The idea of cultural hybridization, or syncretization, has been most successfully applied to a range of phenomena, such as music (including jazz and world music), contemporary art and literature, and religious and spiritual life. But it is hard to assess its scale and scope. One reason for this is the rather blurry conceptual status of this cultural orientation. When the Birmingham respondent saw himself as a "broad person" claiming the earth as his, this seems to combine a sense of hybridity, generated by cultural fusion, with a sense of being cosmopolitan. Hybridity may nonetheless be more ambivalent in its effects than this case suggests.