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This paper addresses issues raised in Taylor’s work concerning how communities may come to work in normatively secular ways. For Taylor, it seems to be sufficient for believers (and nonbelievers) to acknowledge that their own ‘construals’ are not shared by everyone. However, this leaves open the question of how the acknowledgement of difference may be turned into respect. A common strategy is to require that faith‐based truth claims are ‘bracketed out’, treating secular and religious discourse as ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’. This secularising strategy is, however, problematic on a number of counts. The article makes a case for a less confrontational, more cosmopolitan conversation between secular and religious reason in a postsecular age, examining in particular the possibilities for conversation between science and mysticism. It concludes that it is possible to retain a commitment to naturalism and yet also accept some of the most mystical of propositions, thereby establishing a bridge between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ forms of reasoning.

This article advances the case for both an anthropology of cosmopolitanism and, at the same time, a cosmopolitan anthropology. Illustrated by means of a case study of apparently traditional Minangkabau domestic authority structure, the article seeks to sketch in the parameters of an anthropological contribution to the recent attempts to recover a notion of cosmopolitanism, mainly by social and political theorists. One anthropologist who has made out a case for a cosmopolitan anthropology has been Adam Kuper. But unlike Kuper's piece, this article argues that we need to locate all such arguments more firmly within the modern intellectual tradition within which they are formed. This means also that we must seriously engage with those critiques of that tradition that suggest that all such universalizing logics are Eurocentric, based on highly problematic notions of universal human reason, and thereby exclusionary of other races and other cultures. Key Words anthropology • cosmopolitanism • Eurocentrism • Indonesia • Minangkabau • universalismIn this article I want to offer some thoughts on the discipline of anthropology, and on the anthropology of Asia in particular. My limited goal is to sketch out an argument for the proposition that the doing of anthropology is best thought of, and assessed (whether positively or negatively), as a kind of cosmopolitan practice. The argument presented here then is part of a project to recover cosmopolitanism in recent social and political theory, 1 a project to which, perhaps surprisingly, few anthropologists have so far contributed. 2 An exception to this absence of anthropological voices in recent discussions of cosmopolitanism is Adam Kuper's, who has defended what he calls the 'project of a cosmopolitan anthropology' by contrasting it with the discipline's interest in, even obsession with, culture and identity, particularly during the 1990s (Kuper, 1994). However, apart from contrasting a (desirable) universalism with a (in his view) problematic relativism, Kuper does not tell us precisely what he means by cosmopolitanism, makes no attempt to locate himself within the particular intellectual tradition(s) that at UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 22, 2015 ant.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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