Orientarsi nell’intrico delle società europee Un’indagine sul cosmopolitismo dei giovani in mobilità

• Main Author: Vincenzo Cicchelli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Rosenberg & Sellier 2011-04-01
• Series: Quaderni di Sociologia
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/qds/653

The staying abroad for the Erasmus students is the experience the Author analyses to stress the socialization toward the difference and the construction of a cosmopolitan relationship with the world of a part of a European young people. The concept of cosmopolitan Bildung has been defined for describing how these modern travellers access to the new cultures. The three main aspects of the cosmopolitan theory are the explication of their behaviours, the orientation among the European cultures, the belonging to a infranational National or supranational level. The in-depth interviewes of the French Erasmus students point out images of the European southern societies as warm and welcoming, of the northern ones as civil and well-organised, of the eastern ones as spiritual and collectivist, following a not only cognitive cartography. Into the groove of the European cultures these modern travellers don’t define new social utopias and the cosmopolitism could be defined as a bias to the openness toward other cultures, values and lifestyles. It assumes the social actors have a set of capacities for mastering cultural codes of different national contextes in the contemporary societies: here the analytical units are national and transnational at the same time. A cosmopolitan socialization comes from: it is a learning process of the transnational dimensions of the world by these interviewees and their comparison with a different culture of the expressions of their own.