Framing cosmologies: The anthropology of worlds

By Manchester University Press

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781847799081

Book preview

Introduction

The cosmological frame in anthropology

Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

The cosmos has become cool again.

(McKie 2012)

Addressing the Cosmology Group, an informal reading group that we run with our graduate students in the Anthropology Department at UCL, a few months before she died in May 2007, Mary Douglas expressed surprise that in this day and age anthropologists might still be interested in such a topic. Cosmology is the kind of thing the Lele had when she studied with them in the 1950s, she said, and no doubt they and other groups like them still live with its cultural remnants (see also Douglas 1963). But hasn’t the urbanisation of the developing world together with the concerted repatriation of anthropology to the metropolis in recent decades rendered our traditional concern with indigenous cosmologies well-nigh anachronistic? For astride the complexity of the modern world, Douglas ventured, surely people no longer share a cosmology, as the Lele and others may have done in pre-modern times. Notwithstanding the prestige enjoyed by professional cosmologists working in departments of theoretical physics and their growing popular appeal, the plain fact is that the contemporary world is just too complicated to sustain the kinds of unified and collective cosmology encountered by earlier generations of anthropologists amongst ‘primitive’ peoples. At any rate, Douglas concluded, the kinds of isomorphic correspondences between social organisation and cosmological reckonings from which anthropologists drew such theoretical mileage throughout much of the twentieth century are now probably rarely found. So what interest could the study of cosmology possibly hold for anthropologists today?

Somewhat paradoxically given her anthropological age-set, Douglas’s comments expressed exactly the kind of weariness towards cosmology against which we felt we were working in our research and in the Cosmology Group. So, inevitably, coming from an anthropologist whose own work had for so long been so deeply invested in the study of cosmology (e.g. Douglas 1963, 1996), Douglas’s cosmo-weariness was particularly poignant (and also, untimely), adding a sense of urgency to the questions which our group had already for some time been deliberating. What is the relevance of the study of indigenous cosmologies to contemporary anthropology? Can one think cosmology beyond outmoded assumptions about tribal societies and the like? What might the role of cosmology be in modern society? And, in the end, what is cosmology? Born of the conversations Douglas’s challenge provoked, the present volume is the product of our invitation to selected anthropologists working in diverse ethnographic settings, and developing a variety of theoretical orientations, to tackle these questions and so consider the relevance of cosmological concerns to the anthropological understanding of the contemporary world. This, if you like, is a collective answer to Mary Douglas – albeit posthumously, alas – by anthropologists for whom the relevance of cosmology continues to be vital, even as it is refigured in ways she may not have anticipated.

Providing some initial coordinates with reference to which the book’s chapters may be read, in this introduction we do three things. In the first section, we offer some reflections on the broad trends of thinking about cosmology in twentieth-century anthropology which led up to the kind of weariness towards the topic Douglas was expressing by the beginning of the twenty-first. Our key claim here is that the ambivalence with which the topic of cosmology came to be viewed in many quarters flowed from its association with certain tenets of what we call the ‘classical ethnological’ period of anthropological research: namely, on the one hand, the idea that primitive societies were natural wholes or totalities and, on the other, variously explicit epistemic hierarchies (us/them, West/rest, etc.), which tended to exoticise indigenous cosmologies. In the second section we go beyond ethnological anthropology to argue that the recent weariness towards cosmology in anthropology is nevertheless paradoxical, inasmuch as it is out of step with what, as we suggest, is a re-investment in matters cosmological – a veritable re-connection with cosmos – in ‘late modern’ social conditions. In this context, cosmology once again emerges as a prime ethnographic concern for anthropology, now located as a quintessentially contemporary orientation across all types of social formation. We then go on, on the final section, to present the chapters of the volume, showing how each of them expresses, as well as engages with, this renewed vitality of cosmology as a terrain for anthropological investigation. Grouping the chapters in three parts, we show how an abiding spirit of cosmologically inflected anthropological experimentation can be detected in the diverse ways in which the chapters’ authors overcome some of the core tenets on which older approaches to the study of so-called ‘indigenous cosmologies’ were founded. An adequate response to Douglas’s challenge, we suggest, must in part at least involve refiguring the very notion of cosmology she too was beginning to doubt.

