumous, alas.
So, in this article we do two things. In the first section, we offer some reflections
on the broad trends of thinking about cosmology in twentieth century anthropology which
led up to the kind of weariness towards the topic Douglas was expressing by the
beginning of the twenty-first. Our key claim here is that the ambivalence with which the
topic of cosmology is presently viewed in many quarters is owed to its association with
certain tenets of what we call the classical ethnological period of anthropological
research, namely, on the one hand, ideas of holism and, on the other, variously explicit
epistemic hierarchies (us/them, West/rest, etc.), which tended to exoticise indigenous

cosmologies. In the second section we go beyond anthropology to argue that the recent
weariness towards cosmology in anthropology is nevertheless paradoxical, inasmuch as it
is out of step with what, as we suggest, is an abiding re-investment in matters
cosmological a veritable re-connection with cosmos in the late modern aftermath of
neo-liberal socio-economic ideologies. In this context, cosmology once again emerges as
a prime ethnographic concern for anthropology, only now located also as a
quintessentially contemporary one. On this premise, we go on to discuss in a brief and
programmatic way the kinds of novel terrains of investigation which an anthropology
newly sensitised to questions of cosmology might develop, free from assumptions about
holism and exoticising hierarchies of cultural perspectives so characteristic of earlier
approaches to the topic.

Cosmologies: Anthropological and Indigenous

Imagine doing an ethnography of how anthropology was practiced in the times Douglas
rememberedanthropologys classical ethnological period, running roughly from the
1920s till the 1970s, when the study of indigenous cosmologies formed an integral part
of anthropologists confident attempts to chart comparatively the social and cultural
dimensions of (mainly primitive) peoples lives. In brief, one would find a set of highly
educated nationals of colonial and post-colonial powers self-consciously travelling
outward, to the edges of the world, in order to encounter, describe and explicate what
human society and culture looks like at its margins. The sense in which the societies
anthropologists went out to study were marginal was, of course, itself part of the
anthropological debate. In particular, while nineteenth century evolutionism conceived
the distance between civilized society and the savagery of people imagined as living at

its furthest reaches (geographically, economically, politically, etc.) as a matter of natural

differences, anthropologists spent much of the twentieth century showing that the
distance between their own society and those which they studied was itself social and
cultural. This involved developing a series of axes along which these socio-cultural
differences could be articulated: primitive/advanced, simple/complex, stateless/state, preor non-literate/literate, pre- or non-modern/modern, myth/history, magic/science or
perhaps the most encompassing master contrast of alltradition/modernity.
Not unlike the evolutionist matrices of natural stages of socio-cultural
development they purported to replace, then, these classical master contrasts presented an
image of the world as a totality, marking its dimensions outwards, from the familiar
center, namely modern life as we know it, towards a socio-cultural series of differently
construed unfamiliar margins. This is to say that, in its classic ethnological rendition,
anthropology was itself an exercise in cosmology through and through, projecting human
being concentrically and spatio-temporally along a social and cultural gradient, stretching
outwards from a series of civilized centers. Indeed, rather like cosmologists proper (viz.
theoretical physicists), anthropologists imagined themselves as charting the outer reaches
of the social universeits very horizonsin order to better theorize the whole. Only for
these anthropologists (Mary Douglas included), the universe consisted of the varied
social and cultural manifestations that make up humanity as a globally juxtaposed domain
of investigation. Central to this whole was a modern core that was organizationally
complex and more or less culturally homogenoussplit epicentrally but still
predominantly unitedwhilst, marginally, on the periphery of exploration, commerce
and governance, this same whole curled inwards in myriad places, organizationally
similar (as worlds or totalities), but culturally differentiating and diverse. This was the
cosmological picture that emerged from the classical ethnological period of anthropology.

Historians of ideas have much to say about how this image of a human cosmos
relates to broader arcs of thinking, including monotheistic conceptions of divine creation
and providence, Enlightenment images of the uniformity of nature, and the Romantic
enchantment with the diversities of human genius (e.g. Dupr 1993; McGrane 1989).
Here, however, we may note only that, based on an ontology of a uniform nature subject
to a diversity of cultural viewpoints, this image provided also the framework for the
anthropological study of indigenous cosmologies, as well as a template for their overall
shape. In particular, it framed the study of indigenous cosmologies with reference to what
we may call a topology of reflexive ethnocentrism. According to this image, the human
cosmos marks out a particular kind of space whose chief peculiarity is that it contains
within itself multiple perspectives on itselfit is in this sense a reflexive space.
Conceived as cultures, collective representations, symbolic systems and so on, these
perspectives on the worldeach of them a whole unto itselfare themselves deemed
to be rooted in particular parts of the human world, designated as societies or other scales
of grouping.ii Different social groupings may support different cultural perspectives, so
each ethnos, in that metaphoric sense, provides a center unto itself.
It follows that, conceived as a cosmological project, anthropologys attempt to
chart the horizons of the human world is just one actualization of the vast cosmological
potential this topology is able to engender. For if the human world is imagined as
reflexively ethnocentric in this way, with each part of the world (each society) being able
to generate a whole perspective of its own (culture or, as it is also said, worldview),
then one can also ask what account each of these perspectives might provide of the world
as such, which is to say as a whole topos, populated by particular kinds of entities,
organized in specific ways and according to their own dimensions and proportions. In this
way, providing accounts of such indigenous cosmologies became an integral part of an

