Conspicuous Openness to Diversity and Cosmopolitanism. Toward a New Discursive Configuration?

• Published in: Sociologie et sociétés Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 105 - 126
• Main Authors: Fridman, Viviana, Ollivier, Michele
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: 01.04.2004
• Subjects: Bourdieu, Pierre; Classification; Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Capital; Cultural Pluralism; Discourse; Social Life
• ISSN: 0038-030X

This paper examines some of the issues in the present discourse on diversity. Our first line of research is that the increasing value accorded to cultural eclecticism & cosmopolitanism, which we call more specifically ostentatious openness to diversity, fits into a much wider scheme of discourses, based on a ranked set of opposites whose manifestations traverse the whole realm of social life: what is different, open, eclectic, cosmopolitan, trendy & therefore desirable finds itself in opposition to the unitary, the homogeneous, the closed, the retrograde & therefore the undesirable. Our second line of research is that the symbolic accentuation of these opposites, in different fields, produces remarkably similar effects. In the realm of taste, ostentatious openness to diversity functions like cultural capital, in the Bourdieusian sense of a cultural trait widely recognized as desirable, but whose conditions of appropriation are unequally distributed. In the political field, the discourse of openness to diversity is exhibited by groups -- classes, nations, ethnic entities -- variously situated in relations of power, in order to legitimize their own practices & to downplay those of groups with whom tensions exist. 58 References. Adapted from the source document.