Arjun Appadurai

Abstract

Arjun Appadurai (b. 1949), currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the methods and theories of anthropology, history, political economy, and cultural studies. His scholarship, while originally rooted in area studies of South Asia, encompasses programmatic work aimed at formulating conceptual rubrics and questions to guide comparative and critical cultural studies of globalization, development, politics, and economy. He writes for audiences of scholars, creative practitioners, and activists, and for a broader public. A central intervention has been his framing of globalization in ways that privilege the work of imagination and futurity in its constituent processes and institutions; to this end, he has emphasized the mobility of ideas, images, finance, and persons and the durable domains of translocal interaction (e.g., ethnoscapes, finanscapes) that such mobility produces, while downplaying the territorial and cultural fixity of nation-states and localities. A signature rubric, “public culture,” advanced in his own work and especially in the journal of that name, co-founded and co-edited with his late wife, Carol Breckenridge, captures the malleable, contested, and multiply mediated notion of culture that underlies this understanding of globalization. This conception of culture is also meant to signal how hope and aspiration may be articulated with everyday worlds of meaning and action. Over the past four decades, his published work has encompassed books and edited collections, journal articles, chapters, and commentaries. Much of that work has derived from collaborative projects involving both original research and editorial activities, several associated with the journal, Public Culture, and with the Cultures of Finance Working Group, based at New York University. Appadurai also co-founded, with Carol Breckenridge, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research), a Mumbai-based research collective that works with urban Indian communities who are grappling with local impacts of urbanization and globalization. Appadurai’s ideas about culture, globalization, development, commodification, identity politics, and postcolonialism have influenced scholarship in many fields, from his own core disciplines to media and communications studies, postcolonial studies, architecture, urban studies, and political theory.