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Mary Douglas

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Symbolic/Interpretive Anth. External Boundaries--Attempted to analyze universal patterns of symbolism. Used the human body as a symbol of society. Deals with bodily pollution and purity.

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Victor Turner

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Symbolic/Interpretive Anth. Symbols in Ndembu Ritual--worked with symbols specifically dominant symbols or those referring to: "axiomatic" or self-evident values. Ritual symbols are tools for social order renewal and such conflicts are worked out. Symbols are the mechanisms for the maintenance of society and when put together in certain contexts they produce social transformation. Symbols are the smallest analytic unit of ritual. Three most important properties: condensation, unification of disparate significata, and polarization of meaning. Influenced by Gluckman

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Clifford Geertz

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Symbolic/Interpretive Anth. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight--his goal was to provide an empathetic understanding of another society. He used thick description to uncover the layers of meaning surrounding the event. He felt the cockfight is not about winning or losing money but the stimulation of the social interactions between various groups in the community. Culture is created through social actions, not in the mind.

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Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology

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Thought that culture was a mental phenomenon but rejected the notion that culture could be modeled like mathematics or logic. Mary Douglas Victor Turner Clifford Geertz

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Turner's Prescribed Methodology to Decode the Meaning of Ritual

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Turner thought the interpretation of ritual symbols could be derived from three classes of data: 1) external form and observable characteristics. 2) the interpretations of specialists and laypeople within the society. 3) deduction from specific contexts by the anthropologist

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Michel Foucault

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Background to Postmodernism. The Incitement to Discourse--Focused on the development of the discourses and institutions of medicine, prisons, and understandings of sexuality in this period. Discourses relate to power and consist of what is said and what is not said.

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Antonio Gramsci

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Italian Marxist. Founder of Italian communist party. He developed the concept of hegemony and wrote his works while in prison. Hegemony is "a system of political and moral leadership." Philippe Bourgois used his concept of hegemony.

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Pierre Bourdieu

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Background to Postmodernism. Structures, Habitus, Practices--Had the idea of Habitus or the system of structured, structuring dispositions. Influenced by Weber and Durkheim. Theorized the types of capital available as social, symbolic, economic, and cultural that work simultaneous in his notion of a field.

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Renato Rosaldo

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Postmodernism. Grief and a Headhunters Rage--his essay was highly introspective due to his wife dying. The essay is "an act of mourning, a personal report, and a critical analysis of anthropological method."

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Lila Abu-Lughod

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Postmodernism. Tale of Two Pregnancies--She wrote ethnographies of the particular and felt as if stories of truth are equally valid regardless of what culture they are from.

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Allan Hanson

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Postmodernism. The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention and Its Logic--He believes that there is no ethnographic reality that can be known in a scientific way. Culture is not unified but rather more like a process or an arena in which action takes place and different individuals and groups contest for power.

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Background to Postmodernism

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Michel Foucault Antonio Gramsci Pierre Bourdieu

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Postmodernism

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This shatters the grand narrative of modernity. A movement that began sometime after world war two, affecting art, music, and literature as well as all of the social sciences. Renato Rosaldo Lila Abu-Lughod Allan Hanson

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Arjun Appadurai

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Globalization, Power, and Agency. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy--He had the scapes; ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Post-structuralist

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Philippe Bourgois

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Globalization, Power, and Agency. From Jibaro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio--The transformation from manufacturing to service employment-especially in the professional office work setting-is much more culturally disruptive than the already revealing statistics on reductions in income, employment, unionization, and worker's benefits would indicate. Used hegemony from Gramsci. Neo-Marxist

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Theodore Bestor

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Globalization, Power, and Agency. Kaiten-Zushi and Konbini: Japanese Food Culture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction--It focuses on the ways in which both local and international patters of finance and technology affect both the actual food that appears in Japanese restaurants and the cultural understanding of that food.

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Globalization, Power, and Agency

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Globalization theory provides and intersection between capitalism, power, and meaning. Arjun Appadurai Philippe Bourgois Theodore Bestor

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Autoethnography

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Ethnography about yourself. Used by Rosaldo and Abu-Lughod.

