Revision summary
Appadurai models globalisation as five disjunctive scapes, not as homogenisation. Ethno-, media-, techno-, finance-, and ideoscapes move at different speeds. Imagined worlds extend Anderson’s imagined communities. Deterritorialisation is the social condition of that map. The model fits migrants, media, and remittances. Critique: thin production, weak borders, and the immobile poor must be added.
Model answer
Introduction
Arjun Appadurai pictured the global cultural economy as irregular flows, not as a single Western culture covering the earth. The five scapes and their disjunctures are the model, and the critique is what the model underplays.
Body
The model
- In Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy and then Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai argued that globalisation is not cultural homogenisation.
- He named five dimensions of global flow: ethnoscapes of tourists, migrants, and exiles; mediascapes of images and news; technoscapes of machines and software; financescapes of capital; and ideoscapes of state and opposition ideologies such as freedom and rights.
- These scapes move at different speeds, so they are disjunctive: capital can arrive without people, images without investment, and migrants without rights.
- Imagined worlds, extending Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, are the social facts people inhabit when they live in more than one scape at once.
- Deterritorialisation is the condition of that life: group, money, and sacred geography no longer sit inside one village fence, a point that also meets George Marcus’s multi-sited ethnography.
What the model does well
- It fits Gulf Malayali labour, satellite television, remittances, and Hindutva or human-rights talk as one field, not as separate chapters.
- It refuses the old isolate of Malinowski’s island as the only unit of culture.
- It keeps imagination as a social practice, which is why film, cricket, and WhatsApp rumours belong in political economy.
Criticisms
- Class, factory, and agrarian production are thinner than in Wolf or Sidney Mintz; scapes can sound like circulation without a shop floor.
- The state is present in ideoscapes but can look weaker than visas, camps, and border police actually are.
- Five lists invite mechanical answers that tick scapes without showing a disjuncture in one case.
- Some critics say Appadurai over-credits mobility and under-credits people who cannot move, including many indigenous communities locked by mines rather than by airports.
- Gender and caste in India need more than a flow diagram; the household still rations who migrates.
Critical use in an answer
- Keep the five scapes as a map of disjuncture.
- Ground them in one chain, such as a Kerala–Gulf ethnoscape plus a financescape of remittances plus a mediascape of telephone serials.
- Add production, border, and inequality so the conceptualisation does not float.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD E[Ethnoscape] --> D[Disjuncture] M[Mediascape] --> D T[Technoscape] --> D F[Financescape] --> D I[Ideoscape] --> D D --> W[Imagined worlds]
Conclusion
Appadurai’s global cultural economy is a theory of disjunctive scapes and imagined worlds, not of one McWorld. It remains the best teaching map of cultural globalisation if class, border, and immobility are written back in.
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Is Appadurai saying culture no longer has a place?
No. He is saying place is networked. A village can still be a node in several scapes.
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How does this differ from cultural imperialism?
Imperialism models a one-way copy of the West. Appadurai models irregular, multi-directional flows and local imagination.
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