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This paper is a rejoinder to papers by Sabina Lovibond, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Sumner B. Twiss, G. Scott Davis, M. Cathleen Kaveny, and John Kelsay on the author's recent book Democracy and Tradition. The argument covers a host of topics, ranging from epistemology and methodology to human rights, the common law, and Islamic ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I have drawn a brief picture to map the nature of management in modern high-tech organizations from the viewpoint of critical systems thinking. First, I point out the difference between science and art. Then, following Jackson's classification of different systems approaches such as modernism and postmodernism, I connect modernism with objectivism and collective subjectivism, and postmodernism with individual subjectivism. Through clarifying three ways of knowing/understanding the world and introducing a new knowledge systems model of modern high-tech corporations, I argue that in the knowledge age, management is both a science and an art. Objects under consideration belonging to different parts of reality require different approaches to deal with. The purpose of this article is to give a brief explanation of why management is both a science and an art, and to inspire further debate and discussion on the essence of management among academics and practitioners. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a renewed interest among geographers in tourism and how tourism makes the world and its people modern. In this paper, I engage with this renewed interest by way of a case study: British working holiday makers in Australia. Drawing on two modes of research practice, ethnography and political economy, I argue that, while working holidays may be structured in numerous ways, they also involve challenges, active individuals, heterogeneous spaces, and slow time (for reflection and inscription), which together, in a sense, make their makers modern. I frame this engagement, this argument, with a debate familiar to geographers: the problem of Free Independent Travellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the measures known as 'Operation Restore Public Hope,' which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these 'clean-up measures', I argue, undermined the state's claim 'to restore public hope' and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Mukadas Kadirova changed her mode of dress as an act of religious devotion, she and her family – the self-proclaimed (former) epitome of modern, Soviet citizenry – were confronted with conflicting normative systems. Was Mukadas still a modern woman? Was the family? And what was modernity anyway, they asked: socialist ideals, capitalist consumption, or pious women fashionably tying their headscarves? This paper, based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, examines Mukadas's religious transformation; her attempts to map this alteration onto the shifting discursive and material realities of the post-Soviet period; and her play with variant notions of modernity. Mukadas's struggle ultimately shows that while modernity is often characterized by a linear, forward-looking gaze, experiences of modernity are not always marked by this progressive ‘onward’ sense. Modernity can be simultaneously past, present, and future. Résumé Quand Mukadas Kadirova a changé de tenue vestimentaire pour manifester sa dévotion religieuse, elle-même et sa famille, incarnation autoproclamée (mais révolue) de la citoyenneté soviétique moderne, se sont trouvées face à un conflit de leurs systèmes normatifs. Mukadas était-elle encore une femme moderne ? Sa famille était-elle moderne ? Et pour commencer, qu’est-ce que la modernité : les idéaux socialistes, le consumérisme capitaliste ou des femmes pieuses qui nouent coquettement leur foulard ? Basé sur quatorze mois de travail de terrain au Kirghizstan, l’article examine la transformation religieuse de Mukadas, ses tentatives d’ajuster ce changement aux réalités discursives et matérielles mouvantes de l’ère postsoviétique, et son maniement de différentes notions de la modernité. Le dilemme de Mukadas montre, en fin de compte, que bien que la modernité soit souvent présentée comme un regard projeté vers l’avant, elle n’est pas toujours marquée, en réalité, par cette impression progressive de « marche en avant ». La modernité peut tout à la fois être le passé, le présent et l’avenir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which village Muslims living in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan seek to nurture and sustain their region as a socially heterogeneous space by actively embarking on local forms of travel. The heterogeneity of places in the region offers potentials for Chitrali Muslims to enact diverse ways of being Muslim, forge complex structures of attachment to Chitral, and cultivate an attitude of curiosity as to the heterogeneity of life in their region. The expanding body of anthropological work on sacred landscapes is brought into conversation with ethnographic studies in urban settings of the role played by everyday practices in the formation of Muslim ethical selfhood. In doing so, I suggest the wider insights into understanding the complexity and diversity of Muslim experiences of and responses to modernity that are afforded by a consideration of rural societies. Résumé L’auteur étudie la façon dont les villageois musulmans de la région de Chitral, dans le nord du Pakistan, s’efforcent d’entretenir et de soutenir leur région en tant qu’espace socialement hétérogène, en entreprenant diverses formes de voyages locaux. L’hétérogénéité des lieux au sein même de la région donne aux Chitralis la possibilité de vivre différentes manières d’être musulmans, de forger des structures complexes d’attachement au Chitral et de cultiver une attitude de curiosité envers les multiples visages de la vie dans leur région. Le corpus grandissant de travaux anthropologiques sur les paysages sacrés sont