Possible Modernities Author(s): James Faubion Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp.

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Possible Modernities
James Faubion
Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley

Further diacriticsof the modern?Perhapsthose we have are enough. A list of only the most frequentlycited of them would have to include a wide range of organizationalprocesses: industrialization,democratization,bureaucratization, of occupationalroles, among others. It would also have to and the differentiation and populationalcondensainclude such demographicprocesses as urbanization to tion. It would, in addition, have to make reference such sociotechnical complexes as alphabeticliteracy, mass communication,andpanopticism.The modern as we currentlyknow it is also a matterof politico-ethicalprinciples:secularism, meritocracism,and egalitarianism.It is a matterof such epistemic patternsas those of rationalism,scientism, and historicism. It is a matterof dispositions:totoward individualism, and toward empatheticcosmoward participationalism, of aestheticschools: primitivist,realist, surrealist,funcis It a matter politanism. and futurist,again among others. tionalist, fragmentalist, if Modernityis, nothing else, multidimensional.Opinions on which of its dimensionsare more definitive, which are less, significantlydiffer. Opinions on when, and where, and with whom the modernera might begin accordinglydiffer as well. For Burckhardt,and for many others of his generation,that era has its born, in near startingpoint in the ItalianRenaissance.For Weber, it is apparently earnestat least, with the Calvinists. For Hans Blumenberg,quite precisely, it is originallyincarnatein GiordanoBruno. For Foucault, it has its practicalinaugurationwith the reformersof the late 18thcenturyand its ethical and philosophical one, as for Habermasand perhaps for Schluchter, with Kant. For a variety of literaryscholarsfrom Barzunto Kern, it has its outset in some painteror metaphysicianor poet active at or aroundthis century's turn. KarlLowith locates the rootsof the modernin medievalism. HaroldBloom locates them in the Hellenistic period. Nietzsche appearsto locate them in the Ionia and Attica of the fifth and
fourth centuries B.c.'

Burckhardt, Weber, Blumenberg,Lowith, Nietzsche andthe rest may enrich as much as they undermineone another. But they cannot, stricto sensu, all be right-not, at least, if what they are all talking about is a "concrete universal" in moreor less preciseontological analogywith any other. Featurallyambiguous, however, the modernis ontologically ambiguousas well. Sometimes it is in fact manner,as a concreteuniversal. As often, treated,in the usual historiographical if it is as a treated strict, complex, particular.In the social sciences, esthough,
365

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pecially in the last 30 years, it has been treatedstill differently:as a perfectly or system, instancesof which might take hold generalor generalizablestructure can never achieve more thanpartialspeciIf about hermeneutics just anywhere. of the modem canits the hermeneutics if can never exhaust it object, ficity, fully not seem even to fix one. of the modem is, however, commensuratewith the inThe indeterminacy of the objects (or whateverthey might be) to which talkof modernity determinacy almost invariablyalludes: the present;and the self. It is even unlikely that we wouldtalk of modernityat all, unlikely at least thatwe would conceive of it quite so diversely, were we not also uncertainabout the characterof the present, and of our place within it. Anthropology,witness to the ever morerapidwaningof the "primitive" and the "traditional,"cannotavoid the moder as easily as it was once able to do. So far, however, it has taken very little account of the discursivenessof modernity (a social fact, after all), even less of the existential uncertaintybeneath. It has insteadlargely followed recent (and not so recent)2social scientific precedentin presumingthat, ultimatelyanyway, modernityis indeed a generalizedstructure, or system, or design for living distinct from "primitivity" or "tradition" but diacritics amenableto the same analyticseven so. It has not perhapsproliferated as other it has But available. those not, among things, yet seribeyond already do with to as much has whether considered "dysfunction," dismodernity ously and discursive and practical,as with anydisintegration, ruption,disagreement, few a with It has else. instead, exceptions,3largely focused upon one only thing or anotherof modernity'sputative"crystallizations,"and has largelytakenas its analyticalarchetypeone or anotherof modernity'sputativelybetterwroughtand demonstrablystable sociocultural formations-a ratherabstractUnited States amongthem. Even when it has addressedconflict, it has tendedto renprominent der it more or less necessarilyephemeral.Even Geertz's divisive "age of ideology" (1973:254) would appearto be a less thanfully modernand, if perhapslong, one. a neverthelesstransitional Whetheror not modernityhas firstor as much as anythingto do with disrupand disintegration,it in any case has somethingto do with tion and disagreement them, and somethingthat, as Foucault'sefforts have surelyestablished,4no Manchesterianmethodologyis likely entirely to capture.Whetheror not, moreover, to any social or cultural"system" whatever, can properlybe attributed modernity that have settled upon their design for to those it must at least be ascribed less or anothersettled upondoing without one reason for have living thanto those that in the elaborated The one. past two decades by both Foucaultand point, though measure in some is originallyWeber's:that modernity,before it is Blumenberg, of condition is a loss, the loss of faith in an "ethically ordered" anythingelse, life world, in what ancientlywould have been called "the cosmos."5 Anthropology, preciselybecause it is witness to the waning of its formeruniverseof study, is (whetheror not it acknowledgesit) witness also, and with singularintimacy, to the demographic,technological, organizational,economic, political, and noematic precipitantsof that condition of loss, within which, or in the existentially

