The problem of globalization

There is a general consensus that the contemporary world is best under-stood through the prism of globalization. This view is shared by most social scientists, politicians, journalists, businesses, and indeed broad sectors of the general population. Opinions differ as to whether global-ization is a positive or a negative development, but there is general agreement that whatever is going on is either a symptom or a consequence of globalization. There are many good reasons for this view. The number of passengers on scheduled international flights has risen by a factor of six between 1975 and 2000. The number of international tourist arrivals rose by three and a half times during the same period. Much less happily, the number of internationally displaced refugees rose by around 50 percent in the 20 years before 2000. During the quarter of a century after 1975, the duration of international voice telephone calls rose by around 25 times. We could go on multiplying such striking figures i

Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket

For the former colony, decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not asimple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life. Nowhere are the complexitiesand ambiguities of this dialogue more evident than in the vicissitudes of cricket inthose countries that were once part of the British Empire. In the Indian case, thecultural aspects of decolonization deeply affect every domain of public life, fromlanguage and the arts to ideas about political representation and economic justice. lnevery major public debate in contemporary India, one underlying strand is always thequestion of what to do with the shreds and patches of the Colonial heritage. Some ofthese patches are institutional; others are ideological and aesthetic

The European Lurch to the Right

The most recent signs of a widened swing to the Right in Europe require us to look further afield, to countries like the USA, Russia, Argentina and India. In this perspective, the most troubling trend is that the failure of neo-liberal policies around the world appears to feed support for the Right, and not for the Left

The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development

CARGC Paper 4 reprinted Appadurai’s October 2015 Distinguished Lecture at PARGC. In it, he warned against the dangers of “knowledge-based imperialism and scholarly apartheid” and offered possible ways to avoid them. Appadurai identified a growing rift between media studies and communication studies, with scholars concerned with institutions, power, resources, and large-scale data on one side, and scholars concerned with interpretation, texts, languages, and images on the other. Yet, despite the history of this divide, in CARGC Paper 4, Appadurai outlined what we can do to close the growing distance between media and communication studies.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_papers/1003/thumbnail.jp

The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu

This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the “formula” in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India’s larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.Peer Reviewe

Agricultural Reason in the Shadow of Subsistence Capitalism

This collection of essays by Arjun Appadurai based on his fieldwork in rural Maharashtra, India, in the early 1980s is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. In conversation with agronomists, economists, and development anthropologists, the essays explore the ways agricultural technologies, changes in how surface wells are dug and managed, the provision and sharing of food and management of time, issues of scale in studying rural lives, and how local knowledge is formed and transformed reveal the distinctive character of rural Indian sociality. Locating these features in the context of “subsistence capitalism,” Appadurai draws our attention to the importance of relational practices and the pull of autonomy. These essays offer a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and study ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence

The Haptic and the Phatic in the Era of Globalization

Touch is a universal faculty which lets humans explore intimacy, danger and other aspects of their sensory worlds. In India, the regulation of touch is the key to the maintenance of a highly hierarchical, unjust and humiliating social system. Today, the spread of haptic technologies further complicates the relationship between human beings, machines and the paradoxes of intimacy

Muerte segura: Violencia étnica en la Era de la Globalización

En el artículo, escrito en 1998, se revisan los estudios antropológicos sobre violencia étnica que se habían llevado a cabo desde 1990. En estos estudios se había identificado la incertidumbre  social como catalizador para este tipo de violencia, conclusión de la que se sirve para este análisis de la globalización. Siendo éste un fenómeno que no hace sino crear incertidumbres, la violencia étnica que se desencadena en este contexto resulta brutal

Savoir, circulation et biographie collective

Cet article étudie les liens existant entre la circulation comme fait biographique, comme condition des connaissances anthropologiques et problème des interactions mondiales contemporaines. Ces liens éclairent également le dialogue entre les contingences d'une carrière universitaire et les conditions de production d'une science sociale critique internationale. Il propose aussi quelques réflexions sur l'étude de l'Asie du Sud au cours des trois dernières décennies dans le cadre institutionnel spécifiques des universités américaines.Knowledge, Circulation and Collective Biography. – This paper explores the links between circulation as a biographical fact, as a condition of anthropological knowledge and as a problem of contemporary global interaction. The links also illuminate the dialogue between the contingencies of a scholarly career and the conditions of production of a critical internationalist social science. It also offers some reflections on the last three decades in the study of South Asia in the specific institutional conditions of large research universities in the United States