A second birth? Cosmopolitan media ethnography and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology

The cosmopolitan trajectory

When talking about cosmopolitanism I imagine an embodied socio-cultural disposition that integrates two interdependent dimensions. The first, and primary, dimension is what I call the cosmopolitan ethos, referring to the particular cosmopolitan ‘state of mind’ (see Hannerz, 1990). The cosmopolitan ethos can be understood as the ethos of what Beck calls the ‘dialogical imagination’, and thus involves two aspects: on the one hand, a willingness to engage with the Other, and, on the other hand, a willingness to recognize and problematize the orientation and background of one’s own cultural identity.

The cosmopolitan constellation qua domain of experience and horizon of expectations means the internalization of difference, the co-presence and coexistence of rival lifestyles, contradictory certainties in the experiential space of individuals and societies. By this is meant a world in which it has become necessary to understand, reflect and criticize difference, and in this way to assert and recognize oneself and others as different and hence of equal value. The cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility opens up a space of dialogical imagination in everyday practice and in the relevant sciences. (Beck, 2006 [2004]: 89, italics in original)

As Delanty (2009: 11) argues, this reflexive and critical duality of cosmopolitanism is what distinguishes the cosmopolitan from the global. The cosmopolitan ethos stresses a willingness to change – a disposition to put oneself ‘on the line’, enacting a process of translation, self-contestation and potentially self-transformation (see also Nowicka and Rovisco, 2009). This does not imply that cosmopolitanism requires global and transnational mobility, even though such experiences are often important for the rise of cosmopolitanism. As Delanty (2009: 16) also points out, it is important to maintain a clear distinction between cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. What I do argue, however, is that the cosmopolitan ethos is an important catalyst for reaching deeper, and more critical, understandings of transnational and global conditions – notably in terms of symbolic power.

Even though the reflexive cosmopolitan mindset must be located at the core of the cosmopolitan project, theoretically as well as practically, its implications cannot be fully grasped, nor realized, without a more practice-oriented component. It would not be possible to achieve either cosmopolitan social change or any methodological cosmopolitanism solely through a certain structure of willingness. Cosmopolitanism in practice requires certain skills and competences, through which the ethos can socially unfold and (potentially) reinforce itself.

The second dimension of cosmopolitanism, accordingly, is related to what Bourdieu (1990 [1980]) terms practical sense, referring to the pre-reflexive mode of understanding and mastering the world through social practice. This is the ‘feel for the game’, mediated through habitus, which makes an agent able to operate correctly within a social field, adjusting his or her movements to an anticipated pattern of future events. While related to the ethos, I suggest, through a process of social belief and orientation – what Bourdieu calls illusio – practical sense is also analytically distinct from the ethos; precisely because it is not a state of mind:

Practical belief is not a ‘state of mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense. (1990 [1980]: 68)

In this article the idea of practical sense will be applied more broadly, however, pertaining also to naturalized practices occurring beyond the confines of social fields. Practical sense is closely related to what the phenomenologists call the ‘natural attitude’ (e.g. Schutz and Luckmann, 1973), and what in Giddens’s (1991) writings reappears as ‘practical consciousness’, circumscribing a realm of everyday taken-for-grantedness. Within this practical realm, where agents experience a sense of ‘being at home’ in what they are doing (Bourdieu, 1981), actions are performed skilfully and without any problematization of their underlying logics.

There are no absolute or stable expressions of a cosmopolitan practical sense. Nevertheless, I suggest that there are two interrelated realms of practical sense through which the cosmopolitan ethos is potentially reproduced. First, there is the taken-for-grantedness and practical mastery of cultural difference. Within the cosmopolitan practical sense, differences and variations are seen as naturalized facets of everyday life and thus handled with considerable ease. As several theorists have argued, the cosmopolitan person is someone who feels ‘at home in movement’ (see Cresswell, 2006; Morley, 2000), someone who easily adapts to, and translates, new socio-cultural conditions and learns ‘how to get around’ (Moores and Metykova, 2009, 2010). This also means, second, that cosmopolitanism in practice requires the mastery of various means of mobility and transcendence – the means for passing boundaries, entering and exiting various socio-cultural contexts, territories and fields. Typically, these means are not culturally specific, but attain what Giddens (1984, 1991) describes as a disembedding potential, such as the technologies and abstract systems of global mobility (with their local variations), economic exchange systems, globally dispersed languages and, indeed, certain media technologies and representations.

