Post on 12-Mar-2023
Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of
Intercultural Community
This is a draft of the chapter published as
Noble, G. (2009) ‘Everyday cosmopolitanism and the labour of intercultural community’, in A. Wise and R. Velayutham (eds) Everyday Multiculturalism Palgrave, London.
Greg Noble, CCR/ICS, University of Western Sydney
The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has entailed a raft of both
theoretical and political criticisms. Theoretically, the
identity focus of multiculturalism is seen to be incapable
of capturing the cultural complexity of contemporary
societies. Politically, as a set of policies and programs,
it is seen to be inadequate for servicing that complexity,
or addressing concerns around cultural division and the
desire for social cohesion. In its place, a clutch of ideas
has emerged to fill this void and offer alternative visions
for grappling with the consequences of diversity in an
increasingly globalised world. The interest in notions of
cosmopolitanism is central here because they shift the focus
away from a politics of identity, which reifies categories
of ethnicity, towards an ethics of cohabitation. This shift,
however, has not been without its problems – cosmopolitanism
has been too often constrained by its philosophical and
ethical orientation, and its preoccupation with elites, and
rarely used to explore the pragmatics of living in
difference in diverse settings.
This paper explores ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, configured
as situated and strategic practices of transaction in
specific contexts. It builds on the Living Diversity and
Connecting Diversity reports commissioned by Australia’s Special
Broadcasting Service as a way of gaining a better glimpse
into the cultural complexity of Australian multiculturalism
as it is lived and breathed (Ang et al., 2002; 2006). These
studies found evidence of strong civic engagement with
cultural diversity and social issues, support for diversity
and immigration, experiences of hybrid lives and community
identities, and co-existing forms of ethnic and national
belonging. This was significant because they were conducted
during a period of critical debate about multiculturalism,
when panics around terrorism, ‘ethnic crime’ and cultural
disharmony were seen to justify a conservative agenda for
dismantling multicultural programs and policies and to
licence increasing levels of racist vilification, especially
against those of Arabic-speaking and Muslim background
(Poynting et al., 2004).
Against national anxieties around ‘ethnic ghettoisation’,
these studies documented the extent of ‘people mixing’ in
Australian life, by which we meant several things. First,
intercultural connections were occurring in diverse
settings: in private and public life, in local
neighbourhoods and wider social realms such as work and
leisure (Ang et al, 2002). Second, the degree and nature of
cultural diversity was changing and impacting on the lives
of young people in particular: we found second and third
generation Australians who identified with two or more
cultural heritages. Third, these young people seemed to move
relatively happily between different milieux, and were also
comfortable dealing with different groups in Australian
society (Ang et al., 2006). In this regard Australia seems
to be evincing an evolving ‘hyperdiversity’: it wasn’t just
that people lived hybrid lives, or lived them in poly-ethnic
neighbourhoods, but that complexity and its subsequent forms
of interaction were of such a nature that they went beyond
typical understandings of multiculturalism and corresponded
to the claim that diversity was becoming more diverse.
Vertovec (2006) coined the term ‘superdiversity’ to capture
the proliferation of cultural differences in the United
Kingdom context, and how these are woven into other forms of
diversity – socio-economic differentiation, differences of
migration and settlement, regional and spatial distribution,
political and cultural mobilisation, and so on. This only
corresponds, however, to what has been the case in Australia
for several decades. Australian multiculturalism has long
been predicated on the assumption that there is considerable
cultural variety within society, but that variety was
understood as an array of discrete cultures which make up a
colourful mosaic. What we are now seeing is a
diversification of this diversity.
This people mixing and civic engagement demonstrated the
contours of an emerging cosmopolitan citizenship. In the
older paradigm of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism was
usually seen to be an effect of the presence of people from
diverse national, cultural, linguistic and religious
backgrounds, a presence which is savoured by the
‘mainstream’ population – it is rarely seen as an experience
of those people themselves. There have long been, however,
concerns voiced by the ‘mainstream’ that some migrants ‘keep
to themselves’, forming tightly-knit enclaves which fail to
assimilate. Yet the imperatives acting in complex societies
mean that we can’t simply talk about cultural maintenance or
integration as mutually exclusive processes. Just as many
long-time Australians take up the diverse cultural goods
made available by cultural diversity, so too migrants and
their children take up elements of the prevailing Australian
ways of life and maintain the diverse traditions and
practices they have brought with them, and create new
traditions and associations. Against a dominant conception
of cosmopolitanism as a preserve of elites, the study
demonstrated the richness of intercultural encounters in
contemporary suburban settings. One of the results of this
is a kind of everyday cosmopolitanism – or an open-ness to
cultural diversity, a practical relation to the plurality of
cultures, a willingness and tendency to engage with others.
