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The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition

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DIBATTITI

The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global

Condition

di Arjun Appadurai

discutono

Marco Aime, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli,

Arjun Appadurai

Exchange, sell, buy

di Marco Aime

1. Spheres of exchange

Almost thirty years after the issue of The Social Life of Things1,
a book that is now become a «classic», Arjun Appadurai return to a
reflection on things and commodities and overall on values that different
cultures and different societies appoint to them. He do it analysing this
subject above all in light of the process of globalization that marked
more and more our time and of the flows that, always more rapidly
cross our world. Process and flows that give birth to those different
«scapes», skillfully described in Modernity at Large2.
In the first chapter of The Future as a Cultural Fact, Appadurai
offers us an excellent contribute to the historical and obstinate debate
in the field of economic anthropology. A debate which started with
the opposition between formalist and substantivist economic models3
and that often constrained, and in the end it led to schematic and
ideological interpretations, that are incapable to comprehend all nu-
ances of reality. Thanks to a more dynamic, more open and more
compliant with our times analysis, with a cultural anthropology that
feels the effect non only of the post-colonial turn, but also of a more
wide horizon of action, Appadurai stresses the rigid and schematic
approach so often used to analyze different forms of transaction such
as barter or the African institution known as «spheres of exchange».

1
A. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
2
A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minne-
apolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
3
See, for example, R. Wilk, Economies and Cultures. Foundations of economic
anthropology, Boulder, Westview Press, 1996.

RASSEGNA ITALIANA DI SOCIOLOGIA / a. LIV, n. 4, ottobre-dicembre 2013

2 Arjun Appadurai

Therefore I would like to treasure my experience as an Africanist in

order to add a few reflections on the «spheres of exchange» issue,
that Appadurai faces in the first part of his book..
Money as a medium of payment seems to have become a universal
norm in the Western world, however, alongside this normative back-
ground, it is commonly accepted that «money cannot buy everything».
Thus, there are particular effects that cannot be exchanged with
money, but only with other particular, specific effects. For example, a
driving license is «exchangeable» only with specific driving skills and,
in the same way, a Master’s Degree is «exchangeable» only with a
particular discipline’s accurate knowledge. In raising consciousness of
money’s limits, not only we all feel a sense of relief by thinking that
not everything has been commodified yet, but we are also induced
to draw a comparison with radically different realities, such as many
African communities. In these distant realities the so-called «spheres of
exchange» conditioned – and condition still today, though to a minor
degree – all transactions of goods, services and other values.
A sphere of exchange is a domain in which a given product can
be exchanged with other products belonging to the same domain.
Outside its specific domain a product can not find equivalents to
be exchanged with. Basically, not every product can be traded with
whatever other product.
Paul Bohannan’s study on the Tiv of Nigeria is to be considered one
of the most important analysis in anthropological literature4. As Bohan-
nan explains, for the Tiv is neither usual nor desirable to exchange a
good with another, without classifying each good in a particular sphere.
In the 1950s there were ideally three spheres of exchange. The first
sphere included food and other rapid consumption goods, that could be
freely exchanged one for the other. Together with food, in this sphere
were ranked as exchange objects also calebasses, eating utensils, tools
for food-preparation, farming tools, chickens and goats. The second
sphere included prestige goods such as slaves5, cattle, brass rods and a
particular kind of white dress called tugudu. It was possible to purchase
slaves or cattle by paying with brass rods, or to purchase brass rods
by paying with tugudu dresses, and so on. The third sphere included
only one category: the rights in human beings other than slaves and
in particular the rights in women. «Even twenty-five years after official
abolition of exchange marriage, it is this category of exchange in which
Tiv are emotionally most entangled», Bohannan explains. In the third

4
P. Bohannan, Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv, in
«American Anthropologist», 1955, 57, pp. 60-70.
5
Bohannan points out that he’s writing in the present tense beacuse, at the time
of his field study, categories such as «slavery» were still prevailing from an ideological
point of view, even if slavery as a practice had almost disappeared.
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 3

sphere the exchange involves rights in women and in children, that

is, those who were considered dependent individuals and their value
was expressed in terms of kinship and marriage6.
Among the Mossi spheres of exchange varied depending on the
day: in some days rice could be traded with cotton, in others with
peanuts and vice versa; however, it was not possible to exchange
vegetables or plants with animals. Similar restrictions did not apply to
goods only; individuals should also comply with specific principles that
made market exchanges much less neutral. For example, an individual
could not buy anything from a relative except for European goods;
men could purchase only cooked food and they often asked a female
relative to buy it in their place; women could not buy cotton clothes,
but should instead send a man to purchase them7.
Some spheres provide only for unidirectional exchange. Among many
groups in Western Africa oxes are considered as individual wealth and
are used only by men in religious rituals: oxes can not be consumed but
only sacrificed during specific ceremonies8. Moreover, the ox belongs to
a separate sphere of exchange: it can be sold or ceded to others only
if inherited. «When you buy an ox – an old Tangba man once told
me – you already assign it to one of your sons. All sons inherit your
oxes, even if not always in equal parts. A father whose sons get on
well let them divide the oxes; on the contrary, if his sons do not get
along, it will be him the one who divides the cattle. Only those oxes
can be sold, while the other oxes you buy can only be sacrificed».
The spheres of exchange system represents the basis for what
Bohannan and Dalton call «multicentric economies», in which each
sphere is defined by different exchange principles and different moral
evaluations. The «moral» dimension plays here a very important role,
inasmuch the hierarchy between spheres is not strictly economic, rather
it is grounded on the good’s or service’s prestige. These considerations
lead to another fundamental distinction regarding the different kinds of
exchange. On the one hand, Bohannan and Dalton define «transactions»
those exchanges that take place inside the same sphere. On the other
hand, exchanges that happen between different spheres – in very rare
cases, when subsistence becomes more important than prestige – are
called «conversions»9.
In practice, it is as if each sphere represents a separate and in-
dependent economy, though forming with the other spheres a specific

6
P. Bohannan, 1955, op. cit., pp. 62-63.
7
E.P. Skinner, The Mossi of the Upper Volta, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1992, pp. 263-271.
8
The same happens among the Kabre, see C. Piot, Wealth production, ritual con-
sumption, and center/periphery relations in a West African regional system, in «American
Ethnologist», 1992, 52, p. 39.
9
P. Bohannan and G. Dalton, 1962, pp. 3-5.
4 Arjun Appadurai