confrontés ici aux études ethnographiques en milieu urbain consacrées au rôle des pratiques quotidiennes dans la formation du Moi éthique musulman. Par ce biais, l’article suggère que l’examen des sociétés rurales élargit l’approche de la complexité et de la diversité des façons dont les musulmans appréhendent la modernité et y répondent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Jeffrey Stout's thesis that modern societies are “secular,” not in the sense that religion has disappeared from them, but in a procedural sense having to do with what can properly be assumed by participants in moral or political discussion. I endorse this thesis, but argue that Stout employs a notion of justification (with regard to moral belief), which leans too far toward descriptivism or relativism. As an alternative account of the status of religion within “the hypercontext, modernity,” I commend Kant's view of the religious attitude as a fundamentally ethical one, destined eventually to dispense with any “historical vehicle” in the form of revealed doctrine or supernaturalism. Stout's discussion is weakened by its retreat from commitment to the unity of practical reason, though it does pay illuminating tribute to the democratic values of civility and attentiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the position that symbolic interaction can become more relevant to the social issues of modernity and postmodernity by overcoming its traditional tendencies to be apolitical and to focus predominantly on micro aspects of social relations, it considers a serious reading of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as a contribution to this effort. Specifically it sees Habermas' reconstruction of the conception of the individual actor involved in communicating through significant symbols into one consistent with speech act theory and the concepts of speaker and listener as constructive and helpful. The paper also examines Mead's behavioristic theory of attitudes, types of attitudes and taking the attitude of the other(s), and relates it m his logical formulation of rational universals. It suggests that Mead's optimistic image of society and his position on rationality are 'no longer appropriate for discussing social issues in a global society with multiple rationalities. It sees possibilities for reformulation in Habermas' theory because, like Mead's theory, it construes rationality in communicative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how geography, history, and society have shaped childbearing behaviors over the last half-century, and how they are now being reshaped by modernity and the exigencies of urban life, in the democratic Republic of the Congo. The decline of prolonged postpartum abstinence and involuntary childlessness initially raised fertility to high levels (6-7 children per woman). more recently, socioeconomic differentials in fertility have emerged, suggesting that the country may be entering a phase of fertility decline. A full-blown transition, however, seems still a remote prospect. Supported both by cultural traditions and by economic rationality, Congo's people remain largely convinced of the benefits of many children for their own and their kin's security. While an eventual fertility transition may be taken for granted, the article examines the many hurdles, contradictions, and tensions that will have to be overcome to achieve that outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governmental reform programs in the UK have a long history of failed attempts to end incrementalism in local government budgeting. Drawing on structuration theory, incrementalism is presented as institutionalized organizational behaviour. From this perspective, the recent New Labour reform agenda may be interpreted via a theory of de-institutionalization. The approach is illustrated through an analysis of recent developments in a large UK metropolitan authority where new political structures, inspection regimes and regulatory pressures are beginning to challenge incrementalism. A new belief in the measurability of public sector performance seems to be legitimized by a post-bureaucratic modernity rather than any significant technical innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intention of this paper is to vindicate the historical sociology of genocide. This project demonstrates important continuities as well as discontinuities in the history of genocide. These findings call into question the thesis of Zygmunt Bauman that the modernity of the Holocaust challenges orthodox approaches to the sociology of morality and politics. While the Holocaust undoubtedly manifested distinctive features of modern society, it also reproduced ancient motivational and structural sources of genocide. What follows from this analysis is not, as Bauman argues, a radical critique of modern civilization, but a clearer view of the interrelations between the constructive and destructive features of all civilizations. If modernity produced the Holocaust, it also produced the sociological and moral critique of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major question addressed in this paper is why people have a favorable attitude toward the moral majority The theoretical model predicted that moral majority support would be positively related to having a Christian Right orientation, to being opposed to change, and to watching religious television; in turn, it was predicted that the latter three variables would be negatively related to modernity characteristics. Data came from a stratified, staged-random sample of residents of the SMSA containing Muncie, Indiana, the Lynd's "Middletown" (N = 281). It was found that moral majority support had three independent sources: 1) persuasion via religious television, 2) a cultural fundamentalist attitude stressing continuation of the status quo, and 3) advocacy of the Christian Right perspective. Two of these factors are negatively related to modernity variables suggesting long-term decline in support for the moral majority.
