Call For Papers

The "indigenous" and the "cosmopolitan" seem to exist as oppositional formations in the imaginary field demarcated by the local and the global. While the former seems rooted, timeless, and traditional; the latter appears mobile, contemporary, and (post)modern. As recent work by anthropologists has shown, both of these characterizations are quite deceptive. "Indigeneity" is a deeply current issue, which, over the past decade, has relentlessly forced itself onto social, political and academic agendas across the planet. While the question of who is and who is not "indigenous" was never innocent, it is becoming increasingly crucial in today's global and globalising world. At the same time, the genealogy of the "cosmopolitan" has been moved back in time. It now appears as a quasi-primordial reference point for a social and political vision beyond the nation-state and empire.

Together, the "indigenous" and the "cosmopolitan" signify the tensions animating contemporary anthropology. As the discipline negotiates its long-standing commitment to local processes in a rapidly transnational world, both the "indigenous" and the "cosmopolitan" have emerged as crucial figures for analysis and debate. The notions of "indigeneity" and "cosmopolitanism" thus speak to a range of pressing theoretical and quotidian concerns: the politics of recognition, inclusion and exclusion; rights to scarce resources; the relation between peoples, spaces and places; neoliberal visions of the global as open-ended, unanchored flows; autochthony, sovereignty and citizenship; conflict and violence; and the ways global capitalism generates cosmopolitan imaginaries while simultaneously producing novel forms and assertions of emplacement. We welcome papers that engage with "indigeneity" and "cosmopolitanism" in a broad sense - as predicaments, moral locations, political positions, imaginative objects - together with their theoretical, epistemological and practical entailments.

NEW: The deadline for submitting papers has been extended. The new deadline is March 1st.