I feel like Appiah and Anderson share several similar views on being a "cosmopolitan", and what it takes to fully understand another person's culture. Both discuss how there must be a sense of trust created between the two different people so that they can feel comfortable with one another, and be able to share concepts. While under the "cosmopolitan canopy" a person can feel comfortable acting as a cosmopolitan, where if they were outside the canopy, they would not feel as comfortable.
Appiah also talked about the idea of "imaginary strangers", I feel like Anderson touches this topic in his article as well. Anderson talks about the different types of interactions that people have and I think that the "impersonal/ threatening" type of interaction between strangers is a direct correlation to Appiah's idea of "imaginary strangers". Imaginary strangers are people who act differently than you had initially thought that they would act. This relates to Anderson's interaction because with the threatening interaction, one generally makes a judgement on how they think a person is by the way they carry themselves and the way they look- and then decide if they appear to be threatening or not. When a person makes an immediate judgement without getting to know a person for who they really are, then they are not being a very good cosmopolitan.
I think that the best cosmopolitains are the people who constantly feel like they are under a canopy, they always feel comfortable interacting. We need to work on making cosmopolitan canopies much larger as a whole- people should be able to interact constructively with people from pretty much any culture and be able to feel like it is ok to ask questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment