Ethnoscape

Ethnoscape is one of five elementary frameworks (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes) used by Arjun Appadurai, in purpose of exploring fundamental discrepancies of global cultural flows. The suffix -scape indicates that these terms are perspectival constructs inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different kinds of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, and subnational groupings and movements, whether religious, political, or economic, etc..

By using the ethnoscape, Appadurai extends the landscape of persons who form the shifting world where we live, that is, tourists, immigrants, refugees, or any moving groups and individuals of fundamental feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.[1][2] Appadurai claims that this is not to say there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the weft of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move of the fantasies of wanting to move. Ethnoscapes allow us to recognize that our notions of space, place and community have become much more complex, indeed a ‘single community’ may now be dispersed across a variety of sites.[3]

References

1. Frank J. and Boli, Frank J. and John (2012). The Globalization Reader (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. p. 98.
2. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy". Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
3. Smart, B. (1993). Postmodernity. London: Routledge.