Contemporary Authors

• Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1981
• The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1986
• Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1991
• Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1996
• Globalization Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2001
• Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2006
• India's World: The Politics of Creativity in a Globalized Society Rain Tree (New Delhi, India), 2012
• The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition Verso Books (New York, NY), 2013
• Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2016

1. Banking on words : the failure of language in the age of derivative finance LCCN 2015009033 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- author. Main title Banking on words : the failure of language in the age of derivative finance / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Produced Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, [2016]. Description viii, 180 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780226318639 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780226318776 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 026990 CALL NUMBER HG6024.A3 A67 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2016 120104 CALL NUMBER HG6024.A3 A67 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. The Future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition LCCN 2012289834 Type of material Book Main title The Future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created London ; New York : Verso Books , 2013. Description viii, 328 p.; 24 cm. ISBN 9781844679829 (pbk.) 1844679829 9781844679836 (hbk.) 1844679837 (hbk.) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1312/2012289834-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1312/2012289834-d.html CALL NUMBER JZ1318 .F87 2013 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2014 000696 CALL NUMBER JZ1318 .F87 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 3. India's world : the politics of creativity in a globalized society LCCN 2012354629 Type of material Book Main title India's world : the politics of creativity in a globalized society / edited by Arjun Appadurai and Arien Mack ; with an introduction by Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created New Delhi : Rain Tree, an imprint of Rupa Publications, 2012. Description xv, 266 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9788129119575 8129119579 Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy13pdf05/2012354629.html Shelf Location FLM2013 021799 CALL NUMBER HM1271 .I565 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 4. Mumbai's barefoot researchers LCCN 2013334258 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- author. Main title Mumbai's barefoot researchers / writers, Arjun Appadurai [and seven others] ; edited by editor's collective, PUKAR. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Mumbai : PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research, 2008. Description 213 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 27 cm Shelf Location FLM2016 026079 CALL NUMBER H62.5.I4 A67 2008 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 5. Fear of small numbers : an essay on the geography of anger LCCN 2005037849 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Main title Fear of small numbers : an essay on the geography of anger / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created Durham : Duke University Press, 2006. Description xiii, 153 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 0822338343 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822338637 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780822338635 Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip066/2005037849.html CALL NUMBER HM1121 .A67 2006 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HM1121 .A67 2006 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Globalization LCCN 2001023877 Type of material Book Main title Globalization / edited by Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001. Description 334 p. : ill., col. map ; 25 cm. ISBN 0822327252 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822327236 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER JZ1318 .G5787 2001 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 7. Dead certainty ethnic violence in the era of globalization : eighth Punitham Tiruchelvam memorial lecture delivered on January 31, 1998 LCCN 99935241 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Main title Dead certainty [microform] : ethnic violence in the era of globalization : eighth Punitham Tiruchelvam memorial lecture delivered on January 31, 1998 / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created [Colombo? : s.n., 1998] Description 38 p. ; 22 cm. CALL NUMBER Microfiche 99/63012 (D) Request in Asian Reading Room (Jefferson, LJ150) 8. Modernity at large : cultural dimensions of globalization LCCN 96009276 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Main title Modernity at large : cultural dimensions of globalization / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, c1996. Description xi, 229 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0816627924 (acid-free paper) 0816627932 (pbk. : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER HM101 .A644 1996 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HM101 .A644 1996 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 9. Gender, genre, and power in South Asian expressive traditions LCCN 91002711 Type of material Book Main title Gender, genre, and power in South Asian expressive traditions / edited by Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills. Published/Created Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1991. Description x, 486 p. : ill., 1 map ; 24 cm. ISBN 0812230825 (cloth : acid-free paper) 0812213378 (pbk. : acid-free paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 102721 CALL NUMBER GR302 .G46 1991 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) CALL NUMBER GR302 .G46 1991 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 10. The Social life of things : commodities in cultural perspective LCCN 85019529 Type of material Book Main title The Social life of things : commodities in cultural perspective / edited by Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, c1986. Description xiv, 329 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0521323517 Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/cam032/85019529.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam031/85019529.html CALL NUMBER GN450 .S63 1986 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 11. Worship and conflict under colonial rule : a South Indian case LCCN 80024508 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Main title Worship and conflict under colonial rule : a South Indian case / Arjun Appadurai. Published/Created Cambridge [Eng.] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1981. Description x, 266 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0521231221 Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0803/80024508-d.html Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0803/80024508-t.html CALL NUMBER BL2003 .A66 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 12. Worship and conflict in south India the case of the Srī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple, 1800-1973. LCCN 94896112 Type of material Book Personal name Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Main title Worship and conflict in south India [microform] : the case of the Srī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple, 1800-1973. Published/Created 1976. Description xi, 378 l. CALL NUMBER Microfilm 49025 Copy 1 Request in Microform & Electronic Resources Center (Jefferson, LJ139)

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: n 80127955

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Appadurai, Arjun, 1949-

  Variant(s): Arjun Appadurai, 1949-
  Appaduari, Arjun, 1949-

  Field of activity: Anthropology

  Affiliation: New School University Yale University

  Profession or occupation:
  College teachers Authors

  Found in: His Worship and confl. under col. rule, 1981: t.p. (Arjun
  Appadurai, Dept. Anthropol., Univ. Pa.) pub. blurb (b.
  Bombay 2/4/49; Ph.D. Univ. Chicago)
  Mehrfach belichtet, c2003: colophon (Arjun Appaduari;
  Appadurai)
  Email correspondence with the publisher, Jan. 12, 2005 (The
  correct name is Arjun Appadurai; the variant name Arjun
  Appaduari that appears in the colophon is incorrect)
  ¿Hacia dónde se dirigen los valores?, 2006: title page
  (Arjun Appadurai: antropólogo. Es rector de la New
  School University [Nueva York], y ha sido profesor en la
  Universidad de Yale)

  Associated language:
  eng

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• Arjun Appadurai Home Page - http://www.arjunappadurai.org/

  Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).

  Professor Appadurai was born and educated in Bombay. He graduated from St. Xavier’s High School and took his Intermediate Arts degree from Elphinstone College before coming to the United States. He earned his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1967, and his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1976) from The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

  During his academic career, he has also held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Delhi, the University of Michigan, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Italian.

  Arjun Appadurai has held numerous fellowships and scholarships and has received several scholarly honors, including residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (California) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an Individual Research Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (New York). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

  He has also served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, including many major foundations (Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller); UNESCO; UNDP; the World Bank; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Science Foundation; and the Infosys Foundation. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Asian Art Initiative at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Forum D’Avignon in Paris.

  Appadurai’s latest book, The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition was published by Verso in 2013.

  CV

  ARJUN APPADURAI
  Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

  OFFICE ADDRESS
  New York University
  Steinhardt School
  Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
  239 Greene Street
  New York, NY 10003
  tel. 001-917-734-8904
  appadurai@nyu.edu

  ADDITIONAL AFFILIATIONS
  Honorary Professor, Erasmus University, Rotterdam; Senior Research Partner, Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany; Tata Chair Professor, Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

  PREVIOUS POSITIONS
  John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences, The New School (2004 – 2008); Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives, The New School (2006- 07); Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School (2004 – 2006); William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies at Yale University (Prof. Of Anthropology, Political Science and Sociology); Director and Chair, Initiative on Cities and Globalization (2002- 2003); Samuel N. Harper Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago (2001-2002); Director, Globalization Project; Professor of Anthropology; Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (1996-2002); Director, Chicago Humanities Institute, and Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago (1992-96); Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (1987-92) and Consulting Curator, Asian Section, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania; Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (1981-87); Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (1976-1981)

  EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
  Ph.D. Social Thought, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1976)
  M.A. Social Thought, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1973)
  B.A. History, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (1970)
  Intermediate Arts, University of Bombay, India (1967)

  VISITING PROFESSORSHIPS
  University of Michigan, University of Iowa, Stanford University, Harvard University, EHESS (Paris), University of Delhi, University of Amsterdam, Witwatersrand University

  FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND HONORS

  Astor Visiting Lecturer, University of Oxford (2014)
  Honorary doctorate, Erasmus University, Rotterdam (2013)
  New York University, Marron Institute for project on “Cities, Media, Social Justice” (2013- 2015)
  Mondi Migranti Prize, Genoa, Italy (2012)
  Senior Loeb Fellow, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (2011)
  Rockefeller Foundation, 3-year grant (Co-PI), ($750,000) to Harvard School of Public Health, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), Mumbai, and New York University (2008-2011)
  Ford Foundation, “Grassroots Globalization,” 3-year Individual Research and Writing Grant, ($300,000) (1999-2002)
  Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997- Present)
  Open Society Institute, Individual Fellowship Award, Grant for project on “Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” ($100,000) (1997-1998)
  MacArthur Foundation, Globalization Project, ($150,000), Chicago Humanities Institute (1995-1998)
  “Public Spheres and the Globalization of Media,” ($250,000), Chicago Humanities Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, Post-doctoral Residency Fellowships in the Humanities (1993-1997)
  The Research Fund, University of Pennsylvania (with Carol A. Breckenridge), Grant for project on “Consuming the Indian Way: Advertising and the Indian Diaspora” ($24,000) (1992)
  Visiting Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University (1990)
  MacArthur Foundation Fellow, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1989-1990)
  Hollin Chair in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (1989-1992)
  The Research Fund, University of Pennsylvania (with Carol A. Breckenridge), Grant for project on “Public Culture in Twentieth Century India” ($15,000) (1986)
  Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto (1984-1985)
  Fellowship Support, Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (through NSF Grant BNS #8011494) (1984-1985)
  SSRC Post-Doctoral Research Grant for project on peasant thought in Western India (1984-1985)
  National Science Foundation Grant No. BNS-8105360 ($27,135) for project entitled “Cultural Model of Consumption Decisions in an Indian Peasant Community” (1981-1983)
  American Institute of Indian Studies (Senior Fellowship) for fieldwork in Maharashtra, India (1981-1982)
  ACLS/SSRC Joint Committee on South Asia, $4,500 for archival research in London (1981)
  Faculty Research Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (1980)
  Awarded Marc Perry Galler Prize, University of Chicago, for best doctoral dissertation in the Social Sciences (1976)
  Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University (1975-1976)
  Kent Fellow, Danforth Foundation (1972-1975)
  Wien International Scholar, Brandeis University (1967-1970)
  Graduated Magna cum laude, Brandeis University (1970)

  MAJOR LECTURES

  MN Srinivasan Memorial Lecture: “The Ecology of Failure: Reflections on Democracy, Participation and Development”, King’s College London (March 2014)
  Honorary Symposium at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (November 2013)
  Public Lecture, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, University of the Witwatersrand (June 2013)
  Keynote at “Speculation in India: Imaginaries of Indian economies”, University of Copenhagen (March 2013)
  Keynote at “The Human Economy Conference: Economy and Democracy”, University of Pretoria (August 2013)
  Lecture at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawahar Lal Nehru University, Delhi (January 2013)
  Keynote at “The Cosmopolitanism of the Urban Poor”, University of Milan, Bicocca (November 2012)
  Speaker at “New Directions in Global History”, University of Oxford (September 2012)
  Public Lecture, “Imperialism and Modernity: Europe’s Rear-View Mirror and the Colonial Encounter”, Osmania University, Hyderabad (January 2012)
  Keynote at “Unpacking the Nano: The Price of the World’s Most Affordable Car”, Cornell University (March 2011)
  Keynote at “In the Life of Cities: Parallel Narratives of the Urban”, Harvard Graduate School of Design (March 2011)
  Public Lecture, “Truth be said: Concerning the Postsecular”, Center for the Humanities, Utrecht University (June 2010)
  Keynote at “Beyond Multiculturalism? Envisioning the Immigration Society”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (June 2009)
  Inaugural Lecture at Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, Heidelberg University (October 2008)
  Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver (November 2006)
  Keynote at University of Connecticut Law School, Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Hartford (March 2004)
  Keynote at “Should Globalization be made more Democratic?” UNESCO Conference, Paris (March 2004)
  Keynote Lecture, ACLA at Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar (GELS) (April 2004)
  Roth Symond Lecture, Yale Department of the History of Art and Yale School of Architecture Symposium on “Local Sites of Global Practice: Modernism and the Middle East,” New Haven (April 2003)
  Keynote Lecture, International Conference on “Cosmopolitanism and the Nation-State,” Patna, India (February 2001)
  Seeger Lecture 2000, “Remake, Recall, Remix: Globalization and the Aesthetics of Repetition,” Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Toronto (November 2000)
  Keynote Lecture, Conference on “Commodification and Identities: Social Life of Things Revisited,” Amsterdam (June 1999)
  The Wertheim Lecture 2000, “Globalization and Area Studies: The Future of a False Opposition,” Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam (June 2000)
  Keynote Lecture, International Conference on “Global Flows/Local Fissures: Urban Antagonisms Revisited,” World Academy for Local Government and Democracy, Istanbul (May 1999)
  Inaugural Lecture, Globalization Program, University of Minnesota (October 1998)
  Keynote Lecture, International Conference on “Globalization and the Social Sciences in Africa,” Johannesburg (September 1998)
  4th Justice K.T. Telang Endowment Lecture, The Asiatic Society, Mumbai (February 1998)
  Eighth Punitham Thiruchelvan Memorial Lecture, Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo (January 1998)
  Annual Lecture, School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London (November 1997)
  Keynote Lecture, Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Israel, Jerusalem (March 1997)
  Ecumene Lecture, Association of American Geographers, Annual Meetings, Chicago (March 1995)
  Keynote Lecture, The Twenty-first Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison (November 1992)
  Inaugural Lecture, Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture (CCACC), Rutgers University (October 1992)
  Keynote Speaker, 15th Annual Conference, Society of Dance History Scholars, University of California-Riverside (February 1992)
  Ford Lecturer, Collegiate Division of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago (February 1992)

  Additional distinguished lectures (between 2004 and 2014)
  The New School, Cooper-Union University, University of Tokyo, American University in Cairo, Gottingen University, House of World Cultures (Berlin), Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), Beijing University (China), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Central European University (Budapest), Humboldt University (Berlin), University of Cambridge (UK), University of Pretoria (South Africa), University of Oxford (UK), University of California, Los Angeles (USA), Stanford University (USA), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (India), University of Punjab, Chandigarh (India), University of Hyderabad (India)

  RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
  Library Research, Indian Office Library and British Museum, London, 1974, 1977.
  Ethnographic and archival research in Madras, India, Summer 1977 and 1973-74.
  Fieldwork in rural Maharashtra State, India, 1981-82.
  Fieldwork in Madras, Bombay and Delhi, Winter 1986 and Winter 1988 (short-term).
  Fieldwork in Bombay, Winter 1995-96, Fall 1997, Spring 1998.
  Fieldwork in India, South Africa, Philippines, 1999–present.

  LANGUAGES
  French, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil

  RESEARCH/TEACHING INTERESTS
  Historical anthropology; anthropology of globalization: ethnic violence, consumption, space and housing; international civil society; urban South Asia

  UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE
  University of Pennsylvania

  Member, Graduate Groups in Oriental Studies, Religious Studies and International Relations, 1978-92.
  Member, Steering Committee, Ethnohistory Program, 1977-92.
  Member, Center for Art and Symbolic Studies, 1978-87.
  Chairman, South Asia Regional Studies, Fellowships Committee, 1978-80.
  Chairman, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Advisory Committee on Urban Studies Major, 1982-83.
  Member, School of Arts and Sciences Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Education, 1983-85.
  Member, FAS Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, 1983-84.
  Member, Advisory Board, Expedition (University Museum), 1982-87.
  Director, Ethnohistory Program, 1983-84.
  Chairman, Leon Lecture Committee, 1985-86.
  Undergraduate Chair, South Asia Regional Studies, 1985-87.
  Graduate Group Chair, South Asia Regional Studies, 1985-87.
  Member, Faculty Council, Lauder Institute (Wharton School), 1986-88.
  Member, Social Science Divisional Planning Committee, SAS, 1986.
  Member, Editorial Board, Series in Contemporary Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986-92.
  Member, Faculty Search Committee for Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 1987-88.
  Member, Linguistics Department Internal Review Committee, 1987-88.
  Member, Senate Committee on the Faculty, 1987-88.
  Member, Advisory Board, Center for Cultural Studies, 1987-92.
  Faculty Associate, Graduate Communications Program, The Annenberg School of Communications, 1987-90.
  Member, Search Committee, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, 1987-88.
  Member, Personnel Committee, (All appointments and promotions), School of Arts and Sciences, 1988-90.
  Member, Cultural Studies Committee, 1988-92.
  Co-Chair, Ethnohistory Program, 1989-92.
  Chair, South Asia Regional Studies Department, 1991-92.
  Director, Office of Education National Resource Center for South Asia, 1991-92.
  Co-Director, Center for Transnational Cultural Studies, 1989-92.

