From cosmopolitan convergences to situated religious cosmopolitanism: The early spread of the Bahá’í Faith in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1975)

This paper contributes to the debate on cosmopolitanism by examining the spread of the Bahá’í Faith in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1975). The Bahá’í Faith is a significant case as its followers came to span the globe in 150 years. This paper probes into the relationship between the faith's transnational spread and its religious cosmopolitanism in three parts. First, I outline the inseparability of ‘world citizenship’ from Bahá’í teachings. Second, I trace its spread in Singapore and Malaya – a process that initially relied on serendipitous encounters between travellers and migrants, one that I call ‘cosmopolitan convergences’. Third, I explore the expansion of the Bahá’í Faith among Malaya's Semai tribe. Here, Bahá’í world citizenship became grounded in collective cultural practices, facilitating what I call ‘situated religious cosmopolitanism’. The connection between the contrasting populations discussed in this paper demonstrates the potential of grounding religious networks within normative cosmopolitan ideals and practices.     

Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong: re-migration,re-establishment of livelihood and belonging

This paper describes the re-migration and adjustment of Indonesian Chinese to living in Hong Kong and their cultural belonging to Hong Kong, China, and Indonesia. Known in China as guiqiao or ‘Returned Overseas Chinese’, these were Chinese who re-migrated from Indonesia to mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, many were allowed to migrate to Hong Kong. Although arriving with very little money, many have succeeded in establishing a fairly good life in Hong Kong, although there are also many who survive on low incomes. This paper discusses the experiences of the Indonesian Chinese in relation to local and transnational belonging, the perception of homelands, and the re-establishment of a Southeast Asian lifestyle in Hong Kong.     

What’s the matter with being Indonesian? A social representation approach to unravelling Indonesian national identity / ¿Qué significa ser indonesio? Una perspectiva de la representación social para desentrañar la identidad nacional indonesia

Due to its diverse nature, being an Indonesian is sometimes confusing as it entails overlapping national, ethnic and religious identity. By using a social representation approach, online survey research involving 114 Indonesians was carried out to explore these questions: How do Indonesians negotiate their ethnic, religious and national identity? What identity markers should one possess to claim being an Indonesian? And lastly, who is the nationalist? Research findings suggest that national and ethnic identity as well as ethnic and religious identity were consensual, while the relation between religious and national identity was emancipated. It is also found that being a Muslim and possessing a stronger sense of ethnic identity would increase the likelihood of being a prouder Indonesian, while being a female, living abroad for 5–10 years, being a nationalist Muslim and embracing transnational Islamic movements reduced the probability of having a stronger sense of national identity.     

Diaspora governance and religion: The (re)production of the Guangze Zunwang cult in the Chinese diaspora

The role of sending states receives little attention in existing studies of transnational religion; another body of literature on diaspora governance gives little scrutiny to the religious dimension of diaspora strategies. This paper attempts to bridge the two bodies of works by exploring the state-directed religious networking in the Chinese diaspora. Through a case study of the Guangze Zunwang cult, it investigates how origin states mobilize migrant religious networks for diaspora engagement and how diaspora communities respond to governing strategies. Different Chinese (non)state agents operate diasporic religious programs—international cultural tourism festivals and deities’ cross-border processions—respectively within and outside the territory. Inspired by the state-directed networking, diaspora groups also launch temple alliances in residential places, yet at the same time, produce alternative networks dedicated to revitalizing the cult. The paper sheds light on the multiplicity and flexibility of diaspora governance and provides further insights into the agency of the diaspora through transnational religious networking.     

Transnational religion: Hindu and Muslim movements

In this article I deal with transnational Hindu and Muslim movements. I reject the common assertion that migrant communities are conservative in religious and social matters by arguing that ‘traditionalism’ requires considerable ideological creativity and that this significantly transforms previous practices and discourses. I suggest that religious movements, active among migrants, develop cosmopolitan projects that can be viewed as alternatives to the cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment. This raises a number of challenges concerning citizenship, integration and political loyalty for governmentality in the nation‐states in which these cosmopolitan projects are carried out. I suggest that rather than looking at religious migrants as at best conservative and at worst terrorist one should perhaps pay some attention to the creative moments in human responses to new challenges and new environments.     

For good and country: nationalism and the diffusion of humanitarianism in the late nineteenth century

Despite the growing interest in transnational fields and their influence on national-level dynamics, existing literature has not yet addressed the processes involved in creating such fields in the first place. This article provides insight into the complexities involved in national–transnational interactions amidst national and transnational field formation. It examines the nascent transnational humanitarian field of the late nineteenth century through the work of the emerging Red Cross Movement in the 1860s–1890s, drawing primarily on the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The findings show that National Red Cross (NRC) societies employed a discourse drawn from a transnational cultural arena in order to gain central positioning in their national fields and to convince other parties of their necessity. Conversely, NRCs used nationalism as a form of symbolic capital in establishing themselves in their national fields, seemingly at odds with their cosmopolitan aspirations. Thus, by contrast to the ideal-typical representation of global humanitarianism as non-national, these findings suggest that nationalism and impartial humanitarianism are historically intertwined. More broadly, the article argues that national-level field dynamics as well as nationalism play important roles in the creation of transnational fields, even when field actors present themselves as acting for universal causes.     

