Taking its point of departure in the conceptual debate about modernities in the plural, this article presents a heuristic framework based on an interpretative approach to modernity. The article draws on theories of multiple modernities, successive modernities and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity formation. In combining conceptual tools from these strands of social theory, we argue that the emergence of multiple modernities should be understood as a historical result of idiosyncratic social constructions combining global social imaginaries (...) with religious and other cultural traditions. In the second part of the article we illustrate this argument with three short excursions into the history of Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this way we interpret the modern history of Muslim societies as based on cultural conflicts between different forms of social order and individual identities similar to those present in European history. Contrary to the European experience, however, religious traditions gradually assumed an important role in defining ‘authentic’ Muslim modernities, leading to a relatively hegemonic role of so-called Islamic modernities toward the end of the 20th century. (shrink)

Abstract:In his writing in Landscape magazine, the essayist and critic John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) championed a focus on the “everyday” mid-century American landscape. My argument in this paper is that Jackson's writing has enduring relevance for understanding the relationship of modernity to everyday landscapes. Specifically, I develop the concept of “everyday modernities” in order to define and specify the lens through which Jackson sought to reconcile the logics of modernity with the lived realities of mid-century American life. Pulling this (...) concept through two examples of his work—the “other-directedness” of landscape and the bodied landscapes of the hot-rodder—I show how Jackson endeavored to understand how these logics were embedded in some of the most common landscapes. He limned an approach to the modern landscape that took seriously the binary structure of modernist ideology (nature and culture, country and city), but strove to recognize the impacts of this ideology through the networks and connections that produce the material realities of everyday life. While Jackson's particular lens is certainly a very personal one, his interests and approach can help to reveal new connections and inspire new questions about the modern American landscape. (shrink)

'Development' operates as an allegedly value-neutral concept in the policy world. This essay describes four mechanisms that have helped to strip development of its subjective and meaning-laden elements: persistent misreading of technology as simply material and inanimate; uncritical acceptance of models, including economic ones, as adequate representations of complex systems; failure to recognize routine practices as repositories of power; and erasing history and time as relevant factors in producing scenarios for the future. Failure to take these elements into account has (...) led to inequality, injustice and unintended consequences in many development projects. Interpretive analysis of development tools and concepts is a much-needed corrective. (shrink)

Modernities are a theme of our times. Recognizing that modernities are multiple and diverse and transcending ideal-type modernity and its Eurocentric legacy, acknowledges the multi­polar realities of twenty-first century globalization and the ‘rise of the rest’. Real-existing modernities are mixed social formations in that they straddle past and present and import and translate styles and customs from other cultures. In addition, modernities are layered—some components are shared among all modern societies and make up transnational modernity while (...) other components differ according to historical and cultural circumstances. The third section reflects on East Asia as an alternative modernity and sketches its main features. Leaving modernity as utopia behind, for a grounded modernity opens the possibility of coming to terms with the dilemmas that real modernities face. (shrink)

. Religion and past modernities. Cultural Values: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 123-125.

This book presents a heuristic and critical study of comparative theology in engagement with phenomenological methodology and sociological inquiry. It elucidates a postcolonial study of religion in the context of multiple modernities.

In _Sciences from Below_, the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be more productively linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as the major contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects refine (...) their thinking to overcome limiting ideas about what modernity and modernization are, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. She also reveals how ideas about gender and colonialism frame the conventional contrast between modernity and tradition. As she has done before, Harding points the way forward in _Sciences from Below_. Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity versus tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge. Yet, for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. _Sciences from Below_ is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive scientific research and policy. (shrink)

We draw from Eisenstadt’s (2002) conceptualization of multiple modernities which he pro­posed to analyze processes marking modernity and their different versions in contemporary societies. These processes do not delete all pre-existing orientations, value affinities and social arrangements, and while modernity is recognizable everywhere, modern societies also differ at other respects. We formulate a similar contention for globalization. We point to three interacting and intermingling movers of social reality—globalization, multiculturalism and the national principle—which concretize everywhere, and according to contexts and (...) a priori features, specific models qualifying for the notion of multiple globalizations. Beyond the variety of multiple globalizations, this notion underlines the newness of our time and hints the “next society”. (shrink)

