Canadian development workers, transnational encounters and cultures of cosmopolitanism

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International Sociology

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Canadian development workers, transnational encounters and cultures of cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream but has become a social reality, however distorted, which needs to be explored. (Beck, 2006: 44)

Ulrich Beck argues that we are currently witnessing the ‘cosmopolitanization of reality’ at the

local scale of lifeworlds and social institutions alongside the global scale of transnational

organization (2004, 2006). He understands this as a profound ontological change characterized

by ‘new transnational forms of living and communicating, new ascriptions and responsibilities,

new ways to see self and others in the context of global interdependence’ (2004: 430). For him,

cosmopolitanization is a consequence of cross-cultural dialogue and mutual interference in daily

life. It is also generated as the lives of local social actors become increasingly intertwined with

actors beyond their national borders, as well as through a growing non-hierarchical acceptance of

otherness, leading to a crisis in the legitimacy of xenophobic and exclusionary national politics.

Beck’s work is part of a field of cosmopolitanism research that has been largely

preoccupied with theorizing the cosmopolitanization of reality by elaborating the definition of

cosmopolitanism, separating out its normative and analytical dimensions and delineating its

consequences. That field has recently expanded to include research that tackles cosmopolitanism

at a more concrete level by specifying, through empirical studies, its operations and features that

manifest intimately in individual lives to produce this new sociality. Detailing cosmopolitanism

in everyday life enriches understandings of the multifaceted dynamics and meanings of these

social processes, which entail a plurality of scalar interdependencies.

I contribute to this burgeoning literature through a study of Canadian development

workers who were posted in Pakistan for extended periods of time and have subsequently

resumed their lives in Canada. My objectives are to explore how cosmopolitanism manifests

among my research participants upon their return home and what those dynamics tell us about

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the nature of cosmopolitanism. I argue that these global migrants developed various attachments

to Pakistani culture and people through their transnational experiences, which form the basis of a

tentative and ambivalent culture of cosmopolitanism as they live it in Canada. I show that this

process produces new subjectivities, political forms and connectivities between the local and the

global.

This analysis is developed in the remainder of the paper, which has three main sections.

In the first, I outline the ways in which cosmopolitanism is conceptualized in the literature,

focusing on its cultural rendering to develop a framework for mapping the cosmopolitan moment

in everyday life. I rely on Victor Roudometof’s (2005) work, which offers a robust analytic tool

for this type of tracing. He differentiates processes of globalization, transnationalism and

cosmopolitanism, and then develops a continuum of cosmopolitanism characterized by

categories of ‘degrees of attachment.’ The second section delineates the methodological framing

of the project. The paper’s final section analyses how my research participants fall along a

continuum of cosmopolitanism after living in Pakistan for extended periods of time. I describe

the degrees of their attachments to four dimensions of social life that form the basis of a culture

of cosmopolitanism in Canada among these returned development workers. Few participants

developed unambiguously cosmopolitan attitudes. While those attitudes are widespread, local

orientations are also common, which positions these development workers across the

cosmopolitan continuum as a group and as individuals. I end by identifying tentative shifts in

social relations that these cosmopolitan orientations engender.

In detailing the increasingly transnational character of everyday life for these Canadians,

the paper maps the cosmopolitanization of their lives, and in so doing augments current

understandings of the parameters of a culture of cosmopolitanism in Canada. The culture of

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cosmopolitanism that develops among these mobile Northern professionals who have access to

considerable resources is elite in nature. It is a classed formation that, while produced through

similar processes of transcultural engagement, differs in form and mechanics from the

cosmopolitan cultures of immigrants, refugees, migrant laborers and the local others these

Canadians encountered in Pakistan. The paper also achieves a political objective. By delineating

this particularly classed culture of cosmopolitanism, I provide some insight into ‘how we as

human beings and diverse and conflicting cultures in the context of huge disparities of power and

wealth learn to identify (and make common cause) with others (locally and transnationally)

through political involvement and action’ (Roman, 2006: 366).

What is Cosmopolitanism?

The term cosmopolitanism has a long and complex history.i Recently it has regained rhetorical

currency among social scientists concerned with a range of processes that currently threaten the

fate of human collectivities: ethnic and regional chauvinism (Turner, 2002; van der Veer, 2002),

extreme nationalism (Pollock et al., 2002; Robbins, 1998; Roudometof, 2005; Szerszynski and

Urry, 2002), religious intolerance (Calhoun, 2001; Fine, 2003), a lack of social and ethical

responsibility to strangers (Appiah, 2006; Calhoun, 2001, 2002; Featherstone, 1993; Fine and

Cohen, 2002), the unequal global distribution of resources (de Sousa Santos, 2006) and waning

democracy (Calhoun, 2001). These concerns, combined with anxieties about the American ‘war

on terror’ and other Bush-era foreign policy agendas (Calhoun, 2002), account for renewed

interest in cosmopolitanism as a vehicle for encouraging solidarity among strangers, generating

cultural translatability and achieving global peace and justice.

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The term also has a wide range of meanings, which can be typologized into three

‘visions’ of cosmopolitanism: normative, political and cultural.ii Cultural approaches - developed

primarily by anthropologists, sociologists and geographers - foreground shifting cultural patterns

of life that throw into question the territorially given nature of the social. Patterns of interest

include people’s greater tolerance, empathy and respect for other cultures and values, their

cultural competencies and their desire and ability to communicate cross-culturally. This banal

cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002) entails a range of cultural dispositions that scholars claim can

transform subjectivities, forge bonds of reciprocal commitment and responsibility across borders

and generate attachments between the local and the global (Breckenridge et al., 2002; Cheah and

Robbins, 1996; Clifford, 1998; Delanty, 2005; Fine, 2003; Kurasawa, 2004; Vertovec and

Cohen, 2002; Werbner, 2008a).

Others caution against rosy treatments of cultural cosmopolitanism. Craig Calhoun

(2001), for instance, situates cosmopolitanism in projects of empire and capitalism, thereby

challenging its emancipatory potential and questioning the nature and scope of participants.

Relatedly, cosmopolitanism is critiqued as a form of colonialism that translates otherness into

western idioms to facilitate an improving conversion of the local other into the western universal

(van der Veer, 2002). Most treatments also lack an explicit analysis of class, gender and

sexuality. Werbner’s (1999) work, as a notable exception, delineates cosmopolitanism as a

classed phenomenon in which working class labor migrants and business elites, through similar

processes of cultural openness, produce different forms of transcultural hybridization. Although

women throughout the last century, due to their social positioning, were more likely than men to

engage consumer culture and the allure of elsewhere (Nava, 2002, 2006), androcentric theorizing

characterizes cosmopolitanism as masculine agency, ‘an individual who has the ability to live

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anywhere and the capacity to tolerate and understand the barbarism of others’ (Sichone, 2008;

Stivens, 2008: 88). Ulf Hannerz’s (1996) emphasis on ‘the cosmopolitan’ - a cultural travelling

type distinguishable from tourists, migrants and refugees - is consequently criticized for

implying an elite white man whose privilege allows for multiple opportunities abroad and whose

‘openness’ manifests in particular social distinctions and dispositions that often perpetuate

capitalism (Matthew and Sidhu, 2005; Sklair, 2001; Turner, 2002; van der Veer, 2002; Venn,

2002; Wilson, 1998). Moreover, invoking a subject who is ‘open to difference’ posits a humanist

self that is transparent, accessible and fully intelligible to both selves and others, despite

widespread recognition that similarity and difference are context dependent (Hawkins, 2010) and

not self-evident, mutually recognizable and somehow the property of individual social actors.

Finally, critics warn that cosmopolitanism has enemies in the forces of violence (McRobbie,

2006) and the ‘war on terror’ (Calhoun, 2002), in accompanying operations of disciplinary

power and in the many mobile individuals who cross borders but remain in self-contained

enclaves of likeness, eschewing transnational encounters and dialogic imaginings (Clifford,

1998; Matthews and Sidhu, 2005; Werbner, 2008b).

To clarify the character of cosmopolitanism, scholars have begun to analyze cultures of

cosmopolitanism at the concrete level of everyday life in a range of geographical locales using

qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Despite this substantial body of literature, there is

little agreement on how best to operationalize cosmopolitanism in empirical studies. Authors

variously (and often concurrently) conceptualize cosmopolitanism as: (a) a set of identities (‘the

cosmopolitan’ and ‘the local’) (Calcutt et al., 2009; Latham, 2006; Olofsson and Öhman, 2007;

Pichler, 2008, 2009), (b) a set of attitudes that includes a recognition of others’ values, an open

and tolerant worldview, a willingness to accommodate others, and support for global governance

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(Calcutt et al., 2009; Gustafson, 2009; Mau et al., 2008; Molz, 2005, 2007; Notar, 2008; Phillips

and Smith, 2008); (c) a sense of belonging and closeness to the world as a whole (Landau and

Freemantle, 2010; Schueth and O’Loughin, 2008) and (d) a set of cultural competencies (Lamont

and Aksartova, 2002; Pécoud, 2004; Pichler, 2008, 2009). Most of them foreground ‘openness’

as a key feature of cosmopolitanism, while a few focus on ‘the cosmopolitan’ as a fundamental

identity. These two problems combine to prevent most studies from examining the ways in

which people can be locally and globally situated simultaneously (but see Gustafson, 2009).

Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to Victor Roudometof’s (2005) work, which provides

a less problematic operationalization of cosmopolitanism, as well as an analytic tool for mapping

the cosmopolitan moment in the context of everyday life.

Roudometof differentiates processes of globalization, transnationalism and

cosmopolitanism, and then develops a continuum of cosmopolitanism characterized by

categories of ‘degrees of attachment.’ He defines globalization as the processes at work in daily

life that undermine national borders. Transnationalism is the social reality engendered under

conditions of globalization. It does not refer to people’s feelings or attitudes. Rather, it involves

three developments: transnational spaces in which people’s transnational encounters occur, the

actual interactions and practices performed in these spaces and transnational communities

composed of different groups of global migrants. Finally, cosmopolitanism describes the

feelings, attitudes and values that result from transnationalism, without the necessity of global

travel.

Because transnationalism plays out at many different levels, Roudometof (2005: 127)

argues that we are likely to observe

a bifurcation of attitudes among the public. Faced with the reality of transnational experience, members of the public might opt for an open attitude welcoming the

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new experiences or they might opt for a defensive closed attitude seeking to limit the extent to which transnational social spaces penetrate their cultural milieu. In the first instance, we speak of cosmopolitans, while in the second we speak of locals. However, instead of thinking of these two categories as discontinuous variables, I suggest that most people are likely to develop highly complex attitudes with regard to the two alternatives, and, therefore, it is better to conceptualize the two categories as forming a single continuum. Individuals might take different positions within this continuum, but their choices should vary along several dimensions that dictate the basic features of the two categories.

I avoid the terms ‘locals’ and ‘cosmopolitans’, with their classed and gendered associations, by

employing local and cosmopolitan ‘orientations’ as the ideal types on the ends of this continuum.

Rather than assume that a cosmopolitan orientation necessarily results from transnational

experience, we can more realistically expect that individuals develop a complex combination of

cosmopolitan and local attitudes, values and predispositions through their engagements in

transnational spaces. Consequently, attitudes will not usually cluster at the ends of the

continuum.

Others support Roudometof’s reasoning that transnational experience will likely produce

both cosmopolitan and local attitudes due to its differing effects on different people (Hannerz,

1996; Kwok-Bun, 2002; Tarrow, 2005). They call for empirical studies that investigate this

relationship more definitively. Quantitative studies by Gustafson (2009) and Mau et al. (2008)

tackle this challenge by examining the relationship between transnational engagements and

cosmopolitan orientations using Swedish and German survey data respectively. Both studies

found that transnational activities are strongly associated with cosmopolitan values, even when

controlling for gender, age, birthplace, place of residence, education and socio-economic

classification, with no accompanying decline in local orientations. Authors demonstrate a clear

(but not absolute) correlation. However, they cannot explain it or determine the causal direction

of influence due to the type of data used. They propose a strong causal pathway from

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transnational experience to cosmopolitan orientation, rather than the reverse, but agree that the

relationship is mutually constitutive, that a cosmopolitan orientation may also lead people to seek

out engagements in transnational spaces. These studies suggest that the relationship between

transnational engagements and cosmopolitan orientations is highly complex. Not only does

transnational experience take many forms, it can also be both a cause and effect of

cosmopolitanism, but not necessarily. Gustafson (2009) and Mau et al. (2008) urge researchers to

conduct further studies that illuminate this multifaceted relationship, as well as the coexistence of

cosmopolitan and local attitudes. I undertake these tasks in the empirical portion of the paper.

If the poles that define Roudometof’s continuum are local and cosmopolitan orientations,

then what are their features that can be plotted to chart a culture of cosmopolitanism?

Roudometof suggests focusing on degrees of attachments to important dimensions of social life.

He delineates four such attachments: to a native country, to a specific locality, to local culture

and to national protectionism. Locally oriented people, in this scheme, value being a citizen of a

particular state, rather than being part of a global citizenry. A cosmopolitan orientation separates

‘home’ from where a person lives, disrupting the notion of locality as a physical place, whereas a

local orientation values attachment to a neighborhood or city. Local and cosmopolitan

orientations also diverge in attachments to local culture, including religion and language,

demonstrating a connection to their cultural roots or, conversely, a dedication to cultural

pluralism. A particular ‘structure of feeling’ is also relevant to this aspect of a cosmopolitan

orientation: the allure of elsewhere, an urge to experience another culture (Nava, 2002; Stivens,

2008). Finally, these orientations differ in their stance on institutional protectionism at the

national level, with the local supporting economic tariffs on imports and efforts to enhance

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national security, and the cosmopolitan encouraging international engagements and global

migrations for work or more fulfilling lifestyles.