POSSIBLEMODERNITIES 367

uncertainaftermathof which, it in any case also resides. Among those precipitants,the subversionperhapsnot of statusascriptionbutof the finitudeandclosure of status hierarchieswould from a variety of scholarly sources appearto be esOn the other hand, it would appearto be only one sign or pecially important.6 of these symptom what, days at least, may be the most widespreadmotor of sociocultural change: an emergent technocracy (compare, for example, Geertz 1973:236, 248-249). Typically, though not universally, technocracy's "challenge," its assault upon the sanctity or preeminenceof whateveraristocracyor plutocracyor oligarchy or other caste or castelike regime happens to be in the way, is less revolutionarythan revisionary. Even when revolutionary,and even when most successful, however, thatchallenge would appearnot to lead to quite the resultsthatWeberhimself most fearedand fromwhich his own horrifiedinterof modernity,howeverjust in its way, largelyderived. Nowhere, as yet, pretation do we find ourselves in an utterlydisenchanted,utterlyroutinized"iron cage." We insteadfind ourselves, or so I would submit, entangledin a rathermore complex political, epistemic, and valuationaldualism:betweenthe zweckrationaland the wertrationalperhaps;between decisionism and loyalism, betterput. Whether in Japan,or the Netherlands,or America, whetherin other "older" states or in a of thatdualism is in any case no more varietyof "newer" ones, the instauration obdurate permanenceof it. Whetheror not such states strikingthanthe apparently as those which we inhabitneed their share of decisionists as much as their share of loyalists, they thus seem more or less withoutrespiteto have them. With them, the cosmos cannot preserve the integrityit once may have enjoyed. On the otherhand, it appearsrarely,if ever, simply to disappear.The problem thatpoliticalcumepistemic cum valuationaldualismsfoster, the problem,for thatmatter,thatany relativelysustainedclash betweendual, or triple,or still more ways of seeing and being tends to foster, is at the very least not one of fashioning, or refashioning,the cosmos from the ground up. It is consequentlynot the primordial Problem of Meaning that Weber saw as thefons et origo of religious idea-

tion and thatGeertzhas more recentlyexpandedfor us. It is not firstthe problem of suffering(thoughit is sometimes construedas one), nor even firstthe problem of absurdity(though it is sometimes construedas that one, too), as much as it is a problem of suddenly finding onself with "beliefs," and accordingly, with doubts.It perhapsrests less in the mere discovery thatone's own "beliefs" differ from someone else's than in the discovery that one's own "beliefs" have been acquiredquite differentlyfrom someone else's. It perhapsrests less even in that discoverythan in the discovery that the bases of one's own "beliefs" may be no better(andno worse) thananyone else's. Call it the Problemof Foundations. It is by no means exclusively modern. It may, moreover, provoke a retreat frommodernityquite as often as it propelsa marchin the otherdirection. But the problemof foundationsis, as we modems cannot but be well aware, characteristically and naggingly modem even so. It is the impetus, obviously enough, of both conflicts and innumerable crystallizations,many of which we have already which be of could seen, many (it supposed)we have not. Once it gains a foothold, it seems to be no less transitory thanabiding. It has not, I think, receivedremotely

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the anthropologicalattention it merits. It has not been recognized, either, for what, I think, it is: if not exclusively moder, still the fairly precise point of defor anythingwe might reasonablyidentify as a modem bent or turning. parture The problemof foundationsdoes not, however, have a distinctivelymodernsolution. Ratherthe contrary: it is one thatmodernitymanages, sometimesexploits, sometimesembraces,but one that it distinctivelyleaves unsolved. In otherterms, the problemof foundationsis quite so characteristically modernbecauseit imposesthose very phenomenologicalboundaries againstwhich the "modernsensibility" has, in several distinctvariants,arisenand in veiled or explicit referenceto which thatsame sensibilityhas, againin severalvariants,come into its own. The proposalat least has the virtueof a certainintuitiveappeal, and hence of being plausiblyclose to what "we" moders take "our" modernityto be. Because of and beyond that, it perhapshas the virtue of offering about as concise a fulcrumfor comparingnot only one and anothernative view of modernitybut also one and anothermodernnative's views as can at presentbe hoped. Beyond that, it has the virtue of being neither entirely speculative nor entirely new. It is, after a fashion anyway, also the workinghypothesisof Blumenberg's
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). As its title indicates, the treatise is