hierarchical order. A similar model would seem to condemn the cir-

culation of goods to fixed and narrow distribution networks. In this
case, conversions would appear as a zero-sum game in which what
one individual gains must be lost by another. However, Robert Launay
raises an extremely fitting question: unless in case of necessity, who may
be so foolish as to exchange downward, that is, to exchange goods
belonging to a «prestigious» sphere with goods belonging to a sphere
of less prestige?10 The answer, suggests Launay, resides in a deficiency
of the paradigm, which betrays factual reality. The spheres of exchange
systems, as Appadurai emphasizes in the first pages of his book, maintain
their consistency within a given society, but societies are not closed,
as sometimes seems to emerge from Bohannan and Dalton’s model. In
contrast, exchanges take place primarily outside societies. By exiting a
specific circuit of spheres, it becomes possible to exchange goods and
services outside the internal hierarchies. By attributing a different moral
value to exchange objects, each one of the two actors will consider
himself, according to his own parameters, a winner11. Thus, we can
not consider only a society’s internal evaluation system to understand
its economy, rather we must take into account the whole network of
exchange relations that a given society has with its neighbors.
Launay recalls the trade relations between the Guro and the Dyula
of Ivory Coast, which took place in markets along the border between
the two groups’ territories. The Guro of the north had greater access to
these markets, where they traded with the Dyula cola nuts in exchange
for iron bars, that they needed for the construction of agricultural
tools. These bars constituted the exchange unit for both groups. For
the Guro cola and iron bars belonged to two different spheres, and
to give the first in exchange for the latter was considered an exchange
«in surplus», as the bars were assigned a higher prestige.
The Guro of the north, however, accumulated much more iron than
they required to forge their hoes and their tools. This accumulation
was necessary to set in motion another kind of exchange. In Guro
northern regions, characterized by savannah, cola nuts did not grow.
These came from the forests inhabited by Guro communities of the
south. This is why the northern communities must obtain a surplus
of iron. From northern Guro communities’ perspective this second
exchange – iron for cola – appeared to be «in deficit» in terms of
prestige, but advantageous from an economic point of view. In fact,
they obtained larger quantities of cola nuts than those they needed to
pay the Dyula for iron bars. The Dyula considered iron bars merely as
a unit value to be reinvested in trade, while for the Guro iron bars

10
R. Launay, Transactional Spheres and Inter-Societal Exchange in Ivory Coast, in
«Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines», 1978, 72, XVIII-4, p. 561.
11
R. Launay, 1978, op. cit., p. 562.
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 5

represented the medium of payment of bride price. Iron in exchange for

rights in women, here’s another transaction between different spheres,
this time «in the black». By exchanging iron for women coming from
forest-based communities, the Guro living in the north would obtain
additional benefits in terms of trade. In fact, relations between com-
munities were often expressed in terms of kinship, and having southern
wives facilitated cola trade12.
This external exchange, which connects different spheres to which
each actor bestows an emic value, is not prerogative of primitive or
archaic economies, indeed in contemporary Europe we find it at much
broader level. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones highlight
how the majority of exchanges between the West and the former East-
ern bloc countries actually took the form of barter inasmuch money
assumed a different function in capitalist countries compared to social-
ist countries, and was therefore not commensurable. For example, in
socialist countries citizens spent just a small part of their salary for
housing and transport, while clothing and consumer goods were much
more expensive. Exactly the opposite happened in Western countries.
In such separated regimes prices could not hence provide a universal
measure of value. Therefore, as the authors argue, it is true that the
superficial reason why East-West trade took the form of barter was
the lack of hard currency reserves in the East; however, the real cause
must be sought in the existence of different cultural conceptions of
values in the two different economic systems and in the maintenance
of a boundary between them13.
Another case that calls into question the understanding of spheres
of exchange as separate and impermeable domains, it is the one pro-
vided by Fredrik Barth in regard to the Darfur region (Sudan)14. In
Darfur there are two major economic spheres: the first one includes a
wide range of material objects, it provides for the use of money and
it is associated with market exchange; while the second one concerns
the exchange of work and beer. The two spheres are separated by
moral sanctions with respect to the conversion of work or beer into
money. However the model does not seem to be so rigid: for example,
objects considered very prestigious, such as swords, can be purchased
with money. In the same way, even though the sphere of work and
beer is considered of great prestige, bride price mainly consists in
money – or in goods purchasable with money – thus showing that in

12
C. Meillassoux, L’economia della savana, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1975, pp. 137-138.
13
C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.), Barter, Exchange and Value. An anthro-
pological approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 5.
14
F. Barth, «Economic Spheres in Darfur», in R. Firth (ed.), Themes in Economic
Anthropology, A.S.A. Monograph, London, Tavistock, 1967.
6 Arjun Appadurai

this case the monetary sphere is considered of high rank rather than
the opposite.
Barth then analyzes the circulation of goods and services enabled
by families in Darfur: according to his study, the communities’ main
purpose is to direct the circulation of their goods in those channels
that provide maximum gain and the widest variety of consumer prod-
ucts. This allows each family unit to reinvest from time to time in the
most profitable channels for goods accumulation. In this way it is often
possible to shape growth spirals, such as money-cattle-money and work-
millet-beer-work. Through these exchange sequences families can invest
and consequently increase their wealth, even though each distribution
network comes with internal brakes that limit its expansion.
It is interesting to notice that not all goods that participate to a
network can be freely exchanged with other goods, that is, not all
goods exchanged within a given distribution network belong to the
same sphere. Let’s consider the case of «work-millet-beer-work»: in
principle, work can not be obtained in exchange for millet. It hap-
pens, however, that at a certain point of the year, to the end of the
dry season and before the next harvest, many individuals realize they
have committed the majority of their work in the production of cash
crops and consequently find themselves short of millet. This happens
also because much of the Djebel Marra region, inhabited by the Fur,
is occupied by mountains too high for millet growing. This shortage
can be mitigated through the purchase of imported millet. Millet is
used to produce cornmeal mush and beer: the first is consumed daily
by every family, but during ritual occasions parties are held where
cornmeal mush and beer are distributed in large quantities to many
guests. In fact, most of the beer is consumed on ceremonial occasions,
such as parties celebrating the end of collective works. Sometimes
householders ask other men’s help to cultivate their fields and in turn
reciprocate with their own work. This agreement is sanctioned by beer
distribution: the more expansive the land to cultivate, the greater the
beer distributed. In this way, through beer preparation, it is possible
to mobilize work in a quantity proportional to the millet invested to
produce it.
Barth argues that barriers between different spheres actually pre-
vent direct conversion15. The spheres of exchange system is therefore
not a simple subdivision of goods, but is rather to be intended as a
constituent part of a wider system of different exchange forms.
Finally, it is possible to observe that alongside spheres that bind
goods, there are also spheres of «exchangers». We have already seen
how gender determines a certain division of trade, both regarding the
sale and the purchase. Meillassoux points out that in the Ivory Coast

15
F. Barth, 1967, op. cit., p. 164
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 7

regions he studied palm oil, salt and rice were sometimes purchased
by men, but mostly by Dyula women living in big cities; while sub-
sistence goods of local and domestic production, as much as goods
coming from the harvest, were sold exclusively by Guro women.
However, specialization was not based only on gender, as each ethnic
group favored a certain sphere of goods. For example, the Baule of
Ivory Coast traded only prestige goods: guns, gunpowder, ivory and
gold. Similar goods were not, however, traded in markets, but were
exchanged through different channels16.

2. Coins and shells

Academic researches on the introduction of currency among African

populations in colonial times have often suffered from the same rigid
approach discussed above, which disregards the cultural metaboliza-
tion of subjects and objects coming from the outside. «Money is one
of the shatteringly simplifying ideas of all times, and like every other
new and compelling idea, it creates its own revolution. The monetary
revolution, at least in this part of Africa, is the turn away from the
multicentric economy. Its course may be painful, but there is very
little doubt about its outcome»17. In 1959 Paul Bohannan used these
slightly disconsolate words to conclude his article on the impact of
money introduction in commercial transactions among the Tiv of
Nigeria, which he had studied for several years. The introduction of
currency as universal medium of payment had gradually dismantled
the closed spheres system which conditioned internal trade. Bohannan
points out how the Tiv harbored distrust of money and how they
often preferred to be paid in food rather than money. According to
Adeline Masquelier the money coin became symbol of alienation from
traditional values as well as of uncertainty about the future. For this
reason individuals who were hired for a day’s work asked to be paid
in grain rather than in money18.
Thus, it is beyond doubt that the introduction of monetary exchange
had caused the modification of many African communities’ normative
benchmarks. However, rather than the emergence of something different
and new, it was actually a matter of switching units of measurement.
In fact, Africans were not alien to monetary exchange in their
trade. Many authors tend to exaggerate the extent of the impact of

