Resumo de Modernity At Large

In the Sociologist, Appadurai?s book on global thought, Modernity at Large, Appadurai posits five dimensions of global cultural flows naming them ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes to connote that these dimensions take the form of roughly fashioned landscapes. It is in and through the disjunctures of each of these dimensions that global flows occur. Appadurai discusses the state
and the nation as if it were outside of these various scapes, what about
how state processes are constituted within and by them? The vocabulary he
offers the reader readily indicates his enchantment with insterstices,
ruptures, fragments, and fractals from the very start, but once we peel
away the lexicon what remains? What do these global flows look like in
practice?

Appadurai leads the reader closest to practice when he discusses the
reproduction of the family on the move. He suggests that it is women who
bear the brunt of familial friction "for they become pawns in the heritage
politics of the household" (44). Here Appadurai oversimplifies his
account of the relationship of marriage and migration for the sake of his
argument. His use of the word heritage here suggests that the household
reproduces itself according to the inheritance of particular ideals about
family and marriage. If Appadurai were truly interested in disjunctures,
wouldn?t he also be interested in accounting for change, i.e. strategies,
new ways of marrying, and new approaches to parenting?

Appadurai also argues that ethnicity transcends borders, it is constantly appearing outside of political borders in a kind of migration, and therefore has become transnational and global. He conveys a facility of ethnic groups in crossing borders and
boundaries, a general ease in the navigation of a thoroughly global
terrain. Post 9/11 we know that there are very real limitations to
crossing borders; members of particular ethnic groups traverse them
without problem, while others utterly fail. This was also true at the
time Appadurai was writing this very article. In fact, debates about
immigration and border restriction were common in the early 1990s and led
to one of the most massive reforms of U.S. Immigration Law and Policy in
1996. Claims for political asylum (based on UN doctrine) were, and still
are, won and lost on the basis of one's ability to prove a strong purchase
on ethnic or religious identity in order to legally demonstrate how one
would be targeted for persecution and was, therefore, deserving of
political asylum. These very real boundaries and borders existed, then,
but were unthinkable for Appadurai.

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