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The poetic and hagiographical works of early modern north Indian saints constitute a rich case study for understanding the relationship among changes in language, material practices of writing, and ideologies of writing. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the commitment of the vernacular language of bhāṣā to writing had the effect of reconfiguring practices and ideologies of writing, posing a serious challenge to the epistemic and cultural privilege formerly accorded to writing in the literary, intellectual, and religious traditions contained in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Although unable to completely escape the conceptual structures of a postliterate society, these supposedly illiterate, subaltern poet‐saints were able to undermine systems of religious and intellectual authority by questioning the ontological status and epistemic utility of written language and by divesting writing of its aura. They did so by emphasizing the materiality and banality of writing and by characterizing inscription as just another form of worldly labor. Such readings of the saints' poetic works are made possible precisely by their authorial personas as subaltern, illiterate figures, and these personas are in turn established not in the poetry itself but in the hagiographical works that narrativize these saints' lives. Importantly, these hagiographies reflect a concern with historicizing both the saints' utterances and the material processes through which those utterances came to be written down. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this concern with historicity that enables the tradition to establish the transcendent nature of the saints' speech and thought, and to enable those in the present to recreate the transformative speech acts that the hagiographies describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the four papers that make up the themed section locates them in the wider theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives from which they originate. First, it places the study of communalist or sectarian identities in the Middle East in broader comparative debates about the study of ethnic and nationalist identities. It then examines the causalities underpinning the shifting relationship between these different identities in the Middle East. Taking modernity as a starting point, it looks at the integration of the region into a global capitalist market from the mid‐19th century and the consequences of this transformation. It then examines the external imposition and growth in coherence and capacity of geographically delineated states. It details the influence that neo‐liberal policy prescriptions have had on those states and their relationship to society. Finally, it examines the role that a series of extended wars played in the forging of and competition between different sets of identities, trans‐state Arab nationalism, state‐based nationalism, and religious and ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifestyles signify who people are and who people want to be. They contain one's value orientation toward the world. The speeding urbanization over the globe has made the urban lifestyle mainstream, and so does it in China. The overwhelming range of options in cities represents a consumerist society, but meanwhile, there is an emergent underground alternative, especially from the younger generations who are pursuing a "more meaningful life." This paper does an ethnographic study on young Chinese urbanites' engagement in a village as an essential example of this trend. It argues that young people's choice for rural life is a reaction and a resistance to the social forces of consumerism and urbanization. By reflecting on the reimagination of modernity and life politics in the changing process, the research implies that accompanied by opportunities for social change, young people's promotion of rural lifestyles could be linked to the government's development agenda, and this might potentially cause new forms of inequalities in rural development. By drawing on practical experience, the paper brings narratives about young Chinese urbanites' life choices in rural places into the discussion of modernity and life politics, hopefully exemplifying a broader sociological contribution around the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed construction of the controversial Amazon African headquarters at the River Club site in Cape Town encompasses several issues related to modern heritage, colonial practices, sustainable development, the nature‐culture divide, and the Anthropocene. Although approved by the City of Cape Town and the provincial government of the Western Cape, with plans for residential and business units, activists, researchers, environmental organizations, workers' unions, and social justice coalitions associated with indigenous Khoe and San groups oppose the development on the grounds of the symbolic and historical importance of the site earmarked for development. The paper aims to explore the significance of the site, analyze the ensuing confrontations and contestations and examine how the site represents spaces of public history, urban spatial construction, and memory. The focus of the paper will be the complex interplay between social, cultural, ethical, and political forces, and their intersection with legal and institutional policy processes at different levels of the state and the local. Ultimately, the paper challenges the claim of the City of Cape Town, the provincial government, and the developers that their version of historical progress is equitable and fair, and raises a broader question about Eurocentric ideas of emancipation, aesthetics and notions of history, heritage and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Tropicality" has historically been used as an epistemological tool by colonial settlers and thereafter local rulers to naturalize and espouse Western rationality and modernity. Singapore is no exception to this lingering Western framing, which continues to define state narratives of success and heritage. "Tropicality" as a hegemonic force manifests in infrastructures of large physical networks, institutionalized knowledges, and media representations. This paper dissects three chronological dominant modes of "tropicality"—the colonial, the nation‐building, and the contemporary neoliberal mode—alongside their corresponding subaltern lived worlds that speak of an alternative "tropicality" often unnoticed (Figure 1). These diametric strands are studied through hegemonic infrastructure and everyday acts that resist, appropriate, or hybridize these power‐laden spaces. A