16
C. Meillassoux, 1975, op. cit., pp. 135-144.
17
P. Bohannan, The impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy, in «The
Journal of Economic History», XIX, 4, 1959, pp. 491-503.
18
A. Masquelier, Narratives of Power, Images of Wealth: The Ritual Economy of Bori
in the Market, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds.), Modernity and its Malcontent: Ritual
and Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 14.
8 Arjun Appadurai

money as if it were an absolute novelty. This approach is linked to

the early anthropology’s tendency to create dichotomies between pairs
of opposites.
Jean-Loup Amselle has highlighted and criticized such inclination,
which has given rise to binary classifications such as societies with a
state and segmental societies, paganism and Islam, subsistence societies
and market societies, societies with or without monetary exchange19.
However, reality does not fit these dichotomies. African societies of the
past, were they empires or ‘stateless’, have known multiple monetary
revolutions over time, as a result of migrations, conquests, internal
political tensions, trade flows or evolution of production techniques. All
these societies have used different mediums of payment for internal or
external purposes20. Different kinds of currency characterized African
trade: iron rods, copper wire, raffia, hoes, etc.. To ascribe the advent
of monetary exchange to the arrival of white settlers is an act of ar-
rogance. The wide spread of the cauri21 highlights how the concept of
money was already in place well before the settlers’ arrival.
Therefore, white settlers did not introduce currency in itself, but
rather a new currency, which did not immediately replace other exist-
ing mediums of exchange.
It was after World War I that the use of colonial currency became
more frequent, when the French began to levy taxes to be paid in
Francs22. However, it should be asked whether the cauri exchanged
during ritual ceremonies is to be considered as money, in the same
sense in which we define our currencies. The French Franc, introduced
and gradually imposed by colonial administration, did not represent
therefore a novelty in itself, but rather the functions associated with it
were new. The Western coin had a purely economic value, while the
traditional coin was polyvalent and it could have different meanings
depending on the context.
Describing the pre-colonial situation, Servet sustains that for Af-
ricans coins activated all of society’s dimensions. Coins functioned as
mediums of social exchange reproducing the world’s order: they were
committed to given state’s or clan’s hierarchies. In brief, not everything
could buy everything. In a second stage, during Africa’s colonization,
Europeans implicitly affirmed in every territory they conquered the

19
J-L. Amselle, Logiques métisses, Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs,
Paris, Payot, 1990.
20
J.M. Servet, Démonetarisation et remonétarisation en Afrique-Occidentale et Equa-
toriale (XIX-XX siécles), in M. Aglietta and A. Orléans (eds.), La monnaie souveraine,
Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998, p. 290.
21
The cauri, or cyprea moneta, is a little white shell used as a coin in the African
continent.
22
E.P. Skinner, The Mossi of Upper Volta, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1962, p. 260.
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 9

political dimension of monetary exchange by requiring the use of

money coins. Servet concludes that both the non-specialization and
the lack of separation between the economic and the non-economic
use of an object show that the term «economy» makes little sense in
African societies23.
This last argument, which is shared by many scholars, presents once
again – although in a more modern perspective – the classic dichotomy
between monetarist and non-monetarist societies. In the same way, the
approach that considers money coin’s presence or absence as discrimi-
nating between two possible universes of exchange is rather schematic
and recalls once again the classificatory trend that has characterized
many past studies. Since monetary exchange has been considered an
important transformation factor, scholars have often created dichotomies
between traditional and modern economies, pre-capitalist and capital-
ist economies, monetarist and non-monetarist economies, etc.. Thus,
the importance of money in some pre-capitalist economies has been
underestimated, inasmuch it is often assumed that an economic model
completely excludes the other.
Although the cauri can be considered a money coin in all respects,
it coexisted with forms of barter and, on the other hand, the majority
of African societies – even those considered more «primitive» – have
or have had, alongside gift and social exchange, a more «neutral»,
utilitarian and individualistic form of exchange24.
Though intrusive, money has not always been the sole protagonist
on the scene of exchange. Polanyi, for example, repeats several times
how trade and currency have had a separate and independent origin
in respect to markets25. Thus, money is not necessary to make business
affairs. In the same way, as Latouche points out, currency and trading
relations can put in operation a non-mercantile society: in fact, the
«neoclanic oikonomie» uses widely, for the means of its own internal
circulation, the currency created by the official world’s institutions, thus
repossessing to a certain degree the foreign currency26.
In many cases, however, the use of money has transformed the
nature of exchanges, dragging them out of the moral sphere. Anyway
this should not be interpreted as a discriminating action, but rather
as a further contribution to the complexity that characterizes every
human action.
Therefore, as Appadurai observes (pp. 20-21), every commodity
refers to different social arenas and to different social actors: thus, any

23
J.M. Servet, 1998, op. cit., pp. 301-303.
24
S. Latouche, L’autre Afrique. Entre don et marché, Paris, Albin Michel, 1998.
25
K. Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies. Essays of Karl Polanyi,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1968.
26
S. Latouche, Riappropriarsi della moneta: le sfide dell’altra economia, introduzione
a P. Coluccia, La banca del tempo, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2001.
10 Arjun Appadurai

attempt to include goods and services in rigid categories represents a

risk of loosing the complexity surrounding every exchange.
In one of his logic exercises Ludwig Wittgenstein wondered if a
fence with a hole would still be a fence. The great philosopher’s an-
swer was «yes»: the existence of an opening, of a passage, does not
prevent the fence to perform its function. This beautiful metaphor
helps us understand how the social life of objects and goods – even
if it is strongly shaped both culturally and historically – is always
subject to transformations and interpretations that may filter through
that opening.

Escaping trajectorism together with non-humans

di Federico Neresini

To find some discussion points in the last book of Appadurai is

certainly not a problem. Indeed, if anything, the opposite: the real
difficulty is to choose which one to focus on.
Pushed to decide, one could start from the general reflection on
modernity and theories elaborated at its regard.
The line of reasoning developed by Appadurai proposes continual
references to the Weberian thought, showing in several occasions his
farsightedness and, thus his actuality without forcing Weber to say what
he didn’t want or could not say for obvious chronological reasons.
Some passages are enlightening, even when intriguing insights are
just suggested. This happens, for example, when the reader seems
invited to think that the boost for extending the modernity project
outside Europe – a boost which put together conquest, conversion
and economic plunder – is at least partially generated by the need of
finding reassurance for the consistence of the European identity itself.
As in the protestant ethics the methodical way of life bringing to
economic success has been interpreted by earlier capitalists as a sign
of positive predestination, so the worldwide extension of modernity has
been sustained by the collective search of Europeans to be reassured
about the goodness of their project. Therefore, the push to export
democracy, and if necessary to impose it, can be interpreted not only
as a deliberate attempt to mask economic and ethical imperialism, but
is also originating from the need to continuously strengthen the belief
that by achieving success, we are right. It is for this reason that

European cosmopolitanism was not primarily an effort to impose some

European consensus on the rest of the world; it was an effort to find con-
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 11

sensus by the staging of unresolved European debates on a world which had

not invited this engagement» (p. 227).

