Bio:(1949-)Indian-American socio-cultural anthropologist. Arjun Appadurai was born in India and received his doctorate in 1976 from the University of Chicago, after which he continued to teach at the American universities of Yale, Chicago, and Pennsylvania, New School of Social Research, and New York. 

He and his wife, the historian, and anthropologist Carol Breckenridge, in 1988 founded the academic journal Public Culture, which is still being published. Appadurai is the founder of several institutions: Chicago Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago, the non-profit organization Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research, based in Mumbai, and co-founder and co-director of Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization. He was also a director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University. 

In his first book, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: a South Asian Case (1981), which is based on his dissertation, Appadurai presents the results of his research on a Hindu temple in India. In this research, he used a combination of ethnographic methods and archival data. His goal was to re-examine established notions of what constitutes a “traditional” Hindu worship practices. His broader goal in his early writings was to question the traditional anthropological approach – “territories of knowledge”, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, gateway concepts, and the discipline's organization- to study other cultures' material and symbolic life.

Appadurai edited the book The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986) and wrote an introductory essay for it titled “Introduction: commodities and the politics of values”. In that essay, he re-examines how society places value on things and commodities. Each commodity, beyond any trade and commercial network, tells a powerful story about society. The multidisciplinary approach is most suited for exploring those stories. The value placed on the object relies on the specific social rules of exchange because the same object can be a commodity in one setting and a gift in another social setting. While the market tends to commoditize and homogenize all objects, consumers are able to recontextualize purchased object so that it becomes sacralized, singularized, and decommoditized.

In the article Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990) Appadurai studies the globalization of consumption and introduces the concept of “global cultural economy” which refers to the “complex, overlapping, disjunctive order" that brakes the center-periphery model of the global economy. For Appadurai globalization implies multiple processes of circulation, or as Appadurai calls them ‘‘flows’’ or “scapes”: 1) mediascapes (flow of information via mass media and the Internet), financescapes (flow of capital inside the global financial system), technoscapes (flow of technology), ethnoscapes (flow of people, as immigrants, refugees or tourists), and ideoscapes (flow of ideas and ideologies). Migrations of people create “global consumption”, that is, “deterritorialized” versions of cultures that originated in the country where people emigrated from. All over the world consumer can buy versions of cultural products introduced by immigrants that are interesting for immigrants because they are familiar and have sentimental value, while, at the same time, serve as a chance for locals to try exotic products, in their countries, from a different culture. Appadurai states that, instead of cultural homogenization and Americanization, globalization introduces ‘‘heterogenization’’ and hybridization. That means that globalization introduces more variety in what can be consumed in any country and creates an interplay between world markets, international corporations, local cultural identity, and changing consumption patterns.

In the book Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) Appadurai researches the possibility of human agency in the globalized world and concludes that: “where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency” (1996: 7). In the book Fear of Small Numbers (2006) he studies the connection between ethnic conflicts and globalization. In his two latest books Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2016) and Failure (2019) Appadurai shifts his focus to the world of global finance and how lack of understanding of that world brings economic collapses and failures.

Main works

Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981);

The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986);

“Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, in Public Culture (1990);

Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996);

Globalization (2001);

Fear of Small Numbers (2006);

India’s World (2012);

The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013);

Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (2015);

Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2016);

Failure (2019).