Super-diversity and identity trouble in eastern Oslo

Seminar, St Petersburg, 13 November 2014

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

t.h.eriksen@sai.uio.no

I – Overheating and the study of cultural complexity

Never before has humanity placed its stamp on the planet in ways even remotely
comparable to the situation today. Human domination of Earth is such that
natural scientists have suggested to name the current geological era, starting
with the fossil fuel revolution, the Anthropocene, a nomenclature which would, if
widely adopted, make the Holocene (which began just after the last Ice Age,
11,500 years ago) a brief interlude in the history of the planet. We live in an era
which, since the onset of the industrial revolution in Europe, is marked by
human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways (Steffen et al. 2007). It is
an overheated world, a volatile world of accelerated change in which new
opportunities present themselves for comparative anthropological research.
The anthropology of transnational connections and global processes is
not new. Although the Malinowskian revolution after the First World War
resulted in an increased passion for the assumed functional integration of small-
scale societies at the expense of the earlier focus on historical diffusion, there has
always been an interest in translocal and global processes in anthropology. Even
if it has periodically been marginalized, the anthropology of connections and of
world historical processes existed throughout the 20th century alongside the
mainstream focus on small-scale societies and sociocultural integration. As a
matter of fact, Malinowski himself, trained in diffusionist theory at the LSE, went
out of his way to place the Trobriand islands in a broader, regional context
(Malinowski 1984 [1922]). Yet, in practice, research tended to emphasize the
community as the locus of research and the focus of analysis. Wolf (1956)
therefore felt the need to emphasize, in a seminal article about group alliances

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and conflicts in Mexico, that ‘communities which form parts of a complex society
can … be viewed no longer as self-contained and integrated systems in their own
right’ (Wolf 1956: 1965). Quoting earlier work by Julian Steward, he pointed out
that it would lead the researcher astray to assume that parts of a system, such as
local communities, were independent units. In the same period, Wolf's close
collague Mintz (e.g. 1953) produced important analyses based on his doctoral
research in the late 1940s, where both the ethnography and the analysis hinge
on an understanding of the historical and transnational processes that had
created and shaped Puerto Rico. Many others could have been mentioned, such
as Goody, whose decades-long work on literacy and the state has led to a series
of ambitious, large-scale, historically informed, comparative studies contrasting
the Eurasian world with that of Africa (see Goody 2010 for a recent, concise
statement). Many anthropologists were nevertheless skeptical of the broad
palette and occasionally sweeping perspectives characteristic of much of Goody's
work. By the final decade of the last century, research on transnational processes
had nonetheless become an integral part of mainstream anthropological
research, thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Hannerz (1992), Friedman
(1994) and Appadurai (1996). The world of anthropology had caught up with the
world of transnational connections.
In practice, research on local communities was given first priority in most
20th century anthropological research, arguably for mainly methodological
reasons, although the division of labour between anthropology and sociology,
where sociologists took on the study of complex industrial societies, also played
a part. The work of the ethnographer consists in penetrating local life-worlds and
their connections through networks, institutions and cultural universes, and
although multi-sited fieldwork has become increasingly widespread, there is a
looming danger that it may lead to decontextualized ethnography, and
multisitedness is therefore rightly treated with some caution. This chapter will
not advocate multisited fieldwork for the sake of it, but will instead argue the
need to connect ethnographic materials with an understanding of large-scale
processes, such as global neoliberalism or the global environmentalist movement,
and I also intend to indicate some possible rewards of comparative
anthropological research in an increasingly interconnected world.

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 The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part argues that 21st
century globalization is characterized by acceleration and intensification of
networks compared to that of earlier historical periods. It then develops an
analytical perspective and a few research questions which may direct research
on the 21st century hyperglobalized world in a fruitful way. The second part
applies this approach to an empirical case, namely local responses to accelerated
industrial growth in central Queensland, Australia.

Overheating and neoliberalism

As argued by Charles Tilly in an early critique of methodological nationalism in

sociology (Tilly 1984), the period in which he wrote was more interconnected
than any earlier humanly produced world, including the strongly globalized
period before the First World War.