Cosmologies: anthropological and indigenous

Imagine doing an ethnography of how anthropology was practised in the times Douglas remembered – anthropology’s classical ethnological period, running roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s – when the study of ‘indigenous cosmologies’ formed an integral part of anthropologists’ confident attempts to chart comparatively the social and cultural dimensions of (mainly ‘primitive’) people’s lives. In brief, one would find a set of highly educated nationals of colonial and post-colonial powers self-consciously travelling ‘outward’, to the edges of the world, in order to encounter, describe, and explicate what human society and culture looks like at its margins. The sense in which the societies anthropologists went out to study were marginal was, of course, itself part of the anthropological debate. In particular, while nineteenth-century evolutionism conceived the distance between ‘civilised society’ and the ‘savagery’ of people imagined as living at its furthest reaches (geographically, economically, politically, etc.) as a matter of natural differences, anthropologists spent much of the twentieth century showing that the distance between their own society and those which they studied was itself social and cultural. This involved developing a series of axes along which these socio-cultural differences could be articulated: primitive/advanced, simple/complex, stateless/state, non-literate/literate, non-modern/modern, myth/history, magic/science or – perhaps the most encompassing master contrast of all – tradition/modernity.

Not unlike the evolutionist matrices of natural stages of socio-cultural development they purported to replace, these classical master contrasts presented an image of the world as a totality, marking its dimensions outwards, from the familiar centre (modern life as we know it) towards a socio-cultural series of differently construed unfamiliar margins. This is to say that, in its classic ethnological rendition, anthropology was itself an exercise in cosmology through and through, projecting images of human being concentrically outwards and spatio-temporally along a social and cultural gradient, stretching outwards from a series of civilised centres. Indeed, rather like cosmologists proper (physicists), anthropologists imagined themselves as charting the outer reaches of the social universe – its very horizons – in order to better theorise the human whole. Only for these anthropologists (Mary Douglas included), the universe consisted of the varied social and cultural manifestations that make up humanity as a globally juxtaposed domain of investigation. Central to this whole was a modern core that was organisationally complex and more or less culturally homogenous while, marginally, on the periphery of exploration, commerce and governance, this same whole curled inwards upon itself in myriad places, to form so many culturally differentiated and diverse worlds or integrated totalities. This was the cosmological picture that underpinned the classical ethnological project of anthropology.

Historians of ideas have much to say about how this image of a human cosmos relates to broader arcs of thinking, including monotheistic conceptions of divine creation and Providence, Enlightenment images of the uniformity of nature, and the Romantic enchantment with the diversities of human genius (e.g. Dupré 1993). Here, however, we may note only that, based on an ontology of a uniform nature subject to a diversity of cultural viewpoints, this image provided also the framework for the anthropological study of indigenous cosmologies, as well as a template for their overall shape. In particular, it framed the study of indigenous cosmologies with reference to what we may call a topology of reflexive ethnocentrism. According to this image, the human cosmos marks out a particular kind of space whose chief peculiarity is that it contains within itself multiple perspectives on itself – it is in this sense a ‘reflexive’ space. Conceived as ‘cultures’, ‘collective representations’, ‘symbolic systems’ and so on, these perspectives on the world – each of them a ‘whole’ unto itself – are themselves deemed to be rooted in particular parts of the human world, designated as societies or other scales of grouping. Different social groupings may support different cultural perspectives, so each ‘ethnos’, in that metaphoric sense, provides a ‘centre’ unto itself.

It follows that, conceived as a cosmological project, anthropology’s attempt to chart the horizons of the human world is just one actualisation of the vast cosmological potential this basic topology is able to engender. For if the human world is imagined as reflexively ethnocentric in this way, with each part of the world (each society) being able to generate a whole cosmological perspective of its own, then one can also ask what account each of these perspectives might provide of the world as such, which is to say as a single topos, populated by particular kinds of entities, organised in specific ways, according to their own dimensions and proportions. In this way, providing accounts of such ‘indigenous cosmologies’ became an integral part of an anthropology that imagined itself as charting the reflexive horizons of the human cosmos overall. Indeed, it became well-nigh indispensable to pursue this line of investigation, since such cosmologies were thought to provide the overall coordinates within which the people anthropologists studied conceived of themselves and their social practices. Thus, to take just two classic examples, Trobriand Islanders conceived of their social organisation with reference to spatio-temporal ideas about the auto-regeneration of insular spirits and totemic origins in the ground (Malinowski 1948); while Tallensi understood kinship not just in terms of immediate face-to-face relations between kin and affines but also in terms of founding ancestors who still resided in groves or caves in surrounding space (Fortes 1987).

