Arjun Appadurai

Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist known for his influential theoretical work on globalization and culture. In Modernity at Large (1996) he proposed that global cultural flow can be analyzed through five overlapping dimensions, or scapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes, arguing that these disjunctive, unevenly moving flows of people, media, technology, capital, and ideas had produced a genuinely new global cultural condition that older centre-periphery models of cultural imperialism could not adequately describe. As editor of The Social Life of Things (1986), he also argued for treating commodities and objects themselves as having biographies and social lives, shifting anthropological attention from persons alone to the circulation and changing meaning of things as they move through different social and cultural contexts.