  The University of Chicago

  Director, Chicago Humanities Institute, 1992-96
  Member, Provost’s Council on Research, 1992-94.
  Member, Committee on Minority Recruitment and Retention, The College, 1992-93.
  Chair, Faculty Search Committee, Department of Anthropology, 1994-95.
  Member, Ad Hoc Committee on International and Regional Programs, 1994-95.
  Director, Globalization Project, 1994-present.
  Member, Executive Committee, Council for Advanced Studies on Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC), 1995-present.
  Chair, Appointments Committee, Department of Anthropology, 1996-97.
  Member, Governing Board, Center for International Studies, 1996-present.
  Member, Ad Hoc Committee on Undergraduate International Studies Concentration, 1996.
  Member, Faculty Governing Board, Center for Continuing Studies, 1996-98.
  Member, Faculty Board, Human Rights Program, 1998-99.

  Yale University

  Director and Chair, Initiative on Cities and Globalization (2002- )
  Advisory Board, Asian-American Cultural Center (2002- )
  Advisor, Yale World Fellows Program (2002)

  The New School

  Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (Jan 2004 – June 2006)
  Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives (Office of the President) (July 2006-December 2008)

  New York University

  Provost’s Advisory Committee on Academic Priorities

  ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE (PROFESSIONAL)

  General

  Member, North American Working Group, Committee on the Anthropology of Food, International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 1978-79.
  Member, South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 1980-83.
  Trustee (University of Pennsylvania), American Institute of Indian Studies, 1985-86.
  Member, Program Committee, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 1985-86.
  Vice-President, American Institute of Indian Studies, 1985-88.
  Deputy Director, National Resource Center (Title VI) for South Asia, 1985-88.
  Member, Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, 1986-91.
  Chairman, Selection Committee, American Institute of Indian Studies, 1986-87.
  Member, Advisory Panel for Social/Cultural Anthropology, National Science Foundation, 1986-87.
  Member (elected), Executive Committee, American Institute of Indian Studies, 1986-89.
  Member, Forum on Public Communication, Center for Psycho-Social Studies, Chicago, 1988-92.
  Member, Working Group on Technology and Development: Alternative Approaches, World Institute for Development Economics Research, United Nations University, Helsinki, 1986-89.
  Member, Research Advisory Board, Center for Transcultural Studies, Chicago, 1991- 1998.
  Member, Comparative and Transnational Advisory Panel, Social Science Research Council, 1992.
  Member, Task Force on the Future of International Programs, Social Science Research Council, Winter-Spring, 1994.
  Member, The Smithsonian Advisory Council, 1994-97.
  Honorary Associate, Center for the Comparative Study of Religion and Society, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, 1994-present.
  Advisory Board, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory and Interpretation (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, 1994-present.
  Member, Steering Committee, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, 1994-1995.
  Member, International Advisory Board, International Forum for U.S. Studies, University of Iowa, 1995-1998.
  Member, Selection Committee, Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Residency Programs, Arts and Humanities, 1996.
  Member, Governing Board, Center for the Study of Arts and Culture, Washington, D.C., 1996-1999.
  Member, Advisory Panel, Ford Foundation Initiative on “Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies,” 1997- 2001
  Member, Advisory Board, Institute of Cultural Pluralism (Transnational Center of Human Sciences), Rio de Janeiro, 1997-present.
  Member, International Advisory Board, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, 1998-present.
  Member, Board of Directors, Social Science Research Council, New York, 1998-2001.
  Senior Advisor, Project on Cultural Policies for Human Development, Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, 2001
  Member, Advisory Committee on Civic Empowerment and Cultural Issues, World Bank (2001 – present)
  Advisor and Consultant on Cultural Policy, UNESCO (1997- present)
  Member, Scientific Advisory Board, Forum D’Avignon, Paris, (2010-present)
  Member, Asian Art Advisory Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009-present)
  Member, International Advisory Board, Humboldt Forum, Berlin (2010-present)
  Senior Advisor, Forum on Cultural Theory, Baroda, India

  Editorial

  Editorial Board, Social Research, 2004 –present.
  Editorial Board, Political Geography, 2001-present.
  Editorial Board, Social Archaeology, 2000-present.
  Member, International Scientific Council, Critique Internationale, CERI (Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales), Paris, 1998-present.
  Advisory Board, Positions, 1992-present.
  Member, Editorial Board, “Public Worlds” (Book Series), University of Minnesota, 1992-present.
  Co-editor (with Jean Comaroff and Judith Farquhar), “Bodies, Texts, Commodities” (Book Series, Duke University Press), 1992-present.
  Associate Editor, Public Culture, 1988-1999.
  Associate Editor, American Ethnologist, 1989-94.
  Advisory Board, Special Issue of Daedalus, (“Another India”), Fall 1989.
  Assistant Editor (South Asia), Journal of Asian Studies, 1983-86.

  PUBLICATIONS
  Books and edited collections
  2013 The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso

  2012 India’s World: The Politics of Creativity in a Globalized Society (New Delhi: Rupa)

  2011 Le Aspirazioni Nutrono la Democrazia. Milano: et al.

  Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

  2002 Globalization (edited volume). Durham, NC: Duke University Press

  2001 (Translation) Modernità in polvere. Rome: Meltemi

  1996 Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  1991 Co-editor (with M. Mills and F. Korom, Eds.), Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  1988 Guest Editor, Special Issue of Cultural Anthropology on “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory” (Vol. 3, No. 1).

  1987 Guest Editor (with Carol A. Breckenridge), Special Annual Issue of The India Magazine (New Delhi) on “Public Culture.”

  1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Edited Volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.

  1983 (Reprint). Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

  1981 Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  ARTICLES
  2013 “Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” Volume 33, Number 2, 2013, pp. 137-139. Duke University Press.

  2012 “The Spirit of Calculation”, Cambridge Anthropology, Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2012 , pp. 3-17(15).

  2011 “The Ghost in the Financial Machine”, Public Culture Volume 23, Number 3 65: 517-539.

  2011 “What Does the Nano Want? Design As a Tool For Future-Building”, AAP (Architecture, Art, Planning), Cornell University (Summer 2011).

  2011 “How Histories Make Geographies”, Transcultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1. University of Heidelberg, On-Line Publication.

  2011 “Our Gandhi, Our Times,” Public Culture 23:2. Duke University Press.

  2010 “Dialogue, Risk and Conviviality” in Can There Be Life Without the Other? Antonio Pinto Ribeiro, Editor. Carcanet Press, Manchester.

  2009 “The Right to Research.” in Globalization, Societies and Education.
  Volume 4 (2) July.

  2007 “Hope and Democracy,” Public Culture 19:1. Duke University Press.

  2006 “The Thing Itself,” in Public Culture. Winter 18.1.

  2006 “A man behind scapes: An Interview with Arjun Appadurai.” Tehri Rantanen, Global Media and Communication. 2: 7-19.

  2006 “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keywords, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Blackwell Publishing.

  2005 “The Thing Itself,” in ARTIndia. Volume IX. Issue IV.

  2005 EIDOS Interview with Arjun Appadurai. “Glocalisation” Issue No. 1. St. Xavier’s College Mumbai.

  2005 “Materiality in the Future of Anthropology,” in Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities. (The Social Life of Things Revisited) eds. Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere. LIT Verlag.

  2004 “Minorities and the Production of Daily Peace,” in Feelings Are Always Local, V2_Publishing/NA I Publishers, Rotterdam.

  2003 “I&I Interview with Arjun Appadurai,” Items and Issues, 4 (4), Winter 2003/2004: 24-27.

  2003 “The Capacity to Aspire,” in Culture and Public Action, eds. V. Rao and M. Walton. Stanford University Press.

  2003 “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information is Alive, Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Editors): 14-25. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers.

  2002 “The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination” (Interview with Arjen Mulder), TransUrbanism: 33-46. Rotterdamn: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers.

  2002 “Cultural Diversity: A Conceptual Platform,” UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity, Cultural Diversity Series #1. Paris: UNESCO.

  2002 “Broken Promises,” Foreign Policy, September/October: 42-44.

  2002 “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Environment and Urbanization 13 (2), October 2001: 23-43.

  2002 “Deep Democracy: Urban Government and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture 14 (1): 21-47.

  2001 “The Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage: A Discussion with Arjun Appadurai,” in Journal of Social Archaeology. 1 (1):35-49.