anthropology that imagined itself as charting the reflexive horizons of the human cosmos
overall. Indeed, it became well-nigh indispensable to pursue this line of investigation,
since such cosmologies were thought to provide the overall coordinates within which the
people anthropologists studied conceived of themselves and their social practices. Thus,
to take just two classic examples, Trobriand Islanders conceived of their social
organization with reference to spatio-temporal ideas about the auto-regeneration of
insular spirits and totemic origins in the ground (Malinowski 1948); whilst Tallensi
understood kinship not just in terms of immediate face-to-face relations between kin and
affines but also in terms of founding ancestrors who still resided in groves or caves in
surrounding space (Fortes 1987).
This way of construing the nature of indigenous cosmologies has two corollaries
that we would argue are key to the story of the apparent demise of this anthropological
preoccupation in recent years. Firstly, the study of indigenous cosmology was necessarily
conceived as an exercise in holism, and this in two related senses. On the one hand, at the
level of method, cosmology is conceived as a particular part of the total cultural
perspective any given society might generate, to be understood alongside all those
elements that go together to make the society in question an organic wholekinship,
social and political organization, economic arrangements, ritual practices, and so on. On
the other hand, with respect to its contents, indigenous cosmology was also whole unto
itself, inasmuch as its role is taken to be that of presenting an account of the indigenous
cultural perspective conceived as a wholepar excellence, a discourse about the ultimate
horizons of what people variably take to be the world. Indigenous cosmology, one
might even say in short, is that part of the total culture whose role it is to totalize it.
A second consequence of the reflexive ethnocentrism of classical takes on
indigenous cosmology has to do with the hierarchical way in which it orders different

perspectives on the world, and particularly the superiority it accords to the cosmological
project of the anthropologists at the expense of those of the people they study. True, the
ethnocentric character of anthropologists cosmology consists in the fact that each
society is able generate its own image of the world, constituting a center unto itself. So in
this sense all cultural perspectives are equal. Still, the very set-up of this cosmology does
imply that some cultural perspectives are more equal than others. For if what holds this
image together is the idea of a single and uniform world (i.e. nature, including human
nature) that acts as both ground and object for the diverse perspectives different societies
may take within and upon it, it follows that such perspectives can be ranked in relation to
how far they partake of this a priori grounding and actually get the world right (Holbraad
2012: 18-34; Latour 1993a). And in this respect anthropologists have a constitutive
advantage over the people they study since it is they who delineate cosmologically the
conditions of existence of all marginal cosmologies, setting constraints upon the ways in
which alternative images of the world can play out in their own terms in the polycosmological cosmos set up by classical anthropology. Construed as a science, which is
to say as part of the broader project of systematically developing authoritatively accurate
representations of the world, anthropology sees itself as being in the business of
describing the real (human) world. And, from first anthropological/cosmological
principles (so to speak), this involved describing a series of alternative images of the
world (indigenous cosmologies) which to varying extents were manifestly fanciful, even
though valid at their own cosmic locus, meaning in their own right. The master contrasts
of classical anthropology (tradition/modernity and so on) lend analytical weight to this
basicand for most of the twentieth. century self-evidenthierarchy of perspectives.
It goes without saying that deciding how to deal with this implication of
anthropologys cosmology of the human has been at the core of much theoretical debate

within the discipline more or less from its inceptionevolutionism versus diffusionism,
universalism versus relativism, realism versus constructivism and so forth. While we
cannot enter into these larger debates here, it is worth remarking that the status of
indigenous cosmologies vis a vis Western science was for long one of the principal
arenas in which these tense implications were played out, and not least when it came to
disputes over the so-called rationality of indigenous beliefs, which reached their peak
in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Wilson 1974; Horton and Finnegan 1973). That this should
be so is hardly surprising, though not so much because of the putatively quasi-scientific
nature of indigenous cosmologies (e.g. Horton 1967), we would argue, but rather due to
the thoroughly cosmological character of scienceand not least anthropology itself, as
we have seen. Be that as it may, the fact is that, due to the very cosmological set up
within which indigenous cosmologies were conceptualized by anthropologists, their
variously fanciful, less-than-true character was felt to be the abiding theoretical problem
that they presented. Even cultural relativism, with its refusal to pass analytical judgement
on the veracity of one cosmology over another whilst nonetheless framing the groundrules within which a fanciful cosmology might validly play out, is itself partly a response
to just this problemalbeit a particularly laissez faire one (see also Overing 1985).iii
The standard response to the problem of indigenous cosmological fancy, however,
was to reduce it. Indeed, as if to demonstrate how abiding the problem has traditionally
been for anthropologists, one could even pin-point the most distinctive features of the
main theoretical currents in twentieth century anthropology with reference to the
particular ways in which they referred indigenous beliefs with their cosmological
foundations to some other, ostensibly more real level of explanation. Basic human needs
(functionalism), moral and socio-political order and reproduction (structuralfunctionalism), ecological adaptation (cultural materialism), individual agency

