Anthropology and its many modernities: when concepts matter

B j rn Th o m a s sen American University of Rome

This article provides a critical review of the multiple modernities paradigm used in anthropology today. The article also indicates how the work of anthropologists intersects with social theory and historical sociology. It will be argued that by pointing to multiple or alternative modernities in attempts to liberate modernity from its Eurocentric, modernistic connotations, anthropologists re-inject modernity itself with new value. It will be questioned whether this is ultimately a meaningful strategy. With reference to certain branches of social theory, the article develops a position from which the multiple modernities paradigm may be readdressed. This position is based upon a recognition of the particularity of European modernity, and its dening characteristic: a continuous stress on transformation and transgression, a state of permanent liminality.

What modernity after modernity?

Notions of multiple modernities are now standard in anthropological discourse. Such notions are increasingly framing what we do as anthropologists, what we look for in our eldwork, how we make theoretical sense of it, and how we use our ethnography to establish some kind of position on the issue of globalization. Often, the use of the multiple modernities concept involves taking a stance against Westernization, globalization, and/or neoliberal capitalism, by pointing to the existence of repressed or alternative modernities that deserve voice and recognition. In short, a new multiple modernities paradigm has slowly established itself. Clearly, this is not the only paradigm available to anthropologists, and we may question how powerful it is. Indeed, the multiple modernities paradigm demands no singular position, no single view: in contrast to functionalism or Marxism, it has no well-dened theoretical core. Nevertheless, the multiple modernities paradigm is there and constitutes an extremely inuential approach in anthropology today. The evolution of the paradigm is owed to an apparently paradoxical development that has been taking place since the 1980s. During that decade, modernity became an explicit subject of anthropological critique. A main aim of reexive or deconstructive anthropology was to demonstrate how anthropology as a discipline had been rooted in a modern epistemology, and that the anthropological representation of the other had somehow served as an underpinning of that very epistemology and practices of power connected to it. This resulted in a multi-layered debate, involving both a critical
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reconsideration of classical anthropology and the constitution of the anthropological self and its research object, the native. Anthropological theory and practice had been relying on the self-other relationship that had ultimately legitimized modernity itself (Trouillot 1991). It had, furthermore, worked under the realist illusion that societies could be described as actually existing entities in time and space (Clifford 1988; Marcus & Fischer 1986: 23). In short, the discipline had been created through the looking glass of modernity (Herzfeld 1987). The general conclusion was that anthropology had to free itself from that foundation. And so it had to be created anew beyond, against, or outside that modernity. The situation led to a variety of responses, including the more radical ones which claimed that we could or should no longer say very much, except perhaps about ourselves. A deep scepticism was directed both towards theorizing and the very possibility of doing eldwork. Eventually, this crisis of representation shifted focus from the analysis of specic societies to the study of the anthropological observer. A turn towards aesthetics and sentiments was legitimized. By contrast, the very idea that we had nally come to maturity and realized our limitations also fostered a hesitant optimism. One of the reference works became Marcus and Fischers tellingly titled Anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences (1986). It was shaky ground, but still somewhere to speak from. There emerged a new ethnography or a new anthropology. It became possible to claim that the discipline of anthropology, via the essentially reexive and intersubjective nature of the ethnographic self-other encounter, actually represented a particular knowledge position from where we could and should speak (see, e.g., Hastrup 1995). In this vein, Rosenau (1992) correctly identied both sceptical and afrmative postmodernists. While the former remained orientated against any project of theory, the latter took inspiration from reexivity to establish new, critical-theoretical perspectives, now that we had freed ourselves from our self-inicted serfdom to political power and its modernist epistemology. This could easily involve a recasting of new forms of political engagement and went hand in hand with a new politics of difference, as in postcolonial theory and feminism (Moore 1988; Said 1989). If anthropology rebooted itself via a deconstruction of modernity and its premises, how could the multiple modernities paradigm establish itself so easily from the late 1990s? I think this question still needs careful consideration. Evidently, although often implicitly, the pluralizing of modernity somehow came to function as a further unmasking of Western modernity. The main aim of this article is to ask whether this pluralizing still promises useful developments. In order to answer that question, I rst seek to provide an overview of the multiple modernities paradigm as used in anthropology today, pointing to similarities and differences in this indeed bewildering eld of conceptual/theoretical innovation. On the basis of this review, it will be argued that in our insistence to liberate modernity from its Eurocentric, unilineal, and uniform connotations by pointing to multiple or alternative modernities, we unwillingly re-inject modernity itself with new value. It will be questioned whether this re-injection constitutes a helpful or meaningful strategy at the theoretical and normative levels. I should stress from the outset that I have no intention of offering some replacement term or theoretical novelty. I will in fact carefully resist the temptation inherent to much of the existing debate: that some correction formulation exists, or can be produced. It seems to me that efforts in the social sciences to capture the reality in which
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we live are always disappointing. Such theoretical hubris (Szakolczai 2006) is itself an act of naming and a strategy of identication to be analysed on its own terms (Bourdieu 1991). What is needed is a debate about the underlying theoretical assumptions that give direction to our use of concepts, and that equip us with tools to understand the present. I will, therefore, limit myself to some suggestions as to how the multiple modernities paradigm may be readdressed by bringing anthropological discussions of modernity/modernities into closer contact with social theory and historical sociology. In particular, I argue for a necessary recognition of the particularity of European modernity, and what can be considered its dening characteristic: a continuous stress on transformation and transgression, a state of permanent liminality (Szakolczai 2000: 215-27).
The many multiple modernities: a typology