This ‘people mixing’ helps produce an evolving cultural
diversity in which people managed the competing demands of
cultural identity and social co-existence at home, work and
in leisure spaces.
Reconceiving cosmopolitanism
A common element of definitions of cosmopolitanism is the
emphasis on an open-ness to other cultures, although there
is much debate about how we view this open-ness (Vertovec
and Cohen, 2002). There are several, overlapping problems
with the conventional depictions of cosmopolitanism: it
assumes the cosmopolitan is part of an elite, it configures
cosmopolitanism as a series of personal attributes, it is
couched in a moralistic discourse, and it doesn’t grapple
with the quotidian practices which produce this open-ness.
Many early discussions focused on cosmopolitanism as a
characteristic of particular elites. Since then there has
been interest in the extent to which this concept can be
used to describe aspects of the lives of ordinary citizens,
a ‘vernacular’ or ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism. Despite this
shift, the original focus left a legacy of seeing the
cosmopolitan as a social type, or as characterised by
particular attributes as a consequences of globalisation.
This is reflected in the contrasting of locals and
cosmopolitans and the claim that cosmopolitans are somehow
‘above’ local cultures, a metacultural position, from which
one dips in and out and between them (Hannerz, 1992: 252).
This serves well an argument for the cosmopolitanism of
intellectual and social elites, who practice an eclectic
consumption of exotic difference, but it says little about
the intercultural practices of everyday life in culturally
complex societies. In an increasingly globalised world, more
and more people partake of a ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism that is
not the preserve of elites, but a pragmatic orientation in
which engaging with people and goods from other cultures is
everyday practice, and through which we assimilate those
people and goods into our own lives (Werbner, 1999;
Szerszynski and Urry, 2002).
Urry (2003) challenges the idea of the cosmopolitan type,
preferring to see cosmopolitanism as a cultural disposition,
an intellectual and aesthetic open-ness to people, places
and experiences which involves mobility, curiosity, critical
self-reflexivity, diverse cultural literacies and forms of
‘network capital’ that enable people to be articulated with
an array of others. The idea of cosmopolitanism as a
disposition is attractive in so far as the ways we interact
– or don’t interact – with ‘strangers’ poses questions about
one’s habitus and the forms of intercorporeality demanded by
quotidian experiences of diversity. Urry’s approach doesn’t
go this far, however, and tends to revert, if implicitly, to
the intellectual cosmopolitan of Hannerz. But, more
importantly, these dispositions need to be seen as the
outcomes of particular social practices, not the thing
‘cosmopolitanism’ itself. It is easy to collapse this idea
of cosmopolitanism as a set of dispositions back into the
social type model, as an attribute of persons. So we need to
examine the practices through which attributes are
habituated to account for the dispositional nature of open-
ness to others.
Turner and Rojek (2001: 221-5) similarly talk of
‘cosmopolitan virtue’ as a combination of irony,
reflexivity, scepticism, nomadism, care for other cultures
and an ecumenical commitment to dialogue with them. In other
words, they see it as a series of personal capacities. They
describe the ‘cosmopolitan mentality’ as ‘cool’ and ‘thin’,
an abstract, qualified and detached form of belonging.
However, they describe it in functional terms, as ‘a product
of globalization and modernity’. While their analysis says
much about contemporary societies, it reinforces the
conception of cosmopolitanism as a set of moral attributes
of persons. Moreover, as a function of globalisation, it
elides the ensemble of social practices and relations that
constitute the lived realities of cultural complexity. These
practices may produce particular personality traits but it
is the practices, not the attributes, which should be the
point of a socio-cultural analysis of cosmopolitanism.
Examining these practices and relations allows us to explore
the ways in which cultural complexity gets negotiated, the
ways difference and sameness participate in processes of
exchange: the give-and-take that is constitutive of an open-
ness to otherness. We need to bear in mind that ‘open-ness
to otherness’ doesn’t tell us much; such open-ness can only
begin an encounter, it is not the encounter itself. We need
to shift attention to the ongoing work of producing a sense
of ‘being-together’, local but not enclosed relations of
intercommunal practice.
Focusing on practices of co-existence moves away from the
‘identarian reduction’ (Yar, 2004: 57) in much of
multicultural theorising as a politics of recognition
towards the intersubjective nature of social existence. Yar
argues that such work pathologises otherness as a
destructive, radical alterity rather than seeing in the
other the condition of the realisation of one’s
potentiality, the ‘intersubjective agreement’ that generates
‘mediating structures, shared cultural and institutional
forms which reconcile subjects in common normative and
practical orientations’ of solidarity (2004:71-72). The
assumption of the boundedness of identity in the politics of
recognition ‘fixes’ cultural categories of being in ways
that delimit, not foster, interaction (Markell, 2003). The
boundedness of identity politics leads to an assumption that
relations of solidarity are predicated on an opposition
between wider community and difference: as though community
means sameness, and difference its negation. We need, then,
to look at those practices that invoke solidarity and
difference in everyday life (Westwood, 2004: 254).