In Kantian philosophy, cosmopolitanism is understood as antithetical to an attachment to

the local, which is conceived as a precondition for ethnic conflict. Roudometof’s continuum does

not imply that a connection to the local is inherently chauvinistic. Rather, by foregrounding

degrees of attachments, it allows that people may retain local loyalties as they develop a social

imaginary organized around global interdependence that is ‘rooted’ in local lifeworlds. The

Guatemalan diaspora in San Francisco, for example, develop a social imagination that

‘acknowledges the local and particular in a framework of shared values about what it means to

be human’ (Delugan, 2010: 83).

Roudometof’s continuum is a useful analytic tool in three additional ways. First, by

operationalizing cosmopolitanism as clusters of attitudes, values and predispositions that are

engendered under conditions of transnationalism, it bypasses the notion of a cultural disposition

of ‘openness.’ Second, using the concept of attachments, it documents and explains why some

people who have transnational experiences do not develop a cosmopolitan orientation. Third, it

produces a nuanced mapping of a culture of cosmopolitanism that plots different degrees of

cosmopolitan and local attitudes and inconsistencies among them. Once I delineate the

methodological framing of my research project, I use this continuum to map the degrees of

attachments that form the basis of a tentative and ambivalent culture of cosmopolitanism among

an elite group of Canadian development workers who have lived in Pakistan for extended periods

of time.

The Study

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Between January and July 2005, I conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with 31

development workers from across Canada. I began recruiting them using e-mail messages, which

I sent to the Canadian head offices of the Canadian International Development Agency, the

International Development Research Center, OXFAM, the Aga Khan Foundation, and World

Vision. These organizations distributed an electronic recruitment letter to everyone on their

contact lists, which described the research as an effort to understand how their experiences of

living abroad had affected their personal and work lives since returning home. Beyond this

description, the letter stipulated that I was looking for professionals currently residing in Canada

who had held development positions in either a governmental or non-governmental organization

in Pakistan for at least one year.

My interest in professional Canadian development workers with experience in Pakistan

developed from previous ethnographic research with white women working in northern Pakistan

as development volunteers (Cook, 2007). I investigated how these transnational migrants

constructed lives for themselves in this unfamiliar social and labor context. I was disappointed to

find little evidence of cross-cultural dialogue and acceptance of otherness among these long-term

volunteers. More often hierarchical difference structured their engagements with Pakistanis. That

study, which was limited to exploring volunteers’ lives in Pakistan, precluded an understanding

of what participants took away from these experiences after they were distanced from the

everyday challenges of making a life abroad. My current project addresses this gap, while also

focusing on professionals who are specifically trained for international development work and

consequently may have different transcultural experiences than volunteers.

In the recruitment letter, I requested that prospective participants contact me by e-mail.

Within three weeks, eight interested people responded to negotiate interview logistics. I learned

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during my previous study that development workers in Pakistan often construct tightly knit

communities while they are living abroad, so I made use of these webs of social relations by

employing a snowball sampling strategy to identify and gain access to additional participants.

These eight people furnished me with enough introductions to eventually enlist 31 participants

who varied by age, gender, profession, and development work experience.iii

Each interview lasted for approximately three hours and was directed by an interview

guide. But conversations were structured to be flexible, leaving room for participants to choose

discussion issues and directions. I spoke with them in their homes or offices, and sometimes in

public places like coffee shops. I analyzed the verbatim transcripts using standard qualitative

open coding techniques to inductively identify recurring themes related to the

cosmopolitanization of daily life. While I did not structure interview guide questions around

Roudometof’s notion of degrees of attachment, inductively derived themes closely corresponded

to that rubric, which I then used to typologize the data.

Degrees of Attachment

Most participants initially struggled to articulate how their lives in Canada are marked by their

transnational encounters abroad. Everyone agreed that these experiences profoundly affected

who they are and what they think is important, but tracing their effects on everyday existence

was challenging. No one had considered the question. They more effortlessly described their

experiences of living and working in Pakistan, a country that emerged out of the traumatic

dissolution of the Raj and has since struggled with indeterminate borders, civil war, military

coups, political corruption and international intervention. Their musings on why they undertook

development work in Pakistan, what they experienced and learned and who they encountered

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provided a productive grounding for subsequent reflections on how their daily lives in Canada

are marked by these transnational encounters. Informal interview conversations served as

incitements to reflection, showing that local and cosmopolitan orientations in this group are not

transparent and self-evident, but through mindful deliberation and narrative accounting can be

fairly clearly articulated.

