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This paper explores how the language of tradition and modernity has been the dominant idiom that has sought to capture the "essence" of both the Indian nation and the Indian woman. The salience of this discourse demands a critical enquiry to understand how this overarching and hegemonic idiom been accepted as an unproblematic given. India is often seen as a land of contrasts where tradition and modernity coexist-where Indian women are often showcased as emblematic of this coexistence. The paper seeks to look into the complex processes that lie beneath this easy description. It seeks to do so primarily: (i) by presenting a more historicized account of India's modernity from the vantage point of gender, offering a feminist critique of the public private divide which forms the theoretical hub of the modernization framework, and; (ii) by drawing attention to the centrality of gender in the nation state's political, developmental and cultural policies and its more recent shifts in a contemporary globalizing India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reveals contemporary developments in post-Soviet Islam that challenge the predominant juxtaposit ion of Islam against secularization and modernization. I argue that the question Geliner has posed; why is Islam so secularization-resistant, is based on inappropriate assumptions. As the anthropological data from field research among Muslims in post-Soviet regions show, there are trends and processes in contemporary Islam that do not fit into "islam as a secularization-opposed force" thesis. When the problem is approached from a perspective of diversity inside a religious field (Bourdieu) and competing "discursive traditions" then it's possible to identify religious groups that have positive attitudes towards secular institutions and modern solutions, Next, problems with Gellner's vision of contemporary Islam are discussed, particularly concerning the shift in power relations between "folk" and "pure" (or "fundamentalist") Islam. Finally. I argue that overcoming the notion of one homogeneous modernity enables us to understand the modernizing forces in Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper uses three of Bauman's interlocutors—Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Cornelius Castoriadis—to open issues of the worlds we create, for better and more often for worse. Bauman uses Foucault to rethink the sociology of the factory as a site of discipline, though the fibre of his argument is also open to Marxist social history from below. He borrows more selectively from Agamben, in order to address more general problems of modernity and violence. The work of Castoriadis appears in a more positive register in Bauman's work, for his is also a modern and classical enthusiasm for cities as a counterpoint to camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender system can be understood as a cultural system rooted on biological differences. Semiotically speaking, it is a binary sign system (male : female) with some variation involved (transsexuals, homosexuals etc.). in the process of modernity, the biological motivation of the gender system is being loosened by technological innovations such as contraception and mother's milk substitute. At the same time, the state has replaced family and kin as the organising structure of society and the cultural ideal of equality has gained a strong position. These and similar changes together have made gender flow in `post-traditional' societies. The paper deals this process in paying attention to the three theoretically possible constellations in the determination of semiotic identities in social process: functional order in Parsonian sense, formation of struggling parties in the sense of Weber and Bourdieu, and anomie in the sense of Durkheim and Berger & Luckmann. it turns out that elements of all these three theoretical constellations are present in the current transformation of the gender system. This is elaborated with empirical material drawn from the change of the Finnish gender system from the 1950s to the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of structural and cultural changes at a worldwide level show that religion is acquiring a societal role which is completely new in relation to democracy. There seems to be an increasing room for religions in order to create a new culture of democracy as an associational configuration opposed to those lib/lab arrangements which we have inherited by Western modernity. This paper analyses, from a sociological point of view, the past structures and present-day scenarios in and on which religion is a "third entity" in relation to civil society and the political system. The argument is that religion is reorganising itself as a latent sphere which contributes (not without conflicts and frictions) to the construction of an ethically qualified public sphere which is in opposition to the alienation spread by the purely functionalistic process of globalisation which rests upon an increasingly secularised and privatised public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper formulates both general theoretical questions with a conceptualization of ethnicity and empirical implications for ethnic groups' cohabitation. On a theoretical level, the author suggests to surmount misconceptualizations shaped by modernity projects by calling for a much more `constructivist' definition of ethnicity. He also proposes to disregard the sharp individual/collective rights dichotomy by employing an eclectic application of those concepts. On the level of a practical ethnicities' policy, the author suggests to entail a multileveled structure of group neutral and group sensitive considerations. He calls for preserving territorial unity of a nation state and, at the same time, for pursuing a normative goal of equality among ethnic groups and the majority nation. The outcome should be ethnic integration that transforms demarcation line between the ethnic minority and nation state into the triadic structure: unity-difference-equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper main contention is that the changes in Polish society (and other societies in the region) should be no longer analysed solely in the transformation paradigm but rather in the context of the dynamics, differentiation and internal tensions of the global capitalist system. Polish society is still partly determined by the past (both traditional and communist) but a still bigger role is played by Poland's position within the capitalist system and especially by the processes of adaptation to and imitation of three distinctive phases of development of capitalism: "early modernity" "late modernity" and "postmodernity" which shape the new constellations of interests and values of Polish society. The functioning of old and new interests and values in different domain of social life is analysed, in part in reference to and discussion with Inglehart's theory of materialist-postmaterialist value shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invocations of post-modernism in cultural studies suggest two very different answers to our question about the meaning of the nation. In the former, the end of communism seems to suggest the reaffirmation of the nation's role as the dramatis personae of history.¹ In the latter, the passing of modernity suggests the nation's decentering.² But rather than see these apparently opposed accounts of the nation as antinomies, I would suggest that the conjuncture of post-communism and post-modernity sutures these accounts of the nation together in a spiral of cynical unity in which appeals to the truth of the nation and conflicts over its authenticity have different and more unstable meanings than such appeals and conflicts once did. At least I would like to suggest this as a guiding question for future research. In this paper, I make a case for why this is a potentially fruitful point of departure. But before I can talk about this conjuncture, I must pay homage to the famous essay on which this title plays, and consider some of the more recent literature upon which my argument rests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]