Conceptos Puntos Extra

Arjun Appadurai
Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

1. Ethnoscape: I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hithertounprecedented degree. This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting tomove.

2. Technoscape: the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.

3. Financescape: the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before as currencymarkets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast, absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units.

4. Ideoscape: closely related landscapes of images, and also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states andthe counter ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy.

5. Mediascape: refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilitiesto produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), which are now available to a grow- ing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media. These images involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware(electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national, or transnational), and the interests of those who own and control them. Mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms)out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.

6. Production fetishism: an illusion created by contemporary transnational production loci that masks translocal capital, transnational earning flows, global management, and often faraway workers (engaged in various kinds of high-tech putting-out operations) in the idiom and spectacleof local (sometimes even worker) control, national productivity, and territorial sovereignty.

7. Repatriation of difference: export of the designs and commodities of difference. The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, and clothingstyles) that are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, and fundamentalism in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role.

8. Imagination as a social practice: The image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global...