DOCSLIB.ORG

Voice Matter? and How Do We Know? 117

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Voice Matter? and How Do We Know? 117 VOICE & MATTER VOICE Voice and Matter is an outstanding collection that will reinstate “the centrality and urgency of Communication for Development as an area of research and a field of practice. Hemer and Tufe’s vast and the Cultural Return Communication, Development expertise in the field of ComDev shines through in the volume’s multidisciplinary approach, methodological and theoretical advances, and inclusion of contributions from diverse world regions (i.e. Latin Voice & Matter Communication, Development and the Cultural Return American schools of participatory communication and recent African Ubuntu-centric epistemologies, among others). Drawing from the lived experiences of collectives and individuals who use media and communication to work toward emancipation Oscar Hemer & Tomas Tufe (eds.) and social justice, the chapters in this volume make important contributions to how we think about voice, power, technology, culture, and social change. Taking VOICE on the challenge of interrogating the development industries and their inability to detach from market forces and confront power inequities, this volume repositions © Te authors and Nordicom 2016 the agency of subjects who use their own voices and their own media on their own MATTER terms – taking matters into their own hands.” Clemencia Rodríguez, Professor in Media Studies and Production, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-87957-32-1 (pdf) Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte COMMUNICATION, DEVELOPMENT AND Published by: THENordicom CULTURAL RETURN University of Gothenburg Box 713 SE 405 30 Göteborg Sweden University of Gothenburg Box 713, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden Telephone +46 31 786 00 00 • Fax + 46 31 786 46 55 E-mail [email protected] Cover by: Per Nilsson www.nordicom.gu.se Printed by: Ale Tryckteam OscarAB, Bohus, Hemer Sweden, 2016 & Thomas Tufte (eds.) ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 NORDICOM 9 789187 957314 NORDICOM VOICE & MATTER VOICE & MATTER COMMUNICATION, DEVELOPMENT AND THE CULTURAL RETURN Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) NORDICOM Voice & Matter Communication, Development and the Cultural Return Oscar Hemer & Tomas Tufe (eds.) © Te authors and Nordicom 2016 ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-87957-32-1 (pdf) Published by: Nordicom University of Gothenburg Box 713 SE 405 30 Göteborg Sweden Cover by: Per Nilsson Printed by: Ale Tryckteam AB, Bohus, Sweden, 2016 Contents Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements 7 Foreword 9 Oscar Hemer & Tomas Tufe Introduction. Why Voice and Matter Matter 11 I. Reframing Communication in Culture and Development Francis B. Nyamnjoh Communication and Cultural Identity. An Anthropological Perspective 25 Linje Manyozo Te Language and Voice of the Oppressed 43 Stefania Milan Stealing the Fire. Communication for Development from the Margins of Cyberspace 59 Karin Gwinn Wilkins & Kyung Sun Lee Te Political Economy of the Development Industry 71 Susanne Schech International Volunteering in Development Assistance. Partnership, Public Diplomacy, or Communication for Development? 87 Anders Høg Hansen, Faye Ginsburg & Lola Young Mediating Stuart Hall 101 II. Ethnography and Agency at the Margins Jo Tacchi When and How Does Voice Matter? And How Do We Know? 117 Sheela Patel Building Voice and Capacity to Aspire of the Urban Poor. A View from Below 129 Andrea Cornwall Save us from Saviours. Disrupting Development Narratives of the Rescue and Uplif of the ‘Tird World Woman’ 139 Sharath Srinivasan & Claudia Abreu Lopes Africa’s Voices Versus Big Data? Te Value of Citizen Engagement through Interactive Radio 155 Faye Ginsburg A History of Cultural Futures. ‘Televisual Sovereignty’ in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Media 173 Pegi Vail Gringo Trails, Gringo Tales. Storytelling, Destination Perspectives, and Tourism Globalization 189 III. Te Return of the Politics of Hope Ronald Stade Debating the Politics of Hope. An Introduction 203 Ronald Stade On Te Capacity to Aspire. Conversation with Arjun Appadurai 211 Nigel Rapport Aspiration as Universal Human Capacity. A Response to Arjun Appadurai 217 Gudrun Dahl Is Good Intention Enough to Be Heard? On Appadurai’s ‘Capacity to Aspire’ 225 Tomas Hylland Eriksen Hope, Fairness and the Search for the Good Life. A Slightly Oblique Comment to Arjun Appadurai 241 References 249 Contributing Authors 265 Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements Voice & Matter was the overarching theme for the fourth Ørecomm Festival in September 2014. When we founded the Ørecomm Centre for Communication and Glocal Change in 2008,1 it was our pronounced long-term aim to establish a centre of excellence in Communication for Development research with a bi-national base in the Øresund region (Malmö and Roskilde). From 2011 to 2014 we organized a yearly Ørecomm Festival, focused on specifc concepts within – or at the margins of – the feld: Agency and Mediatisation (2011); the Public Sphere (2012); Memory and Social Justice (2013). Voice & Matter (2014), with the subtitle “Glocal Conference on Communication for