it is, moreover, strictlyand solely conpolemical. It is strictlyhistoriographical; cerned with the history of certain Western ideas: "curiosity," originality, free will, and progress, among others. All the same, it is concernedwith a period remarkablefor its many political and epistemic and valuationaldualisms, and it begins not from an ideationalcoalescence but ratherfrom a precursoryhiatus: between the Hellenistic doctrineof the Deus absconditusand its "anti-gnostic" Medievaldenial. Of thathiatus, "modernity" (as Blumenbergunderstands it) is precisely not a bridging, not a synthesis, not a resolutionof any sort at all. It is insteadan alternative,foundedupon or flowing from "self-assertion":
An existentialprogram,accordingto which [one] posits his existence in an historical situationand indicatesto himself how he is going to deal with the realitysurrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities thatare open to him. [1983:138] The program, otherwise put, is simply one of getting along, more or less in the

"here andnow" (cf. also Foucault 1984:40ff), withoutbenefitof the guidanceof ethicalor intellectualabsolutes. Every conception of modernityis a socioculturalfact, an imbeddedinstallationin the inventionof the very thing to which it refers;every conceptionis, to some degree, likely compromisedby its imbeddedness.Blumenberg'sconception of when, and where, and even how modernitybegins is, accordingly, open to dispute.His conceptionof self-assertion,however, if also open to dispute, is still instructive,not least because it incidentallyunderscoresa numberof other conceptions and vantages and practicesthat the anthropologyof modernity, indeed anthropology,has as yet barely touched. Among them, those that are, like the practiceof self-assertion,not simply "in history" but productivelyandreproductively "historicizing" are perhaps the most neglected.7 Indeed, all the ethno-

POSSIBLEMODERNITIES 369

graphicresearchfrom Malinowskiforwardinto one or anothersense of a mythic or legendarypast remainsstill almost entirely uncomplemented by researchinto the ecology or the semiotics of one or anotherantinecessitarian sense of the contingencyof boththe past andthe present,the sense thatperhapsthings do not have to be just as they are. The lacuna is a ponderousone. Not least, it leaves us still stratequite poorly versed in either the social precipitants,the representational gies, or the materialimplicationsof what is arguablythe most perduringof specifically modem debates:between one or anotherexpression of positivistic constructivismandone or anotherexpressionof factitiousor scientisticdeterminism. It consequentlyleaves us poorly versed in what is arguablythe most "peculiar" of specifically modem achievements; the legitimation and, however circumof debates and othercriticalperformances scribed,the institutionalization aimed, than at manifestlyand, it would seem, also substantively,less at the maintenance the "improvement"and "overcoming" of the socially and culturallygiven-at times, even of "the social" and "the cultural"themselves. However peculiar, such achievements suggest at least that certaintypes of conflict, of intermittent disharmony,areno moreeccentrican aspectof modernity thancertaintypes of consonanceand constancy. Perhapsthey also suggest something of what is involved in inhabitingthe less certain, more perspectival, more provisionalphenomenologicaland social regions that appearto unfold in the absence of ready absolutes. They obviously do not compel one to conclude that modernityis inherentlywithouteitherstabilityor systematicity.But perhapsthey suggest insteadthat a portionat least of modernity'sactual stabilityand systemand reconstructionaticitylies in a commitmentto socioculturaldeconstruction a commitment,at least, to consideringthat project. Whetheror not the commitment was what Levi-Strausshad in mind when he distinguishedprimitivesocieties from their "hotter" (and more modern)contraries,whetheror not that distinction is even justifiable, a certain resort to post-structuralist,"post-textual" hermeneutics of some aspects of modernity would, though for the interpretation more than others, in any case appearto be obligatory.8Whateverelse the hermeneuticsof modernitymay or may not have to be, however, it must certainlybe a hermeneuticsof self. "We," of course, are modern. So, too, of course, and whetherwe like it or not, is anthropology,one legitimatedandinstitutional critical performanceamong many academic others. Short of being in bad faith, neither we noranthropology can be muchof anythingelse. For the anthropology of modat the ernity least, comfortingdichotomy between self and other, even between subjectandobject, tends not to dissolve but surelyto be blurredas a consequence. How to proceed?Certainlynot by reinstatingsome latter-dayversionof a mission civilisatrice, guided by the conviction that, all of us being equal, we can demand of anyonewhat we can demandof ourselves. We may all be existing, or be soon to exist, in the shadowsof the same condition, the same loss, the same existential problematic.But our situationscontinue, in many otherrespects, radicallyto differ. One may hope they always will. On to dialogue, to pluralvoices? The end is admirable.But I confess that, after several months in the field, I find it largely utopian. People are, for very good reasons, often distrustfulof dialogue. Even

