Referring to the recent Anthropology and Cosmopolitanism conference, Lorenz Khazaleh notes:
“The topic - cosmopolitanism - seemed to have attracted a special kind of people. ‘There are nearly no Americans here’, one delegate wondered. Usually, lots of Americans attended conferences arranged by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. What I found most striking: The largest part of all delegates were migrants!
Nearly none of them is working at an University in the country they were born. I met an anthropologist from Sri Lanka who’s working in the USA, another anthropologist working in Canada, originally from Turkey but - as she said - ‘a product from Norway’. There were quite a lot of German anthropology migrants living in the UK, and from Switzerland and Italy. A woman wore a badge with ‘Aberdeen University’ on it. Of course, she told me that she’s from Malta!”
Interesting. But what kind of cosmopolitics denies outsiders access to conference papers?
In related news:
Cities in a World of Migration: India and China in Global Perspective
The New School, NYC
April 28-29, 2006
But what kind of cosmopolitics denies outsiders access to conference papers?
Because the conference was organised by The Secret Society of Anthropologists
GLOBAL ETHICS
What does it mean to be a citizen of the globe? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared common situation: the same beautiful small planet we live in?
Global similitudes and local differences are the two poles that maintain the tension in the cultural field, between preserving singular local values as well as distances between heterogeneous communities, and, on the other hand, seeking a universal–hence transcendent–code.
The challenge is to find an ethical field that allows for the flourishing of both distances and universality, of both the localities and the global: an Ethics in which singularities can give expression to a multiplicity of differentiated communities and loyalties while at the same time building an universal ethical code through a powerful common project: the project of living together on the same globe.
Read more on the http://magmareport.net