Abstract:
What is it to feel cosmopolitan (or yokel)? The island of Simbo has long been characterized by what might be defined as a cosmopolitan cultural outlook, welcoming strangers, willingly engaging their worldviews and constituting themselves as members of wider and larger collectives like the world economy, the nation or the global Christian community. Yet cosmopolitan being is relative, a sense of self or identity as revealed against those actual or imagined others who are less so. When island-resident Tinoni Simbo undertake much-anticipated visits to major urban areas, many discover within themselves a shocking sense of being “local. Encountering the different cosmopolitan praxis of their urban-resident kin and denominational fellows induces a crisis of cosmopolitan confidence that is resolved upon returning home to recount their travels. Those urban resident Tinoni Simbo who have, by their different situations, revealed to islanders the limits of their outlooks are themselves, tentative cosmopolitans, feeling themselves local in face of the larger urban communities with which they engage. For members of both groups, their sense of being cosmopolitan or local is experienced through their imaginative constructions of how others see them. In turn, this is shaped by, and expressed in terms of their responses to, contemporary forms of social inequality. I explore these shifting and nested senses of local-cosmopolitan possibilities for different groups of Tinoni Simbo.