Our major conclusion is that support for the moral majority has three independent sources: 1) persuasion via religious television by moral majority advocates, 2) a cultural fundamentalist attitude that desires continuation of the status quo, and thus leads to support for the traditionalist dogma of the moral majority, and 3) the appeal of the moral majority to those who have a Christian Right perspective which calls for the domination of politics by their version of Christianity. Two of these factors are negatively related to modernity variables, suggesting long-term decline in support for a movement such as moral majority. That is to say, assuming that people will become more educated and more cosmopolitan, and given the relations displayed in Diagram 2, it would follow that in the future fewer people will accept either the Christian Right Index or the status quo orientation, both of which are sources of support for the moral majority. On the other hand, if education or cosmopolitanism declines, an increase in support could be expected. The... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the study of politics, economic development, education, and other dimensions of modern society, little quantitative cross-national research has been done on religion, probably because the necessary data has seemed lacking Yet a promising source of available data exists data on religious book publishing which is recorded annually by the United Nations These data provide an indicator of societal religious commitment for at least 43 countries covering the past quarter century. This paper discusses the quality and validity of these data, showing that they correlate well with several dozen other sources of data of more limited scope As a measure of secularization, these data appear related in the expected direction to quantitative, cross-national indicators of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being a theist makes a difference, but not so much to what propositions we assent to, nor to an expanded ontology of spiritual entities. Rather, it is concerned with what commitments we enter into, and involves a participatory engagement with a broader reality then we might have supposed was possible. Embodied practices are a crucial part of the contemplative path, which draws on the wisdom of the body. This leads on to a "labor of culture." Our present culture is not obviously as secular as supposed to be, but what has now become sacred is a strong sense of the individual ego, around which many ethical and political commitments are built, and which sits uneasily with our widely accepted mechanistic view of life. The crucial challenge to artificial intelligence is whether it can find ways of enhancing the mutual recognition that is crucial to the ethical life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the kind of knowledge that is constituted through embodied sensory perception and makes the case for a form of knowledge that is embodied, relational, and potentially transformational. Such knowledge is encountered through our physiological senses and cultivated by reestablishing connections to our bodies. The discussion starts by exploring the literature on sensory perception and interoception and moves on to the role of human agency, which is implicit in the idea of top‐down causation. It is argued that this process can be explained by a top‐down predictive model within which a sense of greater interoceptive accuracy may be cultivated while reducing interoceptive perturbation. The roles of active and perceptual inference are discussed with regard to the regulatory opportunities that these types of attention yield. By being more interoceptively aware, through a practice of contemplation, it is argued, we open ourselves to an encounter with divine presence that is immanent in the world around us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the major Islamic religious discourse in Egypt. It states the widespread resurgence of fundamentalist. It notes the relationship between religion and politics in Islam, and has been regarded by Muslims as important of the organization and integration of society. It mentions the need of Egypt to learn from the West on how to cope with modernity.

