Critique of Appadurai

In his piece Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai talks about the evolution of intra-group social interaction. Unsatisfied with the common model of the global economy, Arjun Appadurai argues that it does not fit with the ever growing, ever changing world in which cultural mix is natural but complex. It “cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models,” (Appadurai, 1990) he says in the piece, and essentially goes on to argue the complexity to outweigh the traditional binary relationships that were previously used to describe the global economy. It is here when he proposes his new “dimensions of global cultural flow.” He breaks it into five different dimensions or landscapes: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. He purposefully uses the suffix –scape to emphasize their “fluid, irregular shapes,” and that they, much like a landscape, do not appear the same from every angle or point of view but rather depend on the position of the spectator (Appadurai, 1990).

The ethnoscape describes the physical movement of people; the tourist, refugee, or immigrant. This scape maintains that as long as people have the ability to move, they always will. The next dimension, the technoscape, captures the fluidity of technology from nation to nation. This technology, “both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries,” (Appadurai, 1990). It brings together previously isolated or independent organizations, companies, and events and allows for the incorporation of foreign involvement. From here, Appadurai moves to the financescape. The financescape is the flow of capital around the world. It is the Stock Market and banking transactions that occurs instantaneously and is unpredictable. Next, the mediascape emerges as the perpetuation and production of information, electronically, as well as the images that are produced in the media by such means. With mediascapes, in congruence with Tsing’s warning of the importance of context, the “farther away these [audiences of the media] are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, event fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined world (Appadurai, 1990).” Lastly, Appadurai talks about the ideoscape. The ideoscape, is similar to the mediascape in it being a collection of images but it is almost exclusively linked to politics. Ideoscapes consist of enlightenment elements and keywords such as freedom, rights, representation, and so on, and how these words can shape political culture. The theme of movement and translation, situational context, and power are common themes throughout all of these landscapes; it is the product of the inevitable interactions between cultures. Together they paint a picture of what Appadurai calls “imagined worlds,” (Appadurai, 1990) or worlds that are created by the imaginations of people around the globe. The landscapes are mere building blocks for these imagined worlds.

And yes, Dr. Bender, most of this came from my final paper...