Globalizations, 2014

Vol. 11, No. 4, 481 –490, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.951209

INTERVIEW

Arjun Appadurai

ARJUN APPADURAI
New York University, New York, NY, USA

INTERVIEWER: MANFRED B. STEGER (MS)1

MS:
Do you can remember when you first heard the term ‘globalization’ and in what context?

ARJUN APPADURAI (AA):

Probably in the very late 1980s—most likely sometime between 1989 and 1991. I would say it
was after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The context? Most likely, I read about ‘globalization’ in the
press, rather than encountering the term through an academic route.

MS:
Do you remember what kind of meanings you initially associated with ‘globalization’?

AA:
Given my background and interest in cultural issues, two meanings were paramount. The first
was based on media reports dealing with the global opening up of markets following the break-
down of rigid Cold War boundaries like the Berlin Wall. But I also I realized that these political
and economic dynamics also had enormous implications on cultural diffusion, hybridization,
and public worries about cultural homogenization US-style. So I remember these two kinds
of resonances.

MS:
Wasn’t this around the time when you wrote your seminal article on the global cultural
economy? (Appadurai, 1990). Where you consciously trying to chip away at the dominant
economic meaning of ‘globalization’?

Correspondence Address: Arjun Appadurai, New York University, New York, NY, USA. Email: appadurai@nyu.edu
# 2014 Taylor & Francis
482 A. Appadurai

AA:
Well, that’s an interesting question. I certainly was already engaged in some kind of idea of
developing counterpoints—not just strictly about markets and states but also about broader
social and cultural processes. Back in 1988, when my wife Carol Breckenridge and I started
the journal Public Culture—and also four years earlier, when I was on a fellowship at the
Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and met Ulf Hannerz—the three of us
associated with a group of academics who were interested in what we then called ‘transnational
cultural processes’. So this was an important precursory phase. But in my own thinking, the
crucial moment came around 1990 when the concept of ‘transnational’ slowly gave way to
‘global’.
Let me backtrack a little to give you as full a picture as I can. When we founded Public
Culture in 1988, Carol and I were still very much using ideas of the ‘transnational’—transna-
tional cultural processes, transnational identities, transnational flows, and so on. I think I was
quite aware of the tensions between political economy and cultural issues—especially within
the discipline of anthropology. But I had great sympathies for people on both sides of this
divide. For example, I recall being very excited about the remarkable work of James
Rosenau, which was firmly planted in political science. But he struck me as a sympathetic inter-
locutor who, like me, acknowledged the core determinative roles of culture, sociology,
economy, and polity in transnational processes. Still, it was not an explicit ‘globalization
agenda’ that marked the founding of Public Culture.
When Mike Featherstone, who was one of the founding editors of the journal Theory,
Culture & Society, invited me to contribute to the 1990 special issue on ‘Global Culture’,
I was already making the switch from ‘transnational’ to ‘global’. This switch was at the
core of my article, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. But in
many ways, I don’t remember clearly what other major issues were in my head that went
into writing this article. But I do remember writing it at the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton University, where I was on a fellowship during the 1989/90 academic year.
It was a very exciting moment—the Berlin Wall had just fallen and we were all trying
to make sense of these momentous events. When I got Mike’s invitation, the word
‘global’ suddenly entered into this invitation to write about ‘global culture’. I think this
article marked the beginning of framing my intellectual interests around matters related to
‘globalization’.

MS:
How closely were you connected to the Mike Featherstone, Roland Robertson, and
other academics linked to Theory, Culture & Society?

AA:
Not close at all. As a sociologist of culture, I knew of them, of course. But I had no previous links
with that journal. But I can look back at it now as one of those serendipitous things that happen in
life.

