Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) “Global Ethnoscapes” provides substantial insight into the notion that “the link between the imagination and social life...is increasingly a global and deterritorialized one” (Appadurai 1996:55). Moreover, Appadurai argues that media affect the imagination in social life so that people are able to fantasize and experience other cultures in a deterritorialized, globalised world (Appadurai 1996:53-54). As a case study regarding the effects of deterritorialisation on the ability of people around the world to imagine other cultures, the song “Jai Ho” from the movie Slumdog Millionaire provides insight into how cultures are partaking and interacting in globalisation through the media in the forms of film, music, dance, and the internet—primarily YouTube. The original Jai Ho video (YouTube 2011a) that was created specifically for the movie Slumdog Millionaire has spread throughout the world via the internet and YouTube to the homes of people of different cultural backgrounds: When searching for “Jai Ho” on YouTube, I received approximately 6,150 search results. This number is staggeringly large and demonstrates that people of different cultures around the world have had the opportunity to imagine a cultural aspect of a different part of the world, Mumbai, due to global deterritorialisation. In this blog entry, I focus on a comparison relating to cultural and social significance between the original Jai Ho video (YouTube 2011a) and a re-creation video of the Jai Ho dance by a couple who appear to be of Western culture (YouTube 2011b).
The original, official version of the Jai Ho video has been viewed approximately 1,500,000 times (YouTube 2011a), and has respectively affected the imaginations of those viewers. According to Appadurai, “the imagination has now acquired a singular new power in social life...More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they did before” (1996:53). Upon viewing the Jai Ho video, one is capable of imagining what life is like for people living in Mumbai and what it is like to experience the culture of another people—in this case, Indian culture. For example, people in various locations are able to imagine what life is like in terms of dance, clothing, music, and social structure in India. However, as Appadurai (1996:54) cautions, this is not mitigating the fact that there is social disparity around the world: People are more able to judge their own social position by comparing themselves with what they can imagine other people in other parts of the world are like in terms of social position.
Although the world is becoming deterritorialised, one must keep in mind that the process of reterritorialisation simultaneously takes place, and that when people imagine other cultures, they are able to do so by incorporating other cultural aspects into their own culture (Inda and Rosaldo 2002:12; Appadurai 1996:32). For example, the second YouTube video that I discuss is of a Western couple who are dancing along with the official Jai Ho video on their television in the background (YouTube 2011b). This couple is obviously in a better social position than those who are living in the slums of India; however, they are able to imagine the culture of those living in the slums of India by listening to the Jai Ho music as well as learning Bollywood style dancing. While imagining this deterritorialised, globalised aspect of Indian culture, the couple is simultaneously reterritorialising the Jai Ho dance: It is clear that they are doing it in their own culture’s setting, in Western clothes, and have changed the dance slightly, and likely inadvertently, by adding more ‘pop’ to their moves—similar to that of Western hip-hop. Interestingly, this video has been viewed more times than the official Jai Ho video—approximately 1,870,000 times. This re-make video is also further deterritorialised and globalised, as people around the world are able to imagine what this couple’s culture is like, and viewers can further imagine how Indian culture has influenced them, and in turn, imagine what Indian culture is like from the original dance moves and music that prevail in the video. Reversely, people in India are able to see how people in the Western world have imagined Indian culture by watching videos like these on YouTube.
Appadurai’s (1996:55) argument that deterritorialisation and globalisation facilitate the imagining of other people’s social and cultural lives is rather provocative and can be applied to various products, like YouTube videos of Jai Ho dancing from Slumdog Millionaire, that circulate around the world. Clearly with globalisation and deterritorialisation comes the shrinking of the world, and the notion that cultures and cultural products are more accessible and readily circulated. Through this circulation, people can imagine what another culture is like, and through this imagining, people are able to better see social disparity around the world (Appadurai 1996). This kind of imaginative flow is evident in videos like of the official Jai Ho dance and replicated dances of it, like that of the Western couple. As demonstrated, the imaginative flows cycle back and forth between cultures of origin and cultures of reception in a continuous, seemingly infinite manner.
References Cited
Appadurai, Arjun
1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo
2002 Introduction: A World in Motion. In The Anthropology of Globalization. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Pp 1-34. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
YouTube
2011a Slumdog Millionaire – Official Jai Ho Music Video (HD). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRC4QrUwo9o, accessed February 4, 2011.
2011b Slumdog Millionaire Dance—Jai Ho. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7AuQKFlhXI, accessed February 4, 2011.
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