Introduction

The essay by Arjun Appadurai in the ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy’ (1996: 27- 47), originally published in 1990) made popular the idea of ‘global flows'
with his locution 'scapes' - ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes and
financescapes. He emphasizes the detrimental effect of these flows and argues that they
supersede standard geographical thinking in social-cultural analysis. In this study’s
perspective, there are a number of flows in this conceptualization, and it propels the study of
mobility to suggest other approaches that renew attention to geographic processes and forms
while transcending the flows of static anthropology. This study accepts Appadurai’s emphasis
on the multiplicity of flows but suggest that in the relative ranking of cause and effect, there is
greater weight to flows of capital, especially financial capital, and to a lesser extent the
landscapes of centralized political power, unlike focussing on complete disjuncture and
implicitly causal equality among all the different flows. This angle of looking at his point of
view helps us to understand global inequalities and the continuing importance of boundaries
better than Appadurai’s approach does, and enables us to broach the topic of differentiated
rights and treatments of mobile goods and populations.

Before we look at Appadurai’s essay concerning globalisation, we will define important terms.

Globalization

In a bid to be more globally competitive in international markets, nation-states began opening

their borders in the beginning of the late 20th century. Multinationals and later on, global
companies began to grow and multiply in unprecedented numbers. As a result of free trade, the
market economy of the 20th century has progressively spread at remarkable proportions around
the world. And hence, the recent shift from the international economy to a world economy that
supersedes nations, including their regulations. This shift has been labelled globalization with
the latter’s extended and evolving history yet to be traced to its origin (Acosta and Gonzalez,
2010).

Inspite of its long history, globalization remains almost static as its forces continually aim at
transcending human differences around the world. Globalization is one of the most discussed
concepts across the disciplines but still remains indefinable and confounded. In this respect,
the debate taking place in the literature on globalization is two-pronged as the definition of the
meaning of globalization is still not consensual and its impacts on local cultures are yet to be
circumvented.

For instance, Beck (2000: 80) defined globalisation as “an increasing number of social
processes that are indifferent to national boundaries“ while Giddens (1990: 64) defined it as
“intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that
local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa”).

Culture

Usually, Scholars and researchers differ on a general definition of culture with over 150
plausible definitions identified in the 1950s (Kroeber and Kluckholn, 1952). Hofstede
(1980:25) defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the
members of one group or society or category or nation from another”. The ‘mind’ refers to
thinking, feeling and acting, with consequences for beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. In this
regard, values and systems of values constitute a core element of culture. While the concept of
‘culture’ can be applied to any human collectively, it is mostly used in the case of societies
which refer to nations, ethnic entities or regional groups within or across nations (Hofstede,
2001). As such, culture is concerned with a distinct environment of a community about which
members share meaning and values.

For Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952: 181): Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of
and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive
achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artefacts; the essential core of
culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may,
on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditioning elements of
future action.

Globalization and culture

For millions of years, human groups spanned over immense territories without means of
communications other than reliance on their physical body parts such as their eyes, voices,
hands and legs. With the advent of the urbanized metropolitan cities dating back to more than
5,000 years ago and the beginning of commercial activities, cultural exchanges have taken
place between individuals living among various societies. However, in the past, means of
communication and transportation were limited and cultural characteristics did not circulate as
rapidly and easily as in modern times. With the industrial revolutions, societies began to have
access to machines which allowed them to create cultural products and export them across
borders.

By the 18th century, thinkers had forecasted a non-reversible trend of cultural standardization.
However, the predominance of the nation-state and national economic barriers had protected
and insulated cultures from external influence. Cultural uniformization based on the European
model at the end of 18th century was prevalent, particularly due to the success of the rational
capitalism that characterized Europe and which was the symbol of cultural modernity (Weber,
1905). Additionally, the enlightenment thinkers had forecasted a uniformized and borderless
world in the sphere of values. By the 19th century, cultural industries depended on technical
innovations during the first and second industrial revolutions such as, printing in 1860, and
electricity and cinema in 1890. Further, cultural miscegenation-related fear dates back to 1853
when Arthur de Gobineau wrote an influential essay on the inequality of human races in France.
Marx and Engels noted an intellectual convergence in the literature which was a kind of
intellectual globalization of ideas that preceded the materialistic globalization of goods and
markets.

In the 20th century, cultural industries appeared as communication technology started to

develop and flow seaminglessly across borders. Interactions between globalization and culture
do not seem to be a recent phenomenon. In fact, they constitute, particularly with the influence
of globalization on culture, a contention point in the literature as various theoretical standpoints
have been developed to examine these interactions.

