Nigel Rapport

University of St Andrews · Department of Social Anthropology

Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on ‘the Other’ offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy’ of subjectivity – a fundamental facet of the human condition – demands an ethics of ignorance and not-knowing; the mystery of otherness is only to be approached through ‘inspiration...

For Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to ‘liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things’. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human ‘no longer offers itself to our powers’: to go beyond the category‐thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes – Self, Society, Cultu...

In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a libe...

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zone...

The chapter concerns the ambition to do justice anthropologically to silence, understood as forming a key component of individual identity and social interaction. One might consider social anthropology to be the study of the effects that human beings as individual, energetic things-in-the-world have upon one another. These effects will often be ina...

In his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivatio...

Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous — even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article...

Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded insight to “what is European about European anthropology” by advocating its cosmopolitanism. Anthropology that is cosmopolitan might go beyond hierarchies of language, country and institution, he urges; might provide the friction between different traditions that sparks a global intellec...

I am grateful (once more) for the attention Don Gardner has paid to my work, in particular to arguments pertaining to individuality and its relation to the aspirations of the social sciences. Let me begin with overlaps he sees between us: (a) prevailing images of what anthropology needed to be, historically (in order to be an adequate science) have...

The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas poses a challenge to anthropology. For Levinas, the “secrecy of subjectivity,” the absolute incomprehensibility of one individual to another, is the fundamental fact of human being. It is also the foundation of morality, an ethical system, acknowledging the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality as pre...

While ‘later life sees care emerge in ways that are new’ (Dawson and Goodwin‐Hawkins), this article argues that there is a general form to ethical care that pertains to all individual citizens in a liberal or democratic society. The form is one of balance: between engagement and inclusion on the one hand, and a preservation of autonomy and personal...

It is a special responsibility to incur individual readings of one’s work from colleagues. I hope the following line of thought does them justice. Nay Rather, an essay by Anne Carson (a translator and poet as well as a classical scholar), begins with an account of the trial of Joan of Arc. Caught in battle against the English and their Burgundian a...

In an earlier work (Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology, 2012), I considered a solution to the ‘problem’ of society as identified by Georg Simmel. The fact that we only come to know the interactional ‘Other’ by way of distortion, by virtue of the imposition of alien and alienating labels, categories and taxonomies, Simmel (1971) descri...

Love ‘discovers the reality’ of individual human beings, wrote Iris Murdoch; love ‘deifies’ the person, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. This book proposes love as a kind of civic virtue: that ‘loving recognition’ might function as a universal form of ethical engagement and inclusion. ‘Loving recognition’ is proposed as a civil practice that enshrines th...

In response to a critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and what it might offer ‘anthropology’, this article sets out to formulate a relation between the two that encompasses an ambitious programme of both knowledge and justice. A cosmopolitan anthropology would look beyond cultural difference to common civilisation, beyond local traditions to truth, and be...

The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a s...

This monograph has been an appraisal of the anthropology of Britain as a project. In this final piece, the volume is reviewed and an argument is made along Kierkegaardian lines. Human life is an inward, personal adventure, of each in the face of the other: life is individual and possessed of infinite depth. Conducting social-scientific research (wh...

There is a distinctive structure to Michael Jackson’s new book, Harmattan. It is reminiscent, in its effectiveness and its appeal, to the Holocaust “memoir,” Fugitive Pieces (1998), by the Canadian poet Anne Michaels: both are beautifully written books comprised of two unequal parts whose relation is unspecified—and suggestive by virtue of that fac...

In this ground-breaking book, a theory of ‘distortion’ - of the way in which the processes of human life are subject to interference, diversion and transformation - is developed by way of the art of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and that art’s public reception. Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spenc...

No abstract is available for this article.

To evidence the human condition must be to provide an account of the manifold modalities of experience: 'Evidence' must include different kinds of humanly experienced truths. However, the question is how does one extend the way in which the 'evidential' is broadly understood so that it encompasses the range of ways and kinds of knowing as practised...

An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a “culture.” Hence, social science comes to terms with the “internal” nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch’s and Evans-Pritchard...

The anthropology of personhood encompasses the definition and study of three conceptual terms: person, self, and individual. It explores the identity of the individual actor and the relationship between that identity and the symbolic forms and material and moral practices of various sociocultural milieus. Recognizing the individual in the role play...

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of kn...

The person speaking is Antal (‘Toni’) Szerb (2009:16), introducing a book entitled The Queen’s Necklace which he wrote between 1941 and 1942, and which was found among his papers after his death. Antal Szerb was starved, exhausted and beaten to death in the Nazi labour camp of Balf, western Hungary, in 1945. ‘Sadly, Toni Szerb is no longer with us...

This book review article is a reflection on anthropology in Israel.

The article treats the issue of generality. How may one conceive of the relationship between the uniqueness of individuality and the commonality of the human (species and society) without reduction? Can generalization be made moral – es-chewing stereotypes in society – and can it be made authentic – enacting a human science which treats the individ...

This article reports on research undertaken in a Scottish hospital on the theme of national identity, specifically Scottishness. It examines the ways and extents to which Scottishness was expressed in the workplace: as a quotidian aspect of individual and institutional identity, in a situation of high-pro file political change. The research was to...

The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vis...