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender-based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's 'journey of violence' reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between 'tradition', Christianity and 'modernity', Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self-analysis and self-transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from being displaced by modernity, the exchange of women's textile valuables of little practical value but enormous ritual significance is increasing in importance in Tonga and amongst Tongan migrants in the industrial West. The dwindling production of and increasing demand for these textile valuables have prompted entrepreneurs to open pawnshops, where customers who are monetarily poor mortgage valuables and customers lacking in exchange networks buy unclaimed valuables. Pawnshops convert valuables into commodities and transform the social relations among those involved. However, the one emotion that underlies traditional exchange, shame, remains central to the transactions, albeit in unevenly distributed fashion. The transformation of textiles from gift to commodity displays both rupture and continuity with pre-modern forms of exchange, continuity operating at the level of emotional subjectivities. Our analysis foregrounds objects, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other, as shaping the course of cultural and social history. Résumé Loin d’être supplanté par la modernité, l’échange des textiles féminins sans grande valeur pratique mais de signifiance rituelle considérable augmente en importance à Tonga et parmi les immigrés tongiens dans les pays occidentaux industriels. La production décroissante de ces textiles précieux et leur demande croissante ont motivés des entrepreneurs à ouvrir des monts-de-piété, où les clients manquant d’argent mettent à gage leurs textiles précieux et où les clients dépourvus de réseaux de fournisseurs achètent ceux qui restent non réclamés. Les monts-de-piété convertissent ces objets précieux en commoditiés et transforment les relations sociales entre les personnes concernées. Néanmoins, la honte, une émotion qui sous-tend les échanges traditionnels, continue à occuper une position centrale à ces transactions, bien que de façon non équilibrée. La transformation des textiles en commoditiés présente aussi bien des aspects de rupture que de continuité avec les formes d’échanges pré-modernes, où la continuité s’opère au niveau des subjectivités émotives. Notre analyse met en valeur le rôle déterminant des objets d’une part et des émotions d’autre part dans le cours de l’histoire sociale et culturelle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on an inner-city college in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, South India, the article investigates the sexual harassment of female students. Locating this violence within the context of social changes resulting from India's integration into the global economy, the article argues that, in this context, sexual harassment is a manifestation of instrumental violence, deployed by subaltern or Scheduled Caste youths to contest their subordination within higher education and the ‘white-collar’ employment market. However, this contest reveals a number of ambivalences through which these subaltern masculinities are constituted. Rationalizing their sexual harassment, the protagonists’ narratives, therefore, oscillate between denigrating ‘Westernization’ while valorizing Tamil culture ideals, and vice versa. This conflict is centred on intense competition for male privilege and status between the newly emerged middle-class elite and impoverished low-caste groups, effectively reworking the social history of youth masculinity to meet the demands of new economic and political conditions. Résumé À partir du cas d’un collège urbain de Chennai dans le Tamil Nadu, dans le sud de l’Inde, le présent article étudie le harcèlement sexuel des étudiantes. En resituant cette violence dans le cadre des changements sociaux résultant de l’intégration de l’Inde dans l’économie mondiale, l’auteur affirme que dans ce contexte, le harcèlement sexuel est une manifestation de violence instrumentalisée par les jeunes hommes des castes subalternes ou répertoriées ( scheduled) pour contester leur subordination sur le marché de l’éducation supérieure et de l’ emploi « en col blanc ». Cette rivalité révèle toutefois un certain nombre d’ambivalences par lesquelles ces masculinités subalternes se constituent. Les récits de protagonistes oscillent donc, pour justifier leur harcèlement sexuel, entre le dénigrement de « l’occidentalisation » associéà l’exaltation des idéaux culturels tamouls et vice versa. Ce conflit se cristallise dans une compétition intense à propos des prérogatives et du statut masculins entre la nouvelle élite des classes moyennes émergentes et les basses castes appauvries. De fait, il revisite l’histoire sociale de la masculinité des jeunes gens dans l’optique des nouvelles conditions économiques et politiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty's book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the narratives of the European Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that a close examination of the government of animals by humans is essential for an anthropology of modern biopolitics: for an understanding, that is, of the many ways in which humans themselves have been governed as animals in modern times. I aim also to work toward a way of theorizing such biopolitics in milieus beyond the modern West. Relying on cultural and historical materials from South India, I call attention to three domains of local biopolitical difference: the particular conditions of