Image Credit: Shuo Jiang
马海天 (Haitian Ma)
Read the Faculty Introduction
As we navigate this diverse and changing world, our interactions with one other always include cultural encounters of values and perspectives. Determining how to live with differences in these values and perspectives then becomes a task that we constantly perform, the urgency of which significantly increases in the modern era, where cultures interact in more direct and confrontational manners. In the attempt to construct a healthy, non-hierarchical manner of interaction, cosmopolitanism has risen as a promising vision. We may literally interpret cosmopolitanism as a culture of the cosmos, or the world. Beyond the literal designation, however, the essential conceptualization of this cosmopolitan vision remains under debate. In “The Case for Contamination,” author Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques and differentiates cosmopolitanism from three candidate ways of interaction: cultural preservationism, anti-colonialism, and neo-fundamentalism. In juxtaposition, Appiah proposes his version of cosmopolitanism based on what he calls the “contamination model,” where individuals get accustomed to new cultural phenomena and gradually merge them into the existing cultural norms. Cultures contaminate each other through progressive mergence starting from the individual level. Now the question arises: has Appiah truly grasped cosmopolitanism in its entirety through this model?
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