heterogenous methodology was adopted, capturing the epistemologies and metis employed in dominant and alternative tropicalities, respectively. Maps, charts, and archives are used to study the former; ethnographic observation, family memory, and affective experiences elucidate the latter. In this paper, I focus on the nation‐building mode of "tropicality", which shaped Singapore's rapid urbanization in the 1960s. Modernist public housing schemes borrowed from the Tropical Architecture movement are situated within a larger infrastructural field that de‐skilled, cleansed, and civilized an "unruly" population, conflating natural and social order. However, these attempts at creating modern subjects were thwarted by everyday resistance performed at a critical mass, in which displaced populations tapped upon past metis, habitus, and ecological aesthetics to appropriate alienating modern infrastructure. Through these ad hoc infrastructural reconfigurations, a hybrid modern "tropicality" was negotiated. It is through deprivileging infrastructures of "tropicality" and drawing out alternative "infra‐structures" of multiple, lived tropical worlds that we may move toward post‐tropicality—a mentality built on an expanded understanding of how our modern environment is and has been shaped equally by dominant, neocolonial forces and also forsaken memories, practices, and everyday acts of resistance, which hold the key to alternative futures beyond the limited scope delineated by our inherited "tropical modernity". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws from a critical selection of the 54 papers presented at the second International MoHoA conference Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene, (October 26–28, 2022), hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. The conference expanded MoHoA's aim of encouraging equitable approaches to modern heritage as an urgent and essential response to an age of planetary crises whose roots are entangled with centuries‐old culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Building on the lessons learned from the first MoHoA conference, Modern Heritage of Africa (2021), hosted by the University of Cape Town and the subject of an earlier special edition of Curator (65/July 3, 2022), this second conference emphasized the interconnection between these cultures and the dawn of the Anthropocene. Participants were asked to reflect on reconceptualized formulations of modern heritage and its entangled relationship with the planetary crises experienced, albeit unevenly and unequally, by all living and nonliving things. This paper assembles and reflects on the contributions of 18 peer‐reviewed papers that collectively demonstrate the range and depth of topics presented. In the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and in line with MoHoA's decentering, decolonizing, and reframing agenda, these have also been chosen to reflect the different contributors' experiences, from senior academics to young and early career professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, we are held to live in the Anthropocene, bringing to an end modern binary imaginaries, such as the separation between Human and Nature, and with them Western assumptions of progress, linear causality and human exceptionalism. Much Western critical theory, from new or vital materialism to post‐ and more‐than‐human thinking, unsurprisingly reflects this internal crisis of faith in Eurocentric or Enlightenment reasoning. At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which places the Caribbean at the centre of the development of a new and distinct mode of critical thought. In attempting to grasp the ways in which Caribbean thought and practice have been seen to enable a distinctive alternative non‐Eurocentric imaginary, this paper heuristically sets out a paradigmatic framing of 'abyssal geography'. We emphasize two key points. The first is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract and timeless philosophical assumptions but figuratively draws upon aspects of Caribbean practices of resistance and survival, for example, from the Middle Passage, Plantation, carnival, creolization, dance forms and speculative fiction. The second is that abyssal work engages the legacies of modernity and coloniality by explicitly seeking to question the lure of ontology: seeking to disrupt, suspend and to problematize the modern project of the human and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children's illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov's Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii's memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight's Move (1923) and Olesha's novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to global social theory by contextualizing modernity/coloniality in East Asia. It begins with a reconstruction and evaluation of three sociological accounts of East Asian modernity, namely Kazuko Tsurumi's theory of endogenous development, Sun Liping's theory of communist civilization, and Chang Kyung Sup's theory of compressed modernity. Despite their insights, these theorists fail to transcend the Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism implicit in the paradigm of latecomer modernization. These problems can be better addressed by anti‐colonial perspectives, including Tani Barlow's colonial modernity, Chen Kuan‐Hsing's inter‐Asia, Xie Lizhong's post‐Western sociology, and Wang Mingming's civilizational anthropology. Yet European hegemony continues to define the spatiotemporal frame of these perspectives. To overcome the lingering problem of Eurocentrism, Laura Doyle's notion of inter‐imperiality is employed to highlight the power‐laden interaction and interdependence among imperial powers in the global and regional history of East Asia. This alternative approach, I argue, can shed new light on East Asian modernity and delineate its dialectical formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Academic research is the site where the production and dissemination of knowledge are embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies which are posited as universal and non‐Eurocentric knowledges are devalued, dismissed, and ignored. Objectives: The goal was to explore the tensions that emerged between the Global North team and the Global South team, from the Global North's perspective. Methods: This paper a collaborative autoethnography to trace how the logics' of coloniality of power structured a transnational research project focused on exploring Indigenous Women's experience of marginalization. The autoethnography involved engaging in critical reflexive auto‐interviews between the team members in the