Disjuncture+and+Difference+in+the+Global+Cultural+Economy


 * =Title= || Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy ||
 * =Author= || Arjun Appadurai ||
 * =Date= || 1990 ||
 * =Summary By= || namalie ||
 * =Summary= || The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. Homogenization (an example of which is Americanization), fails to consider that as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenized.

Great quote: “One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison”

The new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models, even those that might account for multiple centers

In order to explore such disjunctures, Appadurai looks at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow: Ethnoscapes (tourists, immigrants, refugees) Mediascapes (distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information) Technoscapes (global configuration of technology) Finanscapes (global capital, current markets, commodity speculations) Ideoscapes (political images, like “freedom”, “rights”)

These global cultural flows can be exploited by the nation-state, by exercising taxonomical 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.

Appadurai then connects these global cultural flows to deterritorialization. The “deterritorialized” population is comprised of those have traveled/moved to another relatively wealthier country for work. So deterritorialization creates new markets for these cultural flows, in order to meet the needs of the deterritorialized population for products of their home-state.

In conclusion: the critical point is that both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures || = = = = = = = = = = = =

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