Introduction

Abstract

What is cosmopolitanism? Derived from an ancient Greek term meaning a ‘citizen of the world’, the word captures a receptive and open attitude towards the other. It is, then, an ethical stance, in which the individual tries to go beyond the strong psychological and evolutionary pressures to privilege those nearest to him or her (family, tribe or nation, depending on the scale of the example under examination), and endeavours to see the value of the other, and to work towards the possibility of connection and dialogue with the other. It is a denunciation of the popular saying ‘charity begins at home’: in bracketing the appeal of the local and the familiar, the cosmopolitan looks outward to see differences as an opportunity for connection rather than as a pretext for separation. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, purely an individualistic state of mind; we also understand it as having a social — processual and contextual — dimension. It is a behavioural repertoire which can only emerge under certain material conditions, and thus is something like Marcel Mauss’s or Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’ — habits of body and mind that are available in and activated by particular settings. In joining together the idea of an ethical stance with a material context in which this ethics can be activated, we suggest that cosmopolitanism is not possible in all times and all places, through an act of individual will.