(methodological individualism) the expression of underlying social values

(interpretativism, symbolism) or social relations (practice theory) even of a gestalt
personality (culture and personality school), ideology and false consciousness (Marxism):
all of these classic anthropological positions and more were posited at different times as
competing explanations as to why societies the world over set such great store in
imagining the totality of the world in ways that have to be recognized as false. It is
telling, in fact, that even anthropologists who have been most inclined to take indigenous
cosmologies seriously enough to use them as a baseline for (rather than merely an object
of) anthropological theorization, such as Claude Lvi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins or Mary
Douglas herself, have sometimes felt the need ultimately to ground indigenous
cosmological reckonings in levels of analysis that could be recognised as really realthe
underlying binary structures of the human mind for Lvi-Strauss (1963), the unfolding of
universal history and its local structures of conjuncture for Sahlins (1985), or the abiding
social and cognitive formations of group and grid for Douglas (1970).
Now, the relative demise of anthropologists concern with indigenous
cosmologies in recent decades (roughly from the 1980s onwards) could be recounted as a
story of the ascending dominance of just this kind of reductive impulsethe tendency, if
one wills, to refer indigenous ways of imagining the world to cosmos yes, but to
constituents of the cosmos that we, as anthropologists, could recognize as real. On such
an interpretation, the very notion of cosmology has simply collapsed under the pressure
of increasingly sophisticated and convincing modes of analysis that locate explanatory
powerthe action of analysiselsewhere. The rise of cognitive anthropology in this
period would perhaps provide the most obvious example of a straightforward reduction
of this kindqua representations of the world, peoples cosmological reckonings are
examples of cognitive processes at work in the human brain, so cosmological thinking is

10

best understood not in its own terms but with reference to the brain processes it
instantiates (e.g. Sperber 1985; Boyer 1994; Whitehouse 2000). Conversely, moving in
the opposite direction, analyses one could group under the banner of new political
economy have tended to treat putatively local cosmologies as functions of ostensibly
larger, world-wide processes, such as the world system, empire, modernity,
capitalism, and so forth. Transfiguring the anthropological cosmology of a global
human world that is already cosmologically differentiated and folded back on its margins,
these approaches present indigenous cosmologies as inventive reactions to, or refractions
of, more encompassingand in that sense also more realglobal processes (e.g. Boddy
1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Geschiere 1997; cf. Englund and Leach 2000).
Finally, for its part, Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been performing similar forms of
analytical displacement, though arguably for exactly the opposite reasons. Refusing as a
matter of first methodological principle to accord more significance or explanatory power
to any one part of the world over another (and hence opposed to all forms of reduction
see Latour 1993b), ANT theorists treat all datafrom an irritating pebble in ones shoe
to world banking or to the dogma of the Holy Trinityas myriad elements that can make
differences to each other through relations of determinate forms. Any added importance
cosmological discourses might claim for themselves (as they so often do) therefore,
becomes just a further local element to be described in its relations with others in the
network (e.g. Latour 2010; cf. Tsing 2010 and Holbraad 2004), possessing an efficacy
accorded not by its categorical imaginaries but by the myriad over-determinations of the
network.
In each of these trends of thinking, so prominent in the past 20 years or so,
indigenous cosmologies become partial, contingent, local, transient, neutered and
ultimately epiphenomenal to something else. Still, we would argue that, though

11

accounting for cosmologys declining stock in anthropological analysis in recent years,

