The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization is a book by cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai that focuses on the cultural aspect of globalization, especially in recent decades. In chapter two, an essay titled Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Appadurai argues that globalization is not a new phenomenon and that “large scale interactions” between societies have consistently occurred in the world, especially in the form of warfare and religious conversions. Because globalization is not new in practice, Appadurai explains the recent impact of globalization by paralleling the changing forces of globalization with a gravitational field. Appadurai grants “gravitational force” to three global changes: colonialist expansion, Benedict Anderson’s idea of “print capitalism”, and the sudden increase of technological advances. Colonialism and “print capitalism”, or when people began to read the same texts and digest the same ideas without requiring face-to-face communication, act as the basis for what Anderson names “imagined communities." More recently, significant technological advances, especially in transportation and information, have allowed for the creation of communities with a greater degree of “no sense of place” then ever before.
Therefore, Appadurai argues that what has distinguished recent changes in globalization is the use of the “imagination as a social practice." Benedict’s “imagined communities”, or historically rooted worlds formed through an imagination shared between people all over the globe, are now “organized fields” that negotiate between individual agency and “globally defined fields of possibility.” Appadurai coins five terms that build a framework for globalization in the sense of the imagined world:Ethnoscapes: the actual people who live in the modern and changing worldTechnoscapes: the movement and increasing speed of technologyMediascapes: the ability and ways to spread information and create images that often blur the line between real and fictional worlds.
Financescapes: global capitol
Ideoscapes: political ideologies that center around the ideal of the Enlightenment, especially on democracy
The overlapping of these various ‘scapes’ creates a new model of fluid and complex global relations and marks a shift away from the center-periphery model.
Furthermore, Appadurai alludes to a tense relationship developing between the nation and the state in a global context. The flow of media and mass migration of the state no longer aligns with the flow of the nation due to an increase in deterritorilization, or dislocation of people from their native land and the crossing of national boundaries. Since imagined communities lack the formal boundaries that demarcate a state, cultural practices must now be viewed as fragmented, rather than bordered or structured. Appadurai also suggests that mass media has affected western understanding of primordialism. He argues that western nations are beginning to view some Eastern European countries as primitive, violent, and unchanging. This view is the product of mass media that allows for western nations to imagine certain circumstances that differ from reality. Finally, Appadurai addresses the future of anthropology in a global context by suggesting that traditional anthropological questions are asked in the realm of “chaos” and “uncertainty” that align with the shifting global world rather than “structure” and “order.”
Adopted from: Globalization and transnationalism
