Appardurai

Appardurai’s Disjuncture and Difference…

In this commentary on the present globalization and cross-pollination of cultural identities Appadurai is describing a new world construction composed of various scapes. These communication-rich spaces act as the battlegrounds between nations and states, sameness and difference.
He describes these spaces as a way of exploring and understanding present disjuncture between economy, culture and politics. He uses the word ‘scape’ to evoke the fluid and irregular forms that these worlds take, which he believes are similar to the indefinable and complex shifts of international capital. I will briefly touch on the various ones he has defined: ethnoscapes—the landscape of persons in a shifting world such as tourists, immigrants etc.; technoscapes—highspeed exchange of a fluid technology involving communication, production etc.; finanscapes—the movement of mega-money at high speeds THESE THREE SCAPES ARE DISJUNCTIVE AND UNPREDICTABLE ON A GLOBAL LEVEL; mediascapes—the distribution of electronic ability to produce and disseminate information, as in newspapers, television stations etc. (full of ethnoscapes) which invariably produce ‘imagined worlds’; and ideoscapes—tending toward the political, these constructions involve ideologies of states and movements, and are similar in nature to mediascapes. The ideoscape is prone to injections from intellectuals, complicating the fluidity.
It is the disjunctures between these scapes that have become central to global politics. According to Appardurai, deterritorialization has lead to a melding of class worlds, opening a whole new market to connect people back to their homelands. It has created new fears and new tastes. The ground of deterritorialization is where “money, commodities and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world…”(226). The battle between nation and state is a battle of imagination and is intrinsically linked to this complicated global situation
Through ‘production fetishism’ and ‘fetishism of the consumer’, Appardurai believes there is an illusion being created. It is an illusion which is feeding the globalization of culture and firing the battle between nation and state. The state has taken on the role of supporting a repatriation of difference which, according to the author, exacerbates the internal politics of homogenization. Thus there is a continual and mutual state of conflict that is fueled by the disjunctures of these new and uncertain landscapes.