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Abstract ThL· essay draws on the fieldwork from three research projects undertaken in Australia between 2002 and 2007. The general research was concerned with investigating the phenomenology of everyday diversity as it was experienced in a number of spatial contexts (suburban, urban, regional, shopping mall, church and so on). Material interactions with food were found to be a privileged arena for experiences of living within a multi culture, and food consumption constituted a site for experiences of cultural anxiety and dújuncture as well as for prosaic forms of low-level cosmopolitanism. Living in common means living with common resources. Commensality - in its etymology - names the practice of eating at the same table; in its more general meaning it describes the practice of living together with others. ThL· paper explores commensal practices that encourage convivial experiences ofmuliiculturalum while abo investigating how the experience of sitting down with others can exacerbate cultural differences.
Keywords cultural fragrance, commensality, conviviality, cosmopolitanism, diversity, food, space, recognition, reciprocity, non-space
Cosmopolitanism is often conceived as an ethical stance holding die potential to overcome racist, nationalist identity orientations which undermine an individual's capacity to embrace, define, and inhabit the multicultural nation and multi-edinic city on non-assimilative terms. While cosmopolitanism has become a topic of considerable attention from philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and others, Beck has astutely asked, how do cosmopolitan democracy, justice, solidarity, legality, politics, statehood and so forth become possible?1 To that I would add, how does one become the kind of person who might hold a 'cosmopolitan world view' with the capacity to enact this in everyday life? In addition, given that this was a traditionally bourgeois concept,2 how do class, gender, age and other forms of difference and overlapping hierarchies inflect die process of 'becoming cosmopolitan'? There is a recently emerging literature diat differentiates between cosmopolitan ethics, which define it in Utopian, normative terms, and cosmopolitan practice.3 Only very recently, however, has attention begun to turn to the question of 'becoming cosmopolitan'; that is how it is that the dispositional and affective capacity to take the 'cosmopolitan perspective' might evolve.4
This does seem a pressing question since it lies at die heart of (questionable) anxieties expressed by individuals such as Trevor Philips, Britain's former Racial Discrimination Commissioner. In a...