This highlights the relevance of Bourdieu’s perspective for analysing cosmopolitanism as a particular logic of social practice and symbolic power. While largely operating within the pre-reflexive realm, practical sense becomes performative and expressive as soon as it is acted out within the realm of social practice. And, as Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) argues, it is precisely the pre-reflexive nature of such practice, the naturalized attitude of the social actors, that generates those distinctions that demarcate the cosmopolitan person as a man or a woman ‘of the world’, as given by classical Kantian imagery. Practical sense then becomes the foundation of a whole range of cultural distinctions that produce a social distance between those who are culturally classified as ‘cosmopolitans’, moving and interacting easily across cultural boundaries, and those who are not (see Hannerz’s [1990] account of ‘locals’ and ‘cosmopolitans’). However, while in a globalized society these naturalized and classified skills are turned into an increasingly valuable asset, even a form of transnational cultural capital (Kennedy, 2009), distinctions can only emerge if there is resonance between social practice and the logic of a social field.

A key question, then, is whether there exists any particular ‘cosmopolitan social field’ in Bourdieu’s sense. My answer to that question is negative. Still, there exist several social fields that are potentially cosmopolitan, in that they are more likely to integrate institutionalized cosmopolitan competences and understandings of society and the world (cf. Nowicka and Rovisco, 2009). In such cases the very logics of the field institutionalize cosmopolitanism as a kind of symbolic capital, even though the more precise articulations of practical sense, and their symbolic value, may diverge between different fields and sub-fields.

My argument so far is twofold. First, I argue that a strong definition of cosmopolitanism must involve both ethos and practical sense. What I consider cosmopolitanism emerges when the two dimensions reinforce one another through a process of social synergy. The ethical preference for self-contestation and reflexivity then opens the possibilities of an extended realm for the pre-reflexive cosmopolitan practical sense, which is, in turn, a principal enabling force of those boundary-transcending practices that sustain the cosmopolitan ethos. This synergetic process is to be understood as a process of self-transformation, and constitutes the critical, ethical side of what I call the cosmopolitan trajectory.

Second, I argue that cosmopolitanism may sometimes correspond to increased social power, sometimes not. The extent to which the cosmopolitan trajectory also implies an (upward) social trajectory depends upon whether it is formed within the generative logic of a field. Bourdieu (1983: 346n) defines social trajectory or ‘constructed biography’ as:

the set of successive movements of an agent in a structured (hierarchized) space, itself subject to displacements and distortions, or, more precisely, in the structure of the distribution of the different kinds of capital that are at stake within the field, economic capital and the specific capital of consecration (in its different kinds).

What must be underlined here is that cosmopolitanism, in its ethical-practical shape, may also evolve outside of fields, meaning that the embodied natural attitudes of cosmopolitanism are not sanctioned or recognized as symbolic capital. This is presumably the case among a majority of transnational migrants, often caught in more or less coerced mobility, for whom the social benefit of cosmopolitan experiences is very uncertain (see e.g. Andersson, 2008; Burman, 2010; Georgiou, 2006; Vertovec, 2009). Furthermore, the social trajectory sustained by the institutionalized mechanisms of a field may not necessarily lead to a linear process of ‘increasing cosmopolitanism’. Integration and success within a field typically involve parallel processes of social encapsulation and securitization – processes that are typically related to the accumulation of economic capital and what Urry (2007) calls network capital. In order to illustrate the ambiguity of these conditions I will provide an example from my own fieldwork.

