Anthropology and Its Many Modernities

Anthropology and its manymodernities: whenconcepts matter

B jørn Thomassen American University of Rome

This article provides a critical review of the multiple modernities paradigm used in anthropologytoday. The article also indicates how the work of anthropologists intersects with social theory andhistorical sociology. It will be argued that by pointing to multiple or alternative modernities inattempts to ‘liberate’ modernity from its Eurocentric, modernistic connotations, anthropologistsre-inject modernity itself with new value. It will be questioned whether this is ultimately ameaningful strategy. With reference to certain branches of social theory, the article develops aposition from which the multiple modernities paradigm may be readdressed. This position is basedupon a recognition of the particularity of European modernity, and its defining characteristic: acontinuous stress on transformation and transgression, a state of ‘permanent liminality’.

What modernity after modernity?Notions of multiple modernities are now standard in anthropological discourse. Suchnotions are increasingly framing what we do as anthropologists, what we look for inour fieldwork, how we make theoretical sense of it, and how we use our ethnography toestablish some kind of position on the issue of globalization. Often, the use of themultiple modernities concept involves taking a stance against Westernization, global-ization, and/or neoliberal capitalism, by pointing to the existence of ‘repressed’ or‘alternative’ modernities that deserve voice and recognition. In short, a new ‘multiplemodernities’ paradigm has slowly established itself. Clearly, this is not the only para-digm available to anthropologists, and we may question how powerful it is. Indeed, themultiple modernities paradigm demands no singular position, no single view: in con-trast to functionalism or Marxism, it has no well-defined theoretical core. Nevertheless,the multiple modernities paradigm is there and constitutes an extremely influentialapproach in anthropology today.

The evolution of the paradigm is owed to an apparently paradoxical developmentthat has been taking place since the 1980s. During that decade, ‘modernity’ became anexplicit subject of anthropological critique. A main aim of reflexive or deconstructiveanthropology was to demonstrate how anthropology as a discipline had been rootedin a modern epistemology, and that the anthropological representation of the ‘other’had somehow served as an underpinning of that very epistemology and practices ofpower connected to it. This resulted in a multi-layered debate, involving both a critical

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 160-178© Royal Anthropological Institute 2012

reconsideration of ‘classical anthropology’ and the constitution of the anthropologicalself and its research object, the ‘native’. Anthropological theory and practice hadbeen relying on the self-other relationship that had ultimately legitimized modernityitself (Trouillot 1991). It had, furthermore, worked under the realist illusion thatsocieties could be described as actually existing entities in time and space (Clifford1988; Marcus & Fischer 1986: 23). In short, the discipline had been created throughthe looking glass of modernity (Herzfeld 1987). The general conclusion was thatanthropology had to free itself from that foundation. And so it had to be created anew– beyond, against, or outside that modernity.

The situation led to a variety of responses, including the more radical ones whichclaimed that we could or should no longer say very much, except perhaps aboutourselves. A deep scepticism was directed both towards theorizing and the very possi-bility of doing fieldwork. Eventually, this ‘crisis of representation’ shifted focus from theanalysis of specific societies to the study of the anthropological observer. A turntowards aesthetics and sentiments was legitimized. By contrast, the very idea that wehad finally come to maturity and realized our limitations also fostered a hesitantoptimism. One of the reference works became Marcus and Fischer’s tellingly titledAnthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences (1986).It was shaky ground, but still somewhere to speak from. There emerged a ‘new ethnog-raphy’ or a ‘new anthropology’. It became possible to claim that the discipline ofanthropology, via the essentially reflexive and intersubjective nature of the ethno-graphic self-other encounter, actually represented a particular knowledge positionfrom where we could and should speak (see, e.g., Hastrup 1995). In this vein, Rosenau(1992) correctly identified both ‘sceptical’ and ‘affirmative’ postmodernists. While theformer remained orientated against any project of theory, the latter took inspirationfrom ‘reflexivity’ to establish new, critical-theoretical perspectives, now that we hadfreed ourselves from our self-inflicted serfdom to political power and its modernistepistemology. This could easily involve a recasting of new forms of political engage-ment and went hand in hand with a new politics of difference, as in postcolonial theoryand feminism (Moore 1988; Said 1989).

If anthropology rebooted itself via a deconstruction of modernity and its premises,how could the multiple modernities paradigm establish itself so easily from the late1990s? I think this question still needs careful consideration. Evidently, although oftenimplicitly, the pluralizing of modernity somehow came to function as a furtherunmasking of Western modernity. The main aim of this article is to ask whether thispluralizing still promises useful developments. In order to answer that question, Ifirst seek to provide an overview of the multiple modernities paradigm as used inanthropology today, pointing to similarities and differences in this indeed bewilder-ing field of conceptual/theoretical innovation. On the basis of this review, it will beargued that in our insistence to ‘liberate’ modernity from its Eurocentric, unilineal,and uniform connotations by pointing to multiple or alternative modernities, weunwillingly re-inject modernity itself with new value. It will be questioned whetherthis re-injection constitutes a helpful or meaningful strategy at the theoretical andnormative levels.

I should stress from the outset that I have no intention of offering some replacementterm or theoretical novelty. I will in fact carefully resist the temptation inherent tomuch of the existing debate: that some correction formulation exists, or can be pro-duced. It seems to me that efforts in the social sciences to capture the reality in which

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we live are always disappointing. Such ‘theoretical hubris’ (Szakolczai 2006) is itself anact of naming and a strategy of identification to be analysed on its own terms (Bour-dieu 1991). What is needed is a debate about the underlying theoretical assumptionsthat give direction to our use of concepts, and that equip us with tools to understandthe present. I will, therefore, limit myself to some suggestions as to how the multiplemodernities paradigm may be readdressed by bringing anthropological discussions ofmodernity/modernities into closer contact with social theory and historical sociology.In particular, I argue for a necessary recognition of the particularity of Europeanmodernity, and what can be considered its defining characteristic: a continuous stresson transformation and transgression, a state of ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai2000: 215-27).