modernity that constitute certain human lives as an animal object of government, the quotidian practices of care and struggle through which animals are governed in moral terms, and the cultural idioms through which these lives become visible and intelligible as appropriate sites for the exercise of both power and resistance. The empirical ground of this article is formed by three modes of government of human and animal existence in colonial and postcolonial South India: the management of a population of subjects putatively criminal by nature as organisms of instinct and impulse by means of the colonial Indian Criminal Tribes Act; the contemporary echoes of such policing in the everyday practices through which cultivators and plowmen in the region govern the moral conduct of their oxen; and the persistent postcolonial legacies of a Tamil political idiom of “grazing” or restraining populations of human and animal beings deemed incapable of restraining themselves. The intimacy between practices of care and techniques of control in each of these instances suggests that a close attention to animality may provide a way of resolving some of the constitutive paradoxes of the “pastoral” mode of power elaborated by Michel Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Textures of Time" is a rich and challenging book that raises a host of important and hard questions about historical narrative, form, and style; the sociology of texts; and the core problem of ascertaining historical truth. Two that pertain to the book's main claims are of special interest to nonspecialist readers: Is register or style—"texture"—necessarily and everywhere diagnostic of "history"? Does a new kind of "historical consciousness" emerge in south India beginning in the sixteenth century, indeed as a sign of an Indian early modernity? "Textures" is not the first book to argue that historical discourse is constitutively marked by a peculiar style, but the claim is beset by difficulties that scholars since Barthes have detailed. Rather than textures of time—accounts of what really happened in history—what these works offer us may be only pretextures of time, textualized forms of a human experience that make claims about its degrees and types of truth through representations of various states of temporality. Instead of assessing, then, whether these works are history or something else like "myth," we might ask whether they invite us to transcend this very dichotomy, to try, that is, to make sense of historical forms of consciousness rather than to identify forms of historical consciousness. As for modernity, nothing in south Indian historiography from 1500—1800 remotely compares to the conceptual revolution of Europe. But why should we expect the newness of the early modern world to have been experienced the same way everywhere? Modernity across Asia may have shown simultaneity without symmetry. Should this asymmetry turn out to reveal continuity and not rupture, however, no need to lament the fact. There is no shame in premodernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An account of the history and actions of one man is used to show how agency was central to processes of social change among Kubo people of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Through a thirteen-year period, a growing awareness of, but little exposure to, ‘Western’ modes of living challenged earlier certainties, created desires, and suggested alternatives. Modernity thus provided the context for change. But modernity is not itself a process of change. By drawing from ambiguities inherent in pre-existing structures (or discourses) or created de novo through encounters with previously unimagined possibilities, and by favouring one or another of the multiple trajectories legitimized by those ambiguities, people were causally implicated in changing the conditions of their own existence. Those changes entailed a shift from a predominantly relational epistemology to an increasingly categorical epistemology. Résumé Dans cet article, le récit de la vie et des actes d'un homme servent à montrer comment l'intentionnalité ( agency) a été essentielle dans les processus de changement social chez les Kubos des basses terres intérieures de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée. Sur une période de treize ans, la connaissance accrue qu'ils ont eue des modes de vie « occidentaux »– tout en y étant peu exposés – a remis en question des certitudes antérieures, créé des désirs, et suggéré des alternatives. La modernité a ainsi créé le contexte du changement, sans être en elle-même un processus de changement. À partir des ambiguïtés inhérentes aux structures (ou discours) préexistantes ou créées de novo par la découverte de possibilités jusqu'alors inimaginables, et en privilégiant l'une ou l'autre des multiples trajectoires légitimées par ces ambiguïtés, les Kubos ont été impliqués dans une relation causale de changement des conditions de leur propre existence. Ces changements ont entraîné le passage d'une épistémologie principalement relationnelle à une épistémologie de plus en plus catégorielle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market economy and mobilizes a racialized ‘beauty myth’ (a key trope in national identity) in marketing and clinical practice. Beauty practices offer a means to compete in a neoliberal libidinal economy where anxieties surrounding new markets of work and sex mingle with fantasies of social mobility, glamour, and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to Constantin Fasolt, I argue that it is no longer useful to think of religion as an anomaly in the modern age. Here is Fasolt's main argument: humankind suffers from a radical rift between the self and