this theoretical displacement does not do justice to the rather more complex and
ambivalent stance that anthropology overall has taken towards the idea and analysis of
cosmology. Note, after all, that concern with cosmology has hardly disappeared. Indeed,
while senior scholars who had a stake in articulating cosmologically-oriented approaches
in the past continue to expand on this work (e.g. de Coppet and Iteanu 1995; Schrempp
1992; Humphrey 1997; Sahlins 2004; Descola 2005; Handelman 2008; Kapferer 2010;
Viveiros de Castro 2012) , a number of younger researchers are taking the agenda
forward in different ways (e.g. Scott 2007; Willerslev 2007; Pedersen 2011; for a most
recent collection, see Da Col and Humphrey 2012) call this cosmologys second wind.
One could even argue that, if anything, the fact that cosmology has been so unfashionable
for so long has made its theoretical prosecution something of an iconoclastic exercise,
attractive to those who, with various degrees of self-consciousness, like to swim against
the current. (The present article, we may admit, is written a little in this spirit.).
This persistent ambivalence, we suggest, can be understood with reference to the
rather battered state in which the anthropological cosmology of one-world-many-worldviews finds itself today. Under the influence of a heterogeneous set of critical turns
which have gained hold of the discipline from the 1980s onwards (e.g. the so-called crisis
of representation, postcolonial theory, postmodern reverie, the rise of phenomenology
and embodiment, practice theory, as well the variously reductive trends mentioned
earlier), it has become increasingly difficult to pledge allegiance to the classical agenda
of comparative research in anthropology without in the same breath, at least, offering a
series of self-censuring provisos. Crucially for our argument, the two vital corollaries of
the reflexively ethnocentric topology on which research on indigenous cosmologies
reliednamely holism and the hierarchy of modern us over primitive themhave

12

both become big disciplinary no-nos. So since in its classical rendition the very notion of
indigenous cosmology presupposed forms of holism and cross-cultural hierarchy as we
saw, the sustained attack on these corollaries of the classical approach has tended to take
cosmology down too by way of collateral damage, so to speak. In this intellectual
climate, cosmology just feels wrong.iv
Indeed, the ambivalence towards cosmology, and even the persistence of its study
in some quarters as we saw, can be understood with reference to the very partial and often
altogether unprincipled or even incoherent character of the prevalent attitudes towards
holism and us/them talk. For while many of these critiques are by now well taken, they
have rarely been accompanied by a concerted critique, let alone a systematic
reconstitution, of the cosmological matrix which situates them and of which they are a
function, namely the modern dispositif of a single world subject to plural worldviews. It
is telling of this confusion, for example, that aversion to holism and the cross-cultural
authority of science is typically professed on grounds of some variant of cultural
relativism or social constructionismboth theoretical options that work very much
within the cosmological coordinates that engender holism and hierarchy in the first place.
One wayindeed the royal wayout of this predicament of half-measured
ambivalence towards indigenous cosmologies would be to advance, precisely, a
thoroughgoing experimentation with anthropological cosmology itself. Indeed, such lines
of research have been developing for some time now, with a number of anthropologists
exploring the recursive effects that ethnographic materials can have on the very terms in
which they are analyzed, including, most fundamentally perhaps, the world/worldviews
matrix (e.g. Wagner 1981; Strathern 1988; Crook 2007). In this connection, it would be
most relevant to explore the ways in which other indigenous cosmological reckonings can
provide analytical leverages for such recursive experimentation with the very

13

infrastructure of anthropological research itself (e.g. Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2011;

Holbraad 2012).
Given space constraints, however, here we limit ourselves to presenting some
thoughts on what cosmologically oriented approaches could look like in the wake of the
aforementioned critiques. For, as we propose to show, there is no need to throw the
cosmological baby out with their bathwater: anthropological interest in cosmology can be
thoroughly de-coupled from its traditional association with holism and us/them
hierarchies. Indeed, recognising this does more than merely render the concept of
cosmology fit for contemporary anthropological purposes. For, as we shall argue, there is
an important sense in which a concern with cosmology is more apposite to the
contemporary world than it ever was to putatively primitive ones. In close correlation
with political and economic shifts that have taken place since the 1970s (broadly
speaking, from what we, following James Scott (1999), call high modernity to neoliberalism), a new cosmological sensibility has begun to emerge a new orientation
towards the cosmos, generating novel ways of being concerned with it. In the next section
we begin by briefly sketching the features of this reorientation in historical terms,
identifying the emergence of newly immediate relationships with the cosmos as a
defining feature of the late and liquid modernity of neo-liberalism. The crux of the
argument is that, for the most part, high modernity was constitutionally bi-cosmological,
and that contemporary so-called neo-liberal displacements in particular have begun to
simplify the structure, such that, more than ever before and in a sense we shall explain,
humans are now thrown into cosmos. We then go on to outline programmatically the
fresh anthropological terrain opened up by this change in cosmological sensibility a
terrain upon which older insights confidently return to the fore and new objects
cautiously emerge.

