Drawing in Cosmopolitics: Corals, Spirits, and Other Things Less Than Two on a Papuan Reef

Known in scuba circles as a world-class dive site and in conservation as a marine protected area with record-breaking biodiversity, the coral reefs of Raja Ampat in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua are also the dwelling place for a catalogue of spiritual beings who take the shape of animals as well as foreigners. Using the method of drawing elicitation, I show how this cosmopolitical (bio)diversity operates across beings and registers through patterns of partial connection that differ from the cosmopolitics we have come to know from South American anthropology. While the latter enacts worlds that are ‘more than one and less than many’, cosmopolitics in Raja Ampat is more than one but always less than two. This cosmopolitical ‘less-than-two-ness’ has implications for how drawings, spirits, tourists, and colonialists are understood in Raja Ampat. It also has implications for how we understand cosmopolitics in anthropology. Cosmopolitics itself, the paper concludes, requires controlled equivocation.