Appadurai Post

In his writing, Appadurai claims "the central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization". Now if i'm correct I'd say the first part (cultural homogenization) deals with this whole notion of 'sameness' and everything being reproduced/copied/simulated/redistributed in our society. Of course this conflicts with more grassroots strategies and individual efforts to change or redefine objects, ideas, places, etc. in our communities (cultural heterogenization). He says most often this argument for homogenization often dribbles down talking about Americanization and 'commoditization', two topics we have discussed over the course of the semester/relate to CMC key words. One thing I found interesting that Appadurai wrote was how "as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way"...we see this in music, architecture, media, science, spectacles and even in terrorism.


He claims our new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot be understood by previous models. All these variables have to do with tensions between economy, culture, and politics. Appadurai then proposed a framework for exploring these 'disjunctures'  by analyzing five dimensions of global 'cultural flow': ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Now this is where I got confused, I'm not sure I understood what the technoscape or ideoscape (or maybe it was a different 'scape') was necessarily trying to protect/call for, I felt like some overlapped and were worded in ways that made it hard to figure out what Appadurai was trying to say, even after each one's brief introduction. Although I'm sure if they're of any importance then we'll figure it out in class tomorrow.


My favorite quote of the whole piece/every reading since test #2
"one man's imagined community is another man's political prison"

"on my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this post"