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A Cosmopolitan Perspective of Globalization:

Cultural and Aesthetic Consumption Among
Young People

Article in Studies of Changing Societies January 2014

DOI: 10.2478/scs-2014-0151

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 Studies of Changing Societies: Comparative and
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SCS 3'(7)2013:3-23
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A COSMOPOLITAN PERSPECTIVE
OF GLOBALIZATION: CULTURAL
AND AESTHETIC CONSUMPTION
AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE
Vincenzo Cicchelli, GEMASS, Paris 4/CNRS, France

Sylvie Octobre, Ministre de la culture et de la communication,

France

Author's focuses on understanding in which way people relate with

globalization and what kind of imaginative process they engage in to
do so in their everyday life. Article deals with the emerging
cosmopolitan consciousness and practices that derive from young
peoples experiences of a globalized world. The paper is based on two
different researches of young people, the rationale for such a choice
being to understand the impact of emerging transformations on young
people - who are often the barometers of societal change from both
generational and life cycle perspectives.

Keywords: globalization, cosmopolitan perspective, cultural

consumption, aesthetic consumption, young people

The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all

terms that direct us to something critical and new in
global cultural processes: the imagination as a social
practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses
whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple
escape (from a world defined principally by more
concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite
pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary
people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant
for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the
imagination has become an organized field of social
practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor
and culturally organized practice), and a form of
negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and
globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of
the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some

DOI: 10.2478/scs-2014-0151 SCS Journal. All rights reserved

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settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their

competitors. The imagination is now central to all
forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key
component of the new global order

Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference",

Modernity at Large, 31

Introduction

According to Arjun Appadurai, imagination plays a tremendous role

in shaping our relation to the world and its artifacts. Globalization
cannot be reduced to a seldom two-faced process, which first would
be determined by economics and second an increase of inequalities.
Nor can we assume that globalization is supposed to erase cultural
diversity.

The aim of this paper is not to linger on the cultural features of

globalization. Over the last few decades, a sizeable body of cross-
disciplinary research has focused on the development of a global
society (Robertson, 1992; Held et al., 1999). In most fields of the
social sciences, the analyses of supra, cross and transnational
phenomena and dynamics have become increasingly relevant. Over
the last two decades, globalization and cultural difference has been a
major issue for debates about social change, as well as a significant
theme in public policy and political ethics (see for example the
cultural diversity discussion, Walter Benn Michaels, 2007).

This paper focuses on understanding in which way people relate

with globalization and what kind of imaginative process they engage
in to do so in their everyday life. The emerging cosmopolitan
consciousness and practices are derivative of a globalized world, in
which nations are no longer the only units of analysis (Kendall,
Woodward and Skrbis, 2009): cultures are not confined to Nation-
States, even if comparative works confirm the widely accepted thesis
that national contexts still impacts peoples conditions considerably
(Galland and Lemel, 2007).

This paper deals with the emerging cosmopolitan consciousness and

practices that derive from young peoples experiences of a globalized
world. The paper is based on two different researches of young
people, the rationale for such a choice being to understand the
impact of emerging transformations on young people - who are often

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the barometers of societal change from both generational and life

cycle perspectives.

The first research is based on interviews with students from the

Erasmus program (an European student exchange program1) that
deals with young peoples cultural pluralism: the place that
otherness is granted within ones own identity and the broadening
sense of ones national belonging at various levels2. In strongly
interconnected societies, life can seem to depend on anonymous and
unpredictable forces of globalization that individual cannot control,
but, even for a short period of time, travelers can experience cultures
that were once consider exotic, outside their periphery, or
completely strange.

The second is an on-going research, granted by the French Ministry

of Culture and Communication, about everyday life cultural
consumption, dealing with the way the consumption of foreign
cultural goods (such as movies, books, music's, global medias, social
networks but also foods, and clothes) shape and reshape the relation
to otherness3.

In both researches, we address the sense of common belonging to

humanity behind cultural, political, geographical diversity. A sense of
familiarity is certainly the bedrock of cultural adherence. But at the
same time, in a world made up of connected cultures under the
pressure of globalization, familiarity cannot be the only yardstick by
which one can measure reality and identity.

