Contemporary social-cultural Anthropologist Arjun Appaduari finds that today's world involves interactions of a 'new order and intensity'. These interactions are far less restricted than the boundaries which history has shown us. Appaduari argues that modernity and globalization are not unified processes and that there is not a one way direction towards the future within India or any other developing eastern country.
Appadurai identifies how the imagination is part of a new order of interactions associated with the global flows and relationships between information, finance, technology, and many other cultural systems. His main concern is is about the institutionalization of the imagination itself and how it is one of many social tools used to consistently adapt and act with the fast and ever-changing present global order. The core of Appadurai's theory lies within his 'scapes', which are the ways, directions, and overall flow of ideas around the world. Appadurai's theory is composed of five dimensions (scapes) of global cultural flow. These five dimensions are known as ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, finanscapes, and technoscapes, and each impacts the world differently via their make-ups of demographics, electronic information, financial drivers and markets, and modern technology. Consequently, any new ideas which flow into India do so by the five 'scapes' and are interpreted according to the politics of India's past.
Appadurai's developing theory has taken the simple consensus of one size fits all and turned it inside out. His theory conceives that India won't assimilate into a proposed uniformed way of life. Instead India will attune some specifically chosen American and western ideas into their part of the globalizing world.
(Appadurai, A. 1996, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, United States)
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