This pragmatic being-together is a cosmopolitan form of
‘communality’ which is quite different to traditional
notions of community. Yet neither is it the postmodern form
of ‘network sociality’ which Wittel (2001) sees as ephemeral
but intense, informational and technological, disembedded
and emerging in the context of individualisation. It is
relatively stable and yet also dynamic, fashioned out of
negotiation. I don’t wish to romanticise this as
‘intercultural harmony’: the SBS reports record examples of
cultural insularity within Australia, uneven levels of
engagement with others and imbalances of cultural
maintenance and social integration (Ang et al., 2002).
Moreover, Australia is far from being free of racism: there
is substantial documentation of the experiences of racial
and religious vilification, especially since September 11,
2001, which local incivilities as well as forms of violence
(Noble, 2005). Indeed, as this paper will suggest, everyday
cosmopolitanism and ‘everyday racism’ (Essed, 1991)
To avoid a romanticised view of this cosmopolitanism, and to
move away from the abstract rhetoric of existing debates, we
need to explore these issues in a grounded and nuanced way.
Ethnographic analyses of practices of civic encounter,
cohabitation and belonging are important because the debate
around Australia’s diversity has been undertaken in the
context of moral panic about cultural dissensus, rather than
examining sites of what I call ‘unpanicked
multiculturalism’: spaces of cultural complexity which don’t
become subject to conflict or anxieties regarding social
fragmentation.1 This ‘unpanicked multiculturalism’, or the
ways difference gets negotiated in everyday lives away from
the heat of moral panic and state- and media-driven
anxieties about social cohesion, provides an invaluable site
for considering productive practices of intercultural co-
habitation: insights which will prove valuable for the
management of cultural diversity in areas of social
services, education and urban planning.
Panicked multiculturalism has of course been well documented
(see Poynting et al., 2004) and draws on the model of moral
panic developed in the work of Cohen (2002) and others
(Critcher, 2003; Kroker et al., 1989). Yet while ‘panic’ has
been conceptually elaborated, unpanic has not. Yet unpanic
is not simply the absence of panic, it is not simply places
1 Much of my own work has centred, like many researchers on multiculturalism, on spaces of conflict – Bankstown and Cabramatta in south-western Sydney, Cronulla, and so on.
where ‘moral entrepreneurs’ such as politicians and
journalists have whipped social anxieties into a frenzy.
Rather, unpanic is a production in its own right, a set of
relatively stable relations and ways of intercultural being
which emerge out of sustained practices of accommodation and
negotiation. While our understanding of panic can be
articulated though a theoretical framework, our
understanding of unpanicked sites has to emerge from
empirically grounded studies of these practices.
This is not to fetishise the ‘ethnographic real’ (Keith,
2005), but to acknowledge such analyses are important to
develop a view of cosmopolitanism as forms of situated,
strategic, transactional labour in contrast to those who
continue to emphasise a moralised discourse of cosmopolitan
virtue. Exploring the phenomenal manifestation of everyday
cosmopolitanisms, the ways cultural differences get
negotiated in the habitual engagements of ordinary
encounters which produce ‘local liveability’ (Amin,
2002:959), helps us to begin to understand how intercultural
relations contribute to localised (as well as diasporic)
senses of community. It means to ask what kinds of sites
foster forms of intercultural belonging, what kinds of
practices of exchange facilitate the continuation of these
intercultural relations, and what kinds of temporalities
structure these connections (Markell, 2003). How and where
do we capture the intimate details of everyday
cosmopolitanism, and the meanings of the exchanges that
occur?
The cosmopolitan intermingling of school
A place which captures something of the quotidian nature of
intercultural interaction that contributes to everyday
cosmopolitanism is the local public primary school. I want
to draw on forms of encounter that occur at a school in a
middle class area with an increasing array of people from
other countries. One-third of local residents were born in a
country in which a language other than English was the main
language. China, India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia were the main
source countries. In the school itself, over 60% of students
come from backgrounds where English is not the main
language.
