U. Kockel, P. McDermott and L. Campbell (eds) Per Scribendum, Sumus: Ethnopoesis, or Writing Heritage, Zurich: Lit Verlag, pp. 159-165., 2021
Each life is a world of its own, a world to itself. Individuality is the nature of existence; the... more Each life is a world of its own, a world to itself. Individuality is the nature of existence; the quality of individuality is reproduced from the very smallest things to the very largest; one life and the entire universe share a paradoxical patterning of atomism, of individual uniqueness. Maybe the entire evolution of life—its potential for evolution—can be found reflected in any one life. Perhaps to save one life is to engage in the key moral act, to show respect for life per se, on which the entire universe of ethical action can be said to rest. Studying the Talmud in Eastern Europe, during long centuries of being excluded from wider intellectual life and professions, led to ‘dialectics characterized by sometimes exaggerated quibbling and hair-splitting’, Vallentine’s Encyclopaedia informs me, finally, and this ‘must be considered to have been unprofitable from a scientific point of view’. There is something tantalizing in the very gnomic nature of this epigraph—whose ambiguity lends itself to becoming a moral flag, emblazoned on a poster. It might be termed ‘the mathematics of morality’. How to attach a value to human life, human worth and suffering? How does one balance respect for the individual life with an appreciation of the mass of suffering?
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expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivations come to be “accidentally” actualised alike. Devereux’s insights are pertinent regarding the elective decision in Britain to leave the EU, and more broadly for a social-anthropological approach to stereotypes of “Britishness.” There are certain customary discourses by which social life in Britain is “ego-syntonically” conducted, whose competency represents both a sign of belonging and means to navigate everyday interactions. Six discourses of Britishness of this kind might be identified: class; ethnicity; nationality; islandness; privacy; and football. But one is careful to distinguish between such discourses of Britishness — how it is stereotypically, formulaically, to be “British”; how it is publicly, customarily, to express and take part in “Britishness” — and the diversity of individual identities that inhabit and animate those discourses. Equally, one is
careful to distinguish between the kinds of violence or violation that the expression of individual worldviews by way of stereotypic collective discourses might embody: “democratic violence” as against “nihilistic violence.”
What, then, is the cosmopolitan project of anthropology? I present an outline. Of key importance is validating human life as a form of movement towards the future and away from conventional cultural categories and collectivities. Futurity might be defined as an individual’s birthright: the right continually to author an identity. It is the cosmopolitan project to work out an accommodation between universal individual aspirations and local structures of hospitality and politeness.