Case study: the social field of international development aid

In 2007–8 I conducted a media ethnographic study of Scandinavian expatriates working within the international development sector in Nicaragua. Accompanying my wife, who was employed within a development project governed by a Swedish-based NGO, I spent altogether five months in the region of Managua. Being an accompanying family member, not affiliated to any university or other organization, I was loosely integrated within the local community of the development sector, and had continuous opportunities to follow their modes of operation and socio-cultural reflexivity through everyday discussions. In addition, I conducted six individual interviews with people working within various NGOs, through which I could better understand the logic of the development sector as a transnational, potentially cosmopolitan, social field. Two conclusions are particularly important to mention in the context of this article.

First of all, it became obvious to me that cosmopolitanism, in the sense of both ethos and practical sense, gets naturalized over time. Those of my interviewees who had longer and more multifaceted experiences of transnational migration and employment – in this case mainly related to the organizations of civil society – had naturalized a certain mode for adapting to the regular alterations of life conditions, occurring due to both their trans-migrant biographies and the glocally situated nature of their work, and were simultaneously at ease with their identity. Among those in the early stages of the cosmopolitan trajectory the ethos was not to the same extent grounded in practical sense (see also Thompson and Tambyah, 1999).

These observations suggest that cosmopolitanism is one of those realms in which the habitus, through the course of new socio-cultural encounters and challenges, may be altered, and where reflexivity may run parallel to practical sense (see Adams, 2006). Due to the cosmopolitan inclination for social fatefulness, phenomenological ‘crisis situations’ – in the shape of problematic encounters between habitus and foreign social contexts (potentially, but not necessarily, coinciding with particular social fields) (see Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]: 170, 1990 [1980]: 108) – become integral to cosmopolitan lifestyles. In this perspective, the cosmopolitan trajectory illustrates the development of what Sweetman (2003), trying to bridge the gap between Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus and the theories of reflexive modernization (e.g. Beck et al., 1994), calls a ‘reflexive habitus’. Sweetman (2003: 543) asserts that ‘a reflexive orientation towards the contemporary environment may itself be regarded as a form of habitus, itself the outcome of an adaptation to – rather than a distanciation from – the changing nature of the social terrain’. This corresponds to the cosmopolitan practical sense. What is even more instrumental to the cosmopolitan trajectory, in its proper sense, however, is that it integrates a fundamental concern with ethical issues, as suggested by both Beck and Delanty in their approaches to cosmopolitanism. This is something that sets it apart from more consumer oriented and aesthetically driven realms of habitual reflexivity. Cosmopolitanism points to the emergence of an ethically reflexive habitus.

My second important conclusion from the fieldwork in Nicaragua is that the development sector (albeit loosely defined) operates as a field that largely legitimizes cosmopolitanism through the institutionalization of a certain type of symbolic capital. ¹ Those informants for whom cosmopolitanism was most firmly anchored in practical sense, were also those most integrated within the social field of international development aid. Typical status markers appeared to be precisely those skills and experiences that express individual mastery of cross-cultural interaction and translation, not least language skills and the experience of having worked in a variety of developing countries (see Eriksson Baaz, 2005). For those in possession of such qualities the field seemed to operate as a vehicle and an arena for further transnational mobility, and thus for the further accumulation of the type of symbolic capital through which the field reproduces itself.

However, several informants also expressed a concern, even a sense of ethical dissonance, when it came to the practical performance of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, social distinctions were articulated in relation to the life forms of other transnational, potentially cosmopolitan, groupings in the area, such as those working within the diplomatic sector. Among my informants there was above all a desire not to get too encapsulated and detached from local realities:

As a family we don’t live in a gated community or behind those gigantic fences in an isolated house, but we live, well not in a barrio, but at least in a place where we can see the problems of the city.[…] Compared to many of the embassy people who are complaining themselves that they don’t have any contacts with Nicaraguans. (Male project leader in his mid 30s)

On the other hand, the informants also stressed that they themselves found it hard to engage to the same extent, and with the same energy, with the local conditions after having been to a number of different parts of the world. While they agreed that their ability for cross-cultural translation and bridge-building was still expanding, they also stated that the cosmopolitan trajectory, in its social shape, was accompanied by an increasing sense of fatigue:

