"After colonialism. The cultural consequences of globalization ", Arjun Appadurai (1996)

Extract

[...] The intimate sentiments of actors can be comprehensible only with considering larger cultural and historical frames of power and discipline and the sources of ethnic violence can't be reduced to primordial sentiments. To apply these ideas, Arjun Appadurai proposes the alternative model of “ethnic implosion”. Before explaining this model, he introduces Rosenau's notion of “cascade” that helps us to understand why one particular micro event and not another can lead to large-scale ethnic violence. Then he introduces Tambiah's notions of “focalization” (denudating local incidents of their particulars of context and aggregating them) and “transvaluation”(the parallel process of assimilating particulars to a largest cause or interest). [...]

[...] At the same time cascades provide material for the development of local imagination and feelings and so allow the processes of focalisation and transvaluation. One drawback: these concepts are too abstract to capture the raw violence and the new intimacy between enemies (see friends or neighbours fighting with each other) in ethnic conflicts. In the model of “ethnic implosion”, ethnic violence has to be regarded as implosive, structurally (the local politics are influenced by the global ones) and historically (it is the complex product of the local imagination, influenced by the cascades). [...]

[...] The cultural consequences of globalization," Arjun Appadurai (1996) Arjun Appadurai (born 1949 in Bombay) earned his Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (1970) and his Master of Arts (1973) from Brandeis University. He is a Doctor of Philosophy since 1976 (University of Chicago). He currently focuses his studies on ethnic violence in the context of globalization. He also leads a project on the cultural dimensions of social crisis in Mumbai and a comparative ethnographic project on grass-roots globalization. (http://www.appadurai.com/homebio.htm). Arjun Appadurai wants to demonstrate that the primordialist thesis is unable to account for the ethnicities of the twentieth century, mainly characterized by large size, nationalist aspiration and violence, and to propose a new approach to reach this aim. [...]

[...] All the more the countries with ethnic turbulence are very different. Second, according to the primordialist thesis, countries that had long undisturbed periods of ethnic harmony (Germany, France, the United States, Japan) are more mature and can help the others, but there are yet also threatened by the “primordial bug” because they have become host to these more infantile populations, attached to blood, language, religion and memory. According to Arjun Appadurai, one can easily understand that one can't accept such views today. [...]