A sensible rule of thumb for connectedness might be that the actions of

powerholders in one region of a network rapidly (say within a year) and
visibly (say in changes actually reported by nearby observers) affect the
welfare of at least a significant minority (say a tenth) of the population in
another region of the network. Such a criterion indubitably makes our own
world a single system; even in the absence of worldwide flows of capital,
communications, and manufactured goods, shipments of grain and arms
from region to region would suffice to establish the minimum connections.
(Tilly 1984: 62)

Thirty years later, we may safely confirm that the tendency invoked by Tilly has
continued. No matter how you go about measuring degrees of
interconnectedness in the contemporary world, the only possible conclusion is
that many more people today are much more connected than ever before in
history. There are more of us, and each of us has, on average, more
comprehensive and far-reaching links to the outside world than our
predecessors, through business travel, information, communication, migration,
vacations, political engagement, trade, development assistance, exchange

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programmes and so on. The number of transatlantic telephone lines has grown
phenomenally in the last few decades; so has the number of Websites and
international NGOs.
In the context of anthropological research, it may be pointed out that the
same increased connectivity which is the focus of research on transnationalism
was, slightly earlier, a cause of decolonization and the emergence of a
postcolonial sensitivity which in turn led to what many saw as a crisis of
representation in anthropology (Fabian 1983, Clifford and Marcus 1986). A
source of regret for many anthropologists, it may also be seen as a situation
which creates new opportunities for comparative research, as people across the
world cease to be mere consociates, but become true contemporaries (cf Geertz
1957), aware – however dimly – of each other and of the broader processes
within which their lives unfold, sharing a seamless world not only with each
other, but also with the anthropologist writing about their life-worlds. To this
topic we shall return shortly.
The most striking graphic representation of the processes of change
characteristic of the current era is the exponential growth curve (Eriksen 2001).
In its most familiar version, it depicts world population growth, brought to the
attention of policy-makers not least through the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome's
report Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), which advocated population
control as one of several methods for preventing serious resource scarcity in the
future. From a global environmental perspective, the concern expressed by the
Club of Rome is easily understandable. From the time we were anatomically
modern, it took us about 200,000 years to reach the first billion around the year
1800. It subsequently took only a little over a hundred years to reach the second
(achieved in 1920) and less than another hundred year to increase world
population from two to seven billion. Many have argued that it is unlikely to be
possible, economically and ecologically, to offer the majority of these – and world
population is expected to reach nine billion in 2050 – resort holidays by jet, a
family car and everything they might desire in the realm of iGadgets and the like.
Alternatives pursued by activists, politicians and planners include acceptance of
widespread poverty, bracing for an ecological catastrophe, promoting population
reduction, or replacing consumerism with one or several alternative views of the

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good life.
However, growth is exponential in a number of realms, and population is
growing less fast than a number of other phenomena. It is trivially true that the
proportion of the world's population with access to the Internet has grown
extremely fast since 1990, since only a few million used the embryonic Internet
at the time. But even the fast growth of the online world has accelerated since the
turn of the century. As late as 2006, it was estimated that between one and two
per cent of the Subsaharan African population (with the exception of South
Africa) had reasonably regular access to the Internet. By 2012, the proportion
was estimated at slightly over 15 per cent (Internet World Stats 2013). The
simple explanation is that millions of Africans now have smartphones with easy
access to the Web and email.
Or one could look at transnational migration in areas which ‘feel the heat’
of heightened mobility: When, in 1990, I began to write about cultural diversity
in Norway, there were 200,000 immigrants in the country (which had a total
population of 4.5 million, now >5 million). By mid-2014, the figure was 700,000
(including children of two immigrants), and the growth curve of the last decade
is – accordingly – steep. In the same period, urbanization in the global south has
also set in a new gear, and cities like Nouachott (Mauretania) and Mogadishu
(Somalia) have grown from a couple of hundred thousand to a couple of million
inhabitants; in other words, they have grown a thousand per cent in about 25
years (Davis 2006).
Or, again, one could look at international tourism as an indicator of
accelerated change. As early as the late 1970s, there were North Europeans who
spoke about parts of the Spanish coast as being ‘spoiled by mass tourism’.
However, in 1978, soon after the end of Fascism in the country, Spain received a
grand total of 15 million tourist arrivals a year. In 2013, the figure is estimated at
60 million; in other words, tourism in the country has grown fourfold in 35 years.
On a global basis, the UN organization WTO (World Tourism Organization) has
estimated the number of international tourist arrivals to surpass a billion in
2013.
Websites, international organizations (as well as international
conferences and workshops), mobile telephones and TV sets, private cars and