Development”, was in a way a summing up and synthesis of all the previous themes, with the signifcant addition of Hope, and what Indian- American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has defned as “the capacity to aspire”. It is our ambition to continue to organize Ørecomm Festivals, on a biannual basis,2 as part of our strategy to foster further developments of meta-theory within Commu- nication for Development. Te purpose of such meta-theory is, frstly, to integrate ComDev as a research feld in its own right, and subsequently, to defne and refne the theoretical context of ComDev, with regard to specifc key concepts or themes, and thereby also systematise its connections with related research felds. So far, three anthologies, including this one, have come out of the Ørecomm Festivals (Askanius & Stubbe Østergaard 2014; Hansen, Hemer & Tufe 2015), and a number of other publications are directly or indirectly the fruit of this collaboration (i. e. Enghel & Wilkins 2012; Ngomba & Wildermuth, forthcoming). Tis Voice and Matter anthology largely refects the topics dealt with at the con- ference. We are immensely thankful to all the speakers who agreed to elaborate their presentations for this volume. We also wish to thank the former vice-chancellors of our universities, Ib Poulsen and Stefan Bengtsson, and the heads of our departments, Lene Palsbro3 and Sara Bjärstorp, for facilitating our interregional collaboration, with support from the European Regional Development Fund (Interreg IV A) and Roskilde University’s vice-chancellor ofce for fnancial support to this book. A special heart- felt thanks to information manager Ulrica Kristhammar, research assistant Yuliya 7 EDITORS’ PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Hudoshnyk and the interregional project coordinator, Marie Brobeck. Finally, we thank Ulla Carlsson, Ingela Wadbring and the full team at Nordicom for taking on and publishing this anthology. Malmö and Roskilde, May 2016 Oscar Hemer & Tomas Tufe Notes 1. Te ofcial launch was in a panel at the IAMCR Conference in Stockholm in July 2008, with Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Karin Wilkins as invited panellists. 2. Te 2016 Festival addresses the communication challenges of the so called Refugee Crisis in a glocal perspective 3. Lene Palsbro was head of department at the Department of Communication, Business and Informa- tion Technologies until December 2014. 8 Foreword Readers will fnd in this assembly of essays a cluster of remarkable empirical studies in the frst two sections, and some very penetrating discussions of basic concepts in the third. All focus on Communication for Development and Social Change, the discursive network that is set to subvert and replace older Development Communication paradigms grounded in exploitative and/or philanthropic strategies towards what used to be called the ‘Tird’ World during the decades of US-Soviet rivalry for planetary dominance. In other words, the majority of humankind living outside circles of power and wealth. Te bi-annual Ørecomm Festivals serve as a petri dish for invigorating this network. A key pair of concepts investigated here for their capacity to illuminate core is- sues are ‘voice’ and ‘capacity to aspire’. Te term ‘voice’ is especially associated with a much-cited book by political economist Albert Hirschman (1915-2012), Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), and the term ‘capacity to aspire’ with a 2004 essay by cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. However, while the concept ‘voice’ has its merits in emphasizing the fundamental importance of the ability of the world’s poor to express their needs and demands in public fora from the streets to the Internet, the work of Charles Husband (1996; 2000; 2005) over more than twenty years now takes the issues still deeper. Others, such as Australian Communication researchers Tanja Dreher and Penny O’Donnell, Australian sociologist Cate Till, and UK political scientist Andrew Dobson, have also contributed valuably in this direction. Basically, Husband and the others underscore the limits of simply aspiring to speak, as per the argument presented in Gayatri Spivak’s much-cited 1983 essay “Can the subaltern speak?” Admittedly, speech itself is terrorized in many ways in many places, but the act of speaking alone, even when successful, still guarantees rather little. Te essence of the matter, argue Husband and the others, is whether anyone is listening. And by ‘listening’ they mean active listening, not simply having the radio on in the background. Beyond even active listening,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Social Movements: Iberian Connections
