Revisiting
Appadurai: Globalizing Scapes in a Global World – the pervasiveness of economic
and cultural power
Jason L. Powell
University of Central
Lancashire, UK
Introduction
As
we move forward into the mid 21st century, demographers forecast dramatic
increases in cultural diversity in the general population of the globe, which
will also be reflected in increasing populations.
Globalization has also
produced a distinctive stage in the social history of populational projections,
with a growing tension between nation state-based solutions and anxieties and
those formulated by global institutions (Powell 2011). Globalization, defined
here as the process whereby nation-states are influenced (and sometimes
undermined) by trans-national actors. Human identity has, itself, become
relocated within a trans-national context, with international organisations
(such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and cross-border
migrations, creating new conditions and environments for many displaced people
(Estes, Biggs and Phillipson 2003). The work of Appadurai has had a large
impact on understanding the global dynamics of cultural, technological,
political and economic change.
For Appadurai (1990), the global situation is
interactive rather than singly dominated. The United States no longer dominates
the world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational
construction of "imaginary landscapes." In his widely cited paper
"Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy," Appadurai
argues that in this new conjuncture the invention of tradition and other
identity-markers becomes slippery, as the "search for certainties is
regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transitional communication"
(Appadurai 1990: 5) He also stresses that there are various fears besides that
of Americanization: "it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian
Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as
Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization
for Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic
republics," and we must acknowledge that "one man’s imagined
community is another man’s political prison." (Appadurai
1990: 6).
Appadurai posits the
imagination as “central to all forms of agency, [as] itself a social fact, and
[as] the key component of the new global order. To understand, we must bring
together an understanding of the Frankfurt school idea of images; Anderson’s
imagined community, and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire).
Appadurai proceeds to offer a new vocabulary that helps us to understand the
“new global cultural economy,” itself a product of “disorganized capitalism”
and a complex of “fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics”
(Appadurai
1990: 328). To understand these disjunctures, he posits an interrelating
framework of “global cultural flows”
Appadurai 1990: (328), termed -scapes because of
their fluidity, their dependence on perspective (a landscape looks different
depending on how you look and who is looking):
- Ethnoscapes — the
ever shifting “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which
we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving
groups and persons” (Appadurai 1990: 329).
- Mediascapes – “refer
both to the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate
information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film production
studios) which are now available to a growing number of private and public
interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these
media” (330).”Tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of
reality” (Appadurai
1990: 331).
- Technoscapes – “the
global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that
technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at
high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” driven by
“increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political
possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor” (Appadurai 1990: 329-330).
- Finanscapes – the
flow of capital: “currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity
speculations move mega-monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed” (Appadurai 1990: 330).
- Ideoscapes – “Also
concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently
have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of
movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it” (Appadurai 1990: 331).
For Appadurai, building
on Anderson, these -scapes “are the building blocks of…imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds
which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and
groups spread around the globe” (Appadurai 1990: 329).
These intertwining and
fluid landscapes help us to see the dynamic between homogenization and
heterogenization at play every in these disjunctures between these global
flows. To mark this, Appadurai first splits Marx’s classic fetishism idea into
two:
a. production fetishism- “illusion created
by contemporary transnational production loci, which masks translocal capital,
transnational earning-flows, global mangagement and often faraway workers…in the
idiom and spectacle of local (sometimes even worker) control, national
productivity and territorial sovereignty” (Appadurai 1990: 333).
b. fetishism of the consumer – consumer
turned into a “sign” where the control of producers masks itself via advertising
in assertions of consumer agency (Appadurai 1990: 333).
This is a global
homogenization which is “repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national
sovereignty, free enterprise and fundamentalism in which the state plays an
increasingly delicate role…as arbitrater of this repatriation
of difference.” (Appadurai 1990: 333-334). The problem of
“reproduction in the age of mechanical art:” enculturation even at family level
in age of deterritorialization and instability hastened and made more acute by
mechanical arts in media and ideoscapes. Example of gender and violence as an
example where cultural reproduction in everyday life is getting more and more
difficult and torn (Appadurai
1990: 335-336).
Appadurai
stresses that globalizing and localizing processes, or "global
homogenization" and "heterogenization" feed and reinforce each
other rather than being mutually exclusive, and he calls for more
anthropological studies on the "production of locality" (1995a).