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text messages: The growth curves point sharply upwards in all of these domains
(and many others). In 2003, Facebook did not yet exist. Ten years later, the
platform reached 1.1 billion user accounts, growing to 1.35 billion a year later.
The figure is all the more impressive considering that the Chinese, who alone
represent 17 per cent of the world's population, are, for political reasons, not
represented.
Of course, everything everywhere does not accelerate in the early 21st
century, and not everything that grows fast has profound local consequences.
Local or regional deceleration is also a possible consequence of globalized
acceleration, and to this I shall return later. Moreover, although phenomena such
as text messages and tourism, Facebook and cable TV have transformed
contemporary lives in ways which are still only partly understood by researchers,
it is the interrelationship between two processes of change which are especially
consequential for the present and near future of humanity, namely population
growth and the growth in energy use.
Since we are now seven times as many as we were around the time of the
Napoleonic Wars, it comes as no surprise that we use more energy today.
However, the growth in global energy use has been much faster than the growth
in population. In 1820, each of us used, on an average, 20 Gigajoules a year.
Roughly two centuries later, the figure is 80 GJ, chiefly owing to the technology
making it possible to exploit fossil fuels on a large scale. As is well known, energy
use is far from evenly distributed between and within societies, and it has been
estimated that those who live in rich countries have access, on an average, to
machine power equivalent to a situation where every individual had 25 slaves.
The fourfold growth mentioned represents, in real figures, a growth by a
factor of 28, since there are seven times as many of us now as in the early 19th
century. Only between 1975 and 2013, world energy consumption doubled. The
unintended consequences are well known. Those which are visible and subject to
immediate experience are pollution and environmental deterioration. The long-
term, large-scale effects, more difficult to observe and understand, are changes in
the global climate.
One may well speculate that if world population had not started to grow
exponentially in the 19th century, we might have evaded the most serious

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unintended consequences of the fossil fuel revolution. Lovelock (2006) once
remarked that if world population today had only been around a billion, we
might have been able to do ‘pretty much as we liked’, and the planet would still
have recovered. Similarly it is possible to speculate, even if the scenario is
unrealistic, a sevenfold increase in world population without the fossil fuel
revolution. In that case, the climate crisis would also have been avoided, but
instead, the majority of humanity would in all likelihood have eked out a living
only barely covering their basic needs. Instead, our shared planet is one where
modernity has gone into overdrive, where there is full speed ahead in many,
interconnected domains. The human consequences of this accelerated change
should be an area of priority for anthropological research.

II – Super-diversity in Oslo

In the space of a few decades, following the economic expansion of the postwar
decades, decolonisation and greater ease of travelling, the larger cities of
Western Europe have diversified in terms of their population, and in the new
millennium, the diversification has intensified. Perhaps nowhere is this more
true than in Oslo, the capital of the booming Norwegian oil economy, which,
relatively unaffected by economic crises elsewhere in the continent, continues to
attract construction workers from Lithuania, shop attendants from Sweden and
engineers from Germany, just as much as its generous welfare state and peaceful
reputation has made it an attractive destination for refugees and asylum-seekers.
Between the early 1990s and the early 2010s, the immigrant population of
Norway more than trebled, from around 200,000 to around 700,000 (SSB
2013).1 Although much of the growth can be attributed to the opening of the
European labour market —the largest immigrant group in Norway is now the
Poles — ‘immigrant’ (innvandrer) in Norwegian really means non-European.
Danes and Swedes are spoken of as ‘immigrants’ chiefly in a humorous sense.
Moreover, the term ‘immigrant’ increasingly refers, tacitly, to Muslims. They, not
Vietnamese or Ghanaians, are perceived to have a ‘problem with integration’

1The figure from SSB (Statistics Norway) includes both the first and second
generation, but not the third.