    ARTICLE Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Young www.sagepublications.com Vol 17(4): 421–442 Nordic Journal of Youth Research 10.1177/110330880901700405 Global citizenship and the ‘New, New’ social movements: Iberian connections CARLES FEIXA University of Lleida, Spain INÊS PEREIRA CIES/ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal/FCT JEFFREY S. JURIS Northeastern University, USA Abstract The past two decades have witnessed the rise of a new global cycle of collective action not only organized through the Internet and made visible during mass pro- test events, but also locally shaped by diverse organizations, networks, platforms and groups. FocusingNOT on FOR specifi c casesCOMMERCIAL in two Iberian cities — Barcelona USE and Lisbon — we argue that this protest cycle has given rise to new kinds of movements referred to here as ‘new, new’ social movements. We analyze particular aspects of each case, but also discuss their European and global dimensions. The article will also highlight the role of youth, discussing the characteristics associated with the participation of young people in the ‘new, new’ movements. After a short introduction to the research on this topic, focusing on the emergence of the ‘anti-corporate globalization movement’ and related theoretical implications, we provide a description of four protest events in Barcelona and Lisbon. Next, we analyze the local contexts that anchor these events. Finally, we discuss the main 422 Young 17:4 (2009): 421–442 characteristics of the ‘new, new’ social movements, examining the links between Barcelona and Lisbon and the wider international context that shapes them and paying particular attention to contemporary networking dynamics.
    [Show full text]
  • Global Governance: Old and New Challenges
    CHAPTER 13 Global governance: old and new challenges Balakrishnan Rajagopal* I. Introduction cal factors.1 Indeed, it was realized from the begin- ning of the articulation of the right to development The current world economic crisis has high- in the 1980s that its achievement hinged on deep- lighted a profound challenge to conventional thinking rooted transformations in the authorities, institutions on and approaches to human rights, especially the and processes of decision-making at multiple levels right to development. Human rights, primarily eco- within which nation States pursued their development nomic and social rights, are based on a theory of goals. These levels were not only national and inter- constant expansion of the economic pie for all, and national but also sub-State and within social systems the right to development is explicitly predicated on the in constant interaction—in other words, a transforma- idea of the nation State leading the ever-increasing tion of global governance rather than simply interna- process of economic and social well-being of its citi- tional governance. It is in this sense that I use the term zens through international cooperation and solidarity. “global governance” instead of seeing “global” as the These assumptions have never been more under chal- arena beyond/outside the State and “governance” as lenge than now: perpetual world economic expansion a one-dimensional exercise of authority rather than an is under threat; the real wealth of the world—not just interactive one among layers of decision-making. In the economic wealth—may be shrinking rather than this chapter, I analyse the older, inherited challenges expanding; economic and social well-being are more of global governance to the realization of right to and more undermined for the most vulnerable popula- development and emerging new challenges, which tions of the world; the role of the nation State is more have become apparent.
    [Show full text]
  • Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization
    Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization Arjun Appadurai Under what conditions is group violence between previous social intimates U associated with certain forms of uncertainty regarding ethnic identity? In sketching an approach to this question, I build on an argument against primor- dialism developed in a previous work (Appadurai 1996) and lay the foundations for a larger study of ethnic violence currently in progress. In one widely shared perspective, ethnic violence, as a form of collective vio- lence, is partly a product of propaganda, rumor, prejudice, and memory—all forms of knowledge and all usually associated with heightened conviction, con- viction capable of producing inhumane degrees of violence. But there is an alter- native approach to ethnic violence, with roots traceable to Durkheim’s (1951) work on anomie and Simmel’s (1950) ideas about the stranger. This tradition of think- ing—which focuses on doubt, uncertainty, and indeterminacy—has surfaced Earlier versions of this essay were presented before audiences in Amsterdam, Cambridge (Mass.), Chicago, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. The valuable criticisms and suggestions offered to me on these occa- sions were too numerous to fully engage in this revision. Many persons who raised valuable questions at these sessions cannot be named here, for the list would be too long. However, I must note the encour- agement, queries, and suggestions of the following persons: Anthony Appiah, Fredrik Barth, Jean- François Bayart, Jacqueline Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Gal, Manu Gos- wami, Michael Herzfeld, Marilyn Ivy, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Pradeep Jeganathan, Rashid Khalidi, David Laitin, Ben Lee, Claudio Lomnitz, Birgit Mayer, Achille Mbembe, Candido Mendes, Federico Neiburg, Peter Pels, Enrique Rodrigues, Janet Roitman, Roger Rouse, Livio Sansone, Doris Sommer, George Steinmetz, Mary Steedly, Ron Suny, Stanley Tambiah, Xiaobing Tang, Katie Trumpener, Peter van der Veer, and Unni Wikan.
