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The sitting area in the back of Patterson Office Tower is a small space which falls in-between the classrooms in which meet the English as a Second Language classes, as well as other foreign language classes, like Japanese 101. Since foreign language classes tend to encourage conversation among students not only in the language being learned but in the speakers’ native tongue, I wondered if the space outside of the classrooms was a cosmopolitan canopy or just an extension of the relationships formed in the foreign language classes. Elijah Anderson, author of “The Cosmopolitan Canopy,” informs us that a canopy is a place where “folk ethnography” takes place. Folk Ethnography is when people learn about the values and beliefs of others and use what they’ve learned to shape their own.
I feel that my hypothesis about the back of Patterson being a cosmopolitan canopy was disproved. Elijah Anderson described a canopy as a ‘nuetral’ place, and in many ways, the sitting area is ‘nuetral.’ The students who sit in the back of Patterson tend to be understanding and tolerant of one another, as well as curious. This can be seen by their habit of eavesdropping (See interview 002). However, the students don’t act upon this curiosity by initiating social interaction. Anderson’s canopy is neutral in the fact that people treat each other civilly, but it is not neutral in the way people receive the beliefs and behaviors of others, by passivity to social experimentation. In Patterson, people acknowledge each other civilly and tolerantly, but don’t make an attempt to truly understand or learn about others’ viewpoints spontaneously. For instance, in Interview 002, another person sitting in the area, as well as myself, came into contact with some extremely noisy visitors to the back of the building, but neither of us reprimanded or scolded them for being agitators to the silence between us.
Interview 002
I was sitting in the back of Patterson with one other girl and we were both on our computers, when this guy comes in yelling on his cell phone. He lingers a minute at the door, then goes outside to find someone, continues to yell outside, fails to find the person he is looking for, comes back in, and sits down on the bench huffing and puffing. He then leaves and walks through again later. Another guy sings extremely loud while on his way to get on an elevator. She turns her head to look at him, but the elevator door closes, and we exchange looks of curiosity. Then I asked her a few questions.
Did he have earphones in?
I don’t know, I couldn’t see…
I couldn’t either…
Here my interview was rather choppy, because then I mentioned the yelling guy…
If someone called you in here and there were a bunch of people, would you answer your phone and talk in here, or would you leave?
Is it quiet or loud?
Good question…
I don’t answer my phone in quiet places. I might answer it in here if there were a few people, but not if there were a lot.
What if that yelling guy had talked in here?
I would have listened to his conversation…
Were you going to tell him to be quiet (Elevator guy)?
No, I think it’s entertaining…
At this point, I began to wonder if the type of conversation had anything to do with whether or not the area was suitable to carry it out…
What if you were having a conversation like that yelling guy, where you were having a confrontation on the phone?
I would definitely go outside because I know that if I’m listening to other people’s conversations, other people are too. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.

Many of my informants believed in the possibility of communication with members of what the Japanese would call the “Out-group,” or members not within their circles (The circles being, in this case, certain sections of a Japanese class) or, as Kwame Appiah, the writer of Cosmopolitan would put it, with “Imaginary strangers” (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism page 87). But most of them admitted to staying within their own social circles formed in class and to not starting conversations with people they didn’t know from class. For example, in interview 6, my informant claimed “No, it’s mostly people we already know.” None of the other informants seemed to take advantage of the rich variety of different viewpoints from people of different ethnicities by practicing the language they were learning or by simply starting a conversation with someone of a different race.
Part of the complication seemed to be that they were afraid to seem the fool, as stated in interview 002. This fear leads them to wait for the more socially adept and curious to come to them. Informant 6 also insists that “They’ve got to be the starter” and informant 4 mentions, “So I sit here and listen to people talk and then maybe someone will talk to me.” In some cases, they stand with their classmates and don’t sit down at all. A Cosmopolitan Canopy is a place of action and reaction, where people enlighten each other and discuss values, beliefs and other ways of life through spontaneous face-to-face conversations as well as through listening and observing. How could the back of Patterson Office Tower be a canopy if everyone is waiting unproductively for an exchange of words that more than likely isn’t going to occur because everyone else is waiting, too? By embracing their fears of “looking the fool,” the visitors to Patterson could become so much more knowledgeable.
It would seem that most visitors to the waiting area expect some noise (Though few expect it at the level in which it occurred above; this was a rare occurrence throughout my investigations) even if they don’t come to interact. Some do come for the interaction (See interview 4), however, many wouldn’t come if they didn’t have a class, or were waiting for a class and had something else to do. Over and over again in my interviews I heard the answer “I have nothing better to do,” when I asked the question “Why do you come here so early?” or made a remark about how early my informants were (See interviews 1 and 3). A few people study when they come, but people usually don’t come just to do so. As seen by the frequency they occur in my interviews, study groups are actually quite rare in the foreign language classes, though some of the other classes that meet in the area seem to be more dependent on them. Availability of the English as a Second Language students may also be an inhibitor to cosmopolitan behavior, since the ESL classes are held early in the morning and the Japanese classes in the middle of the afternoon. The fact that few people take advantage of the variety of different viewpoints in the sitting area in the back of Patterson can be seen by how people position themselves within the space, which is separated into two halves because of a large open hallway opposite the exit doors. People from different sections of the same class tend to sit on different halves of the room, and they don’t typically sit with people they don’t know unless the benches are full.
In the words of my informant from interview 4, “Conversation it itself is study.” The ESL teachers are always welcoming native English speakers interested in attending their classes, in the hopes that they may help their students learn English by interacting with the English-speaking students. If foreign language classes made it mandatory to attend at least one ESL class, or vice-versa, it would open up possibilities for both groups to learn more in their respective language studies, as well as encourage each other to initiate conversation. Also, since the two Japanese classes meet so close, and at a time interval that doesn’t seem to be too far apart for most students, who often arrive early to class, it might be beneficial to encourage students to hold one conversation with someone from another section of the class so that they might practice their Japanese. I feel that if the teachers of the Japanese and ESL classes were to require some social interaction between classes or sections of the same class, it would bring students closer together and influence them to initiate conversation with one another more often by making them feel more comfortable and by breaking the ice.