To some extent it’s easier [to stay within the enclaves] … because you also get tired. You get to know some Nicaraguans and it’s really nice and you talk. But then after a longer period you also realize that at a deeper level you feel more at ease with Swedish people, and you get bored with all this, the novelty of talking to Nicaraguans all the time in order to learn and getting that experience and exchange. (Male project leader in his mid 30s)

In other words, within the development sector there is no automatic logic through which the cosmopolitan ethos and practical sense are reinforced. While the field indeed privileges cosmopolitan modes of thinking and acting, whereas many other fields rather gravitate towards territorial enclosure and internal value coherence, it is also saturated with the overarching logic of western capitalism. Successful careers are classified and sustained partly by institutionalized means that operate in contradiction to the cosmopolitan ethos of self-reflexivity and social change.

Those of us who are interested in a scholarly way in the interplay between media use and transnational travel and migration must be sensitive to these complex mechanisms. Indeed, conditions of social rupture and re-territorialization, such as in global (trans-)migration, bring with them a strengthened potential for cosmopolitanism to emerge, whether there exists a generative transnational field or not. But how, and under what historical conditions, are various mobilities sustaining and sustained by ethical as well as social trajectories? And how do these trajectories interact with the mediatized (re)production of social regions and fields? As Delanty (2009) asserts, if we conflate transnational mobilities/biographies and cosmopolitanism, instead of empirically assessing their linkages, we would also fail to socially locate the critical, transformative potential of the latter.

Media and texturation

Before turning to the question of what a cosmopolitan approach would imply for the very methodology of global media ethnography, I would like to make a conceptual point as to our object of study – the social significance of media use in globalization processes. A cosmopolitan understanding of such a matter would mean an understanding that is (a) in-depth, (b) non-nationalist (and otherwise territorially non-biased) and (c) potentially self-transformative. While (a) is given by ethnography as such, (b) and (c) call for a certain set of dynamic concepts that are not associated with the commonplace myths and discourses of methodological nationalism. The above-mentioned notion of trajectory provides an example of such a concept, which works well for grasping mobility and change at different spatial levels. Another, complementary concept, which I will discuss here, is the concept of texture.

The point of departure here is that media ethnographic understandings of ‘globalization from within’, which Beck (2006 [2004]) speaks of, must build upon a non- media-centric approach (see Morley, 2009), concerned not primarily with the role of single media technologies or institutions, but with the spatial configurations resulting from the situated intersection and appropriation of various globalizing scapes (including but not restricted to the mediascape) (Appadurai, 1996), as these configurations are produced through the social logics of practice (see Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]). Formulated somewhat differently, the media ethnographic approach should engage with, and critically reflect upon, the totalizing cultural-material textures that characterize particular spaces and movements, and how practical sense among certain groups or class fractions, ‘locals’ as well as ‘cosmopolitans’ (without falling into the reductionism of this dichotomy), pertains to the production and negotiation of these textures, especially in terms of symbolic power relations.

What is texture? In very simplified terms, texture is the ‘communicative fabric of space’. It does not merely refer to the fabric as such, however, but also to ‘the feel of the weave’ (Adams et al., 2001) – which in epistemological terms means that texture attempts to overcome the division between culturalism, such as the cultural anthropological view of ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, 1973), and materialism, such as in Thrift’s (2007) recent advocacy of ‘non-representational theory’. Texture is even a dialectical concept; something through which culture and communication materialize into something deeply felt, a fabric, bypassing the realm of semiotics, while simultaneously something through which the material becomes communicative. The concept of texture thus helps us articulating the material, embodied and embedded dimensions of Bourdieu’s above-mentioned theory of fields and symbolic power – albeit that field is not necessarily the corresponding analytical unit. We may speak of textures in relation to a variety of spaces, movements and processes, such as the ‘textures of the diasporic city’ (Burman, 2010), the ‘textures of tourism’ (Jansson, 2007) or the ‘textures of radio listening’ (Tacchi, 1998).

