Huon Wardle

In conversation, and in the company of a new generation of scholars working in the field, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle re-explore the terrain and meaning of cosmopolitan studies now. This book offers a new survey and theorisation of cosmopolitan research, a burgeoning topic responding to increasingly complex patterns of human interaction in world society. It considers the question of cosmopolitan methodology: What are the methods needed for, or elicited by, studying cosmopolitan situations? And how are we to remain faithful to the heteronomous human interiority and intentionality from which cosmopolitan moments are constructed? The volume focuses on the open-ended moment of ethnographic fieldwork that generates the concepts and methods needed to understand contemporary cosmopolitanisation. The chapters cover a wide range of ethnographic situations and open up debate on what are the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its exploration of human difference and commonality.

The task the editors set themselves with this Handbook of Existential Human Science has been to map out and bring together the questions, cases and concepts that need to be discussed if a distinctively existential form of enquiry is to emerge more fully in the human sciences. We write this at a time when human lives are more interconnected than ever before, and human individuals have greater potential to change their world, for better or worse, than at any time in history. As such, this work is perhaps a more experimental and tentative exercise than the type of handbook that provides a comprehensive overview of a particular field of study. Certain chapters here talk of the enticing 'prospect', rather than the established fact, of an existential approach in their field.
What we mean by existential human science involves something other than simply operationalising the thought of the midtwentieth-century existentialists. Across 24 chapters, we attempt to trace out the task of existential enquiry in its full diversity of aims and outcomes. Even so, we also always return readers to a narrower thematic base, because, for the editors, the existential view involves a specific type of concern. The focus might be framed as a question: How to understand the irreducible living breathing human individual who is both a subject and an object in its own world, and whose life is 'noninterchangeable' with the lives of the other human beings around it?

When we wrote the first edition of this book, more than a decade ago, we envisaged it as a tool that would help newcomers gain a better understanding of the ethnographic tradition in anthropology. Reflexively, we envisaged ourselves writing an ethnography of ethnography that would unpack complex cultural assumptions underlying this type of knowledge. There was a key background concern for us. We had begun our careers in social anthropology in the 1980s at a moment of extraordinary foment around the status and validity of anthropology (the discipline) and ethnography (the method).

Human beings can be found everywhere (Piette) and the true subject of anthropology is anyone (Rapport). What do we need to do to our epistemology and practice to reframe anthropology in existential and cosmopolitan terms? This paper explores processes of cosmology- and society-making through an existential and cosmopolitan epistemology and axiology. We can reenlist classic anthropological discussions on magic to understand how subjects generate a Society into which they insert themselves as creative agents. Magical practice shows how Society is uniquely biographical and personal, and that subjectivity is an irreducible and ‘in-additive’ source of social and cosmological structure. Cosmopolitan anthropology describes, then, encounters of ‘non-interchangeable’ (Kneubuhler) biographical selves meeting in and constructing world-space; different selves on diverse cosmopolitanizing trajectories engage in divergent biographical worldmaking practices. In this light, cosmopolitan anthropology takes the form of analytic biography, tracing and retracing these unfoldings of self-orienting structure. Two radically distinct examples of subject-oriented cosmology-making are enlisted: Rastafari I-Yaric and Arrernte tjurunga knowledge.

anthropologists are in a position to observe and learn from are the biographical life pro- jects of the actual individuals they encounter and how these people go about constructing their world. Alfred Gell puts it this way:

"[T]he spaces of anthropology are those which are traversed by agents in the course of their biographies, be they narrow, or, as is becoming increasingly the case, wide or even world-wide. Anthropological relationships are real and biographically consequential ones, which articulate to the agent’s biographical ‘life project’."
(Gell 1998:11)

For Gell, anthropological relationships are best understood in terms of a ‘bio- graphical series entered into at different phases of the life cycle’ (1998:11).

By this measure, the cosmopolitan encounter is one that intersects with the Other at a particular ‘biographically consequential’ moment. We can give Gell’s words a different emphasis, though: anthropological relationships are real and biographically consequential insofar as they articulate with the agent’s biographical ‘life project’. Likewise, if anthropology is biographically organised (cf. Hart 2022), then this encourages us to ask about the materials from which the biographical project is being constructed. We may usefully break the issues down into three interconnected questions: In this situation, ‘what am I mak- ing (or structuring) myself out of and into (singularly)?’; ‘what are They making themselves out of and into (separately)?’; ‘what are We making ourselves out of and into (together)?’

