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.

References

Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity’, Environment and Planning A: 959-80.

Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese, Routledge, London.

Ang, I., Brand, J., Noble, G. and Wilding, G. (2002) Living Diversity: Australia’s Multicultural Future Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Artarmon, Sydney.

Ang, I., Brand, J., Noble, G. and Sternberg, J. (2006) Connecting Diversity:The Paradoxes of Australian Multiculturalism Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Artarmon, Sydney.

Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone (ed) Global Culture Sage, London: 295-310.

Appiah, A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity Princeton University Press, NewJersey.

Bauman, Z. (2002) ‘The Great War of Recognition’, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference Sage, London: 137-150.

Berking, H. (1999) Sociology of Giving trans P. Camiller, Sage, London.

Binnie, J. et al. (2006) ‘Introduction’, in their (eds) Cosmopolitan Urbanism Routledge, London: 1-34.

Calhoun, C. (2003) ‘”Belonging” in the cosmopolitan imaginary’, Ethnicities 3,4:531-568.

Castles, S., Kantzis, M., Cope, B. and Morrissey, M. (1988) Mistaken Identity Pluto Press, Sydney.

Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils and Moral Panics Routledge, London.

Critcher, C. (2003) Moral Panics and the Media Open University Press: Buckingham.

Essed, P. (1991), Understanding Everyday Racism Sage, Newbury Park.

Frankenberg, R. (1970) Community Studies in Britain Pelican, Harmondsworth.

Friedman, J. (1995) ‘Global; System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in M. Featherstone et al (eds) Global Modernities Sage, London.

Goffman, E. (1971) Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Goffman, E. (1972) Interaction Ritual Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Hage, G. (1998) White Nation Pluto Press, Annandale.

Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity Columbia University Press, NewYork.

Keith, M. (2005) After the Cosmopolitan? Routledge, London.

Kroker, A., Kroker, M. and Cook, D., (1989) Panic Encyclopedia: the definitive guide to the postmodern scene, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

McDonald, K. (1999) Struggles for Subjectivity Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Markell, P. (2003) Bound by Recognition Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Mauss, M. (1966) The Gift Cohen and West, London.

Noble, G. and Tabar, P. (2002) ‘On Being Lebanese Australian’, inG. Hage (ed) Arab Australians Today Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, pp.129-144.

Noble, G. (2004) ‘Accumulating Being’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 7,2:233-256.

Noble, G. (2005) The Discomfort of Strangers’ Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, 1/2: 107-120.

Poynting, S., Noble, G., Tabar, P. and Collins, J. (2004) Bin Ladenin the Suburbs Institute of Criminology Press, Sydney.

Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone Simon and Schuster, New York.

Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review 50 461-81.

Taylor, C. (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Turner, B. and Rojek, C. (2001) Society and Culture Sage, London.

Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity Polity, Cambridge.

Vertovec, S. (2006) The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain Working Paper No. 25, Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford.

Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (2002) ‘Introduction’, in their (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Werbner, P. (1999) 'Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds'. Social Anthropology 7, 1, pp. 17-37.

Westwood, S. (2004) ‘Complex Choreography: Politics and Regimes of recognition’ in Lash, S. and Featherstone, M. (eds) Recognition and Difference Sage, London:247-276.

Wise, A. (2005) 'Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb', Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, 1/2: 171-86

Wise, A. (2008) ‘”It’s just an attitude that you feel”: the interethnic habitus before the Cronulla riots’, in G. Noble (ed)Lines in the Sand: the Cronulla riots and the limits of Australian Multiculturalism Sydney Institute of Criminology, Sydney.

Wittel, A. (2001) ‘Toward a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society 18, 6: 51-76.

Yar, M. (2004) ‘Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire’ in Lash, S. and Featherstone, M. (eds) Recognition and Difference Sage, London:57-76.