Textures are relatively durable structures, whose stability is the product of two things. First, textures are social constructs inseparable from the intersubjectivity and taken-for-grantedness of the lifeworld. To a great extent textures are already in place when we are born, and we get socialized into how to interpret and make use of them. In a more Bourdieusian terminology, they are both the objects and the articulations of our practical sense. Second, textures evolve and endure through cultural-material sedimentation (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966) – the repetition of social practices in relation to material and cultural (infra)structures. We may thus think of textures as objectified sediments of social practice, reproducing the spatial rules and resources of, for instance, a social field (Bourdieu) or region (Goffman, 1959, 1971). Altogether, this means that texture is inherent to all spatial and communicative practices – these practices are both textured (through textural affordances and scripts) and texturing (through textural enactment and articulation). The existence and the power of textures are typically experienced when certain infrastructures or code systems break down and our intended practices are no longer possible to perform, or when we come as foreigners to a new spatial setting and do not understand how to get around or interact (see Moores and Metykova, 2009).

Accordingly, while textures are certainly a site of mutuality and trust, they also, simultaneously, operate as cultural-material mechanisms for social exclusion and distinction. In his work on The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre uses the term ‘texture’ to describe how spatial practices leave their marks in space, and successively generate what he calls ‘reticular patterns’ – material traces and arrangements that ‘embody the “values” assigned to particular routes’ (1991 [1974]: 118). Lefebvre also argues that texture is both an enabling structure and an obstacle to spatial practice: it is possible for human subjects to act outside of textures or to break the rules, but most of the time textures determine spatial practices, which in turn ‘embody a signifying practice even if they cannot be reduced to such a practice’ (1991 [1974]: 57).

This process-oriented view of social space as a realm of continuous texturation, depicting how imaginations, representations and (inter)subjective interpretations are implied or embedded in spatial practice and material structures, provides an interesting link to Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field. In their enabling capacity, textures are to be seen as the stratifying attractions of a social field, or a subfield – magnetic structures that resonate with certain kinds of habitus. Social trajectories imply (among other things) the successive naturalization of textural knowledge and mastery. For those with the wrong habitus, however, textures remain either impossible to discern (since the field is alien), or hard to figure out or enact. It is thus not only the very materiality of space, such as technological infrastructures and various kinds of border arrangements that may prohibit the realization of certain activities, but also the codes of classification, the ‘rules of the game’, and their embodied and often deeply felt manifestations, may exclude entire social groups, such as foreigners, outsiders and the poor, from making use of textures in a meaningful way; which is also to say that they are prohibited from entering the field.

Both these aspects pertain to the social significance of media in texturation, and especially to how different groups cope with the material and cultural mediatization of texture. To illustrate this a bit further I want to specify here the above-mentioned forms of practical cosmopolitan mastery, tentatively considering how the cosmopolitan practical sense pertains to media textures.

First, cosmopolitanism integrates a disposition towards textural alteration and confrontation. As noted above, during my fieldwork in Nicaragua I found that a common cosmopolitan marker was the desire to live in foreign cultural settings ‘for real’, grasping the ordinariness of texture, the ‘true’ feel of the weave. While the disembedding forces of encapsulation were understood as a threat to this ethical orientation, the repeated enactment and successive mastery of unfamiliar textures, especially those textures that were perceived as ‘ordinary’, such as local media and communications infrastructures, were greeted as key facets of habitual reflexivity.

Second, the cosmopolitan practical sense embodies the successive mastery of various disembedding textures – those textures that promote mobility and circulation. Cosmopolitanism is often (but far from always) sustained by means of mediatized assemblages of technologies and abstract systems that facilitate the crossing of territories and fields, as well as refined modes of habitual navigation. The mastery of these assemblages within the realm of practical sense, in turn, leads to the establishment of cosmopolitan distinctions – the expressive, but also naturalized, markers of mobile lifestyles.

