01 23.1 kahn anthropology and modernity

Anthropology and ModernityAuthor(s): Joel S. KahnSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 5 (December 2001), pp. 651-680Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/322558 .

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651

C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001� 2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4205-0003$3.00

Anthropology andModernity1

by Joel S. Kahn

Against those who have taken anthropologists to task for flirtingwith the “meta-narratives” of modernity, this article argues thatit is incumbent on them to engage with both modernity andmodernist narratives far more directly and explicitly than in thepast. This holds even, or especially, for those who, in positing anotion of multiple modernities, have managed to hold modernistnarrative at arm’s length, neglecting the potential fruitfulness ofjuxtaposing Western and non-Western experiences of what Ha-bermas has called the project of modernity. The encounter be-tween anthropology and modernity is generated on the one handby changes in the lives of the subjects of ethnographic research,but the fact of these changes raises more searching questionsabout whether ethnographers ever studied genuinely premodernpeoples and cultures. The reflexive imperative, moreover, con-firms the need to recognize anthropology’s own modernist ori-gins. Finally it is argued that it is critical modernist theory inthe Hegel-Marx-Weber tradition that is the most pertinent to theethnographic encounter and that the exercise of bringing togethercritical theory and ethnographic knowledge, while conflictual,produces fruitful results for both sides.

j o e l s . k a h n is Professor of Anthropology at La Trobe Univer-sity (Melbourne 3083, Australia [[email protected]]). Born in1946, he was educated at Cornell University (B.A., 1967) and theLondon School of Economics and Political Science (M.Phil., 1969;Ph.D., 1974). He has taught at University College London, theUniversity of Sussex, and Monash University. His research inter-ests include development, social change, nation building, andidentity in Indonesia and Malaysia and the history of anthropol-ogy. Among his publications are Constituting the Minangkabau:Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia (Oxfordand Providence: Berg, 1993), Culture, Multiculture, Postculture(London: Sage, 1995), and Modernity and Exclusion (London:Sage, 2001). The present paper was submitted 29 xi 00 and ac-cepted 23 v 01.

1. An early version of this paper was presented at a symposium Iorganized at the University of Sussex. I thank the participants fortheir comments and criticisms, which helped me to clarify mythinking on these issues. In particular, I want to thank ZygmuntBauman, Filippo Osella, and Jon Mitchell for their contributions tothe discussions. Christopher Houston and Maila Stivens read andcommented on a draft of this paper. I am extremely grateful to bothof them, even if I did not always follow their advice. This means,of course, that they are in no way responsible for the final argument,with which they will doubtless disagree at certain points. Theircomments were, nonetheless, invaluable. Finally, I thank FrancescoFormosa for valuable research assistance in the rewriting of thepaper for publication.

In a recent assessment of the pertinence of theories ofmodernity to the practice of anthropology. Englund andLeach criticize anthropologists for flirting with the“meta-narratives of modernity.” The concept of mo-dernity may have been substantially pluralized and re-lativized in recent anthropology (see, e.g., Comaroff andComaroff 1993, 1999; Appadurai 1996; Rofel 1999; Ong1999), but Englund and Leach still find modernist an-thropology guilty of merging the “concerns of ethnog-raphy with those of Western sociology.” Such a merger,they argue, serves to devalue if not erase the particularcontribution of ethnography “as a practice of reflexiveknowledge production.” This, they imply, would be agreat loss, since “the knowledge practices of ethnography. . . are unique in that they give the ethnographer’s in-terlocutors a measure of authority in producing an un-derstanding of their life-worlds” (Englund and Leach2000:225–26).

I want to argue here precisely for the need to reesta-blish the conversation between anthropology and socialtheory and hence between “non-Western” and “West-ern” experiences (and narratives) of modernity that hasbeen neglected in recent years. Specifically, I want toinsist on the value of a more systematic dialogue withthose critical theorists who have attempted to redefineor reconceptualize Western modernity in the aftermathof postmodernism. Against the claims of Englund andLeach, moreover, I will maintain that the notion of pluralor multiple modernities as it has been developed in re-cent anthropology is problematic not because it sub-sumes the ethnographic project to classical modernistnarratives but precisely because it fails sufficiently toengage with them. I am not suggesting that a dialoguebetween anthropology and modernist social theory is orshould be a harmonious one. I agree with Englund andLeach and recent modernist anthropologists that eth-nographic knowledge poses significant challenges to thattheory. Yet to suggest that we should withdraw from thedialogue because of supposedly deep-seated incompati-bilities between the “West and the Rest,” self and other,the proper disciplinary concerns of sociology and an-thropology, or the radical differences between Westernand non-Western experiences of modernity is to fail torecognize that it is precisely out of such an encounterthat all such apparently contradictory entities arise inthe first place. I shall argue that the encounter with acritical theory of modernity is peculiarly pertinent to agenuinely reflexive ethnography.