This way of construing the nature of indigenous cosmologies has three corollaries that, we would argue, are key to the story of the demise of this anthropological preoccupation in recent years. The first two relate to the role of holism. Firstly, with respect to their form, indigenous cosmologies on this classical image were imagined as wholes unto themselves, inasmuch as they were taken to present the varied accounts people in different societies provided of their culture taken as a totality. Thus, where societies were imagined as pre-structured wholes cosmology was given the role of reflecting upon the nature of this totality, providing an account of the kinds of entities and relations that together make up the world taken as a whole (spirits, divinities, forces, mythical or otherwise alternative realms of existence, times of origin, future horizons, and so on). One might say, in short, that indigenous cosmology was taken as that part of the total culture whose role it was to totalise it. Moreover, the expectation that indigenous cosmologies had to be constituted as integrated wholes went hand in hand with at least two related analytical orientations which, as we shall see, have become increasingly unfashionable in more recent years. On the one hand cosmologies tended to be presented as thoroughly local discourses, monolithic in each place and impervious to external influence; for example, Arunta cosmology, Nuer cosmology, Hopi cosmology. On the other hand, and as a consequence, this account tended to present cosmologies in more or less static terms. For, while it was recognised that cosmologies (just like societies and cultures) may change over time in the long run, the basic idea that cosmologies were derivative accounts of ‘the totalised world as such’ carried with it the assumption that they tended towards more or less monolithic order, their basic role being to bring the vagaries of the world at large under a unitary mode of cognitive or symbolic control. Hence also the strong tendency to associate cosmologies with all-encompassing ‘systems of classification’ (e.g. Durkheim and Mauss 1963), symbolic ‘categories’ or ‘structures’ (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1964), or, more recently, all-pervasive cognitive ‘schemata’ or ‘models’ (e.g. Boyer 1994). If not itself wholly unchanging (e.g. Barth 1990), cosmology’s role according to this view was nevertheless, in one way or other, to rein in the ineluctable entropy of the world as imagined. Along with an essential socio-cultural parochialism, then, the holism of classical takes on cosmology also privileged static, uncontested images of worlds as self-contained, encapsulated ‘orders’.

The second way in which cosmology was a function of holism had less to do with the form that indigenous cosmologies were imagined as taking, and more with their position in the broader economy of anthropological analysis. As we have seen, the idea of cosmologies as totalising orderings of the world is rooted in the idea that societies and cultures are themselves naturally integrated: cosmology as the totalising discourse the organic whole tells about itself. But seen in these terms, cosmology logically presents itself as a part of the total culture it serves discursively to totalise – one that must be studied alongside each of the other parts that go to make up a socio-cultural whole: kinship, social and political organisation, economic arrangements, ritual practices, and so on. Again, on the classical image, cosmology was imagined more or less deliberately as reflection of these other aspects of the total socio-cultural situation – one that, to be sure, was both sustained by them and, in turn, served to organise and symbolically legitimate them (here think of classical discussions of origin myths – e.g. Leenhardt 1979). Thus, conceiving of indigenous cosmology as a separate piece of the jigsaw puzzle of his or her ethnography, the anthropologist imagined its analysis as being always partly a matter of making it fit with all the other pieces, to recompose analytically what was already always imagined as amounting to a whole. The holistic principle of structural integration, in other words, went hand in hand with a notion of functional differentiation.

The third consequence of the reflexive ethnocentrism of classical takes on indigenous cosmology has to do with the hierarchical way in which it ordered different perspectives on the world, and particularly the superiority it accorded to the cosmological project of the anthropologists at the expense of those of the people they study. For, if what holds the basic image together is the idea of a single and uniform world that acts as both ground and object for the diverse perspectives different societies may take within and upon it, it follows that such perspectives can be ranked in relation to how far they partake of this a priori grounding and truly apprehend the world as it is (Holbraad 2010; 2012: 18–34; Latour 1993). And in this respect, anthropologists have a constitutive advantage over the people they study since it is they who delineate cosmologically the conditions of existence of all marginal cosmologies, setting constraints upon the ways in which alternative images of the world can play out ‘in their own terms’. Construed as a science, which is to say as part of the broader project of systematically developing authoritatively accurate representations of the world, anthropology saw itself as being in the business of unequivocally describing/transcribing the real (human) world. And, from first anthropological/cosmological principles (so to speak), this involved describing a series of alternative images of the world (indigenous cosmologies distributed across the margins) which to varying extents were manifestly fanciful, even though valid at their own cosmic locus. The master contrasts of classical anthropology (tradition/ modernity and so on) lend analytical weight to this basic – and for most of the twentieth century self-evident – hierarchy of perspectives. Indeed, the contrast between indigenous cosmology (as something others have), and science (including of course the cosmological research of modern astrophysics) as ‘our’ ultimately truer equivalent, was just another iteration of these master contrasts.

