John Baeyens

Leaving to London next week meeting Michael and Nathalie and after reading Michael’s hint on the excellent thesis of Johannes Raffael Hilf (check the cities in the contact page); I feel thrilled meeting some people who share one thing: they are all connected in one way or another to Rio the Janeiro and definitely part of the ‘global class’ Johannes refers to.
One day all these should should get together in Rio..  Hint: November 10th 2007.

An increasing amount of discourse writes about the rise of a ‘global Class’. But who is this global class? Do many people with different cultural origin already form one global class on the merit of having lived and worked almost everywhere on the globe? What do the Asian manager, the Latin American actress, the European engineer, the African diplomat, and the North American journalist share? Actually nothing. Their cultural as well their professional origin could not be more different.
 
So the question arises, what kind of correlated changes do these entire populations experience, if all of them have lived and worked in each other’s respective cultures? Do they now only share the experience of a more or less nomadic biography or do they also mutually share common (cultural) habits that they have learned and adopted during their stays around the world? Do they integrate some of these habits into their own life even after they have left that place again and now live in another, foreign place? How specifically is their practical experienced developed if they continue to live in a place like New York, an environment where all the aggregate cultures in which they have lived before are located in one single place?