is an Indian-American anthropologist, a world-renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization, and the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Coronavirus further intensified the fetishization of science. Experts are being cast as saviours; orderly lines of masked marketgoers mimic religious processions, and daily press conferences function as mass. But metrics have to be relieved from spiritual obligations.
The intensified wave of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa is threatening to unravel the very foundations of European ideas of full citizenship, asylum and refuge, says Arjun Appadurai. But there must be a richer cultural road to legal and bureaucratic solutions currently being debated.