If anthropology and its method, ethnography, are voices in a conversation about being human, what then does the prefix 'existential' add? One answer concerns how anthropology emerged historically and its changing aims. In the Age of Revolution, Kant opened a new meaning for anthropology when he redefined it as the study of what humans, as free-acting beings, make of themselves ([1798] 2006). Bracketing whatever might be biologically inherent ('craniums and their shape …', Firmin 2002, 6), Kant pointed not to the brain but instead to the structure of the human hand for insight into how 'the human being [is] not suited for one way of manipulating things but undetermined for every way, consequently suited for the use of reason' (2006, 228). What was crucial was the dimension of humanness that humans themselves learn freely to create following their own reasoning, what we usually call 'culture'. But his interest was less in culture in-itself than in the human capacity for making it, and how we make ourselves out of it imaginatively.

... Anthony Seeger, “Ethnography of Music” and Helen Myers, “Fieldwork” in Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, Helen Myers, ed ... Report #3: To be based on an interview with a student host or member of ... Assignment sheets explaining each of these projects in depth will be provided. ...

The Windrush scandal belongs to a much longer arc of Caribbean-British transmigration, forced and free. Th e genesis of the scandal can be found in the post-World War II period, when Caribbean migration was at fi rst strongly encouraged and then increasingly harshly constrained. Th is refl ection traces the eff ects of these changes as they were experienced in the lives of individuals and families. In the Caribbean this recent scandal is understood as extending the longer history of colonial relations between Britain and the Caribbean and as a further reason to demand reparations for slavery. Experiences of the Windrush generation recall the limbo dance of the middle passage; the dancer moves under a bar that is gradually lowered until a mere slit remains.

Character feels like an old fashioned analytic when compared to the sophisticated array of terms social scientists use--intersubjectivity, relational person and the like. When we say of someone that they have, or are, a 'character' what are we saying? This paper argues that 'character' is a useful term for pointing to some contradictions and complications we come up against in knowing other people and acknowledging their characteristics. It looks at this through some ethnographic notes on everyday Caribbean social life. The paper comes out of a conference organised by Adam Reed on Character at the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of St Andrews.

Windrush. As symbols go, this one should have an exuberant feel to it. Over recent decades in Britain an image of emigrants standing on the prow of a small troop ship, HMT Empire Windrush, in 1948 has grown into a singularly powerful symbol of how West Indians and their children came to Britain after World War II and changed British national life for the better. Recently, journalists have started to call them the ‘Windrush generation’.

And now, in the same year, there is also a Windrush scandal exposing the British government's treatment of many of the same group – people who, in a Kafkaesque scenario, cannot prove who they are under the laws of their home state.

When I first wrote about Caribbean Cosmopolitanism and the potential for ethnographies of cosmopolitanism in the 1990s the ideas involved perhaps seemed strange and out of place. Nowadays cosmopolitan perspectives in social inquiry and the notion of methodological cosmopolitanism are commonplace and ubiquitous. This essay looks at some of the theoretical contexts for that change in the study of the Caribbean and some of its implications. This is a contribution to the 2018 revised edition of Gerard Delanty's  Routledge Handbook in Cosmopolitan Studies.

At some point during February 1910, John Brown, came to the attention of the Foreign Office in London. Described in official documents as the ‘personal servant’ of English explorer Captain T.W. Whiffen, Brown had testified about acts of violence committed by Peruvian ‘captains’ against both Amerindians and ‘English subjects’ (West Indians) working in the Putumayo sector of the Amazon jungle.
  Despite Brown's claim to Captain Whiffen that he was a Barbadian, and later to Sir Roger Casement that he was a ‘native of Montserrat’, Brown was neither. He was not, in fact, even an ‘English subject’—not, that is to say, any type of denizen of the empire of His Majesty, King Edward the Seventh, yet, under this label, Brown would actively establish the facts about the Putumayo not only for Whiffen and Casement but for the international Consular Expedition that ensued.

abstract Revival Zionists – a small spiritist following in Jamaica – describe how their relations with spirits allow them to bring personal spiritual gifts to bear on every day or 'temporal' experience. Taking a hint from Kant that 'time itself does not change but only something which is in time', the article considers the timely logic of these 'gifts'. In a social-economic situation characterised by paucity of material resources but plenitude of labour-time, spiritual gifts reappear as a valued ground for a person's reputation. Likewise, we may also see them as one example of an attempt to organise the relationship between homo noumenon and homo temporalis.