Summing up, texture is a concept that helps us to reach beyond the nationalist imageries of space. On the one hand, if we chose to study a relatively bounded place, and its production, a key approach would be to pinpoint the multimodality of the textures of this place. For instance, while the mediatized textures of an airport at one level of analysis may seem to signify de-territorialization and spaces of flow (Castells, 1992), even non-place (Augé, 1995), at another level of analysis the very same textures may speak of territorialization, segregation and traditional labour (see Graham, 2005; Lyon, 2007: ch. 6; Parks, 2007; Tomlinson, 1999). Similar arrangements thus evoke different feelings among different groups. On the other hand, if we chose to study certain movements or processes, such as the trajectories of transnational groupings, we can unveil the complex ways in which these trajectories (re)produce, (re)articulate and potentially interlink various spatially anchored textures. As Burman (2010: 104) puts it in a reflexive analysis of the relational spatial poetics of the ‘diasporic city’, this entity ‘gains its dynamic emotional texture – sedimented, yes, but […] closer to motive ocean sedimentation than mineral-to-rock formation – in part from the critical mass of residents with deep ongoing attachments and connections to other places’. This points to the interspatiality of the texturation process.

As a concrete example of the multimodality and interspatiality of texturation we may consider the following extract from one of the interviews I did in Managua, with a young trainee spending her second period in the region:

I can manage without a mobile when I’m travelling, if I would go to Costa Rica then I’m not bringing my mobile, or when I travelled a couple of months in Argentina. But this is my stable point and I’m working and I think it brings security to both me and people around me.[…] Locally I’m texting quite a lot, like ‘what happens this week?’, ‘going to the movies?’ – as a coordination tool.[…] I’m also taking security measures. I call my landlady when I jump into a taxi late in the evening, or I make a fake call saying that I’ll be home in ten minutes so the taxi driver can hear it. (Female trainee in her mid 20s)

Here, on the one hand, we see how the trainee herself contributes to the multimodality of the local urban texture, especially when she describes her habit of making ‘fake calls’ when going by taxi, thus embedding, or encapsulating, her mobility within a particular form of (simulated) media use. It is also obvious that her spatial and communicative practices occur within and through textures that pertain to her particular habitus, stressing an intricate interspatial balance between cultural, transnational adventurousness (the de-mediated textures of travel) and the need for a local comfort zone of routinized mediated security.

Ultimately, as we will see in the final section of this article, ethnographic understandings of the multimodality and interspatiality of texturation hold the potential to cast light also on those textures that integrate and stratify the academic field, thus contributing to a cosmopolitan mode of self-reflexivity.

A second birth: the reflexive project of cosmopolitan media ethnography

The academic field in general, and perhaps the cultural ethnographic subfield in particular, does attain a cosmopolitan potential. However, whereas ethnographic research in practice as well as in terms of methodological doxa encourages self-reflexivity and empirical rigorousness, the field is also marked by paradoxes echoing the conditions I found among international development workers, as described above. To put it simply, possessing academic status positions normally corresponds to an increased distanciation from other fields and textures. For the individual subject it takes great efforts to break out of the encapsulated academic comfort zone in order to actually engage with the complexity of foreign settings. Still, if we want to pursue the ethical and epistemological project of cosmopolitan media ethnography, there is no alternative to actively trying to bring out the cosmopolitan potential of our own academic field.

At an organizational level this would imply more collaboration in multi-local networks, and the active support of interdisciplinarity. According to Beck (2006 [2004]: 88–9) we can ‘develop a new, functional, historically sensitive empiricism focused on the ambivalent consequences of globalization in boundary-transcending and multi-local research networks – a continuation of the community studies of the Chicago School with a cosmopolitan intent’. This is not the most critical challenge, however – and not the final solution to the cosmopolitan ideal of transformation. More fundamentally, a cosmopolitan perspective would imply that we, as the agents of both knowledge production and social change, embodied the cosmopolitan trajectory – within and beyond the scientific field. Our studies would then be governed by the dialogical imagination, challenging our individual viewpoints as social and cultural scientists.

