Appadurai
The questions, links, and information listed here are intended to help you prepare for our in-class discussions and quizzes on Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
The proper pronunciation of his last name is close to "uh-PAH-dur-eye," with the accent on the second syllable. Extensive information about his past and present work is available on his web site.
Although Appadurai's writing style is more concrete and approachable than that of many theorists, your understanding of his work will still benefit from a reference like dictionary.com.
1. Here and Now
The title of this chapter reflects Appadurai's argument that globalization has affected our most fundamental experiences of space and time. As a result of the two great levers of globalization--mass migration and ubiquitous electronic media--we no longer experience "here" and "now" in the same way.
Appadurai notes that his own introduction to modernity was "notably synaestethic and largely pretheoretical" (1). What does he mean by this? Why does he stress these qualities of modernity?
The Global Now
What does he mean by the work of the imagination (3)? This is a key concept for the book as a whole, so make sure you understand the special sense in which Appadurai uses the term "imagination."
On page 4, Appadurai gives a number of examples that illustrate the intersection of mass migration and electronic media, including Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listening to cassettes of sermons recorded in homeland mosques (4). A recent article in the New York Times offers another compelling example of this trend.
Appadurai argues that "few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities" (4). Do you know such people? Have they affected your view of the world?
The Work of Imagination
The first two paragraphs of this section stress the importance of art, myth, and legend in all known societies, not just modern and global ones (5). However, Appadurai argues for three distinctions that make the work of imagination in the "postelectronic" world new:
- Imagination has become a part of ordinary, everyday life (5-6);
- Imagination today is different than older types of fantasy. Imagination focuses energy and mobilizes action rather than dissipating either (7);
- Imagination is no longer individual. The mass media create communities of sentiment, groups that begin "to imagine and feel things together" (8);
The Eye of Anthropology
If readers learn one thing from this book, Appadurai hopes it will be this: "[G]lobalization is not the story of homogenization" (11). What does he mean by this? In what ways does his experience with anthropology help him to see this?
Appadurai works hard to clarify his exact usage of the terms "culture," "cultural," and "culturalism."
"Culture" is best understood "as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity" (15). "Culturalism" is "the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics" (15).
How Areas Get Studies
What are "area studies"? How is this related to the Cold War? What key events happened in 1945 and 1989?
Social Science after Patriotism
Appadurai argues that the system which has divided the world into "nation-states" is in crisis. He writes, "the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs" (19). Understanding his point requires understanding the traditional distinction between "nation" and "state." A nation is a group of people with common ties. "Black nationalism," for example, stresses the links that connect all the peoples whose ancestors came from Africa. A state is a government: it's a political rather than a cultural entity. So, a "nation-state" is a self-governing group of people with a common culture.
Iraq is of course an obvious example of a state in crisis because of various, competing, culturalist agendas. But Appadurai would also point to similar tensions in Western states, including debates about English-only laws in the United States and about Muslim headscarves in France.
2. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy
Chapters 2-4 make up the section called "Global Flows." In this opening chapter of the section, Appadurai identifies the things that are flowing around the globe: people, media, technology, money, and ideas. These result in five interrelated, yet relatively autonomous landscapes: (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. These terms are introduced on page 33 and defined on 34-36.
A key element of this formulation rests in the contrast between a fluid "flow" and a stable "landscape." Appadurai argues that, from the point of view of any particular individual, these flows of people, money, etc. look like more-or-less stable landscapes (46). Individuals make their way within these landscapes as part of the "imagined worlds" that they use to make sense of their lives.
For students of media in particular, Benedict Anderson's concepts of "imagined communities" and "print capitalism" are particularly important (28-29). Appadurai's contribution is to stress the ways that globalization simultaneously produces "constructed primordialisms." For example, English-language literacy made many Indians feel "British" in a way they had not felt before, but it also made many feel "Indian," or "Hindu," or "Tamil," etc. in ways that they also had not felt before.
This leads to one of Appadurai's fundamental insights, explored at length later in the book. We err to the extent that we imagine ethnic identities to be expressions of the past rather than the future. Islamic fundamentalism, for example, is not a holdover or return to past ways of thinking. It is an "ideoscape" produced and sustained by the global systems of the 21st century.
Appadurai's discussion of nostalgia is complex, but outlining the problem is relatively simple. Filipinos love Motown, but not because they are living through a version of the American 1950s. Their present is quite different than the American past, and retro American music functions quite differently there than it did here.
"The crucial point, however, is that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes" (31). Why is this a crucial point? How does it relate to his discussion of homogenization vs. heterogenization on the following page?
The final paragraph on page 31 offers a neat summary of Appadurai's claims for the imagination.
Appadurai's discussion of mediascapes makes the important point that the lines between realistic (e.g. news reporting) and fictional (e.g. cinematic) media are increasingly blurred.
The Enlightenment worldview and its "master term" democracy is a globally influential ideoscape. Appadurai notes, however, that such keywords mean many different things to many different people, and thus can cause translation problems (36-37).