It goes without saying that deciding how to deal with this implication of anthropology’s cosmology of the social has been at the core of much theoretical debate within the discipline more or less from its inception – evolutionism versus diffusionism, universalism versus relativism, realism versus constructivism and so forth. While we cannot enter into these larger debates here, it is worth remarking that the status of indigenous cosmologies vis-à-vis ‘Western science’ was for long one of the principal arenas in which these tense implications were played out, and not least, when it came to disputes over the so-called ‘rationality’ of indigenous ‘beliefs’, which reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Wilson 1974). That this should be so is hardly surprising, though not so much because of the putatively quasi-scientific nature of indigenous cosmologies (e.g. Horton 1967), we would argue, but rather due to the thoroughly cosmological character of science – and not least anthropology itself, as we have seen. Be that as it may, the fact is that, due to the very cosmological set-up within which indigenous cosmologies were conceptualised by anthropologists, their less-than-true character was felt to be their abiding theoretical problem. Even cultural relativism, with its refusal to pass judgement on the veracity of one cosmology over another while nonetheless framing the ground rules within which a fanciful cosmology might validly play out, was/is part of the problem – albeit a particularly liberal one.¹

The standard response to the problem of indigenous cosmological fancy or fiction, however, was to reduce it. Indeed, as if to demonstrate how abiding the problem has traditionally been for anthropologists, one could even pinpoint the most distinctive features of the main theoretical currents in twentieth-century anthropology with reference to the particular ways in which they referred indigenous beliefs with their cosmological foundations to some other, ostensibly more real level of explanation. Basic human needs (functionalism), moral and socio-political order and reproduction (structural-functionalism), ecological adaptation (cultural materialism), individual agency (methodological individualism), the expression of underlying social values (interpretativism, symbolism), situated social relations (practice theory) or of a gestalt personality (culture and personality school), ideology and false consciousness (Marxism): all of these classic anthropological positions were posited as competing explanations as to why societies the world over set such great store in imagining the totality of the world in ways that have to be recognised as false. It is telling, in fact, that even anthropologists who have been most inclined to take indigenous cosmologies seriously enough to use them as a baseline for (rather than merely an object of) anthropological theorisation, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss or Mary Douglas herself, have also been inclined to ground indigenous cosmological reckonings in levels of analysis that could be recognised as really real – the underlying binary structures of the human mind for Lévi-Strauss (1963), or the abiding social and cognitive formations of ‘group and grid’ for Douglas (1996).

And far from abating, this reductive impulse has strengthened to the point where in large zones of contemporary anthropology the very notion of cosmology has simply collapsed. The rise of cognitive anthropology in this period provides one obvious example: cosmological reckonings are traduced merely as instances of cognitive processes at work in the human brain (e.g. Boyer 1994; Sperber 1985; Whitehouse 2000). Conversely, and moving in the opposite explanatory direction, analyses one could group under the banner of ‘new political economy’ have tended to treat ‘local’ cosmologies as functions of ostensibly larger frames of explanation, presenting indigenous cosmologies as inventive reactions to, or refractions of, more encompassing – and in that sense also more real – global processes (e.g. Boddy 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Geschiere 1997). Asserting the analytical priority of indigenous cosmologies over such ‘meta-narratives of modernity’ (Englund and Leach 2000) forms the crux of Bertelsen’s, Empson’s and Pedersen’s contributions in this volume. Finally, for its part, Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been performing similar forms of analytical displacement, though arguably for exactly the opposite reasons. Refusing as a matter of first methodological principle to accord more significance or explanatory power to any one part of the world over another (and hence opposed to all forms of reduction – see Latour 1993), ANT theorists treat all data – from an irritating pebble in one’s shoe to world banking or to the dogma of the Holy Trinity – as myriad elements that can make differences to each other through relations of determinate forms. Any added importance cosmological discourses might claim for themselves (as they so often do) therefore, becomes just a further local element to be described in its relations with others in the ‘network’ (e.g. Latour 2010; cf. Tsing 2010).

In each of these trends of thinking, so prominent since the mid-1990s, indigenous cosmologies become contingent, neutered and ultimately epiphenomenal to something else. Still, while cosmology’s stock has undoubtedly declined as a result, in many quarters of anthropology stances towards the idea and analysis of cosmology remain more complex and ambivalent. Thus, while senior scholars continue to expand on the cosmological themes of their classic work (e.g. de Coppet and Iteanu 1995; Descola 2013; Handelman 2008; Kapferer 2010; Sahlins 2004; Schrempp 1992; Viveiros de Castro 2012), a number of younger researchers are taking the agenda forward in different ways (e.g. Da Col and Humphrey 2012; Tassi and Espirito Santo 2012; Willerslev and Pedersen 2010). Very much represented by the contributors to the present volume, one might think of this as cosmology’s ‘second wind’. Indeed, if anything, the fact that cosmology has been so unfashionable for so long has made its theoretical prosecution something of a staunchly contrary exercise, attractive to those who, with various degrees of self-consciousness, thrive best in swimming against the current – the present volume, we may admit, was conceived a little in this spirit.