The emergence of a global awareness

After more than four decades, the attempts to understand the

increasingly interconnected realities in which we live have
generated thousands of pages of both theoretical and empirical
research on globalization. Following Helds (et al., 1999) classical
definition, globalization can be thought of as the widening,
intensifying, speeding up, and growing impact of worldwide

1 The Erasmus Program (EuRopean community Action Scheme for the Mobility of
University Students), is a European Union student exchange program established in
1987. It forms a major part of the EU Lifelong Learning Program 2007-2013, and is
the operational framework for the European Commissions initiatives in higher
education.
2 This research has recently been published. See Cicchelli V (2012), Lesprit
cosmopolite: voyage de formation des jeunes en Europe, Paris, Presses de Sciences
Po.
3 This comparative research includes Qubec (Nicole Gallant and Michele
Altomonte), France (Sarah Pickard, Syvlie Octobre and Vincenzo Cicchelli) and
Australia (Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis).

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interconnectedness. It is an extensive set of changes of the ways in

which societies interact. For most of human history, social change
has been slow and gradual; the pace of change is accelerating
vertiginously, as globalization involves a process of speeding up, an
increasing velocity of human activities (Giddens, Duneier and
Appelbaum, 2005). More specifically, the concept of globalization
refers not only to the compression of the world but also to the
intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole"
(Robertson, 1992: 8). Is there some credence to the view that the
awareness of the globalization of our world is emerging? Several
factors are leading to a global awareness among people, especially
young people.

It is common knowledge that, for some years, a broad field of social

studies has been devoted to the analysis of some seemingly
unrelated phenomena that, actually, are convergent and belong to
the same movement. For instance the markets that have proved to
be more and more interdependent, transnational agencies and
institutions are on more missions than ever (as are for instance the
UN, IMF, the International Court of Justice, G7 and so on), economic
communities (such as NAFTA, ASEAN or the birth of euro) have been
built and larger political communities appeared (European Union).
Nations are no longer bound to take on national projects, but instead
participate in global flows of capital, goods and people.

Within this increasing interdependency of national societies, we are

witnessing a growing flow of people in move (Lvy, 2008). They may
be moving for various reasons, such as migration, business, tourism,
pilgrimages and education. Leisure mobility has reached an
unprecedented level of development and involves huge technical,
human, financial and cultural flows. In such an increasingly global
world international mobility is more important than ever.

At the same time, the circulation of goods has increased to a

dramatic point: certain products can be found everywhere on the
planet (such as Coke, Jeans, Hit Music, blockbuster movies),
spreading a sense of common knowledge, without depriving from a
wide range of diversity in consumption manners, experiences, etc.
Since the Second World War, cultural goods have become one of the
most circulated goods among nations. This is probably not new
(Amselle, 1990; 2005), but has been taken to an extensive point with
the mass media and cultural industries supremacy.

The world has so appeared to have shrunken, due to the increasing

mobility of people and goods: but this is laid open to paradox. On one
hand travelers or consumers of cultural goods can be exposed to the

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unfamiliar, the unknown, the untested, which might encourage them

to question their cultural patterns and possibly modify their value
judgments. On the other hand they might also be confronted with a
feeling of dj vu.

There are many reasons for this. Lets just list some of them, which
are all culturally connoted.

-The omnipresence of some goods (such as pop music, Coca Cola,

McDonalds food, Starbucks coffee, Gap outfits etc) evoke and
maintain a feeling of amazing familiarity, in spite of the great
diversity of life styles, life rhythms, cultural patterns and languages
that still characterize the world.

-A broad supply of iconographic material, as for instance shots of the

Earth taken from space or documentary films on the impacts of
human activities on nature (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006), may partly
contribute in peoples meeting with globalization. The success of
some movies about global warming risks contributes to create a
feeling of belonging to the same world through facing the same
challenges and fears.

-However, virtual experiences of a global world are above all shaped

by the faster and more intensive circulation and dissemination of
news. An increasing number of people come across the same news
(broadcasted by global medias such as CNN, Fox, EuroNews, Al
Jazeera, BBC World) and discuss them through the blogosphere,
thanks to innumerable blogs.

This circulation of news reshape the knowledge about the others but,
maybe more important, create a variety of shared, or maybe
common, emotional experiences. Various significant events (such as
wars, assassination attempts, Tsunami, genocides) that shock people
around the world generate shared emotions (Truc, 2010). This
applies for natural disaster, war or political events as well as for
cultural events, such as celebritys weddings (recently William and
Kates wedding), lives (Madonnas or Angelina Jolis adoptions) and
deaths (John Lennon, Lady Diana, Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs),
famous sports events (such as the Olympic Games or the Football
World Cup): comparable feelings of commitment, dedication or
sympathy can be found expressed all around the world.

