‘Disjuncture and Difference’ emphasizes the tearing down of differences, not in the
direction of global homogenization but toward a kaleidoscopic blending that cuts across
geographic units or erases any specific geographic referent. Appadurai refers to deterritorialization
as a ‘central force’ (p. 37), and has devoted much of a later essay to it (2003).
So his thrust is to eliminate narrow geographic units (it is ‘de’ territorialization) in the
interests of superseding a bounded, localistic sense of culture, but he is unconcerned
with exploring the processes of a more complex geography. We are told what is putatively
not there, but not what we might constructively look for. An important reason for
this emphasis seems to be to challenge the nation-state as a cultural unit, both in terms
of transnational and subnational cultural phenomena. We will discuss the politics of this
move below. Here, we examine how the new work in processual geography replies to
these themes and provides stronger means for studying the relationship between
movement and spatial entities than the purely ‘fractal’ approach does.7
The crucial starting point is that movement does not necessarily mean the decline of
geographic spaces, and that the existence of such spaces does not necessarily signify
closure or stasis. Appadurai, because he is reacting to a predominant (but not universal)
position in 20th-century anthropology that each culture has a fixed, bounded place,
emphasizes the mobile components themselves (e.g. flowing ideas) but not the routes
through which they move (what we will call passageways) nor the places that are momentary
endpoints. In his broad view either there are places or placeless flows. We come from
a different anthropological starting point, being much influenced by the Rhodes-
Livingstone Institute/Manchester school and by Latin American historical political
economy, in which social-spatial forms are continuously created and transformed through various kinds of interchange and movement (of people, commodities, ideol -
ogies, etc.). Following Friedman’s discussion of ‘system’ and ‘concrete interconnections
among places’ (2003: x), then, we seek to characterize how mobility shapes fluid
components, passageways, and endpoints.