Presenting one “another globalisation”: the globalisation of (((love)))

Abstract

This article presents “another globalisation” in which the protagonists are individuals said to be off the rails of global flows “up” or “down”. They are international migrants, heirs of the hippie movement, who are connected globally by a network of affections and loyalties. The first part of the text presents the religious behaviour of the New Age and the counter-culture as seen through the social sciences and offers a brief ethnographic exposé of a marriage ceremony held in the space-time of a new civilisation in a town in central Brazil. The various stages of the celebration show how the New Age seekers have opened up to intercultural hybridisation and pacific coexistence with difference. The second part contains a theoretical discussion on the importance of the concept of “other globalizations” for understanding many phenomena occurring on the global scale and how they relate to a re-visited concept of cosmopolitics. The New Age and the counter-culture were marked by their mysticism but also by their political protests in defence of an alternative global agenda. The article terminates with some considerations on the cosmopolitanist spirit of this “other globalisation”, the globalisation of (((love))).