Anyway, as Appadurai points out, the globalization of the European

modernity project has not only encountered strong resistance from
other cultures on which it wanted to impose itself; it had to deal also
with the failure to achieve the goals of prosperity, welfare and equity
which modernity hoped to fulfill through «the thoughtful dissemina-
tion of specific tools of technology, productivity, entrepreneurship, and
education» (p. 222). The problems depending on the broken dream
of modernity and disappointment about the poor predictive capacity
of his theory have occurred in various forms, not least the surprise
associated to

the rise of a new communicative technology, organized around the Internet

and allied tools, which made free and fast communication a resource for the
strengthening of highly specific and non-cosmopolitan communities of interest,
including terrorists, hackers, and child pornographers (p. 222).

Here we can recognize a particular case of the general opposition

between utopian and dystopian visions of technology, which seems
to be a structural element of each attempt to interpret the ongoing
transformations with the task of foreseeing the future.
Even the debate recently aroused about the Web – and about ICT
as a whole – is biased by the trap of «trajectorism», social sciences
not excluded. In Appadurai’s definition,

trajectorism is a deeper epistemological and ontological habit, which always

assumes that there is a cumulative journey from here to there, or more exactly
from now to then […] Trajectorism is the idea that time’s arrow inevitably
has a telos, […]. Modern social science inherits this telos and turns it into a
method for the study of humanity (p. 223).

The comparative judgement which is structurally implied in trajec-

torism brings to idealize past and present – both in negative and in
positive terms – and forbids therefore social sciences to understand
deeply the ongoing transformation.
The trap of trajectorism, together with its implicit evaluation between
before and after, provides on the other hand the theoretical assump-
tion on which relies the distinction «reality» versus «virtuality», that
is the opposition on which is based the most of debates about the
social impact of ICT. Of course, virtuality is what comes afterward,
what is added to the existing reality producing positive or negative
effects. But lingering in the attempt to establish whether Internet make
us stupid (Carr) or more intelligent (Weinberger), isolated (Turkle) or
more interconnected (Rheingold), diverts our attention from the fact
12 Arjun Appadurai

that Internet is an essential component of our world because it is an

outcome of a general process of transformation, which has been made
possible also thanks to the Internet, and in the course of which the
Internet itself has been transformed. We and our everyday-life are not
more or less with respect to something else in the past or present, we
are and our everyday-life are simply something new.
Bad consequences of trajectorism become evident also in the way
social sciences tend to consider innovation: a stepwise process that starts
from a here (represented by scientific research and new technologies)
and arrives in a there (the society) putting it in the awkward and
unrealistic condition of adjusting passively to something that happens
elsewhere. Continuing to discuss about the «social impact» of new
technologies, the social sciences are condemned to understand poorly
innovation, being satisfied with a version too simplistic and unidirec-
tional of social processes.
It is possible to observe how trajectorism works also in the pro-
cedures which sustain financial markets and which are for the most
embedded in informatics tools, a context to which Appadurai devotes
a lot of attention in his book.
In this context, trajectorism regards often the forecasts based on
the knowledge of trends which have shaped the previous evolution of
a variety of economical and financial activities: given that things have
gone in that way until now, it is probable that they occur in the same
way also in the future. It is a specific case of what Appadurai calls
the prevalence of the probable on the possible, a way of thinking that
is, among other, the reason because we cannot recognize «the black
swan», as argued Taleb recovering the argument of Russel against the
validity of inductive inference based on enumeration.
According to Appadurai, it is exactly exploiting this generalized
addiction to the probable that some actors are able to succeed: «those
players who define the strategies through which financial devices are
developed and operated (as opposed to those who simply react or
comply with these strategies) use their own intuitions, experiences,
and sense of the moment to outplay other players who might be ex-
cessively dominated by their tools for handling risk alone» (p. 239).
The strategy of these players appears to take the opposite direction
from the «magical thinking» with which the majority uses algorithms
and statistical inference in predictive purposes (that is it interprets
like divinations signs the trends which are magically extrapolated from
huge stream of data today available thanks to the Web), but, on the
other hand, this strategy itself applies some kind of magical thinking,
this time using «intuitions» and «sense of the moment».
What is left in the shadows by Appadurai, however, is the perfor-
mative role that this tools have; they seem to be involved passively in
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 13

the game as mere financial assets in the hands of players, while they
are active elements of the ongoing processes.
The so-called «bots», which realized automatically a huge amount of
buy and sell operations in the financial market, tell an emblematic story.
It doesn’t exist a reliable estimate of their relevance: some maintain
that, more or less, a third of the financial exchanges are made by
them, others dare bigger percentages, more than 50%. Anyway, there
are no doubts about their importance, to the point that governments
and international institutions have stressed recently the necessity of an
intervention for regulating the action of bots. Furthermore, the life-cycle
of bots seems becoming even more short, exactly due the fact that
they are based on forecasting algorithms. Because they act massively
in the financial market, they modify them to the point of putting out
of the game the same predictive capability of their algorithms, and are
eventually substituted by new generations of bots.
The main argument for underestimating the bots’ actions – and the
consequent over-evaluation of the financial players – is clearly connected
to the criticism to actor-network theory (ANT) made by Appadurai.
The bots are, in fact, paradigmatic examples of what the soci-
ology of association proposed by Latour detects as contingent and
unpredictable outcome of processes during which actors (human and
non-human) – or «actant» in the first formulations of Latour – sustain
themselves mutually through interaction.
But for Appadurai

this process must involve something of a habitus, disposition, ethic, or spirit

that infuses some associational forms and precipitates into actual existing cry-
stallizations of the social. […] Absent such a proposal, the world of the device
– so brilliantly portrayed by Callon and his colleagues and interlocutors – can
seem to be a self-animating device, a static crystallization of just the sort that
Latour urges us not to assume as constituting the social a priori (p. 251).

It is not clear, nevertheless, why there is the necessity to animate

non-human actors (being them bots or whatever else) inflating them
a spirit create by the human actors using them.
There are, on the contrary, good reasons for maintaining all on
the same level, for recognizing them the same strength in orienting
the interaction.
First, human and non-human actors become active in the network
of their interactions, therefore they give one to each other agency, but
precisely together and not human before and non-human afterward.
Moreover, the distinction human versus non-human forces sociology to
assume the existence of an antecedent «social» to be used for explain-
ing phenomena in which objects (or non-humans) play a central role
from the very beginning.
14 Arjun Appadurai

Secondly, in the ANT perspective, an actor is not only one who

does something but it’s mainly one who makes other with whom he/
she is interacting do something. From this point of view, the bots
and their algorithms are actors in all respects, even if financial play-
ers betting on negative trends in the short term can use them in a
magical way.
Appadurai, furthermore, seems to miss a fundamental aspect of
ANT: for giving rise to an association the coherence with motivations,
interests or values among the involved actors is not necessarily required,
because their association is produced by the ceaseless mechanism of
«translation», that is by displacing and betraying the goals, desires and
expectations of the other actors. The gap between «ghost» and «ma-
chine» is not, therefore, a strange contradiction, but rather the cause
generating their association: tools acting in the financial market are
developed on the basis of cognitive, econometric and statistic models
which prompt some possible uses, but they can exist properly because
they can be associated both with users which diverge just a bit from
these models, and users which, on the contrary, follow quite divergent
lines of thinking (magical) from those planned by the ones that built
them. For having financial market, as well as capitalism and modernity,
it is not necessary that all the actors follow the same line of thinking,
being it the ghost of the market or the spirit of capitalism - it doesn’t
matter; on the opposite, their existence, their success is depending on
the heterodox uses that heterogeneous actors can perform, including
the actors who act apparently without any awareness or any self-
determination. Translation is the price for success.
At the same time, it is not easy to understand the usefulness of
separating objects from things, arguing that a thing becomes an object
when it is brought «into the orbit of social life» (p. 259). From the
point of view of the analysis and the understanding of a social process,
which kind of relevance can have what is not relevant for this proc-
ess? The answer seems to be only one: nothing, given that it is not
relevant for the social process, and therefore there can be only objects
(or, of course, only things). Unless we consider being relevant «into
the orbit of social life» only the object which are under our deliber-
ate and conscious attention; but then the objects would be very few,
and most have an ephemeral existence, ephemeral and fickle as our
awareness, our attention, and our will are. But in this case, we can
only ask again, as Latour does: where are the missing masses?
Obviously objects – or things – need «contexts that can never be
rigidly derived or deduced in advance from any inherent property of
the object» (p. 262), but not so much because the objects require a
context that someone has to provide them, but because they contribute
to create and to keep it in life through interaction, to the extent of
making them inherently and inextricably part of their context.
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 15

