In "Cosmopolitan Contamination," Kwame Appiah (94) asks the question "Do we need universals?" The question of universals becomes even more significant in the wake of globalization that has undermined distinctions or boundaries of nationalism, culture, geographic borders and governments. The challenge in such a consumer driven global culture, according to Appiah (xiii), is "to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become." This analysis will discuss consumption and cosmopolitanism in relation to the evolution of the global tribe.
Terms like globalization and multiculturalism no longer adequately define the realm that has become the global tribe in modern society. Appiah (xiii) argues that while the meaning of cosmopolitan is often disputed, it is a view that sees all the cultures and inhabitants of the earth "as so many branches of a single family, and the universe as a state, of which they, with innumerable other rational beings, are citizens, promoting together...the perfection of the whole." Basically, cosmopolitanism is a view that recognizes people have differences but underneath we are all the same in the sense that we all owe an obligation to one another and we must take seriously the value of "particular" human lives (Appiah xv). This basically means we must be informed of the practices and beliefs that make other lives significant.
We see in Appadurai's discussion of consumption that time and even space can be completely evolved or modified by consumption. Appadurai (81) argues that today's consumers societies cannot be referred to in the same sense as extensions of the consumer revolution, but "consumption today transforms the experience of time in a way that fundamentally distinguishes it from its eighteenth-
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