  2000 (with Katerina Stenou) “Sustainable Development and the Future of Belonging,” in World Culture Report 2000. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 111-123.

  2000 “Globalization and Area Studies: The Future of a False Opposition.” Wertheim Lecture 2000. Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies.

  2000 “Savoir, circulation et biographie collective,” L’Homme. 156: 29-38.

  2000 “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” in Public Culture, Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism, (Eds.: C. Breckenridge, H. Bhabha, D. Chakrabarty, S. Pollock). 12 (3): 627-651.

  2000 “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” in Public Culture, Special Issue on Globalization, (Ed.: Arjun Appadurai). 12 (1):1-19.

  2000 “The Grounds of the Nation-State: Identity, Violence and Territory,” Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post-Cold War Era. K. Goldmann, U. Hannerz, and C. Westin (Eds.). London: Routledge.

  1999 “The Bomb, Bombay, Mumbai,” Fellow Observer (Open Society Institute, New York) II: I: 10-11.

  1999 “Gift Trapped,” University of Chicago Magazine December: 35-37.

  1999 “Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence: Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai in Conversation,” Interview by V. Bell. Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 21-40.

  1999 “Public Culture,” Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology. Veena Das (Ed.). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

  1999 (Reprint, with James Holston) “Cities and Citizenship,” Cities and Citizenship. J. Holston (Ed.). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

  1999 “Globalization and the Research Imagination,” International Social Science Journal, 160 (June 1999).

  1998 “How to Live Together: An Interview with Arjun Appadurai,” Interview by W. Burszta, F. Kujawinski, and T. Tabako. 2B (To Be): A Journal of Ideas 13: 106-112.

  1998 (Translation). “Globale ethische Räume,” Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft. U. Beck (Ed.). Germany: Suhrkamp.

  1998 “Full Attachment,” Public Culture, Winter, 10:2.

  1998 “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Public Culture, Winter, 10:2.

  1997 (Translation – Chinese). “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Identity and Public Culture. S. C. K. Chan (Ed.). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

  1997 (Translation). “Notas para uma geografia pós-nacional,” Novos Estudos. 49 (November).

  1997 “The Research Ethic and the Spirit of Internationalism,” Items, Social Science Research Council, December, 51:4 (Part I), 55-60.

  1997 “Fieldwork in the Era of Globalization,” Anthropology and Humanism, 22:1.

  1997 “The Colonial Backdrop,” Afterimage, March/April, v. 24:5, 4-7.

  1996 (Translation). “Fogyasztás, idÿtartam, történelem,” Replika, 21/22 május 1996: 81-98.

  1996 “Off-White,” A.N.Y. (Architecture New York), Winter.

  1996 (with James Holston) “Cities and Citizenship,” Public Culture 8: 187-204.

  1996 “Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts,” Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. C. Nelson and D. Gaonkar (Eds.). New York: Routledge.

  1996 “Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” The Geography of Identity. P. Yaeger (Ed.). Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 40-58.

  1995 (Translation). “Le patriotisme et son avenir,” Futur Antérieur 27(1): 35-54.

  1995 (With Carol A. Breckenridge) “Public Modernity in India.” Introductory Essay, Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. C.A. Breckenridge (Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  1995 “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket,” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. C.A. Breckenridge (Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  1995 “The Production of Locality,” Counterwork. R. Fardon (Ed.). London: Routledge.

  1994 “Contesting the Popular in Africa,” Passages: A Chronicle of the Humanities 8: 1.

  1994 (Translation). “Indiase Kookkunst,” In Mijn Vaders Huis II. A. Ramdas (Ed.). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Jan Mets.

  1993 “The Geography of Canonicity,” What is Fundamental? The Committee on Social Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago: 3-12.

  1993 (Reprint) “Consumption, Duration and History,” Streams of Cultural Capital. D. Palumbo-Liu and H. U. Gumbrecht (eds.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  1993 “Consumption, Duration and History,” Stanford Literary Review 10 (1-2, Spring-Fall): 11-23.

  1993 (Reprint) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” The Phantom Public Sphere. Bruce Robbins (Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 269-295.

  1993 “The Heart of Whiteness,” Callaloo 16: 797-807.

  1993 “Patriotism and Its Futures,” Public Culture (3) 5: 411-429, Spring 1993.

  1993 “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament. C.A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  1992 “Father Britto,” Polygraph 5: 248-250.

  1992 (Reprint). “Putting Hierarchy in its Place,” Rereading Cultural Anthropology. G. E. Marcus (Ed.). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

  1991 “Afterword,” Gender, Genre, and South Asian Expressive Traditions. A. Appadurai, F. J. Korom and M. A. Mills (Eds.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  1991 (With F. J. Korom and M. A. Mills) “Introduction,” Gender, Genre, and South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  1991 (With Carol A. Breckenridge) “Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India,” Museums and Their Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. I. Karp, S. Levine and T. Ybarra-Frausto (Eds.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 34-55.

  1991 “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” Interventions: Anthropologies of the Present. R.G. Fox (Ed.). Santa Fe: School of American Research, 191-210.

  1991 (With Carol A. Breckenridge) “Marriage, Migration and Money: Mira Nair’s Cinema of Displacement,” Visual Anthropology 4 (1, Spring): 95-102.

  1991 “Dietary Improvisation in an Agricultural Economy,” Diet and Domestic Life in Society. Sharman et. al. (Eds.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 207-232.

  1990 (with Carol A. Breckenridge) “Public Culture in Late 20 th- Century India,” Items 44 (4), December 1990: 77-80.

  1990 “Technology and the Reproduction of Values in Western India,” Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance. S.A. Marglin and F.A. Marglin (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  1990 “Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,” Affecting Discourse: Anthropological Essays on Emotions and Social Life. C. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.). New York and London: Cambridge University Press: 92-112.

  1990 “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (2 and 3, July): 295-310 (Short Version).

  1990 “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture (2) 2: 1-24 (Long Version).

  1989 “Small-Scale Techniques and Large-Scale Objectives,” Conversations Between Economists and Anthropologists. P. Bardhan (Ed.). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 250-282.

  1989 “Transformations in the Culture of Agriculture,” Contemporary Indian Tradition . Carla Borden (Ed.). The Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington and London, 173-186.

  1988 (With Carol Breckenridge) “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 1 (1, Fall): 5-9.

  1988 “Imagined Worlds: The Decolonization of Cricket,” The Olympics and Cultural Exchange. S.P. Kang, J. McAloon and R. da Matta (Eds.). Seoul: Hanyang University, Institute for Ethnographic Studies, 163-190.

  1988 “Comment on Francis Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats,” Social Science and Medicine 27 (3): 206-207.

  1988 “Putting Hierarchy in its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1, February): 37-50.

  1988 “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1, February): 16-20.

  1988 “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1, January): 3-24.

  1987 “Street Culture,” The India Magazine 8 (1, December): 2-23.

  1987 “The Indian Cow,” Encyclopaedia of Asian History. New York: The Asia Society and Scribner and Sons, Volume 1: 347.

  1987 “Hinduism,” Encyclopaedia of Asian History. New York: The Asia Society and Scribner and Sons, Volume 2: 56-59.

  1986 “Is Homo Hierarchicus – A Review Essay,” American Ethnologist 13 (4): 745-761.

  1986 “Center and Periphery in Anthropological Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (2): 356-361.

  1986 (with Wilhelm Halbfass) “History of the Study of Indian Religions,” Encyclopaedia of Religion. Mircea Eliade, Editor. Macmillan, New York.

  1986 “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” Introductory Essay, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. A. Appadurai (Ed.).Cambridge University Press, 3-63.

  1985 “Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India,” Ethos 13 (3, Fall): 236-245.

  1985 (Review) “Understanding Green Revolutions: Agrarian Change and Development Planning in South Asia,” Tim P. Bayliss-Smith and Sudhir Wanmali, eds., Third World Quarterly (London).

  1985 (Review) “The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, by G. Obeyesekere,” Journal of Asian Studies 44 (3, May): 647-649.

  1984 “How Moral is South Asia’s Economy? — A Review Essay,” Journal of Asian Studies 43 (3, May): 481-497.

  1984 (with Gregory Possehl) “Cow,” Man and Animals: Living, Working and Changing Together. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania: 47-56.

  1984 “Wells in Western India: Irrigation and Cooperation in an Agricultural Society,” Expedition 26 (3): 3-14.

  1983 “The Puzzling Status of Brahman Temple Priests in Hindu India,” South Asian Anthropologist 4 (1, March): 43-52.

