Getting to Know You
Open and Relational Cosmopolitanism in Local Settings
Jay McDaniel and ChatGPT
9/27/2026
The populist movement in America and in other parts of the world is often critical of people with “cosmopolitan” points of view. Populists associate cosmopolitanism with cultural and economic elites who move easily across borders while neglecting the needs, loyalties, and struggles of people rooted in particular places. They worry that these elites feel more at home among one another than among their fellow citizens, and that decisions affecting local communities are made by people who will never have to live with their consequences. There is a real concern here, even if it does not describe every person who calls herself cosmopolitan. Jeffrey’s way of life (see below) gives the criticism some force. Sheila’s suggests another possibility: a cosmopolitanism that begins with care for neighbors and grows through friendships across cultural differences.
Global Elites
Collecting Diverse Experiences
Jeffrey works in global finance. He is at ease in international airports, luxury hotels, and conference rooms as he moves among nations. He enjoys fine restaurants, comfortable flights, and the ease of having someone else arrange the details of his travels. At the five-star hotels where he stays, someone carries his bags, remembers his preferences, and makes sure a car is waiting when he needs one. He has the money and credentials to feel at home in many places. He thinks of himself as “cosmopolitan” in his outlook.
Jeffrey sometimes leaves the hotel to walk through a market, visit a historic neighborhood, or join the crowds at a festival. He enjoys the energy of these places and may talk warmly about the people he meets. But he tends to understand such outings as experiences that enrich his travels: a glimpse of local life before returning to the familiar comforts of the hotel. He encounters difference, though he seldom asks how the people he meets understand their own lives—or what his presence there might mean to them. He collects experiences.
Local Cosmopolitanism
Making Friendships at a Grassroots Level
Sheila works in a department store. She is cosmopolitan in a very different sense. She has lived on the same street for thirty years, but her world has never been small. She is curious and reads widely about places she may never visit. She knows families who arrived from other countries, asks about the traditions they carry with them, and shares stories and meals from her own life. She listens without assuming that everyone must become like her. Her roots give her a place from which to welcome others, and each encounter changes how she understands that place. Jeffrey travels the world; Sheila lets the world meet her where she lives.
One of Sheila’s good friends is a woman who grew up in Mexico and moved onto the street several years ago. Their friendship began with conversations across the garden fence and grew through shared meals, help during illnesses, and celebrations with one another’s families. Sheila has learned about her friend’s childhood and the traditions she hopes to pass on to her children. Her friend, in turn, has come to know the history of Sheila’s family and the neighborhood. What has enriched Sheila’s life is more than what she has learned about another culture. It is the friendship itself, and the way each woman now sees her own home through the other’s eyes.
Religious Differences
There is another difference between Jeffrey and Sheila, and it has to do with their priorities in life. Jeffrey believes in meritocracy. He believes that the purpose of life is to make the most of whatever capacities you are born with or develop through hard work: to make a name for yourself, enjoy the privileges of wealth, and build a record of personal achievement. He combines this approach to life with devotion to his family—he has three children—and with what he calls his Christian faith. He often trumpets his Christian faith as something that gives him a moral compass, but that compass never leads him to sacrifice his life of privilege.
Sheila is also a Christian, but her faith leads her to a different emphasis. She believes that whatever capacities we are born with or develop should be used to lift up others and help create communities in which people can flourish. For her, the purpose of life is measured less by merit than by love. Her faith takes shape in ordinary acts: listening to a neighbor, making room at the table, and showing up when someone needs help. These relationships ask something of her. They sometimes interrupt her plans and change her mind. She welcomes them because the people involved have become part of her life.
A God of Hospitality to Strangers
To these two examples of being “cosmopolitan,” many others could be added. A person may have the chance to travel abroad without belonging to a business elite, returning home with new friendships and a changed sense of the world. A student may learn another language and discover ways of thinking that her own community has overlooked. An immigrant may live between cultures, carrying memories of one place while helping shape the life of another. What makes these people cosmopolitan is not how far they travel or how easily they move through the world. It is their willingness to learn from people whose lives differ from their own, while remaining open to being changed by the encounter.
My focus on Jeffrey and Sheila, however, is to suggest that the way people are cosmopolitan makes an ethical difference. We can move among cultures while keeping our own ambitions and comforts at the center, or we can form relationships in which others matter to us for their own sake.
There is a fundamental difference between approaching life as a process of “collecting experiences” and approaching life as a process of “building relationships.” The first approach lends itself to bucket lists: places to visit, foods to try, and moments to remember as one’s own. The second invites us to ask a different question: Who are the people with whom I can share a life, however briefly, and what might we become through knowing one another?
The second approach is, I believe, consonant with the way “God” is understood in open and relational theology. God does not stand apart from the world, collecting its diverse experiences as possessions. God is present to each life, affected by what happens to it and responsive to what it may yet become. The relationships matter to God in themselves, including relationships among people who live far apart and those who meet across a garden fence. To be cosmopolitan in this spirit is to welcome a wider world into our lives through attention, friendship, and care.
Whether or not this open and relational approach to cosmopolitanism can make a difference to populists is unclear to me. Some may hear the word cosmopolitan and think immediately of the privileged world Jeffrey inhabits. They may have good reasons to distrust people who speak of caring for the whole world while overlooking the troubles of their own neighbors. Sheila offers no argument that can settle every political disagreement. Her life does, however, show that care for people from other cultures need not weaken loyalty to a particular place. Her friendships have made her more deeply involved in the life of her street. Perhaps that is a place where a conversation could begin.
Deep Cosmopolitanism:
Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India
Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world's oldest continuously performed theater. Recognized as India's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the matrilineal temple art of Kutiyattam has been performed by men and women in Kerala, India, since the tenth century C.E.
This book illustrates how Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, author Leah Lowthorp traces the art's cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the premodern Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world.
Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam's multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of one thousand years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.
Indiana University Press generiously make this book freely available as an Open Access monograph. To read, please visit here.
Leah Lowthorp is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon. She is a cultural anthropologist and a folklorist. She is editor (with Frank J. Korom) of South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons (Routledge, 2019). Her email address is [email protected].
Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, critical development studies, and the anthropology of time. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
This book illustrates how Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, author Leah Lowthorp traces the art's cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the premodern Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world.
Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam's multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of one thousand years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.
Indiana University Press generiously make this book freely available as an Open Access monograph. To read, please visit here.
Leah Lowthorp is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon. She is a cultural anthropologist and a folklorist. She is editor (with Frank J. Korom) of South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons (Routledge, 2019). Her email address is [email protected].
Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, critical development studies, and the anthropology of time. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.