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(Jacobsen 2011, Bangstad 2014); and to many Norwegians, Muslims are neither
primarily Somali, Pakistani nor Iraqi — nationality becomes invisible — since
they are defined through their religious identity.
A third of the immigrants in Norway live in Oslo, where 27% of the
population has an immigrant background (the figure for the country as a whole
is 13%). Moreover, most live in the eastern, largely working-class parts of the
city. Although Norway is a relatively egalitarian country with dense social
networks and short social distances, Oslo is so class-divided that an urban
anthropologist recently found himself unable to resist the temptation of invoking
Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the myth of Asdiwal in order to make sense of it
(Andersen 2013: 66). Just as Muslims like Aisha and Faisal are precariously
positioned relative to the imagined community of the nation, they tend to live in
places which are precariously positioned in the Norwegian nation, semantically
unstable places which scarcely fit into standard narratives of nationhood. In
some of the eastern suburbs, the minority proportion approaches 50 per cent; in
certain local communities, the figure may be as high as 70 or 80 per cent, in some
primary schools nearly a hundred per cent.

A short biography of Furuset

One of these localities is Furuset, an urban satellite located about twenty minutes
by metro, somewhat less by car, from the city centre. Furuset is physically
delineated through its metro station and shopping centre, its two schools and
many kindergartens, its municipal library, welfare office, church, mosques and
sport clubs, including an ice hockey team of recent, but faded glory.
Apart from ‘old Furuset’, a chiefly white area of single-family houses and
leafy gardens, Furuset is a new place, built during the 1970s as one of a string of
satellite towns radiating north–eastwards from the city centre, and largely
consists of low-rise blocks of flats. On the main square stands a statue of Trygve
Lie (1896–1968), the first general secretary of the United Nations, who grew up
in old Furuset. Sometimes invoked as a symbol of the global and cosmopolitan
character of the suburb, Lie presides over a population of around 9,000 with
origins in 140 different countries. Roughly 70 per cent of the inhabitants have a

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minority background, but in the two primary schools, the percentage approaches
a hundred. Youngsters in the suburb have been known to say, slightly tongue-in-
cheek, ‘Of course we want to be fully integrated into Norway, but how can we
integrate when we don't know any Norwegians?’
Furuset, like other similar satellite towns along the Grorud valley in
north-eastern Oslo, is not only precarious in relation to the view of nationhood
associating Norwegianness with culture and ethnic identity, but also in terms of
architecture and spatial organisation. It is anti-Norway: urban, industrial,
modern, noisy, new, hectic; Norway, as it is depicted in schoolbooks and tourist
brochures, is rural, clean, quiet, traditional and ancient (Eriksen 1998).
It is almost as if Steven Vertovec developed his concept of ‘super–
diversity’ (Vertovec 2008) not to describe early-21st century London, but for
places like Furuset. Mobility is a constant feature of everyday life there, both in
the short, the intermediate and the long term. The turnover of inhabitants is
faster than in other parts of the country, and the Furuset population ranges from
white Norwegians who live in a house inherited from their parents, to second-
generation Pakistanis with attachments to the suburb through childhood
memories and informal networks, and recently arrived refugees and migrants
from various parts of the world, including other parts of Oslo. Ethnic Norwegians,
87 per cent of the national population, became a minority locally around the turn
of the century. Tendencies of white flight, but also upwardly mobile brown flight,
are perceptible (Stambøl 2013).
Another important form of mobility is the everyday. The substantial flow
of people across Trygve Lie Square in the mornings and afternoons goes in both
directions and encompasses people from other parts of the city who work in
Furuset as well as Furuset dwellers who work or study in other parts of town. As
a result, on any given working day, half of the regular population is gone, and half
of the people who are actually there live elsewhere.
The annual Furuset festival, organised by local associations and
supported by the municipality, displays some of the variety of food, art and
music that comes together in the suburb. There is bhangra and reggae, samosas
and paellas, local rap groups and woollen mittens knitted by elderly women at
the Senior Centre. In this kind of place, creating a collective local identity entails