The public school is a key site where cultural diversity has
some significant bearing on the nature of social interaction
and senses of local belonging. The drop-off and pick-up
times before and after school, for example, are microcosms
of the kinds of mobilities and flows that are seen now to
typify globalised capitalism. It seems less useful then to
describe school as a ‘contact zone’ than to see it as a site
of intermingling, where streams of people – parents,
grandparents, older siblings and other carers – converge and
diverge. The temporalities and spatialities of these streams
are fascinating to watch: they move, pause, aggregate and
disaggregate along various lines of formation and
deformation, punctuated by the rhythms and spaces of the
shared school day and their own lives. People meet –
sometimes by chance, sometimes by habit, sometimes by
agreement – and talk about their kids, school, other
families, shopping, community events, media, current
affairs, and so on. They negotiate coffees, extra curricula
and social events, sporting activities, childcare, etc; they
offer to share responsibilities, like picking up and
dropping off kids, transporting them to other events and
places, swapping visits by school friends, places on canteen
rosters; they buy and sell things, give gifts and hand-me-
downs, borrow and return objects, pass on names of
tradespeople, and so on.
Within these spaces and their attendant rhythms, ethnic,
cultural and religious differences interweave themselves.
Sometimes they are incidental to this array of activity,
sometimes they are central to it. Groups of regular
association gather and disperse. These may contain people
that share physical or cultural similarities – those of
English-speaking background, those that come from Korea or
Japan, women who wear the burkha, those who attend the same
church; more often they involve people-mixing in which those
similarities become differences.
Scholars of globalisation emphasise the flows of people,
capital, commodities, information and meanings across and
within nation-states (Appadurai, 1990), but they often do
this in very abstract terms. In the space and time of the
beginning and end of the school day, these flows are
material and banal but nevertheless examples of the world
the globalists theorise. The milieu of the school
illustrates Markell’s claim that ‘Life is given texture by
countless acts of recognition’ (2003:1), and that these acts
of recognition orient us practically. In this scene, people
are recognised as Muslim or Christian, Anglo or Korean, but
also as males and females, adults and children, buyers and
sellers, builders and teachers, sports fans and media
audiences, citizens and colleagues, friends and neighbours,
and myriad other ways. We can see here several things: the
multiplicity of relations of recognition; the ‘circuits of
recognition’ under which things get done, and the
temporality of these processes.
Central to understanding everyday cosmopolitanism is not
simply an awareness of the mundane place of ethnic
difference in the culturally complex societies of the
twenty-first century, for these alone do not produce the
open-ness to otherness that is usually seen as
characterising cosmopolitanism. We need to examine the
practices of negotiation and exchange, differentiation and
coalescence in which those differences become part of the
process of fashioning durable relationships. Several
examples drawn from the school site will suffice here.
The labour of community
The first point I want to make here is that in focusing on
cosmopolitanism as forms of practice rather than moral
virtue we are stressing the hard work that goes into the
production of connection. I want to emphasise this work is a
form of labour – not just because it is hard, nor because it
is unpaid work done in the absence of social infrastructure,
but because it is productive, transactional and cumulative,
creating things – like ‘community’ and ‘identity’ – over a
period of time.
‘Community’, as we all know, is a deeply problematic term,
and I don’t want to revisit that debate. I want to draw on a
notion of community which is primarily about the forms and
purposes of connectedness (Frankenberg, 1970:245): the
augmentation of kin and affine, the links between street and
suburb, the relation to work and leisure, the ties of
reciprocity, and so on. I’d like to foreground the sense of
what gets done in the networks that ethnographies of
communities describe, and the kinds of hard work that
constitute and maintain these networks. This avoids
beginning with an assumption that community entails the
identification with like-selves and the exclusion of unlike-
selves to explore how differences get navigated and
negotiated in situated practices. Lived communities are
always flawed, fragile, contested, compromised and
paradoxical, but this doesn’t negate the powerful work that
they do
One woman in the area around this school reflects something
of the labour of community. Savitri, a woman of Indian
origin who has been in Australia for 13 years and who has
been involved in an enormous range of local activities:
supervising the school band, working in the school canteen,
running a number of fundraising activities for the school
including an Indian Independence Day lunch, managing the
soccer, cricket and netball teams her children have played
in (even though she plays no sport herself). Savitri also
helps run the Hindi school in a nearby suburb. She typically
‘puts her hand up’ when others pull out.
As well as these formal activities, Savitri has a keen sense
of the importance of informal support services – she says
the daily activity of collective care for children,
especially helping out parents who work or study, is also
important to a local sense of community: ‘you feel safe,
secure and you feel you belong’, and in the area, ‘people
are looking out for you’. She recounts a sense of
achievement in what she does and describes herself as having
a lot of enthusiasm for it. It is easy to offer a socio-
structural explanation for her enthusiasm: she had a
tertiary education in India that wasn’t recognised here and
her thwarted educational capital is transferred to her
voluntary activities. As a woman, she has internalised
gendered roles of cultural and community reproduction. She
performs a lot of unpaid labour that sustains local
institutions and the local economy. She gave up a promotion
in the bank she worked in because it entailed working too
far away from her children, so her community work is an
extension of her ethic of care and her accumulated cultural
capital. Yet while such sociologically-oriented explanations
are valid they don’t capture what gets done. Savitri, for
example, has a profound sense of civic duty and believes it
is important to teach her children the value of volunteering
(even though her husband constantly upbraids her for her
involvements) – and talks frequently of working in a ‘team’.
