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as the economy, culture, and
politics do not move in the same
direction, thereby causing tensions
in society. An example of this is
the distance between a promise
of consumer goods made by global
companies and the ability of local
people to afford them.
Appadurai’s work addresses
how globalization diminishes the
role of the nation-state in shaping
cultural identity and argues
that identity is increasingly
becoming deterritorialized by
mobility, migration, and rapid
communications. People no longer
hold coherent sets of ideas, views,
beliefs, and practices based on
their nationality or membership
of a state; instead, new cultural
identities are emerging in the
interstices between different states
and localities—what Appadurai
calls translocalities.
Globally imagined worlds
The key to understanding
globalization, says Appadurai,
is the human imagination. He
argues that rather than living in
face-to-face communities, we live
within imagined ones that are
global in extent. The building
blocks are five interrelated
dimensions that shape the global
flow of ideas and information. He
calls these dimensions “scapes”—
ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, finanscapes, and
ideoscapes. Unlike landscapes,
which are characteristically
fixed, Appadurai’s “scapes”
are constantly changing, and
the manner in which they are
experienced depends largely
on the perspective of the social
actors involved.
In this context, social actors
may be any one of a number of
groupings, such as nation-states,
multinational corporations,
diasporic communities, families,
or individuals. The different ways
in which these five scapes can
combine means that the imagined
world that one person or grouping
perceives can be radically different,
and no more real, than that seen by
another observer.Shifting scapes
Appadurai first used the term
“ethnoscape” in a 1990 essay,
“Disjuncture and Difference in
the Global Cultural Economy,”
to describe the flow of people—
immigrant communities, political
exiles, tourists, guest workers,
economic migrants, and other
groups—around the globe, as
well as the “fantasies of wanting
to move” in pursuit of a better life.
The increasing mobility of people
between nations constitutes an
essential feature of the global
world, in particular by affecting
the politics of nation-states.
Mediascapes refer to the
production and distribution of
information and images through
newspapers, magazines, TV, and
film, as well as digital technologies.
The multiplying ways in which
information is made accessible
to private and public interests
throughout the world is a major
driver of globalization. MediascapesARJUN APPADURAI
France has embraced many economic
dimensions of globalization yet seeks
to limit the influence of foreign cultures
by, for example, charging a ticket levy
to help fund the French film industry.provide large and complex
repertoires of images and narratives
to viewers, and these shape how
people make sense of events taking
place across the world.
Technoscapes represent the
rapid dissemination of technology
and knowledge about it—either
mechanical or informational—
across borders. For example, many
service industries in Western
Europe base their customer-care
call centers in India, and Indian
software engineers are often
recruited by US companies.
Finanscapes reflect the almost
instantaneous transfer of financial
and investment capital around the
globe in the fast-moving world of
currency markets, stock exchanges,
and commodity speculations.
Ideoscapes are made up of
images that are “often directly
political,” either state-produced and
intended to bolster the dominant
ideology, or created by counter-
ideological movements “oriented toOne man’s imagined
community is another
man’s political prison.
Arjun Appadurai