In what follows I will examine the ways in which an-thropology is, for better or worse, forced into an en-counter with both Western modernity and Western nar-ratives of modernization. This involves also lookingbriefly at the ways in which contemporary modernistethnography has handled this encounter, through eithera rejection or a relativization of modernity. I will thendiscuss briefly those aspects of the critical theory of mo-dernity that appear particularly pertinent to an anthro-pology of modernity. Finally, I shall examine the chal-lenges to both theorist and ethnographer posed by thejuxtaposition of modernist theory and ethnographically



652 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

based knowledge of contemporary Southeast Asia. Theconcept of multiple modernities that has emerged out ofsuch encounters proves to be a problematic response tothe ethnographer’s need to bring the contextual and thepopular dimensions of modernity into frame.

Provoking this confrontation, in other words, forces usto rethink both the ethnographic understanding ofSoutheast Asia and the received notions of modernitythat have been developed in Western contexts in waysthat are fruitful for both. This allows us to return to thereflexive imperative urged on us by Englund and Leachand the notion of multiple modernities but suggests thatonly by engaging directly with both modernity and mod-ernist theory can ethnography ever truly claim to bereflexive.

Encountering Modernity

Ethnography in its broadest sense doubtless remains acornerstone of the discipline of anthropology, but ofequal importance are the theoretical considerations pro-voked by the ethnographic confrontation between selfand other. The following brief discussion of SoutheastAsia is therefore aimed at raising these theoretical issuesin a context that may be broadly typical of many suchencounters.

My own research began in the early 1970s with twoyears of ethnography in Minangkabau villages in bothhighland and coastal areas in the Indonesian province ofWest Sumatra (see Kahn 1980, 1993), although the en-counter dates back to the years before that when the U.S.government attempted but failed to send me to South-east Asia for less peaceful activities. I returned with mypartner, Maila Stivens,2 to a Malay village in the Malay-sian state of Negeri Sembilan for an extended period in1975–76. Since that time we have returned to Malaysiatogether or separately every year or so for periods rangingfrom a few days to several months, during which timeswe have done further research, attended conferences,given seminar papers, and visited postgraduate studentscarrying out their own dissertation research. At the sametime we have welcomed Malaysian and Indonesian col-leagues and postgraduate students in Australia as super-visors, conference organizers, and collaborators in a va-riety of research and publishing projects (see, e.g., Kahnand Loh 1992, Kahn 1999, Sen and Stivens 1998, Hilsdonet al. 2000).

In the time since the first research, developments inMalaysia have so clearly transformed our ethnographicsubject that we have been increasingly compelled to re-define our ethnographic project as an anthropology ofmodernity. The story of Malaysian modernization, par-ticularly since the state-led policies of industrialization

2. I am extremely grateful to the following bodies for funding re-search in Indonesia and Malaysia over the years: the London-Cor-nell Projects, the British Social Science Research Council, the Brit-ish Academy, The Leverhulme Foundation, The British Institute inSoutheast Asia, and The Australian Research Council.

and social reconstruction lumped under the heading ofthe New Economic Policy (NEP) began to make theirmark in the early 1970s, does not need retelling here. Itis enough to note that economic growth over a period ofalmost three decades, punctuated by brief downturns inthe early 1980s and more during the Asian financial crisisof 1997, has been consistently high, and this has beenaccompanied by changes in most of the social and cul-tural indicators that are typically associated with mod-ernization and development. The NEP was expected tocontribute both to national economic growth and to aloosening of the connection between economic functionand race bequeathed by colonialism. The economic de-velopments and “restructuring” of this period had a verysignificant impact on the Malay villages where westarted our research, which up to then had been consid-ered—by ethnographers and Malay nationalistsalike—the locus classicus of premodern Malay societyand culture.

Already by the mid-1970s and certainly when we re-turned during the 1980s, it was evident that a good dealof the economic action was taking place outside the rice-farming Malay village “republics,” in a landscape rapidlydominated by factories and small- and medium-scalemanufacturing plants in free-trade zones and industrialparks scattered throughout the country. Such develop-ments, moreover, were not “offstage” from the point ofview of the villagers; most of them were either workingin these factories or reliant on the income of a familymember who was. This shift was accompanied by thegrowth of cities and towns and of “modern” urban land-scapes of office towers, hotels, and condominiums in theKlang Valley and in regional towns, the mushroomingof housing estates on the fringes of all of Malaysia’s ur-ban centres, the widespread appearance of shopping cen-tres, malls, restaurants, and multinational fast-food out-lets in city centres and suburban fringes, the building ofhighways, toll roads, and bridges and a huge increase incar ownership and accompanying traffic snarls through-out the country, the expansion of banking, share trading,and consumer credit and the growth of all branches ofthe media and the popular entertainment industries, anincrease in tourist arrivals and departures, and the build-ing of theme parks, entertainment complexes, and lei-sure centres. These developments were accompanied byhigh levels of pollution and environmental degrada-tion—the other side of modernization. Many of the samepeople whom we had previously encountered in “our”village in Negeri Sembilan were now living on a per-manent or temporary basis in the new urban centres,where we often met them either by chance or design.These meetings brought home to us the extent to whichthe boundaries between “our” world and “theirs” werefar more permeable in both directions than the tradi-tional vision of ethnography might suggest.