MS:
What occupied you intellectually between the 1990 publication of this article and 1996
release of your highly influential book, Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of
globalization?
 Arjun Appadurai Interview 483

AA:
Ah—that’s a wonderful question! I think what happened between the writing of this article and
the publication of the book—that is, the years 1990 to 1994, when the book was more or less
finished—was that I entered a very generative period in my academic career. It was still the
early years of Public Culture and my wife and I received many submissions on transnational
cultural processes, which we read carefully and commented on. But I had also the opportunity
to write essays that revolved around globalization for various academic journals. Moreover, I
moved from the University of Pennsylvania to the University of Chicago, where I had studied
originally in the 1970s. Modernity at large was mostly finished at the University of Chicago
between 1992 and 1994, or perhaps 1995. I think this period also allowed me to rethink and
reconfigure my somewhat eclectic range of interests from the 1970s. As you may know, in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, major thinkers like Clifford Geertz had been at the University
of Chicago and had formed a committee on the study of ‘new nations’, which was another
pre-globalization moment. Still, mostly the committee was about modernization, development,
and the formation of new nations. My return to Chicago in the 1990s offered me a chance to
reflect on such macro-sociological perspectives on the world.

MS:
At that point, were you using ‘globalization’ and ‘global’ rather than ‘transnational’?

AA:
Most definitely. As I said, the turning point was around 1990 or perhaps a bit later. I don’t think
that using the idiom of ‘globalization’ was a very conscious or deliberate choice on my part. But
when I look back and reflect on it, I think it may have been that the term ‘globalization’ allowed
me to place my work more directly into the same space as media scholars, economists, and
development experts, whereas ‘transnational’ tended to flag cultural identities and isolate my
work in that sector. So I think I had a fortunate intuition that my focus on ‘globalization’ was
a good way of remaining part of a broader conversation.

MS:
I think that one of your important contributions to the evolution of the meanings associated with
‘globalization’ was your sense that its subjective dimensions where just as important as its objec-
tive aspects. For example, your presentation of six globalization ‘scapes’ in your 1990 article,
and then again in Modernity at large, resonated with a large readership. To this day, many aca-
demics remain deeply influenced by your thinking about globalization in terms of these six
‘scapes’. How did you come up with these categories? How did you link them to globalization?

AA:
I have to say that my 1990 article was written in a very inspired way. It seemed to just flow out of
me. I have a poor sense of how I came up with these six ‘scapes’. But I do know that the motive
that made me think about ‘scapes’ in the first place was to introduce something ‘perspectival’
into globalizing dynamics as I saw them at the time. And to say that perspective does
matter—and not simply subjectivity and affect—which, of course, I also believe in—is to say
that the globalizing landscape of technology, ideology, and other crucial phenomena that
were regarded as somewhat given, had something to do with a person’s angle of vision. So
‘scape’ refers to the suffix of terms like ‘ethnoscapes’ or ‘ideoscapes’. It allowed the interjection
of perspective into facts or factors, which otherwise seemed entirely historically given and
484 A. Appadurai

generated by impersonal macro-forces. So the perspectival discourse of ‘scapes’ allowed me to

insert the subjective without adding the subjective as an ‘extra’ from left field. You know, even if
you emphasize that persons and feelings are important, people often to neglect these factors. But
if you show how subjective perspectives shift the tectonics of the economy or finance, then it’s
harder to dismiss these forces. Of course, some people may not find your terminology useful.
Academics in the hard sciences, for example, might find terms like ‘financescapes’ or ‘technos-
capes’ somewhat obscure. But that’s a price you have to pay for emphasizing the powerful role
played by subjective perspectives in globalization processes.

MS:
But adding perspective also forces you to deal with related concepts. For example, you use
‘modernity’ in the title of your book, which means that this term must have been important to
you. You also talk about ‘imaginaries’. Do you link these two concepts to ‘globalization’ in a
conscious way?

