Cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, creolization, common-sense, comedy, adventure, epoché, existential anthropology, reparatory ethics and aesthetics. Area specialities: Jamaica, the Caribbean.

BA, University of Cambridge
MA, University of East Anglia
PhD, University of Cambridge
PGCHET, University of Belfast

My work has centred on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics with an ethnographic focus on the Caribbean and its 'creolizing' social-cultural processes. I have more than thirty years’ experience conducting and supervising research on the Caribbean region. Writing has moved between an ethnographic (empirical-analytical) strand and an anthropological (conceptual-epistemological) one. The search has been for a conceptual toolkit with which to make sense of everday experience in a cosmopolitanizing--often dissonant, jumbled and confused, but also potentially liberating--world society. A pivotal concept has become 'common-sense' as a human universal.

My enduring interest as an anthropologist has been in individuals and how we make a meaningful world, finding freedoms for ourselves; how we transcend cultural categories and relational constraints through creative narrations of experience. This approach is guided by the idea that 'the personal is cosmopolitical' (Wardle and Shaffner 2017:5). It has led me to reenvision the practices that make up a cosmopolitan view, including openness or hospitality toward the ‘foreign’, empathy across categorical boundaries, utopian imagining and the idea of the transcendence of immediate or ‘temporal’ constraints.

I am the author/editor of ten volumes, most recently Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method in conversation with Nigel Rapport, and more than seventy academic papers and other interventions. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, in 2023, I published 人类学家如何写作: 民族志阅读指南, or How Anthropologists Write, with Shanghai Normal University Press. I was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J.B. Donne Prize in 2014.

Positions held at the University of St Andrews:
Head of the Department of Social Anthropology, 2018—2021
Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, 2015—2018
Director of the Centre for Amerindian, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, 2010—2013

Current research activity:

During the spring semester 2025-2026 I have been invited to participate in the work of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.