  1981 “Royal Rituals and Cultural Change,” Reviews in Anthropology 8 (2, Spring): 121-138.

  1981 “The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man (N.S.) 16 (2, June): 201-219.

  1981 “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8 (3, August): 494-511.

  1981 (Review) “Gopal Krishna, ed., Contributions to South Asian Studies 1, Delhi, Oxford University Press,” American Ethnologist 8 (1, February): 211-212.

  1980 “Comment on Female Lingam: Interchangeable Symbols and Paradoxical Associations of Hindu Gods and Goddesses by G. Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi,” Current Anthropology 21 (1, February): 54.

  1978 “Understanding Gandhi,” Childhood and Selfhood: Essays on Tradition, Religion and Modernity in the Psychology of Erik H. Erikson, P. Homans (Ed.).
  Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press: 113-43.

  1977 “Kings, Sects and Temples in South India, 1350-1700 A.D.,” Economic and Social History Review 14 (1): 47-73.

  1976 (with Carol A. Breckenridge) “The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honor and Redistribution,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 10 (2): 187-211.

  1974 “Right and Left Hand Castes in South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (2-3): 216-259.

• Wikipedia -

  Arjun Appadurai
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Arjun Appadurai
  ArjunAppadurai.jpg
  Born 1949
  Mumbai, India
  Fields Anthropology
  Institutions New York University
  The New School
  Alma mater Brandeis University (B.A.)
  University of Chicago (M.A., Ph.D.)

  Arjun Appadurai (born 1949) is a contemporary social-cultural anthropologist recognised as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization.[1]

  Arjun Appadurai was born in 1949 and raised in Bombay, India, and went to the United States where he obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He was the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, he was a senior tutor at New College of the Global Initiative, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture. Arjun Appadurai has presided over Chicago globalization plan, as many public and private organizations (such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, the World Bank, etc.) consultant and long-term concern issues of globalization, modernity and ethnic conflicts. “Some of his most important works include Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990), of which an expanded version is found in Modernity at Large (1996), and Fear of Small Numbers (2006). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.”[2]

  Appadurai held many scholarships and grants, and has received numerous academic honors, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (California) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as individual research fellowship from the Open Society Institute (New York). He was elected Arts and Sciences in 1997, the American Academy of Sciences. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

  He also served as a consultant or adviser, extensive public and private organizations, including many large foundations (Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller); the UNESCO; UNDP; World Bank; the US National Endowment for the Humanities; National Science Foundation; and Infosys Foundation. He currently serves as the Asian Art Program Advisory Committee members in the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the forum D 'Avignon Paris Scientific Advisory Board.
  Anthropology

  Outline History

  Types
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  Social Cultural

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  Linguistic
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  Moai Easter Island InvMH-35-61-1.jpg Anthropology portal

  v t e

  Contents

  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 New School
  2.2 New York University
  2.3 Affiliations
  3 Theory
  3.1 The social imaginary
  4 Publications
  5 See also
  6 References
  7 External links

  Early life

  Appadurai was born into a Tamil Brahmin family in Mumbai (Bombay), India and educated in India. He graduated from St. Xavier's High School, Fort, Mumbai, and earned his Intermediate Arts degree from Elphinstone College, Mumbai, before moving to the United States.

  He then received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1970.
  Career

  He was formerly a professor at the University of Chicago where he received his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D (1976). After working there, he spent a brief time at Yale before going to the New School University. He currently is a faculty member of New York University's Media Culture and Communication department in the Steinhardt School. Some of his most important works include Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990), of which an expanded version is found in Modernity at Large (1996), and Fear of Small Numbers (2006). In addition to his work on globalization, one of Appadurai's earlier publications, The Social Life of Things (1986), argues for the social dimension of commodities' values and meanings from an anthropological framework.[3] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.[4]

  His doctoral work was based on the car festival held in the Parthasarathi temple in Triplicane, Madras. Arjun Appadurai is member of the Advisory Board of the Forum d'Avignon, international meetings of culture, the economy and the media.
  New School

  In 2004, after a brief time as administrator at Yale University, Appadurai became Provost of New School University. Appadurai's resignation from the Provost's office was announced January 30, 2006 by New School President Bob Kerrey. He held the John Dewey Distinguished Professorship in the Social Sciences at New School.[1] Appadurai became one of the more outspoken critics of President Kerrey when he attempted to appoint himself provost in 2008 [2].
  New York University

  In 2008 it was announced that Appadurai was appointed Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development [5]
  Affiliations
  See also: Public Culture

  Appadurai is a co-founder of the academic journal Public Culture;[6] founder of the non-profit Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research (PUKAR) in Mumbai; co-founder and co-director of Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization (ING); and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, including the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations; UNESCO; the World Bank; and the National Science Foundation.
  Theory

  In his best known work 'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy' Appadurai lays out his meta theory of disjuncture. For him the ‘new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’.[7] This order is composed of different interrelated, yet disjunctive global cultural flows,[8] specifically the following five:

  ethnoscapes; the migration of people across cultures and borders,
  mediascapes; use of media that shapes the way we understand our imagined world
  technoscapes; cultural interactions due to the promotion of technology
  financescapes; the flux capital across borders
  ideoscapes; is the global flow of ideologies

  The social imaginary

  Appadurai articulated a view of cultural activity known as the social imaginary, which is composed of the five dimensions of global cultural flows.

  He describes his articulation of the imaginary as:

  The image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.[9]

  Appadurai credits Benedict Anderson with developing notions of imagined communities. Some key figures who have worked on the imaginary are Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Jacques Lacan (who especially worked on the symbolic, in contrast with imaginary and the real), and Dilip Gaonkar. However, Appadurai's ethnography of urban social movements in the city of Mumbai has proved to be contentious with several scholars like the Canadian anthropologist, Judith Whitehead arguing that SPARC (an organization which Appadurai espouses as an instance of progressive social activism in housing) being complicit in the World Bank's agenda for re-developing Mumbai.
  Publications

  2013 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Verso.

  2012 Co-editor (with A. Mack) India's World: The Politics of Creativity in a Globalized Society. Rupa&Co.

  2007 Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge University Press.

  2006 Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  2002 Globalization (edited volume). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  2001 Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Environment and Urbanization, (Vol. 13 No. 2), pp. 23–43.

  2001 La Modernidad Desbordada. (Translation of Modernity At Large) Uruguay and Argentina: Ediciones Trilces and Fondo de Cultura Economica de Argentina.

  2001 Apres le Colonialisme: Les Consequences Culturelles de la globalisation. (Translation of Modernity At Large) Paris: Payot.

  2001 Modernità in polvere. (Translation of Modernity At Large) Rome: Meltemi Editore.

  1996 Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  1991 Co-editor (with M. Mills and F. Korom, Eds.), Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  1988 Guest Editor, Special Issue of Cultural Anthropology on “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory” (Vol. 3, No. 1).

  1988 "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India," Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 31, No. 1): 3-24. 1987 Guest Editor (with Carol A. Breckenridge), Special Annual Issue of The India Magazine (New Delhi) on “Public Culture”.

  1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.

  1983 (Reprint). Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

  1981 Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication Web site - https://www.eshcc.eur.nl/english/personal/appadurai/

  Honorary Professor

  Biographical note

  Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication of Erasmus University Rotterdam. He also holds visiting positions at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity (Gottingen, Germany).

  Prof. Appadurai was educated in India and the United States and received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has held professorial Chairs at the University of Pennsylvania, The University of Chicago, Yale University and The New School and has had visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Delhi, the University of Paris and The University of Michigan. He has been a Visiting Fellow at numerous academic institutes including the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), and the Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Prof. Appadurai has published widely on the topics of globalization, transnational media, cities and the relationship of economics and culture. His most recent book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays in the Human Condition (Verso, 2013) and his forthcoming book is called Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: In Press).

• NYU Steinhardt News (New York University) - http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2015/12/3/QA_with_Arjun_Appadurai_on_new_book_Banking_on_Words

  Q&A with Arjun Appadurai on new book “Banking on Words”

  With Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (University of Chicago Press), Arjun Appadurai, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, delves into the culture of derivative finance and argues that the 2008 market collapse should be viewed ultimately as a failure of language. Long interested in “the sociology of economic action,” Appadurai’s latest project offers a probing cultural analysis of the global economic sphere. Professor Appadurai speaks to some of the book’s central themes in the following Q&A:

  You conceive of the market collapse as a failure of language, more specifically the dissolution of the "promise" as a performative speech act. What distinguishes the promises of derivative finance (or architecture of promises, as you refer to it) from prior capitalistic traditions?