AA:
Yes, there are these related concepts. I think you already mentioned the most important ones.
One is ‘modernity’, with which I still remain preoccupied. You know, when I was a graduate
student at the University of Chicago, the dominant social science paradigm was ‘modernization’.
So that had to be dealt with. Like many people, I went through a period of resistance infused by
my conviction that modernization was a dead paradigm. But I realized in many ways that ‘mod-
ernization’ was an attempt to grapple with change on a planetary scale. Did modernization have
any clear direction? What were the most important convergences? These were two of the many
questions I struggled with and they are still hotly debated within global studies. One intellectual
heritage of this problematic goes back to Max Weber. In fact, the issues related to modernity and
modernization are still extremely important to me. My current work on global finance, for
example, is very much an effort to bring Weber back into the discussion of phenomena that hap-
pened long after his lifetime. Obviously, modernization begins with the problematic of moder-
nity. So that’s one big concept related to globalization. The idea of ‘imaginary’ I owe mainly to
my reading of Benedict Anderson, although later I realized Cornelius Castoriadis was equally
important (Anderson, 1983; Castoriadis, 1998). But I would also say that Charles Taylor is rel-
evant, although, as far as my own writings on the subject are concerned, his use of ‘social ima-
ginary’ comes later (Taylor, 2003). And Taylor is one of those influential writers who wrestled
with modernity throughout his life. But neither Taylor nor Castoriadis directly affected my use
of ‘imaginary’—Anderson was the sole direct influence. But I realize now that what I make of
this term actually corresponds more closely to Castoriadis’ understanding,

MS:
So in a sense you also link your understanding of imaginaire to the French Annales School of
historiography?

AA:
Exactly. All of those works were in my mind, but not consciously. Benedict Anderson’s work
was the one held consciously. Of course, I realized later that the idea of the imaginaire goes
back to Castoriadis and the Annales School. So that’s my second big concept linked to ‘globa-
lization’. And the third one, which I mentioned already, is ‘transnational’. I became very con-
scious of significant processes—many of them cultural—which were clearly crossing national
 Arjun Appadurai Interview 485

boundaries. Think of migration or media processes. I was both wondering and worrying about
how to build new approaches to theorize the transnational when the history of social sciences
was very much tied to the history of the nation-state. As late as the early 1990s, many categories,
inquiries, and epistemologies remained very national—in spite of the rising globalization para-
digm. For me, these three big concepts—modernity, imaginary, transnational—created badly
needed, novel ‘debate space’. Imaginaire and imaginary was perhaps not so much opening up
new debate space as creating an ‘inspiration space’. The question of the transnational—
especially in relation to the social sciences—and the question of modernity forged huge
debate spaces, which ultimately provided the theoretical arena for my globalization research.

MS:
In addition to the intellectual influences we already mentioned, were there any other globaliza-
tion scholars you were drawn to or who helped you develop your own thinking on the subject?

AA:
Yes. I always found Saskia Sassen’s work interesting, because I thought it was on that same
border-zone between harder and softer social science approaches I was working on. Still, she
came from the harder side—the political economy angle. We also shared a similar interest in
immigration issues. I still feel that her work and mine overlap quite a bit, even though we
were shaped by different discourses and followed different academic trajectories. We are also
equally drawn to researching irregularities and oddities, which can be quite revealing. I also
feel an intellectual kinship with Ulf Hannerz, who I mentioned earlier. His work on cultural glo-
balization—especially creolization—was very influential for me and opened up new ways for
anthropologists to widen their lenses. Later, I read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and
found them to be important, although I don’t directly build on their specific themes (Hardy &
Negri, 2001). But I like their concern with issues of sovereignty, new political movements,
and new globalized forms of mass expression. Their insights helped me a lot conceptually
when I started working in Mumbai with slum-dwellers movements.
And I would also add that, throughout the 1990s, there was one big influential thinker who is
not normally seen as part of the globalization literature, but who I realize now was an uncon-
scious presence when I wrote Modernity at large: Gilles Deleuze. Although he never explicitly
theorized the global, his work on rhizomatic formations is utterly vital. However, in the early
1990s when I was developing the ideas that led to Modernity at large, I had only read A thousand
plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). So people who later pointed out to me how close my think-
ing was related to his writings, I told them that I had not read a lot of Deleuze. But, over the
years, the more I read of Deleuze, the more I could see how much my thinking fires intuitively
on the same register—although he is a much deeper philosophical thinker!

MS:
And there is of course also the link between Deleuze and Hardt and Negri.

