We’re going under Nigel Rapport’s microscope

By Frank Kuin

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.

Cosmopolitanism is the study of individual diversity, Rapport explained, an interdisciplinary form of anthropology that emphasizes the individual rather than the group.

“The recent history of anthropology has focused on categories of identity such as culture, society, nation, gender, class, ethnicity and religion,” he said. “I feel that these have detracted from a vision of the complex human singularity.

“Human nature is individual nature. And understanding the individual is a key way in which, as an anthropologist, I can try to access the human.”

Combining anthropology with social theory, philosophy, literature and psychology, Rapport has tried to find ways to generalize without leaving the reality of individual experience behind.

“I try in my anthropology to keep the voice and experience of my individual informants and the individual researcher that is me, alive.”

As part of that approach, Rapport is trying to get social science to take the reality of the individual seriously, he said.

“The individual is not a mere mouthpiece for the social or the cultural or the ethnic or the religious,” he argued. “The individual is not merely a mouthpiece for the general truths that social science tends to deal in.”

Cosmopolitanism is an effort to take that concept into account — and what better place to pursue it than Montreal?

“Cosmopolitanism in the sense that I’m hoping to set it up here will try to find a way to conceive of Montreal, of Quebec, of Canada, as a place of freedom where people can have the space to live out their individual lives, and not be trapped by conceptualizations of identity on the basis of ethnicity or gender or class or nation.”

As such, it has a political aspect to it, defining a new role of the state vis-à-vis the individual, in a globalized world where the nation-state is becoming less of a force than it has been during the past several centuries.

The role of the 21st-century state should be as an arbiter among individuals, Rapport said.

“The role of government should be about ensuring a kind of space in which individuals have the right and the freedom to create their own senses of self, so long as their fulfillment does not impinge on the possibility of those people around them to do the same.”

Canada is an interesting place in this regard, as “a country that does not have an essential sense of self but is itself an aggregation of difference.”

Still, Rapport’s cosmopolitanism resists the Canadian notion of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on cultural particularity.

“I’m very anxious that Cosmopolitan Studies is a kind of argument against identity politics, against a kind of superficial multiculturalism that says that people are first and foremost members of a cultural community,” he said.

“The cosmopolitan vision says that culture is not an essential aspect of self, that the community that you’re born into is not going to determine who you are always and forever.

“So I’m happy to be exploring this project in Montreal, in Canada, because it seems to me to be a place where these are key issues of public debate.”