Not unexpectedly, the material trappings of late-20th-century modernity were accompanied by major upheav-als in the lives of all Malaysians. Between 1970 and 1990,the patterns of social stratification that had prevailed inthe colonial and early postcolonial period were radically



kahn Anthropology and Modernity F 653

transformed. Wage labour was not uncommon in the vil-lages where we carried out our research, but since around1970 we have witnessed the development of wage labourinto the “quasi-universal form of distribution,” to bor-row a term coined to describe the effects of late capi-talism in Europe (see Sulkunen 1992). The emergence ofa Malay working class, a significant proportion of whichis young and female, has directly or indirectly affectedthe lives of almost all rural Malays, including those liv-ing in villages in Negeri Sembilan. Particularly signifi-cant in terms of their implications for rural Malays havebeen the specific character of the new capitalist workprocesses in the burgeoning, labour-intensive, export-ori-ented manufacturing sector and the impact of the ethnic“restructuring” aims of the Malaysian state. These havemeant that more and more Malay villagers, includingsubstantial numbers of young women, have taken upemployment as unskilled labourers in nearby factories,with some abandoning village residence altogether forthe modern lifestyle (kaki jolly) of the factory “girl.”

At the same time, there has been a substantial increasein the relative size of what sociologists are wont to call(problematically) the new middle classes, a developmentthat has also affected a large proportion of Malays whowere previously living in Malay villages (cf. Kahn 1996).We did ethnography and carried out interviews with Ma-lays in a range of new middle-class occupations on hous-ing estates on the fringes of Seremban (the capital ofNegeri Sembilan) during the late 1980s. These peo-ple—among them the children, siblings, and cousins ofvillagers among whom we had earlier done our “eth-nography”—were still to varying degrees bound up invillage life. Many of them had until quite recently livedin “peasant” villages either in Negeri Sembilan or else-where, most of them kept up close ties with kin andfriends in their villages of origin, some had left theirchildren behind with their own parents in the village,and many expected at some point to return to villageresidence, at least on retirement. More successful urbanresidents were expected to send cash remittances and/or do favours for village kin. Some saw it as their dutyas pious Muslims to bring “true” Islamic teachings andpractices to their villages.3 Many consciously attemptedto re-create the best features of village life in their newmiddle-class housing estates.

Apart from changes associated most directly with ec-onomic transformation, there have been significantchanges to both political and cultural/religious land-scapes. The growth in the size, functions, and modern-izing mission of the Malaysian state proceeded apaceduring the prime ministership of Mahathir Mohamad.The current construction of a new capital complex at

3. One should also mention the emergence in both urban and ruralareas of new underclasses mainly drawn from the ranks of immi-grants, both legal and illegal, from poorer regions of Southeast Asia(including Sumatra) who came in Malaysia’s boom times. At thesame time, economic growth has thrown up new kinds of businesselites—Chinese and Malay—with extremely close links to the po-litical parties (cf. Gomez 1990, Heng 1992, Sieh 1992, Gomez andJomo 1997).

Putrajaya is perhaps the grandest expression of a state-directed modernization project. The political partieshave also been transformed. Malaysia is governed, as itwas when independence was granted by the British in1957, by a coalition of race-based parties dominated bythe United Malay National Organization (UMNO).UMNO has developed into a party of full-time profes-sional politicians, a growing number of Malay-educatedsmall and medium-level businessmen, and—the realpower brokers—the so-called New Malays, the wealthyand influential businesspeople, financiers, and managersof large business conglomerates who have benefited themost from government policies favouring Malay com-mercial interests (see Rustam 1993). Following UMNO’slead, all the parties in the coalition have followed thispath of greater professionalism, on the one hand, andcloser links with big business, on the other. Again, theimplications of this particular modernizing process forvillage residents and migrants alike have been signifi-cant, as all Malaysian citizens have come more directlyunder the scrutiny of rational, bureaucratic state andparty apparatuses, with an accompanying decline in thepersonalized and localized political hierarchies of theearlier period.

There have been parallel shifts in the cultural/religiouslandscape. As did Lisa Rofel in China, we found thatmodernity “was something that many people from allwalks of life felt passionately moved to talk about anddebate” (Rofel 1999:xi). At the same time, the rise in the1970s of the so-called dakwah (Islamic “missionary”)movements marked the beginning of significant shiftsin the style and language of religious debate among Mus-lims and non-Muslims. These were part of what is usu-ally described as a religious “revival” in politics and insociety more widely but might be more accuratelytermed a new phase of modernist Islamization of bothstate and society (cf. Hussin Mutalib 1993:x–xi). The so-called Islamic revival and parallel developments amongother religious groups have been less a spiritual move-ment than a process of religious rationalization throughthe establishment of closer links between religion andworldly social processes, both political and economic.4

Alongside the greater involvement of Islam in politicsand the bureaucracy, for example, the period has wit-nessed the emergence of a highly commodified “life-style” Islam, particularly among the new Malay middleclasses (see Stivens n.d.). The spread of these rationalizedIslamic practices and of new Islamic lifestyles into Malayvillages on the peninsula has tended to follow the linksbetween urban and rural Malay life forged by migration,bureaucratization, and the spread of the modern media,the result being the virtual disappearance of the ruralized

4. I am grateful to both Trevor Hogan and Wendy Smith, who haveseparately drawn my attention to this aspect of MalaysianIslamization.