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when they are willing to converse, they are often unwilling to be quoted. We cannotin any case insist upon symposia. We can listen, on the otherhand, though less in the simple nameof recordingthe Other'svoice thanin the name of putting our own into question. Habermassuggests that enlightenmentdepends upon a "therapeuticself-critique" (1984:21). The anthropologyof modernity can, I think, aspireat presentto that. Conflicts,rifts, in diverse domains, even of the most chasmic sort, are nothing new to Greece, which has a devastatingcivil warless thanfourdecadesbehind it, and which has remainedvery much in socioculturalmotion ever since. In Januaryof 1987, for example, PresidentSartzetakis'refusalto commutethe sentence of a certain ChristosRoussos, convicted in 1976 and under circumstancesthat have repeatedlybeen examined and discussed of the murderof his male lover, met with an unheardof public backlash, a subsequent, conciliatory statement from the courts, and a qualifieddenouncement,some few weeks later, from the firstpanel on discrimination Parliament's European againsthomosexuals.During the same period, the popularmedia, at the urging and with the partialfinancial supportof the government,initiated a determinedand fairly sober instructional campaignagainstthe contractionand spreadof AIDS, which neverthelessdid not entirelydo away with a generalsentimentof fear and suspicionand which did not preventa groupof registerednursesandlaw enforcementagentsfrom seizing and a Spanish singer who arrivedin the countryto false claims that she quarantining was sufferingfromthe disease. A disputeover educationalfundinganduniversity admissionsresultedin severalhostile encountersbetweenthe responsibleMinister and discontentedstudents. Prime Minister Papandreou,amid widespreadcomplaint, insistentcalls for election from a resurgentRight, and a series of strikesin oppositionto a long-standingand supposedly anti-inflationary policy of litotita, "austerity," significantlyreorganizedhis Cabinet(and has since significantlyreorganizedit again). In the spring, a Soviet-sponsoredplan to constructan aluminumfoundrywithinthe boundaries of the Delphic landscapewas, afterlengthy local debate and persistentdisapprovalfrom various of the membersof the EuropeanEconomic Community,finally tabled, and the projectedplant's site relosurcatedelsewhere. The presenceof Americanmilitarybases anddisagreements the more continued to Greece's in NATO rounding membership provokeunrest, so when the Americanambassador overtly accusedcertainhigh Greekofficials of having bargainedwith terrorists.A furious contestationbetween the Orthodox Synod and the governmentover the Church's administrative province stirreda spectacularmass outcry and the virtual secession of a cohort of Mount Athos thathadbeen years in the makmonks. Moreor less concomitantly,arrangements ing were finalizedfor the releasingof nationalratio stationsfrom state control. The place, in short, is changing, and indeed changingso rapidlyas to make any resortto a singular"native's point of view" daringat best and to make most resortsto the ethnographic presentnot simply artificialbut positively laughable. On the other hand, Greece is still Greece, and what might, roughly or heuristiscene is, by most of the morefacile cally, be spokenof as its centralcontemporary modstructural-functional reckonings anyway, now as before straightforwardly

POSSIBLEMODERNITIES 371

endowed er. An industrialdemocracy, urban, largely literate, participationist, with its fair shareof institutionsof critique, in those respects Greece looks altogetherlike its WesternEuropeansisters. Among the "culturalelite," the stratum to which my own fieldworkwas largely confined, there are moreoverthose who are as gracefully cosmopolitan, as intent upon one or anotherprogramof selfassertion,as accustomedto gettingalong withoutbenefitof the guidanceof ethical and intellectual absolutes as any soi-disant "modem" could ever hope to be. Among them, there are even quite a few who are passionatelyinterestedin the very topic of "modernity" itself. The twist, however, in what might otherwise seem a quite consistent tableauarises precisely there:the topic of "modernity" one. It is a relativelyrecentimport. There are difis not, as it were, a traditional sometimesused, has largelyartistic ficultieseven with the lexeme: modernikotita, overtones,and is not "good Greek"; the more purelyDemotic neoterikotita,ambiguous between "modernism" and "modernity," is a just-born coinage of hardlyany currencywhatever.The topic is not the only import,either. The agents of industrialization have, since the late '50s, been no more often native than forof governmentare primarily eign.9 The constitutionallydemarcatedapparatuses derived,thoughnot quite so recently, from those of Franceand Belgium. Hence, Greece is in many respects modem without, so to speak, having become so.' Any institutionalimportationor invasion is likely to spawn paradox. With its most commonparadox,thatof "poly-mentality," Greekshave been burdened for centuries;with it, they have, from the authorof the Byzantine epic Diyenis ("Double-born")Akritasto Nikos Kazantzakis,provenquite adept. The paradox of an imported or invasive modernity is, however, less tractable. The irony imbeddedwithinit is above all the ironyof what in Bourdieu's(1984:120ff) sense once put mustbe nameda "dominated"freedom. One of my native interlocutors the matterin severe summaryfor me. "Politically," he said, "we are not a colony. Culturally,we are." The force of thatirony is of course felt beyond Greece, but within it perhaps most acutely by the culturalelite, the stratummost frequentlycalled upon not simply to face it but to make some articulateassizementof it as well. The irony is in anycase importantly responsiblefor makingthe taskof defininganddirecting the Greeksituationquite as fraughtwith uncertaintyand quite as exasperatingas in fact it is. It is correlativelyresponsiblefor complicatingthattask with the categorial requisite also of defining and directing Greece's relation to the several territoriesof "the West"-a nonentity, perhaps, but a practicallyunavoidable one all the same. On this matteras on so many others, views are diverse. The most gracefully cosmopolitan, the least absolutistof those with which I am acquaintedis far less preoccupiedwith either "hellenicity" or "occidentality" as such than with the creative and re-creativepotentialof juxtaposing the hellenic "here" with one or anotheroccidental "there." Indeed, if there is a stylistically integral"Greek modem," whetherin the artsor in politics or in the no less vivid domainof personaldeportment,its content at least would seem to flow quite precisely fromthat(often ironic)juxtaposition.If thereis such a specifiably"Greek" modernity, it would, in my acquaintance,also seem to be wrought by a quite

