Appadurai 12/4

In his work, Appadurai discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization. Appadurai articulated a view of cultural activity known as the social imaginary. For him, the imaginary is composed of five dimensions of global cultural flow: (1)ethnoscapes;(2)mediascapes;(3)technoscapes;(4)financescapes;(5)ideoscapes. Situating globalization in the context of what he views as the transition from an international to a postnational political order, Appadurai argues that the ease and frequency with which media and migrants cross borders is producing new ways of imagining and creating alternatives to the nation-state. He talks about the role of “imagined communities” in the making of the nation-state into his own concept of “diasporic public spheres,” which he believes will bring about its demise. According to his analysis, these “diasporic public spheres” are forged in and through multiple overlapping “scapes”, the parts of global flows which, he contends, facilitate transnational imaginings and make the nation-state insignificant. Appadurai’s scapes offer a user friendly way of thinking about the fluid and smooth nature of goods, images, and human populations in the late-twentieth century, as well as the ways in which they encourage the reimagining of human communities. Part of his argument about the coming decline of the nation-state rests on his analysis of the increasingly transnational nature of cultural groups and the erosion of the connection between nation and state. As populations move across space and across borders, as they reconstruct and reimagine their histories, Appadurai states that cultural groups are becoming less tied to particular geographic places. He calls for a translocal approach to anthropology which can take more fully into account the complexity of human lives in the contemporary world. Although he may underestimate the persisting importance of local spaces for many cultural groups, Appadurai’s point about the need for greater attention to the complicated, translocal, and global processes that affect the lives and imaginations of people worldwide is well taken. I agree that the relationship between the global and the local in the contemporary moment of globalization deserves extensive interrogation. However, whether or not current global processes diminish the importance of the local or the national, they certainly will change the terms by which we understand them.