Appadurai on Disjuncture and Difference

In ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Political Economy’, Appadurai briefly sketches
world cultural history. Rather than being entirely new, he grudgingly acknowledges the wide
ranging ‘flows’ of people over the past 500 years. Prior to the contemporary era, colonists,
merchants, warriors, religious proselytizers and traders have interacted on a global scale (p,
27). Appadurai points out that interaction in the past were slowed by limited technologies of
transportation and communication (pp. 27-8). The tempo of connection increased with western
and non-western expansionism, the peak of European colonialism, and the development of
technologies such as the printing press. Despite recognizing continuities in history, he insists
that the present is radically different from the past, with the present being placeless and having
flows (p. 29), and the past being placed and localistic (p. 28). This is heightened by the
contemporary high speed of transportation and rapid flow of information (p. 29).
The context of change and placelessness provides the ground for his principal concern, the
imagination and the 'politics of global cultural ‘flows’. Appadurai echoes the postmodernist
claim that contemporary cultural politics is based on unmoored signs, shifting meanings, and
complex cultural pastiches. However, he focuses on ‘larger global forces' that are involved in
the 'complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes’ with multiple nodes (that is,
the United States is only one among them, rather than being the centre of the world system).
The unleashing of the imagination as a global social practice is, he proposes, something new
and critical, which he sees as standing apart from a list of previous uses of the imagination
(solace, escape, elite pastime) (pp.30-1).

Appadurai’s framework revolves around the analytical trope of disjuncture (p. 32). He
constantly warns us that the ‘new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex,
overlapping, disjunctive order’. Disjuncture and related words appear repeatedly in the essay,
on pp. 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, and 47. There are also related terms, such as chaos,
fracral, fractured, non-isomorphic, etc. He believes that focusing on disjuncture provides a
powerful criticism of Marxist models that give ordered causal priority to capital accumulation
and class relations because they are ‘inadequately quirky’ (p. 33). In particular, this ‘complex,
overlapping, disjunctive order’ can no longer ‘be understood in terms of existing centre-
periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centres and peripheries)’ (p. 32).

Appadurai’s meta theory of disjuncture centres on what he schematically characterizes as ‘five

dimensions of global cultural flows’ (the previously mentioned ‘scapes’). He assures us that
they interrelate but are not causally ordered (being disjunctive). Here, it is worth noting
confusion in the scapes terminology. Scapes, by analogy to landscapes, are the results of
processes, given material shape and meaning by human action. Scapes are distributions at any
given time, results of processes, but are not the processes themselves. The processes, we
assume, are specifiable flows, mobilities, and relations. But this distinction is not always made
clear, with the consequent problem that observation of the patterned distribution (people
consuming a diasporas media products, say) is taken for specification of the flow or relation
(the diasporas history and its culture industries), which may not in fact have been deeply
investigated.

Appadurai’s exposition of scapes is filled with complex and rich analytical remarks, about
which we can hardly do justice here. The key conceptual framework is a strong contrast
between stability (implicitly, lack of action) and movement, with the latter but not the former
seen as worthy of political and cultural analysis of action, relation, and change.

This essay’s critique of Appadurai rests on a combined empirical and theoretical analysis of
processes (flows) from a particular social theory perspective, a loosely Marxist theory of
capitalism (drawing on Harvey, 1982). It is argued in this paper that prioritizing the impact of
the various types of flows allows for a more systematic, coherent explanation of geographic
processes. In particular, financial capital, the most abstract expression of capitalism, has
demonstrable power to impact global society on a greater scale than do the other types of flows
proposed by Appadurai. Capital, in its most abstract form, is a dimensionless (purely
numerical) comparison of rates of accumulation across production processes, as embodied in
the rates of return on investments (often, investments in funding, several steps removed from
physical activities of production and reproduction) Of course, actually existing capitalism is by
no means always abstract or pure; capitalisms are grounded in particular places, products, and
patterns of social relations (Blim, 2000). Furthermore, other sources of determination coexist
but are not as strong as finance capital, such as various states and 'counter-states', idea
networks, specific kinds of transnational corporations, etc.

Heterogenization and Globalisation

While Appadurai, (1996) admits that globalization for the most part originates from Western
cultures, he rejects the idea that this phenomenon constitutes a homogenization of world
cultures resulting from one way exchanges among the latter. In fact, this “school of thought”
argues that globalization generates rather a state of heterogeneity which refers to a network
structure in which nodes tend to connect with each other in regard to certain cultural
dimensions. Two distinct variants of heterogenization can be distinguished as heterogenization
at a local level which refers to a situation where the practices of a sphere of life in a specific
milieu or locale become more diverse over a period of time and the heterogenization at a trans-
local or global level refers to a situation where the practices of a sphere of life in at least two
locales become more distinct over a period of time (Chan, 2011). In short, heterogenization,
which has also been labelled differentiation, relates fundamentally to barriers that prevent flows
that would contribute to making cultures look alike (Ritzer, 2010).