Savitri plays a kind of broker role for what she calls ‘the
NESBs’ [people of non-English-speaking background] who are
scared to participate, or feel they will be made fools of:
‘I kind of look out for them’ because they don’t yet feel
‘at home’. Having had a couple of experiences of ‘Anglo’
parents who were antagonistic towards her when she was in a
managerial role, she is well aware of the kinds of problems
the other ‘NESBs’ face and goes out of her way to engage in
practices of inclusion and mediation because they don’t
have, as she says, ‘a strong sense of belonging’. Her
cosmopolitan intercultural orientation operates within a
context not of idealised intercultural harmony, but in the
face of local forms of racism and marginalisation.
Savitri likes the trust others have placed in her, and
happily places trust in those she knows and works with; she
recounts several examples of locals with whom she has become
close friends who insist on their kids calling her Aunty,
which she loves. Savitri expends an extraordinary amount of
labour in constituting both her ethnically defined community
(which crosses many suburbs) and in her local community
(which crosses many ethnicities). She has a strong sense of
cultural maintenance and values the work of the Hindi
school, but is also committed to her Australianness: she
links the Indian groups, other ‘NESBs’ and the Anglo-
Australian community. As well as explaining how the Hindi
School starts the day with the Australian anthem, then the
Indian anthem, she recounts stories of getting her daughter
to learn Advanced Australia Fair on the Euphonium with the
combined help of her Australian music tutor and the teacher
at the Hindi school, of organising the kids at the Hindi
school to revise a Hindi song so it included Oi Oi Oi, and
so on. This is easy to dismiss as ideology, but it is
important to also recognise it for the processes of bridging
differences and brokering the inclusion of others. It is
also easy to romanticise as good works, but Savitri is very
clear about her desire to help create a localised world
where she and her family, and her children in particular,
can exist productively.
Where her story is significant is in her role undertaking
what Putnam (2000) calls bonding and bridging.2 Savitri is
important not just because she ‘represents’ the Indian
groups within the area, but because she is recognised as
someone with ‘bridging capital’ – knowledge of the host
society and local structures and connections to those with
influence, and knowledge of the diverse groups which also
constitute the suburb. But Savitri’s competence is not
simply to make ‘ethnic’ connections, she exhibits resources
of ‘network capital’ more broadly. Significantly,
recognition for Savitri thus occurs within and is conceived
in terms of a process of collaboration. This recognition is
based not on sameness, but on cooperative group effort that
entails reciprocity and trust.
Savitri has not succeeded in producing a community that is
free of racism (and I certainly don’t want to romanticise
this suburban community) – indeed, other locals complain
that some groups, like the Koreans, don’t contribute 2 I’ve avoided engaging with Putnam’s work because, although it is a significant contribution to how we understand the formation of communitynetworks, it is too caught up in a series of debates about its assumption, terms, moral emphasis and methods to be of direct relevance here. However, Putnam importantly points to the dual, and sometimes conflicting, processes of bonding (creating social networks between homogeneous groups) and bridging (creating social networks between socially heterogeneous groups). Savitri performs both tasks.
anywhere near as much as someone like her, and keep too much
too themselves – but that would be unfair to expect. What
she and others like her have produced is a relatively stable
set of social networks that is strategic and also
constitutes what I would call intercultural community. It is
an arrangement which works across ethnic boundaries to an
extent that is relatively successful: it is predicated not
on sameness but on connection and collaboration. It is the
kind of strategic everyday cosmopolitanism that gets stuff
done in her locale and seems to generate a collective sense
of security for many people.
The strategic nature of cosmopolitanism
Linda, another woman with a ‘finger in every pie’,
contributed a lot of labour to local community activities,
especially those based around the local primary school and
sporting club. Like Savitri, she was ambivalent about the
very community in which she invested hours of labour, and
she was ambivalent partly because of some sense of the
consequence of cultural division. But unlike Savitri, Linda
was a woman of Anglo-Australian background, with a work
history in the corporate world (rather than professional
life). She treats her community activity as a ‘job’; she
likes to be organised, and to organise others. Her
commitment to the local community is peculiar on another
count: she has sent one child off to an elite private high
school some miles away, and she will also send her other
child to an elite private school when she leaves the local
primary school. Yet Linda continues to invest enormous
amounts of time in the local school and the local area. She
worries that the different ethnic groups that attend the
school don’t have enough parental involvement, and ‘don’t
mix enough’, and that some groups have cultural and language
problems that prevent them from fitting in more – some women
who work in the canteen, for example, ‘don’t know what you
mean when you ask them to prepare the sandwiches or organise
a raffle’. On the other hand, there ‘isn’t any conflict’,
she says, and key people within those communities know how
to bring them into the school when they need to.