What do anthropologists mean when they talk about multiple modernities? It is not possible here to provide a complete overview of what is indeed an exploding eld. Only some tendencies can be indicated. The survey exercise is complicated by the fact that the different concepts are dened and used differently by different authors; hence the generalizations offered below must be taken as rough indications. Moreover, the plurality within the plurality is almost exhausting. I will in the following make reference to twenty-one current ways of putting modernity in the plural, and it is not possible to give all of them equal weight. The list is certainly not exhaustive.1 From the moment the plural form of modernity was suggested,2 a gold hunt for conceptual novelty was initiated, and we will certainly see more proposals over the next years. It is at such a denitional moment that conceptual reection and theoretical discussion are necessary, and this article is of course not the rst to raise this point. To facilitate an overview I here propose to group contemporary multiple modernities concepts into ve tentative, descriptive categories. Some concepts could t into several of the categories. The categories are meaningful to the extent that terms within them share a semantic space and can most often be exchanged without altering the content of the statements made. The categories will be presented and shortly discussed with the double purpose of creating an overview of the debate and of distinguishing some positions. (1) General terms indicating plurality: parallel modernities, global modernities, multiple modernities, manifold modernities, other modernities, plural modernities. These terms are tendentially value-neutral, involving no normative judgement or position. The terms simply indicate plurality, or spatial stretching, without suggesting a hierarchy or asymmetry of power. Beyond indicating plurality, the terms do not positively state what those modernities are about at the substantive level. A cursory literature review suggests that the rst three terms in category (1) are by far the most commonly used. The notion of parallel modernities has, among others, been suggested by Brian Larkin. Larkin understands parallel modernities as referring to the coexistence in space and time of multiple economic, religious and cultural ows that are subsumed within the term modernity (1997: 407). Larkin characteristically keeps modernity in inverted commas without wanting to dene what is meant by it. The monolithic view of modernity, Larkin argues, must be relativized once cultures are viewed as dynamic complexes; we should, therefore, leave behind simple dichotomies such as the West and the rest as the creators and the recipients of modernity.
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The concept of global modernities has been used by a number of anthropologists and sociologists since the collection Global modernities, edited by Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson (1995), appeared. As the concept indicates, the notion of multiple modernities is directly linked to the globalization debates that exploded in the 1990s. In Robertsons (1995) view, globalization is/was not simply a product of modernity (as maintained by Giddens), but the two are now necessarily intersected. What Robertson and others have underlined with the notion of global modernities is the fact that the different parallel modernities do not exist in isolation, but rather become global at their very inception. Multiple modernities refers back to Shmuel Eisenstadt, who has inspired many sociologists and quite a few anthropologists. Anthropologists invoke the notion of multiple modernities to account for cultural diversity in complex society, where people have states, bureaucracies, factories, fast food and technology, but consume and interpret these realities in different ways.3 I shall shortly return to Eisenstadts approach below. (2) Modernities in history: early modernities, later modernities, new modernities. These terms stress the fact that different modernities have existed in history and that new ones keep developing in the present. The plurality proposed is temporal before it is spatial. The notions of early, later, or new modernities constitute a type of pluralizing invoked most often by social (historical) theorists (see, e.g., Kaya 2003).4 The usage is still not widespread among historians but is indeed a logical extensions of established terms like early modern Europe versus modern Europe: the pluralizing here signies that different historical societies had modernities that cannot simply be teleologically reduced as forerunners to a later modernity. This is a much larger debate that cannot be discussed in any detail here.5 (3) Resistance modernities: alternative modernities, counter-modernities, antimodernities, competing modernities. These terms tendentially see modernities as subjects of action. They imply strategies for resistance against something (which may often imply Western modernity and its socio-economic forms). Within this category the most frequently used term is probably alternative modernities. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar opens his introduction to Alternative modernities with this statement: To think in terms of alternative modernities is to admit that modernity is inescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity. Born in and of the West some centuries ago under relatively specic sociohistorical conditions, modernity is now everywhere (2006: 1). Gaonkars introduction is written as an exercise to revise a distinction between societal modernization processes and cultural modernity,6 where cultural modernity refers to an artistic and aestethic reaction against a mechanical and disenchanting modernization process. The introduction is followed by a series of interesting case studies on the appropriation of modernity in different contexts, but none of these studies systematically take up Gaonkars conceptual invitation. As opposed to the idea that modernity is/was an epoch to be surpassed,Gaonkar insists that modernity is an inescapable condition. In contrast, by using the notion of alternative modernities, Gaonkar indicates that other ways to live with that condition are made possible. Invoking the term alternative modernities often involves a balance between recognizing underlying shared living conditions that have been globalized and opening up for cultural elaboration of those global forces, if not resistance against them. In Appadurais reading (1990; 1996), such resistance has much to do with imagination.