Value, valuation, transvaluation

di Roberta Sassatelli

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours

on the moon, I have remained in this new world for
nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite
ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far
from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there
are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled,
each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each
room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears,
there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Good books are all alike; every great book is great in its own way.
As a reader familiar with issues of globalization, culture and commodity
circulation, I did find myself in awe picking up Arjun Appadurai’s lat-
est book. This voluminous work traces the development of Appadurai’s
thought over the last three decades, going back to his celebrated essay
on the social life of things which opens the book, through his works
on the urban poor and their capacity to concoct their own versions
of globalization, up to his reflections on nation, recognition and the
new global financial order. While seven out of fifteen chapters take up
previously published material – often but not always contributions to
the Journal «Public Culture» such as the much quoted «The Capac-
ity to Aspire: Culture in the Terms of Recognition» (Appadurai 2004)
– the remaining eight are expressly written for this book anew, like
the inspiring concluding chapter which lends the title to the whole
collection. This mix of re-arranged classic material punctuated by new
reflections works surprisingly well providing a coherent line of argument,
one which Appadurai had started to sketch in some of his most recent
papers. He has done quite a job in retrospection and introspection to
provide such a line, one that may be synthesized as an exercise in the
critical recognition of aspirations, culturally mediate forms of desire for
change, happiness, and recognition as agents in history in the globalized
era. This particular take on globalization, stressing the role of culture,
the cultural construction of value and the conditions for valuation, is
– it seems to me – Appadurai’s distinctive perspective on how global
interconnection has come to become central for not only politics in
capital letters, but also the politics of everyday life.
While his work has regularly been quoted by most contributions
sketching the debate around globalization (i.e. Held 1999; Mac Gillivray
2006; Scholte 2005), few have engaged seriously with his theoretical
suggestions. Some even consider him as somewhat the «outsider» to
16 Arjun Appadurai

the mainstream debate on globalization, largely because of his radi-

cally cultural outlook whereby cultural phenomena are intrinsic to the
processes and transformations of globalization rather than more or less
cosmetic addenda (see Jones 2010). Yet, his variety of engagement with
globalization – from below, close to the ordinary reality of experience
in a variety of situated, highly differentiated localities, and with a
consequentially necessary attention to the spatiality and temporality of
social and cultural processes, or «flows» in his characteristic terminol-
ogy – is ever more urgent. As we have learnt from his Modernity at
Large (Appadurai 1996) globalization is not just homogenization, but
also heterogenization: it exposes local realities to the numerous fluxes of
global commodities so that each local reality ends up closer to a greater
variety of changes as well as dangers. In conceptual terms, a complete
globalization of culture would probably implicate a shared but hyper-
differentiated field of tastes, values, styles and opportunities uprooted
from their places of provenance. In such a field, power differences and
power relations will not disappear, but will become more complex and
finely articulated. In actual fact, processes which are currently collected
under the banner of globalization tend to make clear that traditions
are continually invented rather than the response of a homogenous
culture, that they are not neutral and often favour hierarchies and
inequalities. Even in traditional and tribal societies the members of a
group don’t share a single and uniform set of understandings: culture
is not something that social actors inherit as an undifferentiated block
from their forebears. Culture is a social practice that is continually
activated in various ways by social actors who in doing so overcome
some differences and create others. Facing globalization, localities offer
both possibilities of empowerment and development, and occasions for
the reproduction or creation of exclusion and disadvantage.
A concern with temporality, or, more precisely, with how we
construct temporality through cultural practices deploying (inherently
unevenly distributed) cultural resources, is dominant in this new book
and has indeed been evident in his work since one of his very early
essays «The past as a scarce resource» (Appadurai 1981). There, the
past is posited as culturally constructed, contrary to the tacit assump-
tion that it be a limitless and plastic symbolic resource; in many ways,
what matters is how it is used and allowed to be used by various
social actors, with a remarkable degree of variability according to
specific social/cultural norms. And how we do construct the past and
our memories of it, building on archives that are continuously recon-
structed through negotiation and dispute, bears on how we do see our
future. We may say that «futurework» a term coined by Gary Alan
Fine (2009) to describe the work done by meteorologists in the West,
is not only the province of specialized disciplines, it is the work of
ordinary people. It is ordinary people in the ordinariness of locality
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 17

who need to produce daily their future: if the ideas that the local is
not «an inherent canvas upon which global or other forces produce
change» and that the local itself has to be «despatialized» were at
the root of his Modernity at Large (Appadurai 2006a, 33), it is to the
role of «imagination», «anticipation» and «aspiration» as components
of the future as a «cultural fact» that Appadurai now turns. Just like
hope, the future is a «routine element of thought and practice in
all societies» rather than the «product of moments of exception and
emergency» (Appadurai 2013, 292). An on-going, embodied process
in fact, which produces forms of difference or – let me use a term
that Simmel himself deployed to describe his normative recipe for
modern subjectivity – of being peculiar (see Sassatelli 2000). «The
future – Appadurai writes (2013, 287) – is not just a technical or a
neutral space, but is shot through with affect and with sensations», is
a collective process and a human capacity. Indeed, in his book the idea
that the future is a cultural fact of this sort goes hand in hand with
the recognition that people around the world do have different access
to future-making practices, that the «capacity to aspire» demands and
promotes recognition. He is particularly concerned with the fact that
through such «navigational capacity [...] poor people can effectively
change the “terms of recognition” within which they are generally
trapped» (ibidem, 289-290, see also chapter 9). Poverty is, like in all
humanist tradition not only the lack of adequate material conditions,
rather such lack produces a void of imagination, a closure of future
through the paucity of future-making practice and knowledge. In a
characteristically anthropological move, Appadurai considers that this
capacity has a «recognizably universal form» while «it takes its force
within local systems of value, meaning, communication, and dissent»
(ibidem, 290). The inequality which harbours everyday life through the
curtailment of future-making practice and knowledge is all the more
serious as we are increasingly witnessing the mainstreaming of the «ethics
of probability» over and against that of «possibility» (ibidem, 295 and
ff.): the future is transformed in a set of alternative, punctual outcomes
with precisely assigned probabilities, and the logic of large numbers
indeed runs over other forms of «divination» which are probably better,
if culturally less legitimate, as a toolkit for facing insecurity rather than
risk, i.e. unknown, unpredictable, spurious outcomes. But, and this is
what we can say after Foucault’s works on bio-politics, it is insecurity
which has somehow become illegitimate in mainstream global culture
and dominant institutions, including those of ordinary life – from
insurances, to health provision to education. Yet, as Appadurai notes
in the chapter «The Ghost in the Financial Machine», the paradox is
that it is the financial players who move stock and futures in simulated
flows of value around the global financial market who least believe
in the reliability of calculating and risk managing devices, exploit the
18 Arjun Appadurai