Global North, analyzing field notes and personal written reflections. Results: Autoethnography revealed how colonial conditioning respectively shaped both—the Global North and the Global South teams' expectations of one another, and as such, how they each operationalized decoloniality in the research process. Conclusion: The Global North team focused on epistemically disengaging from coloniality but became overly concerned on meeting the expectations of the funder's temporally oriented productivity demands and ended up rearticulating coloniality's logics. The Global South was concerned with remedying the material dimensions of coloniality in their local community but became overly focused on adopting neoliberal logic models to efficiently satisfy the North's productivity expectations. Meaning, they, too, rearticulated coloniality's logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline is at a crossroads. Will sociology answer ASA past president Aldon Morris' call for an emancipatory sociology? Or will sociology, as Morris puts it, "continue pretending to be an aloof, objective, detached science"? Recently, Hirschman and Garbes issued a call for an economic sociology of race, wherein they contend that race and racism are not central to economic sociology and that economic sociologists don't engage with contemporary race scholarship. In this paper, I assess and build upon their call. I argue that while the article importantly calls for understanding race and racism in economic sociology, in practice, it—used here as an example of a broader pattern within economic sociology—re‐centers whiteness and men, reifies elitism, and erases marginalized scholars and their contributions. I set forth an alternative perspective. To rise to the Du Boisian challenge, scholars need to critique racialized modernity as Itzigsohn and Brown importantly argue. We must also root our sociological consciousness, citation practices, and conversations in existing, yet marginalized, research. Failure to do so means future research risks reproducing inequities in the discipline and continuing to marginalize the very people, theories, and research that an emancipatory sociology is meant to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between bridewealth and women's autonomy is not only discussed amongst anthropologists, development practitioners and other scholars but also amongst brides themselves. Women continue to embrace such marital exchanges, despite their knowledge of 'modern' development discourse about the constraints of the practice on women's status and its links to gender‐based violence. This paper provides a visual exploration of contemporary brideprice practices and women's autonomy in Mt Hagen. We draw on scenes from our ethnographic film (An Extraordinary Wedding: Marriage and Modernity in Highlands PNG) to explore deliberations and developments that occurred in the case of a particular marriage that took place in 2012. We argue that the institution of brideprice has the potential to enhance the visibility of some women and the importance of their contribution to their own and husbands' kin groups. Despite current tensions regarding brideprice, it can serve as an avenue for the enhancement of women's political participation. The particular brideprice exchange featured in our film, raised concerns for the participants, which we consider in terms of three questions: Does brideprice commodify women? Does it play a role in gender‐based violence? Is it inimical to aspirations for modernist individuality? We discuss the importance of bekim ('return gift') and suggest that this practice challenges the notion of brideprice as a commodity transaction. We argue that, while there may be an association between brideprice and gender‐based violence, brideprice, in and of itself, is not causative of violence. The marriage represented in the film, and discussed in this paper, reveals the creativity of participants in adjusting the values inherent in the customary practice of brideprice to their contemporary aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the intersection of post‐socialism and mobility to not only widen the scope of “new mobilities paradigm” into “off the map” regions but also to highlight new insights for research on mobility by challenging the assumed borders between past and present and between “East” and “West,” as well as those between different mobilities. This paper discusses post‐socialist mobilities via three topics—modernity, freedom and citizenship—which are evident in automobility and beyond. Modernity denotes a mobile “modern age,” with mobility referring to freedom to move—both of which are then tied to the ways in which individuals are governed as citizens. By analysing the constellations of different mobilities vis‐à‐vis shifting power relations between state and citizens, as they are raised in the emerging research on post‐socialist mobilities, the aim of the paper is to stress the many similarities in terms of practices and regulations of mobility across the often‐assumed boundaries between socialist, post‐socialist, and “western” conditions. While the starting point for the paper is changing patterns of automobility and its governing, the paper also makes references to other mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a geography of deindustrialising places as spaces of inhabitation and endurance, rather than one based on narratives of progres, decline and ruination. Ruins have long been a concern for geographers, yet the material remains of modernity's grand schemes feed easily into ways of seeing and knowing deindustrialised spaces that can efface the practices through which lives and worlds are made in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in the former Soviet atomgrad of Visaginas, Lithuania, the paper both acknowledges and pulls back from the draw of the ruin. Moving away from the ruin‐temporalities of progress and decline, it offers an account of ongoing practices and modes of habitation in spaces defined by ruination. A reflexive acknowledgement of our contaminated role in making sense of such spaces allows us to be both enchanted by grand narratives of hubris and decline and to see other stories – stories of living on, of endurance, and of making lives in places circumscribed as futureless by political and economic regimes. As such, the paper offers an alternative geography of places that are decommissioned from above, paying attention to the care, commitment, makeshift practices and aesthetic projects through which their inhabitants live on. Engaging this approach through a series of small stories based on ethnographic and collaborative fieldwork alongside two photographers