In a time when the world is steadily becoming "smaller" due to globalization, an increased attention to the study of modernization is essential. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai closely traces the relationship between media and mass migration and the phenomenon of modernization.
The Work of the Imagination
The primary argument of Appadaurai’s book focus on media and mass migration, as larger forces in shaping what Appadurai labels, the “work” of imagination, an imagination that is being imposed globally. In other words, the work of the imagination is a social practice that, within the mind of especially dislocated peoples, imagined worlds and selves are created, often out of requirement. In discussing imagination and its work, Appadurai refers to Benedict Anderson and his theory of “Imagined Communities”.
Appadurai suggests that “Imagined Communities” are equally as important in understanding the “work” of the imagination. Anderson suggests that the printing press and news media play a crucial role in spreading the idea of a community that is primarily of the mind and plays a large part in the phenomenon of nationalism.
Globalizing Flows
Appadurai further argues that due to the new globalizing flows of media and mass migration, dislocations of peoples is occurring more now than ever. He suggests that people are becoming deterritorialized, causing peoples dislodged from their native or local homes and thus transcending national boundaries, traveling transnationaly. This deterritorialization has placed the nation-state,which is made up of many "scapes" such as ethno, finance, and technoscapes, at many odds with each other.
The nation-state is being challenged by both its elements; both the nation and the state and the hyphen that connects them are faltering; or as Appadurai sees it, they are “cannibalizing each other”. Appadurai argues that the flows of the state and the nation no longer are able to co-exist with each other. He points to the United States as the one exception to this phenomenon in which nation and state have seemingly been able to coexist together. Perhaps not always well, but it seems to function as so.
Appadurai also discusses the concepts of Tribalism and Primordialism, both of which he sees as outcomes of media and mass migration. He suggests that many Western nations tend to see Eastern European countries, such as Bosnia, as static primitive groups that tend to settle all conflicts of difference by violence and barbarism. This simply is not true and Appadurai argues that this view is a result of mass media that allows for western nations to imagine certain regions or scenarios that might not actually be a reality.
Culture Over Economics
Throughout his book, Appadurai accentuates the need to privilege the culture unit of analysis over the unit of economic analysis when approaching the topic of modernity. Readers especially see this cultural approach in the second and third part of Modernity At Large.
For example, Appadurai examines the cultural practice of cricket in modern day India and how cricket acts as a social practice for the fueling of Indian nationalism and experimentation in modernity. He also looks at the use of the number and how it was used in the colonial imagination giving the example of the historical British practice of classification as a instrument of power in colonial India.
"Locality" on the Rise
In conclusion, Appadurai argues about the “Production of Locality” and the increase of locality’s affect on the international scene being at odds with the nation. Appadurai stresses that locality, along with its local subjects, causes both disjuncture and conjuncture; both of which are creating emerging differences on the global scene and that are “both more pressing and more daunting” (Appadurai, 199), alluding to the fact that locality and a newness of difference is on the rise.
There is a lot to digest in Modernity at Large but given the pressing need to understand one's surrounding world in order to keep up with the times, perhaps Appadurai makes points that are not only something to consider but essential to consider out of necessity .
Reference
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Rachel Lombardo - I am a recent graduate of Louisiana State University with two B.A. degrees in History and International Studies. I enjoy reading, writing, ...
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