Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?

I draw out four kinds of cosmopolitanism called on in this volume – as a perceptual ability, as an identity politics, as a pan-human ontology and as a transformative personal capacity. The possibility of ethnographic practice presumes cosmopolitan perceptual abilities. As an identity politics, cosmopolitanism falls into place as an object of mainstream theorising. As an ontology, it becomes the cornerstone of a future-directed anthropological ethics. As a transformative capacity, it signals that cosmological enclosure is only ever a partial condition. We need ethnographies of cosmopolitanism to explore the compatibility of these framings and to test the paradoxes of scale they foreground.