in Visaginas, I posit that the material and subjective remains of the dreams of the first nuclear age give rise to emergent forms of life that stand in excess to narratives of progress and decline. The ruins of Soviet nuclear modernity here operate as containers for practices of endurance and living on through changing relations of power and capital, rather than objects of melancholic loss, and as raw materials through which to forge ways of living in spaces characterised as surplus to requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theoretical advancement in human geography has reconceptualised the border as a process and becoming, which is appropriated and constructed by myriad actors to yield diverse and changing meanings, and accommodate various needs and interests. This enables us to appreciate the dual qualities of the border, both as a barrier to be overcome and an enabling factor for practices and meanings. In particular, cross-border mobility plays an essential role in mediating meanings of the border and identities of those whose lifeworlds are affected by the very existence of the border. On the one hand, mobilities transgress territorial orders imposed by official conceptions of the border. But, on the other hand, the distinctions between economic, social and political milieus at the two sides of the border may give rise to heightened senses of difference and lead to diverging identities. Building on these insights, this article argues for a more nuanced, dynamic understanding of the relationship between border crossing and belonging. It examines two empirical cases: the cross-border attendance of Huashan Festival celebration for Miao people at the Sino-Vietnamese borderland, and the trans-border mobility of Buddhist monks from the Myanmar city Muse to the Chinese border city Ruili. Overall, this paper argues that the potentials of the border to both connect and differentiate are inscribed in the lifeworlds in the borderlands in equally visible ways. Also, this paper adds some twists to Scott's thesis on Zomia, and argues that we must not downplay the importance of the frame of nation-states in shaping the lifeworlds of border inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to rethink the concept of 'cultural heritage' in general and 'living heritage' in particular as applied by the conservation community, for example by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property ().The arguments are informed by my investigation into the reconstruction of the heritage village of Taoping, damaged in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In reviewing the evolution of theories conceptualizing heritage and its conservation, the inherent links to the ontology of modernity become apparent, and carry consequences particularly for heritage settlement conservation. Whereas rural settlements emerged from a long-term communication between nature and people, in today's rural settlements this relationship is skewed by the inhabitants' own drive towards modernization. We see a confrontation between the modernity-grounded heritage conservation and the likewise grounded modernization of the rural settlements. Modernity generated two contesting, even contradictory, movements: (1) generating the concept of (rural) heritage and heritage conservation intrinsically resting on habitation, and (2) the practice of modernization as performed by the inhabitants. The concept of 'living heritage' cannot interpret this dualism, as the initial (conservation-worthy) relationship between land and people no longer exists. The appropriate term would be 'lived-in cultural heritage', as becomes apparent in reconstructing a rural heritage settlement, a process that is complex, where the attitude of the community is volatile, and results of the reconstruction are uncertain. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at a new understanding of modernity from the perspective of connected history. It demonstrates that with the case of Taiwan, so‐called ‘modernity’ emerged from the interactions and connections among the various regions, cultures, and civilizations. Thus, modernity has been entangled since its birth, and has had diverse variants. When we combine this reconceptualization of modernity with the concept of functional differentiation as the most essential structural condition of modernity, a theoretical escape from the trap of Eurocentrism emerges; additionally, we are able to integrate sociological theoretical reflections with the advancements of world history study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of scholarship on transnational religion is grounded within the analytical framework of the religion–migration relationship and has highlighted migrant individuals and groups as main players in forging religious networking. This ignores a wide range of alternative drivers that are forceful in the (re)making of transnational religious networks. In this introduction of the special issue, we therefore open a collection of nine articles which contribute to alternative articulations of transnational religious networks. In particular, our contributors introduce three alternative drivers – ideas, institutions and digital technologies – in (re)producing religious mobilities, connections and networks across nation borders. At the same time, they offer fascinating insights into the diversified ways alternative actors and channels weave together religious migrants' imaginations, practices and experiences, formulating new, complex forms of religious (re)production in a transnational world. This special issue also highlights the creativity, flexibility and vitality of Asian religions in the 21st century modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of 'conceptual history'. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more 'liberal' forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the end of the night within the context of growing work on the literary geographies of modernity. The paper argues that Céline's novel can be productively aligned with other texts such as Ulysses or Heart of darkness as a way of thinking about the experiences of modernity in terms of a spatial disorientation that provokes new kinds of writing. At the same time, Céline's novel is distinctive because it presents the experience of modernity as one of nihilism. In particular, the novel diagnoses the 'creative-destructive' project of modernity through a narrative of abjection and disenchantment, asking readers to question the dialectical promise, and idealist pretensions, of the term. This paper explores how this nihilistic writing is expressed spatially through the parodic 'journey' that structures the narrative, and the different nihilistic landscapes dramatised across the novel. The paper proceeds by examining understandings of modernity within literary geographies, and interpretations of nihilism, before exploring some of the central spatial moments of the novel: the deathscapes of World War I, French Colonial Africa and New York. