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Alternative Modernities

Prospectus

The Ethnohistory Workshop for 1996-7 will center on the problems posed by the idea of modernity when viewed as a cross-cultural phenomenon. In choosing this topic, the Workshop seeks to take advantage of a growing interest in the question of modernity across a wide range of disciplines. Emerging from this interdisciplinary discussion are numerous challenges to conventional understandings of "the modern" and the Eurocentric and linear narratives that these understandings often presuppose.

The concept of modernity has long been central to the western world's view of its own place in both space and time. This concept often supplies a unifying feature by which western societies can be grouped together in contrast to non-western societies. Colonial and post-colonial relations between western and other societies are often described in terms that identify "modernity" with "westernization." Modernity, in many familiar accounts, is also what distinguishes the present as separated from the past by a variety of profound ruptures. Depending on the framework in question, these ruptures may distinguish, for example, the world of gifts from that of commodities, the primordial ties of kinship from the impersonal relations of state formation, or the world of belief from that of rational inquiry. Running through many of these oppositions is an underlying theme, that modernity is marked by a growing belief in, and high value accorded to, the powers of human self-transformation.

Whether such formulations of the concept of modernity serve nostalgia, cultural or political critique, or triumphalism, they tend to reinforce both the opposition between "the west and the rest" and an implicit narrative of linear progress. But cross-cultural study throws into question many of the assumptions underlying conventional ideas about modernity.

The challenge takes two basic forms. On the one hand, it is an empirical question what forms "modernity" will take in different contexts, leaving open the possibility that new and unpredicted forms may be emerging. On the other hand, the multiple histories of "modernity" around the world may pose theoretical challenges to our understanding of modernity even in the west. For example, are "gift" and "commodity" economies really starkly opposed, and is the former as absent from western societies as ethnographers once thought? Does the development of state apparatuses or rationalized markets necessarily entail growing secularization? What is the actual fate of the family in modern societies? Certainly current events in the west suggest that earlier predictions have not fared well. The proposed theme is intended to bring together scholars of both western and non-western societies who are rethinking the concept of modernity and the assumptions that lie behind it.

Speakers, 1996-1997

Fall 1996

September 26, 1996: Sumathi Ramaswamy, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Paper Title: "Virgin Mother, Beloved Other: The Erotics of Tamil Nationalism"

October 16, 1996: Charles Taylor, Department of Philosophy, McGill University
Paper Title: "Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere"

November 14, 1996: Nicholas Thomas, Department of Anthropology, Australian National University
Paper Title: "Native and/or National: Indigenous References in Antipodean Modernism"

December 5, 1996: Svetlana Alpers, Department of Art History, University of California at Berkeley
Paper Title: "Realities of the Studio, or, the Vexations of Art"

Spring 1997

January 30, 1997: Robert Foster, Department of Anthropology, University of Rochester
Paper Title: "Commercial Mass Media in Papua New Guinea: Notes on Agency, Bodies, and Commodity Consumption"

February 27, 1997: Mary Elizabeth Berry, Department of History, University of California at Berkeley
Paper Title: "The Invention of Society in Early Modern Japan"

March 27, 1997: Deborah Poole, Department of Anthropology, New School for Social Research
Paper Title: "Charles Wiener in the Land of the Incas: The Sentimental Boundaries of Nineteenth-Century Americanism"

April 17, 1997: Lucette Valensi, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Paper Title: "The Sheherazade Syndrome: Literature and Politics in Post-Colonial Algeria"