Modernity at large - cultural dimensions of globalization

#book

Appadurai, Arjun. c1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb06472.0001.001.

Notes

Important takeaways from the book:

In-text annotations

"Electronic media give a new twist to the environment within which the modern and the global often appear as flip sides of the same coin. Always carrying the sense of distance between viewer and event, these media nevertheless compel the transformation of everyday discourse." (Page 17)

"ut when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities" (Page 18)

"More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life" (Page 20)

"Slightly transforming and extending Albert Hirschman’s important terms loyalty and exit, we may speak of diasporas of hope, diasporas of terror, and diasporas of despair." (Page 20)

"There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agenc" (Page 21)

"The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things." (Page 26)

"Culturalism, put simply, is identity politics | mobilized at the level of the nation-state." (Page 29)

"With what Benedict Anderson has called “print capitalism,” a new power was unleashed in the world, the power of mass literacy and its attendant large-scale production of projects of ethnic affinity that were remarkably free of the need for face-to-face communication or even of indirect communication between persons and groups." (Page 43)

"we must be reminded that media create communities with “no sense of place”" (Page 44)

"But it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, and Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic republics. Such a list of alternative fears to Americanization could be greatly expanded, but it is not a shapeless inventory: for polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are nearby. One man's imagined community is another man’s political prison." (Page 47)

"I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows | that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscap" (Page 48)

"These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe" (Page 48)

"ethnoscape, | mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals" (Page 48)

"s international capital shifts its needs, as production and technology generate different needs, as nationstates shift their policies on refugee populations, these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wish to." (Page 49)

"o, while India exports waiters and chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah, it also exports soft| ware engineers to the United States—indentured briefly to Tata-Burroughs or the World Bank, then laundered through the State Department to become wealthy resident aliens, who are in turn objects of seductive messages to invest their money and know-how in federal and state projects in India." (Page 49)

"But the critical point is that the global relationship among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable because each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some informational, and some technoenvironmental), at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others." (Page 50)

"mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), 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." (Page 50)

"Mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of element" (Page 50)

"Ideoscapes are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it." (Page 51)

"irst, people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths; of course, at all periods in human history, there have been some disjunctures in the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale, and volume of each of these flows are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture." (Page 52)

"Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world because it brings laboring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in" (Page 52)

"Here, national and international mediascapes are exploited by nationstates to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference, and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage." (Page 54)

"Here, I begin with Marx's famous (and often mined) view of the fetishism of the commodity and suggest that this fetishism has been replaced in the world at large (now seeing the world as one large, interactive system, composed of many complex subsystems) by two mutually supportive descendants, the first of which I call production fetishism and the second, the fetishism of the consumer." (Page 56)

"To the extent that various kinds of free-trade zones have become the models for production at large, especially of high-tech commodities, production has itself become a fetish, obscuring not social relations as such but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnational." (Page 57)

"The locality (both in the sense of the local factory or site of production and in the extended sense of the nation-state) becomes a fetish that disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process." (Page 57)

"The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, and clothing styles) that are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, and fundamentalism in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows, and the nation-state is threatened by revolt, as in the China syndrome; too little, and the state exits the international stage, as Burma, Albania, and North Korea in various ways have done." (Page 57)

"As group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences." (Page 59)

"Central among these facts is the changing social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity. As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond." (Page 63)

"A central challenge for current anthropology is to study the cosmopolitan (Rabinow 1986) cultural forms of the contemporary world without logically or chronologically presupposing either the authority of the Western experience or the models derived from that experience. I" (Page 64)

"Deterritorialization (of which I offer some ethnographic profiles in chap. 2) affects the loyalties of groups (especially in the context of complex diasporas), their transnational manipulation of currencies and other forms of wealth and investment, and the strategies of states." (Page 64)

"he loosening of the holds between people, wealth, and territories fundamentally alters the basis of cultural reproduction." (Page 64)

"What a new style of ethnography can do is to capture the impact of deterritorialization on the imaginative resources of lived, local experiences. Put another way, the task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world?" (Page 67)

"n the past two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons Global Ethnoscapes = 532 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. E-book, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb06472.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of Cornell University throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms." (Page 68)

"hat is, fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies." (Page 69)