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Writers who adopt this term often imply a normative stance, as clearly implied in the invitation for a conference entitled Alternative Modernities: Transcending Postcolonial Conditions, where the organizers stated their goal to use [such] empirically-grounded analyses [of alternative modernities] to generate discussion about alternative modernist state and inter-state structures, interrogating the extent to which those structures produce solidary social forms rather than, once again, centres and peripheries between which the connections are primarily in the interests of the centres.7 It is in this sense that the notion of alternative modernities often becomes a call for new forms of justice and inclusion. (Becks invocation of alternative modernities goes in this direction as well: Beck 1997 [1993]: 110-31.) The notion of counter-modernities has its roots in Foucaults discussion of modernity in his essay What is Enlightenment? (1984). Foucault understood modernity as an attitude or an ethos that involves a certain relationship to oneself. Rather than taking a stance for or against modernity or distinguishing modernity from a premodern or postmodern period, Foucault suggested it more useful to try to nd out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of countermodernity (1984: 34). The plural form, counter-modernities, can meaningfully be described as a way to provincialize Foucault, by pointing to such counter-modernities in a variety of global settings, and especially in the contact zone of imperial encounter. This involves a view from the excluded and a consideration of forms of resistance from marginal positions, seeing practices of power as dialectical and reciprocal. With a different terminology, Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) have argued along such lines. The concept of anti-modernities is less used by academics but tendentially represents a more articulate political stance. The term often emerges within anti-global discourse, where existing forms of socio-economic power hierarchies and patterns of representation are openly debunked and fought against.8 While many anthropologists refrain from adopting an explicit standpoint in the global/anti-global debates, a large amount of ethnographies seek exactly to account for local resistances to particular aspects of modernity and specic manifestations of the modern, which very often amounts to a struggle against global, neoliberal consumer capitalism. The argument has, for example, been made by Aihwa Ong (2001), who in her various discussions of modernity has reiterated Marxs view of capitalism as an alienating force that disrupts communities, dissolves interpersonal relations, uproots earlier forms of life, and leaves people without any means of resistance. Other anthropologists have demonstrated how such resistances to modernity are in fact old, but that in the past, owing precisely to the blindfolding produced by the singular-modernity narrative, we failed to recognize certain cultural forms (playful and ironic as these may be) as resistance. Taussigs (1993) work is emblematic here (but see also Arce & Long 2000). The notion of competing modernities is predominantly used by economists and political scientists, and most often to denote the competitive relationships between Japan/East Asia, Europe, and America. Michael Herzfeld, however, seems to prefer the concept over multiple or alternative modernities, claiming that competing modernities and rationalities would form a worthwhile object of anthropological research (2001: 44). Herzfeld indicates that much of the multiple modernities literature still relies on claims to rationality, and that to compare and contrast these claims (also within anthropology itself) rather than holding them at arms length might prove more productive.
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(4) Vulnerable modernities: uneven modernities, repressed modernities, fragile modernities. Modernities are here conceptualized as objects of domination, threatened congurations that exist in the hidden, despite the threat of more powerful forces (which again may be Western modernity or capitalism). Uneven (Randeria 2002), repressed, or fragile9 modernities typically refer to pluralistic aspects of Western (white, male, heterosexual, capitalist) modernity that are/were marginalized within and beyond the colonial context. Without using these exact terms, much current anthropology, of course, falls within this category, seeking to describe modernities from the margins, from the perspective of the excluded and repressed. The perspective is implicit in some of Appadurais writings on globalization, where he stresses the uneven spread of cultural, technological, and economic resources (Appadurai 1996).10 (5) Positive modernities: enchanted modernities, entangled modernities, gendered modernities, embodied modernities, reexive modernities. Modernities are here seen as carriers of positive values. Most often these values are exactly the ones that modernity was earlier seen to have emptied or precluded. The concepts in this category indicate a movement from modernity as disenchantment to multiple modernities as re-enchantment, a perhaps paradoxical movement in which naked plurality becomes a liberating force in itself (one is bad, more is good), a tendency which is indeed indicative of the larger debate. The notions of enchanted (Deeb 200611) and entangled modernities12 can be taken as indications of open, even ironic, challenges to those versions of social theory which took modernity to represent a top-down process of disenchantment and/or a disentanglement of social and personal relations that spread from the West with imperialism and capitalism. Gendered (Hodgson 2001) or embodied (Martin & Heinrich 2006) modernities indicate a positive possibility to re-inject modernity with meaning and (gendered) subjectivity from the margins or from below. In this sense, categories (4) and (5) must be considered subcategories of the resistance modernities. The notion of reexive modernities has more precise connotations, as it relates to the idea of modernity (in the singular) being reexive. That idea was expressed by mainstream social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck in the 1990s. Beck talked about two modernities, and placed the second modernity in the present as a communicative and non-linear or reexive modernity, much inspired by Habermass communicative rationality. Scott Lashs Another modernity: a different rationality (1999) stayed largely within this discourse and its Habermasian Enlightenment-contained time-framework. When considering together the last two categories of the above list, vulnerable and positive modernities, a remarkable development becomes clear: whereas modernity from the 1980s was deconstructed as ethnocentric, repressive, disenchanting, uniformizing and excluding fragile meanings and alternatively gendered identities, now modernities themselves are posited as fragile and repressed. In most readings, therefore, multiple modernities have switched position, taking on the role of the weak. It is from the position of weakness that they gain a new positivity, in an almost Nietzschean revaluation of values. One sometimes wonders what happened to the beast. To nish this overview of the many modernities paradigm (and disregarding the terms in category [2], which have had little resonance with anthropological discourse),
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a sketchy time-line in the development of all the concepts taken together can be indicated very roughly as follows: the terms in category (1) were the rst ones introduced in the early and mid-1990s in the attempt to establish a post-postmodern vocabulary to account for diversity; the terms in category (3) followed after to indicate something more than sheer plurality;13 the terms in categories (4) and (5) are the most recent ones. Categories (3), (4), and (5) taken together connote and articulate post-postmodern forms of resistance.