In this perspective, cultures remain different one from another. Heterogenization represents a
process which leads to a more inwardly appearing world due to the intensification of flows
across cultures (Appadurai, 1996). Hence, local cultures experience continuous transformation
and reinvention due to the influence of global factors and forces. It is important to keep sight
of the fact that according to this perspective, cultures do not remain unaffected by global flows
and globalization in general, but the actual crux of the culture remains intact and unaffected,
as has always been (Ritzer, 2010) with only peripheral surfaces directly impacted. Robertson
(2001), who is critical of the focus on processes stemming from the United States and its
homogenizing impact on the world, advocates the notion of heterogeneity with a focus on
diversity, multi-directional global flows and the existence of world processes that are
independent and sovereign of other nation-states.

This paper argues that these flows do not eradicate local cultures; they only change some of
their traits and reinforce others. Along the same line, Wiley (2004) contends that national
cultures, which are fluid constructs, have become part of a heterogeneous transnational field of
culture.

Homogenization scenario

In the homogenization perspective, barriers that prevent flows that would contribute to making
cultures look alike are weak and global flows are strong (Ritzer, 2010). In its extreme form,
homogenization, which is also known as convergence, advances the possibility that local
cultures can be shaped by other more powerful cultures or even a global culture (Ritzer, 2010).
This perspective is reflected in several concepts and models such as the Global Culture,
Americanization and more importantly the McDonaldization theory.

More and more people across different regions and countries in the world seem to watch the
same entertainment programs, listen to the same music, consume common global brand
products and services, and wear the same or similar clothes (Prasad and Prasad, 2006). These
comparable developments in cultural practices are suggestive of the emergence of a “global
culture” (Robertson, 1992) or “world culture”

In other terms, globalization contributes in creating a new and identifiable class of individuals
who belong to an emergent global culture. According to this concept, the selfsame dynamics
of globalization are weakening the connections between geographical places and cultural
experiences (Held and McGrew, 2003), and eroding the feeling of spatial distance which tends
to reinforce a sense of national separateness (Prasad and Prasad, 2006). Thus, globalization,
which is a replication of the American and/or Western cultural tradition (Beck, 2000; Berger,
2002), is considered a destructive force, a recipe for cultural disaster (Jaja, 2010) and an assault
on local cultures which the latter are not able to withstand or resist (Berger, 2002). This is
presumably due to the fact that globalization contributes in atrophying identities and destroying
local cultural traditions and practices, diluting, even eliminating the uniqueness of national
cultures, and establishing a homogenized world culture.

This essay is in conformity with the ‘Disjuncture and Difference’ but against the emphasis on
the tearing down of differences, not in the direction of global homogenization but toward a
kaleidoscopic blending that cuts across geographic units or erases any specific geographic
referent. Appadurai refers to de-territorialisation as a 'central force'(p.37), and has devoted
much of a later essay to it (2003). So his thrust is to eliminate narrow geographic units (it is
‘de’ territorialisation) in the interests of superseding a bounded, localistic sense of culture, but
he is unconcerned with exploring the processes of a more complex geography.

Appadurai, because he is reacting to a predominant (but not universal) position in 20th-century

anthropology that each culture has a fixed, bounded place, emphasizes the mobile components
themselves (e.g., flowing ideas) but not the routes through which they move (what we will call
passageways) nor the places that are momentary end points. In his broad view either there are
places or placeless flows.

Mobilities of various kinds may, however, first, help create spaces. An example is that of
Mexican drug trafficking ‘plaza’, locational spaces cum social networks through which
networks of traffickers transport cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana from
production sites in various parts of Latin America to staging areas on the US border and
ultimately to US cities. Smuggling, in turn, has in both past and present helped create the
‘border’ as a distinctive region.
Second, mobility may reproduce spaces. Corporate cultural political formations within Mexico
depended on the constant coming and going of labor migrants and commercial agricultural
products. It is not just that mobility reproduces particular spaces, but that it may reproduce the
difference between and arrangement among spaces, rather than erasing these differences -for
example, the enduring distinction and yet connection between rural zones of reproduction and
urban zones of paid labor.
Finally, of course, mobility may empty out spaces, bring about a radical rearrangement of them,
or replace them with new scales or units of organized space. Heyman (1991) documented one
such case in Sonora, Mexico, where the partial departure of one fraction of capital based on
mining, and the movement of another fraction into global assembly plants, sparked a permanent
relocation of working class families, spatially rearranging north eastern Sonora from an interior
to border focus. The overall point is that mobility does not obliterate geography but rather
forms an ineluctable element of constitutive and processual geography.

