Abstract
This chapter interrogates the validity of Wendy Brown’s apparently self-evident assertion in Regulating Aversion that “Tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful”. Tolerance, she argues, thus marks what is “civilised”, “conferring superiority on the West” (2008: 178). If ethical cosmopolitanism is defined by tolerance, toleration and reaching out to an Other or stranger, may we conclude, with Brown and other cosmosceptics, that cosmopolitanism is necessarily western and elitist, a discursive strategy that disguises and depoliticises relations of dominance? And if so, what room is there for a non-elitist, demotic, vernacular cosmopolitanism that is nevertheless moral and ethical? Can it be that the peoples anthropologists study beyond the West are incapable of being cosmopolitan? Against that view, I argue in this chapter that the habits and capacities associated with routine boundary crossings, physical, ethnic or religious, alongside the customary habits of hospitality and social exchange among strangers, are markers of vernacular cosmopolitanism. So too are ways of settling disputes, providing safe havens or making peace across borders, and of vernacular participatory cosmopolitanism by trade unionists in developing countries that are cosmopolitan despite their inferior class positioning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Inglis argues that many thinkers such as Kant, thought to be merely philosophical, in fact grounded their theories in the empirical context of their time (Inglis 2012: 15).
- 2.
For a range of examples, see the contributions to Werbner (2008b).
- 3.
- 4.
Hill uses the unfortunate notion of ‘cosmopolitan hybridity’ rather than vernacular cosmopolitanism.
- 5.
For a full account, see Werbner (2014).
- 6.
The explanation was suggested to me by my assistant, Queen Gasitsiwe.
References
Basu, Helene. 1998. Hierarchy and Emotion: Love, Joy and Sorrow in a Cult of Black Saints in Gujarat, India. In Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, ed. Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu, 117–139. London: Routledge.
Bigelow, Anna. 2010. Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Wendy. 2008. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cheah, Pheng. 2012. What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 138–149. London and New York: Routledge.
Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Comaroff, John. 1978. Rules and Rulers: Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom. Man (N.S.) 13 (1): 1–20.
Cooper, F. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delanty, Gerard, ed. 2012a. Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. London: Routledge.
———. 2012b. The Idea of Critical Cosmopolitanism. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 38–46. London: Routledge.
Ewing, Katherine P. 2010. The Misrecognition of a Modernist Islamist Organization: Germany Faces Fundamentalism. In Rethinking Islamic Studies: from Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, 52–71. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press.
Frembgen, Jurgen. 2011. At the Shrine of the Red Sufi: Five Days and Nights on Pilgrimage in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Gluckman, Max. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen and West.
Gulbrandsen, Ornulf. 1995. The King is King by the Grace of the People: The Exercise and Control of Power in Subject-Ruler Relations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (3): 415–444.
Hill, Joseph. 2012. The Cosmopolitan Sahara: Building a Global Islamic Village in Mauritania. City and Society 24 (1): 62–83.
Inglis, David. 2012. Alternative Histories of Cosmopolitanism: Reconfiguring Classical Legacies. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 11–24. London: Routledge.
Inglis, David, and Roland Robertson. 2008. The Elementary Forms of Globality: Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global Life. Journal of Classical Sociology 8 (1): 5–25.
Lewis, B. 1994. Legal and Historical Reflections on the Position of Muslim Populations under Non-Muslim Rule. In Muslims in Europe, ed. B. Lewis and D. Schnapper. London: Pinter.
Nowicka, Magdalena, and Maria Rovisco, eds. 2009. Cosmopolitanism in Practice, 1–18. Farnham: Ashgate.
Leichtman, Mara E., and Dorothea Schultz, eds. 2012. Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Movement, Identity, and Contemporary Reconfigurations. Special Issue of City & Society 24: 1.