How can this be achieved? Clearly, there is no way around the deep involvement of the subject-researcher himself/herself. Cosmopolitanism has to be grounded in lived experiences of social rupture and transformation. As Kennedy argues, the trajectory of cosmopolitan self-transformation typically involves a clear break with more territorially defined fields of experience, implying that individuals ‘are able to distance themselves more convincingly and comfortably from their early ethnic/national backgrounds’ (2009: 35). This view resonates with how Beck conceives of cosmopolitan sensibility and competence:

My suggestion is that cosmopolitan sensibility and competence arise from the clash of culture within one’s own life.[…] Cosmopolitan competence, as a fact of everyday and of scientific experience, forces us to develop the art of translation and bridge building. (2006 [2004]: 89, italics added)

What is important to point out here, however, is that the cosmopolitan ‘clash of cultures’ must not be understood merely in terms of nationality, language, religion and other categories anchored in the nationalist schemes of imagination, but also in terms of social life conditions more broadly. As McNay argues in an article on habitus, reflexivity and gender, the particular abilities for critical self-reflexivity, the ‘distanciation of the subject with constitutive structures’, must be seen through a broader logic of social stratification, arising ‘from their embeddedness within differing sets of power relations’ (1999: 110). Similarly, the cosmopolitan trajectory can arise through different kinds of social mobility, fatefulness and self-exploration, related to, for instance, class, gender, sexuality and the often overlooked urban–rural divide.

Here I would like to provide yet another empirical illustration. During my most recent fieldwork, in a Swedish countryside community, I interviewed Knut and Richard, a gay couple living in an old house, inherited from Richard’s family. They both have countryside backgrounds, as well as wide experiences of global travel and, in Knut’s case, an international professional career within the educational and political sectors. Since Knut left the countryside in his youth, his life trajectory has involved a great number of ruptures and re-orientations, combined with higher education and a diversity of cultural encounters. He stresses that it was his interest in languages, which he ‘collects’, that was the original driving force behind his desire to ‘live in different countries for real’, and that the fact that he is gay mostly led him to major cities such as Berlin and Brussels ‘where there is already an infrastructure for making contacts’. From this perspective, Knut’s current life in Granby provides another original site for gaining further real-life experiences, without diminishing his sense of exit-ability.

This example once again underscores the tension-field between the adventurous cosmopolitan ethos and the encapsulating security of moving within a certain social field, where textures are not only familiar but also provide interspatial bridges (such as the inter-urban gay scene mentioned by Knut). It also shows that the cosmopolitan trajectory involves a process of learning and self-transformation that typically, but not necessarily, involves global mobilities and encounters. What is particularly significant here is rather the interplay between socio-cultural exploration and self-exploration, which often resonates with an embodied state of ambiguity and rootlessness.

Cosmopolitan media ethnography must operate according to a similar dualistic logic, requiring not merely the active engagement within diverse realms of mediatized glocal texturation, but also the continuous reassessment of our academic self-understanding. This is where Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology becomes relevant as a framework for pursuing the visions of critical, or methodological, cosmopolitanism. Through the concept of habitus Bourdieu illuminates the sedimented structural constraints that normally prevent social actors from practising self-reflexivity. At the same time, however, habitus is an enabling structure – a force that may also foster more progressive logics of practice. In response to those who have criticized his theory of habitus for being overly deterministic Bourdieu has replied:

The notion of habitus accounts for the fact that social agents are neither particles of matter determined by external causes, nor little monads guided solely by internal reasons, executing a sort of perfectly rational internal program of action.[…] One can even say that social agents are determined only to the extent that they determine themselves. But the categories of perception and appreciation which provide the principle of this (self-) determination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic conditions of their constitution. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 136, italics in original)

Cosmopolitanism, as I have argued above, represents one of those realms in which this dual role of habitus is most clearly brought to the fore (see Adams, 2006; Noble and Watkins, 2003; Sweetman, 2003). What is peculiar about the habitus of cosmopolitanism, and what must be the guiding principle of methodological cosmopolitanism, is the inclination to actively reposition oneself in textures, and select information, that open up the possibility of conflict and alteration of established beliefs. This is also an inclination that habitually generates the transcendence of pre-established social fields and the generation of new hybridized modes of social practice, as well as theorizing.