Shared assumptions and bones of contention

Despite substantial differences, it is possible to single out some interrelated core assumptions within the larger multiple modernities paradigm described so far.14 First, all of the various terms oppose analytical Eurocentrism. One can most easily pin down the common denominator of pluralized forms of modernity by referring to that which they are meant to replace at the analytical level: namely the notion of a singular (Western) modernity. Second, all the terms indicate that modernity does not lead to singularity and thus refuse unilineal modernization processes. As in the work of Ferguson (1999), much anthropology has focused upon how the false belief in a singular modernization process actually underpinned both anthropological practice and theory as well as local peoples expectations of modernity. As opposed to views of globalization as the imposition of a uniform modernity, anthropologists refuse to accept that we are witnessing a unitary global culture, dominated by the West, and insist instead that parallel or alternative modernities are emerging that demand our attention. People are not on their way; they are different. This recognition is seen as enabling us to analyse local forms in their real existence. Third, to think of multiple modernities means to focus on local-global relations. In fact, anthropologists frequently invoke multiple modernities simply to describe local/global congurations. Whereas classical anthropology allegedly overlooked the ways in which local cultures were tied to state and international political economy, anthropology during recent decades has focused exactly on those externalities, making them central to the very object of investigation. In much anthropology, therefore, alternative or parallel modernities simply refer to the many ways in which local traditions blend and fuse with global trends, creating what Roland Robertson (1995) called glocalization. Fourth, each of the above terms imbues people with agency. Modernities become impersonated as they come to rely upon cultural context, which involves a high degree of openness in terms of interpretation (Kaya 2004). The fact that modernities can both be weak and function to signal empowerment is part of a larger analytical strategy, much in line with the anthropological tradition to counter ways of thinking that render people passive, without agency and without history. One strong motivation behind the anthropological embracing of multiple modernities has surely been to give modernity back to the people who live it and shape it via their lived realities. Modernity was oppressive and took away peoples voice; multiple modernities give voice to everyone. It is also from this perspective that the terms enchanted, differently gendered, and entangled modernities become meaningful. A major bone of contention lurking in the debate, and cutting across the categories proposed above, involves two in fact very different views of the multiple, well
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described by Ulf Hannerz: As the civilization of modernity enters into contact with other cultures, changes and refractions result, so that one may see it alternatively as one increasingly internally diverse civilization or as multiple modernities (1996: 46). In other words, are we dealing with varieties of modernity or with truly multiple modernities? To a large extent, this question has to do with a basic difference between, on the one hand, views of modernity as originating in the West and then diversifying and multiplying as the West spreads, and, on the other, views which recognize different sources of modernity. (It is evident from Hannerzs formulation that he opts for the rst view.) To an extent, the question as to whether multiple forms result from an expansion of Western modernity or, alternatively, from various civilizational sources of distinct modernities is a rehearsal of the very old debate in anthropology concerning multiple versus single origins of culture. Centric versus pluralist arguments have in fact dominated the globalization debate within anthropology. In their preface to Global modernities, Featherstone and Lash (1995: 4) called this the debate between homogenizers, who operate with some notion of a global system with a centre, and heterogenizers, who will tend to stress cultural particularity. It is fair to say that the majority of anthropologists have sided with the multiple view. We certainly cannot assume that global capital centres overlap with global image centres. Globalization has to be conceived as multi-layered and multidirectional. While some Western forms of scientism and political traditions have spread to other parts of the world, other items may originate from elsewhere, creating what Appadurai (1990) has described as multi-directional ows. Yoga techniques and sushi have penetrated New York as easily as US dollars transformed Bombays and Tokyos capital markets. Furthermore, globalization is not only a two-way process; there are many cultural ows that take place outside the West altogether. (On such media ows, see, e.g., Herzfeld 2001: 294-315.) I have no wish to question these insights, but will argue below that the homogeneity versus heterogeneity debate becomes more meaningful when accompanied by a historical view that takes the particularity of European modernity more seriously.
Leaving what modernity behind? The parallel trajectories of modernity and civilization

What becomes clear from the above survey is hardly surprising: rather than providing any substantial denitions as to what modernities are about (or what they are not about), anthropologists use ethnographies to demonstrate how modernities are lived and constructed differently in different cultural contexts. In the concrete ethnographies, this involves analysing how specic groups of people cope with capitalism, how they transform state ideologies, how universal religions develop differently in culturespecic settings (Hann 2007; Keane 2007), or how people localize global consumer goods or certain types of global discourse, such as human rights or nationalism (Lomnitz 2001). I do not wish to contest the fact that this approach represents a crucial contribution to the globalization debate. A growing number of ethnographies attest to multiple modernities: that is, to a variety of ways to make claims of rationality and progress that constitute the modern. Compared to the rather autoreferential debates of the 1980s, the multiple modernities paradigm has involved a return to ethnography, and given the modernity debate a badly needed concreteness (see, e.g., Kahn 2001; Miller 1995).
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Yet some questions must be raised. A very general question relates to the overall achievement of this new vocabulary. Despite the merits of the by now well-known plurality discourse, and despite illuminating ethnographies continuously produced within (or at least connected to) this paradigm, the anthropological accounts most often leave the nature and the reproductive energies of these modernities unanswered. The various concepts are, at worst, crudely used to show variation within a globalizing world. The conceptual development that rst abolished modernity and then reintroduced it in the plural form is in fact reminiscent of an older debate, almost forgotten, but particularly pertinent in the current context: the conceptual use of civilization. Reacting against early evolutionism that took Western civilization as the taken-for-granted starting-point and measure for inquiry, twentieth-century anthropologists rejected the civilization concept as ethnocentric, politically biased, and/or analytically useless. Starting in nineteenth-century Germany, and partly as a reaction to French Enlightenment philosophy, culture became the politically correct term in contrast to the loaded term civilization too reminiscent of worn-out ideas supposing Western supremacy. Alternatively, critics of evolutionism like Franz Boas simply started referring to existing societies as civilizations (Stocking 1966), thus relativizing the dividing line between civilized and non-civilized peoples. Boas and others were largely successful in this enterprise. It became commonplace to assume that there was a Melanesian, an Inuit, and a Western civilization. The victory was pyrrhic and with an evident result: the concept of civilization lost its descriptive, let alone analytical, value, as it simply came to denote different cultures or culture areas. Simply put, an analytical concept was diluted into a descriptive device. Kroeber (1957), a student of Boas, tried to reintroduce a grand theory reection on civilizations and civilizational cycles. Indeed, every decade in the post-war period would see a handful of publications seeking to underpin the civilization concept with analytical meaning and content, but a unied discourse never arose.15 If Toynbee or Spengler was quoted by anthropologists, it was most often to deconstruct the authors (admittedly simplistic) classications of world civilizations. Hardly any anthropological textbook written in the post-war period introduced civilization as a possibly useful analytical concept alongside society, culture, tribe, or state. This left anthropologists without an argument when political scientists and international relations theorists from the 1990s started to conceptualize political conict as a cultural clash of civilizations. We know we dont like Huntington, and we are quick to deconstruct his awed world-view (Thomassen 2007), but we have nothing constructive to say about the analytical value or even the empirical reality of civilizations, and we have no real alternative to offer. The silence is regrettable, for never before have the notions of culture and civilization come so visibly to the centre stage of world politics and global conict. There is indeed reason enough to speak up.16 In a similar fashion, modernity has now gone through a tripartite sequence: (1) unrecognized episteme (2); recognized and rejected; and (3) pluralized. We are all modern, just in different ways, the slogan now goes. Before Inuits represented a civilization of their own; now we (we!) call them differently modern when they use snow scooters, listen to Madonna, and sell their furs at market price in London. To continue the parallel, todays notions of plural modernities deny any absolute spatial or temporal dividing line between modern and traditional societies in much the same way as anthropologists earlier relativized the civilized-primitive divide. The discourse of
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multiple modernities has ripped the modern of its teleology and its superiority. In its place we have fragmentation and hybridity. There are strong reasons to suggest that we are driving ourselves into the same corner as happened with our pacication of civilization. If the current pluralizing of modernity ultimately serves to describe the variety of cultural forms that coexist in the world today, the analytical value of the concept is watered down, and little is gained in perspective. Arguably, other, more modest, concepts could have served the purpose better. It matters very little whether we use modernity in the singular or the plural if we do not take a theoretical stance on modernity. If everything is somehow differently modern, the term is deprived of meaning. We are in fact decorating cultural relativism with a new and more fashionable label. Let me in what remains supplement these very general observations with some more specic objections to the current use of the many modernities paradigm, and while doing so also indicate some possible ways to redirect the debate.
Recasting the homogeneity versus heterogeneity debate