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ways in which Céline's writing could be said to make manifest the spatial experiences of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, we are held to live in the Anthropocene, bringing to an end modern binary imaginaries, such as the separation between Human and Nature, and with them Western assumptions of progress, linear causality and human exceptionalism. Much Western critical theory, from new or vital materialism to post‐ and more‐than‐human thinking, unsurprisingly reflects this internal crisis of faith in Eurocentric or Enlightenment reasoning. At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which places the Caribbean at the centre of the development of a new and distinct mode of critical thought. In attempting to grasp the ways in which Caribbean thought and practice have been seen to enable a distinctive alternative non‐Eurocentric imaginary, this paper heuristically sets out a paradigmatic framing of 'abyssal geography'. We emphasize two key points. The first is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract and timeless philosophical assumptions but figuratively draws upon aspects of Caribbean practices of resistance and survival, for example, from the Middle Passage, Plantation, carnival, creolization, dance forms and speculative fiction. The second is that abyssal work engages the legacies of modernity and coloniality by explicitly seeking to question the lure of ontology: seeking to disrupt, suspend and to problematize the modern project of the human and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourists have long been neglected in the literature on home and mobility, although they constitute a massive mobile population within and across national borders. Addressing this gap, this paper advances geography's critical engagement with home in relation to mobility and modernity, and questions the binary distinction between home and unhomeliness in tourist mobility. It focuses on the alienation of Chinese modernity and how one group of domestic tourists negotiates this alienation through their imagination and consumption of home in a popular tourist site (i.e. Lijiang, a World Heritage site in Yunnan province) within the context of China's transformation, which started in 1978. This paper has two objectives. First, it examines why home is woven into the touristic imagination of Lijiang; and second, it links tourists' personal experiences with China's broad sociospatial transformation in order to explore individuals' resistance against and compliance with modernity. I argue that the imagination and consumption of home generates intensely contradictory configurations of struggle that simultaneously push tourists towards an ideal of home for inner freedom and premodern paradise, yet pull them back into the whirling vortex of 'modern' life and commercial forces. The paper sheds light on micro-geographies of people's lives in the context of China's rapid transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse young adults' experiences of moving and the role of identity narratives; how intersecting and multiple identities are constructed through their mobility; and the significance of space and representations of space and place in the processes of subject formation. The focus of this paper is on stories of mobility and the representations of one of many European rural peripheries: the Swedish North. The narratives offer alternative ways of thinking of the urban and the rural; people desire and belong across the places of migration. Even so, the hegemonic neoliberal understanding of the city as progress is reproduced by the informants, while at the same time some of them describe the rural as progressive for valuing the immaterial things people today have forgotten. These narratives can be viewed as ways of both reproducing and resisting the neoliberal understanding of the 'need to be mobile'. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quentin Skinner's magisterial The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published in 1978. A commemorative volume appeared almost thirty years later. My aim in this paper is less to revisit this last discussion by questioning either the importance or the impact of Skinner's book, both of which seem to me undeniable, than it is to unsettle a few of the assumptions that not only inform The Foundations and much of the work that it inspired, but which are all too often taken for granted. In particular, I note some limitations both of Skinner's use of the term 'modern' and of his understanding of political thought before concluding that it may be time to reconsider the category of modern political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main contention of this paper is that education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement. Thinking of modernisation as a trajectory of progress and development symbolised by industrialisation and a reordering of 'traditional societies' through rational forms of governance, we can begin to recognise the importance of the disembedding of people and communities from local institutions and relations that these modernising processes continue to require. Individual education stories are filled with movement that often reflect a commitment to the mobility imperatives of modernity. Reflecting the different scales of practice evident in this mobile modernity, the empirical focus ranges from rural settings to urban mobilities and then out to transnational mobilities and the educational choices exercised by the global middle classes. The paper explores the profound and the mundane ways in which educational structures affect family and individual mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine's scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine's social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine's intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity—an all‐inclusive conception of all human beings—is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine's work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to the article "Sexual, politics, torture, and secular time," by Judith Butler presented in this issue. The author reflects on several aspects of Butler's paper, including the importance of linear conceptions of time for modernity, the causal relationship between sexual politics and torture, the future direction of discourse on culture, the relationship between Islam and western culture, and the importance of the embodiment of various discourses within postmodern constructs.

