absolute cosmopolite

is a person capable of such heights of adaptability and fellow feeling as to be able to see as others see, to think as others think, speak as others speak, and on occasion even to feel as they feel and believe as they believe.

[on malinowski] to project in his ethnographical writings two radically antithetical images of what he variously refers to as 'the competent and experienced ethnographer,' 'the modern anthropological explorer,' [and] the fully professional 'specialized field-worker' On the one side, there is the Absolute Cosmopolite, a figure of such enlarged capacities for adaptability and fellow feeling, for insinuating himself into practically any situation, as to be able to see as [others] see, think as [others] think, speak as [others] speak, and on occasion even feel as they feel and believe as they believe. On the other, there is the Complete Investigator, a figure so rigorously objective, dispassionate, thorough, exact, and disciplined, so dedicated to wintry truth as to make Laplace look self-indulgent. High Romance and High Science, seizing immediacy with the zeal of a poet and abstracting from it with the zeal of an anatomist, uneasily yoked (1988:79).

absolute cosmopolite, n.All

absolute cosmopolite