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Ethnographic Present

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A description of culture as it was prior to contact. Static and unchanging. It doesn't take colonial rule into account.

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Polyvocality/Multivocality

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The fact that a symbol can represent many things. Coined by Turner.

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Polysemy

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Many possible meanings for a word or phrase.

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Semiotics

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Symbolic anthropology--the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretation

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Thick Description

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Employed by Clifford Geertz--Uncovering the layers of meaning surrounding the event. Provide readers a description of what it might be like to live in a culture.

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"Discourse of Power"

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Linked to Foucault---discourses and their control are fundamentally linked to power

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Political Economy

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Bourdieu--how economics favor some groups over others. Associated with Marx

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Omniscient Narrator

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Third person--simply describe the culture. "The ___ do ____." This was a critique of postmodernists on past ethnographies.

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Radical Relativism

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Inseparable from literature Anything goes--you cannot be critical. Post-Modernism

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Multiple Subjectivies

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Each of us is pursuing our own subjectivity, designs structure

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Deconstruction

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Used by Postmodernists. The process of finding and interpreting zones of conflict or logical inconsistencies to reveal underlying cultural assumptions or repressed voices. "Reading culture as a Text"--words are a tool. Derrida and Hanson.

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Social Constructionism

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Associated with Symbolic and interpretive Anth. We construct symbolically our own realities and then live in them. Opposed to materialists. It refers to hermanuic reasoning.

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Reflexivity

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Being aware of who you are and the impact you have in the field. There is no such thing as going into the field and NOT leaving a fooprint, Considering how people are going to react to who you are. "Putting yourself in the story."

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Modernism

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Refers to the early 20th century to the 1970s. Common attributes of their writing in anthropology includes detachment, the assumption of a position of scientific neutrality and rationalism. They often write as 3rd person omniscient observer. Grand Narrative: 1) Rationality of Man 2) Power of Science 3) Arrow of Progress

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Postmodernism

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A movement that began sometime after world war two, affecting art, music, and literature as well as all of the social sciences. It reflects the epistemology notion that the world is knowable. Against the idea the science and rationalism can lead to an accurate knowledge of the world. All knowledge is historically constituted. Everyone's view is valid.

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Liberal Human Subject

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Includes: Rational, Epistemology of Science, and Arrow of Progress. It is the noble idea about how we are to understand the human condition/nature in the essential tenants of modernity. It creates a notion of what it is to be a human being.

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Social Contract

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Rational contract that any rational human being would sign. It is assumed that you ascent to being apart of the contract. We give up just enough of our independent agency to the government so they can impose order that allows us to pursue our individual interests without having to worry about other things.

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"Positioning"

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Related to postmodernism. Discussed by Rosaldo. When his wife died his position changed and gave him a different interpretation than before.

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"Writing Against Culture"

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Abu-Lughod--she argues that the writing of ethnography is inherently an expression of Western power because the concept of culture necessarily contains an element of hierarchy, and ethnographic writing is based on the textual construction of the "other." The subject is not real people in the context of their lives but a fictional composite people constrained by the author and removed from the reality of the particulars of individually lived lives.

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Ethnographies of the Particular

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Abu-Lughod--suggests writing these--instead of writing broad generalizations of a whole group, ethnographers should write ethnographies of particular people in specific times and places.

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Critical Theory

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Associated with Globalization. It is to social theory as political econ is to econ. Noticing power disparities, hergemony. Critical of non-egalitarian.

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Practice/Praxis

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When willful action is taken for social change, especially Marxist in nature, it is called praxis rather than practice.

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Hegemony

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Leadership or dominance, esp by one country or social group. "Firms were tied to national interests and the result was a world characterized by the ______ of Western wealth, power, and ideas." Appadurai. A term created by Antonio Gramsci (while in prison) to refer to a system of political and moral leadership.

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Essentializing/Totalizing

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This is a critique of ethnography such as the Neur are ____. Comprehend in an all encompassing way. It is the opposite of Post-modernism such as Lughod.

