Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
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Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) is a bold undertaking, a multi-layered collection of essays that proposes a theory of “cultural flows” (i.e., the ways that different cultures/ethnicities worldwide are mutually intersecting, overlapping, and enmeshing) in our current internet age. Appadurai examines the existence and perpetuation of globalized cultures that tend to reproduce and reinforce themselves transnationally, and the ways in which, worldwide, people have adapted to them. In so doing, he both advocates for and establishes a model of a new kind of anthropology that is at once transdisciplinary and translocal, incorporating discussions of financial exchange, ethnicity, nationalism, media consumption, and political machinations into an overarching theory of the meanings of “modernity” and “authenticity” in an increasingly interconnected world. Thus, throughout, Appadurai devises and relies upon a theoretical framework that draws upon multiple modes of analysis, making impossible any easy categorization of his work into the epistemological hierarchies of the various disciplines of the academy. Because of this, Modernity is difficult to evaluate succinctly. This review will, therefore, briefly summarize and critique the main ideas of the book as a whole with special focus on the second and most widely-cited chapter of the book, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” - an essay that, significantly, was originally published as a stand alone essay and that appears unchanged in the volume. (First published in Public Culture 2.2 [Spring 1990].)
Modernity is best known for the theory of “scapes,” elaborated in the celebrated second chapter, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Local Economy.” In it, Appadurai describes his theory of five overlapping systems of cultural flows, for which he creates neologisms by appending the suffix "-scape" to various prefixes: ethno-, media-, techno-, finance- and ideo-, thereby providing a model of intersecting webs (or “scapes”) of local- global influence and interaction. He explains that the "new global cultural economy” is a “complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (31). Modernity is comprised of nine chapters, each of which is driven by the following principle assumptions: First, the notion of “modernity” undergirds every aspect of the analysis, and it is consistently used in the very specific and limited sense critiqued by art historians and scholars emerging from the Frankfurt school:
Modernity belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself. What is new about modernity (or about the idea that is newness is a new kind of newness) follows from this duality. Whatever else the project of the Enlightenment may have created, it aspired to create persons who would, after the fact, have wished to become modern. This self-fulfilling and self-justifying idea has provoked many criticisms and much resistance, in both theory and everyday life (1)
This is the modernity of identity politics, of nation-making and building, of Benedict Anderson and of Hegel. Appadurai’s analysis centers on the ways in which “modernity” is inextricably linked, conceptually speaking, with rigid and relatively stagnant twentieth-century cultural notions that intertwine identity, authenticity, nationality and ethnicity. Second, Appadurai’s analysis is unbendingly materialist - as opposed to discursive - in nature. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, or the “structuring structure” of society, Appadurai anchors his conceptions of human behavior and human agency in a paradigm that is constantly premised on the intersection between imagination and action.
It is this third notion - that of imagination - elaborated in great detail in the first and third chapters (“Here and Now” and “Global Ethnoscapes”), that forms the lynchpin of Modernity. Expanding on Benedict Anderson’s concept of print capitalism as a catalyst of the “imagined communities” of nationalisms, Appadurai argues that, in a global system, media, particularly television, create, perpetuate, and reinforce archetypes of ethnies with which diaspora and transnational communities choose to identify as “authentic.” Yet, in a world of migration, transnational flows and diaspora communities, the meaning or existence of “authentic identity” is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, what constitutes “authenticity” for someone who, like the author himself, was born in Bombay but educated in England, resides in the United States, and is married to an American (who studies Hinduism)? More broadly, why has the country of India - a country that fought so diligently to throw off British imperial control and establish itself as “authentic” – adopted cricket as an “authentically Indian” sport? (Appadurai devotes the entire fifth chapter to the subject of India’s relationship to cricket.) The manufactured and arbitrary nature of “authenticity” in a global order is thus more and more evident. Yet, he warns, this imagined identity is costly, as it ultimately contributed to the reification of ethnicities that formed some of the most bitter ethnic wars of the 1990s (e.g., Yugoslavia).