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From High Modernity to Neo-Liberal Orders: Re-Connecting with Cosmos

So, in what sense was high modernity cosmologically duplicated and polarized? And how
is this polarization now transforming? In sum, the doubling of cosmos in high modernity
reflected a separation between, on the one hand, dedicated cosmological thinkingor
cosmology-making (Barth 1990)at the official but highly specialised and socially
exclusive level, where scientists were asked to interrogate cosmos; and, on the other,
much more subsumed and politically circumscribed concerns with cosmology at the level
of modernist ideology, practice and organization. As Alexandre Koyr showed in his
landmark history of modern cosmology (1957), the official level was occupied by
physicists, astronomers and philosophers who gave real meaning to the Renaissance by
delivering a new cosmos from the womb of the medieval world. The latter was
configured as a vaulted whole, enclosed by Heaven above and Hell below, and by a God
who clasped the whole close to and within him. Within this whole, everything of
astronomical significance revolved around The Earth conceived as the privileged
planetary dwelling of human beings, and it was within the compressed, hierarchical
ordering of this whole from above that entities held fixed (rather than accidental)
relations with one another (Lovejoy 1936). Moreover, within this structure, God himself
was finitely and anthropomorphically conceived.
By contrast, Koyr shows, the modern revolution progressively dismantled the
sacred figure and the power that enforced this closure. It spiritualized and then abolished
the god-head, de-centering cosmos as a whole by firstly promoting the sun, and then by
cutting loose the heliocentric system itself within an open and expanding universe.
Contrary to Newtons belief, nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics then came to

15

theorize the absence of any immanent force that could ultimately reverse the entropy of
matter and energy within the universe, leaving in situ no guarantee of harmonious process
that would routinely tip the earthly balance in favour of integration as opposed to chaos.v
Now, whilst this physical thinking has carried the status of received cosmological
wisdom for the best part of a century, even for literate and curious classes its meaning has
largely remained obscure. From the theory of relativity to black holes, from quantum
theory to Schrdingers Cat, from electrons to the God particle, such crucial
propositions on the nature of Being have attracted fascination in, more or less, inverse
proportion to their comprehension. In effect, their understanding has mainly transposed
into a general knowledge of heroic names and momentous events, achieving supremacy
at the level of science, iconic celebrity at the level of popular culture, and yet minimal
penetration at the level of grassroots cosmology.
This, as Toulmin has also argued (1992), was because the official cosmology of
modernity was culturally marginalized at the heart of the social systemof Societyby
the contrary pressure exerted upon it by a generalized progressive consciousness. At
heart, cosmological open-ness was redacted because, axiomatically and at every level,
Progress gradually aggregated matter, exempting natural (including social) formations
from the centrifugal chaos of cosmic contingency. In fact, the immense power of the
Principle of Progress was to endow modern subjects with the unquestioned sense that, as
enlightened actors, they could rationally institute Society (and History) in the same way
as God synthetically created the Heavens and the Earth, and that they could re-make
Human Beings through Society as He made them in the first place. This taken-for-granted
eternal return to Creation at the grassroots of high modernity would be continuously
secured through the illusion of an hermetic sealing of rational practice from disruptive
context (namely from accidents, side-effects, subjectivities, criminalities, insanities),

16

mirroring microcosmically high modernitys exemption of humankind from the infinite

open-ness of the physicists universe, which could in turn be astronomically externalized.
Essentially, thereby, the dual cosmology of high modernity involved the reproduction of
an essentially medieval closure of the world at the heart of high modernity, inwardly
functioning as Society whose most providential expression was the State itself (Hegel
1929), beneath the more cerebrally unconfined cosmology of an infinite, open universe,
the study of which was deemed as the esoteric pursuit of a limited elite of natural
scientistsindeed cosmologists.
It is the unraveling of this duality, we argue, and, in particular, the significant
weakening of the medieval residue at the heart of Society, that establishes a new
cosmological orientation in the West (which remains the heartland of anthropological
practice), and which underpins the sense that modernity has somehow entered a
distinctive new phase that is post, late or liquid. What is the pattern of this unraveling?
What cultural effects does it promote? What does it suggest for cosmologically-conscious
anthropology? Answering these questions discloses several anthropological possibilities,
of which we shall trace three in particular, albeit briefly and in a strictly programmatic
way.
The first directs attention to the structure of the conjuncture (sensu Sahlins
1985) in which cosmological re-orientation begins to occur. We can hypothesize that the
neo-liberalization of political space historically provokes this re-orientation, setting a
stable and recurrent pattern in which contemporary subjects begin to feel
spatiotemporally relocated. How so? How does a strident political economy of
supposedly unfettered social relations open out onto an infinite universe to become a
salient life-world in the process? In many texts, anthropological ones amongst them, neoliberalism dolefully means the commodification of everything, the consequent reduction