Islamic beliefs and religio-political hierarchies that pre-vailed in the first decade after independence.5

This rather simplistic story of modernization has im-portant implications for the doing of anthropology inMalaysia. At a practical level, as have many of our con-temporaries we have felt compelled to go beyond thenarratives of “social change” that had previously beentacked onto most ethnographies, enlarging the scope ofour village-based research to include cities, industrialworkers, and wage work among emigrant (and “trans-migrant”) villagers and their urban-based offspring, anincreasingly bureaucratized and “rationalized” nationalpolitical machine, and the “performance” of Malay cul-ture and Islamic doctrine in film, popular music, adver-tisements, and the ceremonies of state.6 This has takenplace mainly because of a transformation in the Malaykampong (village) itself—the traditional object of an an-thropology of the Malays. In the decades since our firstethnographic research the kampong has not disappearedfrom the rural landscape, but any illusions about its self-sufficiency—its constituting a significant space fromwhich the economic, social, and cultural forces that con-stitute Malay life emanate—have clearly been shattered.At the same time, the self-sufficient and virtuous kam-pong republic continues to reappear in virtual form inthe imaginations of mainly city dwellers (and foreigntourists) in large part because of the growth industryfeeding an urban-based Malay nostalgia. This nostalgiais fed in turn by academics and intellectuals, largely Ma-lay but including foreign ethnographers with their ro-manticized images of a rural Malay cultural “otherness.”Like it or not, the ethnographer of Malaysia is draggedinexorably into a direct encounter with modernity at thesame time as its peoples have been enmeshed in modernprocesses of commodification, instrumentalization, andrationalization.

The impact of these changes has apparently been lessdramatic in places like Sumatra or supposedly more “re-mote” parts of Malaysia itself. However, one does not

5. The classic study of a peasantist Malay Islam is Clive Kessler’ssuperb ethnographic account of the growth of the Pan Malay IslamicParty (the PMIP, now PAS) in rural Kelantan in the 1960s. Kesslershowed that the success of the PMIP in capturing a substantialproportion of the UMNO vote was mainly a consequence of ruraldiscontent with the leadership and policies of the UMNO elite,who in the immediate postindependence period claimed to be themain guardians of Malay interests (Kessler 1978). The Islamic “re-vival” since the 1970s, by contrast, has been overwhelmingly urban,even global, in origin, spread to rural areas mainly by returningmigrants, educated members of the dakwah movements, and themedia (cf. Jomo and Cheek 1992, Stivens n.d.).6. The results of some of this refocused ethnography are publishedelsewhere, in discussions of the discourse of Malaysian intellectualson Malay identity (Kahn 1994) and of the constitution of Malaynessin Malay film and popular music (Kahn 2001:chap. 4), modern Ma-lay urbanism, tourism, and the heritage movement in Penang (Kahn1997), the formation of the new Malaysian middle classes (Kahn1996), the gender dimensions of agrarian change and industriali-zation (Stivens 1996) and modern politics (Stivens 1991), the de-velopment of “modern” notions of motherhood (Stivens 1998a), themoral panics generated by consumption in modern shopping malls(Stivens 1998b), and the emergence of a universalizing discourse ofhuman rights (Stivens 2000).

have to look too far beneath the surface even in sup-posedly “remote” areas to discover the transformativeeffects on village life of commodification, land aliena-tion, bureaucratization, and religious rationalization.Therefore, ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, asin many other parts of the world, has led to a new un-derstanding of the anthropological project—no longer asan anthropology of premodernity but as an anthropologyof modernity. The experience drives us towards ratherthan away from existing modernist narratives, but thereis a second, equally compelling reason for anthropologyto engage with Western modernist narratives, this onestemming from what is seen as anthropology’s reflexiveproject.

Reflexivity and the Modern Spaces ofTradition

By “reflexivity” I mean the implications of the “discov-ery” by anthropologists and their critics that the knowl-edge which anthropology produces is not innocent—thatit is not a simple reflection of a pre-given social andcultural reality out there in the world. Recognition ofthe “constructedness” of ethnographic knowledge com-pels ethnographers to include that knowledge withintheir field of investigation rather than merely reflect onit and therefore to ask about not only the conditionswhich make it possible but its role in the production ofthe very social and political spaces within which eth-nography operates. This is to accept, at least in part, theassertion by Englund and Leach that ethnographicknowledge is in some sense a construction involvingboth ethnographers and their ethnographic “objects,”now seen as active subjects of ethnographic knowledge.That the processes of selection and constitution bywhich an ethnography is produced ideally allow the peo-ple under investigation some role in the production ofknowledge about themselves is essentially what ismeant by the concept of ethnography as a dialogicalexercise.

