Cultural Flows

Cultural flows refer to multidirectional movements and reallocations of human beings, artifacts, and ideas within the ill-defined sphere of “culture” in its global, national, and regional dimensions. The term was widely applied in consumer culture, especially in relation to production/consumption processes and products. Mobilized by transformationalist globalization theorists, the concept suggests that migrations and mobilities generate ever-changing cultural formations, erasing imagined boundaries and territorial borders through which nation-states legitimate their power.

Transformationalists express suspicion toward traditional identifications of globalization with cultural standardization (e.g., one-dimensional “Americanization” of world cultures), arguing instead that cultural flows diffuse identities, generating new possibilities for intercultural dialogues. Unlike other branches of globalization theory (e.g., world systems theory), transformationalism does not establish culture as a single system of collective values and practices. Instead, it highlights the multiplicity of cultural trajectories through time and space, and the power individuals and collectivities have to create, destroy, and reinvent cultures. Cultural flows facilitate human creativity both in organized or institutionalized (in nation-states, factories, cultural industries) and nonorganized forms (through travel, migration, and consumption). Producing and consuming culturally specific goods and ideas become interconnected: consumers assign new meanings to them, a process that transforms them into symbolic producers and grants them with some agency and belonging to a consumer community.

Most world societies have always been in (peaceful or violent) contact with each other. The twentieth-century revolution in communications and transport has only intensified this phenomenon, according to David Held. However, cultural flows remain unevenly distributed across the world: urban areas are more benefited by flows of goods than rural peripheries, as they tend to be the destinations of business or labor migrants or production centers for commodities. The developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Britain, the United States) and Asia (e.g., China, India) possess more military and technological power to control whole regions of the world, as opposed to impoverished countries (e.g., on the African continent), which are cast as political satellites or subaltern cultural formations.

The concept of cultural flows is associated with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Appadurai suggests that we reconsider the binary oppositions colonial history bequeathed us: global [Page 385]versus local, South versus North, or metropolitan versus rural. Instead, we should try to understand how “flows” or “scapes” sweep through the globe, carrying capital, images, people, information, technologies, and ideas. As these flows travel through national boundaries, they form different combinations and interdependencies, mutate, and split cultural imaginations into nation and state. Institutional barriers collapse, and people join imagined communities that live beyond the place they were born and raised (e.g., communities of interest, such as those that maintain Internet blogs or diasporic groups that live outside their homeland).

Refuting the canon of push-and-pull factors of traditional migration theory (e.g., lack of jobs in one country and abundance in another are solely responsible for migrations), Appadurai develops a thesis with an eye to Scott Lash and John Urry's disorganized capitalism hypothesis, that is, to split global cultural flows into ethnoscapes (human migrations), technoscapes (configurations of technology), financescapes (global business networks), ideoscapes (concatenations of images), and mediascapes (cultural industry networks). He claims that global flows occur through and in the growing disjunctures between scapes.

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