Transcript “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Facilitation: Yasmeen Ahmad

“Disjuncture and Difference in the
Global Cultural Economy.”
Facilitation:
Yasmeen Ahmad
Bio, Research, Teaching and involvement with
Public Culture Magazine
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
Research
 Library Research, Indian Office Library and British
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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
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
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
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)
Themes and constructs
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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
Leading construct
Cultural 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)
Five dimensions of global cultural flow.
Ethnoscapes
Ideoscapes
Mediascapes
Finanscapes Technoscapes
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)
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)
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)
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 highlyskilled labor.” (p.297-298)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 masternarrative, and provided instead a
loosely structured synopticon of
politics, in which different nationstates, as part of their evolution,
have organized their political
structures around different
‘keywords(Williams 1976).
(p. 299-300)
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)
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)
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.
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.
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?