Overview

Deep Cosmopolitanism explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world's oldest continuously performed theater. Recognized as India's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the matrilineal temple art of Kutiyattam has been performed by men and women in Kerala, India, since the tenth century C.E. Deep Cosmopolitanism illustrates how Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, author Leah Lowthorp traces the art's cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the premodern Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world. Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam's multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of one thousand years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.

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9780253073594

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Reviews

""This brilliant and beautifully written book invites us to rethink what it means to be modern, traditional, and cosmopolitan. Insightful and engaging, it offers a compelling ethnographic exploration of the world's oldest theater from the crossroads of anthropology, folklore, performance studies and critical heritage. With depth and subtlety, Leah Lowthorp challenges colonialist binaries as she convincingly decolonizes the notion of cultural heritage."" - Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, author of Making Intangible Heritage ""Through her combined ethnography and history of Kerala's Kutiyattam, Leah Lowthorp shows UNESCO's modernist and nation-transcending ""heritage of humanity"" to be but a short episode within a far deeper, variegated, and ongoing temporal sequence of cosmopolitan positionalities.""—Regina F. Bendix, author of Culture and Value: Tourism, Heritage, and Property

""This brilliant and beautifully written book invites us to rethink what it means to be modern, traditional, and cosmopolitan. Insightful and engaging, it offers a compelling ethnographic exploration of the world's oldest theater from the crossroads of anthropology, folklore, performance studies and critical heritage. With depth and subtlety, Leah Lowthorp challenges colonialist binaries as she convincingly decolonizes the notion of cultural heritage.""—Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, author of Making Intangible Heritage ""Through her combined ethnography and history of Kerala's Kutiyattam, Leah Lowthorpe shows UNESCO's modernist and nation-transcending ""heritage of humanity"" to be but a short episode within a far deeper, variegated, and ongoing temporal sequence of cosmopolitan positionalities.""—Regina F. Bendix, author of Culture and Value: Tourism, Heritage, and Property

""This brilliant and beautifully written book invites us to rethink what it means to be modern, traditional, and cosmopolitan. Insightful and engaging, it offers a compelling ethnographic exploration of the world's oldest theater from the crossroads of anthropology, folklore, performance studies and critical heritage. With depth and subtlety, Leah Lowthorp challenges colonialist binaries as she convincingly decolonizes the notion of cultural heritage.""—Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, author of Making Intangible Heritage ""Through her combined ethnography and history of Kerala's Kutiyattam, Leah Lowthorp shows UNESCO's modernist and nation-transcending ""heritage of humanity"" to be but a short episode within a far deeper, variegated, and ongoing temporal sequence of cosmopolitan positionalities.""—Regina F. Bendix, author of Culture and Value: Tourism, Heritage, and Property

Author Information

Leah Lowthorp is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon. She is editor (with Frank J. Korom) of South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons (Routledge, 2019).

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