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uniformcadre. Not to be equated with the socioculturalupperclass, that cadre would neverthelessappearto be largely if not entirelycomposedof personswho, in copious possession of both social and culturalcapital, do in fact belong to the upperclass. " Thatconjunctionis by no meanscoincidental.Sophisticationin the handling of thejuxtapositionof the hellenic "here" and the occidental "there" is in fact a quite self-conscious and quite inexpendableuppercompetency, reflectingamong other things the very prodigious sanction given to that sort of polylingual and polyculturalfluency that can only be acquiredby those who have or who know how to obtainresourcessufficientto enable them to travel, to live, and above all to be educatedabroad-particularly in Paris, but also in Berlin, in London, and on the AmericanEast Coast. Sophisticationin the exploitationof thatjuxtaposiof the "here" and the "there" tion, in the (usually partial)instrumentalization and in the creative playing off of the one against the other, is also a self-consciously uppercompetency. No doubt it reflects, in some measure, a still dominatedfreedom. But it also reflectsthe confidenceprecisely of thatsocial segment that, having least cause to worry over either the security or the dominanceof its native standing, is consequently least likely to see either the "here" or the "there" as a preternatural agency to be adoredor to be despised but in any case altogetherbeyond being manipulatedor put to use. The several ethoses of that segment could not, in that respect, be in more strikingcontrastto those ethoses typicalof segments immediatelyunderneath.If the Greek middle class has even morecause to worryover the securityof its (dominated)native standingthanthe lower ones, that is in partbecause it has more to lose. If, on the other hand, its life chances are no less dependentupon the convolutionof international logistics than those of its lower analogues, they are less easily calculable, and the life chancesof the older, proprietary fractionof the middleclass in any case calculable differentlyfrom those of the newer, managerialfraction. Middle readingsof the relationsbetweenGreece andthe West arecorrespondingly dense, and frequently at odds. Some aremore worldlythanothers. But many of thembetraya decidedly reaction against victimization, imagined, threatened,or real, pretematuralizing from within, from withoutor from both. Mystificationsperhaps, in partat least, are neverthelessobjectively mosuch models of and models for self-preservation tivated.They do not imply a returnof the cosmos; in Greece as most everywhere of that sort is largely dead. else, traditionalism In Greece as most everywhereelse, on the otherhand, isolationismis not at all dead. In Greece particularly,the least mystifying and least mystifiedexpressions of it are typically also the most explicitly political. Hence, for example, the platformof the moderate, "interiorist"wing of the CommunistLeft. Somewhat to be strongly"developmentaltoo ambivalent over the worthof industrialization ist" (cf. Schneider,Schneider, and Hansen 1972:340), that platformin any case favors aftodhiakhirisi(the self-managementof foreign enterprise, see Manezis 1986:37) and topiki aftodhiikisi("local self-government":a sort of administrative federalismfirstbroughtto Greekcountrysideby the Leftist resistanceduring the Second WorldWar). It favors educationalas well as most other sorts of self-

