Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Public Worlds, Vol. 1)

by Arjun Appadurai and Arjun Appadurai

Book Overview

Examines the role of imagination in the cultural development of our shrinking world. The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816627932
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Fresh Outlook on Modernity

Offering a new rubric for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new sites for identity and energies for creating options vis-à-vis the nation-state, whose era some argue is ending. Appadurai writes, "Implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritic and explores their join effect on the work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity" (Appadurai, Modernity at Large 3). Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the win forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. Appadurai examines and analyzes the way images - of lifestyles, pop-culture, and self-representation - circulate internationally through the media and are often appropriated and negotiated in unexpected (to their creator) and inventive ways. Appadurai argues, "This is not a monocausal fetishization of the electronic. [...] In the chapters that follow, I track some ways in which electronic mediation transforms preexisting worlds of communication and conduct" (Appadurai, Modernity at Large 3).

Review of Modernity at Large

Excellent condition; Great book! I ordered as a book review assignment for my grad program and loved the book!

an academic antidote to academia

The great strength behind Appadurai's book Modernity at Large is that he breaks out of the binary thinking that many new historians engage in. Instead, he offers what he coins landscapes, five different threads that weave together and influence one another to form our communities, imagined or otherwise. His ideas of how the imagination and imagined communities affect us build on the established works of others, especially Benedict Anderson, but his approach is very down to earth and accessible without pandering to a lowest common denominator. The book is dense, and not something to absorb in one sitting; it savours like a fine wine. An excellent book, especially for students wanting to research deterritorialization and the transnational public sphere but are intimidated or frustrated with assigned texts.

Required Reading

This brilliant book makes a fundamental contribution to how globalization works. It is required reading not just for anthropologists but for economists, political scientists and others trying to grapple with the rapidity of cross-national economic, cultural and demographic flows in the contemporary world.

A new, refreshing, and essential approach

Professor Appadurai writes with an understanding, clarity, and erudition that is rare among scholars in any discipline. In a small, densely packed, smoothly written text, he provides anthropology and sociology with a powerful set of theoretical tools and concepts with which to grasp modernity and globalization. Like de Certeau, Appadurai examines aspects of intimate, everyday life in minute detail, but like Giddens and Lash, his reach is global. This book provides the integration of perspectives that anthropology desperately needs in order to finally become relevant in the twenty-first century. It is a wake-up call, a gift, and a masterpiece. No one seriously practicing anthropology in the high-modern era should fail to acquaint themselves with this rare gem of a book.