The most interesting thing about Linda’s investment is what
she sees ambivalently as the values of living in a
culturally diverse suburb. In her job as a salesperson for a
small company, she spends a lot of time in the Hills
district of Sydney, famous for its lack of ethnic diversity
(it has a high concentration of Anglo-Australians) and for
its social conservatism (it is home to many Christian
organisations). It was the site of a controversy several
years ago when the local council, in the wake of a moral
panic about ‘ethnic gang rape’ (see Poynting et al, 2004),
rejected an application for a prayer centre from a group of
Indian Muslims). Linda contrasts the tight Anglo communities
of the Hills district with her own suburb. The former has
what she says is a ‘much stronger community’ orientation: an
orientation she obviously envies as she speaks highly of the
atmosphere amongst the people she deals with there. However,
she is also adamant that she sees her kids living in a
multicultural area as a plus. She wants to move even closer
to the school her youngest goes to because the neighbourhood
she currently lives in is too ‘insular’.
The ‘blend’ in the area around the school, she says, is
‘ideal’, and she values this: ‘we’re lucky, I can appreciate
other cultures’. The children benefit from this, she argues,
even if they don’t have the strong community orientation of
the more insular areas. The kids in the greater diversity of
the school are ‘informed kids’. She couldn’t imagine an
Indian Independence Day lunch happening in the schools in
the Hills district where she works. In other words, Linda
misses the strong community orientation of a less diverse
area, but thinks the trade-off for the more worldly and
tolerant experience her children get locally is more than
worth it.
Linda is not what Hage (1998) calls a cosmomulticulturalist,
savouring exotic difference, often from afar, as a form of
distinction conducted amongst middle class whites at the
expense of real intercultural interaction – a kind of
‘multiculturalism without migrants’. Nor is her
cosmopolitanism a moral virtue to be romanticised. She is a
pragmatist, who wants her children to survive in a
culturally complex world. This kind of ‘everyday
cosmopolitanism’ is a strategic negotiation of pervasive
difference for the purposes of co-habitation. Like Savitri,
we need to examine the practices undertaken, rather than
read off a virtuous nature. Certainly these practices are
transactional, and involve a high degree of reciprocity and
mutuality, but we should be wary of casting these in moral
terms.3
The phenomenology of reciprocity
This focus on the reciprocal nature of transactions reminds
us of Mauss’ (1966) analysis of the gift as a particular
type of social activity that enables shared, social
existence because it produces relations of mutuality – the
obligations to give, receive and reciprocate. Recasting
intercultural encounters in terms of exchange and
reciprocity, as Wise (2005) has done, shifts our
understanding of the scaffolding processes of intercultural
being-together at work.
3 Putnam, for example, too easily collapses reciprocity, trust and honesty, and so skews the practical nature of co-mingling. He confuses reciprocity, for example, with altruism (2000:134).
Two examples from the school capture the intricate details
of these processes of reciprocity. Dylan and Namil, two
eight-year-old boys that attend the school I’ve just
described – swap lunches. Dylan is of long-standing,
English-speaking Australian heritage; Namil arrived from Sri
Lanka when he was four. They spend a lot of time together
both at school and in their leisure time. Dylan exchanges a
beef sausage for Namil’s curry puff, and each is happy as
they sit together eating. What’s going on in this utterly
banal moment of school lunch? Not the ‘culinary distinction’
of cosmomulticulturalism; there may be something of this,
but it’s not the most important thing. It is rather the
‘exploratory gestures’ (Cohen, cited by Hannerz, 1992: 70)
of cultural transaction. It is the exchange itself that is
significant, and the cementing of a bond of friendship –
this is just one moment in other forms of entanglement in
which cultural difference is sometimes significant,
sometimes not. At some distance from the critique of the
culinary cosmopolitanism of middle class elites, there is a
broader recognition of the social and cultural importance of
food in creating cultural meaning, social bonds and senses
of personal identity. As Berking (1999:65) argues, food-
sharing is a basic form of solidarity and interdependence –
evidenced in hospitality laws towards strangers, ritualised
meal-taking etc.