There are two well-known critiques of what Mitchell (2000) called the easy many modernities; they will not be the focus of attention here, as they are the most widely discussed. First, the strategy of pluralizing easily sidesteps asymmetries of power in the global system, by injecting everyone with agency and creating an illusion of equity (Mitchell 2000). Second, at the level of representation, it can also be argued that to speak of multiple modernities may in fact turn into yet another construct of other cultures as essentialist others, this time as differently modern others (Foster 2002). As such, the change of vocabulary, far from representing an advance, really just reproduces another kind of othering: a distancing in space, if less so in time. There is, in my view, a very concrete dimension to this aspect, which is sometimes ignored: the ethnographic fact that many people around the world keep referring to modernity in the singular, and as something indeed very positive. In many corners of the world, modernity in the singular remains a much used and positively laden emic concept which people very consciously invoke as a parameter of successful development. This sounds terribly like modernization theory, true enough. But what if people live and see it as such? Is it our role to tell them that they are not on their way? That they represent an alternative modernity? Such an insistence can clearly come to function as not only another semantic distancing, but also as a very real disregard of peoples concrete wishes for a better life. As argued by Englund and Leach (2000), rather than imposing meta-narratives, we should leave more space for subjects to dene for themselves the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Here, however, I would like to focus on another shortcoming of the current debates: if we are quick to demonstrate local adaptations to modernities, we often hesitate to discuss the sources of those modernities; if we are quick to point out that there are many paths to modernity, we are less quick to point out the contours of those paths and their substantial differences. The anthropological adaptation of the multiple modernities paradigm has led to a privileging of the discussion of heterogeneity versus homogeneity, over and against a diachronic view. This is particularly misplaced, insofar as the notion of multiple modernities, as introduced to the social sciences by Shmuel Eisenstadt (1999; 2000a), rested from the very outset on the recognition of a need to re-inject social theory with history of the longue dure. Such a historical view is necessary to make sense of the homogeneity versus heterogeneity
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debate; and it is a view which involves a consideration of modernitys nexus to civilization, or, rather, civilizing processes. Eisenstadt invoked the notion of multiple modernities in the footsteps of Max Webers comparative study of the world religions, which served to answer more fully the question concerning the particularity of the West in a world-historical comparative framework (Weber 1963 [1922]). Eisenstadt always understood his notion of multiple modernities as an inherent part of the wider theoretical and historical framework that Karl Jaspers (1953 [1949]) called the Axial Age (Eisenstadt 1982; 1986; Voegelin 1974; for fuller discussion, see Thomassen 2010). In his studies of China, India, Ancient Judaism, and in his unnished manuscripts on Islam and early Christianity, Weber clearly recognized that civilizations are multiple and unique. At the same time he noted a series of structural similarities: the role of prophecy and its institutionalization; the tension between this-worldly and other-worldly ethics; and the notion of salvation, and the culture-specic means of its accomplishment, leading to what we may term different trajectories of civilizing processes.17 This view tempers the opposition between the one and the many. Weber found commonalities between the major civilizations based on shared conditions of emergence and shared predicaments. This perspective was exactly what Jaspers (1953 [1949]) developed in his work on the Axial Age, in which he argued for a common axis point in world history, but one with multiple origins. This, however, does not preclude the possibility that a global coming-into-contact has also happened. Weber knew well that the imposition of one civilization complex on others had taken and was taking place. To Eisenstadt, modernity can indeed be understood as an original Western project he talked about the original cultural programme of modernity. Eisenstadt argued that Western patterns of modernity are not the only authentic modernities; they only have a purely historical precedence (2000b: 2-3). His argument is that modernity, as it spread to the rest of the world, led not to a single civilization, or even remotely to a similar modernization trajectory, but to the development of several modern civilizations. (The argument here builds on comparative work done by Eisenstadt in the 1960s on the evolution of empires.) Eisenstadt here stayed close to Weber in that he identied structural similarities within a variety of civilizations. The developmental dynamics may be cognate, and many underlying characteristics are indeed similar, but differences remain and keep unfolding. This means in my view that we have to understand the notion of multiple modernities in two ways that are not mutually exclusive. First, the analysis of various civilizational developments that led to specic gurations, of course with internal differentiations, makes it possible to conceive of multiple modernities as being plural in the sense that they are embedded in civilizational congurations from their very beginning; and that beginning must surely incorporate the Axial Age theory as a theoretical and historical framework. Second, multiple modernities keep unfolding owing to culture contact and the spread of ideas. Multiple modernities can be conceived as the various local ways in which global inuences are incorporated and transformed, and how, for example, Western capitalism transforms and is transformed by local societies. However, neither of these perspectives disregards the fact that modernity erupted in Europe. This, I would argue, happened in the period following the waning of the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth to seventeenth century, when a modern worldview installed itself. This installation took place as a fragmentation of the Renaissance
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project (Szakolczai 2007). According to Weber, it was the specic Western type of rationalizing the religious rejections of the world, identied by the inner-worldly asceticism of Christian sects, which led to the breakthrough of modern capitalism, which did indeed have a centre of origin: Europe. As stressed by Eisenstadt (2005), and drawing also on the work of Eric Voegelin, much the same can indeed be said about a parallel development in the political realm. Nationalists and political revolutionaries from the seventeenth century onwards were in fact, as suggested by Voegelin, secular carriers of an inner-worldly eschatology (see also Szakolczai 2008), and this was what gave European politics a fervour and revolutionary potential unknown in other areas of the world. The parallels can be further continued into a consideration of the scientic revolution of the seventeenth century, famously analysed by Franz Borkenau, who pointed to the joint emergence of modern philosophy and the mathematical-mechanistic world image (for further discussion, see in particular Szakolczai 2000: 141-51).
Forms of resistance: multiple modernities and the proliferation of identity politics