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hard work. A brief comparison with a small town on Norway's southern coast
may illustrate this point. Kragerø, two hundred kilometers south of Oslo, has
roughly the same population as Furuset, but it is ethnically homogeneous,
historically rooted and socially interconnected through a web of multiplex
relationships. People sleep, work, study and shop in overlapping spaces, creating
what Sandra Wallman (1986) once called ‘homogeneous, overlapping networks’.
A sense of place and community can be taken for granted. It enters the habitus of
the inhabitants from the moment they utter their first words in the inimitable
local dialect. Young people who move from the town express relief at having left
the straitjacket of cultural intimacy behind, but many later return to start a
family.
At Furuset, the challenge, as it is perceived by local administrators and
many of the inhabitants, is the exact opposite; namely, how to create a sense of
shared identity and belonging where there was formerly none. Unlike in classic
nationalism and traditional Gemeinschaften, a collective identity in Furuset and,
more generally, in super-diverse places, cannot be based on an ideology and
social practices based on shared origins, history and culture. This is where the
complexities of identification, personal and collective, in Furuset and indeed the
new Norway, begin to resemble the social and cultural dynamics witnessed in
New World plantation societies for centuries. Not only does it entail hard work
to build and maintain a community under such circumstances, but the nature of
community – is it based on place, social organisation, kinship or cultural ties – is
similarly contested.

Migration and the unexpected force of culture

What non-European migrants ending up in places like Furuset have in common,

notwithstanding their mutual differences, is the search for a better life. In a book
about her father and his generation, the Pakistani-Norwegian journalist
Mahmona Khan (2009) has described the situation of the first Pakistani migrant
workers in the country from around 1970. Part of a much broader process which
continues up to the present and has facilitated transnational mobility worldwide,

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the initial trickle of Pakistani ‘guestworkers’ was never meant to be permanent,
neither by the migrants nor by the recipient state. They were in Norway to work,
in order to return after a few years. Neither citizenship nor family reunification
was on the agenda in the early 1970s. Long-term planning was absent. In the
event, the Pakistani men were slowly to settle and to form what would become
the world's northernmost South Asian community, to bring family members over
from Pakistan, and to be joined by other migrants from their networks of caste,
kinship and locality; from the 1980s, the Norwegian immigrant population was
boosted by streams of refugees from many countries, from the early 2000s by
labour migrants from the new membership states of the EU; and throughout,
family reunification contributed to increasing the numbers of the group and
keeping the relationship with the old countries vibrant and laden with moral
commitments.
Both in the majority and among the new minorities, there was a tendency
to underestimate the force and depth of what we – for want of a better word –
may call culture. Neither culture nor religion was on the agenda when
immigration and ‘guestworkers’ were discussed in the first years, at a time when
issues concerning class, employment and livelihood were at the forefront. This is
partly because the vast majority of migrants at the time were men who were
either unmarried or had left their families at home, but also because Norwegian
politics at the time were chiefly class-based, on the eve of the neoliberal
revolution personified by the twin symbols of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan. With the subsequent emergence of migrant families, which coincided
with the decline of class politics in the 1980s, public attention began to shift
towards the cultural implications of migration. Indeed, the immigrants
themselves were soon to discover that their way of life, their values and cultural
resources were not only different from that of the majority, but an important
existential dimension of who they were, not to be lightly discarded. To many, it
also slowly became evident, in practice if not necessarily consciously, that
cultural skills were not something you could learn in government-sponsored
evening classes on Norwegian language and society. You could learn the
language and yet be amiss when it came to its implicit meanings. The learnt
resources that enabled you to distinguish right from wrong and, more generally,

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to navigate meaningfully in the world, were as embodied as they were linguistic,
as unconscious as they were conscious.
In the late 1990s, I was invited to write a textbook in social studies for
second-generation minority youth, meant to unpack some of the salient
categories of Norwegian majority culture for them. Some high-school teachers in
Oslo had discovered that many minority adolescents appeared to be well
integrated into Norwegian society – they dressed and spoke like their white
schoolmates – but that there were important aspects of Norwegian culture about
which they were clueless. Why, for example, did Norwegians venture out into
nature instead of sitting in cafes on a grey and wet November Sunday; why did
they glorify the frugal and simple life associated with the mountain cabin when
they could afford not to; what was the significance of equality, including gender
equality, and the meaning of ‘peace and quiet’ in mainstream Norwegian
discourse; and what on earth did majority Norwegians do on Christmas Eve?
(Eriksen 1998, see also Gullestad 1992) Trying to avoid the complementary risks
of sterile deconstructionism and simplistic essentialism, the book argued that
cultural Norwegianness was best envisioned as a three-dimensional room rather
than a two-dimensional list. Based on some shared understandings, most of them
implicit if not embodied, Norwegians would position themselves differently in
the three-dimensional space delineating the boundaries of the discursive space.
These were some of the ‘two or three things’ I had learned about culture (Sahlins
1999), and which formed the backbone of this book, which highlighted
egalitarian individualism as the key Norwegian value.
The lives of migrants and migrants' children have become complex in
ways that could not conceivably be anticipated upon their arrival. Their priority
consisted in making a living and support their families in the home country, or –
in the case of refugees – a quest for safety, security and hope. Although many
were aware that learning a new language would both be difficult and necessary,
they did not anticipate a future life-world where a main preoccupation would
consist in balancing contrasting, sometimes conflicting cultural expectations
from their complex surroundings and the cultural world of their childhoods or of
their parents, to the extent of partaking in processes of ‘cultural stripping and
rebuilding’ (Mintz 2996: 298). Immigrants and their children, as well as