Renegotiating religious transnationalism: fractures in transnational Chinese evangelicalism

In this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation'.     

Don't call me ibu: challenges of belonging for childless transnational Indonesian women

New forms of transnational families are being created by the feminization of migration, particularly of mobile Southeast Asian female workers who take on the financial responsibility of supporting their nieces and nephews who remain in the home country. This understudied kin relationship provides important insights into the complexities of transnational belonging among childless women. Fieldwork conducted in 2015 with Indonesian professional migrant women in Melbourne, Australia, reveals a translocalized Javanese cultural practice of fostering nieces and nephews. Using a framework that extends the anthropology of belonging into a gendered transnational context, in this article I argue that children who are absent, whether living in another country or never born, are yet present in women's narratives and are key to a larger migrant project of recreating oneself as an ambiguously valued subject.     

伊朗政治合法性与宗教合法性之构建

伊朗政治合法性和宗教合法性的构建一直受到重视,因为这有利于社会的长治久安。其政治合法性和宗教合法性的构建需要深厚坚实的基础,但处理好两者关系需要漫长的实践过程。本文以伊朗历史上具有代表性的政治制度和宗教为例,说明伊朗政治合法性和宗教合法性构建的意义、基础、途径、两者间关系及其过程。面对全球范围内的物质和精神的冲击,伊朗面临的问题是在当今国内外新形势下,如何重新构建和巩固政权的政治合法性和宗教合法性。     

New trade formations: precarity,pragmatic cosmopolitanism and long‐distance trade in the Caucasus

For many ordinary people responding to ongoing post‐Soviet precarity, domestic and transnational trade has become a common choice of livelihood. This article is about the small and medium sized traders who deal in cheap Chinese commodities in the Caucasus –particularly in Georgia and Armenia. It introduces the notion of ‘trade formations’ to account for the multiple ways in which cross‐cultural trade and microfinance practices, as well as stereotypes about national and regional groups and trading minorities, highlight the role of trust, reputation and everyday diplomacy in long‐distance commercial networks. While current trade networks are rooted in the cultures of trade practised under the Soviets, dispositions of pragmatic cosmopolitanism and defensive nationalism often determine who may or may not respond to post‐Soviet precarity by turning to transnational trade, embracing political and religious diversity, and overlooking hostilities, past and present.     

Internet usage and cosmopolitanism in Europe: a multilevel analysis

Despite the transnational interconnected nature of the internet, cross-national comparisons in internet usage and their effects are still relatively scarce. Moreover, one of the core intrinsic properties that internet theorists have distinguished, the ability to increase democracy and ‘global understanding’ through its connectivity, has hardly been empirically studied. This paper examines how internet usage affects individuals’ openness to other cultures: cosmopolitanism. I analyze two manifestations of such openness: first, the cosmopolitan orientation toward other cultures in the broad sense; second, the interest in foreign cultural expressions. Using Eurobarometer data on 29 European countries, the results show that interactive internet practices are positively associated with openness to foreign culture. Buying culture online is positively related to interest in concrete expressions, but negatively to cosmopolitan orientation. Importantly, individual effects on cosmopolitan orientation are often moderated by the country people live in, whereas effects on interest in foreign expressions are more stable across Europe.     

Figures of the cosmopolitan

In contemporary European social and political thought, cosmopolitanism is frequently closely linked with the modern cultural citizen, who is open to the variety of global cultures and can participate equally at al levels of society from the local to the global. The cosmopolitan or privileged national moves freely and, from a secure vantage point, is at home anywhere. However what I suggest in this paper is that there is a darker dimension, which is too easily forgotten in the celebratory figures of the cosmopolitan based on unfettered movement and consumption of places. There is another cosmopolitan figure which draws upon an ambiguous historical baggage where the rootless and flexible outsider was treated with suspicion and hostility. In 20th century Europe, cosmopolitanism often epitomised the Jew with divided allegiances and little attachment to the land, and more often at home in the city, unlike indigenous populations. Today the fear of divided loyalties and transnational political participation falls in particular upon Europe's Muslim populaitons, who must demonstrate that they are not cosmopolitan. Thus what is interpreted positively in the privileged national is deemed to be negative and problematic in the migrant.     

The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On the Cultural Significance of Europeanization

The idea of a cosmopolitan Europe is defined against a ‘national Europe’, on the one side and on the other, ‘global Europe’ where an internationalist EU-led Europe plays a major role in the world. A cosmopolitan Europe is a more accurate designation of the emerging form of Europeanization as a mediated and emergent reality of the national and the global. It is possible to conceive of European identity as a cosmopolitan identity based on a cultural logic of self-transformation rather than as a supranational identity or an official EU identity that is in a relation of tension with national identities. As a cosmopolitan identity, European identity is a form of post-national self-understanding that expresses itself within, as much as beyond, national identities.     