These sociological changes are also reflected in the exchange of ideas and
values as well as imagination. As the movement of people influences cities as
well as countries, even people who are not mobile themselves come in contact
with new ideas, practices, technology, information and economic practices flows
of thought go between people. A good way of modeling the complex interchange of
thoughts between people is as a cultural economy. ( Appadurai, 1996 )
Culture and scapes
The different dimensions of the cultural economy may be and often are
disjoint. People in one place may feel one way about economics and another way,
incompatible with the first, about immigration. These disjunctures may even be
part of a single individual. The disjunctures in the global cultural economy
can be explored by looking at the relationship among five dimensions of global
flows:
The suffix -scape indicates fluidity and irregularity, because it is a
matter of fact that they are all in constant change. As people move,
ethnoscapes change; as technology is moved around and invented, technoscapes
change; as capital moves around the world as part of the global economy,
financescapes change. Extension and changes in reach of media from different
places make mediascapes change. Different television and radio channels are
available in different places. When ideas are exchanged and spread, ideoscapes
change. (Appadurai,1996 )
Global scapes occur in and through the growing disjunctures among these
landscapes. These landscapes are the building blocks of multiple imagined
worlds of historically situated imaginations of persons and groups around the
world. As people encounter the flows, they do so within their historical
context. From their context and the flows, they construct a worldview. The
scapes are deeply perspectival constructs. Therefore, the worldview that anyone
of us constructs depends on who we are, where we are, and what scapes we see
and how we interpret them; therefore there will be multiple ways of imagining
the world, and so there will be multiple imagined worlds. ( Appadurai, 1996
)
Appadurai sees modernity as the practice of imagining where you would
like to be. Following Emile Durkheim, anthropologists view collective
representations as objective social realities and facts (Powell, 2005).
Appadurai proposes that due to relatively recent changes founded on
technological changes, imagination has become such social fact, and that this
leads to a “plurality of imagined worlds.” (Appadurai, 1996) He argues that
imagination has become part of everyday, ordinary life for ordinary people,
instead of being the sole domain of the privileged and powerful.
Ordinary people can and do imagine themselves in different
circumstances and different places, due to the increased rates of migration and
the technologies that transmit images of other lifestyles and other places. He
emphasizes that these lifestyles and places are not fantasy, but are more
properly imagined than fantasized. The mediascapes that people are exposed to
stimulate agency, and the imagination fuels action rather than dreams of
escape. This imagination is taking place on an individual scale, but the
collective imagination of a group of people that begin to feel and imagine
things together is pivotal. As groups share collective imagination, they create
new social realities. (Appadurai, 1996 ) .
Problematizing Finanancescapes and culture
The term ‘financescape’ is one of the
perils of economic globalization, defined as “cross-border movements” of loans,
equities, direct and indirect investments, and currencies that transcend the
power of the nation state. Appaduerai (2006) further describes financescapes as
the imperialism of global flows of finance in which uncontrolled and rapid
movements of capital can destabilise national economies.
It is the evolving financescape and its uncertain
future that is made visible through the contemporary credit crisis that is
rapid due to changes in currency markets,
national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations and the speed at which
they move at in the global arena (Estes, Biggs and Phillipson, 2003).
Financescapes focus on the flow of
currencies, securities, and of capital. To take an example of organised crime
and relationship to financescapes.
Financescapes are extended through de-regulation
and have made it easier for vast sums of money to travel the globe and be
laundered by criminal organisations without interference from national
governments. Mythen and Walklate (2006) makes the point that transnational
organised crime syndicates are able to protect their financial resources in
foreign bank accounts, and are able to network with other criminal
organizations in diverse countries to acquire the necessary funding for their
activities.
Financial payments for these different services as
well as the necessary money laundering is facilitated by escaping nation states
the availability of banking secrecy, lack of regulation and electronic
financial transfers that can move money within seconds on a global scale. In
weak or failing states, such rapid movements of capital are enough to provoke
economic and political collapse (Mythen and Walklate 2006).
Financescapes are also the product of another
global dynamic: privatization and the decline of the nation-state. Severe difficulties are inherent in the capacities of individual
nation states to “fix” or “correct” problems that may result from the pressures
of financial markets with few controls and little social regulation (Marginson
and Sawir 2005). When things go wrong,
costly bailouts by the state can be expected for financial speculators. Appardurai (1996) observes that the logic of
this financial hegemony is to decrease government expenditures and state
intervention through privatization and contracting out and do away with capital
contributions.
Following this, Appadurai
(2006) has characterised the international financial sector to a ‘casino’
metaphor in which assets are traded increasingly by non-bank, private financial
institutions, entirely for speculative profit.
The emergence of ‘around-the-world’ 24/7 financial markets, where major
cross-border financial transactions are made in cyberspace represents a
familiar example of the economic face of globalization (Estes, Biggs and
Phillipson 2003).
The definition and social construction of ‘the problem’ of
state power is transferring from the state and its citizenry to private sector
global finance (Appadurai 1996; 2006; Estes, Biggs and Phillipson 2003). For
example, Powell (2006) points to how the economic stakes and social
consequences of ‘aging populations’ cannot be underestimated for the upholding
of power by multi-national corporations. Looking ahead, the race is on for
‘Global Custody’ through the socially constructed ‘Ticking of the Pensions Time
Bomb’, as described by the Financial Times with Europe as a
‘battleground’ for the US Banks (The Bank of New York, State Street Bank, JP
Morgan and Citibank) competing against the European Deutsche, BNP Paribas and
HSBC for custody of the growing pensions market and the highly lucrative
financial services supporting it. As further incentive to eager financial
enterprises, the ‘global picture’ in private wealth drawn from the lucrative
business of pension providing is by 2012 to exceed $13,000 billion in the USA,
$10,000 billion in Europe, and $7,200 billion in Asia (Powell 2011).
