Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology pdf

Nigel Rapport feels he has come to the right place to further his research in cosmopolitanism. Rapport has joined Concordia’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It’s a change from a small medieval town that he describes as “Cambridge by the sea” to a large city with an urban campus. The British anthropologist has been made the Canada Research Chair, Tier 1, in Globalization, Citizenship and Social Justice. He is also the founding director of the Concordia Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, launching research programs and workshops that promote an appreciation of the rights, the capacities and the experience of the global individual.

Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology pdf by Nigel Rapport

Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality.Rapport draws widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials bringing into the debate a range of voices, among them Nietzsche, Wilde, George Steiner, Richard Rorty, John Berger and Anthony Cohen. In doing so he approaches individuality in terms of a range of issues: biological integrity, consciousness, agency, democracy, discourse, globalism, knowledge and play.