"Instead, what is implied is that even the meanest and most hopeless of lives, the most brutal and dehumanizing of circumstances, the harshest of lived inequalities are now open to the play of the imagination." (Page 69)

"For the new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas, and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of mass media. Thus, standard cultural reproduction (like standard English) is now an endangered activity that succeeds only by conscious design and political will, where it succeeds at all." (Page 69)

"ather, ethnography must redefine itself as that practice of representation that illuminates the power of large-scale, imagined life possibilities over specific life trajectories. This is thickness with a difference, and the difference lies in a new alertness to , the fact that ordinary 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." (Page 70)

"Put another way, some of the force of Bourdieu's idea of the habitus can be retained (1977), but the stress must be put on his idea of improvisation, for improvisation no longer occurs within a relatively bounded set of thinkable postures but is always skidding and taking off, powered by the imagined vistas of mass-mediated master narra" (Page 70)

"effect” (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982; Veblen 1912), = 66 = Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. E-book, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb06472.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of Cornell University namely, the tendency of mobility patterns to be organized around the imitation of social superiors." (Page 81)

"As a general feature of the cultural economy, consumption must and does fall into the mode of repetition, of habituation." (Page 82)

"The inertial logic of repetition is a resource around which societies and their ruling classes build larger regimes of periodicity, typically around some form of seasonality" (Page 83)

"The more diverse a society and the more complex the story of its interactions with other societies, the more fragmented the history of its consumption practices is likely to be, even if broad styles, trends, and patterns are discernible. T" (Page 90)

"The effort to inculcate nostalgia is a central feature of modern merchandising and is best seen in the graphics and texts of gift-order catalogs in the United States." (Page 91)

"As far as the experience of time is concerned, the pleasure that lies at the center of modern consumption is neither the pleasure of the tension between fantasy and utility (as Campbell suggests) nor the tension between individual desire and collective disciplines (Rojek’s proposal), although these latter contrasts are relevant to any larger account of modern consumerism. The pleasure that has been inculcated into the subjects who act as modern consumers is to be found in the tension between nostalgia and fantasy, where the present is represented as if it were already past." (Page 98)

"For the former colony, decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life." (Page 105)

"Malcolm Muggeridge once joked that “Indians were the last living Englishmen,” thus capturing the fact—true at least of the urbanized and Westernized elites of India—that while England itself became gradually denatured as it lost its Empire, aspects of its heritage took deep root in the colonies" (Page 105)

"The process by which cricket gradually became indigenized in colonial India can best be envisioned by making a distinction between “hard” and “soft” cultural forms. Hard cultural forms are those that come with a set of links between value, meaning, and embodied practice that are difficult to break and hard to transform. Soft cultural forms, by contrast, are those that permit relatively easy separation of embodied performance from meaning and value, and relatively successful transformation at each level. In terms of this distinction, | would suggest that cricket is a hard cultural form that changes those who are socialized into it more readily than it is itself changed." (Page 106)

"Much that has been considered local knowledge is actually knowledge of how to produce and reproduce locality under conditions of anxiety and entropy, social wear and flux, ecological uncertainty and cosmic volatility, and the always present quirkiness of kinsmen, enemies, spirits, and quarks of all sorts." (Page 198)

"Insofar as neighborhoods are imagined, produced, and maintained against some sort of ground (social, material, environmental), they also require and produce contexts against which their own intelligibility takes shape" (Page 201)

"This context-generative dimension of neighborhoods is an important matter because it provides the beginnings of a theoretical angle on the relationship between local and global realities. How so? The way in which neighborhoods are produced and reproduced requires the continuous construction, both practical and discursive, of an ethnoscape (necessarily nonlocal) against which local practices and projects are imagined to take p" (Page 201)

"local subjects engage in the social activities of production, representation, and reproduction (as in the work of culture), they contribute, generally unwittingly, to the creation of contexts that might exceed the existing material and conceptual boundaries of the neighborhood." (Page 202)

"The many displaced, deterritorialized, and transient populations that , constitute today’s ethnoscapes are engaged in the construction of locality, | as a structure of feeling, often in the face of the erosion, dispersal, and im| plosion of neighborhoods as coherent social formations. Th" (Page 216)