Hannerz, Ulf
Two faces of cosmopolitanism : culture and politics /
Ulf Hannerz
- Barcelona : Fundació Cidob, 2006
- 29 p.
- Documentos Cidob : Dinámicas interculturales ; 7 .
- Documentos Cidob. Dinámicas interculturales ; 7 .
"Cosmopolitan" can stand, or has stood, for a number of things, at different times and in different places, in the vocabularies of different people -it may be someone with many varied stamps in his or her passport; or a city or a neighbourhood with a mixed population; or, with a capital e, a women's magazine, at least at one time seen as a bit daring in its attitudes; or an individual of uncertain patriotic reliability, quite possibly a Jew; or someone who likes weird, exotic cuisines; or an advocate of world government; or, again with a capital e, a mixed drink combining vodka, cranberry juice, and other ingredients, to offer some examples.
A word of such protean quality may not seem to hold out much promise as a term for scholarly use. Yet sometimes words become keywords not through the precision and consistency of their deployment but rather through appealing to our imagination by way of ranges of somewhat opaquely interconnected uses. "Cosmopolitan", and related forms such as "cosmopolis", "cosmopolite" and "cosmopolitanism", would seem to have been among such terms, serving as foci of attention for many kinds of thinkers, and as rhetorical equipment for others, over the years and centuries.
What follows here relates mostly to two main tendencies in understandings of matters cosmopolitan, and to their recent past. To begin with, the account will be in part autobiographical. I first became involved with notions of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans in the mid-1980s, and then rather stayed away from them for some time. Recently I have returned to them, although not finding them where I left them. So let me first sketch that personal involvement. (Font: Presentació)