Another example: when Dylan has his birthday, he invites a
boy who is new to the school – Dong, who arrived from Korea
with his family only recently and who spoke very little
English. He was seated next to Dylan in class with and the
two strike up a relation: Dylan helped him with his work and
takes a keen interest in Dong’s progress. At some point Dong
shows Dylan the little Origami figures he makes, and over
time gives several to Dylan. In response, Dylan invites Dong
to his birthday party. For a present, Dong gives Dylan a
framed set of origami figures of little people from around
the world in national and historical costume he has made
himself. This is significant both because of the labour of
the gift as an objectification of interpersonal bonds
(Noble, 2004), and because of the significance of the image
as a representation of intercultural unity. The figures
reflect some cultural and historical stereotypes, of course,
but express a kind of gift of what Hannerz calls ‘the global
ecumene’ (1992:217) beyond the meeting of two ethnicities.
Further illustrating this gesture, Dong includes a brief
letter to Dylan that thanks him for being his ‘first
Australia friend’, and offers further lessons in origami.
Dylan invites Dong to his home; Dong takes a gift of origami
paper, and the two spend the afternoon making figures (and
henceforth spend the occasional moment at school doing the
same). Dong teaches Dylan new skills and enjoys the occasion
to try out his English. At times both boys work on their own
version of the same Origami figure, and sometimes they work
together on the same object; at other times Dylan helps out
Dong in trying to articulate some instruction. These are not
isolated gestures, then, but implicated in an ongoing
process of reciprocity.
Now my point is not to use this story as a celebration of
intercultural harmony, but to illustrate the processes of
exchange that bring into being everyday cosmopolitanism as a
practical negotiation of together-in difference. I call this
intercultural community – a sharedness of meanings and
practices among consociates in particular spaces and times –
but bearing in mind that we have to struggle against a
romanticised notion of community as bounded and harmonious
that has been well-critiqued in the humanities and social
sciences. I am more interested in the practices that bring
people into relation with each other, and thereby bring
differences into relations of reciprocity.
Wise (2005) calls these moments ‘hopeful intercultural
encounters’ against the usual emphasis on moments of
tension. She describes the kinds of misunderstandings that
occur in shared places like shopping centres,
misunderstandings which produce resentment; but she also
describes other exchanges which work towards mutuality, and
the creation of relations of recognition and reciprocity
which get over or around misunderstandings to produce co-
existence in the local by managing intercultural relations
as interpersonal ones.
Against the popular tendency to talk about multiculturalism
in terms of reified and essentialised communities, we need
to remember, then, that culture is a process, not a thing –
it is constituted out of practice (Friedman, 1995:81) for
‘getting things done’, as the ethnomethodologists would say.
Interethnic encounters similarly involve getting things
done, There is nothing automatic about cultural sharing, as
Hannerz (1992:44) reminds us: its accomplishment is always
problematic. Yet it’s the ‘going about things’ that enables
reciprocal cultural flows, the mutual give and take of a
micro-cultural setting. These are not just instrumental
transactions but involve investments that contribute to the
sense of cohabitation in everyday cosmopolitanism.
These practices also entail processes of recognition which
are not simply about ethnicity per se, but are complex and
mutual forms of acknowledgement of worth and competence. The
question of temporality is absolutely crucial here, because
these are durable relations built over time (Markell,
2003:10). But my main point is this: cultural difference is
inseparable from the nature of this interaction, yet
recognition is not reducible to some fixed notion of
cultural identity. There is recognition of each child or
adult in terms of their different accomplishments:
competencies that become the basis of a process of exchange.
But they are engaged in a shared endeavour that is itself an
act of recognition – we are doing this and we are doing it
together.
Conclusion
Cosmopolitanism is what Urry calls global fluid; it gets
around obstacles; it is crucial to what he calls the
dialectic of mobilities and moorings (2003: 42,133, 126).
This is usually cast in terms of the global and the local,
or the moving between cultures abstractly defined. I think
we need to see it in terms of the concrete social encounters
that bring differences together and the productive forms of
communal labour that create forms of local liveability. We
also therefore need to see everyday cosmopolitanism in terms
of the durability of connections, not simply as intermittent
and ephemeral meetings – we need to explore how this
durability is produced, especially since, as Appadurai
emphasises, we live in era of disjunctures. This durability
rests on the reiteration enacted in everyday cosmopolitan
neighbourhoods.
This is crucial to understanding the dispositional nature of
cosmopolitanism, not as a pre-given or sociologically-
derived ‘orientation’, but habits of engagement produced out
of complex, mutual practices. These habits may entail sets
of skills in navigating difference, a desire for
interaction, an ability to map and reflect upon one’s own
cultural backgrounds and experiences (Binnie et al., 2006:7-
8) – but such a disposition can only be explored through
the iterative practices in specific settings. Such a focus
raises questions of the nature and complexity of identity,
especially as it relates to forms of embodiment. But if we
are to begin to configure a sense of what Wise (2008) calls
an ‘interethnic habitus’, then we need to cast these
questions in terms of the productive practices which
habituate us to difference, and develop the capacities to
navigate our way around them. Ironically, if everyday
cosmopolitanism entails habituation to ’strangers’, then
everyday cosmopolitanism dissolves their unfamiliarity
(think of how, for example, no-one would now consider the
local Chinese restaurant as a marker of cosmopolitanism).
