Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the win forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patters, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. He considers the way images--of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation--circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions.

Arjun Appadurai is director of the Chicago Humanities Institute and Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor of Anthropology, both at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981) and editor of The Social Life of Things (1986).