Modernity+at+large

1 What quotes capture the critical import of the text?
 * __Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. //Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization//. Univ. Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London__**

“Implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the //work of the imagination// as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. The first step in this argument is that electronic media decisively changed the wider field of mass media and other traditional media.” (p.3)

“Thus, to put it summarily, electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation.” (p.4)

“This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In the chapters that follow, I show that the work of the imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.” (p.4)

“What I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.” (p.5)

“There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, //agency//.” (p.7)

“We have now moved one step further, from culture as substance to culture as the dimension of difference, to culture as group identity based on difference, to culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity.” (pp.14-15)

“In a world of people on the move, of global commoditization and states incapable of delivering basic rights even to their majority ethnic populations (see chap. 2), territorial sovereignty is an increasingly difficult justification for those nation-states that are increasingly dependent on foreign labor, expertise, arms or soldiers.” (p.21)

“Diasporic public spheres, diverse among themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, activists, students, and laborers. It may well be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogenous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogonous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some nongovernmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies).” (pp.22-23)

“Rather, ethnography must redefine itself as that practice of representation that illuminates the power of large-scale, imagined life possibilities over specific life trajectories. This is thickness with a difference, and the difference lies in a new alertness to the fact that ordinary lives today are more often powered not by the givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media (either directly or indirectly) suggests are available.” (p.55)

“The pleasure that has been inculcated into the subjects who act as modern consumers is to be found in the tension between nostalgia and fantasy, where the present it represented as if it were already past. This inculcation of the pleasure of ephemerality is at the heart of the disciplining of the modern consumer.” (p.83)

On census in India: “My general argument is that exoticization and enumeration were complicated strands of a single colonial project and that in their interaction lays a crucial part of the explanation of group violence and communal terror in contemporary India.” (p.115)

“Put very simply, other regimes may have had numerical concerns and they may also have had classificatory concerns. But these remained largely separate, and it was only in the complex conjuncture of variables that constituted the project of the mature colonial state that these two forms of dynamic nominalism came together to create a polity centered around self-consciously enumerated communities.” (p.132)

“In this way, transnational social forms may generate not only postnational yearnings but also actually existing postnational movements, organizations, and spaces.” (p.177)

2 What is the main argument of the text?

Identity and experience is formed in the context of the “paradigm” in a changing socio-cultural landscape of globalization, people are affected by many social forces and institutions in this process of formation. Appadurai focuses on migration and media as constraining and enabling these formations. This changing communicative and physical landscape has consequence visible in the imagination and beliefs of the individual.

3 Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.

Micro-cultural analysis is linked to globalization theory and macro-cultural analysis.

4 Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to.

Cultural Studies, Postcolonial studies, anthropology, media studies, migration studies.

5 Describe at least three of the text’s themes or topics that are of general interest in STS.

Effects of media technology on identity formation. Global communications technology as enabling migration and maintenance of connections across geological boundaries. Developed understanding of cultural shift sets stage for study of implications for participants in knowledge production, and is related to political economic context in which scientists work.

6 Explain how this book could inform your research.

Health tourism People travel for health, with careful analysis of migration as creating cultural pattern, it suggests part of a story for why transnational healthcare is becoming more common.

Methods Grounding ethnographic method into macro/political economy, and cultural studies suggests interesting opportunities for studying cultural change.

Tech Studies Technology mediates many of the cultural shifts he discusses.

Policy Studies Population change and belief shift are central to the creation of appropriate policy, and the changing of “imaginations” speaks to the boundaries of acceptability as well as the underlying desires for the future.