But this, surely, is not the end of the story. Stressingthe role of ethnography’s interlocutors in the construc-tion of knowledge about themselves must not blind usto the far more authoritative role played by ethnogra-phers themselves and, more important, by the moderndiscourse of ethnography in this process. What makesan account of such an encounter ethnography—as op-posed to anecdote, fiction, journalism, travel writing, ad-vertising copy, or the scrawlings of amateurs—has verylittle to do with the scrutiny of particular interlocutorsor even the personal characteristics of individual eth-nographers. It derives instead from unambiguously mod-ern spaces governed by institutions such as universities,publishers, academic/professional journals, and fundingbodies that determine what is and what is not valid eth-nographic knowledge, what is or is not “good ethnog-raphy.” To put this another way, the reflexive imperativedemands that we evaluate ethnography less in the con-




text of the singular dialogue between individual ethnog-raphers and particular informants on the supposedly non-modern terrain on which individual acts of ethnographyare carried out than as part of a sustained project ofknowledge production and consumption within modern-ity. To recognize that ethnographic knowledge is itselfmodernist is to accept that the reflexive imperativeforces us to consider the social relations (including, butnot exclusively, power relations) within which anthro-pological knowledge circulates in modern spaces and theimplications of such knowledge for the world in whichit circulates. Of course, since the discipline of anthro-pology in the strict sense has its origins in the West, themodern world within which anthropological knowledgehas circulated has been a Western one. But this imper-ative is not altered by the fact that since that time an-thropology has been globalized and, hence, that the prac-tising anthropologist is as likely to be a postcolonialintellectual in the “West” or the “East.” The relationshipbetween “native” anthropologists and their informantsis of the same order as that involving Western anthro-pologists.

One important role played by anthropological knowl-edge in the West has been as part of a project of culturalcritique. The case of classical American cultural anthro-pology is perhaps the most commonly cited instance ofthis (Marcus and Fisher 1986). But this embedding ofnotions of cultural otherness within a critique of moderninstrumentalism was certainly not restricted to anthro-pology, being part of a much broader movement amongartists, intellectuals, and even wider parts of the newmiddle classes in the Americas, Europe, and Asia in theinterwar years (see Kahn 1995). Surely the reflexive im-perative demands an analysis of this movement, onebased on careful examination of the changing role andfunction of intellectuals in different periods of modernhistory, the significance of modern cultural debates andconflicts over rationality and its limitations, and the like.This kind of reflexivity is possible only when we acceptthat the results of ethnography have always been con-stituted by their relationships with modernist narra-tives—even when mobilized within a critique of a par-ticular version of modernism, namely, techno-instru-mental rationalism.

Yet one thing that both the insistence on ethnographyas dialogue and the postcolonial emphasis on its role ingoverning relations between “the West and the Rest”forcefully remind us of is that ethnography is also im-plicated in a set of relations between the “us” and the“them” of ethnographic discourse. In other words, eth-nography is more than decontextualized knowledge per-forming the function of cultural critique far from itspoint of production. Ethnographers of Malaysia, for ex-ample, would find it impossible to avoid this conclusionnot so much because of the individual actions of theirtraditional interlocutors as because intellectuals, poli-ticians, and others are coming to speak forcefully, andwith authority, for or on behalf of those interlocutors.Allowing “informants” to become “interlocutors” pro-duces a very limited degree of reflexivity when there are

so many “native” voices with the authority to interro-gate ethnography who would thereby be bypassed be-cause they are not the voices of ethnography’s traditionalinformants but those of academics, intellectuals, poli-ticians, and others. Ironically, now that there are “na-tives” with real power to act as gatekeepers in the cir-culation of ethnographic knowledge, their contributionsare completely erased by a vision of a non-modern eth-nography that denies them authenticity presumably be-cause they are too caught up in the meta-narratives ofmodernity to speak in the unmediated subaltern voice.

The best-known critic of “Western” representations ofMalaysia is none other than Prime Minister MahathirMohamad, although his vigilance is shared now by awide range of Malaysian intellectuals, including anthro-pologists. Nor can foreign anthropologists any longer eas-ily escape these voices when they come back home,given the intensification of cultural globalization and thepowerful sensitivity to the concerns of postcolonial in-tellectuals in what remain the metropolitan centres ofanthropological knowledge production. Not surprisingly,as the example of the “voice” of Mahathir suggests, these“native” voices are not ones anthropologists are alwayshappy to hear, if only because they do not fit our notionof what it is appropriate for natives to say. Insisting onthe integrity of interlocutors located at the sites of pro-duction of ethnographic knowledge still permits met-ropolitan anthropologists to ignore almost completelythe crucial question of the role and function of ethno-graphic knowledge in places like modern Malaysia andhence to sidestep what are far more significant reflexivedilemmas than those posed by traditional ethnography.

At the same time, theorizing Malaysia as a site of mo-dernity and redefining our task as an anthropology ofmodernity compels us to take these voices seriously. Itforces us to probematize the relation between insidersand outsiders, between “foreigners” and “natives,” be-tween “us” and “them”—in other words, to engage in aproject that is genuinely rather than spuriously reflexive.What, then, might the role of ethnography be in a placelike modern Malaysia? This question can be broachedonly if we reconsider the proposition that ethnographyspeaks of places outside modernity.