    [Show full text]
  • Debt Structure in the West: Money and Gift, and the Influence on Community
    University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2011 Debt Structure in the West: Money and Gift, and the Influence on Community James A. Becker The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Becker, James A., "Debt Structure in the West: Money and Gift, and the Influence on Community" (2011). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 293. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/293 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEBT STRUCTURE IN THE WEST: MONEY AND GIFT, AND THE INFLUENCE ON COMMUNITY. By James August Becker Bachelor of Arts, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, 2001 Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In Anthropology The University of Montana Missoula, MT December 2011 Approved by: Sandy Ross, Associate Dean of The Graduate School Graduate School Professor G. G. Weix, Chair Anthropology Professor Greg Campbell Anthropology Professor Christopher Muste Political Science © COPYRIGHT by James August Becker 2011 All Rights Reserved ii Becker, James, Master of Arts, Fall 2011 Anthropology Chairperson: Professor G. G. Weix Abstract Debt structures all relationships in America as well as all of our economic material exchanges.
    [Show full text]
  • Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art
    Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art EVAN MWANGI EMBERS OF THE KENYAN CULTURAL GROUP Chelewa Ufike promote their local culture by fusing their messages with M signatures of modernity.1 The name of the group, Chelewa Ufike, is the Swahili expression for ‘better late than never’ or ‘slow but sure’; and, true to their name, Chelewa Ufike seem to be determinedly but cautiously singing and dancing themselves to a global space by nourishing themselves on cultural practices seemingly foreign and antagonistic to local culture. In its performance of cultural songs in which it bemoans foreign- ness as its treats themes ranging from love and AIDS to cross-border trade, Chelewa Ufike members play drums with inscriptions of the Nike swoosh on them. Embedded in the group’s critique of loss of values due to cross- border trading with Tanzania would be expected a critique of the very global corporate culture that the Nike swoosh represents. Borrowed from a local proverbial expression that at once warns against hasty projects and vindicates steady progress, Chelewa Ufike’s name is not an endorsement of the Enlightenment notion of linear progress in which the African village would view its present condition as ‘backward’ and its desired destination to be unqualified westernization. Rather, it articulates the need for nourish- 1 Chelewa Ufike comes from the Tsimba Village, Mwambara Location, near the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya. I am grateful to Dan Teng’o and his colleagues at the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, for sharing with me their oral literature fieldwork reports on this group.
    [Show full text]
  • Signs in Flow: Transnationalism, Media, and Racism
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Istanbul Sehir University Repository International Journal of Communication 7 (2013), 2386-2399 1932–8036/20130005 Signs in Flow: Transnationalism, Media, and Racism MAHMUT MUTMAN Istanbul Sehir University Transnationalism and globalism are complex features of the world today. One of their most elaborate articulations can be found in Arjun Appadurai’s influential work on the emerging disjunctive and hybrid nature of the global cultural economy. Following a critical conceptual engagement with Appadurai’s framework, including his concepts of hybridity and negotiation, this article argues that the present condition of intense, dynamic, and multiple global interactions does not necessarily and uniformly lead to a pluralistic world of hybrid cultures and negotiated identities beyond nationalism or essentialism. The very same condition is also responsible for authoritarian and paranoid formations such as racism. It frequently has been argued that, in today’s globalized world, the transnational flow of cultures, finance, people, and commodities disrupts the borders of even the most “closed” and “detached” societies. The nature of this transnationalism and globalism is often considered in terms of an increasingly decentralized or multicentered, hybridized, and complex world of multiple encounters. In this approach, the effects of transnational flows are not uniform at all; on the contrary, they provide accessibility to global and transnational forms, discourses, and commodities by previously marginalized societies and communities. Such communities do not merely receive these flows in a passive manner; they create and negotiate new, hybrid forms out of them. Media images and information seem to play a pivotal role in this process; they are often regarded as the major arbitrators or mediators of the emerging global hybridization of cultures.