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againstdependency, and is sufficiency. It is conversely and quite understandably political andeconomic ties to the accordinglyagainstGreece's deeply entrenched capitalistempires, especially the United States. Unlike its pro-Soviet, "exteriorist" counterpart, and rathermore like the platformof Papandreou's rulingPanhellenic Socialist Movement, the interioristplatformis neutralist.Like the platformof all otherGreekparties, it is unabashedlynationalist. With little chance of enactment,it is moreoveralmostexclusively a platform of principle,andit is in principleandby principleneither"vulgarly" Marxistnor "vulgarly" enthusiasticabout "cultural" revolutions. Its most usual proponents but from various higher class sectors: accordinglycome not from the proletariat the culturallydominantbut economically dominated literati, the culturallyrespectable"liberalprofessionals," and the culturallyrespectfulpetite bourgeoisie (Manezis 1986:37). Its metataxicappeal, odd in some respects, is in any case due perhapsless to its being stringentlyCommunist(in fact it is not) thanto its offering a cogentrepresentational strategyof resistance-and not simply againsteconomic domination,either. Beyond at least one militaryjunta, beyond urbanpollution and urbansprawl, beyond one of Europe's highest rates of unemployment,dehave also stimulated and exacerbateda widependency and peripheralization spreadandself-suspectingcomplex of "relativedeprivation"-more preciselyof 12The highly selective andoccasionallydis"culturalfallenness" or degradation. approving gaze of the touristandthe foreign scholarhas only reinforcedthatcomplex. The literati,the liberalprofessionals, and the petite bourgeoisie have alike sufferedfrom it most. Against it as well, the interioriststrategyis, briefly put, less negationalthaninversional.Its abidingpostulate:if Greece is fallen, the capitalistWest has made it fall even further. Isolationism, however, also has expression-still typically middling, but moremystified, certainlyless literaland political thansymbolic and sentimental, considerablyless resistive than merely reactive-in nostalgism, and particularly in a nostalgiafor the rustic and insularpuritiesof a Greece that existed, or supposedly existed, sometime in the not too distantpast:before the junta, before industrialization, duringthe interludebetween the Firstand Second WorldWars. It is occasionally displaced into a love of everything laiko ("laic," "popular"). "Essentialist"in Geertz'sprecise sense of thatterm(1973:241), it is occasionally displacedas well into a rathermore abstractpreoccupationwith the "true" substanceof ellinikotita("Hellenicity," "Greekness"). It is, on the otherhand, diaxenomaniaorxenolatria ("madmetricallyopposedto the stridentlyantinostalgic ness for the foreign," "worship of the foreign": often heard in Demotic) characteristicof those fractionsof the newer middle class whose store of economic, social, and culturalcapital is almost entirely derived by association, director inor academicenterprise of or in the West. direct,with one or anothermanufactural Both sorts of sentimentfind an easy enough object in the ethnographer-this one at least. Evidently enough Western, I not infrequentlydiscovered myself in the role of the corrosive invader;and perhaps, anthropologystill being, in our supI not infrequently was. posedly postcolonialera, a largely unilateralundertaking, No less frequently,however, I discovered myself in the role of the enviable em-

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issary of an enviable land whose bounties could be but dreamed. I was in fact once told, by an up-and-comingrightist and newer middle politician whose undaunted to debunk,that "hegemony was pro-Westerism I was busily attempting just fine"; and whetheror not others of his same class cohort would be quite so convincedof hegemony's goodnesses, a greatmany of them have surrendered to its seductionsall the same. That surrender is manifest in the mannerismand the mimeticismof many of the accoutrementsand denizens of Athens' more chic quartiers.It is manifestin the nationaldebt, which has steadily climbed as more andmore money has been spent on Westerntrappingsand Westernluxuries. It is manifestsometimes in an antipopulistsnobbery, sometimes in a "taste" for the folk. As elsewhere, so, too, in Greece, the convolutionsof international logistics thuspress an alreadyoperativeschizmogenesisnot simplytowardsentimentalbut also towardstylistic extremes. Not coincidentally, the symbolic isolationist and his or her "modernistic"altershow an almost compulsive scorn for one another, all the more hostile perhapsbecause both are in competitionfor the same sociocultural resources-in any event, for the same sociocultural"space."'Anti-Westernism, is, in the name of authenticityamong other things, a weapon frequently wieldedin thatinternalcontest;pro-Westemismis, usually in the nameof an "escape from backwardness,"frequentlywielded as well. If a meeting of minds is unlikely, thatis perhapsbecause socioculturalresourcesand socioculturalspaces are indeed scarce. Not everyone is at leisure to gamble with what he or she has. Nostalgia and its opposite are, in Greece as perhapselsewhere, sentiments of duress.Neithernostalgicnor antinostalgic,neither"essentialistic" nor "modernistic," for thatmatterneither"epochalistic" (Geertz 1973:241) nor necessarily "developmentalistic"either, the Greek modem is somewheremore leisurely in between. The lesson is not that, in Greece or anywhereelse, what might be spokenof perhapsnot as an ethos, certainlynot as an ideology,13but instead, and moreabstractly,as the modem "alternative"is likely to be of little sociocultural impact.In Greeceat least, in partbecauseof the endowmentsof those who pursue it, thatalternativeis of no mean impactat all. The lesson, perhaps,is ratherthat the task of being and becoming modern is likely to be quite differentfrom one place to the next, and hence thatmodernityitself is likely to be not one but many things. The lesson, perhaps,is also thatthe task of being and becoming modern, however it might differ from place to place, is likely to be arduouseverywhere. A decidedly unsettlingethnographic(and of course ethnocentric)condescension has on several occasions already resulted from making far too little of that arduousness. The issue is not, however, whether we can be free of all bias. We cannotbe. We can, on the otherhand, at least remindourselvesthata self-serving reverenceof modernityis bound to do no more anthropologicalgood than the orientalizingromanticizationof the primitive has already done. The issue is whetherand to what extent it mightbe plausiblethatthe "modernalternative"is suited, perhapsnot to what the world once was but to what, in all its particularly unisolated,frantic,and relentlesslyweird splendor,it is now; and that in its suitability-which is somethingelse besides either its effortlessnessor its adaptabilbut its moralweight in fact lies. ity-not simply its anthropological