Summary and Conclusions

The critique of this essay does not aim at dismissing Appadurai’s work or at restoring the
scholarly status quo before his intervention. Instead, it suggests that the alternative view of
flows and mobilities constitutes a coherent and productive alternative that is amenable to
synthesis with important themes that Appadurai raises. Geographic spaces are constructed over
time, and flows do not only erode geography; rather, they may create it, reproduce it, transform
it, or undermine it. As a result, globalization is usefully understood as a definable network of
relations among spatially located entities, allowing for some processes that tend toward
multilocality or even truly global coverage. Disjuncture and breakdown of bounded social and
cultural units are contingent outcomes of processes that may also reinforce social and spatial
entities, boundaries, and so forth.

The arguments in this essay are thus not meant simply to emphasize the continued existence
and force of nation-states and borders, although these phenomena continue to have enormous
weight in the world. Nor would it advocate retreating to a concept in which fixed and bounded
societies have analytical priority, and flows are thought of as secondarily taking place between
them. Indeed, it is more inclined than Appadurai to reject isolated socio-cultural units in regards
to the past as well as the present; hence, it disagrees with his perspective of this being an
epochal change (a matter of time periods) rather than a needed reform in scholarly analysis (a
matter of perspectives).

Having laid out these positions, it is useful to revisit some of Appadurai’s most provocative
ideas. First, he is correct to raise the question of imagination within networks of the movement
of people, ideas, and media imagery; one might ask how this conforms to or presses against the
bounds of processual geography (the specifiable lines of movement and interrelated spaces of
which we have spoken).

Second, Appadurai’s sensitivity to incongruence can be carried over into the approach just
delineated. This essay is critical of his repeated emphasis on disjuncture and dismissal of any
kind of relative hierarchy of causation, but positing a completely coherent system would be a
mistake in the opposite direction. The productive relations of movement that we sketched
above may well have important degrees of contingency and incoherence, and these are well
worth exploring, including the human experience of contradictions and unpredictabilities.

Finally, Appadurai’s concern with the challenges of reproduction of culture is well taken, and
not only for the contemporary era; if cultural-geographic spaces are contingent, only sometimes
being stably reproduced by flows and often in either the process of construction or destruction,
and if such processual spaces often involve the flow of people and ideas (as well as goods),
then anthropology’s cyclical, unproblematic ideas of cultural transmission need serious
reassessment. And if we have taken him to task for over-stating the difference between past
and present, it is certainly the case that the processes discussed here are faster and thus more
culturally challenging than they ever have been before.

REFERENCE
Appadurai, Acjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Acosta, O., & Gonzalez, J. I. (2010). A Themodynamic Approach for the Emergence of
Globalization, in K.G. Deng (Eds.), Globalization- Today, Tomorrow, pp. 1-26, Sciyo, Rijeka,
Croatia.

Beck, U. (2000). What is Globalization? MPG Books, Bodmin Ltd., Cornwall.

Kroeber, A., & Kluckholn, C. (1952). Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions,
Random House, New York.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and

Organizations Across Nations (2nd Ed.), Sage Publications, Thousands Oaks, California.

Weber, M. (1921/1968). Economy and Society, Totowa, New Jersey.

Harvey, David (1982) TheLimitsto Capital. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Blim, Michael (2000). ‘Capiralisms in Late Modernity’, Annual Review of

Anthropology 29: 25-38.

Chan, C. S. (2011). Divorcing localization from the divergence paradigm: Localization of

Chinese life insurance practice and its implications, International Sociology, 26 (3):346– 363.

Ritzer, G. (2010). Globalization: A Basic Text, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, UK.

Robertson, R. (2001). Globalization Theory 2000+: Major Problematics, in G. Ritzer & B.

Smart (Eds.), Handbook of Social Theory, pp. 458-471, Sage Publications, London.

Wiley, S.B.C. (2004). Rethinking nationality in the context of globalization. Communication

Theory, 14 (1):78–96

Prasad, A., & Prasad, P. (2006). Global transitions: The emerging new world order and its
implications for business and management, Business Renaissance Quarterly, 1(3):91- 113.

Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, Sage Publications,
London.

Held, D. & McGrew, A. (2003). The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the
Globalization Debate (Eds.), Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

Berger, P. (2002). The cultural dynamics of globalization, in P. Berger & S.P. Huntington
(Eds.), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, pp. 1-16, Oxford
University Press, New York.