Cosmopolitan
Encyclopedia : C : CO : COS : Cosmopolitan
- For other uses, see Cosmopolitan (disambiguation)}}}.
The word derives from Greek cosmos (the world) and polis (city). Its sense overlaps to some extent with citizen of the world, implying identification with a world community rather than with a particular nation or people. Indeed, its first recorded usage was the by Diogenes the Cynic, who described himslef as a "kosmou polites", i.e. "a citizen of the world"; and as such he would seek attachments beyond the local ones, disregarding the importance given to 'accidentally' obtained concepts of gender, place of birth, place of residence and so on.
The word is sometimes misused to mean only "the global", either as a person who is seasoned in ways of the world, or as an adjective, to describe something with a far-reaching impact. However, it is argued by many scholars that a multicultural context, multiculturalism, is a necessity for people to develop a cosmopolitan identity.
Cosmopolitan identity would, as all other identities, be contextual and situated. This might mean that while feeling quite cosmopolitan in a situation, a person could act, for example, as a nationalist in a different context.
The cosmopolitan view is the core of Cosmopolitanism, a socio-political stance or movement which sees all persons in all nations as members of a single global community -- in contrast with nationalism. Actually, the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is not a simple one. Research so far has not produced data that unambigiously support the idea that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are opposites, despite a shown negative relation between the two. The fact that there exist several different understandings of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism does not make it easier to comprehend the relationship between the two concepts.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.