17

of all human value to price, and the hyper-individualization of agency. True enough.
However, we can, if we theorize beyond the social categories of this conscious model,
also register a more profoundbecause more ramifyingspatiotemporal consequence of
this politico-economic re-arrangement. Indeed, the crucial effect, produced systemically
by economic de-regulation and tacit de-nationalization, is for populations to feel not only
severed from traditional communities (Giddens 1991) and receding homelands (Clifford
1997), but also to feel inchoately thrown into a world without limits (Heidegger 1962):
in effect, to be cast into a space that is no longer vaulted by the State above and by the
Nation below. The result is that, with the much-vaunted death of Society, the social
becomes part of an ill-definable felt infinity which can be portrayed in many registers, all
of them allowing for the possibilityand in some cases the inescapabilityof significant
continuities with the immensities of cosmic process (out there) as well with its allpervasive nanosphere (in here).
Examples of this sense of being cut loose and cast out into an indeterminate space
can be drawn from traditional subject areas in anthropology as well as in fields freshly
opened up by new technologies, perceptions and experiences. In the field of religion, for
instance, Western worshippers find themselves decreasingly drawn towards a
sacredness that emanates from, and gravitates towards, some elevated altar-piece or
architectural center. Rather, a new religious binary tends to emerge that, at the one pole,
opens up to the maternal flows and energies of Earth, Sky, Sea and Mountain (The New
Age), and at the other, allows for penetration by the overflowing paternity of Spirit (e.g.
in Pentecostal churches). These new religions rely upon amorphous redeemers in Nature
and Heaven with energies that are not easily contained by either heroic personification or
sacred building and which may well ecologically overflow to attain regular apotheoses in
forests, rivers (Baptist as well as New Age!) as well as in the market-place. The

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sacredness of these redemptive agencies seems much more at home in an infinite cosmos
of myriad openings and flows than in a human-directed dei-sphere that is typically set
aside from the profanities of flesh or lucre.
Similarly, the Western body also now seems more open to cosmic cause and
affordance. Sick buildings mysteriously transmit spectral affect over and above the
rigorous materiality of their architectural design. Pathological pylons, tumor-inducing
phones and leukaemia-producing sub-stations generate putatively new illnesses that are
credibly attributed to concentrations of waves, particles and rays. Whilst, on positive
axes, extreme performers begin to both stretch athletic prowess beyond the staid confines
of the arena and lidoto the mountain, to the desert, to wild waters, to simulated
journeys to Mars, to space-stationsand, in reverse, to bring cosmic unboundedness
subversively into the organized symmetry of the city. This happens increasingly when
marathon-runners, free-runners and skate-boarders all in their own ways undo the
integrity of purpose-built walls, slopes and edges, pulling them onto the precarious planes
of their own technical kinetics. In the process, the Euclidian geometry of the city is prised
apart to accommodate new body practices, and the cityas well as venues made up of
distant ecosystemsis invited to re-connect with the perilous curl and swirl of the
essentially undisciplined universe.
It is worth noting that these emergent anthropological concerns make no virtue of
a putative necessity to associate cosmology with the bounded worlds of the nonmodern. To the contrary, it is precisely the heightened cosmic investments of late
modernity that thrusts them onto the anthropological agenda, discarding earlier fixations
with holism and the characterisation of cosmology as a practice of exotic others.
Cosmology, on this argument, becomes peculiarly our game, where the us designates

19

that complex and multiply differentiated and variegated collectivity of all those who,
across the globe, must live their lives amidst contemporary neo-liberal orders.
This goes just as much for a second terrain for anthropological attention in the
midst of these contemporary shifts, namely research on the explicit production and
consumption of cosmology per se. This occurs, of course, not just at professionally
official sites like NASA, CERN, university physics departments, museums, theological
seminaries, film studiossome of which loci will be ethnographically off-limitsbut
increasingly amongst both passionate amateurs and grassroots consumers. In fact, whilst
anthropology has borne witness repeatedly to the elaborate cosmoi and cosmologymaking of informants abroad, of its own cosmos it has had very little to say (for reasons
explained in the last section). The situation begins to change though when, from inside a
social realm that increasingly opens out onto cosmos, increasing numbers of people begin
to engage with it.
Take popular engagements with the solar system as just one example. Already an
influential field in Europe and America, amateur astronomy is now burgeoning. Thus:
Amazon has reported a 500% increase in telescope salesand subscriptions to amateur
astronomy magazines, such as the BBCs Sky At Night are rocketing (McKie, The
Guardian 21st January 2012). Often obsessive to be sure, these lay scientists respond not
only to the traditional lure of discovering and naming new stars and planets (and, thereby,
of placing themselves celestially), but also, increasingly, to invitations by real
astronomers to take crucial measurements by proxy. Undoubtedly, the rise and rise of
popular astronomy reflects the almost daily media coverage of discovery in the heavens
and in the (Hadron) collider. TV cosmologists become household names. Big Bang, dark
matter, black hole books proliferate. New newspapers run cosmology columns that begin