generative interstices of risk and «animate the otherwise deterministic

play of risk» (ibidem, 249) by riding their own capacity to face and
even, somehow, exploit and enjoy (a form of) insecurity.
«The future is ours to design» writes the India-born anthropolo-
gist as an entry to his book, but we «cannot design it exactly as we
please» and research as «human right» is fundamental to «build a
picture of the historical present that can help us find the right balance
between utopia and despair» (ibidem, 3 and ff., on research as human
right see also chap. 14). In Appadurai’s words, the ethics of possibility
amounts to «those ways of thinking, feeling and acting that increase
the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that
produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire,
and that widen the field of informed, creative and critical citizenship»
(ibidem, 295). Taking seriously the capacity to aspire then entails – so
I believe – considering it as a research object (to be addressed empiri-
cally documenting the variety of notions of the good life) and as an
objective of research (using documentation as a way to intervene on our
access to how we do see the good life, the future). This clearly entails
a dual move, which openly requires an evaluative twist: «commit(ting)
oneself to a partisan position» (ibidem, 299) against the ethics of prob-
ably and its exclusionary effects. Clearly he thus delineates a form of
«public» anthropology, to use a qualification that Michael Buroway
(2005) has vernacularized among sociologists. Leaving aside the more
academic speculation on how Marxist rather than Weberian this might
all be, what interests me is that Appadurai accompanies such a dual
move with a further twist, reaching yet again from below and suggest-
ing that the best boost for research as «the systematic pursuit of the
not-yet-known» (ibidem, 271) is considering as it a «human right». We
do know that the language of human rights is fraught with cultural
contradictions and deeply nuanced even in apparently similar countries
such as the UK and the US (Nash 2009). Yet it offers the chance to
radically remove the need for research from the exclusivity of the aca-
demic world, and establishing the duty to devise strategies to make the
pursuit of the not-yet-know relevant, accessible and usable for ordinary
people for ordinary matters. These concerns are all but abstract and
utopian as not only the telling examples from housing movements in
India reported in the book illustrate, but also the capillary politics of
everyday life that a transition (indeed a transvaluation) to sustainable,
slow living across the globe require (Sassatelli 2013).
More broadly, I want to stress that taking seriously the capacity
to aspire is very different from adopting «positive thinking» (Peterson
2000; Vaughan 2000). As a psychological attitude and a style of explana-
tion, «positive thinking» is the technicalized counterpart to «optimism»,
recommended in countless self-help books as a technique of survival
deploying routines such as repeating positive affirmations about what
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 19

we have to face in the present, something which should produce a

positive mental attitude resulting in measurable change and in fact
health gains (Peterson and Bossio 2001). Many contemporary, typically
middle-class, heavily commercialized, standardized and individualized
practices – from fitness training to macrobiotic cooking to foodism
– put «positive thinking» to work, and are themselves the expression
of the prevalence of an «economy of experience» (Pine and Gilmore
1998) that relies on people’s enthusiastic collusion in instrumentally
manipulating their own emotions and outlooks on clearly itemized ac-
counts. If his major work on the cultural dimensions of globalization
was ungenerously considered too celebratory and positive, this book
is anything but an exercise in «positive thinking». Positive thinking is
in fact to be placed under the rubric of fear and instrumentality: it’s
the ultimate psychologistic resource against risk society available to
the 20% of the world population – the upper, often Western tail, in
fact – that may incidentally gain from risk-management. Yet, it might
well be like Weber’s «congealed spirit» – something that modernity
may harbor for us if we come to consider that the «ultimate value»
by which our conduct is to be decided is «good administration» (see
Scott 2013). You force yourself through thinking positively as this is
said to work well to allow you to survive: no fantasy, no real aspira-
tion, no hope if not the possibility to get by with the least damage
possible. Positive thinking – in a word – is not about the future,
is sailing though the congealed present. Recognizing the role of the
«capacity to aspire», encouraging it, looking for it as a social science
strategy, thus dignifying research as a public act, is something quite
different, something which gives the genuinely generative power of the
future its due.
Right from the start of this book, Appadurai (2013, 2) himself
suggests that in all his work he saw «culture as the great counterpoint
to economy». However, I felt that this very formulation does justice
to neither to his repeatedly recognized debt to Weber nor to his own
work. My impression is that he does more than this: he clearly shows
how radically cultural is the economy. And he does so by showing that
a theory of value is central to whatever economic enquiry or practice
– including the risk-managing techniques (taming or generating, as it
happens) that he critically diagnoses. How value is established facing
goods, time and space? What is the space of subjective valuation?
What transvaluations are possible? These are three key questions that
I think the book helps bring together and that I shall try to pursue
a little more. A reflection on the issue of value means considering the
universal sub specie particularis, and the here and now of value, for
Appadurai – as for Sombart, Simmel and Weber – is co-terminous
with a focus on the «capitalist spirit». Such spirit has been push-
ing towards a rationalisation of the economic system that may have
20 Arjun Appadurai

disciplining effects upon people. Both labour and consumption get

rationalized. Material objects always implicate forms of social knowl-
edge. With globalization, as the flows of commodities became more
complex, global and above all long distance, they brought with them
flows of more articulate yet unequal knowledge which provided new
arenas the construction of value that engaged producers, traders and
consumers. As Appadurai wrote in his classical piece on the politics
of value here re-published «as distances increase, so the negotiation of
the tension between knowledge and ignorance becomes itself a critical
determinant of the flow of commodities» (ibidem, 45): the emphasis is
thus put on individuals’ ability to recognise the value of things and it is
by instructing them on the value of things that they can be governed.
In this new situation the emphasis passes from the exclusivity to the
authenticity of the goods, expert knowledge becomes crucial and social
actors have to measure themselves more-and-more through discourses
that connect their identities with their desires for objects. The increasing
role of knowledge in these processes had turned knowledge itself into
a commodity. We may read Appadurai’s work as intending to underline
that economic value is a cultural product shaped by consumers and
traders, producers and cultural intermediaries. The distinctive material
and cultural circuits which define different commodities become the
focus of the analysis, highlighting the way in which practices of con-
sumption are socially and culturally entwined with those of production
and exchange in a complex non-deterministic web of interdependencies.
As globalized modernity gets established, commodities flows were ac-
companied and sustained by knowledge flows: as complex configura-
tions of goods-with-thought that gave way to cultural and economic
changes (Sassatelli 2007). Following from this perspective, it is crucial
to analyse the cultural processes of commodity classification which ac-
companied modernity and which continue today to define the shifting
boundaries of contemporary global culture. These are processes which
become visible in moral and moralistic discourses on the relationship
between people and objects, but which can also be seen in artistic
representations and, with the establishment of scientific economics, in
the analysis of economists. The normative discourses surrounding the
relationship between objects and people are a fundamental dimension
of all social action. Labelling some goods as national, others as exotic,
some as tasteful, others as tasteless, some as natural others as artificial
and so on, these discourses offer a moral picture of everyday life and
of our capacity to aspire. It is through similar classificatory processes,
which are reflected in daily practices and sustained by social institu-
tions, that notions such as necessity, luxury, fashion and good taste
are continually defined forming the basis of our claims for recogni-
tion. These notions in turn structure the cultural space where a new
social figure, so relevant for contemporary Western market culture, the
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 21

