Animal Religion and Cosmonautical Allegories

The term ‘cosmopolitan’ differs from the term ‘metropolitan’ in that it refers to not merely being a citizen of a city but a citizen of the world. In spite of this, there is a widespread association of cosmopolitanism with cities, as major settlements of trade and thereby of multicultural assimilation or negotiation. This essay aims to explore an inversion of this situation in exploring what it might mean to conceive of the whole cosmos as a home or what it might mean to feel at home in the cosmos. Here, the question of ‘cosmopolitan animals’ is not one of how animals may be brought into a human sociopolitical economy, be it as commodities or as creatures accorded rights and agency, but one of how human animals are able to coexist with other animals in a cosmic sense