Arjun Appadurai

The capacity to aspire is a key cultural resource in navigating globalization.

Globalization produces a world of cultural hybridization, not homogenization.

Anthropology must engage with the futures that people imagine for themselves.

Violence in the modern world is often a failure of imagination.

Ethnicity is not primordial but produced in the crucible of modernity.

The nation-state is under siege from the forces of global cultural economy.

Cultural politics is the battleground where identities are forged and contested.

In the age of migration, home is no longer a place but a process.

Objects carry the traces of their journeys through social worlds.

Global flows create disjunctures that anthropology must map.

The future is not given; it is ethically produced through collective imagination.

Capitalism thrives on the production of desire across cultures.

Anthropologists should study the dreams of the poor as much as the designs of the powerful.

Locality is a fragile achievement in the face of global forces.

Media are not just transmitters but architects of cultural possibility.

In globalization, the center is everywhere and the periphery is nowhere.

The social life of things teaches us that value is relational.

Imagination links the private and public worlds in new ways.

Fear of the other fuels the small numbers that ignite large conflicts.

Anthropology's task is to understand the cultural dimensions of globalization.