[Published in 2011 Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn, edited by Haim Hazan and Esther Hertzog, Ashgate Books] THE COSMOPOLITAN MOVEMENT OF THE GLOBAL GUEST Nigel Rapport (University of St. Andrews) In his edited collection on Israeli nationality, ‘A Composite Portrait... ’ (1980), Emanuel Marx urges against conceptualization that tends towards the bounded, closed and monolithic. Even a powerful centralistic state such as Israel is not a single entity but the sum of certain relationships, activities, processes and ideologies. Nor is ‘the state’ coterminous with ‘the nation’; nor is a nation territorially fixed. ‘Nodes’ in ‘fields’ and ‘environments’ better convey the open multidimensionality of social arrangements whose bounds may vary per situation. ‘Social phenomena’, Marx writes in another place, ‘are too complex to yield to summary treatment’ (1976:95). What one wishes to convey is social life as a series of partially overlapping open systems (cf. Strathern 1990). This essay is a paean to Luftmenschlichkeit , to being of the air. ‘Luftmenschen ’ was a favorite slur of the Nazis: the people of the air were the rootless, those who would not or could not take root. Renouncing the ‘Blut und Ehre ’ (blood and honor) of a genealogical attachment to the earth they remained ‘guests among others’ (Steiner 1997:237). The paradigm cases of Luftmenschen were, of course, Jews and Gypsies. In this the Nazis could be said to follow Hegel (so George Steiner elaborates (1997:307)), who saw in these people 1