The problems posed to the nation-state by deterritorialization are central to pages 39-41. In the final paragraph on page 41, Appadurai begins an extended discussion of links between the cultural and the economic. He wants to challenge the traditional Marxist notion that economics is the foundation that shapes everything else, including cultural identities. To do so, he identifies two contemporary illusions: production fetishism and consumption fetishism.
Production fetishism is the illusion that local production provides a kind of control, ownership, and wealth to the local area. Increasingly, this is not the case. For example, Georgia competes with Alabama and the Carolinas for German and Japanese car manufacturing plants, giving away massive tax breaks and other subsidies on the assumption that the plant itself will provide more wealth than it costs (41-42).
Consumption fetishism is the illusion that a choice of products is equivalent to free choice: "....[T]he consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser" (42). A key term here is "agency," which is the ability to take actions that make a real difference. For example, what does it mean to "Buy American" when parts for Hondas are made in North Carolina and Georgia, and Fords are made in Mexico?
The Work of Reproduction in an Age of Mechanical Art
This section focuses on families and their dynamics in our period of rapid cultural change. Why does Appadurai argue that women bear the brunt of these tensions?
Shape and Process in Global Cultural Formations
Pages 45-47 summarize Appadurai's proposed framework for understanding "modernity at large." He stresses chaos and complexity theory, which analyzes the ways that small changes can influence larger structures and result in larger patterns.
3. Global Ethnoscapes
This chapter focuses on ethnography, the branch of anthropology in which Appadurai specializes. In much of the chapter, he is attempting to re-invent ethnography so it can deal with human cultures in an age of globalization. Older ethnographers emphasized the uniqueness and idiosyncrasies of self-contained local cultures. This no longer works: "The landscapes of group identity...are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous" (48).
Cultural Studies in a Global Terrain
In this section Appadurai shifts away from anthropology to a different wing of scholarship. Anthropologists tend to think of themselves as scientists, but their discipline (the study of human culture) has been invaded other the past 20 years or so by many scholars who see themselves instead as humanists. "Cultural studies" is the name these scholars gave to their new discipline, which approaches the study of culture from humanistic perspectives.
As Appadurai writes, "the subject matter of cultural studies could roughly be taken as the relationship between the word and the world" (51). He wants to borrow from this strategy to create a new kind of anthropology, one able "to capture the impact of deterritorialization on the imaginative resources of lived, local experiences" (52).
"Word" here includes all kinds of media production, including, for example, television. We might take the character from Maria Full of Grace as an example: The re-runs of Friends and Sex and the City that are now broadcast on local Colombian television will affect Maria's understanding of the United States and New York--as well as her ability and willingness to consider migration as a personal option. But even if she stays in rural Colombia, her new access to Japanese animation, Brazilian soap operas, and American movies will offer new imaginative possibilities, shaping Maria's responses toward the lived reality that she inhabits.
Imagination and Ethnography
A good summary: "More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before. One important source of this change is the mass media..." (53). What do you think Appadurai means by the term "semiotic diacritics" (53)?
A key point: Appadurai stresses that this increase in imaginative possibilities is not a particularly cheerful observation; he doesn't mean to imply that there are now more happy endings in the real world (54).
Another good summary: "[O]rdinary lives today are more often powered not by the givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media (either directly or indirectly) suggest are available" (55).
Three Examples
Appadurai offers three examples of the new orientation of imaginations and, therefore, of lived realities:
- The Hindu priest Thangam Bhatter--a friend and informant of Appadurai's wife--who now works in Houston.
- Cortázar's "Swimming in a Pool of Gray Grits," a comic fable that illuminates multiple aspects of life in globalized culture, including "the problems of imitation and cultural transfer" (60).
- Mira Nair's film Indian Cabaret, which reveals a Bombay strip club to be a place when imagined lives are negotiated, within structures borrowed in part from Bollywood movies (62).
Conclusion: Invitations and Exhortations
One central problem facing students of culture today is the problem of where to begin: "there is no easy way to begin at the beginning," since so many different histories are now tied up in our lived experiences of the present (64). Appadurai suggests, therefore, that the best place to start is with this present.
4. Consumption, Duration, History
As the chapter title suggests, Appadurai is concerned here with different experiences of time in different societies throughout history. His main concern, though, is with the present, consumption-based cultures that are becoming a global phenomenon. This global "consumer society" is a very recent innovation; other times and places have had strikingly different attitudes toward the material objects that make up their worlds. Appadurai argues that the "social life of objects" in all times and places seem to revolve around some combination of interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion (71). He describes societies of interdiction in detail (71-72), but he assumes that we know what "sumptuary law" means. Here's the Encyclopedia Britannica's definition:
[A]ny law designed to restrict excessive personal expenditures in the interest of preventing extravagance and luxury. The term denotes regulations restricting extravagance in food, drink, dress, and household equipment, usually on religious or moral grounds.
Renaissance England, for example, depended on a strict set of sumptuary laws regulating appropriate fabrics and clothing styles. Today, in contrast, life in England (and the U.S.) is structured by fashion. The rules about what we can and cannot wear are still strict ("That's so last year"), but these rules change very quickly, and they involve an enormous increase in the number of items in play.
