This volume explores the anthropology of knowledge. Inspired by eminent scholar Marilyn Strathern, leading anthropologists explore key theoretical themes of subjectivity, ethics and gender through global ethnographies.

Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ (...) and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns. (shrink)

The provocative title of this book is deliberately and challengingly universalist, matching the theoretically experimental essays, where contributors try different ideas to answer distinct concerns regarding cosmopolitanism. Leading anthropologists explore what cosmopolitanism means in the context of everyday life, variously viewing it as an aspect of kindness and empathy, as tolerance, hospitality and openness, and as a defining feature of pan-human individuality. The chapters thus advance an existential critique of abstract globalization discourse. The book enriches interdisciplinary debates about hitherto neglected (...) aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism as a political and moral project, examining the form of its lived effects and offering new ideas and case studies to work with. (shrink)