  The primary difference between this architecture and previous similar ones is that it involves a contradiction between kept promises (those between derivative traders when they buy and sell "promises" to one another) and broken promises, such as in credit default swaps where derivatives make or lose on money based on the likelihood of broken promises in deals between others.

  You depict derivative finance as a technique for slicing and dicing the individual and then "reassembling these divided bits of the person" into a subject for financial gain. You liken this to the state of the "dividual," an erosion of the western idea of the individual. Yet in this concept of the dividual, you also identify a radical form of politics to counteract the financial market's "predatory dividualism." Can you outline this new form of politics and articulate the source of your optimism?

  This potentially progressive way of bringing together "dividuals" in new ways to challenge the domination of banks, corporations and finance professionals, can already be seen in the effort of various unions and pension funds to take charge of their own investments, the various student movements to re-structure student debt and the efforts of progressive hedge funds to distribute their profits to their stakeholders in a just manner.

  In all these cases, that part of ourselves which is "chopped up" into our profiles as students, workers, debtors, homeowners etc. can be re-possessed and mobilized in a manner which challenges the domination of predatory financial elites.

  Throughout the book you note with regret the limited engagement between the fields of economics, anthropology, sociology. Indeed you extend "an open invitation" to develop a new field of inquiry, one in which culture and finance are not divorced from each other. Which questions might benefit most from such interdisciplinary dialogue?

  There are many topics which would benefit from this engagement and some of them are already being discussed by economists, anthropologists and others. Examples include: the question of the meaning of money and why money seems always to produce desire for more money, even apart from what money can buy; the issue of the cultural horizon of aspirations and how aspirations for a better life can come out of very different approaches to increasing one's wealth; the problem of risk and of how different classes, cultures and countries present highly different levels of tolerance towards economic risk; the study of innovation and the extent to which innovation is a product of history, culture and public support of innovative thinking.

  You mention that your fascination with the sociology of economics began in graduate school and has informed much of your subsequent research and scholarship. Can you describe some of the intellectual pathways this involvement has taken over the decades?

  I was introduced to the work of Max Weber in my first year of graduate school at The University of Chicago and he has been my model of how not to recognize boundaries between sociology, politics, economics and world history. Equally, I have been greatly influenced by Clifford Geertz's work on the economies of Indonesia and Morocco in his great studies of agriculture and bazaars in the 1960's, which showed how <>, styles and values. Lastly, Albert Hirschman's way of thinking about the passions and the interests in his studies of markets, parties and politics remain a model of economics with a human face.

  In my own work,<< I have pursued the relationship between culture and economy starting in the early 1980’s>> in a series of articles on the culture of agriculture in India, in my work on “the social life of things,” in dialogues with development economists about the “capacity to aspire,” culminating in this most recent book on the logic of derivative finance.

Appadurai, Arjun. Banking on words: the failure of language in the age of derivative finance
R. Grossman
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1206.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about

Appadurai, Arjun. Banking on words: the failure of language in the age of derivative finance. Chicago, 2016. 180p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780226318639 cloth, $67.50; ISBN 9780226318776 pbk, $22.50; ISBN 9780226318806 ebook, contact publisher for price

53-3576

HG6024

2015-9033 CIP

This book argues that the financial failure of 2007-08 was primarily a failure of language. Without denying the role of other factors (e.g., greed, ignorance, weak regulation, irresponsible risk-taking), Appadurai (media, culture, and communication, NYU; senior fellow, Institute for Public Knowledge) argues that the new role of language in the marketplace "is the condition of possibility for all these more easily identifiable flaws." Economists and linguists have devoted a considerable amount of attention in recent years to studying the importance of words, particularly policy makers' communications, written and verbal. Indeed, leaders of the US Federal Reserve, starting with the chairmanship of Ben Bernanke, have been far more forthcoming in communicating their ideas about and plans for policy. Even though Appadurai's emphasis on words is apt, he ignores previous episodes of financial turbulence and does not discuss how language in the 2007-08 episode differed from the language surrounding the crises of 1873, 1893, and 1907, the Great Depression, or other episodes. Such an explanation would have made the book more useful to economists and historians. Summing Up: ** Recommended. With reservations. Researchers and faculty.--R. Grossman, Wesleyan University

Grossman, R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grossman, R. "Appadurai, Arjun. Banking on words: the failure of language in the age of derivative finance." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1206. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661707&it=r&asid=b276643e183119159e7ed16d61fc428e. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661707
The future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition
28.6 (Dec. 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/

9781844679829

The future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition.

Appadurai, Arjun.

Verso

2013

328 pages

$29.95

JZ1318

In this sequel to 1996's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai (media, culture, and communication; New York U.) revisits his anthropological approach to globalization, first presenting a reworked essay from 1986 on "the social life of things" as they "move across regimes of value, enable new commodity paths, and bridge worlds far apart in space and time through their own capacity to morph, without losing their cultural significance" and then presenting chapters that reflect on his own journey through thinking about culture that are marked by the thematic issue of working through the discipline of anthropology's multidimensional approaches to culture and globalization, as well as Appadurai's debt to the insights of Max Weber. Another overarching theme reflects Appadurai's frequent studies of the Indian city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), which address issues of housing, urban governmentality and politics, and lessons on ethical cosmopolitanism from the slums of Mumbai. Other significant topics addressed include the causes of ethnocidal campaigns in the era of globalization, nationalist mobilization through the private sphere and the world of the family, the social life of design, and research as a human right.

([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition." Reference & Research Book News, Dec. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA351466089&it=r&asid=aaa41dae092488f62ff1a7a27e50c9c3. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A351466089
Globalization
Ade Peace
14.2 (Aug. 2003): p266.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Arjun Appadurai (ed.) Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 362, 3 photos, 1 map, figs., bibliog., index. US$64.95 (Hc.), ISBN 0-8223-2725-2; US$22.95 (Pb.), ISBN 0-8223-2723-6.

The torrent of publications on just about every conceivable dimension of global culture is somehow epitomised by this volume. Over 340 pages long, it includes pieces which are about as uneven, unconnected and, in some cases, uncertain in purpose, as can be imagined. At one end of the spectrum, there is a two-page item comprising three photographs of African women taken by the Senegalese video maker, writer and photographer Fatu Kande Senghor. The piece is titled 'On the Predicament of the Sign: The Modern African Woman's Claim to Locality', but since no text at all accompanies the photographs, the reader is provided with no clue as to likely connections between title and image. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a theoretical blockbuster by the American sociologist Saskia Sassen which is titled 'Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization'. Sassen's concern is with the 'considerable internal differentiation and growing mutual imbrication' between the global and national, and to this end, '(t)he theoretical and methodological task of this essay will be one of detecting/constructing the social thickness of these dimensions with the aim of developing a suitably textured understanding of dynamic spaces of overlap and interaction' (p.261). If this is the language that you speak, there are 20 unremitting pages of it for you to savour, each of which systematically obliterates any conception of social agency as most anthropologists would understand that term.

There are, however, three essays which are worth drawing to the attention of an anthropological readership, the first being Arjun Appadurai's 'Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination'. Although this is the first essay in the volume, Appadurai does not take on the customary editorial role of drawing out, ordering and assessing themes, issues and ideas which run through the collection. In fact, much of the essay is drawn from two earlier publications. Yet Appadurai has an important point to make: among the many relations of disjuncture, difference and division constituted between the multiple flows of global culture, one of the most significant is 'a growing disjuncture between the globalization of knowledge and the knowledge of globalization' (p.4). By way of response, Appadurai argues, it becomes increasingly important to exploit the globally enhanced role of the imagination in social life by breathing new life into area studies. Appadurai is aware of the substantially loaded nature of the conce pt of area studies: the boundaries and the parameters of contemporary areas of significance are different from those which informed earlier anthropological approaches; and their analysis will require more in the way of collaborative research than the discipline has been accustomed to. It is, however, from this kind of research that new knowledge can be created and thus provide the oxygen for transnational advocacy networks, the type of political alliance Appadurai considers most appropriate to realising grassroots improvement and reform under global conditions.