AA:
Indeed. Between Deleuze and Hardt and also between Deleuze and thinkers like Bruno Latour—
all of which are interested in capitalism and the global finance industry. There is also an excellent
French theorist by the name of Elie Ayache who has recently written a terrific book called The
Blank Swan—not the black swan, but the blank swan—which explains financial trading by
building on Alain Badiou’s work (Ayache, 2010). And then there is also the link between
486 A. Appadurai

Badiou and Deleuze, and Deleuze had a deep dialogue with Michel Foucault, who for me has
always been a very important influence. If you read Modernity at large, you notice that Foucault
surfaces everywhere—but always with some resistance, because I don’t like the sense of com-
plete containment that Foucault sometimes appears to convey—with almost no room for
linkages.

MS:
In the two decades since the publication Modernity at large, how has your globalization thinking
evolved?

AA:
Well, my early writings on globalization were quite hopeful. There is some truth to the charge of
my early critics that I was far too hopeful and positive, stressing mainly globalization’s eman-
cipatory and aspirational dimensions. Consequently, I followed another line of inquiry on glo-
balization and ethnic violence, which lead to the publication of my book, Fear of small
numbers (Appadurai, 2006). There, I discussed one of the dark sides of globalization. To be
honest, even when I wrote Modernity at large, I was not as rosy and bubbly as some people
have taken me to be. I had my concerns, but the critics were right to point to my elevated
sense of enthusiasm. From 1996 to 2006, when Fear of small numbers came out, I went quite
deep into the relationship between globalization and extreme ethnic violence. But I don’t see
the darker sides and brighter sides of globalization as a dichotomy; they are intertwined in
ways I called ‘cellular formations’. These can be very liberating, but also terrifying. Having
gone through this intellectual phase, I would say that now, overall, I still see globalization as
a logic of flows that pushes circulation while simultaneously creating obstacles along the
way. So the same dynamic both interconnects and disrupts. But globalization is not a new
dynamic that meets old obstacles, but one that creates its own obstacles. For example, the
Chinese state is resisting the Internet, but in some ways the Chinese state is as much a
product of global processes as the Internet. As I put it, the flows and the bumps are ‘co-produced
by the same process’. I guess that indicates somewhat of a shift in my views on globalization—
that it’s neither just a hopeful process of flows, nor a dark exclusionary process, but a curious
dynamic of co-production.

MS:
Are you perhaps approaching globalization now in a more dialectical way?

AA:
Yes, in a more dialectical and more co-productive way. You can’t say that one is here and pro-
duces the other over there. The two necessarily go together, because the bumps are not just the
old bumps—old forms of nationalistic hatred, for example—but there are also new bumps. So
that’s one important point. The other is that today I see globalization—with this dual quality
of flows-and-bumps—also linked to the co-production of great wealth and extreme poverty—
and new exposures to risk, which we all know is one of the great paradoxes of our era of glo-
balization. This paradox is what I’m exploring in my new book on the future of the global con-
dition (Appadurai, 2013). I believe that the co-production of wealth and poverty is creating a
series of unprecedented planetary challenges—in terms of health, climate, natural resources,
social inequality, and so on. But it also provides a new terrain for the politics of hope. And
this is one prospect that I now grasp more clearly than back in the 1990s. Now I see more
 Arjun Appadurai Interview 487

broadly that globalization creates the terrain for certain kinds of affiliated politics—among
slum-dwellers in Mumbai, for example, where I have done quite a lot work.2 I guess
this makes me more sympathetic to writers like Hardt and Negri, who emphasize a new
global democratic politics enabled by hope.

MS:
Would you say that the formation of global organizations like Slum Dwellers International is
about the globalization of that kind of hope?

AA:
Absolutely. We are witnessing the forging of the new global weapons of the weak. Access to
the Internet and new travel opportunities in the context of global civil society are a crucial
part of it. We see the creation of a global movement, which cannot be understood in terms of
conventional theories of social movements, because it presents formidable challenges to
national sovereignties and even to official transnational or international sovereignties.
These new global movements are decidedly ‘unofficial’. Or we might call them ‘informal’.
It is clear that informal politics of the broadest type has received some impetus from
globalization at the same time as globalization has created many of problems for informal
politics.