-Last, but not least, we are witnessing the development of social

networks (such as Facebook, Linkedin or Myspace), cosmopolitan
utopias that bring together millions of people, making it possible for

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them to meet and keep in touch in order to create a potential world

of friendship.

All these factors are linking people together across borders more
than in the past and confront them with cultural, ethnical, national
differences and similarities. This connected world is still made of
various, heterogeneous cultures: it is not, if ever, a flat world
(Friedman, 2005) anymore, a world of separate national
communities living side-by-side, but a world of overlapping
communities of fate where the trajectories of all countries are deeply
enmeshed with each other (Held et al., 1999).

Political communities can non longer be considered (if they ever

could with any validity) as simply discrete worlds: they are
enmeshed in complex structures of overlapping forces, relations and
networks (Held et McGrew, 2007:4).

How do people engage with globalization?

How are globalization and culture tied together? How do people

engage with globalization from a cultural perspective? Is
globalization using cultural products and behaviors in order to
improve its power and strength? As John Tomlinson already
underlined,

The trouble with these phrases (the impact of globalization on

culture or the cultural consequences of globalization) is that, taken
literally, they imply globalization to be a process which somehow
has its sources and its sphere of operation outside of culture
(Tomlinson, 2007: 150).

For Tomlinson, the cultural identity is much more the product of

globalization than its victim (Tomlinson, 2003: 268). As globalization
distributes the institutional features of modernity across all cultures,
it produces identity in its modern sense. There is a strong logic
between the globalization process and the institutionalized
construction of identity. How and in what ways are people the agents
of this developing global frame of reference ? How does globality or
globalism (McGrew, 2010) refer to the growing awareness of the
world as a shared social space ?

The increasing interconnectedness, the rapid growth of mobility of

individual and goods and cross border activities, and the
pervasiveness of global media raise many questions. If they do
indeed change the organization of social lives (practices,
participation, information, knowledge, etc.), how do they impact

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individual representation, imagination, beliefs in and consciousness

of the world? As becoming cosmopolitan is a two-side process, made
of objective patterns and subjective beliefs, we need to document
both processes, especially because they may evolve by following
different ways, rhythms and patterns. For example, the sense of local
belonging can be addressed through actual mobility as well as
through the imaginative work of elsewhere . Addressing those
phenomena helps to understand the processes of socialization to
cultural plurality.

The answers to these questions have renewed the field of

investigation. Former studies on globalization markets and the
profound changes in capitalism have been joined by new approaches
based: a) on the transnationalization of politics, activism, protest,
solidarity and cooperation between States, on the dynamics of
formation and transnational spread of ideas, institutions and
practices; and b) on the process of cosmopolitanization of individual
consciousness and the emergence of shared values and ideals. All
these perspectives, however, share the seminal idea that recent
world-wide changes imply to develop and advance existing
sociological methods to understand increasingly transnational and
global levels of social reality. One of the main challenges that
sociology and social sciences face today is to understand how
individuals, collective actors and structures cope with the dilemmas,
tensions and ambivalences of modern societies embedded in
supranational dynamics. The challenge is theoretical but maybe even
more methodological.

What is Cosmopolitism ?

A momentous body of cross disciplinary research in the last few

decades mostly theoretical - has focused on the development and
impacts of a global society, and more recently on the cosmopolitan
consequences of such changes. The idea of cosmopolitanism has re-
emerged in the last two decades as a major focus for debates about
social change, globalization, and cultural differences (Kendall,
Woodward, Skrbis, 2009). We know today it is no longer tenable to
see the global society in terms of a single, integrated and unified
conceptual scheme, which means it is more compelling to conceive
globalization in the plural.

The term of cosmopolitanism is highly context-dependent and even

volatile (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). There are almost as many
definitions of cosmopolitanism as there are scholars of this topic.
The idea of cosmopolitanism existed long before that of the

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globalization as we know it today (Coulmas, 1995)4. But in spite of

this, globalization has improved some features related to
cosmopolitanism for many reasons as we have seen.

Cosmopolitan can mean anything from an attitude or value, to a

regime of international governance, or a set of epistemological
assumptions about the nature of social structures (Woodward,
Skrbis and Bean 2008: 208).

