Global Peddlers and Local Networks: Migrant Cosmopolitanisms

Abstract

This paper is based on the experiences of street traders from South Asia and West Africa who currently live and work in Barcelona. I argue that in the ‘informal’ and marginal spaces inhabited, utilised, and created by these traders, they produce forms of nonelite cosmopolitanism through which livelihoods are sustained, social bonds are strengthened, and fluid, diasporic identities are produced. These are enabled by the development and maintenance of globalised networks and allegiances that are negotiated in highly localised ways and are often based on religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Thus, mobile and abiding cultural characteristics coexist as peddlers’ experiences of travelling and their encounters in place challenge conventional notions of cosmopolitanism and parochialism, and their apparent dualism. The paper introduces the notion of a strategic cosmopolitanism that emerges out of the need for vulnerable individuals and groups to make a living in an environment characterised by insecurity, and concludes by enquiring whether there are temporal dimensions to their cosmopolitanism.