Abstract
In this collection of essays, distinguished cultural anthropologist and globalization scholar Arjun Appadurai analyzes how the post-1970s globalization era has profoundly and unevenly impacted the lives of ordinary people around the globe. Tracing the accelerated movements of persons, goods, money, arms, ideas, lifestyles, images, and technologies across regional and national spaces, Appadurai skillfully demonstrates how these movements generate hybrid, changeable, and uncertain local conditions within which human beings must nevertheless establish durability and coherence in their lives. Further, drawing on his anthropological research with slum dwellers in India, Appadurai illustrates how “global flows” exacerbate the vulnerabilities of the world’s poorest not only by depleting their already precarious material conditions, but also by limiting their cultural capacities to envision futures and build knowledge to navigate and transform their uncertain social conditions—what he describes as “the capacity to aspire.” Based on these lessons, Appadurai calls upon social scientists to reconsider common conceptions of culture that emphasize “pastness,” tradition, inheritance, and habitus, and instead bring focus to the future-making capabilities of humans, and the future as cultural fact.
Highly sophisticated and dense, Appadurai’s book offers a wealth of useful theoretical tools for psychologists seeking to conceptualize how emerging global economies and cultural movements condition the possibilities for human life. Further, Appadurai opens up basic questions about culture in the 21st century, which will be of special interest to sociocultural psychologists.
The book is divided into three sets of essays that are worth reading consecutively given their progressive theoretical developments. The first part sets up Appadurai’s anthropological theory of commodities and their circulations in everyday life, which is crucial for understanding how he connects culture with economy. Reading Simmel, Bourdieu, Marx, Weber, Kopytoff, and others, Appadurai argues that commodities need not be limited to “material objects of production,” for all social objects have the potential to become commodities; social objects are considered commodities when they are deemed exchangeable and valuable by particular cultural groups during particular historical periods. Tracing the “social life of things” as they are exchanged within differing cultural and historical contexts, Appadurai shows how the values and trajectories of commodities are further determined by political tensions between differing “regimes of value” or sociopolitical frameworks (about price, bargaining terms, and so on), which transcend cultural boundaries, and as such they regulate the transcultural and transnational movements of commodities. As cultural objects however, commodities carry the tendency to undermine the varied cultural contexts that they enter, at times imposing altogether new social arrangements.
Studying commodities from an anthropological perspective, Appadurai shows how global economic systems are inherently tied up with culture, as they regulate the movement and distributions of “cultural forms.” Cultural forms refer to “a family of phenomena, including styles, techniques, or genres, which can be inhabited by specific voices, contents, messages, and materials” (p. 66); for instance, “the university” or “the nation.” With accelerated commodity exchange, corporate expansion, new communication and transport technologies, and rising illegal markets, Appadurai argues that cultural forms now travel at increasingly high speeds and through new “forms of circulation” (e.g., the internet, migration) that transcend national boundaries, leading to hybrid and shifting cultural conditions with unpredictable social effects. This is nicely exemplified in two illustrative essays that trace the heterogeneous journeys of “the nation,” “sacrifice,” and “memory,” first in the context of Gandhian politics, and thereafter in the deleterious practices of ethnic genocide. Importantly, by tracing these contradictory social movements as they arise through mixed and contradictory global cultural flows, Appadurai brings to the fore how, in the rapidly changing global context, “daily routine requires a miracle of cooperation” (p. 82).
Globalization is not an impersonal process, nor is the global a site where diverse forms coalesce. The global “is the site of the mutual transformation of circulating forms,” which “always occur[s] through ‘the work of the imagination’” (pp. 67–68)—that is, as humans exercise their social, imaginative, and technical capacities to “produce localities” within which they function. The point is that the materials from which we construct our lives today depend less on substantive stories and theories and more on shifting “forms, styles, idioms, and techniques” (p. 68).
In the second part of the book Appadurai draws upon his ethnographic research with slum-dweller activists in Mumbai to show how, despite growing disparities and uncertainties, the world’s poor are developing practices of “self-governance, self-mobilization, and self-articulation” (p. 192) that are changing their “terms of recognition” and challenging assumptions about social change that tend to undermine the capacities of the poor to participate in improving their own conditions. This inspiring account elucidates how the poor build their own knowledge and politics; develop local and global networks, pursue distinct visions of equity, justice, democracy; advocate to broader publics; and in all these ways develop the capacities necessary to navigate their distinct precarious conditions. Appadurai summarizes these efforts in the “capacity to aspire,” defining this as a navigational capacity variably distributed among cultural groups, yet necessary for their active, informed, and democratic participation in overcoming their unequal conditions.
It is because of the urgent need to develop the capacities to aspire of diverse disadvantaged groups that Appadurai calls for an “anthropology of the future,” and devotes the third part of his book to outlining the scholarly protocols and research practices necessary for such a project. Most importantly, to focus on the future means rethinking traditional ideas about humans as the bearers and reproducers of history, customs, and habits, and focusing instead on how different groups construct and seek out unique visions of the good life given their unevenly distributed cultural and economic conditions. The point is not merely to observe what visions are constructed or how persons manage and anticipate these, but to turn these ideas into “a general point of view about humans as future-makers and of futures as cultural facts” (p. 285).
Ultimately Appadurai leaves his readers both disconcerted and inspired. His project clearly shows how for most people today, and especially for those who are poor, displaced, repressed, and/or excluded, “the future presents itself as a luxury, a nightmare, a doubt, or a shrinking possibility” (p. 299). At the same time, he carefully analyzes how these trends may be countered, and the first task for researchers is to study persons as future-makers bestowed with the capacity to aspire. Appadurai’s ideas may be of special interest to sociocultural psychologists who already study the temporal unfolding of human experience and persons as future-oriented cultural agents (e.g., Simão, Guimarães, & Valsiner, 2015). Appadurai’s research could extend this and related work by showing how future-making is not equally distributed across the globe, and how futures as cultural facts are built out of increasingly hybrid, changeable, and uncertain materials.