the world. The chief function of religion is to mitigate or cope with this fracture by means of dogmas and rituals that reconcile the self to the world. In the past, religion successfully fulfilled this job. But in modernity, it fails to, and it fails because religion is no longer plausible. Historical, confessional religions, then, are no longer doing what they are supposed to do; yet the need for religion is still very much with us. Fasolt's account would be a tragic tale, if not for his claim that there is a new religion for the modern age, a religion that fulfills the true reconciling function of religion. That new religion is the reading and writing of history. Indeed, for Fasolt, reading history is religiously redemptive, and writing history is a sacred act. The historian, it turns out, is the priest in modernity. In my response, I challenge both Fasolt's remedy (history as religiously redemptive) and its justification (the fall of historical religions). Indeed, I reject both his romantic view of past religion as the peaceful reconciler, as well as his pessimistic view of present religion as the maker of "enemies" among modern people. In the end, I argue that the way Fasolt employs his categories—"alienation," "salvation," "religion," "history"—is too vague to do much useful work. They are significant categories and they deserve our attention. But in my view, the story Fasolt tells is both too grim (on human alienation) and too cheerful (on historian as modern savior). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many current literacy campaigns intended for indigenous peoples in Third World countries are reconceptualizations of earlier colonial projects and conform to the needs of late-modern capitalism. Early anthropology may have influenced the discourses surrounding literacy, but current anthropologists have charted important cultural and linguistic territories that provide vital information to use when conceptualizing indigenous literacy education. Anthropology can also play a role in supporting indigenizing modernities through literacy programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine patterns of literacy use in the daily life a rural community in the Papua New Guinea highlands. It is demonstrated that many of these practices do not correspond to the ways in which agencies responsible for imparting literacy, particularly the local school, intend. Instead, village concepts of prestige, chance, and reciprocity are influential in shaping literacy practices, and the uses are governed by local associations and preoccupations with modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to people's concept of the person when their "dividuality" engages with the Christian concept of the 'individual'? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life times? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian 'soul'? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or 'back-slider') people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the educational implications of the shift in economic livelihood in an Ohio Amish community since a landmark 1972 Supreme Court decision paved the way for control of their schools. The clash between tradition and economic pragmatism, and their multiple interpretations, has led to diverse educational pathways, including public schools, charter schools, homeschooling, GED programs, and vocational courses. The diverse ways in which the Amish continue to renegotiate social boundaries with their English neighbors suggests the need for more attention to internal diversity in the anthropological study of schooling in so-called ‘folk societies.’ [Amish schooling, culture and modernity, minority education]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how members of an ex-untouchable, ‘backward’ community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within ‘modernity’. Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth-century global master narrative of progress. We note many correspondences between this ex-untouchable community's optimistic master narrative and another powerful and pervasive meta-narrative – the global story of modernity as development, promoted by state government, reform movements, and development theorists alike. Life-history narratives forcibly bring us – European interlocutors – into the same space as the tale-tellers, speak of encounters between Indians and Europeans, and urge us to recognize that we live in ‘one world’. Malayalis stake claims for equal participation in modernity's projects even as they point out ways in which coevalness is denied. This prompts us to suggest that narratives of modernity in India and the UK should occupy the same analytical space, contrary to moves to theorize multiple modernities. With our Malayali respondents, we are participating in a confabulation/confabrication of a shared story which appears to be one about the nature of global capitalism. Modernity produces dream and disillusionment, promising progress to all while delivering to a few. In its seemingly endless capacity for self-regeneration and reinvention it is, as a phenomenon in global history, far from over. Even as theorists try to write it off as a moment past or a project failed, it still holds out its promises and provides a structuring framework for contemporary life-stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the implications when Manjaco urban migrants represent and perform cosmopolitanism during funeral ceremonies in the rural homelands of Guinea-Bissau. It is observed that by performing their accomplishments at funerals, Manjaco emigrants allow cosmopolitanism to become a part of what they believe to be tradition rather than the opposite.

