The cosmopolitics of inhabiting multiple worlds

Cosmopolitanism, as an idea that recognizes the humanity of all as equal fellow-beings, remains pertinent to our imagination and inhabitance of the world, in shaping our relations with our selves and others. Yet, cosmopolitanism often celebrates universal notions of oneness or reifies cultural differences. Challenging both these aspects of cosmopolitanism, this article prefers the term cosmopolitics to refer to human endeavors to live with differences. We propose cosmopolitics as simultaneously lived practice and abstract potential. Cosmopolitics as lived practice refers to the practices of trying to reconcile with differences, and therein lies and emerges the abstract potential of inhabiting the world with differences in ways that neither tolerate nor obliterate them. Ethnographic examples from our respective fieldwork in India exemplify the ways in which people grapple with their worlds, whereby sometimes cosmopolitics emerges as a powerful impulse while at others it gets engulfed by hegemonic universals, yet remaining a hopeful potential.