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. Copyright 1993 by The University of Chicago. Chapter 9 is reprinted in revised form from Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Copyright 1995 Arjun Appadurai. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans­ mitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Appadurai, Arjun, 1949- Modernity at large : cultural dimensions of globalization I Arjun Appadurai. p. cm. - (Public worlds i v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2792-4 ISBN 0-8166-2793-2 (pbk.) 1. Culture. 2. CiVilization, Modern-1950- 3. Ethnicity. 4. Mass media-Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HM10l.A644 1996 306-dc20 96-9276 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. For my son Alok, My home in the world Contents Acknowledgments ix Here and Now Part I Global Flows 2 Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy 27 3 Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology 48 4 Consumption, Duration, and History 66 Part II Modern Colonies 5 Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket 89 6 Number in the Colonial Imagination 114 Part III Postnational Locations 7 Life after Primordial ism 139 8 Patriotism and Its Futures 158 9 The Production of Locality 178 Notes 201 Bibliography 205 Index 219 "" vii "" Acknowledgments This book was written over a period of six years, and during that time I have benefitedfrom contact with many persons and institutions. The idea for the book took shape during 1989-90, when I was a MacArthur Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Parts of it were written while I was at the University of Pennsylvania, as codirector of the Center for Transnational Cultural Studies. It was completed at the University of Chicago, where I have enjoyed a great range of cross-disciplinary conver­ sations at the Chicago Humanities Institute, and where I have benefited from the energies of the Globalization Project. Also, in Chicago during this period, conversations and debates at the Center for Transcultural Studies (previously the Center for Psycho-Social Studies) provided na­ tional and international perspectives that were invaluable. The following individuals have given me valuable criticisms and sug­ gestions in regard to various parts and versions of the chapters in this book: Lila Abu-Lughod, Shahid Amin, Talal Asad, Fredrik Barth, Sanjiv Baruah, Lauren Berlant, John Brewer, Partha Chatterjee, Fernando Coronil, Valentine Daniel, Micaela di Leonardo, Nicholas Dirks, Virginia Dominguez, Richard Fardon, Michael Fischer, Richard Fox, Sandria Frei­ tag, Susan Gal, Clifford Geertz, Peter Geschiere, Michael Geyer, Akhil Gupta, Michael Hanchard, Miriam Hansen, Marilyn Ivy, Orvar Lofgren, ix David Ludden, John MacAloon, Achille Mbembe, Ashis Nandy, Gyanen­ dra Pandey, Peter Pels, Roy Porter, Moishe Postone, Paul Rabinow, Bruce Robbins, Roger Rouse, Marshall Sahlins, Lee Schlesinger, Terry Smith, Stanley J. Tambiah, Charles Taylor, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Greg Urban, Ashutosh Varshney, To by Volkman, Myron We iner, and Geoffrey White. To those I have inadvertently overlooked, my sincere apologies. A few persons deserve special mention for their more general and gen­ erous support. My teacher, friend, and colleague Bernard S. Cohn started me on a journey involving anthropology and history in 1970 and has been a steadfast source of ideas, friendship, and critical realism ever since. Nancy Farriss kept me always alert to the challenges of historical compar­ ison and to the meanings of fidelity to the archive. Ulf Hannerz has been my partner in the study of things global since 1984, when we spent a year together at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto). Peter van der Veer, in both Philadelphia and Amsterdam, has been a steadfast source of friendship, wit, and engaged debate. John and Jean Comaroff, through both their scholarship and their stimulating pres­ ence in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, contributed in many ways to the shaping of this book. Sherry Ortner en­ couraged the project from the start and provided one of two careful, sug­ gestive readings of the manuscript for the University of Minnesota Press. I am grateful to the second, anonymous reader as well. Dilip Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee (coeditors of the series in which this book appears) have been friends, colleagues, and interlocutors in more ways that I can easily describe. Homi Bhabha, Jacqueline Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Steven Collins, Prasenjit Duara, and Sheldon Pollock provided a community of ideas which, even as it forms, has helped me complete this book and imag­ ine many futures. Lisa Freeman, the director of the University of Minnesota Press, and Janaki Bakhle (preViously at the Press) stayed with me, combining pa­ tience and prodding, critical suggestions and editorial wisdom. Many students, both at the University of Pennsylvania and the Univer­ sity of Chicago, have been a source of inspiration and energy. I must make special mention of those whose work has enriched the ideas contained in this book: Brian Axel, William Bissell, Caroline Cleaves, Nicholas De Genova, Victoria Farmer, Gautam Ghosh, Manu Goswami, Mark Liechty, Anne Lorimer, Caitrin Lynch, Jacqui McGibbon, Vyj ayanthi Rao, Frank Romagosa, Philip Scher, Awadendhra Sharan, Sarah Strauss, Rachel To len, Amy Trubek, and Miklos Voros. Eve Darian-Smith, Ritty Lukose, and Janelle Taylor deserve special mention for both their intellectual contribu- Ackn ow ledgments "" X "" tions to this book and for their practical assistance. Caitrin Lynch did a splendid job on the index. Others who have helped in the complex process of producing this text include Namita Gupta Wiggers and Lisa McNair. My family has lived with this book, always generously and sometimes without knowing it. My wife and colleague, Carol A. Breckenridge, is pre­ sent in some way on every page: this book is one more document of our life adventure. My son Alok, to whom the book is dedicated, has grown to adulthood with it. His talent for love and his passion for life have been a steady reminder that books are not the world: they are about it. Acknowledgments "" xi "" Here and Now Modernity belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself. What is new about modernity (or about the idea that its newness is a new kind of newness) follows from this duality. Whatever else the project of the Enlightenment may have cre­ ated, it aspired to create persons who would, after the fact, have wished to have become modern. This self-fulfilling and self-justifying idea has provoked many criticisms and much resistance, in both theory and every­ day life. In my own early life in Bombay, the experience of modernity was no­ tably synaesthetic and largely pretheoretical. I saw and smelled modernity reading Life and American college catalogs at the United States Informa­ tion Service library, seeing B-grade films (and some A-grade ones) from Hollywood at the Eros Theatre, five hundred yards from my apartment building. I begged my brother at Stanford (in the early t 960s) to bring me back blue jeans and smelled America in his Right Guard when he returned. I gradually lost the England that I had earlier imbibed in my Victorian schoolbooks, in rumors of Rhodes scholars from my college, and in Billy Bunter and Biggles books devoured indiscriminately with books by Rich­ mal Crompton and Enid Blyton. Franny and Zooey, Holden Caulfield,and Rabbit Angstrom slowly eroded that part of me that had been, until then, forever England. Such are the little defeats that explain how England lost the Empire in postcolonial Bombay. I did not know then that I was drifting from one sort of postcolonial subjectivity (Anglophone diction, fantasies of debates in the Oxford Union, borrowed peeks at Encounter, a patrician interest in the humanities) to another: the harsher, sexier, more addictive New World of Humphrey Bogart reruns, Harold Robbins, TIme, and social science, American-style.