Reading Arjun Appadurai

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Reading Arjun Appadurais

• Disjuncture and Difference in the
• Global Cultural Economy.
• Facilitation
• Yasmeen Ahmad

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Background on Appadurai

• Bio, Research, Teaching and involvement with
• Public Culture Magazine

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Bio

• Arjun Appadurai is a socio-cultural
  anthropologist with specializations in
  globalization, public culture, and urban studies.
  His major accomplishment has been the
  construction of anthropological frameworks for
  the study of global media, consumption, and
  migration. His current work focuses on poverty,
  violence, and social inclusion in mega-cities
  with a special focus on Mumbai (India).
  www.appadurai.com

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Research

• Library Research, Indian Office Library and
  British Museum, London, 1974, 1977.
• Ethnographic and archival research in Madras,
  India, Summer 1977 and 1973-74.
• Fieldwork in rural Maharashtra State, India,
  1981-82.
• Fieldwork in Madras, Bombay and Delhi, Winter
  1986 and Winter 1988 (short-term).
• Fieldwork in Bombay, Winter 1995-96, Fall 1997,
  Spring 1998.
• Fieldwork in India, South Africa, Philippines,
  1999 present
• 
  www. appadurai.com

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Teaching

• During his teaching career, Arjun Appadurai has
  taught graduate and undergraduate students a wide
  range of courses including courses on the
  Anthropology of Modernity, on Ethnic Violence in
  Global Perspective and on the study of South
  Asia.
• John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences, New
  School University (2004 - present)
• William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International
  Studies at Yale University (Prof. of
  Anthropology, Political Science and Sociology)
• Director and Chair, Center for Cities and
  Globalization (2002 - 2004)
• Samuel N. Harper Distinguished Service Professor,
  University of Chicago (2001-2002)
• Director, Globalization Project
• Professor of Anthropology
• Professor of South Asian Languages and
  Civilizations (1996-2002)
• Director, Chicago Humanities Institute, and
  Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor in the
  Humanities, University of Chicago (1992-96)
• Professor of Anthropology, University of
  Pennsylvania (1987-92) and Consulting Curator,
  Asian Section, University Museum, University of
  Pennsylvania
• Associate Professor of Anthropology, University
  of Pennsylvania (1981-87)
• Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University
  of Pennsylvania (1976-1981)
• www. appadurai.com

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A founding editor of Public Culture

• Public Culture seeks a critical understanding
  of the global cultural flows and the cultural
  forms of the public sphere which define the late
  twentieth century. As such, the journal provides
  a forum for the discussion of the places and
  occasions where cultural, social, and political
  differences emerge as public phenomena,
  manifested in everything from highly particular
  and localized events in popular or folk culture
  to global advertising, consumption, and
  information networks.
• 
  www.publicculture.org

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Appadurais Framework for a Global Cultural
Economy
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Theoretical gaps and new framework

• Gaps
• Centre-periphery models
• Models of push and pull in migration theory
• Models of surplus and deficits in models of
  balance of trades
• Issues of consumer and producer in Neo-Marxist
  theories of development
• Marxist global development theory
• The complexity of the current global economy
  has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures
  between economy, culture and politics which we
  have barely begun to theorize. (p. 296)

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Themes and constructs

• Globalization- focus on cultural dimensions
• Power- operating from multiple centres, not
  centre
• Agency-suggests different kinds of indigenization
  occurring
• Diversity- of experiences, locations, identities,
  relationships
• Intersections-consistently changing between
  scapes
• Identity/Citizenship - shifting, multiple,
  imagined, transnational
• Difference- in discussion and explanation of
  third world
• Access-visual suggestion, imagination, realities
• Authority- challenges Enlightenment world view
  and master narrative
• Technology-moving images meet mobile audiences
• Publics- multiply located counterpublics being
  created and dissolving

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Leading constructCultural dimensions of
globalization

• I propose that an elementary framework for
  exploring such disjunctures is to look at the
  relationship between five dimensions of global
  cultural flow which can be termed (a)
  ethnoscapes (b) mediascapes (c) technoscapes
  (d) finanscapes and (e) ideoscapes.
• (p. 296)

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Five dimensions of global cultural flow.
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Ethnoscapes

• By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of
  persons who constitute the shifting world in
  which we live tourists, immigrants, refugees,
  exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and
  persons constitute an essential feature of the
  world, and appear to affect the politics of and
  between nations to a hitherto unprecedented
  degree. (p. 297)

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Ethnoscapes

• Appadurai consistently provides diverse range of
  examples of actors in scapes, bringing range of
  identities and locations into this conversation
  and emphasizing fluidity of identities globally.

• What is more, both these
• realities as well as these fantasies now
  function on larger scales, as men and women from
  villages in India think not just of moving to
  Poona or Madras, but of moving to Dubai and
  Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find
  themselves in South India as well as Canada, just
  as the Hmong are driven to London as well as
  Philadelphia... (middle of p.297)

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Technoscapes

• By technoscape, I mean the global
  configuration, also ever fluid, of technology,
  and of the fact that technology, both high and
  low, both mechanical and informational, now moves
  at high speeds across various kinds of previously
  impervious boundaries. (p.297)

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Technoscapes

• Appadurai addresses how technoscapes now exist
  across boundaries and are increasingly fluid,
  irregular and driven by complex
  interrelationships.

