ABSTRACT
The intellectual field of cosmopolitanism studies has developed tremendously over the last twenty years. Like every intellectual field, it has narrated its own origins, with the growth of such fields in part stimulated by debates and disputes as to what those origins may be (Alexander, 1987). There are now readily available histories which endeavour to trace out the genealogy of cosmopolitan concerns from the ancient Greeks, generally taken as the original source of cosmopolitical reflections in the ‘West’, down until the present day (see e.g. Toulmin, 1990; Heater, 1996; Lu, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Breckenridge et al., 2002; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002; Cheah, 2006; Delanty, 2009; Holton, 2009). Such synoptic histories allow scholars in the field, to come to forms of self-understanding vis-à-vis both valued intellectual inheritances and also legacies from the past to be rejected or avoided. But as with all such genealogies, after a while certain orthodoxies in narration can arise, with subsequent authors reproducing, rather than interrogating, the histories offered by earlier contributors. The history of a field can become frozen, reproducing unquestioned verities, instead of interrogating standard narrations (Somers, 1996). When standard narrations overly dominate more heterodox understandings of the roots and branches of the field, this threatens to close off opportunities for developing fresh foci and forms of thinking figures (Fine, 2003b).