Western civilization has, over its relatively recent past, undergone dramatic, unparalleled changes. The historical period in which these changes have occurred is commonly referred to as 'modernity', and although modernity has had profound repercussions on all aspects of people's lives, what has received less attention in the nursing literature is how modernity has influenced, and continues to influence, the mental health of modern men and women. In an attempt to address this, the following paper, drawing on the work of Szasz, Nietzsche and Frankl, seeks to present an accessible introduction to one of the most salient features of modernity; namely, the erosion of those traditions that gave life a meaning or a purpose, and that provided people with ready answers to the problem of how they ought to live. The paper will then introduce some of the possible consequences of this on the mental health of modern men and women, as well as providing preliminary suggestions as to how mental health nursing might respond. In doing so, the paper also seeks to stimulate further discussion and research into how modernity has influenced, and continues to influence, the mental health of modern men and women, and how psychiatric and mental health nursing might respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars of nationalism seem to assume that religious nationalism is inherently and necessarily hostile to the secular nation-state and to modern developments in general. The present paper challenges this conviction by drawing on recent debates among sociologists of religion, and it points to the existence of modernist versions of religious nationalism that acknowledge the legitimacy of the secular nation-state and are generally sympathetic to modern developments. It examines one of the most prominent manifestations of this variety of nationalism, namely Protestant modernist nationalism. After a brief consideration of cases from nineteenth century Europe, the remainder of the paper focuses on the modernist religious nationalisms arising in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Slovenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Taking as its point of departure Bury's (1982) concept of chronic illness as biographical disruption, this paper provides a critical assessment of its fortunes since that time. Having 'rescued' the concept from recent postmodern and disability critiques, the paper provides a series of further reflections on its strengths and weaknesses, including the notion of 'normal illness'; the importance of timing and context; the significance of continuity as well as loss; and the role of biographical disruption itself in the aetiology of illness. This, in turn, provides the basis for a broader set of reflections on the vicissitudes of the biographically embodied self in conditions of late modernity: a situation of chronic reflexivity in which our bodies/selves are continually problematised if not pathologised. The paper concludes, given this 'balance sheet', with a discussion of some potentially fruitful lines of future research, including links with the life-events and inequalities literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to present a world regional approach to the analysis of modernity and in doing so it also aims to make a contribution to comparative sociology and social theory. It is argued that world regions are the most suitable entry-point for comparing different socio-political constellations of our time, preferable to continents, civilizations and nation-states. However, a world regional foundation on its own is insufficient, due to the internal plurality and historically changing forms of world regions, and therefore needs to be accompanied by a concept that provides some degree of coherence within world regions and a tool for comparison with other world regions. The notion of modernity offers this level of generality while at the same time allowing for variety in its historical forms. Six main formations of modernity are identified, of which the European model was the first one and often a cultural reference for many other parts of the world. The thesis is that in the present day the most important developments are in the Asian and Latin American varieties, which unlike Europe are witnessing major historical transformation. Decisive in all of this is the question of democratization in the shaping of social imaginaries. Beginning with the problem of how to define the specificity of Europe, the paper provides an exploratory analysis of some of the salient considerations around a number of world regions, their formations of modernity, and the extent of major historical transformations in their present constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the paper titled "The Dialectics of Reason," by John Friedmann. In the paper the author has taken all the doubts that have arisen about the foundation of ideas, values and promises on which the west has rested for the past two centuries and has placed them in a wider framework, making it possible for people to understand a number of specific situations that they confront. The framework which the author proposes is both creative and fertile and helps to understand more fully the urgent challenges one faces in Latin America including the need to strengthen democracy, the reformulation of relations between the state and private enterprise, the role, of the political parties and the reassessment of socialist proposals. Friedmann suggests a series of necessary developments, although understandably he has not sought to analyse his own proposals in greater detail because of the need for brevity in his paper. As Friedmann clearly points out, modernity is not basically a powerful idea that has triumphed on the strength of its own intrinsic truth. Rather, it is the ideology which has accompanied the expansion of capitalism and that is why it has been recovered and experienced in such an original way in Latin America.