From an axiological perspective, cosmopolitanism is a cultural

phenomenon, defined by openness to other cultures, values,
emotions and experiences. In this sense, cosmopolitanism refers to
the multiplicity of ways, values and norms that shape our common
and plural world. A cosmopolitan approach is rooted in the
recognition of the plurality of modernities, civilizations and societal
transformations. From a praxeological point of view, in spite of the
fact that there is no world government - which means that nation-
states try to manage the changing situations as best they can,
defending their own interests -, cosmopolitanism refers to a strong
claim to a supranational regulation (at least on a imaginary level, as
an unreachable but desirable wish). From an epistemological
outlook, cosmopolitanism is related to the study of a set of concepts
meant to unfold the cosmopolitanization of the world (Beck, 2006;
Cicchelli and Truc, 2011). From this theoretical point of view, one
can ask how social scientists combine the two pillars of a
cosmopolitan sociology, e.g. the claim to universalism and the
respect of particularism. As Robert Fine emphasized, formulating a
cosmopolitan approach lays to the following stand:

Cosmopolitan social theory is a collective endeavor to build a

science of society founded on a claim to universalism. Its basic
presupposition is that the human species can be understood only if it
is treated as a single subject, within which all forms of difference are
recognized and respected but conceptualized as internal to the
substantive unity of all human beings (Fine, 2007).

Cosmopolitan challenges: condition, outlook and

belonging

The cultural dimension of cosmopolitanism can be analyzed as a mix

of knowledge, experience, emotion and consciousness. Eating foreign
food does not always lead to cosmopolitanism: one has to go through

4 Itis not possible to say when globalization started (Chanda, 2007) and a broad
discussion concerning the main events in the history of modern globalization
(Cotesta, 2006) would not be necessary for the purpose of our discussion.

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an imagination work, based on taste (liking or not the food itself, the
context in which you had it, the emotion that it gave you, the desire
of having it again or not) that progressively shape a curiosity, an
empathy and a familiarity to otherness.

Investigating cosmopolitanism from the individual awareness

perspective means looking at cosmopolitanism on the ground as
action and attitude, taking into account the narratives of ordinary
people instead of archetypal cosmopolitans (such as global business
elites, refugees, expatriates, or cultural connoisseur , curators or
experts). According to Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006), a
cosmopolitan approach should start by taking individuals as the
proper object of moral concern, which means it should also take the
choices individual people make seriously including those related to
the culture they live in, the global spread and hybridization of
culture.

Much of the existing literature addresses the difference between the

cosmopolitan condition and the cosmopolitan outlook (what have
been called the cosmopolitan mind , Cicchelli 2012, see also Fine,
2006). The cosmopolitan condition is related to the several features
of the globalization of our societies, as we have seen, while
cosmopolitan outlooks (or mind) are shaped (and reinforced) not
only by transnational structural factors. Yet the globalization process
and its manifestations enable us to experience a plurality of cultural
influences (Cotesta, 2009). Going more deeply, cosmopolitan
outlooks are associated with: a) a stance toward openness and
cultural forms and practices of other ways of living, thinking, acting;
b) the dialectic between the sense of belonging to a common world
and the sense of belonging to a local level.

This means that the individual developing a cosmopolitan

perspective will retain some allegiance to particular groups, such as
families friends, and communities, and will have to balance a
combination of demands and concerns the universal and the
particular/local throughout their lives. In short, the cosmopolitan
will be an expression of the interpretation of the global and the local
(Hopper, 2007: 175).

The core requirements of cultural cosmopolitanism include: a) the

recognition of the increasing interconnectedness of communities in
diverse domains including the social, economic and environmental
as well as cultural; b) the development of an understanding of
overlapping collective fortunes which require collective responses
- locally, nationally, regionally and globally; c) the celebration of
difference, diversity and hybridity while learning how to reason

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from the point of view of others and mediate traditions (Held, 2002,
p. 13).

From this point of view, and as Skrbis and Woodward (2011: 66)
pointed out, cosmopolitanism is a performed frame of reference for
dealing with openness to everyday cultural difference.

What is emerging is a new way in which people see the world,

combine and use local allegiances and a broader sense of belonging,
the way in which they manage multiple identities, the awareness of
such changes. The local-cosmopolitan dimension refers to the scale
of social environment in which the individual sees oneself. Locals
view themselves primarily as members of a local community while
cosmopolitans are more aware of their relationships to larger social
agencies. (Dye, 1963).

