Issues in Contemporary Cultural Economy

1
Issues in Contemporary Cultural Economy

• Central problem of todays global interactions
• Tension between cultural homogenization and
  cultural heterogenization
• New global cultural economy
• Complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that
  cannot be understood any longer through
  center-periphery models
• Complexity of the current culture
• Has to do with fundamental disjunctures between
  economy, culture and politics

2
Issues in Contemporary Cultural Economy

• Heterogeneity/indigenized Homogeneity/globalized

P
CENTER
P
P
Center-Periphery Model
P
P
3
Appadurais scapesFive Dimensions of Global
Culture
technoscapes
financescapes
ethnoscapes
ideoscapes
mediascapes
4
The scapes A Way to Understanding

• Depict relationships among 5 dimensions of global
  cultural flows
• Landscapes with fluid irregular shapes
  perspectival constructs influenced by the
  historical, linguistic and political location of
  different sorts of actors navigated by agents
  who both experience and constitute larger
  formations. Building blocks of imagined worlds
  constituted by the historical imaginations of
  people and groups spread about the world.

5
The scapes A Way to Understanding
Ethnoscapes

• The landscape of persons who constitute the
  shifting world in which we live tourists,
  immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and
  other moving groups more persons or groups deal
  with the realities of having to move or fantasies
  of wanting to move
• Fluid global configurations of technology and the
  fact that both hi- and low-tech, mechanical and
  informational now moves at high speeds across
  what used to be boundaries driven by the
  increasingly complex relationships among money
  flows, political possibilities, and availability
  of both unskilled and highly-skilled labor

Technoscapes
6
The scapes A Way to Understanding

• Disposition of global capita, mysterious, rapid
  and difficult to follow, currency markets,
  national stocks exchanges, and commodity
  speculations move megamonies at blinding speed
  global relationships among ethnoscapes,
  technoscapes, and financescapes are disjunctive
  and unpredictable each act as constraint and
  parameter for movements in the others

Financescapes
7
The scapes A Way to Understanding

• Distribution of the electronic capabilities to
  produce and disseminate information, now
  available to a growing number of private and
  public interests throughout the world, and the
  images of the world created by these media
  provide images in which the world of commodities
  and the world of news and politics are deeply
  mixedlines between realistic and fictional
  become blurred by distance between audience and
  direct experiences portrayed
• Connected images often directly politically and
  frequently having to do with state ideologies and
  the counterideologies of movements oriented to
  capturing state power or a piece of it. Composed
  of elements of the modern worldview a chain of
  ideas, terms, and images such as freedom,
  welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation and,
  specially, democracy, changing in meaning as
  things move along

Mediascapes
Ideoscapes
8
Fertile Ground of Deterritorialization
persons
Chasing each other around the world
money
commodities
9
Issues in Contemporary Cultural Economy

• And so deeper cultural change driven by the
  scapes and the disjunctures among them in their
  continuously fluid and uncertain interplay Newer
  relationships between production and consumption
  in todays global economy
• Production fetishism
• The local masking the translocal
• such as free-trade zones
• Fetishism of the consumer
• Make-believe that he or she
• is an actor

10
Issues in Contemporary Cultural Economy

• Thus as disjunctures between different sorts of
  global flows central feature of global culture
  today becomes the mutual effort of sameness and
  difference to cannibalize each other, and
  proclaim their success either as a triumph of the
  global or the continuation of the local
• Negative examples Riots, refugee flows,
• state-sponsored torture, ethnocide, terrorism
• Positive examples Expansion of many individual
• horizons of hope and fantasy, forces of global
  opinion
• influence on human rights, growth of progressive
• transnational alliances