Abigail Hebert

On Wednesday evening, students, faculty and community members gathered in Kresge Auditorium to hear from Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Elijah Anderson, professor of sociology and of Black studies at Yale University. Anderson delivered a lecture titled after his book, “The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life,” and spoke in conversation with Kevin “KAYR” Robinson ’05.

Anderson began the talk by describing how as an ethnographer, his research engages in the systematic study of culture, which he defines as a set of shared understandings and “local knowledge” developed in every human community. By exploring the worlds that people live in and how they operate, Anderson discussed how he hopes to discover how people make and remake their social order in everyday life.

“The ethnographer is concerned with trying to apprehend this local knowledge through qualitative field work by spending time with real people, by eating with them, drinking with them, talking with them, spending time in their community and then representing that world in their essays, their articles, their books and even in movies,” Anderson said.

Anderson presented the idea of a “cosmopolitan canopy” as an “island of racial civility located in a sea of segregation,” a concept he first introduced in his book published in 2011.

“The cosmopolitan canopy is a metaphor for civil society,” Anderson said. “I think it speaks to, in many ways, the ways in which race works in society.”

The concept of the cosmopolitan canopy, where people from all backgrounds—often from ethnocentric spaces—come together in a physical space and experience a respite from competition and tension, is based on Anderson’s urban ethnographic research in Philadelphia.

“Philadelphia is probably the sixth most segregated city in the country, and it has a storied past, of course, but in this city of segregation, so to speak, there are islands of racial civility where people of all different kinds get along,” Anderson said.

Anderson modeled the idea of the cosmopolitan canopy after places like the Reading Terminal Market and Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, although he argued that the concept applies to every city.

“Every city has at least one or two of these places where all different kinds of people get along, or at least they’re civil,” Anderson said. “A lot of that has to do with the social gloss they’re able to put forth—being polite, being pleasant, moving by one another, that kind of thing. There are people who are cosmopolitan, but there are also people who are deeply ethnocentric. Under the canopy, the ethnocentric [people] tend to keep their ethnocentrism or their racism in check until they don’t.”

However, as Anderson explained, there exist moments of “acute disrespect,” where the harmony of the cosmopolitan canopy is disrupted and the color line between races becomes visible. For Black people, Anderson said, this is the “n-word moment.”

“It may be a small moment, but the big moments are usually too big to ignore. They’re highly consequential and very disturbing. And they can be very, very disruptive, because, given the progress that we’ve made over the years, this color line has blurred,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s work has inspired people already, including Robinson, who met Anderson at age 14 when the academic was mentoring at-risk youth in Philadelphia. After Anderson’s lecture, Robinson told his own story, describing Anderson’s work as the “theory” and his own life as the “practice.” Hearing Robinson’s story, sociology major Anjelica Manzo-Valenzuela ’28 highlighted the importance of empathy within ethnographic research.

“I think it’s touching to see both stories with one another, in terms of having ‘research’ and then the ‘research participant.’ Hearing the inside-and-out, and this idea that you’re talking about empathy in terms of caring for the people that you’re around—that’s the best way [to] get the full understanding of everything,” Manzo-Valenzuela said.