The article presents several reflections on how a contemporary linguistic concept of communication results into a failure to understand the development of the modern liberal subject as a naturally communication subject. The complex characteristics of this misunderstanding as a legacy of the Cold War processes of knowledge production about technology and communication are examined.

Studies the correlative association of analytical practice with musicological interpretation. Epistemological convictions of enlightenment modernity; Utility or desirability of framing and interpreting music as an autonomous manifestation of ideal structural relations; Relationship between the formalist precepts of analytical methodology and the interpretative imperatives of its various critics.

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists' "empirical" work on technological risks with the "theoretical" risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as "transcending" socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United States-based work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientific-technical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United States-based perspectives provide a better "fit," for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much "transcend" social divisions as to reinforce them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cinematic landscape provides a rich opportunity to explore cultural representations of place, space and nature. This essay focuses on the depiction of landscape in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 ). Previous approaches to the critical interpretation of landscape in the cinema of Antonioni have been characterized by three principal weaknesses: a narrow emphasis on formalist and auterist lines of influence between different branches of the visual arts; an attachment to exceptionalist characterizations of the Italian cinematic landscape; and a transhistorical interpretation of existential themes such as alienation. In this essay we shall consider two neglected themes: the significance of the technological sublime for the aesthetic experience of industrial landscapes; and the impact of abstract expressionism on Antonioni's cinematic vision. We will counter simplistic categorizations of Antonioni's work by considering the complexity of the relationship between the cinematic landscape and wider developments in twentieth-century modernism. The essay concludes by locating Red Desert at a unique juncture in the development of modernist conceptions of nature and landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I suggest that "population" operates as a capacious domain of modern power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses, and social effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as my ethnographic case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's distinctive Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to population control, in the construction of "Chinese socialist modernity." I trace the historical, political, and bureaucratic process by which the state's planned birth project, designed to create a modern, planned population, produced not only a large group of planned persons but also a huge outcast group of unplanned, "black" persons who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of society, lacking citizenship rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population and fearsome birth planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social power of governmental projects of population control-to create new classifications of social life, new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political exclusion, [population, modernity, personhood, China] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rumors about disease and illness draw on the rich symbolism of the body and are a way for social groups to express concerns about their relationships to the community and state. The Indonesian "AIDS Club" rumors are part of a corpus of contemporary legends about AIDS that have circulated globally. In their local form, however, they speak to particular concerns that urban Indonesians have about modernity and the power of the Indonesian state. [AIDS, rumors, Indonesia, New Order, disease and illness, violence, body politic, somatization] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written to honor the memory of Sharon Stephens as an exceptional anthropologist this article focuses on her groundbreaking work of critically theorizing children and childhoods in relation to the politics of late capitalism and structures of modernity. Stephens's research into the contested category of childhood is here linked specifically to the location and uses of the figure of "the child" in the gendered politics of globalization, [children, childhood, globalization, gender, late capitalism, modernity, Cold War, "national security" discourses] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions of religious attitudes and behavior tend to suggest--and in a few cases, provide evidence--that Americans are becoming "more spiritual" and "less religious." What do people mean, however, when they say they are "spiritual" or "religious"? Do Americans see these concepts as definitionally or operationally different? If so, does that difference result in a zero-sum dynamic between them? In this article, we explore the relationship between "being religious" and "being spiritual" in a national sample of American Protestants and compare our findings to other studies, including Wade Clark Roof's baby-boomer research (1993, 2000), 1999 Gallup and 2000 Spirituality and Health polls, and the Zinnbauer et al. (1997) study of religious definitions. In addition to presenting quantitative and qualitative evidence about the way people think about their religious/spiritual identity, the article draws implications about modernity, the distinctiveness of religious change in the recent past, and the deinstitutionalization of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In western societies influenced by Christianity, women are more religious than men on virtually every measure. If religion is rooted (as Marx suggested) in economic vulnerability, can the