In thinking through the impact of global mobility on ‘home’ life in Canada, my

participants often anticipate Roudometof’s claim that transnational travel is not the only route to

transnational experience and ensuing cosmopolitan attitudes. Indeed, Anita,iv a 57 year old

professor of nursing who spent three years developing programs for women health professionals

at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, claims that ‘Being exposed to cultures in your own

society, as opposed to going abroad and experiencing that culture as a foreigner there, that’s even

more changing, initiates more development internally, and more empathy between cultures.’

Drawing on his three year experience as a development program coordinator in Islamabad, Mark

agrees that ‘the main way and most effective way that a lot of Canadians will experience

Pakistani culture is seeing it here on more of a day-to-day basis.’ According to Anita and Mark,

transnational interactions in local transnational spaces, which are sustained and often

unavoidable, are more likely to effect local transformation of a cosmopolitan nature than

overseas experiences. Many participants also question the claim that global travel necessarily

leads to a cosmopolitan orientation. Karl, a multi-lingual water engineer, encountered ‘some

development workers who embraced that cross-cultural opportunity and those who shut

themselves off from it, who can live abroad for two years or five years and not have gained

anything from the experience, who have just been there and sought as many ways to recreate

their home world wherever they happen to be,’ constructing what Joseph calls ‘home facsimiles

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abroad.’ Mary assumes that the same affinity to locality, which she also witnessed among a

couple of her CIDA peers in Islamabad, is at work in Canada: ‘We have a very, you know,

diversified population right here in Canada, but the same people who are closed to the idea of

travelling to developing countries are also probably closed to interacting with people from other

cultural backgrounds here in Canada.’

Mary astutely differentiates local and cosmopolitan orientations, but implies they are

mutually exclusive. The development workers in this study pursued opportunities for travel to

the global South. However, not all of them developed unambiguously cosmopolitan attitudes and

values. While those attitudes are certainly widespread and often fervent, local orientations are

also common, which positions these development workers across the cosmopolitan continuum as

a group and as individuals.

Attachment to Nation

Participants’ unmistakable lack of exclusive attachment to Canada and their Canadian citizenship

perhaps best illustrates a robust cosmopolitan orientation. No one clings to a self-evident

‘Canadianness.’ Rather, like Isabel, they find themselves asking ‘what does it mean to be

Canadian and what does it mean to go and work overseas and for how long? When I was in

Pakistan I reflected a lot on my politics of my nationality. What is nationality really and why is

that important? You know these boundaries, sometimes we like them and sometimes we don’t.’

Mark goes further, saying that ‘overseas work experiences help me see the importance of

thinking of ourselves as global citizens, of the value and benefits of sort of seeking out, enjoying

and benefiting from cross-cultural relations. I mean I tap into something that’s larger than where

I come from. It’s very positive for me.’ Global citizenship is also positive for Laurie: ‘I love

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aspects of Canada, no question about it. But I just don’t love a steady diet of it!’ After working

for four years as an environmental consultant, Frank suspects that if he had moved ‘into a UN

position and got on that career track, I probably would still be out there. I would be even less

attached to Canada. I’ve talked to some people who have done this, and none of us think of

ourselves as purely Canadian anymore.’ At the most extreme, Michael, who appreciates the

privileges that accompany a Canadian upbringing in a white middle-class household,

characterizes himself at several points in our interview as Pakistani: ‘I was born in Karachi and

50 years later I went back. I don’t have a living memory of it because I was just a tot when I

left…Most people we knew in Karachi were immigrants or refugees who came in the aftermath

of Partition. So, often I was the only Pakistani in the group.’

Attachment to Locality

While most participants clearly articulate a lack of exclusive attachment to Canada, the

overwhelming majority did not explicitly refer to the more micro scale of locality in terms either

of attachment or detachment. For those CIDA employees and professors of nursing who first

encountered Pakistan during multiple short-term work junkets, followed by an extended sojourn

of several years, ‘home’ remained the neighborhoods and cities they temporarily left behind.

Even though none of them said they were homesick abroad, on return they settled back

comfortably into the rhythms, if not always the preoccupations, of local life. Five participants are

notable exceptions in that they describe alienating feelings of detachment from locality. During a

‘home leave’ to Canada, Mark’s four-year-old daughter broke down, crying ‘I want to go home!