The many multiple modernities: a typologyWhat do anthropologists mean when they talk about multiple modernities? It is notpossible here to provide a complete overview of what is indeed an exploding field. Onlysome tendencies can be indicated. The survey exercise is complicated by the fact thatthe different concepts are defined and used differently by different authors; hence thegeneralizations offered below must be taken as rough indications. Moreover, the plu-rality within the plurality is almost exhausting. I will in the following make reference totwenty-one current ways of putting modernity in the plural, and it is not possible togive all of them equal weight. The list is certainly not exhaustive.1 From the moment theplural form of modernity was suggested,2 a gold hunt for conceptual novelty wasinitiated, and we will certainly see more proposals over the next years.

It is at such a definitional moment that conceptual reflection and theoretical dis-cussion are necessary, and this article is of course not the first to raise this point. Tofacilitate an overview I here propose to group contemporary multiple modernitiesconcepts into five tentative, descriptive categories. Some concepts could fit into severalof the categories. The categories are meaningful to the extent that terms within themshare a semantic space and can most often be exchanged without altering the contentof the statements made. The categories will be presented and shortly discussed with thedouble purpose of creating an overview of the debate and of distinguishing somepositions.

(1) General terms indicating plurality: parallel modernities, global modernities, multiplemodernities, manifold modernities, other modernities, plural modernities. Theseterms are tendentially value-neutral, involving no normative judgement or position.The terms simply indicate plurality, or spatial stretching, without suggesting a hierar-chy or asymmetry of power. Beyond indicating plurality, the terms do not positivelystate what those modernities are about at the substantive level.

A cursory literature review suggests that the first three terms in category (1) are by farthe most commonly used. The notion of parallel modernities has, among others, beensuggested by Brian Larkin. Larkin understands parallel modernities as referring to ‘thecoexistence in space and time of multiple economic, religious and cultural flows thatare subsumed within the term “modernity” ’ (1997: 407). Larkin characteristically keeps‘modernity’ in inverted commas without wanting to define what is meant by ‘it’. Themonolithic view of modernity, Larkin argues, must be relativized once ‘cultures’ areviewed as dynamic complexes; we should, therefore, leave behind simple dichotomiessuch as ‘the West and the rest’ as the creators and the recipients of modernity.

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The concept of global modernities has been used by a number of anthropologists andsociologists since the collection Global modernities, edited by Featherstone, Lash, andRobertson (1995), appeared. As the concept indicates, the notion of multiple moder-nities is directly linked to the globalization debates that exploded in the 1990s. InRobertson’s (1995) view, globalization is/was not simply a product of modernity (asmaintained by Giddens), but the two are now necessarily intersected. What Robertsonand others have underlined with the notion of global modernities is the fact that thedifferent ‘parallel’ modernities do not exist in isolation, but rather become global attheir very inception.

Multiple modernities refers back to Shmuel Eisenstadt, who has inspired many soci-ologists and quite a few anthropologists. Anthropologists invoke the notion of multiplemodernities to account for cultural diversity in ‘complex society’, where people havestates, bureaucracies, factories, fast food and technology, but consume and interpretthese realities in different ways.3 I shall shortly return to Eisenstadt’s approach below.

(2) Modernities in history: early modernities, later modernities, new modernities. Theseterms stress the fact that different modernities have existed in history and that new oneskeep developing in the present. The plurality proposed is temporal before it is spatial.The notions of early, later, or new modernities constitute a type of pluralizing invokedmost often by social (historical) theorists (see, e.g., Kaya 2003).4 The usage is still notwidespread among historians but is indeed a logical extensions of established terms like‘early modern Europe’ versus ‘modern Europe’: the pluralizing here signifies that dif-ferent historical societies had modernities that cannot simply be teleologically reducedas forerunners to a later modernity. This is a much larger debate that cannot bediscussed in any detail here.5

(3) Resistance modernities: alternative modernities, counter-modernities, anti-modernities, competing modernities. These terms tendentially see modernities as ‘sub-jects of action’. They imply strategies for resistance against ‘something’ (which mayoften imply ‘Western modernity’ and its socio-economic forms). Within this categorythe most frequently used term is probably alternative modernities. Dilip ParameshwarGaonkar opens his introduction to Alternative modernities with this statement: ‘Tothink in terms of “alternative modernities” is to admit that modernity is inescapableand to desist from speculations about the end of modernity. Born in and of the Westsome centuries ago under relatively specific sociohistorical conditions, modernity isnow everywhere’ (2006: 1). Gaonkar’s introduction is written as an exercise to revise adistinction between ‘societal modernization processes’ and ‘cultural modernity’,6 where‘cultural modernity’ refers to an artistic and aestethic reaction against a mechanical anddisenchanting modernization process. The introduction is followed by a series ofinteresting case studies on the appropriation of modernity in different contexts, butnone of these studies systematically take up Gaonkar’s conceptual invitation.

As opposed to the idea that modernity is/was an epoch to be surpassed,Gaonkar insiststhat modernity is an inescapable condition. In contrast, by using the notion of ‘alternativemodernities’, Gaonkar indicates that ‘other ways’ to live with that condition are madepossible. Invoking the term ‘alternative modernities’ often involves a balance betweenrecognizing underlying shared living conditions that have been globalized and openingup for cultural elaboration of those global forces, if not resistance against them. InAppadurai’s reading (1990; 1996), such ‘resistance’ has much to do with imagination.



Writers who adopt this term often imply a normative stance, as clearly implied in theinvitation for a conference entitled ‘Alternative Modernities: Transcending PostcolonialConditions’, where the organizers stated their goal to ‘use [such] empirically-groundedanalyses [of alternative modernities] to generate discussion about alternative modern-ist state and inter-state structures, interrogating the extent to which those structuresproduce solidary social forms rather than, once again, centres and peripheries betweenwhich the connections are primarily in the interests of the centres’.7 It is in this sensethat the notion of alternative modernities often becomes a call for new forms of justiceand inclusion. (Beck’s invocation of alternative modernities goes in this direction aswell: Beck 1997 [1993]: 110-31.)