Being forced to confront the essential modernity ofcontemporary Malaysia leads one to question whetherthere nonetheless remain “remote” spaces within South-east Asia that are somehow outside modernity orwhether these remote traditions are similarly the “in-ventions” of a colonial society that was by any measureof rationalization, social differentiation, commodifica-tion, and bureaucratization itself already modern. Werenot the “traditional” spaces in the apparently remotecorners of the world being colonized by classical eth-nography in the 1920s and 1930s in fact already part ofthe same world that had given rise to anthropology andanthropologists in the first place? And are those parts ofthe Third World that, unlike peninsular Malaysia, havenot achieved high rates of economic growth, urbaniza-tion, and industrialization—including the supposedly re-mote areas of Malaysia itself and the “outlying” regions




of neighbouring Indonesia (for this reason more favouredby foreign ethnographers in search of “real” other-ness)—any less modern for all that?

My archival research on the colonial history of centralSumatra in the 1980s, for example, suggests that the ap-parent otherness-to-modernity of economy, culture, andsociety in “remote” regions of the Netherlands East In-dies was in fact a precipitate of a particular trajectory ofcolonial modernization from the last decades of the 19thcentury (see Kahn 1993). In other words, the Minang-kabau as they became known to an earlier generation ofethnographers were actually a historical product of spe-cific patterns of modern state formation, colonial landalienation, and the growth of a capitalist economy. In-sights into how this happened within a modernizingDutch empire is provided by Albert Schrauwers’s superbstudy of economy, society, power, and religion amongPamona villagers in the highlands of Central Sulawesi(Schrauwers 2000). This ethnography shows clearly thatthe To Pamona as a distinctive cultural group, apparentlywith distinctive indigenized forms of Christian beliefand practice, is no premodern survival in an otherwisemodernized world but in fact has its origins in the pro-cesses of rationalization and modernization that beganin the period of high colonialism.

Schrauwers’s case for the distinctively modern originsof To Pamona social and religious traditions is all themore convincing precisely because it is based on a thor-ough ethnographic study of forms of production, kinship,patronage, and ritual in To Pomona villages, combinedwith a reading of important materials from the colonialmissionary archives. Schrauwers offers us a detailedanalysis of the interrelations between “tradition” and“modernity” in highland Sulawesi, examining the linksbetween commodified and non-commodified forms ofproduction and exchange, between administrative power(both secular and religious) and the personalized powerrelations that we are accustomed to seeing as traditionaltypes of patronage, and between Christian doctrine and“indigenous” religious practice. This all points to theconclusion that To Pomona culture cannot be under-stood as combining elements from the past and the pre-sent. Instead it is an integrated whole representing a par-ticular regional form of modernity. Schrauwerscompellingly concludes that the conflicts associatedwith modernization, particularly those that haveemerged as a result of the power vacuum associated withthe collapse of Suharto’s “New Order” state, are notthose “between a secular modern state and a succes-sionist ethnic periphery whose identity is rooted in ‘pri-mordial’ sentiments” as is so commonly assumed.Rather, “local identities are anchored in ‘religion’, itselfa recent, transethnic phenomenon” (Schrauwers 2000:228–29).

This reorientation of the problematic of Indonesiannationalism radically subverts the self/other and tradi-tional/modern polarities that served to underwrite manyearlier ethnographic encounters, even those that focusedon “capitalist penetration” or “social change” after West-ern contact (cf. Kahn 1985). Like those of some of his

contemporaries, Schrauwers’s study suggests insteadthat “traditionalization” and “modernization” are partof the same historical process and that this process in-volved metropolitan Europe, colonial indigenes, and eth-nographers from the outset. As a consequence Schrau-wers always keeps the regional specificities ofmodernization in Sulawesi and the Netherlands withinthe same analytic frame.

This in turn provides us with a starting point in asearch for answers to questions about the modern func-tion of ethnography itself. As Schrauwers’s study dem-onstrates, the practice of ethnography in Sulawesi waspart of a process that constructed seemingly non-modernterrains within a sea of modernizing institutions andpractices—in other words, it was directly implicated inthe traditionalizing and particularizing phases that areas much part of modernizing processes in the West asthey are in places like Indonesia. Anthropology is there-fore again led towards rather than away from an en-counter with modernity, suggesting that it would do wellto engage directly, however critically, with existing mod-ernist meta-narratives.

The factors that drive an ethnography of SoutheastAsia into this encounter with modernism are in manyways typical of those experienced by a large number ofcontemporary ethnographers. What are the implicationsof processes such as those described here for the projectof ethnography? Do we gain anything by saying thatSoutheast Asia is a site of modernity and that our taskshould now be recast as an anthropology of modernity?What could this mean?

Meanings of the “Modern”

Obviously the term “modern” and its derivatives havehad many meanings. According to Raymond Williams,the word “modern” came into English from the Frenchmoderne, meaning “just now.” The French usage wasitself derived from the 5th-century Latin modernus, used“to distinguish an officially Christian present from a Ro-man, pagan past” (Smart 1990:17). From the 16th century“modern” acquired a new comparative/historical sense,this time to provide a contrast with “medieval.” Fromthe 18th century “modern” was used mainly to describearchitecture, fashion, and behaviour. It was only in the19th century that it came to be used favourably to mean“improved,” “satisfactory,” or “efficient” (Williams1983:108–9). Related and more specialized terms such as“modernize” and “modernist” did not appear in system-atic usage until the 19th century or even later. Accordingto Barry Smart, the “first positive references to modern-ism are to be found in 1888 in [the Nicaraguan poetRuben] Dario’s praise of the work of a Mexican writer,Ricardo Contreras, and subsequently in 1890 in refer-ences to modernismo as a movement in Latin Americafor cultural emancipation and autonomy from Spain”(Smart 1990:18). This is rather uneven ancestry for a rig-orous analytic concept.




