Care and cosmopolitanism - with Nigel Rapport
Episode 3 of Careful Thinking
Felix Nussbaum, 'Camp Synagogue', 1941 (yadvashem.org)
For the third episode of the ‘Careful Thinking’ podcast, I’m joined by Nigel Rapport, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at St Andrews University in Scotland, and the founding director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. Nigel is the author of numerous books, the most recent being Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement Beyond Culture (the header image for this post is from the book’s cover).
I’ve known Nigel for a long time. We were postgraduate students together in Manchester in the early 1980s and although our careers then took us in different directions, I’ve followed Nigel’s academic progress closely in the intervening years. Recently, I was intrigued to notice that our interests had started to converge, and that Nigel was writing about issues related to care and quoting some of the writers on care who have been important to me. I find Nigel’s ideas about care both intriguing and challenging, so I welcomed this opportunity to explore them with him.
Nigel RapportOur conversation traced the trajectory of Nigel’s academic career as an anthropologist and explored the influence on his work of creative writers and artists, as well as philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, the subject of Nigel’s next book. We talked about Nigel’s ethnographic fieldwork as a hospital porter, and about the development of his notion of ‘cosmopolitan politesse’ and its relevance for thinking about care. The episode ends with a very personal coda, in which Nigel reflects on his identity as a secular Jew and the significance for him of Israel and Zionism, the subject of another book that he’s currently working on.
In the course of our conversation, I played devil’s advocate a little and voiced doubts as to whether a cosmopolitan vision was an adequate framework for an ethic of care. Surely it’s precisely our local attachments, of various kinds, that motivate us to care for each other? On the other hand, I can see that we need something beyond those ties of family, community or culture to facilitate care on a wider scale. I also struggle a little with the kind of radical individualism espoused by Nigel, but after our conversation I feel better informed about the rationale behind it.
A central question at the heart of Nigel’s work is how care can respect the ‘personal preserve’ of the unique human individual. Here’s a key quote by Nigel from the episode:
Care recognises a kind of balance between action and inaction…care as a kind of respect for an otherness that is ultimately its own, an otherness that by rights one should not claim to know or to determine…How does a good society…a society that balances restraint with engagement…come to include. It doesn’t wish to incorporate, but how does social inclusion work, how do you include without category thinking, how do you include without claiming that everyone is in a cultural, conventional category…cultural categories that are an imposition on the individual, intrinsic nature of being…Maybe a good society can include by recognising members as individual human beings alone…
‘Cosmopolitan politesse’ is the name that I give…to a style of engagement that is polite and mannerly and inclusive, but doesn’t claim to know anything other than ‘here is Anyone’…it attempts a kind of balance between inclusion and distance, recognition and reticence…giving people the space to go their own way, to be themselves, to express themselves as they will…to fulfil themselves according to their own lights, to relate insofar as they wish to and in their own terms.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Comments and feedback are welcome, as always.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