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal 'Great Man' people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists' drive to document and empathise with "suffering subjects", I suggest that being 'left behind' and 'forgotten' is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of 'making great men.' Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being 'last place' (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being 'the greatest people' of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to 'be great' reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a 'suffering slot', the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Veblen's status emulation theory in the background, but essentially engaged in theoretical debates on the transition to capitalism and modernity, this paper attempts to provide a comparative account of different forms of domination in Western European feudal society and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, an individualistic representation of reality gained prevalence in social conflicts in Western Europe, precisely because forms of exploitation associated with European serfdom were far more severe and un‐tempered than was true for the Ottoman Empire. Due to being short of a legitimate claim to genuine nobility, Western European feudal aristocracy was driven into an insatiable hunger for luxury and waste. In the absence of a powerful central authority, members of this class "turned inward" for their ever‐increasing exploits and waged war against their servants, living and working under their private jurisdictions. The peasants, both free and serf, not only revolted repeatedly, but also ran into the cities to have "fairly secure property rights" so that they would be "the lord" or "dominus" of their own lives and morality. Out of this, a new justice notion had grown, that of natural rights law, which equated all human individuals within one single concern, that of "the right to self‐preservation," eventually dragging the whole social fabric into heightened self‐centeredness. The Ottoman ruling class could not turn inward and wage an open class war against its servants. This was the land of peace, dar‐al Islam. All people, Muslim and non‐Muslim lived, or were supposed to live, in peace and harmony under the supreme order of Hakk. The transition to an individualistic justice notion along the lines of natural rights law was on the whole clogged in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is directed to two immediate purposes which lie beyond anthropology as practiced within academia: to contribute to the ongoing dialogue within the discipline on applied anthropological engagement in and with the Australian native title and Indigenous development arenas; and secondly, to add to our conversations with Indigenous people themselves on what it means to be Indigenous in contemporary Australia. It aims to do this by focusing initially on what I argue are two ostensibly alternative constructions of contemporary Indigenous identities implicitly established through different provisions of Australia's Native Title Act, one of which I propose draws from the particular legal construction of Indigenous tradition in that Act and in native title jurisprudence, and the other from certain aspects of identity held to be associated with modernity. I argue, however, that there is a false dichotomy between tradition and modernity in contemporary circumstances, and that Indigenous identities are better understood as 'hybrid' in the sense that they involve a complex interpenetration of forms of identity and practice drawn from diverse domains. I further argue that these arguments have important implications for an applied anthropological practice well beyond the native title arena, and for Indigenous people themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, I argue that frontiers are dilemmas composed of multiple dualities, be they exclusive and inclusive powers, connected space and national periphery, or modernity and primitiveness. These dilemmas, in consequence, become the mechanism to create a leeway for the state to 'tailor' different meanings of frontier to meet the contingent market demands. I use tea production on China's southwest frontier as an example to demonstrate that dilemma is not an end result, but a mechanism to rearticulate the relationship among frontier, the state and the market economy. Specifically, I argue that dilemmas on China's southwest frontier have been forged by the Chinese state with its incompatible desires between 'modernisation' and 'primitiveness' of the tea landscapes in Yunnan, a province on China's southwest frontier. Meanwhile, the incompatible desires and the resulting dilemmas on China's southwest frontier have further mobilised the state to flexibly rework its power to reconstruct the frontier to meet contingent market demand. Based on the shifting meanings of tea landscapes, the state has flexibly 'shuttled through' the dilemmas between development of modernisation and preservation of primitiveness on the frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses South Africa as an example to explore how crises of trust - stemming from the legacy of Apartheid, local and international corporate failures and the changing regulatory framework in the United States - have contributed to shaping aspects of South African corporate governance. Using Giddens' theory of modernity, the research considers how the country's racist past and recent corporate scandals have converged to shape South Africa's corporate governance landscape. In turn, mechanisms of modernity explain why South Africa has developed a highly sophisticated system of corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two important social transformations have occurred since the 1960s: the rise of the Black middle class and the influx of immigrants from Latin, America, Asia and Africa. The cultural and economic outcomes for first- and second-generation Black immigrants are often linked to the Black poor/underclass. However, we understand little about the ways in which the Black middle class is a potential pathway of integration for immigrants. This paper reviews the sociological debates on the socioeconomic incorporation of immigrants and the racial and ethnic relations of new and old African-Americans. It discusses the important contributions of minority culture of mobility hypothesis for class-based theories of immigrant integration. We draw from the literature on social stratification, race relations and immigrant incorporation in order to chime in on the conversation about how becoming socially mobile in America may mean having similar social experience as the African-American or minority middle class. The paper also suggests ways to better analyze the relationship between identity, integration, space and generation in minority incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper an attempt is made to reassess how and why the laic/Islamic dual opposition has come to be a decisive factor in the politics of Turkish capitalist modernity. The question as to whether this opposition may survive into the twenty-first century is briefly discussed. It is noted that in the