Tuhina Ganguly

All around us today, we see an assertion of majoritarian demands for conforming to fixed, homogenous ideas of subjecthood and citizenship. Anthropologists are wrestling anew with an ordering of the world based on ever more constricting conditions of belonging. Such definitions of belonging are not only extricating those at the margins but are relegating ever newer sections of people into the realm of a distinct Other. What is the moral-political impetus driving the renewed constitution of regions/nation-states/cosmos as homogenous? Whose world is it and who gets to inhabit it? How do we find a new language to challenge the givenness of this unified, singularity? The proposed workshop, ‘Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary’, will address these questions in the context of contemporary India, given the particular nature of everyday violence and the proliferation of it in newer forms by engaging with Isabelle Stengers’ concept of cosmopolitics. The workshop has two aims: First, to bring together anthropologists with research interest in India but based in different parts of the world to critically and urgently engage with the contemporary Indian socio-political context through the lens of ‘cosmopolitics’. Second, to re-imagine the classical anthropological concern with the Other in terms of its renewed constitution in majoritarian imagination globally.