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Essay on Appadurai and Haraway in the Post- Modern World
Images, meanings, and values associated with gender, consumption, modernity, place, and "the family" circulate within the global cultural economy (Appadurai 1-24) and these "ideoscapes" and "mediascapes" are interpreted and appropriated in varied sites by diverse actors in ways that either promote or constrain mobility. It is argued that consumers in different countries may have more in common with one another than consumers in the same country. Such commonality is driven by media exposure made possible by television advertising that brings consumers together across cultures. (Appadurai 295-310) Music signals a lost nationalist dream with its fractured, post-modern notions of national identity, while simultaneously offering us glimpses of possibilities for “hope and fantasy” (Appadurai 1990:17) in the nation people belong to.
The complexity of global, national and local forces may be summarized in Appadurai’s (1991) five dimensions:
- ethnoscapes (tourists, immigrants, refugees);
- mediascapes (lines between the “real” and the fictional landscapes are blurred through the media);
- technoscapes (configurations of technology);
- finanscapes (financial flows have decoupled themselves from other landscapes); and
- ideoscapes (ideas of freedom, welfare, rights, and so on are spreading in the world).
The principal idea behind this classification is that different aspects of globalization have different rhythms and different distribution. Sometimes there are contradictions between some aspects of globalization; the same phenomenon is both legitimized and questioned in the world polity. For instance, the model of the West European nation-state is spreading but at the same time the role of the state is questioned and sometimes undermined.
Appadurai’s scapes fit almost all flows of humans, technologies, machines, money, information and images. They create new inequalities of access/non-access. Some scapes include particular groups (information flows of financial, scientific and economic nature), leaving others totally excluded. States are slowly failing to mobilize societal goals and are turning into regulatory states...................
