Review: Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization by Arjun Appadurai

Abstract

This is a collection of sole-authored essays revolving around questions concerning the end of the nation-state, diaspora, new modernity, deterri-torialization, the concept of culture, postcolonialism, the production of locality, flows, and "'scapes" and the work of the imagination. The author is a prominent advocate both for a new postnational discourse and an anthropology that captures the qualities of translocal culture. He has dis-tanced himself from dominant academic establishments by extending his intellectual interests across the boundaries of literature, history, ethnogra-phy, and politics and by foregrounding his own biography as a traveler across continents. At the universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago, he has steered transnational studies into the field of cultural globalization, deliberately seeking to render the specifics of our age as a new intellectual project. Broadly in book catalog terms, Modernity at Large will be found in the field of cultural studies. But its arguments amount to a constant provocation for sociologists, a challenge to the way we think and do our work. We should attend to them because they concern concepts that have been central for decades in sociological accounts of the contemporary world. Effectively they highlight how wedded sociology has been to concepts that often appear as abstract, analytical, and universal but are in fact expressions of a particular time and place. Culture, ethnicity, neighborhood , and modernity are focal topics in narrative accounts of our time, part of wider public discourse rather than simply scientific constructs. Moreover, faced with a competitor account, sociology has to acknowledge that it too is a purveyor of a special kind of present-day history writing. It is one of Appadurai's theses that the contemporary world has transformed the imagination via the media and made it public. His own work represents the imagination at large in the social sciences and for that reason alone these essays repay reading. They are at their most convincing in his accounts of the uses of statistical measurement in the colonization of India and then again in the Indian appropriation of the game of cricket from its British masters. Both depend for their effect on the wrenching of a topic from its taken-for-granted roots-statistics in science and ad