Modernity is thus a deeply-thought activist call for a “post-national” order in which we acknowledge the contingent, imagined, and in many ways anachronistic nature of the national identities and ethnicities to which we have been taught to cling. It is strongest in its discussion of the ways in which media influences identity and society in the complex feedback loop between global and local. It is, moreover, rightly praised for its extremely useful theory of “scapes,” though, curiously, with the important exception of ethnoscapes, they are collectively entirely unmentioned outside of the second chapter. Indeed, the connection between the broad-ranging theoretical premise of the “scapes” and their conceptual contribution to the book as a whole is tenuous at best. Relative to the themes that Appadurai does choose to emphasize from his scapes theory, of greatest concern is the issue of the relationship between the influence of mediascapes and individual agency. Appadurai focuses extensively on the ways in which the media reinforce and perpetuate imagined ethnicities (thus ethnoscapes) in an era of constant transnational migration. Yet, by constantly emphasizing the imagined nature of contemporary ethnic “authenticities” and their power to radicalize, he loses much of the power of Bourdieu’s oft-cited theory of habitus: Bourdieu’s genius lay in the way he positioned his materialist conceptions of culture in tandem with the individual’s ability to act freely within the constraints of culture. This is particularly relevant given the ways in which new media have changed the hierarchical flows of information and cultural production since the publication of this volume, allowing for much more dynamic, top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top processes.
It is this third notion - that of imagination - elaborated in great detail in the first and third chapters (“Here and Now” and “Global Ethnoscapes”), that forms the lynchpin of Modernity. Expanding on Benedict Anderson’s concept of print capitalism as a catalyst of the “imagined communities” of nationalisms, Appadurai argues that, in a global system, media, particularly television, create, perpetuate, and reinforce archetypes of ethnies with which diaspora and transnational communities choose to identify as “authentic.” Yet, in a world of migration, transnational flows and diaspora communities, the meaning or existence of “authentic identity” is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, what constitutes “authenticity” for someone who, like the author himself, was born in Bombay but educated in England, resides in the United States, and is married to an American (who studies Hinduism)? More broadly, why has the country of India - a country that fought so diligently to throw off British imperial control and establish itself as “authentic” – adopted cricket as an “authentically Indian” sport? (Appadurai devotes the entire fifth chapter to the subject of India’s relationship to cricket.) The manufactured and arbitrary nature of “authenticity” in a global order is thus more and more evident. Yet, he warns, this imagined identity is costly, as it ultimately contributed to the reification of ethnicities that formed some of the most bitter ethnic wars of the 1990s (e.g., Yugoslavia).
Modernity is thus a deeply-thought activist call for a “post-national” order in which we acknowledge the contingent, imagined, and in many ways anachronistic nature of the national identities and ethnicities to which we have been taught to cling. It is strongest in its discussion of the ways in which media influences identity and society in the complex feedback loop between global and local. It is, moreover, rightly praised for its extremely useful theory of “scapes,” though, curiously, with the important exception of ethnoscapes, they are collectively entirely unmentioned outside of the second chapter. Indeed, the connection between the broad-ranging theoretical premise of the “scapes” and their conceptual contribution to the book as a whole is tenuous at best. Relative to the themes that Appadurai does choose to emphasize from his scapes theory, of greatest concern is the issue of the relationship between the influence of mediascapes and individual agency. Appadurai focuses extensively on the ways in which the media reinforce and perpetuate imagined ethnicities (thus ethnoscapes) in an era of constant transnational migration. Yet, by constantly emphasizing the imagined nature of contemporary ethnic “authenticities” and their power to radicalize, he loses much of the power of Bourdieu’s oft-cited theory of habitus: Bourdieu’s genius lay in the way he positioned his materialist conceptions of culture in tandem with the individual’s ability to act freely within the constraints of culture. This is particularly relevant given the ways in which new media have changed the hierarchical flows of information and cultural production since the publication of this volume, allowing for much more dynamic, top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top processes.
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