MS:
Your work in urban Mumbai with slum dwellers opens up the subject of the Global South,
especially the role of thinkers in the Global South on the development of global studies.
What is the role of voices from the Global South in defining globalization, writing about globa-
lization, criticizing globalization?

AA:
That’s an interesting question, because the minute you identify someone as a ‘Global South
thinker’ it might raise problems. Let’s take Partha Chatterjee, for example, who, interestingly,
almost never uses the word ‘globalization’. But he writes about almost all of the related key
issues such as civil society, the nation-state, development, and mass politics. But globalization?
Not really. Isn’t that an interesting exclusion? The same could be said about someone like Boa-
ventura de Sousa Santos who teaches at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and writes about
global human rights from a Global South perspective. Both thinkers are ‘Southern’, but also
quite mobile. And they are still tied to the national. And why this is so poses a very interesting
puzzle to me. Some cynical people argue that global studies is a project driven by privileged
intellectual classes. This might have some truth to it. But, for me, the deeper issue is that the
force and presence of the nation-state in the Global South is still so great that it remains a pre-
occupying intellectual focus—even in regions populated by ‘weak states’, ‘failed states’, or ‘out-
sourced states’—in terms of security issues. Even when the state outsources itself—as it happens
in Africa—or when it’s highly contested—as in Egypt—the national still plays a tremendous
role. And the honest truth is that even in Europe, ‘globalization’ as an analytic has only relatively
recently taken off. European Union discussions about the welfare state, for example, still tend to
occur within the older national framework that mainstream political sociologists still regard as
perfectly satisfactory. Of course, regionalism has also been part of the globalization impetus as
well as religion, especially Islam. But the great irony is that the place for the globalization dis-
course has been the United States.
488 A. Appadurai

MS:
What about the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries?

AA:
I was going to say Australia and the UK. And that’s very interesting, because the antipodal con-
tributions have been especially important. But between the United States and these Common-
wealth-related places, one finds a large number of developing societies where ‘globalization’
has not been such a generative idea. And why not is an interesting question, isn’t it? As I said
before, my hypothesis is that the nation-state still remains a distracting and very compelling fra-
mework. India is a great example. It has produced world-class intellectuals in many areas, some
of whom are diasporic, while many of them have remained in India. But what if you ask Indian
scholars, ‘What is your theory of globalization?’ Who in India is theorizing globalization? Being
one of these diasporic Indian intellectuals myself, I don’t take Indian commitments and interests
lightly. But I also have to take seriously the fact that I have been away from India for a long time.
Still, I have to say that if I went to Delhi or Calcutta or Chennai and say, ‘Who are the major
theorists of globalization’, I would get responses in terms of social movements, gender, mass
politics, but not globalization. I don’t have a very clear sense of why that’s so.

MS:
This brings me to a question that relates to the rise of the transdisciplinary field of global studies.
To what extent do you see yourself part of it?

AA:
I have to say that I take an interest in it. And I pay attention to global studies literature. But I
don’t see myself as a main contributor to this kind of intellectual formation. There are two
reasons for that. For one, I have retained a firm regional bias. My concern about global
studies—as with many of these new and rather abstract fields—is that you feel like you are sup-
posed to know everything equally well. Not me. My archive is still India and South Asia. The
second reason is that global studies requires constant interlocution, contradiction, and resistance
among existing disciplines. And for me, anthropology already provides for that. To be clear, I’m
not a disciplinary loyalist who rigidly defends the intellectual autonomy of anthropology. But
it’s the space from which I come. It gives me a point of view. So both my disciplinary point-
of-view and my regional point-of – view limit my self-identification with global studies.

MS:
As you know, the research project for which Paul James and I are interviewing globalization
scholars like yourself is about the ‘intellectual career’ of the concept. Let’s try look at
‘career’ dialectically. To what extent has globalization—the concept—been an important
factor in your intellectual career? To what extent has ‘globalization’ made the academic
Arjun Appadurai?

