An Article Review of Ajun Appadurai’s Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

In the article, the author discussed the disjunctures on the general theory of global cultural processes. He used 5 dimensions of global cultural flows to explain the disjuctures, namely, the ethnoscapes that constitutes “the shifting world in which we live”, the technoscapes to be “the global configuration of technology that moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries”, the financescapes to mean “the disposition of global capital that is more mysterious, rapid, and difficult to follow”, the mediascapes that refer to “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information”, and the ideoscapes that are “concatenations of images that are directly political and that have to do with the ideologies of states and counterideologies of movements”.

Appadurai proposed the “dynamics of global cultural systems as driven by the relationships among flows of persons, technologies, finance, information, and ideology.” He argued that these set of terms, these dynamic flows, intersect and overlap creating instability and disjuncture in patterns of globalization leading to the complex interactions between relationships of difference and sameness that are context-dependent.

On the specifics, the author talked about the “the tension on cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.” He critiqued the idea of “Americanization” of Filipinos arguing that “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes.” He discussed the idea of “imagined worlds” similar to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” to argue that we live in a universe of multiple imagined worlds that are constituted by “historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread across the globe.”

Appadurai connected his idea of cultural flows to deterritorialization. That deterritorialization is “one of the central forces of the modern world.” It creates a venue, termed by the author as “new markets,” for the things that constitute the characteristics of the different “landscapes” such as film, art, travel, food, clothing to meet the desires of deterritorialized populations for contact with their homelands.

With the author’s discussion on the politics of global cultural flows centered on “Americanization”, I was struck with the term he borrowed from Fredric Jameson, the “nostalgia for the present,” of “nostalgia without memory.” This is in reference to Filipinos’ affinity for American popular music. In the context of CAR, this can be observed by the country music heard being played by a friend, a neighboring house, in bars, radio stations, even the audio tapes played over and over again when riding a bus along Halsema H-way. Indeed, the contents of such songs are not the history of a local person, but the playing of such songs invokes nostalgia to that person picturing a somewhat similar experience. All the same, it is the nostalgia of a past that that will remain to be a memory. Whether it is an “Americanization” or otherwise, the point is, such scenario is subsumed in the “imagination as a social practice in the global cultural processes.”

The arguments in the article are somewhat similar to the views of Mathews on the “global cultural supermarket.” Having arrays of choices, and easy access to most through technology and public media, it breaks the distinction of other people in other places. This leads to having a global identity that transcends cultural identity through the different global cultural processes that transcends national boundaries.