I want to go home to Pakistan,’ a longing Mark optimistically interprets as an expanded sense of

home and global belonging. Less sanguinely after more than five years of result-based

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management work for the Aga Khan Foundation in Islamabad, George doesn’t ‘feel at home

anywhere now. I don’t know why, it’s a curse. So when I’m travelling sometimes I’m acutely

aware that this isn’t where I actually belong but I have to fit in and function. And then when I go

to a shopping mall or something here, I’m like my god, this isn’t my home either! So, yeah, I

don’t really feel like I fit in anywhere.’ Wendy’s troubling feelings help her empathize with

newcomers to Canada: ‘I have two Egyptian friends who are struggling with depression because

of their trials and tribulations with immigration…They’re caught between places, and may never

be able to cope or belong in either of them. And after my experiences overseas, I’m displaced

myself, feeling like I’m living in a couple of different places at the same time. So I kind of relate

to how they feel.’ Helen and Andrea experience a detachment from local preoccupations, rather

than from unsettled experiences of home. For Helen, ‘worrying about kids’ soccer seems

inconsequential compared to issues of world poverty and injustice,’ while Andrea is frustrated

with people who are ‘more interested in things happening in their own neighborhood than they

are about the whole world, like what the inside of our church looks like, you know, trying to

make yourself perfect within some local organization and forgetting about a wider social

responsibility completely.’

Attachment to Local Culture

When it comes to loyalties to local culture, a dialogic imagination and cosmopolitan orientation

that values cultural pluralism are almost ubiquitous among participants. Jean senses her ‘old

[ethnocentric] foundation shifting’ as she ‘goes with the cultural flow’ of Pakistan, making her

what Michael calls ‘culturally street smart’. Although ‘going with the flow’ may imply a degree

of passivity, everyone expressed a ‘sheer fascination for new places’ (Frank) and an urge to

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engage different cultural circumstances. Martin adeptly describes this impulse to abroad: ‘I’m

interested in learning languages and history and meeting new people, experiencing new

cultures…It’s the thrill of going somewhere else, living in a different culture and learning about

it.’ This desire for cultural difference leads George to characterize Vancouver, a city most

Canadians view as a cultural mélange, as ‘just kind of monotone. There’s just not enough

diversity, not enough richness. I have these yearnings to go again where I’m exposed to neat

places, and where I’m put outside my element, put outside my comfort zone. I really enjoy that

and find it really rewarding, and I learn a lot from it.’

Although others struggled to find the time, Wendy, Martin and Ellen devoted themselves

to learning a local language in Pakistan, acknowledging that linguistic abilities enabled them to

‘connect better with people’ (Ellen). Except for two, all the women (but none of the men) wore

shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan that comprises a long tunic over loose pyjama

trousers, with the addition, for women, of a long scarf that drapes over the shoulders. Even

though the dominant discourse in the west represents shalwar kameez for women as ‘oppressive’

(Cook, 2005), Andrea ‘found it quite the opposite. I found it very liberating. It’s a great class

equalizer.’ Participants also learned to appreciate Pakistan’s rich, vibrant and ancient culture, as

well as Pakistanis’ talents as problem solvers and creative adaptors who do well with the limited

resources at their disposal. But two aspects of their cultural engagement with Pakistan most

profoundly detached them from local culture, making them cultural pluralists.

First, an extended association with Pakistani culture induced a new understanding of and

respect for Islam, which positively affected a couple participants’ own spirituality. According to

Jeannie, ‘the monolith that is Islam [in Canada] gets subdivided into its component parts pretty

quickly [in Pakistan]…I’ve learned respect for Islam.’ Jean, a professor of nursing who has over

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10 years of work experience in Karachi, subsequently has ‘a hard time criticizing Muslims

because the Sunnis and Shiites and Ismailis I know just aren’t like how they’re portrayed here.

So yes, I guess my religious world has grown.’ Also exercising a dialogic imagination about the

intermingling of religious cultural elements in her life, Isabel asserts that ‘Being in a Muslim

country definitely helped me deepen my own faith, understanding belief systems and

commitment and discipline from another point of view.’ George is the only participant who

retains an affinity to local religious culture in that his ‘tolerance for Islam is completely lower

than when I first started going there. I was far more interested in finding out more about the

religion and how it works, and now I’m, you know, fairly opposed to the religion, less perhaps

what’s in the books, but especially the way I saw it practiced and the way that people think about

it.’

Second, participants said their understandings of Muslim women as passive specters of

social life (Cook, 2008) were shaken as they saw these women actively participating in many

spheres of daily life in Pakistan, leading Zonny to appreciate how ‘[western] feminism and

Islamic feminism can sort of live together.’ Andrea now believes that not all Muslim women are

merely pawns in arranged marriages after watching prospective brides choose grooms and

‘negotiate [marriage contracts] for six months before turning the guys down.’ Pakistani women

in political positions also unsettle common western assumptions. Frank has pictures of himself

with the ‘elected chair of the local Islamic council, who’s also the head of a women’s NGO that

runs a micro-credit bank. So women have some power, they just have to wear a black robe. And

there’s essentially no hunger in her region, and each village is electrified in ways that don’t harm

the environment. And then I come back to Canada, and people say ‘Oh, isn’t Pakistan scary.’