AA:
Globalization issues actually form the bulk of my career, although there have been other
markers between, say, 1976 and 1990. Let me give you two brief answers to your question.
The subjective answer is that I am curious about many things—cinema, cities, ethnic violence,
modernity, and so on. Some of these themes relate to globalization and others don’t. I don’t
necessarily have to look at every single thing through the lens of globalization. If you
 Arjun Appadurai Interview 489

actually look under the big intellectual umbrella of my work, you’ll find that my essays fit lots of
menus.
The more objective answer is that it would be difficult for me to deny that—from a branding
point of view—globalization has been important for my career. I am not always thrilled about
that, because I feel that it supports the superficial implication that one’s academic career must
be built or created around one ‘big idea’ and that somehow one must use this idea to promote
oneself. I resist this kind of self-commodification. But I certainly recognize the role of globali-
zation in my academic career. More importantly, however, I would say that my career has been
infused with my desire to show that anthropological and cultural approaches have something sig-
nificant to say about the human condition. This has certainly been my intellectual thread from
1990 to now, and it is central to my work. You know, people sometimes ask me, ‘What do
you globalization scholars think about the financial crisis?’—or cities, or the environment. In
that sense, then, I do see large part of my career as very closely tied up with the career of the
concept ‘globalization’. But the place where there is an interesting tension relates to the parochi-
alisms I mentioned before: anthropology and my regional bias.

MS:
But one could also say that your work provides a crucial link between studies of globalization
and cultural inquiries. By theorizing globalization, your work has enriched cultural studies and
cultural thinking. At the same time, you enriched globalization theory by infusing it with cultural
themes.

AA:
That is true. I think both categorizations are entirely fair. To the extent that I have received intel-
lectual encouragement, support, and endorsements, it would be mostly for those two things. But I
also think that you can look at it in another way and say that both my disciplinary focus on
anthropology and my sense of place are important correctives to a certain danger: a kind of
megalomania that can befall you when you get into global studies, namely, that that you have
a view from everywhere and have a theory of everything. So I think my two foci are both
helpful and healthy counterbalances to that sort of megalomania.

MS:
Last question. After 9/11, may people said, ‘Well, the globalization fad is over’. But globaliza-
tion talk didn’t end. What do you think will be the future trajectory of globalization, the concept?

AA:
I think there are two potential trajectories. One is the trajectory of normalization. I don’t think
that ‘globalization’ is a fad. Actually, it has become associated with a specific field—global
studies—which has its courses, its degrees, and so on. That’s fine with me—I see nothing
wrong with that. But I also see another way in which it might join some other rubrics, and
yet remain a cutting-edge theme, not just a normalized additional subject that everybody
does—sort of. That is the intellectual place from which ‘globalization’ links up with questions
of ‘the planetary’, the anthropocene, the human moment, whatever you want to call it. These
perspectives are very new, even though our questions about human experience are very old.
And now we could argue that globalization, planetary dilemmas, and the nature of what it is
to be human have come into a global dialogue. This cutting-edge dialogue has hardly begun,
and it cannot be owned by global studies. But I think that ‘globalization’ will be an important
490 A. Appadurai

concept in this unfolding dialogue, which, I hope, will traverse all disciplines and fields of
knowledge.

Notes
1 The interview took place on June 11, 2013 at the campus of New York University in New York City.
2 See, for example, http://www.cades.be/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Debates/2011–11-22/Salon_Vol4_Appadurai.pdf.

References
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Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture & Society, 7, 295– 310.
Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. London: Verso.
Ayache, A. (2010). The blank swan: The end of probability. New York, NY: Wiley.
Castoriadis, C. (1998). The imaginary constitution of society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Hardy, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (2003). Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Arjun Appadurai is Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.
A world-renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization, Appadurai formerly
served as Provost and Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the New School in
New York City. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has
held various professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in the
USA and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the
USA, Latin America, Europe, and India. Examining the role of identity, migration, and elec-
tronic mediation in contemporary globalizing dynamics, Appadurai’s book, Modernity at
large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (1996), has had a significant and lasting impact
on globalization research. Professor Appadurai’s most recent study is The future as cultural
fact: Essays on the global condition (2013).
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