In Anglophone social science in particular, the termderives much of its meaning from a source that has cometo be widely despised, at least by large numbers of an-thropologists—modernization theory. The notion of themodern deployed in modernization theory drew mostheavily on a particular liberal and techno-instrumentalvision of what was earlier thought of as a civilizing pro-cess. Here civilization was understood as a universal tra-jectory of individual emancipation and constantly evolv-ing rational mastery. This tradition is manifest in thepersistent influence of the thought of Comte, Spencer,and Durkheim in contemporary social theory.7 Althoughmodernization theory went out of fashion in academiccircles, the particular understanding of modernity un-derpinning it was not substantially altered. In otherwords, while the positive valuation of modernizationthat derived from its liberal-evolutionist origins fell intowidespread disrepute, especially among left-leaning in-tellectuals with an interest in the Third World, thesecritics shared with modernization theorists the vision ofmodernity as a process of emancipation and continuoustechnological change. The difference was that for thecritics modernization had failed to deliver on bothpromises.

This negative stance towards both modernity and clas-sical narratives of social modernization was transformed,again without altering the underlying understanding ofmodernity, as evidence began to accumulate that at leastparts of the former Third World seemed to be breakingout of the cycles of poverty and underdevelopment towhich many critics of modernization theory had arguedthey were condemned. Thus drawn into a renewed en-counter with modernity, many ethnographers, under theinfluence of poststructuralist and postcolonial currentsin the discipline, renewed the earlier critical stance to-wards modernization. Influenced particularly by thework of Foucault, who in a very different context asso-ciated modernity with discursive and hence power-sat-urated techniques of surveillance and discipline, the eth-nographic critics of modernity now came to viewmodernization negatively as a set of discursive processesassociated especially with Western domination. A par-ticularly nuanced and interesting such study is Fergu-son’s analysis of the discourse of development in Lesotho(Ferguson 1990; see also Escobar 1995).

But the salient point is that in most of this literature

7. This is clearly a sweeping generalization that would require morecareful argument than is possible here. To argue that much recentsocial theorizing remains within this tradition involves tracing con-nections between Comte’s social determinism, Spencer’s linkingof biological ideas about functional differentiation, the discussionsin classical political economy of the “modern” division of labour,and ideas about the evolution of the modern individual, and theway these are put together in Durkheim’s contention that individ-uation is a product of an organicist type of social structure. Thesenotions, strengthened by structural linguistics, found their way intoan “antihumanist” structuralism and, with renewed critical edge,into structural Marxist and then poststructuralist attempts to “de-centre” the modern subject. I am indebted to both Martha Mac-intyre and John Morton for this particular way of tracing the con-tinuities from structuralist into poststructuralist anthropologies.

it is precisely a liberal or techno-instrumental vision ofthe modern that is under attack. What is clear, then, isthat many recent attempts on the part of anthropologiststo come to grips with modernity—this time understoodas a negative rather than a positive experience—haveretained the particular understanding of modernizationformulated within the Western liberal tradition, revers-ing only its normative evaluation. This is at the heartof the new defence of ethnography articulated by an-thropologists like Englund and Leach, but their advocacyof a more traditionalist understanding of ethnography asan escape from the terrain of the modern has not beenthe only reaction. Instead, some have been led to a rathernew understanding of modernity and modernization asplural rather than singular phenomena.

Pluralizing the Modern

What happens when one juxtaposes or brings into con-frontation the theorization of modernity within theWestern liberal tradition and experience of ethnographicencounters in places like late-20th-century SoutheastAsia? Certainly when measured against the yardstickprovided by any classical Western narrative of modern-ization, Southeast Asia will always be found wanting:modern perhaps, but incompletely modern at best. Ma-laysia and Indonesia have modern states but states whichappear deficient because of the absence of full democ-racy. Malaysia and Indonesia have rational bureaucra-cies, but they also seem to be characterized by the “sur-vival” of elements of a premodern political order inwhich the system of government was coterminous withpersonalized ties between patrons and clients. Malaysia’sand Indonesia’s are clearly capitalist economies, but theexistence of such apparent non-market “perversities” as“cronyism,” state-imposed controls on internationalcurrency exchange, and personalized ties between em-ployer and employee suggests that they still have someway to go before they meet the standards of efficiencyexpected of a fully modernized market economy. A“modern” separation between church and state has de-veloped, but the pervasiveness of political Islam suggeststhat the separation is somehow incomplete. Viewedthrough the lens of classical modernist theory, in otherwords, Malaysia and Indonesia appear to be characterizedby an incomplete separation of public and private (how-ever defined) or a failure of differentiation of economicand political spheres. Both nations are urbanized, butsubstantial peasantries and tribal populations seem to“survive” in “remote” regions. While the Malaysian andIndonesian states may seek to impose a universal formof citizenship, preferential rights may be granted to par-ticular cultural or religious groups, and particularisticsystems of racial identification and antagonism remainkeystones at least in the everyday lives of the majorityof citizens. Periodic and often violent outbreaks of anti-Chinese sentiment punctuate recent Indonesian history,and Indonesia as a nation now appears to be fragmenting




along “primordial” ethnic and religious fault lines. Sim-ilarly, race remains a primary principle of identity andidentification in the everyday lives of most Malaysians.