Yet the promise of being locally situated and at the same time
globally connected and mobile has never seemed more possible than
it is today. The question remains as to whether it is positive and
realistic for us to have multiple loyalties. Can we sustain community
and solidarity with our neighbors while we look beyond our nation?
And if we can't - or won't consider distant strangers as part of our
own world, are there increasingly dire consequences? (Woodward,
Skrbis and Kendall, 2008).

The forms of identification with humanity and the globe are

fractured by boundaries of self and others, threats and opportunities,
and the value of things global and local, which means that most
people are likely to be ambivalent cosmopolitans (Skrbis and
Woodward, 2007).

First example: the cosmopolitan Bildung of Erasmus

students

Lets take an example of cosmopolitan socialization through

Erasmus. What cultural baggage are young people taught during the
Erasmus program ? Does it help them to become citizens of Europe
and of a global society, and how? The concept of cosmopolitan
Bildung helps to answer that question by exploring how students
learn about other European cultures.

Travels formed youth, to which the Erasmus exchanges constantly

attest. Traveling, seeing other horizons, discovering other ways of
living, of being. To learn, to understand, to enrich oneself, to open
oneself, to adapt oneself, are some of the many qualities necessitated

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and required all at once by travelling. Gaining those qualities is the

aim of many students engaged in Erasmus program (Cicchelli, 2012).
The journey of European students in foreign lands is a very old
tradition, coming from the Grand Tour of the XIXe century: young
people from the upper classes used to spend some time travelling
around Europe before taking their fathers position.. Its novelty
resides in the fact that, for the first time, this mobility is favored by
European institutions and does not only concern elites.

The qualitative investigation on Erasmus Students (N =170

interviews) requested to address such questions as: who is the
Other I met abroad, and what kind of place do I give him/her? The
research was undertaken in order to better understand the place
allotted to otherness in contemporary identities and focused on the
way in which young people mark out symbolic and cultural identity
borderlines between themselves and the natives. To do so, three
major topics were examined a) what otherness means to the
interviewed when they compare their own societies with the host
society; b) what is appreciated (or rejected) by young people when
they describe the host society; and c) the presence (or non presence)
of gap-bridging efforts on the part of the students with natives. The
above three topics find their way in all the narratives.

An Erasmus exchange is full of promises of empowerment and self-

fulfillment, adventure and self-discovery, encounters and life
sharing. They are the cosmopolitan promises. Two of the most
recurrent reasons that accounted for the students undertaking an
exchange program were curiosity for unfamiliar ways of living and
the chance to meet with young people from all over Europe. That
goes on as if a fraction of contemporary European youth was
experiencing a certain inner emptiness and was trying to perfect his
or her education with new knowledge and by eye-witnessing new
realities. Being shaped by the pervasiveness of alterity and
prominence of cosmopolitan sociability, those journeys are a form of
socialization to otherness.

For this generation, merely being familiar with your own culture is
not enough. Opening up ones circle of sociability by means of
international encounters, learning to read the codes and behavior of
other lands, finding ones way in the different European societies and
at different levels (sub-national, national and transnational), being
able to orient oneself among the various types of European societies,
and being able to situate oneself on different geo-cultural levels:
these are the pillars of an education that places value on the virtue of
an open mind. This stay abroad is meant to improve the capacity of

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young people to be self-reflective as well as to develop inter-cultural

skills.

And yet living abroad means taking risks. Everything does not fulfill
the utopia of festive communion (such as the French movie
Lauberge espagnole pictures it). Decentering might prove to be
disturbing for young people (e. g. by observing ones own self and
becoming aware of the relativity of ones own way of living). The
reflexive comparison between the host and ones own society could
provoke critical feedback.

During an Erasmus exchange a young students initial certainties

regarding his or her customs may change. The difficulties of
integration and above all the lack of hospitality and lack of concern
of the young natives in the host country are often mentioned in the
interviews.

The interviewed also often complain that their counterparts in age

will not help them to decipher the cultural patterns of the host
country. The socialization to cultural differences seems to be the aim
of the travelers and not the priority of the natives. The rapid
socialization the Erasmus students experience is somehow
transparent to the natives, but very clear to them. Therefore,
Erasmus Students tend to gather together to share their experiences,
this sharing both help them through the socialization process
(sharing knowledge, experiences etc ), as well as reinforce their
identity of cross-cultural codes learners. Their circle of sociability
stays therefore, in most cases, international.

