Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait

摘要

This book is indeed a self-portrait, as the subtitle suggests. John Western calls his book an ethnography, demonstrating it as such through its reliance on people living in Strasbourg rather than on primary texts from archives or use of existing scholarship. The author emphasizes his personal perspective and his relationship to Strasbourg as much as he discusses the interviewees' relationship to the city and its landscape. Depending on how they came to live in the city, the interviewees call themselves Alsatian if they speak the dialect, Strasburgers if they have lived there a long enough time, or some form of hyphenated Strasburger, relating to the country their immigrant families hail from. These identities point to the cosmopolitan aspect of Strasbourg-a city in France that has many transnational influences, and thus its inhabitants do not feel specifically or only French.