«consumer» starts to move – in other words, they contribute to the

repertoires of motives and reasons which people may draw upon in
order to understand and justify their consuming desires and practices.
We know that since the strong material and symbolic impact of colo-
nialism, consumers became dependent on markets that extended way
beyond their vision of the world, and thus they began to recognise
systems of cultural value different from those of their local communities.
Such forms of transvaluations are deeply intertwined with the colonial
and, indeed, post-colonial order as a feature of globalized modernity:
the individual desires of Western consumers – constructed through
an international division of labour that regionalize certain localities as
reservoirs of exotic and mysterious commodities – are described as
inexhaustible and come to appear as the origin of the social world and
as the source of the value of things. Yet, other transvaluations are pos-
sible, of a variety which critically engage with the fact that «[i]n some
ways, all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory»
(Appadurai 2006b, 33). These transvaluations, I believe, help melting
down the phantomatic objectivity of the commodity, renegotiating the
flows thereby congealed, re-imagining its possible future manufacture
and deployment. Coming clean on the knowledge congealed in objects
is of the essence.
On this point, Appadurai (2013, 45) observes again in what has
become the opening chapter of this book that «[c]ommodities rep-
resent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge. In
the first place, and crudely, such knowledge can be of two sorts: the
knowledge (technical, social, aesthetic, and so forth) that goes into
the production of the commodity; and the knowledge that goes into
appropriately consuming the commodity. The production knowledge
that is read into a commodity is quite different from the consumption
knowledge that is read from the commodity». Now, production and
consumption knowledges are clearly a-symmetrical: they mark different
standing points with respect to commodities and commoditization. In
particular, Appadurai underlines that, as modernity becomes consolidated,
the social actors’ knowledge as consumers generally becomes infinitely
more varied than and different from their knowledge as producers. The
variety of consumption as a necessarily local practice however requires
quite a bit of work on the part of consumers, opening up – as sug-
gested – a space for new social differences. All in all, the storing up
consumption knowledge is a serious affair which may be demanding
both on time-pressured elites and on money-short working-classes or
the impoverished underclass. There is a structural dimension to this.
Indeed, as the heterodox economist Tibor Scitovsky (1992; see Sassatelli
2013) suggested, the insidious gap between the generalized knowledge
which is needed for everyday consumption and specialized skills which
are required in the work environment is widening through an emphasis
22 Arjun Appadurai

on instrumental, technical, vocational education which – as Appadurai

himself recalls – is all about getting the right credential for a global,
highly specialized professional market. Educational options are increas-
ingly weak on the humanistic, ethic and aesthetic side which, I reckon,
the idea that research is a human right helps addressing.
Appadurai (2013, 3) garnishes his persuasive call for an «analytic
diagnosis of our current global condition» with repeated reference to
the characteristically Western inventory of classic sociology featuring
Sombart, Simmel and, in particular, Weber (whose Protestant Ethic
he himself affectionately declared to be the book that influenced him
the most in a recent, inspired cameo, see Appadurai 2012). Likewise,
he inspiringly refers to the pantheon of anthropology – from Mauss
to Levi Strauss to post-structuralists such as Victor Turner or Clifford
Geertz. Reference to Eastern thought, in contrast – besides the experi-
ences of for example his local associate in Pukar and the development
of the principle that «documentation is intervention» (Appadurai 2013,
280) – appears to feature more as an object of research than a tool
for it. However, I did feel in reading this work, as indeed others
have, that the great philosophical and spiritual tradition of India, as I
can modestly see it, was somehow speaking to me. I wonder, indeed,
what we can learn, now, if the «capacity to aspire» is placed against
such classic Indian tradition as the Upanisads of the Vedic period, or
even more to the point against contemporaries inspirations such as the
political philosophy of ahismsa (non-violence) popularized by Gandhi
and the teaching on education and the common good of Jiddu Khri-
snamurti. Taking my chance of playing pedestrian, and I can see no
better person to ask than Ajrun Appadurai himself.

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 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 23

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Scott, A.
2013 Capitalism as Culture and Statecraft. Weber-Simmel-Hirschman, in «Journal
of Classical Sociology». Special issue In Memoriam David Frisby edited
by Nigel Dodd.
Vaughan, S.C.
2000 Half Empty, Half Full: Understanding the Psychological Roots of Opti-
mism, New York, Harcourt.
24 Arjun Appadurai

Response to comments

di Arjun Appadurai

The diversity of these responses from three distinguished Italian

colleagues to my recent book is both a challenge and an opportunity. I
thank them for taking the time to respond to my work so generously.
For any author, the period immediately after a new book appears is
invariably a mix of regrets about imperfections, relief at having sent out
another message in a bottle and hope for more opportunities to satisfy
oneself and one’s readers. I write in this mixed affective state.
Marco Aime’s reflections on the subject of the spheres of exchange,
especially from his deep knowledge of Africa, gives me a chance to go
back to the first chapter of my recent book, which is a shorter version
of a long essay I first published in 1986, about the social career of
commodities, and of the challenge of classifying objects whose destiny
is to move from one state to another. Of course, I am not an expert
on Africa, so I will not take up some of Prof. Aime’s most nuanced
ethnological observations. I will, rather, use his responses to add a few
thoughts on the matter of liquidity.
The spirit of modern Western money is its ambition to make all
things exchangeable for one another, with the minimum moral and
technical obstacles to such unfettered exchange through commensurabil-
ity and a relatively independent measure. African spheres of exchange
aspire to a different aim, which is to restrict exchange among objects by
creating categories or «spheres» in which some objects are exchangeable
with others and others are not. Similar spheres arise by discriminating
some human actors from others, as appropriate exchangers of some
things, and not of others. Prof. Aime reminds us that such systems
are always imperfect and objects and exchanges invariably leak out of
them, especially as spheres of exchange in one society encounter the
different spheres of others, thus creating dynamics of a larger scale or
new moral possibilities for exchange. Indeed, sometimes the spheres
within a society seem geared to create resources for exchange outside
one society and over to another. Above all, the effort to create parti-
tions or spheres runs into another universal human force, which is the
tendency of money to always break out of the channels designed to
control its flow. This is what Mary Douglas pointed out in her brilliant,
and now less remembered essay on «primitive rationing» (1967).
So there are actually two fundamental problems with money, for
traditional African societies but also for all human beings. The first is
how to control its powerful tendency to flow out of the channels, block-
ages and compartments we design to control its flows. The other, which
is related to the first property, is the tendency for money to become a
way to exchange all objects in some amoral manner, which even today
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 25