The notion of counter-modernities has its roots in Foucault’s discussion of moder-nity in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1984). Foucault understood modernity as anattitude or an ethos that involves a certain relationship to oneself. Rather than taking astance for or against modernity or distinguishing modernity from a premodern orpostmodern period, Foucault suggested it more useful ‘to try to find out how theattitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with atti-tudes of “countermodernity” ’ (1984: 34). The plural form, counter-modernities, canmeaningfully be described as a way to ‘provincialize Foucault’, by pointing to suchcounter-modernities in a variety of global settings, and especially in the contact zone ofimperial encounter. This involves a view from the excluded and a consideration offorms of resistance from marginal positions, seeing practices of power as dialectical andreciprocal. With a different terminology, Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) have arguedalong such lines.

The concept of anti-modernities is less used by academics but tendentially representsa more articulate political stance. The term often emerges within anti-global discourse,where existing forms of socio-economic power hierarchies and patterns of represen-tation are openly debunked and fought against.8 While many anthropologists refrainfrom adopting an explicit standpoint in the global/anti-global debates, a large amountof ethnographies seek exactly to account for local resistances to particular aspects ofmodernity and specific manifestations of the modern, which very often amounts to astruggle against global, neoliberal consumer capitalism. The argument has, forexample, been made by Aihwa Ong (2001), who in her various discussions of modernityhas reiterated Marx’s view of capitalism as an alienating force that disrupts commu-nities, dissolves interpersonal relations, uproots earlier forms of life, and leaves peoplewithout any means of resistance.

Other anthropologists have demonstrated how such resistances to modernity are infact old, but that in the past, owing precisely to the blindfolding produced by the‘singular-modernity’ narrative, we failed to recognize certain cultural forms (playfuland ironic as these may be) as resistance. Taussig’s (1993) work is emblematic here (butsee also Arce & Long 2000).

The notion of competing modernities is predominantly used by economists andpolitical scientists, and most often to denote the competitive relationships betweenJapan/East Asia, Europe, and America. Michael Herzfeld, however, seems to prefer theconcept over multiple or alternative modernities, claiming that ‘competing modernitiesand rationalities would form a worthwhile object of anthropological research’(2001: 44).Herzfeld indicates that much of the multiple modernities literature still relies on claimsto rationality, and that to compare and contrast these claims (also within anthropologyitself) rather than holding them at arm’s length might prove more productive.

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(4) Vulnerable modernities: uneven modernities, repressed modernities, fragile moder-nities. Modernities are here conceptualized as objects of domination, threatened con-figurations that exist in the hidden, despite the threat of more powerful forces (whichagain may be ‘Western modernity’ or capitalism). Uneven (Randeria 2002), repressed, orfragile9 modernities typically refer to pluralistic aspects of Western (white, male, het-erosexual, capitalist) modernity that are/were marginalized within and beyond thecolonial context. Without using these exact terms, much current anthropology, ofcourse, falls within this category, seeking to describe modernities from the margins,from the perspective of the excluded and repressed. The perspective is implicit insome of Appadurai’s writings on globalization, where he stresses the uneven spread ofcultural, technological, and economic resources (Appadurai 1996).10

(5) Positive modernities: enchanted modernities, entangled modernities, genderedmodernities, embodied modernities, reflexive modernities. Modernities are here seenas carriers of positive values. Most often these values are exactly the ones that moder-nity was earlier seen to have emptied or precluded. The concepts in this categoryindicate a movement from modernity as disenchantment to multiple modernities asre-enchantment, a perhaps paradoxical movement in which naked plurality becomesa liberating force in itself (one is bad, more is good), a tendency which is indeedindicative of the larger debate.

The notions of enchanted (Deeb 200611) and entangled modernities12 can be takenas indications of open, even ironic, challenges to those versions of social theorywhich took modernity to represent a top-down process of disenchantment and/or adisentanglement of social and personal relations that spread from the West withimperialism and capitalism. Gendered (Hodgson 2001) or embodied (Martin & Hein-rich 2006) modernities indicate a positive possibility to re-inject modernity withmeaning and (gendered) subjectivity from the margins or from below. In thissense, categories (4) and (5) must be considered subcategories of the ‘resistancemodernities’.

The notion of reflexive modernities has more precise connotations, as it relates to theidea of modernity (in the singular) being ‘reflexive’. That idea was expressed by main-stream social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck in the 1990s. Beck talkedabout two modernities, and placed the ‘second modernity’ in the present as a commu-nicative and non-linear or reflexive modernity, much inspired by Habermas’s com-municative rationality. Scott Lash’s Another modernity: a different rationality (1999)stayed largely within this discourse and its Habermasian Enlightenment-containedtime-framework.

When considering together the last two categories of the above list, vulnerable andpositive modernities, a remarkable development becomes clear: whereas modernityfrom the 1980s was deconstructed as ethnocentric, repressive, disenchanting, uni-formizing and excluding fragile meanings and alternatively gendered identities, nowmodernities themselves are posited as fragile and repressed. In most readings, therefore,multiple modernities have switched position, taking on the role of the ‘weak’. It is fromthe position of weakness that they gain a new positivity, in an almost Nietzscheanrevaluation of values. One sometimes wonders what happened to the beast.

To finish this overview of the many modernities paradigm (and disregarding theterms in category [2], which have had little resonance with anthropological discourse),



a sketchy time-line in the development of all the concepts taken together can beindicated very roughly as follows: the terms in category (1) were the first ones intro-duced in the early and mid-1990s in the attempt to establish a post-postmodernvocabulary to account for diversity; the terms in category (3) followed after to indi-cate something more than sheer plurality;13 the terms in categories (4) and (5) are themost recent ones. Categories (3), (4), and (5) taken together connote and articulatepost-postmodern forms of resistance.

Shared assumptions and bones of contentionDespite substantial differences, it is possible to single out some interrelated coreassumptions within the larger multiple modernities paradigm described so far.14

First, all of the various terms oppose ‘analytical Eurocentrism’. One can most easilypin down the common denominator of pluralized forms of modernity by referring tothat which they are meant to replace at the analytical level: namely the notion of asingular (Western) modernity.

Second, all the terms indicate that modernity does not lead to singularity and thusrefuse unilineal modernization processes. As in the work of Ferguson (1999), muchanthropology has focused upon how the false belief in a singular modernizationprocess actually underpinned both anthropological practice and theory as well as localpeople’s ‘expectations of modernity’. As opposed to views of globalization as the impo-sition of a uniform modernity, anthropologists refuse to accept that we are witnessinga unitary global culture, dominated by the West, and insist instead that parallel oralternative modernities are emerging that demand our attention. People are not ‘ontheir way’; they are different. This recognition is seen as enabling us to analyse localforms in their real existence.

