Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. Its ethnographic and theoretical subject is the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitan is not, and never has been, a "western," elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North--in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico--juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.

Pnina Werbner is a professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University.