On the other hand, any resurgence of the cosmological project in anthropology has to re-route away from the three negative corollaries of the reflexively ethnocentric topology on which, as we saw, research on indigenous cosmologies used to rely – namely (a) cosmology as the structural integration as a discourse about the total ‘order’ of a corresponding socio-cultural whole (b) cosmology functionally differentiated from other parts of that whole (kinship, economy, politics, etc.), and (c) cosmology as the exoticised effect of the hierarchy of ‘modern us’ over ‘primitive them’. Each of these concepts have become abundantly problematic, and it is precisely in their critical transcendence, we suggest, that the cosmological frame for anthropology finds a creative way forwards.

In the current anthropological climate, then, unreconstructed appeals to cosmology just feel wrong.² Still, while many critiques of their negative corollaries are by now well taken, they have rarely been accompanied by a concerted reconstitution of the cosmological matrix which situates them and of which they are a function: namely the modern dispositif of a single world subject to plural worldviews. It is telling of this shortfall, for example, that aversion to holism and the cross-cultural authority of science is typically professed on grounds of a cultural relativism or social constructivism that works very much within the cosmological coordinates that engender holism and hierarchy in the first place.

One way of dealing with this dilemma is to probe indigenous cosmologies in the theoretical expectation of finding a greater elasticity and openness of system and structure (as Handelman, Feuchtwang, Sahlins, Scott, and Kapferer essay in this volume), proceeding from less hierarchical but still representational stances anthropologically speaking. But another – indeed the royal – way out of the predicament offered by a half-hearted relativist concession towards indigenous cosmologies would be to advance, precisely, a thoroughgoing experimentation with anthropological cosmology itself. Indeed, such lines of research have been developing for some time now, with a number of anthropologists exploring the ‘recursive’ effects that ethnographic materials can have on the very terms in which they are analysed (e.g. Crook 2007; Strathern 1988; Wagner 1981) and showing how indigenous cosmological reckonings can provide analytical leverages for such experimentations within the very infrastructure of anthropological research itself (e.g. Bubandt & Otto 2010; Holbraad 2012; Viveiros de Castro 2009, 2012). Certainly, as we shall see in more detail, a number of the chapters of the present volume draw on this developing literature, taking the prospect of a cosmologically informed recasting of core anthropological concepts and orientations in a number of directions.

Here, however, we limit ourselves to presenting some thoughts on what cosmologically oriented approaches could look like in the wake of the aforementioned critiques. For, as we propose to show, there is no need to throw the cosmological baby out with the bathwater: anthropological interest in cosmology can be thoroughly de-coupled from its traditional association with traditional holism and us/them hierarchies. Indeed, recognising this does more than merely render the concept of cosmology fit for contemporary anthropological purposes. For, as we shall argue, there is an important sense in which a concern with cosmology is now more apposite to the contemporary world than it ever was to putatively ‘primitive’ ones. In close correlation with political and economic shifts that have taken place since the 1970s (broadly speaking, from what we, following James Scott (1999), call ‘high modernity’ to neo-liberalism), our argument is that a new cosmological sensibility has begun to emerge – a new orientation towards the cosmos, generating novel ways of being concerned with it. In the next section we begin by briefly sketching the features of this reorientation in historical terms, identifying the emergence of newly immediate relationships with the cosmos as a defining feature of the ‘late’ and ‘liquid’ modernity of neo-liberalism.

From high modernity to neo-liberal orders: re-connecting with cosmos

Drawing on Alexandre Koyré’s consummate history of modern cosmology (1957), as well as Stephen Toulmin’s more philosophical critique of modern science (1992), the advent of high modernity can be told as a story of cosmological bifurcation – high modernity, if you will , as the emergence of a polarised dual cosmos.

On the one hand, as Koyré has shown, if the medieval world was conceived as a vaulted whole with Earth at the centre, held together by a God who lorded a fixed order for all entities (Lovejoy 1936), then the modern cosmos that was delivered from its womb by astronomers and philosophers from the Renaissance onwards became increasingly de-centred. With the Sun having taken the Earth’s place as cosmic centre, and the sacred power of God as guarantor of the order of cosmos as whole increasingly weakened, nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics in particular came to theorise the absence of any immanent force that could ultimately reverse the entropy of matter and energy within the universe. This left in situ no guarantee of harmonious process that might tip the earthly balance in favour of integration as opposed to chaos.