This is a really messed up world.’

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Running throughout these quotations and the longer interview transcripts is a noteworthy

emphasis on learning, participants’ desires to engage with and understand another culture from

the inside out. No one characterized this learning as a smooth or straightforward process. Rather,

it required disconcerting reflection on their own cultural practices, myths and assumptions as

they listened carefully to others and eventually joined with local voices in probing and

problematizing western discourses of otherness. As ironists, they dissociated themselves from

their previous cultural vantage points - a practice Bryan Turner (2002: 57) calls ‘reflexive

distancing from the homeland’ - revising and reformulating their predispositions along the way,

to create more provisional pictures of society, to become skeptical of grand national narratives

and to develop respect for another culture. Reflexivity was initiated when these development

workers found themselves in new situations where old answers no longer sufficed.

Attachment to National Protectionism

Only a few participants mentioned in interview conversations their lack of attachment to a state

agenda of national protectionism. Concerned about the Canadian preoccupation with guarding

national economic interests, Frank blusters that ‘Nobody cares about what’s happening in

Pakistan, because they’re all wrapped up in what we’re doing here. If you start going on a

rampage about why the hell doesn’t the federal government get to .7 percent of GDP for foreign

assistance, nobody cares, because they’re all worried about tax levels and stupid stuff like that!’

Jean has ‘criticisms of some of the political issues and our foreign aid, and what we’re doing in

Afghanistan and Pakistan, going in and bombarding a country. We go there, create an elitist

position and then we don’t want to leave.’ Although my participants promote global work

migrations and international engagements between countries, several are - like Jean - critical of

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imperialistic encounters such as the ‘war on terror’ that exploit South Asian people as national

protectionist strategies are pursued. For instance, Anne is ‘now angry at the Canadian and

American governments, because of the way they’ve messed around with the world. Pakistan has

been just another pawn in their games. Sometimes they intervene, sometimes they walk out of

child protection programs. They’re jerks! How can you do that in a country like this?’

Although participants are strongly oriented toward cosmopolitanism, they do not employ

the language of ‘openness’ to describe their predispositions, as many scholars do. After the

unsettling experience of transnational encounter, they have some sense that others (and selves)

are not readily transparent and accessible, or fully intelligible, as ‘openness’ implies.

‘Tolerance,’ another commonly employed concept in the cosmopolitanism literature, is also

eschewed, perhaps because these development workers are ambivalent; while they come to

appreciate some aspects of Pakistani culture, like Islam, they develop critiques of self-serving

politicians and rampant corruption. Participants do not communicate a humanist stance of

‘openness’ and ‘tolerance,’ but rather a relationally constituted subjectivity riddled with

ambivalences and occlusions. Their cosmopolitan orientations are characterized by elements of

self-doubt, reflexive self-distanciation and irony that enable them to search for commonalities

and connections without disregarding disparate and inequitable histories. Their notable ethic of

care, which is engendered through global connectedness and dependency, is based on the

recognition of human and cultural vulnerability (McRobbie, 2006).

Cosmopolitan Consequences

A sizeable body of theoretically oriented research has debated the definition, dimensions and

implications of cosmopolitanism. But a growing number of scholars are turning their attention to

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documenting cultures of cosmopolitanism in the making. My contribution to this literature has

been to refine conceptions of cosmopolitanism by describing and analyzing the tentative,

ambivalent and classed culture of cosmopolitanism that is ‘becoming’ among an elite group of

returned Canadian development workers. I tackled this goal by employing Roudometof’s

continuum of cosmopolitanism, which is an analytic tool that effectively encapsulates the range

of orientations and attachments articulated by my participants. Whether or not it is equally useful

in studying the cosmopolitan realities of differently classed groups is a topic for further research.

In this case the continuum enables me to map the complex repertoire of local and cosmopolitan

allegiances that characterize a culture of cosmopolitanism, while demonstrating an overarching

cosmopolitan orientation. It also helps to explain why some people who have transnational

encounters may not develop a cosmopolitan orientation when local attachments prevail (Cook,

2007).