Third, to think of multiple modernities means to focus on local-global relations.In fact, anthropologists frequently invoke multiple modernities simply to describelocal/global configurations. Whereas ‘classical anthropology’ allegedly overlooked theways in which local cultures were tied to state and international political economy,anthropology during recent decades has focused exactly on those ‘externalities’,making them central to the very object of investigation. In much anthropology, there-fore, alternative or parallel modernities simply refer to the many ways in which localtraditions blend and fuse with global trends, creating what Roland Robertson (1995)called ‘glocalization’.

Fourth, each of the above terms imbues people with agency. Modernities becomeimpersonated as they come to rely upon cultural context, which involves a high degreeof openness in terms of interpretation (Kaya 2004). The fact that modernities can bothbe ‘weak’ and function to signal empowerment is part of a larger analytical strategy,much in line with the anthropological tradition to counter ways of thinking that renderpeople passive, without agency and without history. One strong motivation behind theanthropological embracing of multiple modernities has surely been to ‘give modernityback to the people’ who live it and shape it via their lived realities. Modernity wasoppressive and took away people’s voice; multiple modernities give voice to everyone.It is also from this perspective that the terms ‘enchanted’, differently ‘gendered’, and‘entangled’ modernities become meaningful.

A major bone of contention lurking in the debate, and cutting across the catego-ries proposed above, involves two in fact very different views of the multiple, well

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described by Ulf Hannerz: ‘As the civilization of modernity enters into contact withother cultures, changes and refractions result, so that one may see it alternatively asone increasingly internally diverse civilization or as multiple modernities’ (1996: 46).In other words, are we dealing with ‘varieties of modernity’ or with ‘truly’ multiplemodernities? To a large extent, this question has to do with a basic differencebetween, on the one hand, views of modernity as originating in the West and thendiversifying and multiplying as the West ‘spreads’, and, on the other, views whichrecognize different sources of modernity. (It is evident from Hannerz’s formulationthat he opts for the first view.) To an extent, the question as to whether multipleforms result from an expansion of Western modernity or, alternatively, from variouscivilizational sources of distinct modernities is a rehearsal of the very old debate inanthropology concerning multiple versus single origins of culture. Centric versuspluralist arguments have in fact dominated the globalization debate within anthro-pology. In their preface to Global modernities, Featherstone and Lash (1995: 4)called this the debate between ‘homogenizers’, who operate with some notion of aglobal ‘system’ with a centre, and ‘heterogenizers’, who will tend to stress culturalparticularity.

It is fair to say that the majority of anthropologists have sided with the multipleview. We certainly cannot assume that global ‘capital centres’ overlap with global‘image centres’. Globalization has to be conceived as multi-layered and multi-directional. While some Western forms of scientism and political traditions havespread to other parts of the world, other ‘items’ may originate from elsewhere, creat-ing what Appadurai (1990) has described as multi-directional ‘flows’. Yoga techniquesand sushi have penetrated New York as easily as US dollars transformed Bombay’s andTokyo’s capital markets. Furthermore, globalization is not only a two-way process;there are many cultural flows that take place outside the West altogether. (On suchmedia flows, see, e.g., Herzfeld 2001: 294-315.) I have no wish to question theseinsights, but will argue below that the homogeneity versus heterogeneity debatebecomes more meaningful when accompanied by a historical view that takes theparticularity of European modernity more seriously.

Leaving what ‘modernity’ behind? The parallel trajectories of modernityand civilizationWhat becomes clear from the above survey is hardly surprising: rather than providingany substantial definitions as to what modernities are about (or what they are notabout), anthropologists use ethnographies to demonstrate how modernities are livedand constructed differently in different cultural contexts. In the concrete ethnogra-phies, this involves analysing how specific groups of people cope with capitalism, howthey transform state ideologies, how universal religions develop differently in culture-specific settings (Hann 2007; Keane 2007), or how people localize global consumergoods or certain types of global discourse, such as human rights or nationalism(Lomnitz 2001). I do not wish to contest the fact that this approach represents acrucial contribution to the globalization debate. A growing number of ethnographiesattest to multiple modernities: that is, to a variety of ways to make claims of ratio-nality and progress that constitute the modern. Compared to the rather auto-referential debates of the 1980s, the multiple modernities paradigm has involved areturn to ethnography, and given the modernity debate a badly needed concreteness(see, e.g., Kahn 2001; Miller 1995).



Yet some questions must be raised. A very general question relates to the overallachievement of this new vocabulary. Despite the merits of the by now well-knownplurality discourse, and despite illuminating ethnographies continuously producedwithin (or at least connected to) this paradigm, the anthropological accounts mostoften leave the nature and the reproductive energies of these modernities unanswered.The various concepts are, at worst, crudely used to show variation within a globalizingworld.

The conceptual development that first abolished modernity and then reintroducedit in the plural form is in fact reminiscent of an older debate, almost forgotten, butparticularly pertinent in the current context: the conceptual use of ‘civilization’. React-ing against early evolutionism that took Western civilization as the taken-for-grantedstarting-point and measure for inquiry, twentieth-century anthropologists rejected thecivilization concept as ethnocentric, politically biased, and/or analytically useless. Start-ing in nineteenth-century Germany, and partly as a reaction to French Enlightenmentphilosophy, ‘culture’ became the ‘politically correct’ term in contrast to the loaded term‘civilization’ – too reminiscent of worn-out ideas supposing Western supremacy. Alter-natively, critics of evolutionism like Franz Boas simply started referring to existingsocieties as ‘civilizations’ (Stocking 1966), thus relativizing the dividing line between‘civilized’ and ‘non-civilized’ peoples. Boas and others were largely successful in thisenterprise. It became commonplace to assume that there was a Melanesian, an Inuit,and a Western civilization. The victory was pyrrhic and with an evident result: theconcept of civilization lost its descriptive, let alone analytical, value, as it simply cameto denote different cultures or ‘culture areas’. Simply put, an analytical concept wasdiluted into a descriptive device. Kroeber (1957), a student of Boas, tried to reintroducea grand theory reflection on civilizations and civilizational cycles. Indeed, every decadein the post-war period would see a handful of publications seeking to underpin thecivilization concept with analytical meaning and content, but a unified discourse neverarose.15 If Toynbee or Spengler was quoted by anthropologists, it was most often todeconstruct the author’s (admittedly simplistic) classifications of ‘world civilizations’.Hardly any anthropological textbook written in the post-war period introduced‘civilization’ as a possibly useful analytical concept alongside ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘tribe’,or ‘state’.