I have no wish to argue that we should abandon the concepts of multiple modernities. I fully accept that the contemporary scene is characterized by multiple interpretations of the modern. Most of the above-mentioned terms are meaningful descriptive tools to make sense of the world in which we live. One can only sympathize with Tsings insistence (2005) that our primary role should not be to take sides for or against globalization but rather to follow, in our ethnographies, its contours and variations (its frictions in her words). And yet, as noted above, there is indeed a quite strong tendency to invoke alternative or repressed modernities as implicit or explicit strategies to resist the overwhelming forces of globalization. To pluralize and write into history hitherto excluded subjects by discovering hybrid or alternative modernities is employed as a means of resistance to the new global (neoliberal) order, and a call for new forms of justice and inclusion. As indicated in the above, it is from such a perspective that the reference to multiple and alternative modernities serves as a continuation of the modernity critique of the 1980s; in fact, as Aihwa Ong (2001) has so clearly put it, anthropology should become aware of the fact that the discipline is both an extension of modernity and an instrument for its undoing. It is this project I think we seriously need to question; not our ethnographic endeavour to describe and analyse multiple forms of modern projects. Anthropology was born from a recognition of cultural diversity. The moment we cease to marvel at the wonder of cultural creativity and innovation, we arguably lose our reason to exist. But at the heart of our current celebratory attitudes towards pluralities of the modern lies a theoretical misconception that needs to be spelled out with some clarity. This misconception rests on the conclusion reached in the 1980s, namely that old modernity represented a uniformizing/rationalizing force. It is against this background that plural modernities became both good and necessary. It is certainly true that in the social sciences the dominance of modernization theories in the post-war period led to a view of modernity as uniform across time and space, equating it with Western ideals, ideas, and institutions. The problem is that this idea of modernity as unitary and uniformizing was always wrong. It is even conceptually wrong. The very notion of being modern was, from its inception in the early sixteenth century precisely not about creating sameness, as it indeed demarcated a
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difference from the past (the ancients), and a notion of continuously evolving horizons. The modern was the new, the diverse, the forward-looking: it had no denite form and no denite end result, other than a continuously moving horizon; it was about change and movement (Giesen 2009; Koselleck 1979; Wagner 2001). Here one can adopt Stuart Halls formulation: Essential to the idea of modernity is the idea that everything is destined to be speeded up, dissolved, displaced, transformed, reshaped (1996: 17). Szakolczai, applying the conceptual vocabulary of Victor Turner, has ttingly, albeit deeply paradoxically, diagnosed modernity as permanent liminality, alluding to its negation of stabile forms and ideas (Szakolczai 2000: 215-27; Thomassen 2009). The many modernities paradigm in current anthropology feeds upon a politics of inclusion and recognition, aiming to establish a more just and free world by ghting centralized forms of dominance. In the postscript to Expectations of modernity, Ferguson said what in most other accounts remains rather implicit: if socialism is no longer a valid alternative to the neoliberal agenda, then a multitude of social movements mobilized around such issues as human rights, sexuality, and religion can take their place alongside a revitalized Marxist critique and a re-energized global labor movement to counter neoliberal globalization (1999: 258). The problem with these normative approaches is that they almost invariably come to predicate upon exactly those universalist ideologies of freedom and emancipation that lie at the very heart of modern ideology. This leads to a highly ambivalent process, captured by Foucault: exactly those universalistic ideologies of emancipation invariably end up creating more suffering and repression. It is, of course, true that contemporary critical theory departs from a de-centred self and involves a reexive starting-point. Yet this produces a rather uneasy mixture of appeals to identity/diversity, universalism (as in human rights), and re-energized forms of class struggle. One may in fact suspect that this is one principal reason why the multiple modernities paradigm gained such widespread and easy favour in the 1990s: while simultaneously drawing on old vocabularies of repression and resistance and newer ones that stress strategies of representation, local agency, and diversity via the many ows of cultures, the discourse seemingly allows for a relatively painless marriage between neo-Marxism and the postmodern celebration of diversity (see also Thomassen 2008). This can also be said in a different way. To invoke repressed and then liberated modernities (trans-gendered, re-cultured, re-emancipated) forms part not only of a larger politics of recognition, but indeed of a larger politics of identity. In line with post-structural theory, the anthropology of multiple modernities takes a celebratory stance towards heterogeneity and hybridity. As in the much-quoted literary approach of Bhabha (1994), this involves a search for interstitial positions between xed positions, an entertainment of difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. Combined with critical theory and/or revitalized Marxism, this has come to represent an anthropological version of new critical theory. However, to combine two excesses does not necessarily create a harmony. With its obsessive preoccupation with marginality and suffering, and the belief in the complete elimination of human misery, Marxism and other twin modern ideologies systematically only managed to proliferate still more misery. But there is something even more perplexing about our very celebration of difference. Are such pluralist strategies really an antidote to modernity? I think the argument can be made that not only is this not so, but that to plunge into further rounds of global identity politics is rather to
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exacerbate modernitys most problematic aspect: not only its utopian call for freedom and emancipation, but exactly its constant going beyond, its centrifugal tendencies. And, as Foucault (1988) came to recognize, those forces are predicated upon a continuously evolving politics of ourselves that lies at the very heart of the modern project. By simply taking a celebratory stance towards pluralism, diversity, movement, hybridity, and uidity in our attempts to go beyond modernity, we are indeed celebrating the perhaps most critical aspect of that very modernity: the ceaseless drive towards overcoming traditional boundaries, or, using the expression of Giesen (2009), the constant lure to transgression.
Conclusion: whats next?

