ABSTRACT
Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization introduces important ideas about how anthropologists and others should conduct research in the context of globalization. Appadurai also introduces significant methodological insights that have proved to be helpful within globalization studies. Appadurai’s emphasis on the heterogenization of cultural forms helped anthropologists to link the global and the local. Some social scientists are building on Appadurai’s idea of “scapes.” They are defining additional “scapes” where conjunctures and disjunctures occur among global cultural flows. However, as Appadurai predicted, transnational social movements are growing, addressing human rights, women’s rights, social justice for the poor, and other global issues. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai argues that scholars should study the cultural dimensions of globalization through the conjunctures and disjunctures between five “scapes,” or dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.