Appadurai once again stresses that different histories may be discovered in different places. India and Japan, for example, followed different paths toward consumption-based societies than did England, the U.S., and France. He uses the term "history" to make comparisons and connections across cultures and "genealogy" to emphasize the local and particular histories that impact any given pattern of consumption (74).
He suggests in the final sections that changes in consumer credit also have changed our experience of time. For the anthropologist, he argues, what is most striking is that "the small periodicity (typically daily ones) of consumption have now become subtly contextualized in an open, linear sense of the very rhythm of consumer life" (82).
Imagination is once again key: through it, we learn "to link fantasy and nostalgia to the desire for new bundles of commodities" (82). Through the imagination, we reproduce "the conditions of consciousness in which buying can occur" (83).
In the chapter's conclusion, Appadurai argues that the valorization of ephemerality in the link that connects the cultures of the emerging global order. "[T]he dominant force, spreading through the consuming classes of the world, appears to be the ethic, aesthetic, and material practice of the ephemeral" (84).
5. Playing with Modernity
Sports influence society by promoting certain values in those who play and watch them. What values did cricket promote in Victorian England, according to Appadurai (93-94)?
Appadurai argues also that these values are no longer associated with Indian cricket. Today, cricket in India is infused with values drawn from merchandising and spectacle (110). However, this does not signify the sport's (or India's) re-colonization by international capital, since Indian entrepreneurs lead this commercial exploitation of the Indian sport (106). Worldwide, cricket is now dominated by "the black and brown former colonies," with England relegated to a second tier (107).
The reasons for cricket's widespread popularity in India, Appadurai suggests, stem from the sport's linkages of gender, nation, fantasy, and bodily excitement (110).
Two popular cricket web sites, Cricketworld.com and Cricinfo.com, illustrate both the internationalization of cricket and the contemporary dominance of the sport by Britain's former colonies.
7. Life after Primordialism
"We need an account of ethnicity that explores its modernity" (139).
He summarizes the argument with which he disagrees (140).
Appadurai argues that recent efforts to impose "Western models of political participation, education, mobilization, and economic growth" in the Third World have increased ethnic violence rather than eased it (141). Since this book was published in 1996, the debate over the U.S. occupation of Iraq has crystallized around the positions that Appadurai sketches here. As Al-Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim says in Control Room, "Democratize or I'll shoot you. It just doesn't work that way."
Appadurai later articulates a key doctrine of U.S. neoconservatism: "If you cannot educate societies out of primordialism, you can certainly beat it out of them" (142).
8. Patriotism and its Futures
Chapters 7 and 8 are a pair; in this chapter Appadurai continues his examination of postnational identity politics by looking more closely at the United States, which he argues is a unique case in the emerging global order.
He begins the chapter discussing the crisis of the nation-state. (For a definition of the nation-state, see the section on chapter 1 above.) His discussion of the hyphen linking the two terms "nation" and "state" emphasizes that these terms are increasingly coming apart (159). Anxious, angry, and fearful reactions to this crisis of the nation-state abound, and many are aggressively xenophobic. (e.g. the "This is our country..." mass mailing). As he summarizes later in the chapter, "The violence that surrounds identity politics around the world today reflects the anxieties attendant on the search for nonterritorial principles of solidarity" (165).
Nevertheless, Appadurai stresses again--as he did in chapter 7--that ethnic violence today is not primordial: "The violence and terror surrounding the breakdown of many existing nation-states are not signs of reversion to anything biological or innate, dark or primordial" (161). He uses the words "tribe" and "tribal" as shorthand for this mistaken explanation of contemporary violence.
This view is mistaken, he argues, in part because we identify today with many people that we have never seen or met; instead, we identify with them because we all watch the same movies and TV shows. "The modern nation-state in this view grows less out of natural facts--such as language, blood, soil, and race--and more out of a quintessential cultural product, a product of the collective imagination" (161). This is part of the genius inherent within the idea of "America," founded on the principle that "all men (sic) are created equal."
America is not, however, either as central or as influential as U.S. parochialism often assumes. Americans often assume that concepts like democracy, capitalism, free enterprise, and human rights belong to this country; "When Americans see tranformations and cultural complications of their democratic vocabulary and style, if they notice them at all, they are annoyed and dismayed" (175). Instead, he argues that the U.S. may be well placed to create a new kind of state, created around forms of "transnationality" (He discusses transnations and their citizens in the section beginning on page 172).
One way into Appadurai's argument about the U.S. is to consider this question: Why don't European-Americans tend to think of themselves as "European-American"? Other questions: Have you heard the U.S. described as "a nation of immigrants"? What is the (political/cultural/social) purpose of this description? What about the idea of the "melting pot"? Appadurai claims that new metaphors like "mosaic" are not much more useful than melting pot (173). Why not?
Many organizations today are increasingly offering alternatives to national identity. These include philanthropic movements, terrorist organizations, the fashion industries, environmental moments, Christian missionary and philanthropic agencies, and the Olympic movement (167). "We are looking at the birth of a variety of complex, postnational social formations" (167).
People throughout the world are entering an era of plural loyalties and plural patriotisms. Our identities are increasingly bound up with transnational networks of ethnic, regional, linguistic, religious, and other allegiances (176).