This education to alterity, which we have termed cosmopolitan

Bildung, is less of a long-lasting and irreversible learning than an
ambivalent and incomplete tentative to make a place for the other in
ones identity (Cicchelli, 2007). In most cases, the cosmopolitanism
does not exclude a profound feeling of attachment to a culture with
clearly drawn traits. The cosmopolitism of young Europeans must
not be seen as a universal citizenship. It expresses more a desire to
reach a horizon of universality by encountering other ways of being
and thinking, while remaining strongly attached to the homeland.
Hence, it is clearly understood that to call yourself European, you
must begin with a national identity. The cosmopolitan mind is rather
the work of a social actor to drive his or her culture of belonging to a
meeting with other European cultures.

Cosmopolitanism consists in recognizing and appreciating the other

as a stranger. And that means that he/she is not completely a
stranger, nor an exact copy of oneself. Re-conciliating community

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and otherness, identity and difference, finding the universal in the

particular and the particular in the universal, that is not only the
definition of the dialectic but the condition of all authentic dialogue
(Hassner, 2002).

This meeting of European neighbors could provoke reformulations

of frontiers of belonging. Notably, the pure model of the unattached
cosmopolitan is very marginal in the data (Laczko, 2005; Myers,
Szerszynki and Urry, 1999). In the great majority of cases, the
interviewees claimed a strong national identification that co-exists
with a strong interest for other European ways of living. The
inhabitants of Europe do not refer to themselves as European: they
regard themselves foremost as Spanish, French, Greek, Swedish,
Estonian, etc. Comparing to national identities, the extent of a strong
European identity is still to be confirmed. The Union is not yet in the
hearts and minds of its inhabitants. "The European flag or hymn
don't evoke the same patriotic feelings as they do in their American
counterpart" (Halman, Sieben and Van Zundert, 2012).

For young people interviewed, Europe represents a space open to

mobility: they all claim a right to freely choose where to travel, live
and work. The EU is considered the frame in which every single
national culture is guaranteed. Differences should be protected and
promoted throughout the continent. The cultural and historical
diversity and the peaceful coexistence of the European countries is a
most characteristic feature of Europe, which means a lot to young
people. The painful past, made of wars, genocides and persecutions,
has been forgotten for the sake of peace and equal dignity of each
country. The European mosaic is thus distinguished from other
Western areas, particularly from the United States (Kumar, 2008).
However according to the results of the survey, the asserted
European specificity does not imply a feeling of transnational
belonging. The extent of a strong European identity is still to be
confirmed.

Second example: Aesthetic cosmopolitanism

The second research focuses on the way people engage with

globalization through cultural goods consumption to develop
aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Does consumption, taste (like and
dislike), emotion (positive or negative) lead to the emergence of
cosmopolitan consciousness? What kind of role do behaviors and
tastes regarding music, movies, clothes, food, etc. play in shaping a
sense of a broader community belonging and how does that combine
with local (sometimes micro-local) attachment?

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Communications, dissemination of cultural goods, cultural exchanges

have reshaped the perception of time, space and sequences. Cultural
goods, especially those coming from the cultural industries (musics,
movies, clothes, etc.) are not only the outputs of the globalization
process but are its roots, even more since culture and
communication are embedded (Donnat, 1994). We aim to
distinguish two levels of analyses: the cosmopolitanization of
everyday life consuming culture (which is, at a macro sociological
level, an on-going process in which the power of the market melted
with cultural groundings) and the cosmopolitan outlook which is, on
a individual level, a reflexive work via cultural goods by which young
people reshape their relation to the world on different scales (local,
national, international, transnational, worldwide). Those two levels
combine cultural products (their economy, from production to
distribution), consuming behaviors (reception, appropriation) and
representation (hybridization of imagination, from local to
transnational, from individual to collective). And they both imply, in
their own ways, hybridization (Amselle, 1996 and 2001),
recombination and indigenization (Appadurai, 1996). The
perspective focused on ordinary cosmopolitanism (Skrbis,
Woodward, 2007) helps to understand the new place (symbolic and
behavioral) of cultural goods in post-modern societies and in
individual construction or identity: individual recombination of
cultural consumption from different social fields (Lahire, 1998) and
increasing part of foreign cultural products in everyday life cultural
consumption (Donnat, 2009). Taking this new perspective on
cultural consumption into account allows to discuss concepts such as
cultural legitimacy (Bourdieu, Darbel, 1966), eclectism (Donnat
1994), omnivourness (Peterson and Rossman 2007), poaching (de
Certeau, 1990), reception (Passeron, Pedler, 1991), sub-cultures
(Hall, 1975; Hoggart, 1991; Grignon et Passeron; 1989), and
universe of tastes (Octobre, Detrez, Merckl, Berthomier, 2010) as
they were used in national contexts.

