Fifty Key Anthropologists

Arjun Appadurai was born and raised in Mumbai, India. He initially came to the United States after attending Elphinstone College in Mumbai, earning his BA from Brandeis University in 1970 and then obtaining his MA (1973) and PhD (1976) from the University of Chicago. As a student at Chicago he worked closely with both anthropologists and historians at the innovative and interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought. His geographic area of focus from then till now has been South Asia, and during his graduate studies he worked closely with renowned scholars of South Asia including the anthropologist, Bernard Cohn. He went on to teach and do research in Anthropology departments at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Yale University between 1979 and 2003. He then became the Provost and the John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at the New School of Social Research. As of January 2009 he became the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of numerous scholarly fellowships and awards. The personal and intellectual impact of both his experiences as an

immigrant and his interdisciplinary training are revealed consistently throughout Appadurai’s fecund intellectual career. His scholarly publications on India have traversed various cultural terrains, including religion, colonialism, agriculture, cuisine, public culture, and urbanization. His earliest intellectual project was to question the tendency to characterize South Asian culture as static rather than exploring the importance of change to this region. His first book, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: a South Asian Case (1981), a revision of his dissertation, was a fine-grained study of a South Asian Hindu temple, Sri Partasarati Svami Temple, a Sri Vaisnava shrine. Using a specific place of worship as his field-site, Appadurai combined archival and ethnographic methodologies to re-examine assumptions in both anthropology and history as to what defines ‘traditional’ Hindu worship practices. Appadurai has committed himself to question and re-examine

received wisdom regarding the best and most appropriate ways to investigate the material and symbolic organization of social life. This commitment is readily apparent in a special issue of Cultural Anthropology edited by Appadurai called ‘Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory’ (1988). Here Appadurai questioned the tendency of academic disciplines to rely on certain ‘territories of

knowledge’ to demarcate social reality in particular ways, thus shaping conceptual and theoretical frameworks and ultimately the organization of the disciplines themselves. Other essays that reconsider how the geography of South Asia has been anthropologically traversed, relying on certain gateway concepts, include ‘Center and Periphery in Anthropological Theory’ (1986a) and ‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’ (1986b). His introductory essay in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in

Cultural Perspective (1986) re-examines the notion of a commodity by considering the process by which value becomes attached to things. Appadurai proposed that commodities themselves, as much as or more than the larger exchange systems within which any individual commodity is embedded, have powerful stories to tell about social organization. These stories can not be well documented unless multiple disciplinary perspectives are embraced. A theory of the social life of things became a powerful tool for analyzing the social and material conditions involved in exchange systems. This essay as well as the edited volume has been widely used in anthropology, history, and other allied disciplines. He has continued to publish essays interrogating the epistemologi-

cal and ontological foundations of disciplinary knowledge in the social sciences, focusing on the discipline of anthropology and the geographic region of South Asia. Recent examples include ‘The Geography of Canonicity’ (1993), ‘Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts’ (1996a), and ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’ (2000a). By the late 1980s Appadurai also began to incorporate theories of

migration and globalization into his scholarship, further moving his thinking away from the classical anthropological strategy of linking a geographic locale with a bounded community and culture. The fluidity of symbolic and material life, both across time and through space, which had been articulated in The Social Life of Things, moved to the center of his scholarly work. In collaboration with his late wife, the historian Carol Breckenridge, he commenced a new intellectual project on the notion of ‘public culture,’ that was a novel recasting of former, spatially demarcated definitions of culture, a necessary task given the increasingly economically and culturally connected social realities of modernity. With public culture, groups of people can share values, beliefs, and practices (for example relationships to mass media) but not share a geographic locale. In 1988 they founded the renowned scholarly journal Public Culture which created a forum for scholars interested in pursuing the construction and

movement of cultural ideas, practices, and formations across national, linguistic, class, race, and gender boundaries. Although Appadurai’s published record on globalization and public culture is notable, he has also been heavily involved in creating intellectual environments for other scholars to further explore interdisciplinary projects on culture and globalization, first with the journal, and subsequently as the founding director of the Chicago Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago and as director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University. The book Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,

first published in 1996, compiled his scholarship on culture and globalization, creating new analytic frameworks for understanding all manner of endeavors, including watching television, playing cricket, and counting people. In this collection, Appadurai addressed debates in social theory as to the possibilities of human agency in the face of social and economic constraints, particularly consumer capitalism, examining closely the role of mass media in creating new globalized arenas for values, practices, and beliefs. His view was generally optimistic: ‘consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery, part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency’ (1996b: 7). For Appadurai, anthropologists must address the role of consumption in modern societies, deploying the ethnographic gaze to focus on the role of consumption practices in people’s everyday lives. At the same time, his analysis of economic forms of consumption is mediated by his investment in the power of symbols and signs in people’s everyday lives. The essay, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,’ reprinted in Modernity at Large, was particularly influential because Appadurai, among the first anthropologists to problematize the concept of culture in the context of globalization, created a case for future scholarship focusing on what he defined as global cultural flows. He called for scholars to look at what he calls disjunctures in the global system, with a focus on landscapes based not on territories but rather on ‘perspectival constructs.’ These are: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. For example, members of a given ethnic group may form distinctive enclaves or temporary communities throughout the world as immigrants, guest workers, refugees, tourists, and businessmen (global ethnoscapes). The environmental movement spreads to many different cultures, adapting to each environment (global ideoscapes). Television and computers have taken over the world, but the technologies and media products have

to some degree been indigenized (global technoscapes and mediascapes). The focus on such constructs, Appadurai argues, allows scholars to identify the emergence of an integration of material and symbolic actions, now global in scope but still culturally inflected. His own theoretical perspective works to more fully reconcile the economic system of capitalism into the emerging academic corpus connecting all aspects of globalization by fully engaging material conditions with systems of meaning. Recently Appadurai has extended his commitment to creating

communal intellectual spaces to understand globalization by investing in research that involves greater civic engagement. He is the founder of the non-profit PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research) in Mumbai. He is also the co-founder and co-director of ING (Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization). His current research focuses on the effects of globalization, particularly in the South Asian context, by looking at ethnic violence, urbanization, and new forms of grass-roots activism. The recently published Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) chiefly concentrates on the connection between globalization and contemporary ethnic conflicts. Appadurai has always embraced anthropological preoccupations as

powerful ways of informing understandings of the human experience. For example, he has recently discussed the importance of the discipline’s long engagement with magic, which he defines as ‘what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm.’ He then calls it a ‘universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control,’ a universal feeling that has allowed, for example, Americans to accept certain banking practices that could be seen as magical (Immanent Frame, November 2008). In an interview, Appadurai uses Mary Douglas’s seminal ideas in Purity and Danger to help explain modern tensions between the middle classes in Bombay and their slum-dwelling neighbors (Perspecta34, ‘The Illusion of Permanence,’ June 2003.) Appadurai’s version of navigating ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ideas

within the discipline of anthropology created exciting new intellectual paths. His ideas helped shape the anthropological research of many scholars and students, leading to contemporary ethnographic inquiries considering movement, imagination, consumption, and media in the contemporary construction of culture. As Appadurai asserts in Modernity at Large, ‘I view locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial’ (1996b: 178). His efforts to articulate

and elucidate this alternative definition of place, geography, and culture, as well as the implications for individuals, communities, and the formation of knowledge, has allowed several generations of anthropologists to cross intellectual boundaries and discover new scholarly frontiers just as many thought that world had, once again, become flat.