ABSTRACT
In his 1996 book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai argues for a new theoretical framework, or working methodology, based on the concept of global cultural flows. This concept is intended to help the study of culture in a modern, globalized world. Appadurai’s framework encourages the study of how ideas, things, and people move around the world in global cultural flows, such as migration and electronic media. Appadurai’s insights provided important new directions for anthropologists who were looking for methods and theories to understand culture in a globalized world. For Appadurai, the multiple threads that make up people’s identities should be the focus of a new kind of ethnography. Ethnography describes both the method of research and the work produced by cultural anthropologists. Although British colonialism ended in India in 1947, the country was still dominated by British cultural influences during Appadurai’s childhood.
