Reflection on Appadurai’s Perspective of Globalization vs. Ethnocide

Appadurai said globalization is driven by the triple engines of speculative capital, new financial instruments, and high-speed information technologies. Appadurai did not have an optimistic perspective toward globalization, which is the buzzword for western corporate elites, whereas he linked globalization with the prevalent violence globally, terrorism and genocide, a radical but valuable perspective.

According to Appadurai, globalization, for the world besides the west, brought double anxiety: fear of inclusion, and fear of exclusion. On the one hand, the developing countries fear that the developed countries will dominate its culture, market, and politics because of globalized flows of information, industry and technology, and thus lose their distinguished characteristics. That is the fear of inclusion. On the other hand, the developing countries welcome the foreign investments, because the mass capitals can help them in economic developments. Developing countries are afraid of being excluded from the mainstream markets. To the developing world, globalization might eventually be an ambivalent concept, poison wearing sugarcoats, and subtle permeation of Americanization, Hollywoodization, or Europeanization.

Globalization is an organism generated with play of powers, and a fight to become the super power. Globalization is in some sense adopting Darwinism that the fittest will survive. However we can not blame all causes of genocide and terrorism on globalization, while we should admit that globalization is a factor that brings tensions in and out the nation states. It is the tensions and pressures of becoming left behind, and becoming incomplete that produces the violence. The ethnocide, the internal violence, in Appadurai’s words, is a worldwide tendency to arrange the disappearance of the losers in the great drama of globalization and those weaker in quantities and actions—in a modern term: minorities become the target. We have to be aware that both minorities and majorities are the products of a distinctly modern world of statistics, censuses, or population maps created mostly since the seventeenth century. I think it is under constant labeling and creating of differentiation that lead to cognition that certain people should be cleaned to make the blood purer, and to make the state superior. To build predatory identity—a kind of identity in need of extinguishing other identities, requires controlling and killing those dissidents and small numbers.

What I also found interesting:
On terror, Appadurai said,
Terrorism adds the element of unpredictability, the key to producing constant fear…Terror, in the name of whatever ideology of equity, liberty, or justice, seeks to install violence as the central regulative principle of everyday life. (p.32)