However, while much of this physical thinking has carried the status of received cosmological wisdom since the middle of the nineteenth century in scientific quarters, even for literate and curious classes its meaning has largely remained obscure. From the theory of relativity to black holes, from quantum theory to Schrödinger’s Cat, from electrons to the ‘God particle’, such crucial propositions on the nature of being have attracted fascination in, more or less, inverse proportion to their comprehension. In effect, their understanding has mainly transposed into a ‘general knowledge’ of heroic names and momentous events, achieving supremacy at the level of science, iconic celebrity at the level of popular culture, and yet minimal penetration at the level of grassroots cosmology.

This, as Toulmin has argued (1992), was because the official physical cosmology of modernity was culturally marginalised at the heart of the social system by the contrary pressure exerted upon it by progressive sensibility that sought certainty in cosmological closure. Cosmological openness was redacted because, axiomatically, progress was held to gradually aggregate and organise matter, exempting human nature and social formations from the centrifugal chaos of cosmic contingency. In fact, the immense power of the principle of progress was to endow modern subjects with the unquestioned sense that, as enlightened actors, they could rationally institute society (and history) in the same way as God synthetically created the heavens and the Earth, and that they could re-make human beings through society as he made them in the first place. This taken-for-granted eternal return to Creation amongst the grassroots of high modernity was putatively secured through the illusion of an hermetic sealing of rational practice from disruptive context (namely from accidents, side-effects, subjectivities, criminalities, insanities), mirroring microcosmically high modernity’s exemption of humankind from the infinite openness of the physical universe.

In effect, the dual cosmos of high modernity involved the reproduction of an essentially medieval closure of the world at its heart, that inwardly spawned society cradled beneath an infinite, open universe. The esoteric study of the latter was to become the pursuit of a limited elite of natural scientists – indeed cosmologists.

It is the unravelling of this duality, we argue, and, in particular, the significant weakening of the medieval residue at the heart of society, that establishes a new cosmological orientation in many contemporary contexts, and which underpins the sense (wherever it exists) that modernity has somehow entered a distinctive new phase that is post, late or liquid. What is the pattern of this unravelling? What cultural effects does it promote? What does it suggest for cosmologically conscious anthropology? Answering these questions discloses several anthropological possibilities, of which we shall briefly trace three in particular.

The first directs attention to the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ (Sahlins 1985) in which the present-day cosmological re-orientation begins to occur. We can hypothesise that the neo-liberalisation of political space historically provokes this re-orientation, setting a stable and recurrent pattern in which contemporary subjects begin to feel spatiotemporally relocated. How so? How does a strident political economy of supposedly unfettered social relations open out onto an infinite universe? In many texts, anthropological ones amongst them, neo-liberalism dolefully means the commodification of everything, the consequent reduction of all human value to price, and the hyper-individualisation of agency. True enough. However, we can, if we theorise beyond the social categories of this ‘conscious model’, also register a more profound – because more ramifying – spatiotemporal consequence of this politicoeconomic re-arrangement. Indeed, the crucial cosmological outcome of economic de-regulation and tacit de-nationalisation spelled out politically as ‘freedom’ has frequently been for populations to feel not only severed from traditional communities and receding homelands (Clifford 1997; Giddens 1991), but also inchoately ‘thrown into a world’ without limits (Heidegger 1962): in effect, to be cast into a space that is no longer vaulted by the state above and by the nation below. The result is that, with the much-vaunted death of society, the social becomes part of an ill-definable felt infinity which can be portrayed in many registers, all of them allowing for the possibility – and in some cases the inescapability – of significant continuities with the immensities and nano-spherical minuteness of cosmic process ‘out there’ and within. Examples of this sense of being cut loose and cast out into an indeterminate space can be drawn from traditional subject areas in anthropology as well as in fields freshly opened up by new technologies, perceptions, and experiences. In the field of religion, for instance, ‘Western’ worshippers find themselves decreasingly drawn towards a sacredness that emanates from, and gravitates towards, some elevated altarpiece or architectural centre of a religious place. Rather, a new religious binary tends to emerge that, at the one pole, opens up to the maternal flows and energies of earth, sky, sea and mountain (the New Age), and at the other, allows for penetration by the overflowing paternity of infinitely diffuse spirit (e.g. in Pentecostal churches). These new religions rely upon amorphous redeemers in Nature and Heaven with energies that are not easily contained by either heroic personification or sacred buildings, and which may well ecologically overflow to attain regular apotheoses in forests, rivers (Baptist as well as New Age) as well as in the marketplace. The sacredness of these redemptive agencies seems much more at home in an infinite cosmos of myriad openings and flows.