religiosity of women be explained by economic or social circumstances? Or what about the vulnerability of the physical body - can women's religiosity be explained by their greater contact with birth and death? If modernity entails the progressive eradication of all kinds of vulnerability, what might this mean for the future of religion in general and of women's religiosity in particular? And what further twists to the story might postmodernity add? The article uses these questions as a frame for reviewing the literature on women's religiosity in the modern West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of morality has lost its position of importance within the discipline, yet a growing number of sociologists interested in the ambivalent character of (post)modernity have returned to this subject in recent years. This article examines the revival of interest in morality and suggests it would benefit by engaging creatively with Durkheim's writings on homo duplex, collective effervescence, and the social construction of moral orders. After examining this relatively neglected part of Durkheim's work, developed most fully in his (1995 [1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, we focus on two of the most influential contemporary commentators on morality, Bauman and Giddens. Having evaluated the limitations of their respective approaches (which associate the sources of morality respectively with a methodologically individualistic bodily impulse of `being for the other', and with an increasingly global cognitive reflexivity), we analyse recent writings which have attempted to transcend such difficulties by engaging with some of the tensions in Durkheim's account of sacred moral. orders. These high- light those features of Durkheim's work which continue to offer a productive basis on which to develop further a thoroughly sociological appreciation of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modem democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coinciding with the popularity of postmodern theory, the fall of communism appeared to offer further evidence of the exhaustion of modernity. Such analysis is grounded in a view that the Soviet system was the epitome of modernity. An alternative approach regards post-communism as opening new terrains of struggle for modernity. Thus Habermas and others suggest that post-communist societies are rejoining the trajectory of western modernity whose problems they now recapitulate. This alternative view implies that Soviet systems were something other than `modern', although their nature is not always clearly defined. However, even if post-communist societies do encounter problems of modernity, they do so in new circumstances where modernist notions of social development have become problematic. This article argues that, contrary to those who regard modernization or postmodernization as irresistible trends, core post-communist societies are likely to develop along an alternative path to that of western modernity. This is tentatively described as `neo-mercantilist'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of `modernity' have been influenced by mechanical metaphors of the type to be found in Weber's writings on religion and politics. Through a detailed examination of Maurice Halbwachs' analysis of collective memory and social order, the appropriateness of these mechanical metaphors is called into question. It is argued that the Durkheimian school generally has a more nuanced account of the nature of `modern' society; one which pays closer attention to the cultural preconditions of the workings of machine-like modern organizations and social relations. At the core of these organizational forms is actors' capacity to act appropriately which is in turn grounded in tacit knowledge which cannot be deduced from formal procedures or explicit rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline of religious ethics consists in critical reflection on religious varieties of ethical discourse, but to study a variety of ethical discourse, we must look at particular examples of it. Which examples should we be looking at? What varieties or traditions shall we take them to represent? In answering these questions, scholars reveal much about their normative commitments. When religious ethics replaced theological ethics as a curricular rubric in some schools, many ethicists attempted to present their work as value neutral, but it is better to admit that commitments matter and are unavoidable. The new traditionalists make no secret of their normative commitments, which imply an indictment of modern ethical discourse as a whole. Their candor is commendable, but their indictment can be challenged. Debunkers of modernity have trouble accounting for their own position. Their samples of modern ethical discourse are not representative. Many democratic voices evidently remain unacknowledged and unexplained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Even though France has experienced increasing and inevitable feminization in its immigrant population since 1974, research has tended to ignore the role of immigrant women, especially Muslim women, in the migration process. Public attention has been diverted by concern over such relatively marginal issues as the headscarf affair, and insufficient attention has been paid to the important role Muslim women play in France, especially those coming from Algeria. These women function as cultural mediators between the traditional culture of the sending country and the modern one of the host country. They see themselves as both tradition-bearers and integration proponents. The demands of immigration have given rise to the growth and development of different leaders, among them cultural mediators seeking a bridge between Islam and modernity, economic mediators seeking to establish women in the media and as entrepreneurs, and political mediators who seek access to power at the local level for the immigrants. These new mediators will eventually shape a new generation of female actors very far from the traditional countries of origin, although for the time being they still suffer from the inequality of rights for women and chances in their overall social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]