• Many countries now are the roots of
  multinational enterprise a huge steel complex in
  Libya may involve interests from India, China,
  Russia and Japan...the odd distribution o
  technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these
  technoscapes are increasingly driven not by any
  obvious economies of scale, of political control,
  or of market rationality, but of increasingly
  complex relationships between money flows,
  political possibilities and the availability of
  low and highly-skilled labor. (p.297-298)

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Finanscapes

• ...it is useful to speak as well of
  finanscapes, since the disposition of global
  capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and
  difficult landscape to follow than every before,
  as currency markets, national stock exchanges,
  and commodity speculations more mega-monies
  through national turnstiles at blinding speed,
  with vast absolute implications for small
  differences in percentage points and time units.
  (p. 298)

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Finanscapes

• Appadurai reinforces critical point that
  relationships between scapes are unpredictable
  and that theorizing the global political economy
  requires acknowledging shifting relationships.

• the critical point is that the global
  relationship between ethnoscapes, technoscapes
  and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive and
  profoundly unpredictable...thus even an
  elementary model of global political economy must
  take into account the shifting relationship
  between perspectives on human movement,
  technological flow and financial transfers which
  can accommodate their deeply disjunctive
  relationships with one another. ( bottom of
  p.298)

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Mediascapes

• Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of
  the electronic capabilities to produce and
  disseminate information (newspapers, magazines,
  television stations, film productions studios,
  etc.) which are now available to a growing number
  of private and public interests throughout the
  world and to the images of the world created by
  these media... (bottom of p.298)

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Mediascapes

• Appadurai theorizes on the complexity of how
  forms of media impact viewers and create imagined
  worlds and desire for other lives/things and can
  create movement.

• What is most important about these
  mediascapes is that they provide (especially in
  their television, film and cassette forms) large
  and complex repertoires of images, narratives and
  ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in
  which the world of commodities and the world of
  news and politics are profoundly mixed.
• The lines between the realistic and the
  fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so
  that the further away these audiences are from
  the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the
  more likely they are to construct imagined
  worlds...
• (p.298-299)

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Ideoscapes

• These ideoscapes are composed of elements of
  the Enlightenment world-view, which consists of a
  concatenation of ideas, terms and images,
  including freedom, welfare, rights,
  sovereignty, representation, and the master
  term democracy. The master-narrative of the
  Englightenment (and its many variants in England,
  France and the United States) was constructed
  with a certain internal logic and presupposed a
  certain relationship between reading,
  representation and the public sphere...(p.299)

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Ideoscapes

• Appadurai problematizes global political
  communication.
• He points out need for further analysis of how
  words and ideologies are differently interpreted
  globally.
• He argues that global political narratives are
  problematic in terms of translation issues and
  contextual conventions.

• ...but their diaspora across the world,
  especially since the nineteenth century, has
  loosened the internal coherence which held these
  terms and images together in a Euro-American
  master-narrative, and provided instead a loosely
  structured synopticon of politics, in which
  different nation-states, as part of their
  evolution, have organized their political
  structures around different keywords(Williams
  1976).
• (p. 299-300)

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A tentative formulation

• This extended terminological discussion of the
  five terms I have coined sets the basis for a
  tentative formulation about the conditions under
  which current global flows occur they occur in
  and through the growing disjunctures between
  ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes,
  mediascapes and ideoscapes.
• (p. 301)

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Emphasizing disjunctures

• ...people, machinery, money, images and ideas
  now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths of
  course, at all periods in human history, there
  have been some disjunctures between the flows of
  these things, but the sheer speed, scale and
  volume of each of these flows is now so great
  that the disjunctures have become central to the
  politics of global culture. (p.301)

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Critique
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What is intellectually significant about how
Appadurai develops this construct?

• Stresses disjunctures as missing and central to
  theory
• Emphasizes complexity of identity by using and
  naming states, nations, imagined nations, groups
  and individual actors.
• Provides examples of invisible boundary
  crossing to demonstrate complex
  interrelationships and transnational activity.
• Theorizes on impact of media and migration
  moving images meet mobile audiences.
• Addresses issue of linguistic transfer,
  interpretation and different understandings and
  suggests further analysis.

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How does this text move the conversation
forward?

• First, suggests disjunctures as part of
  contribution to restructuring the Marxist
  narrative. (p.308)
• Second, broadens scope of conversation on
  global through diverse use of examples.
  Acknowledges diversity within groups, particulary
  in third world?
• Third, suggests need for more analysis on
  political communication and linguistics.

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Discussion questions
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Questions

• Is there/ Can there be/What is the nature of a
  global infrastructure according to Appadurai?
• What other scape/s might exist or be required?
• Other questions?