More importantly, however, such a focus alters the way we
think recognition operates.
Intercultural, collaborative recognition is not simply a
face-off relation of oppositional identities that some
discussions of recognition imply, but may involve a process
where two or more beings are brought into relation because
they are producing something, an encounter, which brings
these identities into relation – sometimes oppositionally
defined, but also in a relation of standing together, of
mutuality. Now it is hard to say this without sounding as
though I am romanticising this as a utopia of cultural
harmony. This is why we need Goffman, who stresses that
‘working consensus’ which makes social encounters possible –
both as social encounters that produce something, and as
performances of roles that harbour social inequalities as
well as differences.
As Goffman and the ethnomethodologists emphasise, social
activity is about getting something done – it involves
questions of subjectivity but, framed in terms of ‘front’
and ‘facework’, as part of the process of getting producing
a meaningful encounter. Goffman (1971:21) talks about this
in terms of a necessary ‘working consensus’, ‘cooperative
activity’ that involves levels of respect and processes of
recognition. In encounters in which we ask others take
seriously the impression that is offered, ‘mutual
acceptance’ is a basic structural feature of interaction
(1972:11,28). This emphasises the incidental or contingent
nature of recognition and subjectivity in social encounters,
whereas the politics of recognition in multicultural theory
treats such encounters as though they are primarily about
identity. As Goffman argues, ‘maintenance of face is a
condition of interaction, not its objective’ (1972:12).
The idea of the ‘working consensus’ is close to the forms of
social life to be described in intercultural neighbourhoods.
Goffman of course doesn’t mean a deeply felt harmony – this
is too much of an ‘optimistic ideal and in any case not
necessary for the smooth working of society’ (1971:20), but
a kind of ‘agreement’ which gives a modus vivendi to the
interaction. Why this working consensus important? Theorists
of recognition like Taylor argue that modern politics must
extend public recognition to all citizens, both as human
beings and as bearers of particular social identities
(Taylor, 1992: Markell, 2003:3). Recognition theory,
however, tends to forget to explore empirically what this
first mode of recognition means, and privileges the second
mode – the mode of identity. However, work on racial
vilification I have conducted suggests that what is at stake
in acts of vilification is the sense of one’s humanity being
taken away, or reduced to a social category, which has
consequences for their capacity for effective social
participation (Noble, 2005). We recognise people in the
fullness of their humanity – their competencies and
accomplishments as well as their social identities. As
Westwood (2004:257) argues, plurality is not an endgame but
a beginning, a generative and productive process that forges
cosmopolitan sensibilities and citizenship.
By exploring the phenomenal dimensions of culturally complex
neighbourhoods – both the tensions of everyday racism and
the intimacies of everyday cosmopolitanism – we may address
gaps in the literature on globalisation and ethnicity and
begin to describe the forms of productive, social
‘intensities’ – the networks of interdependent association,
if not solidarities (Calhoun, 2003) – of suburban life. As
Bauman (2002) suggests, conflict shifts entanglement to
engagement – it requires some addressing of the issues at
stake. In a different way, the habituation of multicultural
intimacies is another mode whereby issues are negotiated.
But it is the how and where of these processes which are in
need of analysis. Such an approach would set out to map the
flows of intercultural interaction (amongst locals and
between locals and others), forms of local, national and
global belonging, civic participation, conceptualisations of
local space and their link to national and global
imaginaries, investments (social, economic, affective) in
local spaces and institutions (such as schools), use of
local media, and so on.
Such an approach demands a reconfiguration of our
understandings of identity and community. The everyday
labour of intercultural connection, alongside the practices
of exclusion, can recast the question of recognition, so
central to identity politics, by showing the distinction
between recognition as (I am this, you are other), and
recognition with, the mutual, collective fashioning which
comes out of shared practice, out of doing something
together. In this sense, recognition is the beginning of
something, not its end, and the end is never a given. It may
be conflict-ridden and difficult, but the desire and
capacity to engage is a fundamental demonstration of the
dispositions of an everyday cosmopolitanism. Such an emphasis
points suggestively towards a more nuanced understanding of
a ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ (Appiah, 2005) – understood here not
as a moral discourse of right and wrong but as protocols for
negotiating differences, developing obligations and
reciprocities that facilitate an ongoing intercultural
interaction. Importantly, in the making of social
connection, cultural difference may become incidental, and
yet fundamental. It is through an analysis of the labour of
everyday cosmopolitanism that we may begin to flesh out what
Ang (2001) has referred to as the complicated entanglements
of togetherness-in difference.
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