In other words, capital flow is being re-invented through
pensions in financescapes. Financescapes
simultaneously brings home - and exports - the processes of privatization,
competition and rationalization as well as the transformation of pension sectors
of society through flexibilization and deregulation (Estes, Biggs and
Phillipson 2003). Financescapes greatly extends the corporate capacity of
capital to “exit” a nation (and thereby to escape corporate responsibility
and/or taxation) in the course of struggles over regulation of financial
resources (Appadurai 1996; 2006).
Examples of Global Scapes:
The Case of the University
Appadurai (1996) examines
‘globalization’, which he interprets as ‘worldwide connectedness’ through the
idea of ‘global scapes’. Following Appadurai (1996), we can postulate five
dimensions of such global scapes that influence the work of Universities (and
academics) in the globalised environment: ethnoscapes, technoscapes,
mediascapes, financescapes and ideascapes.
Taken as an example of the university, it is these dimensions that
characterise the construction of knowledge across boundaries. That is, people
(academic researchers) travel to conferences, read internationally refereed
publications, write for internationally published academic journals and
books/monographs, use international perspectives and networks to inform their
research etc. The interconnectedness of people provides the ethnoscape
of the academic world.
The
global technology of the ‘world wide web’ facilitates the identification of
knowledge sources, allows up-to-date access to the latest research, provides
global connectedness through email, blogs and Web 2 data processing capacities.
This is the ‘technoscape’ within which we live our academic lives.
Mediascapes
provide information and images from around the world, scripts and scraps of
narrative that are the resources that can be infinitely reassembled and provide
global relevance to prospective research projects. The use of distance learning
by new modes of media such as web based learning packages, learning portals,
and on-line undergraduate and postgraduate degrees illustrate the depth and
breadth of media information of education beyond the physical layout of the
University.
Marginson and Sawir (2005) agree, noting that distance education is evolving
into a post-Fordist global instructional corporatism of open education.
The
ideoscapes are the images and big ideas about the potential of global
interconnectedness that inform our intentions and underpin our ‘realities’.
‘The ideoscape of the “global university” promised freedom of a kind,
positioning it as an autonomous institution providing passage to knowledge,
resources and possibilities unimpeded by national government. The ideoscape of
the ‘global university’ provides the possibility for research to be globally as
well as locally relevant.
Financescapes
flourish in an open trading environment in which the mode of interaction is as
much competitive and cooperative; commercial infrastructures facilitate academic
activity and, increasingly, high profile research.
The
fact that we recognise these dimensions of ‘global flows’ so easily as they are
present in the modern university, should mean that a globalised research
program in universities with a will to locate themselves internationally and
globally.
In
the field of University education, however, the boundaries and barriers to
international research obstruct the global flows. The boundaries which define
and, to a greater or lesser extent, inhibit joint research efforts are not only
the geographic boundaries of the geo-political world, they are also cultural,
methodological and sociological (Danaher and Wyer 1995). The boundaries within
which knowledge is constructed and across which knowledge construction might
take place, but which might be obstructive of the global flows are:
Marginson’s
and Sawir’s (2005) and Appadurai’s (2006) ‘global flows’ are, indeed,
obstructed by some of the same ‘scapes’ that characterise global academic work.
Ethnoscapes
remind us that the academic ‘flow’ of University personnel is within and
towards those already sharing common academic traditions, concepts and
languages (Lather 2004). The technoscapes that facilitate and define the
academic landscape do not provide a uniform vista of instant and reliable
access. In many of the most significant research sites technology is not
reliable, access not widely available (Marginson and Sawir 2005). Although the
global university might be connected into the financescapes of international
research and commercial patents, international educational research does not
figure in the financescape of the global university (Lather 2004). Moreover,
increasingly the research that is most likely to be successful in attracting
large-scale funding is that which meets the ‘Gold Standard’ of ramdomized field
trials (Lather, 2004), rather than participatory, case-based research.
Conclusion:
This paper has attempted to explore
Appadurai’s implicit conceptual toolkit to examine facets of culture. Quite
audaciously, he differentiates five dimensions of global "scapes,"
flowing across cultural boundaries: 1) ethnoscapes, the landscape of persons
who constitute the shifting world in which people live, 2) technoscapes, the
global configuration of technologies moving at high speeds across previously
impermeable borders, 3) financescapes, the global grid of currency speculation
and capital transfer, 4) mediascapes, the distribution of the capabilities to
produce and disseminate information and the large complex repertoire of images
and narratives generated by these capabilities, and 5) ideoscapes, ideologies
of states and counter-ideologies of movements, around which nation-states have
organized their political cultures. We examined the relevance of them to
understanding higher education in the age of ‘scape’.
The
ultimate paradox of scape is the problem of escape. A problem all
institutions have within the contradictions of multiple scapes.
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