aftermath of the prolonged confrontation between the emergent imagined community of the Gezi Revolt and the Islamist AKP government, a religiously neutral political identity came into sight in public life, which can be considered as the harbinger of a new kind of social individuality, one which is incommensurate with the laic/Islamic dual opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper offers a critical reflection on the uses of Michel Foucault's ideas and the notion of 'modernity' which mark a current trend among so many ethnographers of Melanesian life-worlds. Through the examination of several ethnographic cases I show the limitations of these usages and, correlatively, advocate a more mindful epistemic regard for the cultural realities and the processes of transformations of Melanesian life-worlds in the present-day world-historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The decarbonisation of energy systems is leading to a reconfiguration of the geographies of energy. One example is the emergence of community energy, which has become a popular object of study for geographers. Although widely acknowledged to be a contested, capacious, and flexible term, “community energy” is commonly presented as singular, bounded, and localised. In this paper, we challenge this conception of community energy by considering evidence about the role and influence of three categories of actors: community, state, and private sector. We demonstrate how community energy projects are unavoidably entangled with a diversity of actors and institutions operating at and across multiple scales. We therefore argue that community energy is enabled and constituted by trans‐scalar assemblages of overlapping actors, which demands multi‐sectoral participation and coordination. We point to the need for further academic attention on the boundaries between these actors to better understand the role of different intermediary practices and relationships in facilitating the development of decentralised energy systems with just outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tragic characters fight battles they cannot possibly win. That is what makes heroes out of them. However classical and modern tragedies display ontological differences whose fault line is to be found in the philosophical shift from the rationalist principle of sufficient reason to that of insufficient reason. Hence, life ceases to be a necessity imposed by the wrath of the gods and becomes the ordinary outcome of man's failure. Given that, this paper will consider the nature of the shift and its conceptual impact on the Greek term hamartia. Modernity comes with a redefinition of Weltanschauung: it does not have the cosmic range of the classics, and thus it is less about fate than it is about guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectacular new religious buildings on London's outskirts are often cited as evidence of London's multicultural diversity. However, the suburban location of these new buildings is usually dismissed as incongruous, drawing on familiar tropes of the suburbs as sites of modernisation, materialism and secularism. This paper uses this assumed incongruity to address the complexity of relationships between religion and suburban space by tracing the significance of religion in changing suburban geographies through a focus on London's suburbs. The paper begins with a critique of the absence of religion in suburban studies, which emphasise secularisation and homogeneity. The rediscovery of the creative potential of the suburbs gives little consideration to religious creativity. Similarly recent work on diasporas and religion have little to say about the significance of the suburban. Our paper uses three case studies, of different faith groups, from North and West London to explore three distinctive articulations of the relationship between religion and suburban space that we call 'semi-detached faith', 'edge-city faith' and 'ethnoburb faith'. These examples are not intended as ideal types but as analytical categories that open up the relationships between space, faith and mobilities. We argue there is a need to more carefully theorise the ways in which faith communities have engaged with the challenges of suburban geographies including processes of secularisation and suggest that the study of faith in suburbia offers new ways of thinking about the complexity of suburban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of care in modern society and seeks to expose how deep transformations in care arise from wider social relations. From historical survey we may discern a series of transitional points, where the practice and the experience of care was greatly, sometimes suddenly, redefined. Each betrayed deeper political and ethical struggles that went to the core of social relations, and which weren't merely therapeutic in nature. This paper explores two such ‘moments’. I first examine the emergence of a new institutional landscape during the middle industrial era, in the wake of a series of legal and political reforms that sought to settle a social order uprooted and distressed by raw modernisation. I provide a composite, yet incomplete view, of how this transformation proceeded in one urban setting, colonial Melbourne. In the second instance, I review the ambitions and process of deinstitutionalisation in the late 20th century. Ostensibly, this reform sought, inter alia, to collapse the great division between ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ established in 1834. Again, empirical reference is made to the reconstitution of care in Melbourne, Australia, this time during its late 20th experience of institutional reform. The focus in this case is the process of downscaling and closure for a major congregate facility, Kew Cottages. The major conclusion is that periods of intense transition in the ideology and mode of care are reflective of wider social transformations not merely of therapeutic or institutional shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing nature of Lihirian masculinity in the context of large-scale resource development is characterised by ingenuity, disjuncture and struggles for legitimacy. In this paper, I consider the various ways Lihirian masculinity is challenged and shaped by exogenous influences, how Lihirians appropriate particular aspects of modernity for their own purposes, and the ways in which certain Lihirian men have attempted to redefine masculine ideals according to neoliberal democratic values in their quest to modernise Lihir. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in the Lihir Islands between 2003 and 2007. [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]