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everybody else who lives in these ethnically complex parts of the small, big city
of Oslo, notice the significance of cultural meanings every day, especially when
they clash or are being challenged.

III – Conditions for a shared identity in a multiethnic city

The question is, put simply, how much people need to have in common in order
to have a shared identity which is sufficiently strong and durable to create a
sense of commonality, cohesion and solidarity. The answer may be that what is
needed is not a common culture, but a community of disagreement, which I think
of in terms of cosmopolitanism. Allow me therefore, at the end, to speak about
cosmopolitan values and how they differ from liberalism and nationalism.
In a review of Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006) John Gray states
that ‘As a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is distinct from relativism
and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual understanding between
adherents to different moralities but without holding out the promise of any
ultimate consensus.’ (Gray 2006)
In other words, fervent missionary activity is not, according to this view,
compatible with a cosmopolitan outlook, nor is an ethical position which
assumes that there is but one good life. These two initial principles are,
incidentally, in line with Kant’s views, which consistently emphasises the need to
communicate across cultural and political boundaries, to accept hospitality when
offered (an anthropological theme par excellence, incidentally), and to respect
the difference of the other.
A question asked by liberals may be why they should tolerate intolerance;
the answer is that they are not asked to do so. They are only asked to coexist
with, and if need be, to collaborate with people of different persuasions or
differing life-worlds. Most conflicts involving immigrants in Oslo, where I live,
are of a practical nature and require practical solutions. For example: Why do the
parents of immigrant children active in sports so rarely take part in the
community work – organising lotteries and jumble sales, selling hot dogs on
match days and so on – which is essential to raise money for the children? Why
do immigrant parents let their children play noisily outside late in the evening?

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Why do Norwegians so rarely invite their immigrant neighbours in for a cup of
tea?
It is this kind of everyday problem that contributes to creating coldness
and distance between natives and newcomers, along with – admittedly – more
dramatic events involving gang violence, frictions between school values and
home values, and diverging views of gender and sexuality. However,
interestingly in the light of the huge significance attributed in the media to the
Muhammad cartoon affair, I have yet to hear of a single conflict between ethnic
Norwegians and immigrants that directly involved differences in religious beliefs.
In a study of ethnic Norwegians in areas where the majority are immigrants or
children of immigrants, Anders Vassenden (2008) found that the main yearning
and complaint among the ethnic Norwegians consisted in what we could call a
lack of cultural intimacy; sharing implicit frames of reference based on common
experiences and an embodied world-view. The main flaw in many accounts of
cosmopolitanism accordingly consists in their reliance on dialogue, verbal
exchange, mutual cognitive understanding and so on. Lived cosmopolitanism has
more in common with Baumann’s (1996) ‘demotic discourses’, where the motley
population of Southall pragmatically adjust to each other situationally, than with
Calhoun’s (2002) frequent travellers, whose cosmopolitan outlook is contingent
on their detached lives.
Where I live, we don’t really care which political party the neighbour
votes for, and we don’t know if they have any religious beliefs or if they love
European classical music as much as we do, nor do we care, as long as they take
their turn shovelling snow in our common courtyard in the winter months and
take care to close the gate when entering or leaving the courtyard, to ensure that
the smaller children do not run out into the street. Whether the activity in
question consists in hot dog service, cups of tea, snow shovelling or other
communal activities, is besides the point. The insight from anthropology into the
questions of cosmopolitanism is not an insight about intellectual agreement or
agitated discussion; it is about the shared structures of relevance emerging from
common activities and simple acts of reciprocity. Perhaps that is all we need.

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