We live in this world. There is no other world, and hence no possibility of withdrawal. Our attempts to take us out of modernity are tragically part of the modern project. As Foucault (1984) spelled out very clearly in his last writing, this was exactly Kants denition of the Enlightenment: an exit, a way out. It is a connected world, and true enough a world in which the local and global can no longer be separated. Any position of exteriority is futile. Any imagined position of a-posteriority is merely tragic, part of the utopian drive that gave the modern project much of its destructive energy. Such positions are not far away from the indeed untenable positions of scientic objectivity that dominated most of the twentieth century. They all predicated upon a sense of alienation, a setting oneself against or above given conditions; they imply the loss of that balance between involvement and detachment (Elias 2007 [1983]) which is a precondition for effective thought and practice. I have argued that a central task of anthropology must indeed be to study the frictions of multiple modernities (Tsing 2005). I have also argued, however, that the postmodern and now contemporary celebration of diversity and a larger politics of difference set against an oppressive and hegemonizing modernity was badly misconceived from the very beginning, and that the diversity and hybridity we keep celebrating might be porous indeed a part of the problem itself. We need to re-embed our descriptive efforts of multiple modernities in a theoretical/historical understanding of modernity itself. This takes us beyond the discipline of anthropology. The argument proposed has not implied an attempt to save modernity, to retain some core or some positive principles that we can still refer back to, and from where a new departure becomes possible: to protect rationality while aware of its abuses, as in Habermass project. There is indeed reason enough to question the selfunderstanding of modernity as rational and progressive; but there is equal reason to doubt that a continuous celebration of hybridity and cultural diversity poses any kind of alternative whether theoretically or normatively. This is especially so insofar as the research subjects in which we detect such seeds of resistance are already well absorbed into those consequences of modernity that seem to us so fatal: the global spread of a capitalist economy and its own inbuilt frenzy; the continuous transformation of society by new technology and science; and the increasing fervour with which people around the globe tie their personal identities to abstract and often purely demographic categories such as gender, race, nation, or religion. Multiple modernities can only serve as meaningful forms of resistance to the extent that they openly recognize and identify these processes and the mimetic processes by which they have spread, imploded, and transformed within a variety of civilizational contexts. I am willing to risk this formulation: there are no real alternative modernities
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with which we can correct the errors of old modernity. The problem is not Europe or the West; the problem is modernity. The recognition of the particularity of European modernity, therefore, also allows us to disentangle modernity from the larger concepts of civilization and civilizing processes, which are indeed not simply empty and politically charged terms. We should recognize that there are sources of civilization (Szakolczai 2004) even within the Western context that not only predate that modernity, but that represent genuinely alternative values and worldviews. And to an extent, this was of course the importance of the Axial Age and the spiritual foundations it laid within the various world civilizations (Jaspers 1953 [1949]), implying in fact a call for a de-emphasizing if not elimination of the ego, and a humble recognition of boundaries, re-anchoring the human being in a recognition of a divine order. In such a light, one role for anthropology may relate to the task of attesting to cultural traditions or strategies that serve to problematize the over-condence in human autonomy and rationality and which aim to diagnose and tame those tendencies towards limitless growth and constant self-overcoming that characterize the modern episteme. Another task may relate to valorizing and respecting concrete human presence in this world, against the political investment of persons into the continuously proliferating cults of abstract rights, ideologies, or identities. An insistence on concreteness and bounded existence (Horvath 2008) is perhaps the only remedy against the spinning logics of global identity politics. Modernity will not be overcome by injecting it with cultural diversity. It will consolidate and perpetuate its most vital and most problematic aspect: the loss of limits, the drive towards growth, and the constant search for renewal, transformation, and going beyond given conditions at any price, and anywhere.