20

to displace traditional horoscopes whilst, bolstered by dyspeptic attitudes to Science,

astrology itself remains in good health (Willis and Curry 2004; Schrempp 2012).
Moreover, at the wackierbut even more popularend, surveys show that
the bulk of modern populations confidently expect (and want) that life will be found
elsewhere in the universe (Battaglia 2005) and many amateurs spend hours of their
life helping professional listeners listen for it under the very respectable auspices of
SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Institute), indicating a prevalent estimation that
life on Earth is special but not that special. More conventionally, new big powers
(India, China) predictably compete (once again) to put humans on The Moon, whilst
old big powers continue to probe, photograph and sample the mineral content of the
universe and even plot lunar agricultural colonies. The privately established Artemis
Project writes on its website: As the lunar outpost develops and a permanent
population is established, it will no longer be acceptable to import food from earth.
(http://www.asi.org/adb/02/12/01/ accessed 03/082012)
In this new conjuncture, anthropology has a lot of catching up to do in matching
popular interest in cosmos and tracking developments on the new periphery, and so
deepening comparisons with the cosmological compulsions of others. In effect, guided by
a new sensibility, an exotic ethnography of outer space begins to be transformed into an
anthropology of open universe whose status is simultaneously real, imagined,
fictionalized but, above all, here and now.
We can hypothesize that a new cosmological sensibility in the anthropological
heartlands sensitizes the ethnographic impulse towards cosmological sensibilities
everywhere. Consequently, our third anthropological possibility re-directs the couplet of
theory and ethnography once again to the margins of modern governance where, in both
distributed populations and tight-knit communities, becoming modern and striving for

21

greater worldliness nonetheless remain projects, strongly intertwined with primordial

frames that have irreducibly cosmological dimensions. So that, whilst for many
anthropologists the indigenous cosmos will forever be a largely powerless representation,
the resonant trend at the theoretical center of the discipline is even more ethnographically
attuned to the plethora of ways in which foreign forms (e.g. mines, money, medicines,
white persons, white gods) are not only incorporated into customary ways of life but are
radically re-signified within and through existing worldviews and cosmologies (e.g.
Sahlins 1981; Taussig 1983; Hutchinson 1996; Kirsch 2006).
One notes that the cosmological inflection in studies of globalization since the
1970s has productively bifurcated. One set of tracks leads to loci at which emergent
modernities are predominantly indigenized. In these spaces, whatever messages cling to
modern values are muted or silenced precisely by their metaphorical myth-recognition in
life-worlds that limit real value to primordial truth and its cosmogonic renewal. In these
systems, people veritably know, and what they do not know is either open to oracular
divination through some special portal of the known, or is too unimportant to bother with.
By contrast, the other set of tracks leads to worlds which, at their extremities and in their
deepest recesses, may be murky, unclear, unfinished and elusive not just to outsiders
(such as the ethnographer) but also to their inhabitants. It is precisely in such quasiintractable realms that cosmos becomes critical as the space in which truth was only ever
partly revealed and within which it must be continually quested, divined and inventively
fixed for a time (Wagner 1981, 2010).
In the hierarchical, poly-cosmological image of classical anthropology with which
we began this article, the periphery was effectively treated as though it was built to
perfectly submit to the knowledge centers/glands of both local subjects and
anthropological authorities. Where it was perceived not to, the periphery was

22

cosmologically disordered, brutish, recessive and utterly subject to the moral and
physical disintegration that Joseph Conrad depicted for Africa, as it is assumed,vi in Heart
of Darkness (1990) and as Michael Taussig portrayed for the Amazon (1987). In the new
conjuncture we have sought to delineate, however, a re-acknowledgement of an open
universe and its cultural history leads, on the one hand, to complex and positive
understandings of what may well turn out to be epistemic murk (Taussig 1987) on the
periphery but, on the other hand, also to an appreciation that uncertainty itself is a
determinate effect of what one knows and that anthropologists need not necessarily
anticipate for elsewhere, therefore, emergent modernities with either closed or open
universes.
The second wind of interest in the study of indigenous cosmologies that
anthropology is now experiencing, as we have suggested, can itself be placed in the
context of this late modern investment in cosmology tout court. Once again, it seems, the
anthropological imagination is being captured by that of the natives which is to say, our
informants. Only that now cosmology is no longer assumed to connote a dedicated
cultural domain reserved for total, totalising and always exotic discourses about the world
as such, that may act either as the base-line for cultural explanation or otherwise
become itself the object of explanatory reduction. Rather, what distinguishes some of the
most compelling writings in contemporary anthropology is a spirit of abiding
experimentation with matters cosmological, carving novel ethnographic and analytical
terrains out of their multiple and ever emergent imbrications with other dimensions
peoples lives. The Vietnam war seen (also) from the point of view of its ghosts (Kwon
2008); hierarchies of global development as a function of axial cosmologies of the
transcendence of heaven (Robbins 2009); the formation of cosmos through the humour of
hunting and shamanism (Willerslev and Pedersen 2010); Afro-Cuban spirits and sorcerers

23

as affective societies (Ochoa 2010); post-socialist society in Mongolia as a shamanic

spirit world (Pedersen 2011); nomadic motility as an exercise in harnessing fortune
(Empson 2011); the cosmogonic effects of material practices (Tassi and Espirito Santo
2012); the cosmological coordinates of drug-smuggling in the Andes (Kernaghan in
press). For studies such as these, to even raise the question of holism (let alone a
hierarchy of distinct worldviews) as anything other than a moot ethnographic question
(as opposed to an analytical predilection) is altogether a category mistake.

