Books by Nigel Rapport

Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spencer painted not only landscapes and portraits with loving detail but also the 'memory-feelings' which he felt were a 'sacred' part of his consciousness. This book deals with his life and work.

Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality outlines the quest for an ethic of social recognition and inclusion based on shared humanity rather than membership of fictional social, and cultural groupings such as religions and ethnicities. The book proposes love as the glue for social inclusion, where love is the emotional recognition of others.

This book offers the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape, what these mean to us and how they acquired that significance. Key essays from landscape architects are presented with the authors current reflections.

The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring the humanA" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor...

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.*BR**BR*The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.*BR**BR*In this book, the authors draw on their ethnographic experiences to reappraise the concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalisation, religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms. How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the ongoing construction and the rightful expression of such migrant identities?

Rapport argues that anthropology should demonstrate a commitment to a liberal agenda through a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropological theorizing and ethnographic writing. This work also argues for a social-scientific appreciation of the individual as methodological, moral, pragmatic and aesthetic subject.

Asking why the real effort of constructing and living within an identity is so often overlooked, this volume examines the subjective experience of existing in the world, with the power to define and transform oneself.