Reading: Appadurai "Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"
During class, I was paired with another classmate to discuss one section of Appadurai's reading (p. 519-522). This last pages of his writing discussed three primary topics, 1. Marx's ideology, 2. family structures in culture, and 3. ideoscapes. According to Appadurai's analysis of Marx's theory of fetishism of commodity, there are two forms of fetishism, 1. production fetishism and 2. consumer fetishism. These fetishism can only exist together and describes the cultural reality that people are prioritized with the factory reality that society exists within. Then, he moves to the discussion of family structures and how they are influenced by the globalization of culture. In this situation, he states that people are influenced by their global cultures and this change in people also influences their family structures, which is how outside factors change the dynamics within families. One example that I provided during class was of an individual whose family aligns with the global culture of a strong religion whose sexual identity does not align with their believes and ideology. In this situation, the family structure changes because of outside opinions provided by the globalization of culture, meaning that the individual's family cannot accept that queer identity because their religion states that queer people are sinful. Finally, Appadurai discusses his last of the "-scapes," ideoscapes, which combines the role of mass media in the politics of gender identity, for example. This ideoscape creates a chaos theory where there are contradicting opinions which exist within one cultural identity. In the example of the queer son within a religious family, the family is influenced by chaos theory because parental cultural rules dictate that they love their children by their religious cultural rules dictates they condemn his sin.
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