POSSIBLE MODERNITIES 375 Notes I would like to thankMia Fullerfor readingandcommentingupon sevAcknowledgments. eralearlierdraftsof this article. I would especially like to thankPaul Rabinow, for similar readingsandcomments, andfor numerouschallengingandproductivediscussionsas well. The observationsupon which this article is based were collected from October 1986 throughJune 1987. Financial supportwas provided by the ITT International Fellowship Foundation.Beyond the Foundation, I would like to thank the staffs of the Instituteof International Educationand of the American EducationalFoundationin Greece for proandadvice before, during,andaftermy stay in the field. While vidingme with information there,I was affiliatedwith the Academy of Athens' Centerfor Researchon GreekSociety, and would like to thankGrigorisGizelis, Eva Kalpourtzi,and Iliana Andonakopoulou of the Centerfor theirconsiderableinformation,advice, and patience as well. 'See Burckhardt (1954). Weber's position is to be found in the closing pages of The ProtestantEthic (1958:180-183). For Blumenberg'sposition, see The Legitimacyof the Modern Age (1983:469ff). Foucault's position is quite elegantly suggested in the second part of The Order of Things (1970:217-221), but somewhat differently, and more explicitly stated in Discipline and Punish (1979:105-131), in which the politico-epistemics of reformismare given center stage. On the ideationaland attitudinallineamentsof modernity, see Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?"(1984). Similarly, see Habermas'firstvolume of The Theory of Communicative Action (1984:211-226). Compare Wolfgang Schluchter'sRise of WesternRationalism(1981). Barzun'sClassic, Romantic, and Modern, a manifestoof antimodernism in 1943; Kern's "rhe(andpro-Romanticism) appeared torical" portraitof a "cubist" modernity, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (1983), precisely40 years later. Blumenberg'sargumentin The Legitimacyof the Modern Age is specifically directed against Karl Lowith's "medievalizing" and secularizationist readingof modernity(Lowith 1949;pace, cf. Blumenberg1983:27-35). The most recent, and singularlysubtle, "Hellenizing" construalof modernity,after Nietzsche (cf. 1956), has appeared in HaroldBloom's Agon (1982). 2Parsons is by far the most influential. See, in particular,Lerner(1958) and the several collected in Old Societies and New States (Geertz, ed. 1963). Parsons'most develessays and Process in ModernSocieties (1960). Comparealso oped statement appearsas Structure Bendix's more particularistic "Traditionand ModernityReconsidered"(1967). 3See, for those exceptions, Bourdieu(1972) and Rabinow (1975). 4Aparticularly starkportrait anddiscussionof characteristically modernpolitico-epistemic battlingmay be found in I, Pierre Riviere . .. (Foucault,ed. 1975). 5Foucault spoke less of "the cosmos" than, more precisely perhaps,of the "Classical," the collapse of which in any case allowed the "modernepisteme" to emerge (cf. Foucault 1970:218-220). See, comparably,Blumenberg(1983:137ff) and Weber (on disenchantment, most eloquently, 1946b:139-142, 155; on the loss of the "ethically ordered" cosmos, 1946a:350-357). 6Seeespecially Fallers' essay in Old Societies and New States (1963:158-219).
7So far as I know, the first (and still virtuallythe only) analysis of the historicizingcon-

sciousness undertaken by an anthropologistis to be found in the closing chapterof The

