Kirjahaku

In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008-while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking-was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language-and particular failures in it-paved the way for ruin. Appadurai moves in four steps through his analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives are essentially written contracts about the future prices of assets-they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss's The Gift and Austin's theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are all too familiar with now. With his characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most complicated-and yet absolutely central-aspects of our modern economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make: between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what we say we will do with it.

In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008-while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking-was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language-and particular failures in it-paved the way for ruin. Appadurai moves in four steps through his analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives are essentially written contracts about the future prices of assets-they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss's The Gift and Austin's theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are all too familiar with now. With his characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most complicated-and yet absolutely central-aspects of our modern economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make: between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what we say we will do with it.

Examines the role of imagination in the cultural development of our shrinking world. The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through the people we meet, the products we buy, the foods we eat, and the movies we watch. In this bold look at the cultural effects of a shrinking world, leading cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai places these challenges and pleasures of contemporary life in a broad global perspective. Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. He considers the way images-of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation-circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions. Appadurai simultaneously explores and explodes boundaries-between how we imagine the world and how that imagination influences our self-understanding, between social institutions and their effects on the people who participate in them, between nations and peoples that seem to be ever more homogeneous and yet ever more filled with differences. Modernity at Large offers a path to move beyond traditional oppositions between culture and power, tradition and modernity, global and local, pointing out the vital role imagination plays in our construction of the world of today-and tomorrow.

The period since 1989 has been marked by the global endorsement of open markets, the free flow of finance capital and liberal ideas of constitutional rule, and the active expansion of human rights. Why, then, in this era of intense globalization, has there been a proliferation of violence, of ethnic cleansing on the one hand and extreme forms of political violence against civilian populations on the other?Fear of Small Numbers is Arjun Appadurai’s answer to that question. A leading theorist of globalization, Appadurai turns his attention to the complex dynamics fueling large-scale, culturally motivated violence, from the genocides that racked Eastern Europe, Rwanda, and India in the early 1990s to the contemporary “war on terror.” Providing a conceptually innovative framework for understanding sources of global violence, he describes how the nation-state has grown ambivalent about minorities at the same time that minorities, because of global communication technologies and migration flows, increasingly see themselves as parts of powerful global majorities. By exacerbating the inequalities produced by globalization, the volatile, slippery relationship between majorities and minorities foments the desire to eradicate cultural difference.Appadurai analyzes the darker side of globalization: suicide bombings; anti-Americanism; the surplus of rage manifest in televised beheadings; the clash of global ideologies; and the difficulties that flexible, cellular organizations such as Al-Qaeda present to centralized, “vertebrate” structures such as national governments. Powerful, provocative, and timely, Fear of Small Numbers is a thoughtful invitation to rethink what violence is in an age of globalization.

Providing a conceptually innovative framework for understanding sources of global violence, this work describes how the nation-state has grown ambivalent about minorities at the same time that minorities, because of global communication technologies and migration flows, increasingly see themselves as parts of powerful global majorities.

This second installment of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet seeks to intervene in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization, which includes debates about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term. The volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites-local, regional, diasporic-are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence.Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions-China, Africa, South America, Europe-and representing different disciplines and genres-anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography-the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally.Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, JÉrome BindÉ, NÉstor GarcÍa Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar TourÉ MandÉmory, Achille Mbembe, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen

This major collection of essays, a sequel to Modernity at Large and Fear of Small Numbers, is the product of ten years' research and writing, constituting an important contribution to globalization studies. Appadurai takes a broad analytical look at the genealogies of the present era of globalization through essays on violence, commodification, nationalism, terror and materiality.Alongside a discussion of these wider debates, Appadurai situates India at the heart of his work, offering writing based on firsthand research among urban slum dwellers in Mumbai, in which he examines their struggle to achieve equity, recognition and self-governance in conditions of extreme inequality.Finally, in his work on design, planning, finance and poverty, Appadurai embraces the "politics of hope" and lays the foundations for a revitalized, and urgent, anthropology of the future.

What makes us human? We are all connected but do we feel lonely? Does democracy still work? Are cities for everyone? Should the planet be a design project? If Mars is the answer, what is the question? Who wants to live forever? The world of tomorrow is shaped by emerging design and technology of today. Bringing together a range of objects either newly released or in development, The Future Starts Here begins to imagine where our society might be headed. Cute but intelligent robots, massive unmanned aircraft that deliver internet access, crowdfunded buildings, tools printed in space, mysterious black boxes that understand human genetic codes - how can these objects affect the way we live, learn and love? And how are they challenging our understanding of what it means to be an individual, a citizen, a crowd or a species? With contributions from Arjun Appadurai, Zara Arshad, Teju Cole, Anne Galloway, Corinna Gardner, Rory Hyde, Jennifer Kabat, Alex Kalman, Natalie D. Kane, Kieran Long, Justin McGuirk, An Xiao Mina, Richard Moyes, Mariana Pestana, Susan Schuppli and Leanne Shapton.

Analysis of an agrarian society confronted with capitalism. This collection of essays by Arjun Appadurai based on his fieldwork in rural Maharashtra, India, in the early 1980s is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. In conversation with agronomists, economists, and development anthropologists, the essays explore the ways agricultural technologies, changes in how surface wells are dug and managed, the provision and sharing of food and management of time, issues of scale in studying rural lives, and how local knowledge is formed and transformed reveal the distinctive character of rural Indian sociality. Locating these features in the context of “subsistence capitalism,” Appadurai draws our attention to the importance of relational practices and the pull of autonomy. These essays offer a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and study ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence.

Att massorna har kapacitet att ingjuta fruktan är känt sedan länge. Men hur kommer det sig att vi i dagens liberala stater bevittnar en allt mer utpräglad rädsla för de fåtaliga en fruktan för minoriteter av alla slag? För samhällsvetaren och antropologen Arjun Appadurai måste svaret på denna fråga sökas dels i historien om de moderna nationalstaternas uppkomst, dels i de speciella villkor som de senaste årens globaliseringsprocesser har skapat. Med utgångspunkt i den till synes paradoxala iakttagelsen att dagens förhärskande diskurs om öppna gränser och integration samexisterar med allt tätare utbrott av kulturellt motiverat våld och etnisk rensning, erbjuder han ett begreppsligt ramverk för att hantera några av de mest brännande politiska frågorna i vår tid. Arjun Appadurai är författare till den uppmärksammade studien Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Vredens geografi, som är den tredje titeln i TankeKrafts bokserie »Globaliseringens ideologier«, är hans första bok som ges ut på svenska.

Arjun Appadurai ist einer der renommiertesten Anthropologen der Gegenwart. Mit Die Geographie des Zorns liegt nun eines seiner wichtigsten Werke erstmals auf deutsch vor. Appadurai beschäftigt sich mit der Dialektik der Globalisierung: Während die Jahre nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauer einerseits eine Zeit der Demokratisierung und der weltweiten Angleichung von Instutitionen waren, erlebten wir beispiellose Exzesse der Gewalt: den Völkermord in Ruanda, die Bürgerkriege auf dem Balkan, die Anschläge des 11. September. Angesichts der drohenden kulturellen Homogenisierung erwacht ein "Narzißmus der Minderheiten"; wir leben - so Appadurai - in einer "Kultur des Kampfes".