Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference”

Connection to Other Texts

• The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam

Putting Together These Terms

Ideoscapes

Some connections I have made were:

• Connecting the ideas of failure, relationships with others, and the idea of improvment.

"As a result of the different diaspora of these keywords, the political narratives that govern communication between elites and followings in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and a pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements; and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public policies"(516).

• Ideals or values in a culture or society. Examples include the idea of morals, rights, or freedom.
• Appadurai states that it "also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter- ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it"(516).

Finanscapes

• Having to do with finances or money
• Appadurai describes "since the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move mega-monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units"(515).

Technoscapes

From the Start

• "The global configuration, also ever so fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries"
• Examples are how computers, and even airplanes have changed how infromation is spread.

• In his introduction Arjun Appadurai starts off by explaining how cultural interaction has been around for as long as humans have been civil. However, these interactions were never peaceful, and usually were the result of religious or territorial warfare.
• It was not until the expansion of the Western World in the 1500's where interactions between different world cultures started to developed into a system that we still use today.
• The past century has especially helped develop cultural interactions due to the rise of technology that continues to become more advance each and every day.
• With this use of technology and a more advanced world, media starts to play an important role in how we view other cultures, society, and the global economy.
• Since all these culture are being "blended" together, there is irony in what actaully belongs to a certain culture. (e.g America being a blended culture). Cultures are now no longer associtated with their geograpic location, and are scattered throughout the world.

Homogenization

Mediascapes

Arjun Appadurai,

Cultural Homogenization and Cultural Heterogenization.

• "refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information" (515).
• Examples given are newspapaers, magazines, televison and film
• Most media ties into the imagination, creating of fantasy world for others, leading them into a different life of plot and characters.

Arjun Appadurai

• Cultural Homogenization is "an aspect of cultural globalization, listed as one of its main characteristics, and refers to the reduction in cultural diversity through the popularization and diffusion of a wide array of cultural symbols" (Wikipedia)
• Cultural Heterogenization is "the process of adoption of elements of global culture to local cultures" (Wikipedia)
• Global interactions are problamatic due to the tension between the two.
• "Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner, and much more needs to be done" (Appadurai 513).

• Born in Mumbai, India in 1949
• Major theorist in globalization studies and anthropology.
• Received his M.A and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
• His "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" is his "claim to fame" and also his most cited work.

5 Important Factors

In his research, Appadurai states "I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow" (Appadurai 515).

Those five terms are

1. ethnoscapes

2.mediascapes

3.technoscapes

4.finanscapes

5.ideoscapes

Work Cited

Ethnoscape

Appadurai, A. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Public Culture 2.2 (1990): 1-24. Web.

DNA Trip. Youtube. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaEQEmt5l

• "the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live"
• tourists, immigrants, refugees
• Appadurai explains how "as international capial shifts its needs, [...], these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to" (515).
• They are constanting dealing with having to move (force) or wanting to move (fantasy)

Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy ”