Join the discussion!
Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
↓
return to top
Background
Arjun Appadurai (born 1949) is currently teaching at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Growing up in colonial India, in a privileged but nevertheless not overly wealthy family, he was educated in the spirit of British secondary education, before shifting his interest to the educational possibilities in the U.S. He received his B.A. from Brandeis University and pursued first his M.A. and then his Ph.D at the University of Chicago. Modernity at Large was published in 1996 during his tenure at the University of Chicago and is one of his most influential works, in which he explores the forces of media, movement, and imagination in their power to shape the globalized world. Appadurai was married to Carol Breckenridge, an American anthropologist with a research interest in India, who died of cancer in 2009. They have one son, whom Appadurai frequently mentions in his book. This testifies to his deep personal investment in the study of global flows and the new quality of the production
of locality, identity, and allegiance.↓
return to top
Content
In Modernity at Large Appadurai characterizes modernity—in the form of globalization—in its boundary defying tendencies (e.g. vis-à-vis cultures; nation states; consumerism;
identity formation; the discipline of athropology/ethnography). He argues that modernity is shaped by the disjunctive flows among ethnoscapes (which throughout the book feature most prominently), technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. The accelerated development and widespread availability of electronic media, as well as the increased flows of global migration, establishing more and more diasporic public spheres, are the main forces behind the imaginative endeavor of more and more individuals, who construct imagined worlds that constitute and profoundly influence their identity and allegiances. The traditional nation-state with its need for boundaries, is more and more torn apart in the force field of deterritorialized imagined spaces, which are now increasingly constitutive for individual and group identities and
allegiances. Locality is produced through the interplay of the nation-state with diasporic flows and the imaginative forces operative in electronic and virtual communities. It remains a “property of social life” (p.182), articulated in the “actually existing social forms” (p. 179) of the neighborhood.
Globalization, as the primary articulation of modernity, is an ambiguous process which changes patterns of consumption, identity formation, allegiance, the local, and the nation. Appadurai explores these changes, focusing on movement (of people and media content), its effect on individual and collective imagination, and (thus) the production of reality. This new, modern reality transcends traditional boundaries and challenges our notions of the global, national, and local. “Yet a framework for relating the global, the national, and the local has yet to emerge.” (p. 188)—true in 1996 and true today?!
↓
return to top
Key Terms
media
migration/ movement/ global flows
(disjunctive!)
diasporic public spheres
imagination/ imagined worlds
ethno-/ media-/ techno-/ finance-/ ideoscapes
globalization
deterritorialization
culture/culturalism
nation-state
(new) patriotism
locality (production of)
neighborhood
↓
return to top
Dialogue
Appadurai seems firmly rooted in the emerging scholarly community of globalization and migration scholars, as well as the traditional sociological discourse (Weber, Toennies, Durkheim, Norbert Elias, etc.) One of the most important scholars for Appadurai’s work is Benedict Anderson and his research on the connections between imagination, nationalism, community, and printed media. Appadurai’s frequent mention of Anderson highlights the importance of his Imagined Communities (1983; rev. ed.
1991), since, apart from one smaller article, this is the only work cited (both editions). Overall, Appadurai does not seem to follow any particular school of thought, but positions himself in an emerging field through original research and terminologies, and a seemingly excellent knowledge of prior and contemporary research.
↓
return to top
References
Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Public Worlds 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
↓
return to top
External Links