The second paper worth reading is by Steven Feld. 'A Sweet Lullaby for World Music' examines the trajectory of world music from the 1960s when, faced with the absolute dominance of Western music, it had a distinctly populist ring to it, through to the 1990s, by which time it had become not only the object of ceaseless media attention but had been thoroughly commoditised as well. Other social analysts have traced this trajectory before now in relation to specific genres of world music, and generally ended up by lamenting the resultant loss of authenticity (for which read, 'primitiveness'.) But in addition to describing this slice of global cultural history with admirable clarity, Feld's assessment is more complex: whilst world music is, on the one hand, appraised through the trope of anxiety, on the other hand, there is always the trope of celebration, and it is the contradictory relation between the two which is analytically intriguing. In the second part of his article, Feld provides a fascinating narrative from the rich and complex discourse generated by, and circulating around, world music, an account which well illustrates his general argument. He charts the saga-like progress of a Baegu lullaby as it becomes part of transnational cultural flow. Multiple renderings of the sweet lullaby, Rorogwela, eventually resulted in international recognition and substantial financial gain: but behind that register of success lay a story of labyrinthine cultural politics which involved, amongst many others, the renowned saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the Norwegian Press Council, and Feld himself. Feld's point is this:

... even this introductory accounting begins to make clear how companies, performers, recordists, organizations and media can now find their identities embroiled in complex multilocal song histories. These histories can be reviewed as signs of anxious and celebratory contradictions in world music and as signs of globalisation's uneven naturalisation. (p. 210)

The third important paper is by Anna Tsing and it is a tour de force from which many important analytic lessons can be gleaned. Tsing's concern is to detail the brief but remarkable history of the goldmining company Bre-X, the brainchild of a semi-educated Canadian bankrupt who went to Indonesia looking for investment opportunities at about the same time as Australian mining companies were pulling out. Bre-X struck gold in 1992 and created a kind of Kalimantan Klondike: its growth was spectacular by any standards and, as the word spread, thousands of (especially North American) investors rushed to invest their savings in the company. Yet when the company was taken over by the corporate mining behemoth Freeport, Bre-X was revealed to be a total sham. Far from being the greatest gold strike ever, '(t)here was nothing there' (p.157).

How to explain all this? For Tsing, it is to be understood as a rich and elaborate cultural performance, a highly imaginative conjuring trick, which wove a wide range of interests, ideas and images into a vastly seductive web, the appeal of which became transnational in scope. Tsing focuses on the interrelationship between three key variables, finance capital (predominantly from outside Indonesia), franchise cronyism (rife inside the country, above all in the ranks of the elite), and frontier culture (in which Kalimantan is constructed as a place of mystery, fable and untold promise). She details how these combined into 'a great fire', (p.1 63) a vast conflagration which had enormous consequences for socially and spatially dispersed populations in different parts of the world. Like Feld, Tsing emphasises the diversity of people who become involved in an economic and political project in which any distinction between the local and the global instantly proves hypothetical. The art of conjuring which brought Bre -X into spectacular being was 'practiced not only by Bre-X officers and employees but also by the analysts, reporters, investors and regulators who formed their retinue' (p.168). In this world of trickery, magic and myth making, Tsing accords a distinct iconic place to contracts of work (CoWs) without which mining cannot take place in Indonesia. Once accessed however, the CoW becomes a fetish object, a miraculous thing, which has the power to create an exceptional range of unrivalled opportunities, above all the spectacular accumulation of private and national wealth.

The contributions by Tsing and Feld make absolutely clear why it is so important for social anthropologists, when faced with the complexities of global culture, to continue to hold on, as the former puts it, 'to a disciplinary heritage of attention to up-close detail' (p.160). Tsing in particular demonstrates that by doing so we can throw light on global processes of critical significance whilst at the same time 'freeing critical imaginations from the specter of neo-liberal conquest' and detailing how the flux and flow of latter day capitalism ceaselessly creates 'new sources of hope, and, of course, new nightmares' (p.188).

Peace, Ade
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peace, Ade. "Globalization." The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, p. 266+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA105657591&it=r&asid=121a16ee15a55304e4134867adcec18f. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A105657591
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
Sergio Fielder
46.2 (Summer 2002): p164.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Berghahn Books, Inc.
http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/sa/

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Appadurai's Modernity at Large provides a cultural perspective on the impact and political possibilities of globalization. As an academic born into a middle class family in Bombay, but now working at a U.S. university, Appadurai positions himself as a postcolonial intellectual. He writes about the subject as someone whose own identity and professional life has been affected by the cultural instabilities and displacements engendered by globalization, lie points out, like others have done before him, that globalization is not a new process: modern capitalism has always been a global system. Appadurai, however, is distinctively interested in the Global Now. That is, in the ways in which over the last twenty years there has been a drastic rupture in the pattern of social relations globally. For him, therefore, the Global Now calls for a new political and theoretical imagination to make sense of the almost ubiquitous effects globalization now exercises on people's lives.

Whereas earlier cultural analyses of globalization, such as Friedman's, attempted to locate cultural and identity formation within a world systems approach, Appadurai attempts to conceptualize the global from the perspective of the local. <> and above all, on the question of how popular imagination is transformed within the context of a globally embedded everyday life. In this respect, he problematizes three major dimensions of community life as it is affected by the Global Now: <> He displaces the political and theoretical narratives of modernity, but makes no attempt to offer an integrating framework to analyze or offer a solution for the crises of sovereignty, conflict, and social polarization. Moving away from the political "architecture of modernization theory" provided by the nation-state, he resolutely argues for a postnational perspective.

The impact on the everyday of the electronic media, and the proliferation of grassroots micro-narratives of new social movements are features of the Global Now, which are radically upsetting the boundaries and the possibilities of what constituted national identities. To hold on to national identity as a cultural response to and defense against globalization amounts, for Appadurai, to a nostalgic desire for the dignity of a past that never was. He stresses instead the emergence of new spaces, which are transversing the national, and are characterized by their mobility, juxtaposition, and difference. Drawing on the spatial metaphor of landscapes, he puts forward a typology of five "global cultural flows" anchoring the "imagined world" of the new postnational subject. He calls them ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.

Ethnoscapes refers to landscapes inhabited by those human groups who live constantly on the move even if they have to settle in a single place. This space includes a variety of nomadic individuals ranging from refugees to tourists. Mediascapes are produced by the mass `mediatic' systems and products--such as newspapers, magazines, films, among others--which disseminate information at a global level. Technoscapes are those landscapes dominated by the diffusion of both mechanical and informational technologies around the world. Financescapes, on the other hand, form the transnational texture of economic relations created by the increasing flow of capital movements. Finally, ideoscapes refer to the landscape of political ideologies and imagery often associated with a particular state or social movement, and include the different discourses about freedom, democracy, human rights, and so on.

By using these concepts, Appadurai stresses that within the new global flows there has developed a global public sphere and new forms of social imagining which are fundamentally disassociated from the territoriality of the nation-state. Like capital and mass communications, nations themselves are becoming diasporic and hybrid. To be a Hindu, a Tamil or a Chinese today is not necessarily to embrace a national identity that takes place within the civic institutions of a modern state, but <> Accordingly, Appadurai vigorously argues against any return to "primordialist" assumptions about cultural identity, where ethnicity is simply understood as built on strong collective feelings of group identity and boundaries drawn from primary affective relations, such as those of kinship and place. For him, primordialism presumes an unsurpassable cultural bridge between different ethnicities and national groups. Thus, Appadurai's explanation for interethnic violence is national implosion, not irreconcilable primordialist differences. Ethnic violence then is the product of a collective strategy of solidarity in a desperate attempt to find security. He suggests that the founding ground for ethnic violence is product of the impact of global forces on the local, and the need to secure an identity, not the "enclosed" nature of ethnic groups.

For Appadurai locality can never be disembedded from the global. In fact, the local--including its ethnic dimensions--is itself produced by the overlapping, interaction, and tension between the different types of landscapes outlined above. His perspective certainly presents a major challenge to ethnography which has often tended to research the local as an ontologically self-contained entity.

Although Modernity at Large gives privileged attention to the cultural aspect of globalization, it does not adopt the "culturalist" approach of Cultural Studies. Appadurai still anchors the emerging forms of postnational subjectivity in larger political and economic processes. However, although he makes an ethical argument for a postnational politics, he provides few clues as to what that politics might entail. As a consequence Appadurai runs the risk of endorsing in the postnational a vision resembling that promoted by ideologues of neo-liberal globalism. He does not share the same imagination and project, but his critique of the nation-state and primordialism might well be construed as an attack on discourses and strategies of power that the globalizing forces of capital have already displaced. Despite these concerns, Modernity at Large represents a crucial work of scholarship for those interested in understanding the cultural implications of the global processes of the last twenty years. That is the reason why, in this book, Appadurai's attempt to conceptualize the postnational remains an inescapable point of reference for all those researching culture in the new global context.