we experience as a moral problem, of the sort that Michael Sandel

explore in his recent book on «what money can’t buy» (2013).
The interesting fact is that in the context of the recent global
financial meltdown, most bankers and financial traders defended the
importance of the new methods and tools of financial profit-making
because they guarantee «liquidity» in the global financial markets. What
this means in simple language is that bankers justify even their most
exotic methods of taking risks with other people’s money – in the last
instance – by reference to the importance of liquidity, which means
the ability to convert any financial asset into money at short notice.
Since these financial assets are built today as derivative instruments that
reflect the value of other underlying assets (such as housing, health,
education, polluting emissions, environmental catastrophes and anything
else that humans desire) this defense amounts to saying that the new
financial tools are justified because they allow anything (in principle)
to be quickly converted to money. In short, the financialized present
day global economy is built on the desirability of making any sort
of tradable risk as feasible as possible, by increasing the sphere of
liquidity. This is how far we have come from the world of demarcated
«spheres of exchange»!
In my book I argue in favor of an ethics of possibility over against
the growing scope of the ethics of probability. The ethics of probability
is an ethics in which uncertainty is managed by manipulating numbers,
since monetization, quantification and financialization have always been
historical allies. To this extent there is a natural alliance between argu-
ments on behalf of liquidity, which dissolve all human efforts to create
restrictions on market-style exchanges, such as in the African spheres
of exchange. To the extent that such liquefaction threatens to capture
the entire domain of sociality, without regard to ethics or spirit, we
need to be on guard against it.
From the point of view of the arguments about the nature of global
finance in my book, they draw upon Max Weber, to call for a deeper
understanding of ethos and ethics in an age in which machines have
come to dominate our worlds. This might be an appropriate transition
to the remarks about my book by Prof. Neresini, which open the ques-
tion of my disagreements with Actor-Network Theory, as articulated by
Bruno Latour and Michel Callon over the last two decades.
In essence, Prof. Neresini wonders why I am not an enthusiastic
support of ANT or why I am not Latourian enough. This is a legitimate
question. I may be forgiven by beginning my response by wondering
why Latour and his colleagues have not paid more attention to my
early efforts, indeed in 1986, when I first wrote the essay which is now
published in abbreviated form in 2013, and proposed a new approach
to the relationship between things and persons. So far as I know, ex-
cept for one noteworthy footnote by Callon, neither of these authors
26 Arjun Appadurai

has seen fit to recognize that the work of the group that generated
the ideas in The Social Life of Things was an early (though no doubt
cruder) anticipation of the ANT industry that matured from the mid-
1990’s onwards under their leadership. Perhaps they believe that my
own ideas were too greatly in thrall to Mauss or Marx or both!
More serious, and more relevant to Prof. Neresini’s comments
about my work, is Latour’s marginalization of Gilles Deleuze in his
major book on Reassembling the Social (2005). Here we are treated to
a significant piece of genealogical retro-engineering, whereby Deleuze,
who is addressed in two footnotes and one place in the main text, is
reduced to a thin shadow of Diderot, based on Latour’s reading of
Diderot’s use of the term «reseaux» (network), which Latour uses to
dismiss Deleuze as a minor stop on the road from Diderot to Bergson
to himself! I am therefore now consoled since I join Deleuze in the
footnote department of ANT!
The issue about ANT and Deleuze is not minor, however. Of
course Deleuze has precursors, the most important being Spinoza,
and no allusion to an essay by Diderot can change that. But this
is a secondary point. The fact is that the entire apparatus of ANT
is unthinkable without Deleuze, without his monumental corpus of
work, both independently and with Felix Guattari. Both Foucault and
Derrida (no minor figures) took Deleuze very seriously, so he can-
not be disappeared from the context of ANT, especially in France.
Deleuze’s ideas about the rhizome, about nomadic thought, about the
everyday practices of nomadic science, about molar versus molecular
formations, about the machinic phylum in relation to the category of
«human», about the body without organs versus the organism, about
the desire-machine and more, constitute an extraordinarily fertile effort
to turn the tide of French thought about agency, society, singularity
and thought itself away from the hegemony of Descartes, Kant and
Hegel, each devoted to human reason as some sort of transcendental
window into being.
ANT is a partial effort to create a sociological version of Deleuze’s
gigantic archive of ideas, which he did not bother to enshrine as a
method, theory or school. The irony is not only that ANT would
simply not exist without Deleuze, since there is nothing in ANT which
constitutes an independent road to Bergson and Spinoza in the critical
matter of distributed agency and animate assemblages, of which the
human is a mere variation or element. The irony is deeper still. By
making an unauthorized social science version or adaptation (however
reduced and instrumental) of Deleuze’s ideas, Latour (and less force-
fully, Callon) have in fact performed their own self-negation since
they have taken out of Deleuze the most radical ideas from Spinoza,
Bergson, and Jacob van Uexkull, among others, about rhizomic politics,
machinic desires, the brutalities of «royal» science (as it extends its
 The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition 27

empire over the nomadic war machine), and more. By deploying such
terms as «qualification», «formatting», «translation» and more, Latour
and Callon have gutted the tradition from which Deleuze comes of its
most unruly animistic elements, and turned their particular «sociology
of science» into a docile partner of conventional social science. This is
nowhere more evident than in the ease with which Callon and his fol-
lowers, who rejoice in their creation of the «new» field of the sociology
of finance, have found themselves in friendly dialogue with bankers,
traders and hedge-fund managers, as they show these money makers
how to better exploit Spinoza and Bergson for their improved daily
profit-making endeavors. Deleuze would have been deeply depressed
had he known what would come of his radical effort to bring Spinoza
and Bergson back into French everyday social science.
I hope this excursus makes it a bit easier to see why I have some
reservations about ANT. It is not that I am an old-fashioned humanist,
still uneasy about robots, algorithms and other non-human agencies. It
is just that I am not in favor of bringing in the «missing masses» at
the cost of any vestige of critique, ethics or politics.
This may be the right moment to turn to the generous remarks of
Prof. Sassatelli, who seems to understand my intuitions better than I
do! Her insightful, collegial and original observations deserve a much
fuller engagement, which I hope we can organize in another scholarly
context. For now, I will simply improvise on a few of her most sug-
gestive remarks.
First, I am delighted by her attention to the theme of «research
as a human right». Indeed, this essay reflects a deep investment on
my part in an auto-critical exercise on my own values as a scholar in
the Western academy, where research the governing clichés of our self-
justification. In my work with an NGO in Mumbai, called PUKAR, I
tried to test the limits of making the capacity to do research available
to those who seemed unqualified for it. I discovered, in that collec-
tive exercise, that the capacity to create new knowledge is no more
parochial than we wish it to be, and that it is a sobering exercise to
try to share one’s own most precious trade secret with less privileged
others. But it is the most radical act than a scholar based in the
Western academic world can attempt. I appreciate Prof. Sassatelli’s
recognition of this effort.
I am also glad that Prof. Sassatelli recognizes that my own interest
in the capacity to aspire is not part of the contemporary ideology of
«positive thinking», first designed and launched in the United States. I
have been frequently seen as a celebrator of the new, a naïve optimist
about the future, and as not adequately alert to the great cruelties of
class, race and gender. So I am glad that Prof. Sassatelli has exempted
me from being in the great chain of «positive thinkers» from Dale
Carnegie to Oprah Winfrey. My own grounds for optimism come from
28 Arjun Appadurai

my direct contact with the activist slum-dwellers of Mumbai, who al-

lowed me to talk to them over some years, and who have refused to
become pessimists in spite of many reversals and disappointments in
their struggles to achieve secure housing. At a more exalted theoreti-
cal level, I identify myself with the ideas of the German philosopher
Ernst Bloch, the great theorist of hope, who argued for the virtues of
utopian thought, not as a belief in an ideal and frozen state of affairs
in some distant future but as a commitment to the «not yet» which
permits creative dissent in the present.
Above all, I am grateful to Prof. Sassatelli for gently correcting the
impression I conveyed that my interest in culture is somehow at odds
with my interest in the economy. Indeed, my life work has been con-
cerned with the ways in which culture and economy inflect and inform
the constitution of one another, whether in the life of commodities, of
cities or of human actors. Indeed, the work of building the future can
only move forward on a productive basis if we recognize the inner
affinities between the spheres of culture and economy, and the extent
to which the imagination can be an asset for the enrichment of both.
This dialogue with my three colleagues from Italy is a fine example of
how collaboration across these artificial boundaries can proceed.

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