Micro-cosmopolitanisms at the urban scale

Abstract

Scholars may no longer see cosmopolitanism as the preserve of the jet-setting elite, but they still tend to focus on international travel as the primary means of acquiring cosmopolitan competence. However, one should not confuse mindsets with mileage: if travel does not always generate cosmopolitanism, then neither is it a precondition for it, so stay-at-homes can become cosmopolitan too. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in multiethnic neighbourhoods of Montréal, Quebec, to show how cosmopolitanism can be produced and practised within the microcosm of the city. While international mobility is not necessarily part of these negotiations of difference, other kinds of spatial and social mobility are, especially intra-urban mobility and mobility of the imagination. Examining micro-cosmopolitanism at the urban scale, however, also reveals that practices of and aspirations towards cosmopolitanism do not necessarily coincide.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• mobility
• reflexivity
• urban ethnography
• interethnic relations
• urban space

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Vered Amit and Pauline Gardiner Barber for organising the panels at the meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society and the American Anthropological Association at which earlier versions of this article were presented and to Sharon Roseman, discussant at those events, and the anonymous reviewers and associate editors for their astute feedback.

Notes

1. See Radice (2009) for a fuller discussion of concepts of cosmopolitanism.

2. In this article, Calhoun (2002) was actually critiquing political cosmopolitanism rather than the personal variety, for being too top-down and centred on the global North.

3. I prefer to use the word parochial as cosmopolitan’s opposite (‘(1) of or concerning a parish, (2) (of affairs, views, etc.) merely local, narrow or restricted in scope,’ Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2004), although it does have somewhat pejorative and ethnocentric connotations.

4. In fact, as Rapport and Dawson point out, our imaginations are intrinsically mobile, because our cognitive faculties depend on movement, or the perception of distance and difference between the things we apprehend. ‘[T]he mind operates with and upon differences’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998, 20).

5. Although I do not have room to present them properly here, I identified a different ‘flavour’ of cosmopolitanism as practised in each of the four streets, which goes to show how important local context is for understanding urban diversity (Berg and Sigona, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre d’études ethniques des universités montréalaises and the Institut national de la recherche scientifique – Urbanisation Culture Société.

Notes on contributors

Martha Radice

MARTHA RADICE is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University.