Sergio Fiedler, Writing, Journalism, & Social Inquiry, University of Technology, Sydney.

Fielder, Sergio
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fielder, Sergio. "Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization." Social Analysis, vol. 46, no. 2, 2002, p. 164+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA94872728&it=r&asid=320778e922ac6da56f2f3a5dc7ccd0f5. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A94872728
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
GIJSBERT OONK
11.1 (Spring 2000): p157.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. By ARJUN APPADURAI. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 229. $18.95 (paper).

Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to state that "we all live in a global village," "the world is shrinking," and "the world is growing smaller." Economists, sociologists, and anthropologists all realize that globalization has dramatically changed the world. However, they do not agree on the causes and consequences of these changes. In particular, what is "new" about globalization? World historians, especially, are aware of the fact that the "shrinking" of the world started as early as 1492 or 1498. Indeed, mass migration, cross-cultural trade, warfare, and colonization have economically, culturally, and politically been changing the shape of world history over the past five centuries already.

In Modernity at Large the cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai has taken up the challenge and has attempted to show what is new about "globalization" in the last two decades or so (pp. 44, 53, 66, 139). His main aim is to focus on the cultural dimension of globalization. He explores how the interconnectedness of migration and modern mass media affects the imagination and defines notions of neighborhood, nation, and nationhood. In his view, it has only been in the past two decades that the media and migration have begun to deterritorialize, which has led to the emergence of long-distance nationalism, "diasporic public sphere," ethnic violence, and the growing disjunction of various economic, cultural, and political aspects of daily life.

Here we arrive at the heart of Appadurai's theory. Appadurai became famous in the early 1990s for his neologism--the use of the suffix -scape, which, when combined with the appropriate prefixes (ethno-, media-, techno-, finance-, and ideo-), offers a radical new framework for examining cultural dimensions of globalization over the last two decades. Central to Appadurai's theory is that the new global cultural economy "cannot longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (p. 32). These various "scapes" suggest an alternative spatial rendering of the present: one that is not fixed as a typical landscape might be, but amorphous and flowing in various directions and with various sizes. These "scapes" are the building blocks of the contemporary imagined worlds.

Modernity at Large is best seen as an extension and a repetition of Appadurai's earlier essays. His appealing rhetoric made him very popular among postmodernists. Despite their rhetorical brilliance, however, these essays have their limitations. Why, for example, does Appadurai distinguish only five "scapes," where I could think of many more, such as "science" and "environment." Furthermore, what is the relation between the different "scapes"? Is there any relation, and if so, how does it work? If the main aim of these essays is to offer a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, what then is so cultural about "finance-scapes"? In his first chapter, "Here and Now," Appadurai makes a great fuss over the difference between culture, cultural, and culturalism, but as far as I can see, he does not use his own analytical framework in any of his other chapters. In other words, Appadurai gives us few clues as to how to use his "scapes" in empirical research. This is particularly striking in his other essays, where he hardly refers to his own theoretical model. The main themes of the other essays in Modernity at Large include the "Indianness" of Indian cricket, the use of counting bodies in colonial states as an important new agenda for a critique of colonial rule, and some thoughts on the "production of locality."

Most of these essays refer to another main theme in the book related to "scapes": the fact that modern media and mass migration have separately and together produced an increasing degree of instability in the creation of selves and identities. The near universal access to mass media images has democratized and extended the imagination of ordinary (and often illiterate) people around the world. This extends Benedict Anderson's idea of the "imagined community" of the nation-state toward an idea of "diasporic public spheres." Modernity at Large exceeds the boundaries and determinations of the nation. Appadurai describes the well-known examples of Turkish guest workers in Germany who watch Turkish films in their German fiats or Koreans in Philadelphia who watched the 1988 Olympics in Seoul on satellite. However, I would like to know how these examples differ from the deterritorialization of Chinese culture in the last two centuries. Why is it that most Chinese all over the world retain some feelings of "Chineseness," despite the fact that their families have lived in New York, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and other places for generations and differ in cultural background in terms of language, common history, and religion? How did mass media influence their identity, and was it the same in Bombay as it was in New York? This is doubtful.

Given these critical remarks, it would be too easy to write Appadurai's essays off as a postmodernist literary exercise, especially since sociologists around Martin Albrow try to extrapolate from Appadurai's "scapes." (See J. Eade, ed., Living in the Global City [New York: Routledge, 1997]; and M. Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997].) Albrow sees Appadurai's theory as a stimulus to the sociological imagination for current research. In my mind, it would be even more interesting if Appadurai himself would take up the challenge to do empirical socio-historial research, using his ideas of "scapes" in order to show "the newness" of various cultural changes within the sphere of globalization and, more important, the empirical value of his theory. This would be a useful exercise indeed, and the results could bring postmodernists' notions and discussions about globalization beyond what world historian Janet Abu-Lughod has termed "the global babble." Modernity at Large has become a must for postmodernist students and scholars, and it has the potential to become a must for other scientists as well.

GIJSBERT OONK Erasmus University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
OONK, GIJSBERT. "Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization." Journal of World History, vol. 11, no. 1, 2000, p. 157. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA61939366&it=r&asid=15756c70bf3429e5753a40bd67e0828f. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A61939366
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
D.A. de Zoysa
32.4 (Winter 1998): p1073.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc.
http://www.cmsny.org/

By Arjun Appadurai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Pp. 229.

D. A. DE ZOYSA University of Edinburgh

Modernity at Large explores the interconnection between electronic media and transnational diaspora and their effects on collective imagination and action. In particular, Appadurai demonstrates how imagination and nostalgia provide new avenues for creating alternatives to the modern nation-state. In problematizing the nation-state, he asks why ethnic violence may precipitate in one historical context but not in another and why such violence is spreading despite the dismantling of the hyphen (in "nation-state") in the face of globalization and consumerism. In addressing this two-pronged question he attempts nothing less than a "general theory of global cultural processes" (p. 45). He queries primordialist explanations which presuppose a hidden substratum that erupts in (unpredictable) ethnic violence and draws on Rosenau's rendition of chaos theory which, in a nutshell, claims that small perturbations may be magnified exponentially or "cascade," so that an apparently random event could precipitate large-scale violence. Specifically, the uncertainty of ethnic categories or identities may result in a disjunction between appearance and reality (so that one's neighbor may turn out to be a Muslim rather than a Serb), feelings of betrayal and, in turn, violence. Finally, the mobilization of ethnic identities is initiated by the modern nation-state which, despite approaching its demise, whips up primordial sentiments through "national" sports (cricket) and the enumeration and compartmentalization of populations into administrative units (census). Thus, rather than give rise to cultural homogenization, globalization has resulted in a reification of ethnic identities at the local and regional levels.

Modernity at Large is a masterpiece in interdisciplinary thinking, as Appadurai draws on a range of theorists from disciplines as far-flung as anthropology, history, literary studies, economics, and philosophy with remarkable aptitude and ease. Though operating at differing levels of abstraction, the overall method is both historical and comparative, as he delineates how global realities such as international finance and commerce, refugee flows, AIDS, internet, CNN, transnational organizations, and NGOs have come to supplant the bounded nation-state and are embedded in local life worlds (the neighborhood or region) which are sites of contestation of power. Thus rather than narrowly focus on "thick" descriptions of the concrete particular, he highlights how the habitus is both reproduced and transformed through the imaginative practices of collectivities both locally as well as worldwide. The end result is a formidable critique of essentialist views of culture (as noun) in favor of the more heuristic adjective "cultural" which is inscribed in bodily subjects and everyday practices.

In promulgating the thesis that the neoclassical economists' notion of consumption must be rectified by situating it in time, Appadurai introduces the notion of "fetishism of the consumer," so that in the global economy fashion (which is rooted in a collective nostalgia for the past) becomes the mediating link between production and consumption. However by focusing on the commoditization of time from the vantage point of consumption alone, the other side of the coin (production) remains untheorized and fairly incidental to the book. Nonetheless, this perspective today characterizes the disciplines as a whole, and Modernity at Large remains testimony to the theoretical and methodological contributions that transnational anthropology and historiography have to offer in an era of globalization and ethnic violence.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zoysa, D.A. de. "Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization." International Migration Review, vol. 32, no. 4, 1998, p. 1073+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54205111&it=r&asid=4a76e36bd5830778757e635e3556b8c2. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A54205111