    [Show full text]
  • Project Paper
    UNCILASSFZIED UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL . DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION AGENCY AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Washington. D. C. 20523 BOLIVIA PROJECT PAPER SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY MANAGEMENT AID/LAC/P-910 PROJECT NUMBER: 511-0621 UNCLASSIFIED AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL C "LOPMENT7PE 1. TRANSACTIONAC' POAdd COL DOC'UMENT _ __ __ _ _ __ __ _ __ __ _ _ _ PROJECT_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ DATA_ SHEET __C A rnAdd Am endm ent Ntu mbejr CO _ Change DE 2. COUNTRYIENTITYBOLIVIA E D Delete 3 47 BURAUIOFFICE.7 3. PROJECT NUMBER LATIN AMERICA CARIBBEAN 02- _ S. PROJECT TITLE T (maximum 40,characters) I.Arl C BD 05 nSTAINABLE E: FORESTRY MANAGEMENT 6. PROJECT ASSISTANCE COMPLETION DATE (PACDJ 7. ESTIMATED DATE OF OBLIGATION MM I DO I YY (Under '0. below, enter 1. 2. 3, o, 4) 10913 10 10 10 A.Iitia FYI[1 3, 8.Oarter 8. COSTS Ej C.PFnalFY 919 $000 OR EQUIVALENT SI a A. FUNDING SOURCE FIRST LIFE OF PROJECT AID Appropriated ' B. FX . TOT___. TOTAL ant) Hoat Country Other.D ora,)TOTALS 701 -- 70 n _- nOtJ II nL__ 9. SCHEDULE OF AID :RIATIO- FUNDING (SOO_ PRIMARY C. PRIMARY PURIATIONSPERpI H CO D I 01LIGATION TO DATE E. AMOUNT APPROVED CODE Grant 2 Loan 1. Grant F. LIFE OF PROJECT 2. Loan 1.Grant 2. Loan. 1. Grant 2.Loan -- --- - - 2,968 15 ,000 TOTALS 2,9-----6---------8_ 10. SECONDARY TECHNICAL CODES _ (maximum 6 codes of 3 positions each) 1. SECONDARY PURPOSE COD I _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I _ _ _ _ _ 12.
    [Show full text]
  • Amsterdam, June 12, 2000 Arjun Appadurai University of Chicago
    Amsterdam, June 12, 2000 Arjun Appadurai University of Chicago Please send comments to: [email protected] Draft: Not for quotation or reproduction without author’s permission DEEP DEMOCRACY: URBAN GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE HORIZON OF POLITICS I. Prelude What follows is a preliminary analysis of an urban activist movement with global links. The setting is the city of Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in Western India. The movement consists of three partners and as an Alliance, its history goes back to 1987. The three partners have different histories. SPARC is an NGO formed by social work professionals in 1984 to work with problems of urban poverty in Mumbai. NSDF (The National Slum Dweller’s Foundation) is a powerful grassroots organization established in 1974 and is a CBO (community-based organization) which also has its historical base in Mumbai. Finally, Mahila Milan is an organization of poor women, set up in 1986, with its base in Mumbai and a network throughout India, which is focused on women’s issues in relation to urban poverty, and is especially concerned with local and self-organized savings schemes among the very poor. All three organizations, which refer to themselves collectively as the Alliance, are united in their concerns with gaining secure tenure in land, adequate and durable housing, and access to urban infrastructure, notably to electricity, transport, sanitation and allied services. The Alliance has also strong links to Mumbai’s pavement- dwellers and to Mumbai’s street children, whom it has also organized into an organization called Sadak Chaap (Street Imprint) which has its own social and political agenda.
    [Show full text]
  • Culture and Public Action
    SUP_Rao.qxd 3/30/20042:58PMPagei Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Culture and Public Action Culture andPublic SUP_Rao.qxd 3/30/2004 2:58 PM Page ii Contributors Anita Abraham Sabina Alkire Arjun Appadurai Lourdes Arizpe Fernando Calderón Monica Das Gupta Shelton H. Davis Mary Douglas Simon Harragin Carol Jenkins Arjo Klamer Timur Kuran Jean-Philippe Platteau Vijayendra Rao Amartya Sen Alicia Szmukler Marco Verweij Michael Walton SUP_Rao.qxd 3/30/2004 2:58 PM Page iii Culture and Public Action Edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton Stanford Social Sciences an imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2004 SUP_Rao.qxd 3/30/2004 2:58 PM Page iv Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2004 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 Telephone 202-473-1000 Internet www.worldbank.org E-mail [email protected] Chapter Three © 2004 by Arjun Appadurai All rights reserved. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work.The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply any judgment on the part of the World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries. Rights and Permissions The material in this work is copyrighted.
