Modernity of this century: Four ethnographic perspectives

• Main Authors: HARMS, Erik, JOBSON, Ryan, MERRIFIELD, Caroline, RANDLE, Sarah Priscilla
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Anthropology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/118
• Institution: Singapore Management University

From an anthropological perspective, ‘modernity’ appears at once conceptually straightforward and theoretically elusive. Scholars seem to know it when they see it, yet specific definitions and approaches to the study of modernity rarely seem complementary. Some scholars, especially those steeped in European and North American philosophical and historical traditions, insist that modernity is a particular form of social and political organization with European origins. In this conceptualization, modernity is a product of processes which define the ‘modern period’: the expansion of capitalism, the rise of nation-states, and the development and spread of forms of rationality associated with scientific reason (Giddens 1991:1; Rabinow 2008: 2). But these conceptions have not gone unchallenged. One particularly influential body of literature critiques the very concept of modernity as a repressive technology of differentiation involving the forced and largely fictional purification of nature from culture (i.e., Latour 1993), and of Europe from its colonial others (i.e., Dussel 2000; Escobar 1995; Mignolo 2011). Other perspectives critique the idea of a single modernity with discrete origins by broadening the concept’s reach to encompass and celebrate ‘alternative’ modernities not beholden to a single genealogy emanating from enlightenment Europe (Gaonkar 2001; Rofel 1999; Trouillot 2002). The differences are clear: some say modernity comes unequivocally from Europe; some say we have never been modern, that modernity is a fiction imposed on the world by powerful actors seeking to dominate others; and others say that everyone is potentially modern in her own alternative way.