“cr azy white men” 257W hile Jammal and Sell share a history of growing up in Africa, so-
journing in Europe, and eventually returning to Africa, Espen Sørensen’s
biography is even less fi xed according to geographica l and cultura l terms.
Growing up in a family who cultivated a cosmopolitan lifestyle, his for-
mative years were spread out across four countries—Denmark, Zam-
bia, England, and Tanzania. Of the three musicians, he attests most to
Nava’s argument that a cosmopolitan orientation may also be tied to a
family habitus. Sørensen’s maternal family developed just such a habitus,
across several generations: his mother was born in Bangkok and grew up
in Borneo, where her father, a Dane who had served in the British Royal
Air Force, worked in the timber business. His mother’s mother, born in
Bangkok, too, had a British father, who served as legal adviser to the King
of Siam. His paternal family, though less cosmopolitan, has Danish and
Polish roots, his father being half Polish. As he told me in our interview,
his parents were very liberal in terms of his upbringing: “They always let
me be whatever I wanted to be. If I wanted to be a Zambian kid, when I
was in Zambia, I was allowed to.” The political economy of development
work is the enabling condition of Sørensen’s early cosmopolitan experi-
ences. This brought his parents to Africa and Sørensen himself later on
when he worked as a coordinator for the Pilgrim Foundation, the socially
responsible affiliate of a Danish jewelry company of the same name.
Cosmopolitanism has sometimes been criticized as a category mostly
held by elites (Vertovec and Cohen 2002). W hile the three musicians
surely do not belong to the lowest strata of the societies they live in, calling
their performances and lifestyle elitist would surely misrepresent them.
On the one hand, they thrive on certain privileges, which in one way
or another are implicated by the history of European imperialism. On
the other hand, they try as much as possible to emancipate themselves
f rom t h is legac y. Ia n Woodwa rd a nd Zlat ko Sk rbis (2 01 2: 130) d i fferent iate
between “reflexive and banal forms of cosmopolitanism.” W hereas the
reflexive type is “related to a deep capacity for inclusive ethical practice,”
the banal form comes closer “to sampling and superficial enjoyment of
cosmopolitan opportunities in a variety of settings.” As the musicians
demonstrate, however, these two ideal types must not mutually exclude
each other. If cosmopolitanism, at its most basic level, implies transcend-
ing boundaries—geographical, cultural, social, and political—the three