This left anthropologists without an argument when political scientists and inter-national relations theorists from the 1990s started to conceptualize political conflict asa cultural ‘clash of civilizations’. We know we don’t like Huntington, and we are quickto deconstruct his flawed world-view (Thomassen 2007), but we have nothing con-structive to say about the analytical value or even the empirical reality of ‘civilizations’,and we have no real alternative to offer. The silence is regrettable, for never before havethe notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ come so visibly to the centre stage of worldpolitics and global conflict. There is indeed reason enough to speak up.16

In a similar fashion, ‘modernity’ has now gone through a tripartite sequence: (1)‘unrecognized episteme’ (2); ‘recognized’ and rejected; and (3) pluralized. ‘We are allmodern, just in different ways’, the slogan now goes. Before Inuits represented a civi-lization of their own; now we (we!) call them differently modern when they use snowscooters, listen to Madonna, and sell their furs at market price in London. To continuethe parallel, today’s notions of plural modernities deny any absolute spatial or tem-poral dividing line between modern and traditional societies in much the same wayas anthropologists earlier relativized the civilized-primitive divide. The discourse of

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multiple modernities has ripped the modern of its teleology and its superiority. In itsplace we have fragmentation and hybridity.

There are strong reasons to suggest that we are driving ourselves into the samecorner as happened with our ‘pacification’ of ‘civilization’. If the current pluralizing ofmodernity ultimately serves to describe the variety of cultural forms that coexist in theworld today, the analytical value of the concept is watered down, and little is gained inperspective. Arguably, other, more modest, concepts could have served the purposebetter. It matters very little whether we use modernity in the singular or the plural if wedo not take a theoretical stance on modernity. If everything is somehow ‘differentlymodern’, the term is deprived of meaning. We are in fact decorating cultural relativismwith a new and more fashionable label. Let me in what remains supplement these verygeneral observations with some more specific objections to the current use of the manymodernities paradigm, and while doing so also indicate some possible ways to redirectthe debate.

Recasting the homogeneity versus heterogeneity debateThere are two well-known critiques of what Mitchell (2000) called the ‘easy manymodernities’; they will not be the focus of attention here, as they are the most widelydiscussed. First, the strategy of pluralizing easily sidesteps asymmetries of power in theglobal system, by injecting everyone with agency and creating an illusion of equity(Mitchell 2000). Second, at the level of representation, it can also be argued that tospeak of multiple modernities may in fact turn into yet another construct of othercultures as essentialist ‘others’, this time as ‘differently modern’ others (Foster 2002). Assuch, the change of vocabulary, far from representing an advance, really just reproducesanother kind of ‘othering’: a distancing in space, if less so in time. There is, in my view,a very concrete dimension to this aspect, which is sometimes ignored: the ethnographicfact that many people around the world keep referring to modernity in the singular,and as something indeed very positive. In many corners of the world, ‘modernity’ in thesingular remains a much used and positively laden emic concept which people veryconsciously invoke as a parameter of successful development. This sounds terribly likemodernization theory, true enough. But what if people live and see it as such? Is it ourrole to tell them that they are not ‘on their way’? That they represent an alternativemodernity? Such an insistence can clearly come to function as not only another seman-tic distancing, but also as a very real disregard of people’s concrete wishes for a betterlife. As argued by Englund and Leach (2000), rather than imposing meta-narratives, weshould leave more space for subjects to define for themselves the contexts of theirbeliefs and practices.

Here, however, I would like to focus on another shortcoming of the currentdebates: if we are quick to demonstrate local adaptations to modernities, we oftenhesitate to discuss the sources of those modernities; if we are quick to point out thatthere are ‘many paths to modernity’, we are less quick to point out the contours ofthose paths and their substantial differences. The anthropological adaptation of themultiple modernities paradigm has led to a privileging of the discussion of hetero-geneity versus homogeneity, over and against a diachronic view. This is particularlymisplaced, insofar as the notion of multiple modernities, as introduced to the socialsciences by Shmuel Eisenstadt (1999; 2000a), rested from the very outset on the rec-ognition of a need to re-inject social theory with history of the longue durée. Such ahistorical view is necessary to make sense of the homogeneity versus heterogeneity



debate; and it is a view which involves a consideration of modernity’s nexus tocivilization, or, rather, civilizing processes.

Eisenstadt invoked the notion of multiple modernities in the footsteps of MaxWeber’s comparative study of the ‘world religions’, which served to answer more fullythe question concerning the particularity of the ‘West’ in a world-historical compara-tive framework (Weber 1963 [1922]). Eisenstadt always understood his notion of mul-tiple modernities as an inherent part of the wider theoretical and historicalframework that Karl Jaspers (1953 [1949]) called the Axial Age (Eisenstadt 1982; 1986;Voegelin 1974; for fuller discussion, see Thomassen 2010). In his studies of China,India, Ancient Judaism, and in his unfinished manuscripts on Islam and early Chris-tianity, Weber clearly recognized that civilizations are multiple and unique. At thesame time he noted a series of structural similarities: the role of prophecy and itsinstitutionalization; the tension between this-worldly and other-worldly ethics; andthe notion of salvation, and the culture-specific means of its accomplishment, leadingto what we may term different trajectories of ‘civilizing processes’.17 This view tempersthe opposition between the one and the many. Weber found commonalities betweenthe major civilizations based on shared conditions of emergence and shared predica-ments. This perspective was exactly what Jaspers (1953 [1949]) developed in his workon the Axial Age, in which he argued for a common axis point in world history, butone with multiple origins.