Conclusion
There are three things that an anthropological program for contemporary cosmological
study cannot be. Firstly, whilst it broadens the investigation of an infinitely open,
expanding cosmos, the study must refrain from generalizing the de-centered concept of
an open, expanding universe to all modernities. Emerging modernities sit in a variety of
relations to pre-existing and transforming cosmological visions and these emergences are
the subject of particular ethnographic probes. Secondly, where political relations have
been transformed in ways that can be described as neo-liberal, the study is decisively not
the comparative cataloguing of neo-liberal cosmology, establishing correlations to
justify or express corresponding dominant political relations. Rather, the premise is that
neo-liberal mutations in politics introduce cleavages that significantly re-orient
populations within existing cosmological fields, making transformations in the social
imagination of the local cosmos (and, subsequently, all cosmoi) probable. And, thirdly,
the study also cannot proceed from the conclusion that, in the radical opening of modern
social relations to an expanding cosmos, all that remains for the social imaginary is flow,
flux, fold, wave, particle and energy, passing through human subjects as if they were
merely spectral presences, unable to either impede or react. In truth, the range of

24

ethnographic and sociological data supports the contention that, from imagination to act,
what is cosmically specific about social relations and social subjects is that they can as
equally cohere/organize substance and energy as institutions with their own local
horizons as they can dissociate them and dissolve themselves into streams or planes of
consistency (Deleuze and Guatarri 2004), merging with the most distant of horizons.
This must mean that, as social actors imagine themselves to be in cosmos, so do they
imagine determinate, yet alterable, horizons for the specific beings they are.
That all social relations are positioned and grounded in cosmos is, therefore,
incontestable. That in all social relations there is some recognition of this grounding, is
likely but is a matter of anthropological investigation. That now is an opportune time for
anthropologists to intensify investigations into the cultural articulation and social setting
of cosmological awareness and knowledge is the principal claim of this essay.

25

BIOS
Allen Abramson teaches social anthropology at University College London, where he
co-directs the Cosmology, Ontology, Religion and Culture Research Group (CROC).
He has published widely on myth, ritual and gender in Oceania and on risk and
cultural transformation in Britain, and is co-editor of Land, Law and Value: Mythical
Lands, Legal Boundaries (Pluto Press, 2000)

Martin Holbraad teaches social anthropology at University College London, where he

co-directs the Cosmology, Ontology, Religion and Culture Research Group (CROC).
He conducts ethnographic fieldwork on religion and socialism in Cuba and is author
of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago,
2012).

26

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i Broadening its remit somewhat in line with the development of graduate students interests, the group
has since been renamed as CROCthe Cosmology, Ontology, Religion and Culture Research Group.
In May 2011 at UCL, CROC held an international workshop on the theme Contemporary Cosmologies
and the Cultural Imagination, bringing together anthropologists whose work takes notions of
cosmology seriously in diverse ways. The present article also represents a first attempt to provide a
perspective on the deliberations of that workshop and will form the basis of our introduction to an
edited volume, provisionally titled Contemporary Cosmologies: Critical Re-Imaginings in
Anthropological Theory and Analysis, which is based on the proceedings of the workshop.
ii Scaling upwards, such social units may start from socially significant individuals or families, through
clans and tribes, hamlets and villages, classes and social strata, to language groups, cultural regions,
nations or even whole continents.
iii
To get a sense of how timid anthropologists relativism actually is only needs to consider the
disciplinary censorship visited on those who have seriously flirted with asserting the reality credentials
of indigenous cosmologies the controversies surrounding the work of Carlos Castaneda (1968; cf. de
Mille 1976) and Marcel Griaule (1975; cf. van Beek 1991) provide stark examples of this.
iv
See Chu 2010: 6 for an example of the careful embarrassment with which anthropologist now feel
they must appeal to the term
v In twentieth-century physical orthodoxy, this overriding instability of form and identity would pertain
to even the most basic categories of mass, space, speed, and time. For not only would each of these
basic ontological variables lawfully co-vary (as Newton theorized) in ways that could be attributable to
God in deistic frames, but the very law of their interrelations came to be seen as being variable and
relative to different ranges of space-time (as predicted by the theories of relativity.
vi
Conrad never names Africa in the book itself though it is telling that generations of readers have
assumed that Africa is where the story takes place.

36