Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”

Arjun Appadurai is a socio-cultural anthropologist who has formulated frameworks in which to study media, consumption, and migration across the globe.  He proposes that today’s world is a ‘complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models’ (Appadurai, 32).  He locates this disjuncture, as opposed to any homogenizing conjunction of culture, in a dynamic of ‘indigenization’, where ‘…at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way’ (32). 

This particular tendency, however, seems not so new.  An interesting historical example to consider, in New Zealand, of this kind of vital ‘indigenization’ that Appadurai refers to, might be when Maori were exposed to the technologies and imagery of colonial settlers.  One result was an innovative period in the use of paint for figurative depictions, which also included the painted word, on, and inside their houses.  Hamish Keith, in his book The Big Picture, emphasizes their radical innovation on a par with any European conception of the avant-garde, but which has at times been misconstrued as an inconsequential folk art not proper to Maori traditions.  The point was that Maori art was alive and responding to an economy and ‘look’, in its own idiosyncratic way.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s recent colonial history seems to present a small foretaste of what Appadurai now sees as ‘new’ in our global situation, where the unprecedented mobility of populations has broken up the habitual territories of custom and inclination.  Culture has become, ‘more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences’ (44).  Although not exactly what was being described here, I thought about how Pakeha culture rises from a deterritorialised ancestry, which once may have considered itself as representing a ‘centre’ here in a ‘periphery’ land.  It might now be considered as doubly deterritorialised: positioned somewhere between Not Maori and therefore not of the whenua, and Not European.  We are a culture that perhaps truly occupies the landscape Appadurai calls an Ideoscape, since we are the living semantic of a treaty written into the land. 

 

Pakeha abroad in Europe can become more aware of what elements of environment or ecology, and proximity to Maori, has made a difference (as compared to the British) to their cultural sense of self-understanding.  Hamish Keith emphasizes with regard to the Maori-Pakeha relationship that, ‘From the beginning each had borrowed from the other – imagery and technology – but nowhere could it be said that these borrowings flowered into some common experience that their art reflected’ (254). This also seems to follow Appadurai’s meaning of disjuncture and difference between influencing cultures.  However, it does not also follow that artists have not been able to find fertile connections and extensions.   Keith puts forward the example of Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon where, ‘Hotere had provided … McCahon with the waiata written by Hotere’s father … that became The Song of the Shining Cuckoo’ and, ‘The biblical text in Hotere’s Aramoana screen is as much homage to McCahon as it is simply a quote from Ezekiel’ (257). 

Citations

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Keith, Hamish. The Big Picture: A History of New Zealand Art from 1642. Auckland, London, Sydney, Houghton, and New Delhi: Random House, A Godwit Book, 2007.