Arjun Appadurai

Among the people I cover, Appadurai stands apart as a genuine intellectual heavyweight. A Mumbai-born, Chicago-trained anthropologist who became one of the defining theorists of globalization, he gave us a vocabulary for how people, goods and especially imagination flow across borders. What astonishes me is the foresight: decades before our hyper-connected social-media age, he was already mapping how imagination becomes a collective social practice. The Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is well earned. I find more romance in a thinker who quietly reshaped how we see the world than in most celebrities, and he is squarely that.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Arjun Appadurai

Name (Japanese)

アルジュン・アパデュライ

Reading

あるじゅん・あぱでゅらい

Born

February 4, 1949 (age 77)

Origin

Mumbai, Bombay State, India

Occupation

anthropologist / sociologist / academic / theorist / ethnologist

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Ox

University

University of Chicago

Awards & achievements

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• Official sitehttp://www.appadurai.org
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun%20Appadurai
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A5%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A2%E3%83%91%E3%83%87%E3%83%A5%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q560986

Tags

• Bombay State
• anthropologist
• sociologist
• academic

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.