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world-knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self-expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.

Résumé L'auteur examine la vie et l’œuvre de Carl Abrahams, artiste jamaïcain et « citoyen du monde ». En réponse à Gell, selon qui l'art doit être pensé comme une « technologie de l'enchantement », et à une approche plus large qui tente d'expliquer l'art en faisant référence au contexte culturel, l'article est axé sur la vision du monde, la Weltkenntnis propre d'Abrahams. La Weltkenntnis d'un artiste, ou d'ailleurs de n'importe qui, est souvent en discordance avec la situation culturelle environnante autant qu'avec les moyens techniques dont il dispose pour s'exprimer. Il n'est jamais possible de réduire tout à fait une forme donnée d'expression de soi à une vision plus large du monde ou, à l'inverse, à un ensemble précis d'effets techniques. L'auteur explore les tensions culturelles qu'impliquent l'affirmation par Abrahams qu'il est un artiste cosmopolite et son travail de centrage et de périphérisation de lui-même dans la Jamaïque coloniale et postcoloniale.

This is the second of some lectures on cosmopolitical processes. In this lecture I discuss the centrality of magical thinking in Capitalist cosmology. Central to capitalism is the limitless process of enclosure known as 'commodification'--the efficacious connecting of money and thing to create the commodity.
For the anthropologist, this process has one obvious basis--in magic--that is in knowing 'how to do things with words'. So, this becomes the focus of discussion here, bracketing out other widely debated structural features of capitalism.

This is one of a series of lectures I have given recently on Anthropology, Cosmopolitics and Cosmopolitanism. There is a degree of continuity between contemporary concerns and Edmund Leach's view of the 'Runaway World' . However the shrinking (Harvey) and virtualisation (Hart) of social distance has continued apace, as has the 'cosmopolitanization' and local 'overheating' (Eriksen) of global social-economic activity.

‘Freedom’ is one the most fiercely contested words in contemporary global experience. Yet, during the last fifty years, anthropologists have had surprisingly little to say on the topic. As Malinowski pointed out, some of this reluctance comes down to the ‘semantic chaos’ that emerges when we try to determine what freedom actually means in everyday life. With this volume, the editors, Moises Lino e Silva and Huon Wardle, tackle this problem and add a more explicit ontological dimension to it. This is done through the study of eight dramatically different cases of freedom in practice. This volume originated in a conference on ‘Freedoms and Liberties in Anthropological Perspective’ held at the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, St Andrews University in June 2013.

The paper opened for discussion here is the pre-publication version of the introduction to the book. It was intended as a broad survey of problems and approaches in the study of freedom and at framing an answer to why freedom has been so significantly absent as a concern for anthropologists. The editors are currently writing a briefer discussion of the current analytical status of 'freedom'. This is why we opened this version up for critical comment here.

table of contents for Freedom in Practice (Routledge 2016):

Introduction: Testing freedom 1
MOISES LINO E SILVA AND HUON WARDLE
1 The inscrutability of freedom and the liberty of a life-project 34
NIGEL RAPPORT
2 Becoming “no one”: Muneyoshi Yanagi’s theory of
freedom in the fi gure of the unfree craftsman 54
HIDEKO MITSUI
3 John Brown: Freedom and imposture in the early
twentieth-century trans-Caribbean 63
HUON WARDLE
4 Self-interest and civil society: Freedoms and liberties in
South Italian associationism 87
STAVROULA PIPYROU
5 ‘Livin’ this way’: Reading aboriginal self-determination
through some debates about freedom 101
DIANE AUSTIN-BROOS
6 Jeronimo’s declaration of independence: Piro accounts of
slavery and freedom 121
PETER GOW
7 “Don’t mess with my fags!” – said the drug lord: Queer
liberation in a Brazilian favela 144
MOISES LINO E SILVA
8 Liberty and lock-in: The trouble with freedom in anthropology 164
CHRISTOPHER M. KELTY

The task with intellectual autobiography, beyond sketching a life, is to lay out the crucial dispositions, ideas, and struggles with reality that define the protagonist's project. But Keith Hart wants more with Self in the world: anthropology should help us understand who and where we are in world society, with its mounting human-made problems. By and large, biography and autobiography are better used for this than mainstream anthropology, so we need to synthesize both. As a form of education, anthropology should enable anyone, bar none, to find intellectual tools within their own life that connect where they are now with the fate of humanity at large: ‘Only connect’.