I suggest that the representation of cities in Indian cinema — the effects and affects of modernities as well as of ambiguous, multiplicitous sexualities — mark significant change in engagement with modernity ever since independence in 1947. The city in the Indian imaginary has occupied an ambivalent, confrontational as well as contemplative space that signifies ‘modernity’ and its concurrent promise as well as ills. Non-normative sexualities have always occupied a liminal space in socio-political configurations, a site both of empowerment (...) through transgression and containment through regulation. The urban space — newly freed up and as yet un-proscribed — assumes the metonymic equivalence of available sexual freedom (particularly for women), its powers and its dangers. The cinema as a text is especially well-suited to play with the dynamics of this fraught space: often, a film’s contexts and narratives identify the film text itself as a signifier of the liminal spaces that it proposes to explore, enacting both their limitations and their possibilities. (shrink)

This article discusses Eurocentric history, its focus on the Renaissance and modernity, which continues also in recent global history perspectives. Goody’s argument regarding renaissances in the plural situates Europe in the wider field of Eurasia and deeper in time, going back to the Bronze Age, characterized by plough agriculture, the use of animal traction and urban cultures. Goody’s perspective includes viewing renascences as accelerations and leaps in the circulation of information. Since it is always the trope of the modern that (...) marks Eurocentric claims, unpacking modernity is central to scrutinizing this construction. Goody shows that Europe is a late-comer rather than a forerunner to major strands of modernity. A wider question this account poses is: if Renaissance in the singular produces modernity in the singular, do renaissances in the plural produce modernities in the plural? (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Modern, Stevie March 15, 2016: A 19 year-old American tourist is arrested in Jerusalem. Police authorities had found him asleep in a prohibited cave area, deep under the Muslim quarter of the Old City. A search finds his backpack loaded with rubble dug with a pickaxe, at a site where myth tells of lost religious treasure. The tourist claims no memory of his actions. Israeli media reports the story as a possible case of 'Jerusalem Syndrome' - a religiously themed psychosis. (...) The syndrome affects nearly 100 people each year out of millions of tourists who visit Jerusalem. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a grave (...) mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened in May this year, nearly 13 years from the date when 2,983 people were murdered by Islamist hijackers. It is 20 years from Al Qaida's first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

Modern, Stevie In the movie Exodus set in 1947, Paul Newman plays a Jewish 'people smuggler' Ari Ben Canaan in an amusing early scene where he disguises himself as a British soldier. Ben Canaan fools a commanding officer into signing off on the transport of recent holocaust survivors out of detention in Cyprus, making the officer believe the survivors would be shipped back to Germany.

This article identifies civilizational analysis as one response to a recent crisis in the sociology of large-scale social configurations and explores how far the concept of civilization can go in analyzing the contemporary global social constellation. The reasoning proceeds in four steps. First, a brief review of the recent conceptual debate in social theory and historical sociology leads to the conclusion that concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ still work with too strong presuppositions about continuity and commonality of patterns of (...) world interpretation. Second, a proposal is made to distinguish several basic problématiques that all human collectivities need to address and to suggest that such a distinction lends itself to research-oriented disentangling of various aspects of social phenomena. In an explorative manner, third, this approach will be applied to South Africa and Brazil, two social configurations that can fruitfully be studied as collectivities but lend themselves much less to civilizational analysis. By way of conclusion, finally, the trajectories of these non-European modernities will briefly be compared to the European one to illustrate the potential of this approach for a global sociology of plural trajectories of modernity. (shrink)

The analysis of modernity in Latin America has led to recurrent controversy and debate. In spite of its tension-ridden and even contradictory implications, it has been the relatively open-ended character of modernity and its élan of material and cultural progress and the promise of expanding autonomy and equality that has been a major asset for its endorsement in Latin America, a region that some have called the ‚farthest West,‘ a name that hints at the ambiguous and sometimes conflict-ridden relationship of (...) these societies with the poles and agents of Western expansion and hegemony. This article claims that the confrontation with Western modernity is in Latin America a confrontation with roots, discourses and institutions that turned out to be their own. Accordingly, the dynamics of expansion of modernity has been linked from very early on to global and transnational arenas, turning modernity into multiple yet truncated, leading to recurring attempts to reconstitute and attain the unfulfilled promises of modernity in the region. (shrink)