    [Show full text]
  • GLOBAL ETHNOSCAPES Notes and Queries for a Transnational
    Chapter 10 GLOBAL ETHNOSCAPES Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology Arjun Appadurai IN my title, I use the term cthnoscape. This neologism has certain ambiguities deliberately built into it. It refers, first, to the dilemmas of perspective and representation that all ethnographers must confront, and it admits that (as with landscapes in visual art) traditions of perception and perspective, as well as variations in the situation of the observer, may affect the process and product of representation. But I also intend this term to indicate that there are some brute facts about the world of the twentieth century that any ethnography must confront. Central among these facts is the changing social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity. As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic "projects," the ethno in eth­ nography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality, to which the descrip­ tive practices of anthropology will have to respond. The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer famil­ iar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly terri­ torialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous. We have fewer cultures in the world and more "internal cultural debates" (Parkin 1978). 192 ARJUN APPADURAI By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who make up the shift­ ing world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest- workers, and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization a R J U N a PPADURA
    Modernity at Large PUBLIC WORLDS Dilip Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee Series Editors VOLUME 1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization A R J U N A PPADURA Modernity a t L a r g e Cultural Dim ensions of Globalization 'UBUO WORLDS, VOLUME ' IN HE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRE SS SO I TA I MIN NE A POL I S LON DON M The Public Worlds series is a product of Public Works Publications, which includes Public Planet Books and the journal Public Culture. Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Chapter 2 is reprinted in revised form from Public Culture 2.2 (1990): 1-24. Copyright 1990 Center for Transnational Cultural Studies. Chapter 3 is reprinted in revised form from Recapturing Anthropology, Working in the Present, ed. Richard C. Fox. School of Ameri­ can Research Advanced Seminar Series, 191-210. Copyright 1991 School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chapter 4 is reprinted in revised form from Stanford Literature Review 10.1-2 (1993): 11-23. Copyright 1993 Arjun Appadurai. Chap­ ter 5 is reprinted in revised form from Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 23-48. Copyright 1995 the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Chapter 6 is reprinted in revised form from Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314-39. Copyright 1993 University of Pennsylvania Press. Chapter 8 is reprinted in revised form from Public Culture 5.3 (1993): 411-29.
    [Show full text]
  • Another History of Museums: from the Discourse to the Museum-Piece
    Another History of Museums: from the Discourse to the Museum-Piece Dominique Poulot1 1. Université Paris 1 – Pan- théon-Sorbonne. E-mail: <dominique.poulot@univ- -paris1.fr>. ABSTRACT: The history of museums could get inspired on the procedures of material studies and of Anthropology in order to take a new stand and move away from the institutional approach and consider the approach of objects traditionally labelled as museum objects. The so-called “museum pieces” are supposed to have a number of characteristics, particularly some great historical and artistic qualities, sometimes an heritage quality, but above all the ability to make “friends” around the community or around the world. In all these respects, it is proposed here a number of research procedures that may supplement or enrich the directions usually assigned to the history of institutions. KEYWORDS: History. Museums.Objects.Museology.Heritage. RESUMO: A história dos museus poderia se inspirar nos caminhos dos material studies e da antropologia para rever seus pontos de vista, e passar do ponto de vista da instituição para aquele dos objetos tradicionalmente qualificados como objetos de museu. A definição desses objetos evoca um certo número de características, sua qualidade, particularmente a qualidade histórica e artística, ou ainda patrimonial, a capacidade de suscitar “amigos” em torno deles, enfim, sua utilidade pública. Sob todos esses aspectos, propõe-se aqui uma série de caminhos de pesquisa que podem completar ou enriquecer a direção que normalmente se dá à história das instituições. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: História. Museus. Objetos. Museologia. Patrimônio. RÉSUMÉ: L’histoire des musées pourrait s’inspirer de la démarche des material studies et de l’anthropologie pour réviserson point de vue, et passer de celui de l’institution à celui des objets qualifiés traditionnellement d’objets de musée.
    [Show full text]