agency

alternative modernity

anthropology

colonialism

community of sentiment

consumption

cultural homogenization - cultural heterogenization

culturalism

culture

democracy

difference

disjuncture

ethnicity

fetishism of the consumer

fetishism of the producer

gatekeeping concept

genealogy

global cultural flow

global culture

globalization

grassroots globalization

homogeneity

hypertime of leisure

imagination

imagined world

indiginized

local subject

locality

mediascape

methodological fetishism

nation-state

nationalism

patriotism

pleasure

production of locality

scape

scape - ethno - media - techno - finance - ideo

social destructionism

social life of things

technoscape

violence

nationality

Indian

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

innovator in the field of

ethnography

globalization theory

modernity theory

transnational studies

scientific organization

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

sociologist

American

academic

cultural anthropology

anthropologist of India

Modernity Al Large

is always in relation to imagination, which is itself a social fact and is the key component of the new global order.

imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order' (Appadurai 1996:31).

is related to pleasure such that where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency.

Where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom on the other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity' (Appadurai 1996:7)

is modernity not as singular, but rather in its multiple processes.

A recognition that 'globalization does not homogenize cultural imaginations' (Rofel 1999:287). The term brings light to a transnational understanding of modernity that forms across differences. ---> Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism University of California Press

anthropology is an archive of lived actualities (Appadurai1996: 11)

is a community formed and/or held together by shared feelings and shared imaginations.

communities formed and/or held together by shared feelings and shared imaginations. a 'groups that imagine and feel things together'. From Max Weber. 1990b). (net)

is necessarily grounded in some combination of interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion.

In general, all socially organized forms of consumption seem to revolve around some combination of the following three patterns: interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion' (Appadurai 1996:71).

is not the end of the road for goods and services, a terminus for their social life, a conclusion to some sort of material cycle.

There is a misperception that 'that consumption is the end of the road for goods and services, a terminus for their social life, a conclusion to some sort of mate'I rial cycle. My main concern in this chapter is to show that this view is indeed an illusion, and that in order to get rid of it we need h time conceived multiply as history, periodicity, and process. From this view follows a series of methodological suggestions and a preliminary proposal about a way to conceptualize what is new about l consumerism after the advent of electronic media' (Appadurai modernity 66)

is the mobilization of cultural difference in the service of a larger national or transnational politics.

Culturalism ' the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics' (Appadurai modernity 15).

is a dimension of phenomena rather than a substance, not a property of individuals and groups, but a tool we use to talk about difference.

culture is not usefully regarded as a substance but is better regarded as a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference. Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference' (Appadurai modernity 12-13)

is a master narrative that presupposes a certain relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere.

Democracy. The master narrative of the Enlightenment (and its fl many variants in Britain, France, and the United States) was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere' (Appadurai Modernity 36). . . .[Appadurai then goes on to discuss how the use of the term is a semantic (problem of translation) and a pragmatic (problem of how political actors and elites chose to use the term) (appaudurai modernity 36).

is the most valuable feature of the concept of culture. It is a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things.

The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things. Although t wers), its main virtue is that it is a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories:| classes, genders, roles, groups, and nations. se), we stress the idea of situated difference, that is, difference in relation to something local, embodied, and significant: (Appadurai modernity 12)

Appadurai Talks about in contrast to 'infrastructures' . . . Built upon these disjunctures (which hardly form a simple, mechanical global 'infrastructure' in any case' (Appadurai 1990: 298)

is, in a globalized world, faced with the paradox that primordial (or 'locality' in the form of language or skin color, etc,) have in essence become portable.

the central paradox of ethnic politics in todays world is that primordial (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized' (appadurai modernity 41).

is the conscious and imaginative construction and mobilization of differences.

the idea of ethnicity I propose takes the conscious and imaginative construction and mobilization of differences that constitutes the diacritics of group identity' (Appadurai 1996:14).

is the illusion that a consumer has agency where in fact the agency lies with the producer and the forces of production.

To briefly restate Marx's concept, fetishism of the commodity is the regard of a product as divorced from its production. That is, it forgets the origin of an item as the product of human and labor and instead reifies it as an autonomous object, thus providing it with an agency that it does not actually possess. Appadurai shifts the focus of this fetishism from the commodity to the act of production and the consumer. To define the former, 'The locality becomes a fetish that disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.' (517) In regards to the latter, fetishism of the consumer is a 'mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production.' (517-518) Appadurai then cites global advertising as a medium which has driven and actively perpetuates this obscuring of the true origin of agency, which in Appadurai's estimation is the producer

is the illusion that the act of production has a locality, whereby this in fact disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production proces.

is a core discourse that adheres to certain regions and places.

Anthropologist of complex societies are controlled by what Appadurai calls 'gatekeeping concepts' which 'seem to limit anthropological theorizing abut the place in question, and that define the dominant lines of questions of interest in the region' (Appaudrai 357). essentially boil down to the core discourses of certain places, and he provides examples such as 'hierarchy in India, honor-and-shame in the cirum-Mediterranean, filial piety in China' (ibid). He further asks 'whether these gatekeeping concepts, these theoretical metonyms, really reflect something significant about the place ikn question, or whether they reveal a relatively arbitrary imposition of the whims of anthropological fashion on particular places' (358).

is about circulation. Where history leads you outward, genealogy leads you inward, toward cultural dispositions and styles that might be stubbornly embedded both in local institutions and in the history of the local habitus.

history leads you outward, to link patterns of changes to increasingly larger universes of interaction ... genealogy leads you inward, toward cultural dispositions and styles that might be stubbornly embedded both in local institutioans and in the history of the local habitus' (Appadurai Modernity 74). . . . 'For Brahman elites, fo r example, the history of hat wearing links them to a narrative of their own comopolitan, colonial past, but its genealogy was problaby less comforning, for it juxtaposed very different ideas about hair and headgear, also crucial to the Brahman habitus' (74). . . . ..'If the geneology of cultural forms is about their circulation across regions, the history of these forms is about their ongoing domestication into local practice' (Appadurai 17). . . . . . .

is the complex, overlapping, disjunctive order of the new global cultural economy.

the complex, overlapping, disjunctive order of the new global cultural economy. Appadurai discusses five so-called scapes: 'ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. Ethnoscapes refers to the actual flow of people (individuals or groups, temporary or permanent) around the world. Technospaces refers to the disterbution and flow of (high and low skilled, mechanical and informational) technology across political boundries. Financescapes refers to the flow of global capital. Mediascapes refer to both the global distribution of distributors of information as well as the 'images of the world created by these media' (35). Ideoscapes refers to the political images of states as well as the movements of counterideologies. 'These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consist of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy' (36). The use of -scapes is an attempt to convey the varying context-specific perspectives that arise in this new model of global cultural flows. It is also important to note how these five different -scapes converge and blend and diverge and clash. Appadurai argues that a critical change in the new global cultural process is that the 'imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility' (31).' (From NET)'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy' :

is today characterized by the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another.

Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and, thereby proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular' (appadurai modernity 43)

Arjun Appadurai

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