Last week, we discussed Anderson’s work on the cosmopolitan canopy. With my expert question, I asked if cosmopolitan canopies are ultimately more helpful or harmful for community building and if we can use the framework of the cosmopolitan canopy to understand social media communities. While discussing this question, Professor Greene asked us to define, what is a cosmopolitan canopy? While we were looking for a definition, what ensued was a conversation, and some disagreement, about what spaces and places would qualify as cosmopolitan canopies.

In the article “The Cosmopolitan Canopy,” Anderson explains that people in cities have developed, “a pervasive wariness towards strangers” (Anderson, 15). However, through his ethnographic work in Philadelphia, he claims that there are certain places, he terms them cosmopolitan canopies, that break this trend of wariness. In these places, people are treated with “a certain level of civility” regardless of their identity and they are able to partake in “folk ethnography.”

While it might seem like many places in an urban setting could qualify as a cosmopolitan canopy, in our class discussion we realized this definition might be harder to fit to a place than suggested by Anderson in his article. I still question the existence of places where people of every identity feel neutral and secure. It seems likely to me that even if people are physically safe and engaging in simple small talk, people of marginalized identities might still be feeling wary. For example, Anderson offers an interaction where “a white man with white-supremacist friends” has a “frank conversation” (Anderson, 20) with Anderson in the Market.  While the man was comfortable talking to Anderson, Anderson does not say whether he himself was comfortable in that space hearing that this man had friends with such views and might hold those views as well. My point is that I am not convinced from our discussion or Anderson’s article that people of different backgrounds feel equally secure and neutral in these spaces.

From this discussion, our class then moved on to wonder, is Bowdoin a cosmopolitan canopy?  I think that the concept of the Bowdoin hello is useful in addressing this question because I believe it shows that while the administration might try to make Bowdoin a cosmopolitan canopy, the space does not fit the definition in reality. The Bowdoin hello is the idea that here at Bowdoin, campus members do not engage in the wariness that Anderson uses to describe urbanites and instead we regularly say hello and engage in small talk with any stranger they might see on campus. However, any Bowdoin community member would tell you that this simply is not true. We do not go around saying hello to every person we see walking by and often times you will see people, “employing elaborate facial and eye work, replete with smiles, nods and gestures geared to carve out an impersonal but private zone for themselves” (Anderson, 15). In this way, I think the concept of the Bowdoin hello and lack of practice illustrates how in reality, despite how we might want to appear, we are not a cosmopolitan canopy.

However, while I was reading Anderson I did recognize many parallels between the Market and Thorne dining hall, most especially Thorne Dining hall during the power outage this week. People in this time and space did talk to strangers and feel safe sharing space with people they might not have known. With this observation I wonder, is common experience the key to achieving relative neutrality and civility? Is eating the same food, or surviving the same storm what allowed us to relate to each other, even if only in a superficial way? Thus, are canopies just the places where there are commonalities strong enough to bring us together but not so niche that they keep out certain groups? I also wonder, if Thorne dining hall is not always a cosmopolitan canopy but only was one during the storm, is there a temporal element to this concept? Can places be canopies during an event and then lose this element of their existence?