As researchers we cannot adopt this ethically reflexive outlook as just another methodological skill, however. It cannot be established through handbooks or engagement with mere theory. It can only be adopted, as Bourdieu puts it, ‘by a slow process of co-option and initiation which is equivalent to a second birth’ (1990 [1980]: 68, emphasis added). As a case in point, the fact that my fieldwork in Nicaragua did not have any formal ties to any academic institutions in the region or elsewhere, but was carried out within and through an emerging realm of everyday social experience, helped me understand the restrictions of the academic gaze, as well as the encapsulating logic of the field. In a broader sense, the fact that I was myself socially re-embedded and no longer classified first and foremost as a researcher helped me to understand the dilemma of enacting the cosmopolitan trajectory without separating one’s whole subject (at least temporarily) from the taken-for-granted structures and textures of a field.

In the case of Bourdieu himself, it is tempting to interpret his thorough anthropological fieldwork in France and Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s, in terms of a series of fateful moments within his own research biography – a process that later on led him to formulate his unique version of a reflexive sociology (see especially Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). In a retrospective assessment of his famous Kabylia studies, Bourdieu finds that ‘scientific practice never takes the form of an inevitable sequence of miraculous intellectual acts, except in methodology manuals and academic epistemology’ (1990 [1980]: 16). Reflexivity takes time and can only emerge through practical experience:

It is not easy, without self-congratulation or reconstruction by hindsight, to describe the long effort applied to oneself which little by little leads to the conversion of one’s whole view of action and the social world that is presupposed by ‘observation’ of facts that are totally new because they were totally invisible to the previous view. (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]: 16, italics in original)

One key moment in Bourdieu’s experience of conversion, he writes, was when during a subsequent study in Béarn (his childhood province), which he considered a ‘reverse test’ of his experience of ‘familiarization with an alien world’ (1990 [1980]: 16), he encountered a social utterance that made him rethink also parts of his conclusions drawn in the context of Kabylia. All in all, through multi-sited ethnography (which is, as such, not a unique feature of the Bourdieusian ethnographic project), and more specifically through the unpredictability of social confrontation, he developed at the same time a culturally transcendental theory of symbolic capital and a reflexive epistemology transcending the divide between structural sociology and phenomenology (see also Robbins, 2007). In our context, these aspects together point to a cosmopolitan way of looking at the social logics of symbolic power in potentially transnational settings.

Here, the status of conversion, which also marks out the domain of the cosmopolitan ethos, can hardly be overestimated. In Bourdieu’s view, reflexive sociology must not only break with native experience, but also, through a second break, problematize the presuppositions of the observer (1990 [1980]: 27). Such a double epistemological break is the only possible way of gathering a deeper, more naturalized understanding of the practical sense and symbolic power of situated lifestyles, and eventually turning this understanding into a generalized theory. As shown by Bourdieu’s own biography, the conversion of the gaze, the turning of the ‘scientific gaze’ back upon ourselves (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 199), is sustained by the continuous engagement within complementary domains of social practice:

To do this, one has to situate oneself within ‘real activity as such’, that is, in the practical relation to the world, the pre-occupied, active presence in the world through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be done and said, things made to be said, which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as a spectacle. (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]: 52)

To the extent that Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology invites us to break with both common sense and scholastic conventions it must be regarded as an ethical as well as an epistemological project – ‘an exercise in rupture and self-creation’ (Frangie, 2009: 219). In a similar manner, I argue, cosmopolitan media ethnography must try to reach beyond the field of social science and also integrate a concern with ethical issues of identity and power (see Robbins, 2007: 94). Bourdieu’s methodology might be the starting-point for a truly ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (Delanty, 2009; Szaló, 2010), informed by the act of self-creation and recreation that also marked the trajectories of Bourdieu’s academic and social career. It is no coincidence that Bourdieu, in spite of his ascending social trajectory continuously described himself as an outsider in the academic field, haunted by feelings of insecurity, ambiguity and estrangement – a split habitus (Frangie, 2009: 224–5).

Cosmopolitan media ethnography would thus imply an active mode of self- transformation, the alteration of habitus in the direction of increased self-reflexivity. It would imply not only the exploration of the mediatized textures and trajectories of the Other, and the emergence of transnational fields of symbolic (potentially cosmopolitan) power. It would also imply the contestation of our own social fields, lifeworlds and textures, in order to ignite the synergetic process between the cosmopolitan ethos and the cosmopolitan practical sense.