Liebeskind, Claudia. 1998. Piety on Its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marsden, Magnus. 2012. Fatal Embrace: Trading in Hospitality on the Frontiers of South and Central Asia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.): S117–S130.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2012. De-colonial Cosmopolitanism and Dialogues Among Civilizations. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 85–100. London: Routledge.
Peters, Emrys L. 1990. The Bedouin of Cyrenaica: Studies in Personal and Corporate Power. Ed. Jack Goody and Emanual Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rehman, Uzma. 2007. Sufi Shrines and Identity-Construction in Pakistan. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.
Robertson, Roland, and Anne Sophie Krossa. 2012. European Cosmopolitanism in Question. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Roudometof, Victor. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Empirical Social Research: Some Methodological Issues of an Emerging Research Agenda. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 115–126. London: Routledge.
Rovisco, Maria, and Magdalena Nowicka, eds. 2011. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Farnham: Ashgate.
Saheb, S.A.A. 1998. A “Festival of Flags”: Hindu-Muslim Devotion and the Sacralising of Localism at the Shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif. In Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, ed. Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu, 55–76. London: Routledge.
Saiyed, A.R. 1989. Saints and Dargahs in the Indian Subcontinent: A Review. In Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll, 240–256. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Schapera, Isaac. 1956. Government and Politics in Tribal Society. London: Watts and Co.
Selwyn, T. 2000. An Anthropology of Hospitality. In In Search of Hospitality: Theoretical Perspectives and Debates, ed. C. Lashley and A. Morrison, 18–37. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
Schler, Lynn. 2008. Transnationalism and Nationalism in the Nigerian Seamen’s Union,’ Special issue on ‘Rethinking Labour in Africa. African Identities 7 (3): 387–398.
Shadid, W.A.R., and S. van Koningsfeld. 1996. Loyalty to a non-Muslim Government: an Analysis of Islamic Normative Discussions and of the Views of Some Contemporary Islamists. In Political Participation and Identities of Muslims in Non-Muslim Countries, ed. W.A.R. Shadid and P.S. van Koningsveld. Kampen: Kok Pharos.
Shryock, A. 2004. The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host and Guest in the Culture of Public Display. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46: 35–62.
———. 2008. Thinking About Hospitality, with Derrida, Kant and the Balga Bedouin. Anthropos 103: 405–421.
Southall, Roger. 1995. Imperialism or Solidarity? International Labour and South African Trade Unions. Cape Town: UCT Press.
Stivens, Maila. 2008. Gender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms. In Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, ASA Monographs, ed. P. Werbner, vol. 45, 87–110. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Turner, Bryan S. 2012. The Cosmopolitanism of the Sacred. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 188–197. London: Routledge.
Van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Syncretism, Multiculturalism and the Discourse of Tolerance. In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism, ed. Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, 196–211. London: Routledge.
Werbner, Pnina. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. In London: Hurst Publishers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 2006. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society on ‘Problematizing Global Knowledge’. Ed. Mike Featherstone, 23 (1–2): 496–498.
———. 2008a. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives. New York: Berg.
———. 2008b. The Cosmopolitan Encounter – Social Anthropology and the Kindness of Strangers. In Anthropology and Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspective, ASA Monograph No. 45, ed. Pnina Werbner, 47–68. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
———. 2009. Religious Identity. In The Sage Handbook of Identities, ed. Margaret Wetherell and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 231–257. London: Sage.
———. 2014. The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana. London: Pluto Press.
Woodward, Ian, and Zlatko Skrbis. 2012. Performing Cosmopolitanism. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty, 127–137. London: Routledge.
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 2005. The Scope and Limits of Islamic Cosmopolitanism and the Discursive Language of the ‘Ulama’. In Muslim Networks: from Hajj to Hip Hop, ed. Miriam Cook and Bruce B. Lawrence, 84–104. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Werbner, P. (2018). De-orientalising Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Local Cosmopolitan Ethics. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5376-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5376-4_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-5375-7
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-5376-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)