This, however, does not preclude the possibility that a global coming-into-contacthas also happened. Weber knew well that the imposition of one civilization complexon others had taken and was taking place. To Eisenstadt, modernity can indeed beunderstood as an original Western project – he talked about the ‘original culturalprogramme of modernity’. Eisenstadt argued that Western patterns of modernity arenot the only ‘authentic’ modernities; they only have a ‘purely historical precedence’(2000b: 2-3). His argument is that modernity, as it spread to the rest of the world, lednot to a single civilization, or even remotely to a similar modernization trajectory,but to the development of several modern civilizations. (The argument here buildson comparative work done by Eisenstadt in the 1960s on the evolution of empires.)Eisenstadt here stayed close to Weber in that he identified structural similaritieswithin a variety of civilizations. The developmental dynamics may be cognate, andmany underlying characteristics are indeed similar, but differences remain and keepunfolding. This means in my view that we have to understand the notion of multiplemodernities in two ways that are not mutually exclusive. First, the analysis of variouscivilizational developments that led to specific figurations, of course with internaldifferentiations, makes it possible to conceive of multiple modernities as being pluralin the sense that they are embedded in civilizational configurations from their verybeginning; and that ‘beginning’ must surely incorporate the Axial Age theory as atheoretical and historical framework. Second, multiple modernities keep unfold-ing owing to culture contact and the spread of ideas. Multiple modernities canbe conceived as the various local ways in which global influences are incorpora-ted and transformed, and how, for example, Western capitalism transforms and istransformed by local societies.

However, neither of these perspectives disregards the fact that modernity eruptedin Europe. This, I would argue, happened in the period following the ‘waning of theMiddle Ages’, in the sixteenth to seventeenth century, when a modern worldviewinstalled itself. This installation took place as a fragmentation of the Renaissance

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project (Szakolczai 2007). According to Weber, it was the specific Western type ofrationalizing the religious rejections of the world, identified by the inner-worldlyasceticism of Christian sects, which led to the breakthrough of modern capitalism,which did indeed have a centre of origin: Europe. As stressed by Eisenstadt (2005),and drawing also on the work of Eric Voegelin, much the same can indeed be saidabout a parallel development in the political realm. Nationalists and political revo-lutionaries from the seventeenth century onwards were in fact, as suggested by Voege-lin, secular carriers of an ‘inner-worldly eschatology’ (see also Szakolczai 2008), andthis was what gave European politics a fervour and revolutionary potential unknownin other areas of the world. The parallels can be further continued into a consider-ation of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, famously analysed byFranz Borkenau, who pointed to the joint emergence of modern philosophy and themathematical-mechanistic world image (for further discussion, see in particularSzakolczai 2000: 141-51).

Forms of resistance: multiple modernities and the proliferation ofidentity politicsI have no wish to argue that we should abandon the concepts of multiple modernities.I fully accept that the contemporary scene is characterized by multiple interpretationsof the modern. Most of the above-mentioned terms are meaningful descriptive tools tomake sense of the world in which we live. One can only sympathize with Tsing’sinsistence (2005) that our primary role should not be to take sides ‘for’ or ‘against’globalization but rather to follow, in our ethnographies, its contours and variations (its‘frictions’ in her words). And yet, as noted above, there is indeed a quite strong tendencyto invoke alternative or repressed modernities as implicit or explicit strategies to resistthe overwhelming forces of globalization. To pluralize and ‘write into history’ hithertoexcluded subjects by discovering hybrid or alternative modernities is employed as ameans of resistance to the new global (neoliberal) order, and a call for new forms ofjustice and inclusion. As indicated in the above, it is from such a perspective that thereference to multiple and alternative modernities serves as a continuation of themodernity critique of the 1980s; in fact, as Aihwa Ong (2001) has so clearly put it,anthropology should become aware of the fact that the discipline is both an extensionof modernity and an instrument for its undoing.

It is this project I think we seriously need to question; not our ethnographic endeav-our to describe and analyse multiple forms of modern projects. Anthropology was bornfrom a recognition of cultural diversity. The moment we cease to marvel at the wonderof cultural creativity and innovation, we arguably lose our reason to exist. But at theheart of our current celebratory attitudes towards pluralities of the modern lies atheoretical misconception that needs to be spelled out with some clarity. This miscon-ception rests on the conclusion reached in the 1980s, namely that ‘old’ modernityrepresented a uniformizing/rationalizing force. It is against this background that pluralmodernities became both good and necessary.

It is certainly true that in the social sciences the dominance of modernizationtheories in the post-war period led to a view of modernity as uniform across time andspace, equating it with Western ideals, ideas, and institutions. The problem is that thisidea of modernity as unitary and uniformizing was always wrong. It is even concep-tually wrong. The very notion of being modern was, from its inception in the earlysixteenth century precisely not about creating ‘sameness’, as it indeed demarcated a



difference from the past (the ancients), and a notion of continuously evolving hori-zons. The modern was the new, the diverse, the forward-looking: it had no definiteform and no definite end result, other than a continuously moving horizon; it wasabout change and movement (Giesen 2009; Koselleck 1979; Wagner 2001). Here onecan adopt Stuart Hall’s formulation: ‘Essential to the idea of modernity is the idea thateverything is destined to be speeded up, dissolved, displaced, transformed, reshaped’(1996: 17). Szakolczai, applying the conceptual vocabulary of Victor Turner, has fit-tingly, albeit deeply paradoxically, diagnosed modernity as ‘permanent liminality’,alluding to its negation of stabile forms and ideas (Szakolczai 2000: 215-27; Thomassen2009).

The many modernities paradigm in current anthropology feeds upon a politics ofinclusion and recognition, aiming to establish a more just and free world by fightingcentralized forms of dominance. In the postscript to Expectations of modernity, Fergu-son said what in most other accounts remains rather implicit: if socialism is no longera valid alternative to the neoliberal agenda, then a multitude of social movementsmobilized around such issues as human rights, sexuality, and religion can take theirplace alongside a ‘revitalized Marxist critique’ and a ‘re-energized global labor move-ment’ to counter neoliberal globalization (1999: 258).