Youth,Mobility, and the Emotional Burdens of youxue (Travel and Study): A Case Study of Chinese Students in Italy

Based on fieldwork in China and Italy, this article examines the affective dimension of middle-class Chinese students’ youxue (travel and study) practices in Italy. With the liberalization of state policy in China’s self-funded study abroad market and the proliferation of educational intermediaries, youxue has become a special type of educational consumption that caters to the middle-class Chinese family’s desire for transnational mobility and cosmopolitan life styles. The blurring of the line between travel and study points to the open-ended and multi-linear nature of transnational student mobility. However, due to the limitations and pitfalls in international education policies in both the sending and the receiving countries, Chinese students’ youxue experiences in Italy are marked by notable contradictions between mobility and immobility, hopes and frustrations, self-appreciation and self-reproach.     

Hybridising the cultural identity of Mulan from a Chinese ballad to American films

Hybridisation refers to the fusion of diverse cultural elements which generates new cultural forms that are distinct yet interconnected with one another. Previous studies affirmed that hybridisation has become part of an ongoing trend in transnational culture, emerging from a Third Space where diverse cultural elements enmesh. This study aims to explore how Mulan's cultural identity is hybridised when the folklore flows from China to America, becoming entangled within a conflict of Chinese-Western transcultural clashes. Using Jameson's cultural identity model, the paper analyses Mulan's cultural identity in three texts which are the original The Ballad of Mulan, Disney's animated movie Mulan (1998) and its subsequent life-action installment Mulan (2020). Components measuring the protagonist's cultural identity comprising vocation, class, geography, philosophy, language, biological traits with cultural aspects are compared. The findings show that the movies have particularly hybridise the protagonist's cultural identity from the aspects of geography, philosophy, and language. This results in a hybrid cultural identity with transnational markers in Mulan. The significance of the research thus lies in its contribution towards highlighting how Chinese figures are increasingly hybridised by Western influences as the Chinese culture continues to transcend transnational borders.     

Cosmopolitan communication online: YouTube responses to the anti-Islam film Fitna

In 2008, a Dutch member of parliament released a short anti-Islamic film entitled Fitna, which stirred a huge public controversy and provoked public condemnations around the world. In response to the film, hundreds of videos were uploaded on YouTube, mostly with the aim to provide a more positive representation of Islam, express support for the author and his views, or defend his freedom of speech. Drawing on interviews with YouTube users who posted the videos, this paper reflects on the capacity of the Internet to sustain cosmopolitan communication and examines how cosmopolitan attitudes and practices on-line differ depending on the participants' cultural and social background, especially their religious affiliations. Particular attention is paid to how the opportunities for cosmopolitan communication are shaped by the unequal distribution of cosmopolitan attitudes and practices among groups, and by global inequalities of power. In addressing these issues, the paper also engages with broader debates about cosmopolitanism, and argues for an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a quest for universalism, which remains anchored in the particular, but involves communication across difference, and requires openness to the possibility that the other is right.     

Anti-War Initiatives and the Un-Making of Civic Identities in the Former Yugoslav Republics

This paper describes the emergence of anti-war initiatives in the former Yugoslavia against the background of the official nationalism of Communist elites and their post-1990 successors. The author argues that anti-war activism in the disintegrating state was a mobilization of the most articulate segment of a widespread, all-Yugoslav, urban, cosmopolitan and genuinely non-ethnonationalistic cultural identity. One of the reasons behind its easy suppression by the official rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity is its purely cultural stance and lack of experience in alternative forms of political organization. Dominant approaches to ethno-nationalism in former Yugoslavia are criticised for essentializing ethnic identities, and contrasted with some interpretive approaches that analyze the structural preconditions of ethno-nationalism as top-to-bottom projects of the ex-Communist middle-to-high ranking functionaries in search of legitimacy and forced to create a 'democratic electorate.'     

Special theme introduction: methodological cosmopolitanism across the socio‐cultural sciences

The cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism.     

The democratic deficit of transnational environmental activism: a case study of e‐waste governance in India

The literature on transnational activism often associates environmental NGOs with democratic legitimacy, grassroots representation and environmental justice. Authors employ case studies to demonstrate how engaging in transnational networks increases the political agency of environmental NGOs. Yet, there is a tendency mostly to select successful cases. In this article, I investigate the political activities of the environmental NGO, Toxics Link, surrounding the recycling of electronic waste in India. Based on qualitative research, this study shows how the political incorporation of Toxics Link in transnational advocacy networks and domestic governance networks constrains their political agency. The structural exclusion of e‐waste labourers from Indian policy negotiations negates the discursive claims of legitimacy, representation and justice. These incorporation processes create a democratic deficit. I use the insights gained from this case study to provide a critical assessment of theories of transnational environmental activism.