Similarly, the ‘Western’ body also now seems more open to ‘cosmic’ cause and affordance. ‘Sick’ buildings mysteriously transmit spectral affect over and above the rigorous materiality of their architectural design. Pathological pylons, tumour-inducing phones and leukaemia-producing substations generate putatively new illnesses that concentrate waves, particles and rays, while, more positively, extreme performers begin to both stretch athletic prowess beyond the staid confines of the arena and lido – to the mountain, to the desert, to wild waters, to simulated journeys to Mars, to space-stations – and, in reverse, to bring cosmic unboundedness subversively into the organised symmetry of the city. This happens increasingly when marathon-runners, free-runners and skate-boarders all in their own ways undo the integrity of purpose-built walls, slopes, and edges, pulling them onto the precarious planes of their own technical kinetics. In the process, the Euclidian geometry of the city is prised apart to accommodate new body practices, and the city – as well as venues made up of distant ecosystems – is invited to re-connect with the perilous curl and swirl of the essentially undisciplined universe.

It is worth noting that these emergent anthropological concerns make no virtue of a necessity to associate cosmology with the bounded worlds of the ‘non-modern’ and to see the ‘modern’ as correspondingly socially a-cosmological. To the contrary, as we shall see in more detail with reference to the chapters of this volume, it is often precisely the heightened cosmic investments of late modernity that thrusts them onto the anthropological agenda, discarding earlier fixations with holism and the characterisation of cosmology as a practice peculiar to exotic others. Cosmology, on this argument, becomes peculiarly our game, where the ‘us’ designates that complex and multiply differentiated collectivity of all those who, across the globe, must live their lives in ultimate as well as immediate frames (i.e. all of ‘us’!)

This goes just as much for a second terrain calling for anthropological attention in the midst of these contemporary shifts: namely research on the explicit production and consumption of cosmology per se. This occurs, of course, not just at professionally official sites like NASA, CERN, university physics departments, museums, theological seminaries, film studios, but increasingly amongst both passionate amateurs and grassroots consumers. In fact, while anthropology has borne witness repeatedly to the elaborate cosmoi and cosmology-making of informants abroad, of its own cosmos it has had very little to say (for reasons explained in the last section). The situation begins to change though when, from inside a social realm that increasingly ‘breaks out’ of imagined enclosure to open out onto cosmos, increasing numbers of people begin to intimately engage.

Take popular engagements with the solar system as just one example. Already an influential field in Europe and America, amateur astronomy is now burgeoning. Thus: ‘Amazon has reported a 500% increase in telescope sales … and subscriptions to amateur astronomy magazines, such as the BBC’s Sky At Night are rocketing’ (McKie 2012). Often obsessive, these citizen scientists respond not only to the traditional lure of discovering and naming new stars and planets (and, thereby, of placing themselves celestially), but also, increasingly, to invitations by ‘real’ astronomers to take crucial measurements by proxy. Undoubtedly, the rise and rise of popular astronomy reflects the almost daily media coverage of discovery in the heavens and in the (Hadron) collider. TV cosmologists become household names. Big Bang, dark matter, and black hole books proliferate. New newspapers run cosmology columns that begin to displace traditional horoscopes while, bolstered by dyspeptic attitudes to science, astrology itself remains in good health (Schrempp 2012; Willis and Curry 2004).

Moreover, at the wackier – but even more popular – end of this cosmological extroversion, surveys show that the bulk of modern populations confidently expect (and want) that life will be found elsewhere in the Universe (Battaglia 2005). Consequently, many amateurs spend hours of their life helping professional listeners listen for it under the very respectable auspices of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Institute (SETI), indicating a prevalent estimation that ‘life on Earth’ is special – but not that special. More conventionally, new big powers (India, China) predictably compete (once again) to put humans on the Moon, while old big powers continue to probe, photograph, and sample the mineral content of the Universe and even plot lunar agricultural colonies. The privately established Artemis Project writes on its website: ‘As the lunar outpost develops and a permanent population is established, it will no longer be acceptable to import food from earth’ (Artemis Society International 2004). Cosmology begins to factualise phantastic ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