376 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY than it ought Savage Mind (L6vi-Strauss1966:258ff). It is indeed much less appreciated to be, thoughit veers in its assertionthathistoryis a methodwithoutan object (1966:262) so far from ethnographic reality as to underminethe force of its largerargument.Sahlins' more recent study (1985) has in fact almost nothing to say about the specifically historicizing consciousness, and his continualist,processualistview of the relationbetween culturalconceptions and temporalevents (cf. 1985:144ff) seems to me not to offer a very promisingapproachto an analysis of the conditions underwhich that consciousness has itself, either. In contrast,and beyond Blumenemergedandhas succeededin reproducing berg, see Foucault(1970:217-221, 328ff) and HaydnWhite (1973). HaroldBloom's "practicalpoetics." BeyondAgon, seeA Map 8Ihave in mindparticularly of Misreading(1975:3-6, 83-105). 9Forthe periodbetween 1960 and 1966, for example, fully half of all industrial investments in Greececame from multinational In one-third of the industrial Greek 1970, corporations. sectorwas still foreign. See Yannitsis(1986:256; 1983:94). '?Thepoint has been made by several native scholarsas well. Among them, see Tsoukalas (1983:38-39). "Hereand in the pages thatfollow I use not Marx's notion of class but ratherBourdieu's, itself a synthesis of Marx's notion and Weber's notion of the Stand, or status group. See Bourdieu'sDistinction (1984:xi-xii). '2On American,involvementin the 1967junta, scholarlyopinion (see, foreign, particularly e.g., Yanoulopoulos1977:87;Tsoukalas 1981:190ff;Veremis 1986:141-142) is generally cautious, at least in print. Among the Greek public, however, there is very little doubt aboutthe CIA's facilitative role in bringingthe colonels to power. As for the rate of unemployment,estimates official, quasi-officialand unofficial rangedduringmy stay from between9 and 20%. '3Foucault (1984) indeed suggests that modernitybe substantivelyconstruedas an ethos. It seems to me, as the obvious enough differenceof ethos between such a modem as Kant and such a modem as Foucaultitself indicates, that modernity,conceived as I have been particularly conceiving it throughoutthis article as a personalcondition, would betterbe construed as imposingcertainphenomenologicalconstraintspreclusiveof the formationof certainethoses andfacilitativeof the formationof a varietyof others. Similarly, modernity is not itself a "model of and model for" the managementof any particular practicalproblem whatever-not even the problem of foundations. At most, it imposes those limits withinwhich such models must, whatevertheirpurposes,be wrought-at least if they are to be "modern." References Cited Barzun,Jacques 1943 Classic, Romantic,and Modern.Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press. Bendix, Reinhard Studiesin Society andHisandModernityReconsidered.Comparative 1967 Tradition tory 9(2):292-347. Bloom, Harold 1975 A Map of Misreading.New York:Oxford UniversityPress. 1982 Agon: Towardsa Theoryof Revisionism. Oxford:Oxford UniversityPress.

POSSIBLE MODERNITIES 377 Blumenberg,Hans 1983 The Legitimacyof the ModernAge. RobertM. Wallace, trans.Cambridge: MIT Press. Bourdieu,Pierre 1972 Esquisse d'une th6oriede la pratique.Geneve. 1984[1979] Distinction:A Social Critiqueof the Judgmentof Taste. RichardNice, trans.Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress. Jacob Burckhardt, 1954 The Civilizationof the Renaissancein Italy. New York. Fallers, Lloyd E. 1963 Equality, Modernity, and Democracy in the New States. In Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernityin Asia and Africa. Clifford Geertz, ed. Pp. 158-219. New York:The Free Press. Foucault,Michel 1970 The Orderof Things: An Archaeologyof the HumanSciences. New York:Vintage Books. 1979[1975] Discipline andPunish:The Birthof the Prison. Alan Sheridan,trans.New York:Vintage Books. 1984 What Is Enlightenment? CatherinePorter,trans. In The FoucaultReader. Paul Rabinow, ed. Pp. 32-50. New York:PantheonBooks. Foucault,Michel, ed. 1975 I, PierreRiviere, having slaughtered my mother,my sister, andmy brother. . . . A Case of Parricidein the NineteenthCentury.FrankJellinek, trans.New York:Pantheon Books. Geertz,Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures.New York:PantheonBooks. Geertz, Clifford, ed. 1963 Old Societies andNew States:The Quest for Modernityin Asia and Africa. New York:The Free Press. Habermas,Jirgen 1984 The Theoryof CommunicativeAction, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. ThomasMcCarthy,trans. Boston: Beacon Press. Kern, Stephen 1983 The Cultureof Time and Space: 1880-1918. Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press. Lerner,Daniel 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizingthe Middle East. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. Levi-Strauss,Claude 1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press. Lowith, Karl 1949 Meaningin History:The Theological Presuppositions of the Philosophyof History. Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press. Manezis, Aristovoulos 1986 I Exelixi ton Politikon Thesmon stin Elladha:Anazitondasmia dhiskoli nomopiisi. In I Elladhase Exelixi. Pp. 15-60. Athens:Exandas. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1956 The Birthof Tragedy. FrancisGolffing, trans. New York:AnchorBooks.

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