Appadurai, Arjun

Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1988. The Social Life of Things Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press. 

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press. 

Many local units of measurement are tied practically to particular activities. Marathi peasants, as Arjun Appadurai notes, express the desired distance between the onion sets they plant in terms of hand-breadths. When one is moving along a field row, the hand is, well, the most handy gauge. In similar fashion, a common measure for twine or rope is the distance between the thumb and elbow because this corresponds with how it is wrapped and stored. As with setting onions, the... 

Subaltern studies have exhaustively documented the ways in which local structures, from agriculture, to political and social hierarchies were systematically undone by the colonial project in South Asia. Cadastral and census surveys enabled the transformations described by the postcolonial scholar Arjun Appadurai ... 

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