What are the implications of this analysis for how we understand cosmopolitanism? First,

the frameworks my participants use to describe their transnational engagements differ from those

employed by many scholars, showing that cosmopolitanism is more appropriately

operationalized as an ambivalent set of attachments than as ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance.’ Second,

in contrast to Kantian notions of cosmopolitanism as a stance of detachment, we see that it

entails numerous obligations to others. Third, cosmopolitanism is animated as a tangible set of

attachments at play in everyday life, rather than some abstract engagement with a world of

difference. These attachments are heterogeneous, within groups and individuals, which constitute

a multiplicity of cosmopolitanisms with varying intensities. Finally, this analysis helps clarify the

relationship between transnational engagements and cosmopolitan orientations. My qualitative

data supports quantitative findings that these processes are associated, without the absolute loss

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of local attachments. But it goes further to explain why and how they are associated. The

relationship is certainly mutually constitutive. Some participants, especially those bilingual

children of recent immigrants, may have been inclined toward a cosmopolitan orientation that led

them to seek out development work, which in turn intensified that orientation. However, most of

them characterized what I’m calling a cosmopolitan orientation as a product of their extended

transnational engagements in Pakistan.

I presume that a similar relationship and set of processes is unfolding among the

Pakistani people with whom these foreign development workers interacted during their tenure

overseas. Further research could tease out those processes and their effects in that culture, which

would allow us to detail another culture of cosmopolitanism, what we might call a ‘subaltern’

version (Notar, 2008). A study of this kind would also empirically strengthen the claim made by

Roudometof and my participants that transnational engagements, which influence attachments,

are not limited to those we have abroad.

This mapping of cosmopolitan and local orientations also illuminates two tentative shifts

in social relations. First, as these development workers robustly experience and recognize others,

both proximate and distant, in their daily lives, their subjectivities are hybridized. As

cosmopolitanized subjects, they are decentered in new ways, creating new reflexive practices of

the self that are not wholly circumscribed by the local. In contrast to a humanist subject,

ostensibly coherent and transparent, cosmopolitanized subjects are relationally, multiply and

conflictually constituted beings. And they are not so much open to and tolerant of difference as

self-doubting ironists exploring current global connections alongside imbricated, inequitable

histories. Moreover, they are ambivalently cosmopolitanized, constituted through both local and

cosmopolitan orientations. This insight troubles facile hopes for grand transnational political

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transformations even as it enriches prospects for and interpretations of cultures of

cosmopolitanism.

Second, a nascent culture of cosmopolitanism - characterized in part by recognized

communal dependencies, vulnerabilities and histories - generates additional connectivities

through which social relations are constituted beyond the limits of national societies. Localities

become deterritorialized ‘glocalities’ (Robertson, 1995) through global connectivity, leading, as

this analysis demonstrates, to new forms of political community, as well as sociality. The new

forms of community documented here question imperial and capitalist projects of the past and

present as they agitate for reciprocal global relations.

The resulting ‘utopia in a minor key’ (Clifford, 1998: 366) may not engender a global

revolution. It may not even make it easier in the short term for proximate others to find

employment, make a living wage and access affordable housing, or for cosmopolitanized

subjects to intervene in global economics and militarism. Cultural differences that are gendered,

classed and racialized persist. But here and there cosmopolitan orientations and related ethics of

care prevail. They may be sporadic and diffuse, with few global or local institutions to support

them, and their full effects remain to be seen. However, even a hesitant growth of a culture of

cosmopolitanism suggests that changes in the context within which social and political life has

been historically understood are afoot. More empirical studies of the cosmopolitanization of

reality are needed to track their developments and effects.

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Appendix 1- Research Participant Characteristics

lifeline - participants are aged between 28 and 76; 6 are in their twenties, 5 in their thirties, 2 in their forties, 9 in their fifties, 8 in their sixties and 1 in their seventies

ancestry - 25 participants claim an Anglo-Saxon heritage; 2 call themselves South Asian Canadians; 1 each of Malaysian, Chinese, Egyptian and Latin American backgrounds

formal schooling - all participants are university educated - many have advanced degrees: 4 HBAs, 16 MAs, 11 PhDs

vocation in Pakistan - 9 CIDA development officers; 15 health education consultants; 1 environmental consultant; 3 engineering consultants; 1 refugee consultant; 2 architects

time spent working in Pakistan - 8 participants: 1 year; 1 participant: 2 years; 14 participants: 3 years; 5 participants: 4 years; 3 participants: 5 years

religiosity - to 9 participants, Christianity is an important component of their lives; the rest claim to be non-practicing or to have no religious affiliation

station - 14 self-identify as upper middle-class, 17 as middle-class

partnership - 22 participants are married; 9 are single progeny - 19 participants have children

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Notes i For brief reviews of the word’s etymology, see Cheah (1998); Delanty (2000); and Matthews

and Sidhu (2005). See Cheah (2006) and Fine and Cohen (2002) for details of the term’s

historical development.

ii For an overview of these approaches see Beck and Sznaider (2006) and Skrbis et al. (2004).

iii See Appendix 1 for a chart of participant characteristics.

iv Pseudonyms chosen by individual research participants are used throughout this analysis.

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Documents

Canadian development workers, transnational encounters and cultures of cosmopolitanism