Making others (un)equal: The social ethics of Scandinavian enclaving in Maputo, Mozambique

This article explores practices and ideologies of equality as the central mechanisms through which cosmopolitan Scandinavians in the capital of Mozambique simultaneously build themselves as a community and sever relationships with locals, thereby constructing a socioeconomic, cultural and moral enclave within the city. Scandinavian sociality is predicated upon the absence of overt signs of social differentiation and these practices are reproduced in their interactions in Maputo. Egalitarian values, paradoxically, allow Scandinavians to mask the structures of inequality inherent to local society and engage in structurally unequal relations in which they act as if all interactions were between autonomous equals, possessed of equivalent social and economic capital. Specifically, the article explores the ways through which Scandinavian expatriates justify the use of domestic labour while refusing to recognise the implication of this structurally unequal employment in the local context. By insisting on equality and autonomy as the basis for social interactions, Scandinavians reject local forms of constructing relationships that are predicated upon the recognition of unequal positions and an obligation of responsibility towards dependents. They thereby refuse to engage with local expectations and understandings of labour relations and fail to recognise the implications of their position within the Mozambican social hierarchy.

‘You’ll be very far from this place’: Temporal and spatial aspirations at Bridge International Academies in Kenya

The association between aspirations and education across the African continent is widely recognized. However, it is only in recent years that scholars began observing this connection in the context of the booming low-fee private schools (LFPS) sector. In this article, we consider the case of one of Kenya’s most prominent LFPS actors, a chain of primary schools called Bridge International Academies (BIA). Despite catering for a lower-class clientele, BIA bears ostensible markers of privilege, in the form of a veneer of internationality and intensive application of technology. Indeed, while BIA’s main promise relates to performance on the critical Kenyan Certificate Primary Education exam as a gateway to a better future, such promises are profoundly infused with ideas that appear disconnected from the harsh material conditions of the schools’ clients and staff. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in BIA schools in Nairobi focused on teachers and staff, we show the appeal of the language of internationalism to socio-economically marginalized Kenyans and consider its multiple interpretations within local imaginations.

Frontiers of cosmopolitanism: Educational enclaves and the extractive roots of international schools

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and ‘offshore-like’ enclavement. To do so, we build upon the notions of modularity and extractivism, which we use as heuristics to analyse social and spatial practices of defining boundaries. Gazing beyond the main foundational myth of international schools, we first outline their concomitant extractive roots. Second, we shed light on the conditions of international teachers’ circulation worldwide. Third, we examine the territorial entanglements and disentanglements that characterise international schools. Finally, we investigate the tensions induced by a cosmopolitan educational ethos whose discourse of inclusion is inevitably paired with practices of exclusion.

A cosmopolitan bubble? Constructions of locality at an international school in China

The notion of cosmopolitanism captures the duality of the global world. On one hand, it represents an inclusive orientation towards the cultural Other, while on the other, it has become a form of cultural capital that is owned by the global elite and frequently used to demarcate social distinctions. This article, based on ethnographic research in an international school in China, introduces the concretization of this paradox. The article shows how teachers and students in a gated school – in which local students, by Chinese law, were not permitted to study – used different practices to signify invented Chineseness as legitimate and non-legitimate. This process is explored by deciphering practices of boundary-making that produced a unique bubble. Based on three mechanisms of boundary-making and groupness, I show how a cultural process of identification and differentiation challenges previous empirical assumptions of selective boundaries in reference to the locale. Instead, the presence of ambiguous perceptions of Chinese locality in school suggest the existence of elastic, continuous and unfixed boundaries.

Looking for the authentic other: Cosmopolitan ethos and orientalism in French migrants’ experiences in Abu Dhabi

French migrants in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates – UAE) are often portrayed as money-driven and greedy, notably by their compatriots. Common representations of the Gulf area as extraordinarily affluent reinforce these suspicions and prompt migrants to justify their expatriation. This moral effort takes on the form of a cosmopolitan ethos. French residents in Abu Dhabi generally express a strong desire to get out of the ‘expatriate bubble’, to meet the ‘locals’, and to experience ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’. They perform migration as an opportunity for cultural enrichment and continuously search for otherness. Abu Dhabi’s unusual demographics and singular coloniality generate complex tensions around these cosmopolitan desires. French delineations of (valuable) otherness conflate ‘local’ and ‘national’, largely replicating orientalist structures of perception. These perceptive schemes homogenize the UAE and erase its ‘diversity’ within the cosmopolitan rationale. French delineations of localness also draw on national narratives constructing the country as ‘Arab’, while casting the foreign resident population (89% of the total UAE population) as non-local and temporary. Drawing on ethnographic field research, the article analyses expatriate cosmopolitan desires for difference as the encounter of Western orientalism and Emirati national narratives of Arabness.

Cosmopolitan enclaves: An introduction

Cosmopolitan enclaves emerge at the intersection of global dynamics and local contexts as spaces where the cultivation of a cosmopolitan ethos encounters processes of socio-spatial boundary work and segregation. In the introduction to this special issue, we discuss under which circumstances the intention to cultivate open-mindedness goes hand in hand with keeping the local environment at bay. We argue that ethnographic attention to cosmopolitan enclaves may help bridge macro-level observations regarding globalization and its graduated sovereignties with the micro-level understanding of actual day-to-day interactions and boundary work within concrete spaces. We thus address the paradox of the omnipresence of enclaves in a global world and analyse the ambiguous aspirations and expectations derived from cosmopolitan ideals and how they relate to (under)privilege. While cosmopolitan aspirations exist alongside reproductions of postcolonial representations and hierarchies, they may also express the will to resist the politics of exclusion by demarcating an alternative safe haven.

When diversity becomes a resource: Managing alterity and everyday cosmopolitanisms in Carlo Pisacane, a primary school in Rome

The paper addresses the ways in which the negative social connotation associated with a majority of foreigners in an Italian primary school (Carlo Pisacane, Rome) was first ‘ethnicized’ in numerical terms, and subsequently politically transformed into an issue of national identity. The purpose of this paper is then to show Pisacane’s attempts to transform itself from a school of immigrants into a cosmopolitan space and, to some extent, how it is unintentionally transforming itself into a cosmopolitan enclave. The proposal is therefore to rethink to Pisacane as a cosmopolitan enclave within which different forms of everyday cosmopolitanisms have the opportunity to grow and develop, together with some paradoxes and unintentional practices of exclusion. In the attempt to eradicate the opposition between being cosmopolitan and being parochial, the suggestion is to rethink to cosmopolitanism no longer as a typical phenomenon of Western “rootless” elites but rather as situated.

How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up

It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical and ethical norms in the discipline are calibrated to allow researchers to both know about and protect those with relatively little power who made up much of anthropology’s original topical area of interests. By contrast, studying people who exercise power entails special ethical and theoretical consideration. This article enumerates some of those considerations, and suggests that anthropologists need to have coherent theories of social action in addition to theories of social meaning. The article also suggests that some canonical disciplinary ethical norms are inappropriate for the study of the powerful for empirical and practical reasons.

Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.

Introduction: Ethnographies of power and the powerful

This introduction suggests that anthropology often assumes that the people anthropologists work with are relatively powerless. Due to this default, anthropologists tend to design their research and theorizing to reflect a relatively powerless other. We suggest that the accumulated scholarship on studying up, that is, studying those who structure the lives of many others, offers more accurate ways to theorize power and its exercise as partial and situated, as well as more plural and productive ways to imagine anthropological practice and ethics. We also suggest that this line of thinking gives us some ground to speak to the larger direction of the discipline.