The confounding island should interest social anthropologists since it puts comparative sociology and a classic emphasis on social institutions to new use and back on the agenda in a lively way. The central 'confounding' dimension is that Jamaica as a nation-state is strikingly chaotic and structurally dysfunctional, yet, internationally, the island is a remarkable cultural attractor with a number of institutions for which it is justifiably famous: Jamaica has the fastest track runners in the world; its music styles are recognized everywhere; it tops press freedom charts; and it recently developed a perky financial services market. Albeit in a context of extreme violence, it maintains a two-party democracy; and, despite chronic social deprivation and, again, lethal instability, people live on average long, convivial, and healthy lives. Even its political leaders, like Michael Manley, have sometimes been charismatic beacons on the world stage while their policies were (arguably) generating capital flight and de facto national bankruptcy at home. As Orlando Patterson shows, 'confoundingly', the kind of good institutions that should make for a good society can exist more or less independently of a surrounding failed state edifice.

There is a huge volume of writing in Anthropology on mobilities – diverse socially informed moves that people make. However, the question of ‘thought’ in this mobility is muted. Answering this, Molly Rosenbaum and Giuseppe Troccoli focused their workshop on ‘motivity’. The word sounds like yet another anthropological neologism. In a sense it is – it was invented by John Locke in the Seventeenth Century to describe a thoroughly modern concern; how is it that our own thoughts are able to move us?

Notes for the Derek Gordon Keynote Lecture presented at the University of the West Indies, 31st May, 2019.

Autobiographical power can be causative and legislative. So, institutions & plans for ‘health’ need to show understanding of individuals’ categories and their practical storying of their place in their world. The Lecture explores the narratives and epistemologies for health of 'walkfoot people' in Jamaica.

This lecture starts a conversation between anthropologists and animators. Both anthropologists and animators are critical constructivists; they build up their pictures of the world in a certain way in order to make people think again about how the world is organized. They aim to shake up some habits of thought and to create new ways of understanding human experience.

There is a common history of deploying modern technologies to critique modernity often in a playful or ironic way. There is an interest in the magic hidden in rational intentionality.

While with animation complex concepts and intuitions are mixed and embedded technically in the uncanny reality of the animator's film-world, in anthropology it is the other way round--ethnographic fieldwork exposes the ethnographer to 'strange ideas'; it is the anthropologist's job to give these an explicit status in their theoretical depiction of what it means to be human.

Finally, both anthropology and animation have a complex, deliberately peripheral and questioning relationship with their overall fields-- film-making and social science. Both of them are 'anti-disciplines' in a certain sense.

Mette High, Director of the Centre for Energy Ethics, invited me to ‘speak for 10 minutes about anthropology, art, including your own art work’ by way of opening remarks at the Centre’s inaugural conference, ‘Art and Energy’. My first thought was something like ’10 minutes, that is a tall order’, and my next response, keeping in mind the larger aims of the CEE, was to say to myself ‘we are all artists, ethical thinkers and analytic beings, but those capacities are endlessly polarized and hierarchized in the kind of hyper-bureaucratic and micro-managed late modern society we now find ourselves in’. The issue is to keep discovering a dialogue between those dimensions of who we are.

Every year I give lectures on money from an anthropological point of view--'Magic, Mana, Money & Capitalism'. This is a revision of an earlier set of these lectures. Capitalism with its drive to draw all human experience into the money-commodity matrix is driving the emergence of new kinds of 'virtualisation' in our experience of society.
At one level, this offers imaginative freedoms for the individual with access to money and the commodity sphere, but it also reinforces social inequality on a massive scale due to the clash of the commodity matrix as an imaginary or virtual cosmos and the situation of human beings in the world as it is actually lived. We need to explore new approaches to the imagining individual human being and to consider new approaches to the problems of world citizenship.