The problem with these normative approaches is that they almost invariably come topredicate upon exactly those universalist ideologies of freedom and emancipation thatlie at the very heart of modern ideology. This leads to a highly ambivalent process,captured by Foucault: exactly those universalistic ideologies of emancipation invariablyend up creating more suffering and repression. It is, of course, true that contemporarycritical theory departs from a ‘de-centred self ’ and involves a ‘reflexive’ starting-point.Yet this produces a rather uneasy mixture of appeals to identity/diversity, universalism(as in human rights), and re-energized forms of class struggle. One may in fact suspectthat this is one principal reason why the multiple modernities paradigm gained suchwidespread and easy favour in the 1990s: while simultaneously drawing on old vocabu-laries of repression and resistance and newer ones that stress strategies of representa-tion, local agency, and diversity via the many flows of cultures, the discourse seeminglyallows for a relatively painless marriage between neo-Marxism and the postmoderncelebration of diversity (see also Thomassen 2008).

This can also be said in a different way. To invoke repressed and then ‘liberated’modernities (trans-gendered, re-cultured, re-emancipated) forms part not only of alarger politics of recognition, but indeed of a larger politics of identity. In line withpost-structural theory, the anthropology of multiple modernities takes a celebratorystance towards heterogeneity and hybridity. As in the much-quoted literary approachof Bhabha (1994), this involves a search for interstitial positions between fixed posi-tions, an entertainment of difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. Com-bined with critical theory and/or revitalized Marxism, this has come to represent ananthropological version of ‘new critical theory’.

However, to combine two excesses does not necessarily create a harmony. With itsobsessive preoccupation with marginality and suffering, and the belief in the completeelimination of human misery, Marxism and other twin modern ideologies systemati-cally only managed to proliferate still more misery. But there is something even moreperplexing about our very celebration of difference. Are such pluralist strategies reallyan antidote to ‘modernity’? I think the argument can be made that not only is this notso, but that to plunge into further rounds of global identity politics is rather to

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exacerbate modernity’s most problematic aspect: not only its utopian call for freedomand emancipation, but exactly its constant ‘going beyond’, its centrifugal tendencies.And, as Foucault (1988) came to recognize, those forces are predicated upon a continu-ously evolving ‘politics of ourselves’ that lies at the very heart of the modern project. Bysimply taking a celebratory stance towards pluralism, diversity, movement, hybridity,and fluidity in our attempts to go beyond modernity, we are indeed celebrating theperhaps most critical aspect of that very modernity: the ceaseless drive towards over-coming traditional boundaries, or, using the expression of Giesen (2009), the constant‘lure to transgression’.

Conclusion: what’s next?We live in this world. There is no other world, and hence no possibility of withdrawal.Our attempts to ‘take us out of modernity’ are tragically part of the modern project. AsFoucault (1984) spelled out very clearly in his last writing, this was exactly Kant’sdefinition of the Enlightenment: an exit, a ‘way out’. It is a connected world, and trueenough a world in which the local and global can no longer be separated. Any positionof exteriority is futile. Any imagined position of a-posteriority is merely tragic, part ofthe utopian drive that gave the modern project much of its destructive energy. Suchpositions are not far away from the indeed untenable positions of scientific objectivitythat dominated most of the twentieth century. They all predicated upon a sense ofalienation, a setting oneself against or above given conditions; they imply the loss ofthat balance between ‘involvement and detachment’ (Elias 2007 [1983]) which is aprecondition for effective thought and practice.

I have argued that a central task of anthropology must indeed be to study the‘frictions’ of multiple modernities (Tsing 2005). I have also argued, however, that thepostmodern and now contemporary celebration of diversity and a larger politics ofdifference set against an oppressive and hegemonizing modernity was badly miscon-ceived from the very beginning, and that the diversity and hybridity we keep celebratingmight be porous – indeed a part of the problem itself. We need to re-embed ourdescriptive efforts of multiple modernities in a theoretical/historical understanding ofmodernity itself. This takes us beyond the discipline of anthropology.

The argument proposed has not implied an attempt to ‘save’ modernity, to retainsome core or some positive principles that we can still refer back to, and from wherea new departure becomes possible: to protect rationality while aware of its abuses,as in Habermas’s project. There is indeed reason enough to question the self-understanding of modernity as rational and progressive; but there is equal reason todoubt that a continuous celebration of hybridity and cultural diversity poses any kindof alternative – whether theoretically or normatively. This is especially so insofar asthe research subjects in which we detect such seeds of resistance are already wellabsorbed into those consequences of modernity that seem to us so fatal: the globalspread of a capitalist economy and its own inbuilt frenzy; the continuous transfor-mation of society by new technology and science; and the increasing fervour withwhich people around the globe tie their personal identities to abstract and oftenpurely demographic categories such as ‘gender’, ‘race’, ‘nation’, or ‘religion’. Multiplemodernities can only serve as meaningful forms of resistance to the extent that theyopenly recognize and identify these processes and the mimetic processes by whichthey have spread, imploded, and transformed within a variety of civilizational con-texts. I am willing to risk this formulation: there are no real alternative modernities



with which we can correct the errors of ‘old’ modernity. The problem is not Europe orthe West; the problem is modernity.

The recognition of the particularity of European modernity, therefore, also allows usto disentangle modernity from the larger concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizing pro-cesses’, which are indeed not simply empty and politically charged terms. We shouldrecognize that there are ‘sources of civilization’ (Szakolczai 2004) even within theWestern context that not only predate that modernity, but that represent genuinelyalternative values and worldviews. And to an extent, this was of course the importanceof the Axial Age and the spiritual foundations it laid within the various world civiliza-tions (Jaspers 1953 [1949]), implying in fact a call for a de-emphasizing if not elimina-tion of the ego, and a humble recognition of boundaries, re-anchoring the human beingin a recognition of a divine order. In such a light, one role for anthropology may relateto the task of attesting to cultural traditions or strategies that serve to problematize theover-confidence in human autonomy and rationality and which aim to diagnose andtame those tendencies towards limitless growth and constant self-overcoming thatcharacterize the modern episteme. Another task may relate to valorizing and respectingconcrete human presence in this world, against the political investment of persons intothe continuously proliferating cults of abstract rights, ideologies, or identities. Aninsistence on concreteness and bounded existence (Horvath 2008) is perhaps the onlyremedy against the spinning logics of global identity politics. Modernity will not beovercome by injecting it with cultural diversity. It will consolidate and perpetuateits most vital and most problematic aspect: the loss of limits, the drive towardsgrowth, and the constant search for renewal, transformation, and going beyond givenconditions – at any price, and anywhere.

