The Cosmopolitan Encounter

Social Anthropology and the Kindness of Strangers 1

Bibliographic Data

ID20083695
AuthorsP Werbner (0000-0003-2296-9851, corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages47-68
Publication date2020-05-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueAnthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9781003084617-4
OpenAlexW3026850292
ISBN9781003084617
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Like the discipline itself, many of the most prominent members of the founding circle of modernist anthropology were immigrants, refugees, exiles or secular Jews, the archetypal cosmopolitans, and often all four. Unlike the intrepid anthropological traveller or the world citizen, cosmopolitans are normally associated with cosmopolitan spaces, and with the creation of a transcendent culture beyond the local. Contemporary research on international migration has parallels with earlier studies of circulatory labour migration in Africa: in South-Central Africa, for example, African migrant workers moved to multi-ethnic colonial cities from diverse ethnic hinterlands, crossing the radical disjuncture between cultural worlds. Trade unions in Africa were historically extremely important civil society organisations in the colonial era, mobilising different ethnic and even national groups in demand of basic rights, in unitary opposition to colonial regimes. This was made evident in early anthropological studies of miners on the Zambian Copperbelt, and on the railways in East Africa

Kindness · Sociology · Theology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Philosophy · Psychology

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