ABSTRACT
Arjun Appadurai’s theory of global cultural flows, as set out in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, offers a productive starting point for studying what is distinctly modern about globalization. Many people share his view that what is characteristically modern about globalization is reflected in the unpredictable movements of ideas, things, and people that he terms “cultural flows.” The majority of references to the text relate to Appadurai’s theory that there are five “scapes” of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Appadurai’s emphasis on the social imagination was favorably received as a contribution to a longer-term attempt to understand human agency within global cultural forces. Some have built on Appadurai’s work by naming other important “scapes” in addition to the five he outlined. For example, Martin Albrow and other sociologists in the United Kingdom have developed the concept of “socioscapes,” or flows of relationships and networks.