NOTES1 I have, for example, omitted from the discussion the almost limitless possibilities of invoking space-

specific modernities, as in ‘Turkish’, ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Melanesian’, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Japanese’ modernities. I also donot consider theme-specific modernities, as in ‘Islamic’, ‘Christian’, ‘Confucian’, or ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’modernities. This omission by no means indicates that the exploding literature using such terms is irrelevantto the larger debate; quite the contrary. Their usage, however, faces the same risks as the terms discussed here:for example, an under-theorized stretching of the modernity concept itself. To talk about, for example,‘Islamic’ or ‘Turkish’ modernities can easily come to represent ‘legitimate’ ways of recasting nation or religionas analytical units.

2 To my knowledge, Faubian’s ‘Possible modernities’ (1988) was one of the first anthropological attemptsto pluralize modernity.

3 Examples abound, but see Kamali (2006) or Rofel (1999). In Lau (2003), the concept is invoked toindicate different types of cinema and mass media consumption in East Asia, different ways of ‘becomingmodern’.

4 In his argument for a ‘cosmopolitan modernity’, Delanty has, drawing upon Eisenstadt and Wittrock,defended the idea of ‘early modernities’, indicating that by such modernities we may think of varieties ofmodernity before the age of globality (2006: 276, fn. 4).

5 It is little known that the notion of historically contingent, multiple, and shifting articulations of‘modernity’ was suggested in the 1940s by the political theorist Eric Voegelin, in his early drafts that formedpart of his History of political ideas (Voegelin 1998). To my knowledge, Voegelin was actually the first thinkerto pluralize modernity (into what he called the Mediterranean and Atlantic modernities). For furtherdiscussion of Voegelin’s perspective, see Thomassen (2010).

6 To confuse matters a bit, Gaonkar’s distinction only superficially resembles the better-known distinctionproposed by Charles Taylor between ‘cultural’ and ‘a-cultural’ modernity. Taylor (2001) defines culturalmodernity as something specific which has arisen within Western Europe and Anglo-America, whilea-cultural modernity suggests a universal teleology, and identifies some central processes of modernity

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through which all societies will eventually go. Taylor is as sceptical about the latter as he is about those‘negative modernities’ that deny modernity in all its forms.

7 ‘Transcending postcolonialism’, University of Cape Town, December 2006.8 Conversely, journalists and political commentators sometimes invoke the concept of ‘anti-modernities’

to refer negatively to ‘traditionalist’ positions which oppose ‘the modern life’ and its values. Pro-Western(or pro-American) commentators invoke the term to this effect, but the concept is also used in, for example,Indian public debate, negatively referring to both Hinduist and Islamic fundamentalisms.

9 Kapustin (2003) invokes ‘multiple fragile modernities’ to account for the problematic post-communistdevelopment of Russia.

10 It should be noted that the uneven spread of modernity always lay at the heart of Gellner’s theory ofnationalism (1983).

11 Deeb considers the Shi’i Muslim community she studied in Beirut as an example of an alternative andenchanted modernity; there are also signs that a related notion of ‘sacred modernities’ is about to establishitself.

12 This term was proposed by the social theorist Göran Therborn (2003) to indicate the ways in which avariety of grand narratives and social forces have come to coexist and relate to each other, hence ‘entangled’(see also Arnason 2003). For an anthropological application of a similar position, see Deutsch, Probst andSchmidt (2002). The notion of modernities being entangled must again be seen as a reversal of an oldersociological understanding of modernity as disentanglement.

13 Alternative modernities, however, was in use from the early 1990s.14 In terms of its application, it is worth noting that the various concepts used by anthropologists are

employed tendentially in what can be identified as a few salient sub-fields of the discipline: popular culture,consumption, religion, development, and gender and identity studies writ large (including self-other rela-tions, ethnic movements, diaspora culture, etc.). I see nothing inherently natural about this tendency ofapplication. A notion of multiple modernities should be equally applicable to traditional core themes inpolitical or economic anthropology and comparative kinship studies.

15 Noteworthy exceptions are, of course, the Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks involving historical-comparative analysis and long-term social evolutionary process that developed in the 1970s: see, for example,Friedman (1975); Wallerstein (1980); Wolf (1982). An alternative longue durée approach was developed by JackGoody from the 1950s, with a research focus on literacy, production, inheritance, and kinship (Goody 1983).

16 For an exception, see Robertson (2006).17 This framework resonates well with the anthropological literature on the spread and appropriation of

the world religions, and especially well with the emerging literature that links ‘projects of moderntiy’ withspecific religious ideas and practices (see, e.g., Comaroff & Comaroff 1991; Keane 2007).

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Les nombreuses modernités de l’anthropologie : de l’importancedes concepts

Résumé

Cet article se veut une revue critique des multiples paradigmes de la modernité employés aujourd’hui enanthropologie. Il souligne également les intersections entre le travail des anthropologues, la théoriesociale et la sociologie historique. L’auteur avance qu’en pointant les modernités multiples ou alternativesdans les tentatives de « libérer » la modernité de ses connotations eurocentriques et modernistes, lesanthropologues donnent une nouvelle valeur à la modernité elle-même. On se demandera si cette stratégiepeut, en définitive, avoir un sens. Faisant référence à certaines branches de la théorie sociale, l’articledéveloppe une position à partir de laquelle il serait possible de revisiter le paradigme des modernitésmultiples. Cette position se base sur la reconnaissance de la spécificité de la modernité européenne et surla caractéristique qui la définit : l’accent constamment mis sur la transformation et la transgression, un étatde « liminalité permanente ».

Bjørn Thomassen works at the Department of International Relations at the American University of Rome,where he teaches anthropology, sociology, and political theory. He has done fieldwork in Catalonia and inIstria (Italy/Slovenia/Croatia). His research interests include the anthropology of borders, nationalism, urbananthropology, globalization, and comparative civilization. He is co-founder and co-editor of the journalInternational Political Anthropology (www.politicalanthropology.org).

Department of International Relations, American University of Rome, 00153 Rome, Italy. bjorn_thomassen@

yahoo.co.uk

Bjørn Thomassen178


Documents

Anthropology and Its Many Modernities