NOTES 1 I have, for example, omitted from the discussion the almost limitless possibilities of invoking spacespecic modernities, as in Turkish, Scandinavian, Melanesian, Chinese, or Japanese modernities. I also do not consider theme-specic modernities, as in Islamic, Christian, Confucian, or colonial and postcolonial modernities. This omission by no means indicates that the exploding literature using such terms is irrelevant to the larger debate; quite the contrary. Their usage, however, faces the same risks as the terms discussed here: for example, an under-theorized stretching of the modernity concept itself. To talk about, for example, Islamic or Turkish modernities can easily come to represent legitimate ways of recasting nation or religion as analytical units. 2 To my knowledge, Faubians Possible modernities (1988) was one of the rst anthropological attempts to pluralize modernity. 3 Examples abound, but see Kamali (2006) or Rofel (1999). In Lau (2003), the concept is invoked to indicate different types of cinema and mass media consumption in East Asia, different ways of becoming modern. 4 In his argument for a cosmopolitan modernity, Delanty has, drawing upon Eisenstadt and Wittrock, defended the idea of early modernities, indicating that by such modernities we may think of varieties of modernity before the age of globality (2006: 276, fn. 4). 5 It is little known that the notion of historically contingent, multiple, and shifting articulations of modernity was suggested in the 1940s by the political theorist Eric Voegelin, in his early drafts that formed part of his History of political ideas (Voegelin 1998). To my knowledge, Voegelin was actually the rst thinker to pluralize modernity (into what he called the Mediterranean and Atlantic modernities). For further discussion of Voegelins perspective, see Thomassen (2010). 6 To confuse matters a bit, Gaonkars distinction only supercially resembles the better-known distinction proposed by Charles Taylor between cultural and a-cultural modernity. Taylor (2001) denes cultural modernity as something specic which has arisen within Western Europe and Anglo-America, while a-cultural modernity suggests a universal teleology, and identies some central processes of modernity

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through which all societies will eventually go. Taylor is as sceptical about the latter as he is about those negative modernities that deny modernity in all its forms. 7 Transcending postcolonialism, University of Cape Town, December 2006. 8 Conversely, journalists and political commentators sometimes invoke the concept of anti-modernities to refer negatively to traditionalist positions which oppose the modern life and its values. Pro-Western (or pro-American) commentators invoke the term to this effect, but the concept is also used in, for example, Indian public debate, negatively referring to both Hinduist and Islamic fundamentalisms. 9 Kapustin (2003) invokes multiple fragile modernities to account for the problematic post-communist development of Russia. 10 It should be noted that the uneven spread of modernity always lay at the heart of Gellners theory of nationalism (1983). 11 Deeb considers the Shii Muslim community she studied in Beirut as an example of an alternative and enchanted modernity; there are also signs that a related notion of sacred modernities is about to establish itself. 12 This term was proposed by the social theorist Gran Therborn (2003) to indicate the ways in which a variety of grand narratives and social forces have come to coexist and relate to each other, hence entangled (see also Arnason 2003). For an anthropological application of a similar position, see Deutsch, Probst and Schmidt (2002). The notion of modernities being entangled must again be seen as a reversal of an older sociological understanding of modernity as disentanglement. 13 Alternative modernities, however, was in use from the early 1990s. 14 In terms of its application, it is worth noting that the various concepts used by anthropologists are employed tendentially in what can be identied as a few salient sub-elds of the discipline: popular culture, consumption, religion, development, and gender and identity studies writ large (including self-other relations, ethnic movements, diaspora culture, etc.). I see nothing inherently natural about this tendency of application. A notion of multiple modernities should be equally applicable to traditional core themes in political or economic anthropology and comparative kinship studies. 15 Noteworthy exceptions are, of course, the Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks involving historicalcomparative analysis and long-term social evolutionary process that developed in the 1970s: see, for example, Friedman (1975); Wallerstein (1980); Wolf (1982). An alternative longue dure approach was developed by Jack Goody from the 1950s, with a research focus on literacy, production, inheritance, and kinship (Goody 1983). 16 For an exception, see Robertson (2006). 17 This framework resonates well with the anthropological literature on the spread and appropriation of the world religions, and especially well with the emerging literature that links projects of moderntiy with specic religious ideas and practices (see, e.g., Comaroff & Comaroff 1991; Keane 2007). REFERENCES Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture 2: 2, 1-24. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arce, A. & N. Long 2000. Anthropology, development and modernities: exploring discourses, counter-tendencies and violence. New York: Routledge. Arnason, J.P. 2003. Entangled communisms. European Journal of Social Theory 6, 307-25. Beck, U. 1997 [1993]. The reinvention of politics: rethinking modernity in the global social order (trans. M. Ritter). Cambridge: Polity. Bhabha, H. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity. Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J. & J.L. Comaroff 1991. Of revelation and revolution I: Christianity, Colonialism and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University Press. & 1997. Of revelation and revolution II: the dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier. Chicago: University Press. Deeb, L. 2006. An enchanted modern: gender and public piety in Shii Lebanon. Princeton: University Press. Delanty, G. 2006. Modernity and the escape from Eurocentrism. In Handbook of contemporary European social theory (ed.) G. Delanty, 266-78. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Deutsch, J.-G., P. Probst & H. Schmidt (eds) 2002. African modernities: entangled meanings in current debate. Oxford: James Currey.

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Les nombreuses modernits de lanthropologie : de limportance des concepts

Rsum Cet article se veut une revue critique des multiples paradigmes de la modernit employs aujourdhui en anthropologie. Il souligne galement les intersections entre le travail des anthropologues, la thorie sociale et la sociologie historique. Lauteur avance quen pointant les modernits multiples ou alternatives dans les tentatives de librer la modernit de ses connotations eurocentriques et modernistes, les anthropologues donnent une nouvelle valeur la modernit elle-mme. On se demandera si cette stratgie peut, en dnitive, avoir un sens. Faisant rfrence certaines branches de la thorie sociale, larticle dveloppe une position partir de laquelle il serait possible de revisiter le paradigme des modernits multiples. Cette position se base sur la reconnaissance de la spcicit de la modernit europenne et sur la caractristique qui la dnit : laccent constamment mis sur la transformation et la transgression, un tat de liminalit permanente .

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

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

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