Focusing on cultural consumption leads to many questions: do young

people engage with globalization from cultural consumption and
how? Do they combine a local/national attachment with a broader
vision of belonging through cultural goods and how? How do young
peoples relationships with popular cultural goods influence their
reception and understanding of globality and/or of local cultures?

French cultural consumption has dramatically changed over the past

two decades, and young people have been ahead of those changes.

- Firstly, a growing part of the cultural production and cultural

consumption comes from abroad and this has reshaped the aesthetic

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taste of the French young people. The last French enquiry about
national cultural consumption (Pratiques culturelles des Franais,
2008), showed for example that the majority of young people now
prefer watching movies and series in English (their predecessors
used to prefer to watch French movies or dubbed foreign
productions or with subtitles (Donnat, 2009)). The same turn has
affected musical taste since the 1970s.

- Secondly, we note an excitement of the local artistic productions,

and the receptions by even micro-local "communities", as showed by
analyses concerning the associative network (Saez et Glvarec;
2002), as well as research concerning rap music (Mucchielli; 1999)
or rock music (Pickard, 2012). These phenomena have been
described as indigenization (Appadurai; 1996).

The tension between those two trends (globalization and

localization) has been called glocalization , and described an
interaction from transnational and local contexts (Robertson; 1992),
that produces forms of interbreeding, creolization, hybridization
(Amselle; 1996 et 2001).

We suppose that cultural consumption is a way to understand

socialization to otherness (from language to codes such as body
languages). All over the earth, the global media spread out news
about events, facts, foreign customs and rules and this immediacy
present this knowledge to be the objective truth and a direct access
to cultural specificities. The same happens with a lot of artifacts, such
as cultural goods, especially the language - English being the lingua
franca. Does supporting creation in French among the cultural
industries, that are the most globalized part of cultural goods, still
make sense nowadays? And for what purpose? How do young people
deal with the increasing amount of cultural goods they are offered?
Why do some of them search for that diversity while some others
tend to limit it? What kind of cultural, social, economical, educational
backgrounds help to face cultural diversity? And for what kind of
social benefits? Is aesthetic cosmopolitanism of new part of young
peoples empowerment?

This on-going research combines two sets of data:

- qualitative data from interviews with young students (students of

18-24 years old, N = 50)

- quantitative data: a national inquiry founded by the French

Ministry of Culture and Communication will be conducted in
September 2013 (N=1500).

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Addressing this question leads to a certain number of

methodological difficulties. Measuring knowledge about foreign
culture is not enough. The melting of foreign product into the
national range of goods is also part of the research topic. Moreover,
knowledge does not lead to attachment: taste is a mix of information
and likes. And belonging is a mix of taste, and reflexivity, that is
nourished by an imaginative process by which one builds his/her
own relation to the world. We therefore want to address several
levels of analysis - aesthetical knowledge, aesthetical taste,
aesthetical belonging to inform the imaginative work that shapes
the sense of relating to the otherness.

To conclude

The cosmopolitan perspective is today the most exciting and helpful

perspective for understanding emerging cultural issues and new
social consumption in a globalized world. Our researches, mainly the
quantitative part, will provide outcomes on usually forgotten
questions:

- What is the down side of new normative injunctions to be open-

minded and curious? How do people cope with this pressure to be
open-minded that is an heritage of the upper class from the XIX
century?

-Does that awareness or curiosity come from family, school or

biographical trajectories? The question of transmission of open-
mindedness is still unexplored and hides new forms of social
inequalities. Cosmopolitism is maybe nowadays a new form of
distinction that combines with or replaces cultural legitimacy. Even
if the opportunities to confront global imagination are bigger than in
the past, cosmopolitan practices such as speaking a foreign language,
traveling and studying abroad, liking foreign cultural products are
still the prerogatives of a few.

Our research wishes to answer these questions by proposing both a

theoretical model and a methodological pattern. This is the challenge
our research will take up in the future in order to displace the aloof,
globetrotting bourgeois image of cosmopolitanism as Vertovec and
Cohen asked for (2002).

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