Part 2 Cosmopolitan Socialization ∵ Introduction to Part 2

Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, a sky, a sun of its own.1 ∵ At a time when global phenomena are profoundly reshaping national societies and connecting ever more people who live in infinitely different societal and ethnonational contexts, one of the main issues that sociology must grapple with is how to better understand the production of contemporary individuals. Although there have been countless studies devoted to globalization penned by economists, sociologists, geographers and political scientists alike, few have truly examined the impact of this phenomenon on everyday life and on the emergence of new spatio-temporal contours to the human experience.2 Even cosmopolitan sociology has generally limited itself to analysing the large-scale mechanisms that govern contemporary societies. By neglecting the more quo- tidian dimensions of the global world, such research often struggles to understand how individual cosmopolitan orientations can develop. The best way to determine if cosmopolitanism is more than philosophical discourse or an abstract moral position (Holton, 2009) is to study its presence in individual experiences. Although the cosmopolitan orientation has occa- sionally been compared to a state of mind (Roudometof and Haller, 2007), very few empirical studies have examined or confirmed this promising ob- servation. It is moreover widely accepted that cosmopolitanism can be ex- pressed through a large variety of cultural practices and types of movement and mobility. How, then, can we make the cosmopolitan perspective opera- tional and use it to produce empirical studies (Woodward and Skrbis, 2012; Cicchelli, 2013a)? In other words, how can we move beyond cosmopolitanism understood as a macro-sociological view of the world to the study of the con- crete mechanisms that lead individuals to establish (or not) a cosmopolitan outlook on the world?

1 François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, [trans. A. S. Kline] Part 1, Book 12, Chapter 3, 1848. 2 With the notable exception of Hans-Peter Blossfeld et al. (2005).