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Habitus

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Bourdieu--Includes both behavior (and thus empirical verification) and mental models--cognitive and subconscious--held and enacted by practitioners who comprise a class or a class fraction. (Class Consciousness [Marxist] equivalent)

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Multiple forms of Capital

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They include: Economic Social Cultural Symbolic

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Economic Capital

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Bourdieu--wealth that can be invested in ownership of the means of production with the goal of increase.

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Social Capital

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Bourdieu--membership in networks of individuals and positions within such networks

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Cultural Capital

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Bourdieu--possession of education, special knowledge, and skills

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Symbolic Capital

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Bourdieu--possession of prestige and honor (as well as the actual symbols of those things)

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Bodily Symbolism

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Douglas--her analysis centers on the body and its products. Blood, breast milk, and other products of the human body are symbols of of society.

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Stages of Ritual Transformation

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Turner via VanGennep (Intellectual father of Victor Turner) 1) Separation (leminal state where you are treated poorly to show your worthiness) 2) Transformation (graduating from boot camp) 3) Reintegration (entering society with a new status)

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Properties of Ritual Symbolism

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Turner Condensation: When one symbol represents many things and actions Unification of Disparate Significata: Underlying meanings of the symbol being interconnected by common or analogous qualities or by association. Polarization of Meaning: two poles of meaning, a "ideological pole" and a "sensory pole"

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Modernity/Post-modernity

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Saunders lecture Modernity--write ethnographies as if the anthropologist was a neutral, omniscient observer. Post-Modernity--claim that because the collection of anthropological data is subjective, it is not possible to analyze the data objectively. This is the OPPOSITE of scientific but truer because life is messy. You cannot find nomothetic laws, need an accurate description.

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Globalization

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driven by facts on the ground. Cultures are always changing. Focus on the present and the past two or three decades in analyzing ways in which societies are articulated with the world economy in general and with capitalist enterprises in particular. Focus on the expansion of multinational corporations, the outsourcing or production and labor and the ability to move goods and information around the globe.

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World Systems Theory

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Wallerstein and Gunder Frank vs Appadauri. World System theorists argued that the perception or groups being bounded was wrong. The communities anthropologists studied were not bounded and traditional but rather connected to and conditioned by international flows of trade and by wealth. Appadurai extends this argument-interaction between cultures is the rule.

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"Death of Anthropology"

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Not on test.

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*Challenges to writing ethnography posed by postmodern insights*

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Omniscient narrator heightens the sense of scientific objectivity projected by the text and improperly severs the relationship between what he/she knows and how he/she came to know it. Issues of interpretation--text is necessarily an author's interpretation. Had the effect of making anthropology more objective.

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Postmodernist associations with linguistic theory and neo-Marxism

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Discourses! Our realities are created through language. Neo-Marxism--critical perspective. There is lots of conflict, use and abuse of people. Language is both arbitrary and conventional. We create a system with linguistic tools that tap into deep under root systems.

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Interpretation in Postmodern Anthropology

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Their voice is one among many is as often competing with the other voices. Don't think that their voice or interpretation should be held above other voices. The only way to prove yours is true is through delicensing.

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Delicensing

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A method to disprove other interpretations used by Postmodernists.

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Condensation

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Turner-- One dominant symbol that represents many things or actions

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Disparate Significata

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Turner-- Stuff under symbols being interconnected. A tree, for example, is held up and fed by the roots.

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Polarization of Meaning

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Turner-- A symbol has two distinguishable forms a meaning. The American flag for example can evoke patriotism and hatred.

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Discourses

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Populations of people who are sharing the entailments. There is no objective reality about subjective topics.

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Hedgemonically

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The way most people think about a system. Seeing from outside of it is extremely difficult but possible. It is a linguistic idea developed by Antonio Gramsci

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Ethnoscapes

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Appadurai Landscape of changing geographies

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Technoscapes

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Appadurai How do we get it there? What means get things places.

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Ideoscapes

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Appadurai Ideologies that are flowing and rolling all over

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Mediascapes

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Appadurai Mixes of media from everywhere

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Financescapes

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Appadurai Money $$

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