In this new conjuncture, anthropology has a lot of catching up to do in matching popular interest in cosmos and deepening comparisons with the cosmological compulsions of others. Indeed, we can hypothesise that a new cosmological sensibility in the anthropological heartlands sensitises the ethnographic impulse towards cosmological sensibilities everywhere. Consequently, our third anthropological possibility re-directs the couplet of theory and ethnography once again to the margins of modern governance where, in both distributed populations and tight-knit communities, ‘becoming modern’ and striving for greater worldliness nonetheless remain projects, strongly intertwined with primordial frames and their irreducibly cosmological dimensions. So that, while for many anthropologists the indigenous cosmos will forever be a largely powerless fictional representation, the trend represented in this collection connects with cosmological openness by to illuminate the plethora of actual ways in which foreign forms (e.g. mines, money, medicines, white persons, white gods) are not only incorporated into customary ‘ways of life’ but are radically re-signified within and through existing cosmological frames (e.g. Kirsch 2006; Sahlins 1981; Taussig 1983). More than half of the chapters that follow chart these kinds of ethnographic terrains in an array of socio-cultural situations.

Indeed, the second wind of interest in the study of indigenous cosmologies that this volume exemplifies can itself be placed in the context of this late modern investment in cosmology tout court. Once again, it seems, the anthropological imagination is being captured by that of the natives – which is to say, our informants. Only that now cosmology is no longer assumed to connote a dedicated cultural domain reserved for naturally total, totalising and always exotic discourses about the world as such, that may act either as the baseline for ‘cultural explanation’ or otherwise become itself the object of explanatory reduction. Rather, what distinguishes some of the most compelling writings in contemporary anthropology is a spirit of abiding experimentation with matters cosmological, carving novel ethnographic and analytical terrains out of their multiple and ever emergent imbrications with other dimensions of people’s lives. For studies such as these, to even raise the question of ‘holism’ (let alone a hierarchy of distinct ‘worldviews’) as anything other than a moot ethnographic question (as opposed to an analytical predilection) is altogether a category mistake.

The structure and content of the book

The chapters of the present volume have been selected to reflect the full diversity of this spirit of cosmological experimentation – both, that is, as an analytical impulse on the part of the anthropologist and as an ethnographic observation about the people anthropologists study, the latter to be taken seriously in its own terms. For purposes of exposition, we have grouped the chapters into three parts that correspond to the three critical departures for which, as we have argued, the recent literature on cosmology in anthropology is in different ways reaching.

Titled ‘Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole?’, Part I sets the conceptual underpinnings for the book as a whole. In different ways, the chapters address the ways in which fresh anthropological interest in cosmology problematises traditional conceptions of holism understood as a ‘totalising’ discourse. What happens to the anthropological imagining of cosmos once it slips free of frames which organically impart an a priori wholeness and mandatory integration to the organisation of constituent parts? Indeed, what happens to totality once cosmos is both fluidly comprehended and understood as a dispersal of entitles and relations? Addressing these questions, the five chapters that comprise this part of the volume are united in locating pattern a posteriori, rendering it as much, if not more, an effect of singular cosmological imaginings as their premise.

Michael Scott’s Chapter 1 opens the volume with a critical reflection on the relationship between cosmology, ontology, and alterity in recent anthropological writings. Detecting in the recent resurgence of cosmologically and ontologically oriented anthropology an ethical agenda that elevates an openness to alterity as a disposition tantamount to ‘wonder’, Scott seeks to delineate the ‘meta-cosmology’ that is implicit (or sometimes explicit) in this approach to anthropological analysis. Focusing on the ontological disposition towards what he calls ‘non-dualism’ which, as he argues, is often married with this anthropological fascination with wondrous effects of difference, Scott uses his own ethnographic engagement with the role of cosmological wonder among his Makiran informants in the Solomon Islands effectively to multiply the ways in which anthropologists might wonder about wonder. Questioning whether non-dualism really is more conducive to wonder and ethical relations than any of the possible forms of mono- or poly-ontology (including Cartesian dualism, as well as the particular configurations of Makira cosmology), the chapter offers a concerted argument in favour of a new anthropology of wonder: namely, the comparative ethnography of wonder as a mood that may assume diverse modalities according to diverse cosmological configurations of ontology and their historical transformations.

Staying with Island Melanesia (Ambrym island in the nation of Vanuatu), Chapter 2 by Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen shifts attention from the meta-cosmological effects that cosmological wonder can have on anthropologists’ imagination to the transformative effects it precipitates on the ground, Here, the complex imbrications between origin myths, local understandings of the Bible, national projects of ‘development’, and the promise of the creation of a New Man, make it impossible to understand processes of political and ideological change without reference to people’s shifting cosmological concerns with life, land