Citing Professor Arjun Appadurai's "distinguished career as a scholar in historical anthropology" and his "innovative and bold theorizing," Akhil Gupta, President of the American Anthropological Association, presented Appadurai with the 2021 President's Award.
"[Appadurai] has helped open new domains and new methods for anthropological research, from his work on religious life in Tamil Nadu to agriculture in Maharashtra, gastropolitics, cookbooks, and nationalism in India, the social life of things, the global cultural economy as a complex order composed of interrelated but disjunctive global cultural flows."
Arjun Appadurai is a social-cultural anthropologist. He is Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and the Max Weber Global Professor at the Bard Graduate Center. Appadurai has published a number of seminal books within the field of globalization studies, such as Modernity at Large (1996), Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006), The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013), and Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2015). His most recent book (co-authored with Neta Alexander), is Failure (2019).