Measured against the yardstick of modernist narra-tives, then, Malaysia and Indonesia become “other to themodern” in significant ways, forcing us back into thelanguage of a liberal social evolutionism in which oth-erness was constituted as historically anterior to and, asa result, an incomplete or immature version of the mod-ern, civilized self (see Kahn 2001). Southeast Asia appearsat best perversely modern, or to manifest various per-verse forms of modernity. These may be explained awayas premodern survivals or invented traditions, but nei-ther explanation does much to come to grips with whatis apparently unique to such places.

One reason for this state of affairs has to do with anunderstanding of modernization as some sort of pure,disembedded process uncontaminated by culture andhistory that prevails particularly within the liberal tra-dition. The implications of such a vision have recentlybeen nicely exposed by Peter Wagner in a rather differentcontext. In an article on the image of America in Eu-ropean social theory (Wagner 1999), Wagner argues thatmodernist theory has tended to represent America pre-cisely as such a sphere of “pure modernity.” This treat-ment leads to an assessment of America as superior toEurope in a technical-economic and sociopolitical sensebut inferior in a moral and philosophical sense. All suchapproaches, he says (p. 43),

“have in common” a double intellectual move. Theyfirst withdraw from the treacherous wealth of sensa-tions that come from the socio-historical world toestablish what they hold to be those very few indu-bitable assumptions from which theorizing cansafely proceed. And subsequently, they reconstructan entire world from these very few assumptions.Their proponents tend to think that the first movedecontaminates understanding, any arbitrary andcontingent aspects being removed. And that the sec-ond move creates a pure image of the world, of sci-entific and/or philosophical validity from whichthen further conclusions, including practical ones,can be drawn. (Whatever dissonance there may bebetween sensations and this image will then betreated as the secondary problem of the relation be-tween theory and empirical observation.)

Such an operation is bound to fail, Wagner maintains,because concepts such as autonomy and rationality, socentral to the modernist interpretation of the world, “arenever pure, or merely procedural and formal, never de-void of substance. As a consequence, they cannot markany unquestionable beginning, and doubts can be raisedabout any world that is erected on their foundations, thatis, about the consequent second move.” To understandmodernity as always embedded in culture, inevitably“contaminated” by history, is to go against the Westernquest for universal principles by which we must all liveand to accept that, precisely because our own meanings

of the modern are particularistic, they may also be ex-clusionary, even racist, however well-intentioned (Kahn2001).

The alternative has been to attempt to reconceptualizemodernity in the plural. Some such notion of “multiplemodernities” has been developed, often independently,in a wide range of anthropological accounts. A first stepin this pluralization of modernity is the argument that,while modernity is a singular phenomenon of Westernorigin, once “spread” to non-Western contexts by colo-nialism it became “indigenized” and hence divergedfrom the Western trajectory in significant ways. MayfairYang, for example, examines the intricate networks ofpersonalized relationships and informal practices asso-ciated with the phenomenon of guanxi/guanxixue inChina as a way of gaining a window on the formationof modernity in that country, a modernity that differs inmany respects from the modern patterns of the West(Yang 1994). Guanxi relationships, ideas, and practiceshave recently (re)emerged in the Chinese context andbecome increasingly widespread and influential. Yang ar-gues that these form a sort of “gift economy” that islocated within (and is just as much constitutive of) themodernity that has emerged in socialist China. Modern-ity can, writes Yang (pp. 37–38),

be spoken of in the singular because it issues fromthe Western Enlightenment and Industrial Revolu-tion. But when the force of modernity impinges onand interacts with hitherto more discrete cultural orpolitical-economic zones, it produces not one formbut many. . . . For a long time, the West has ceasedto be the only site of modernity or the only genera-tor of the types of power found in modernity. Mo-dernity in China was triggered by western and Japa-nese imperialism in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. [But i]t gave rise to, and its direct impactwas diffused and overtaken by, new social forcesthat were a complicated mixture of native and im-ported elements . . .

But did the key elements of modernity really appearfirst in the West, only then to be transported and indi-genized elsewhere? Evidence can certainly be producedto demonstrate that the modernization of the West andat least parts of the non-West—Russia, Japan, China, thecentres of the Islamic world (or even apparently remotecorners of the Islamic world such as Malaya)—were con-temporary processes rather than being merely cases ofearly “Westernization,” raising the possibility of moregenuinely parallel, multiple, or plural modernities.8

In his monograph on Greece, for example, James Fau-bion (1993) argues that Greek modernity is more thanan indigenized version of something that came from out-side. Citing Weber’s characterization of Western Euro-pean civilization as dominated by technical, instrumen-tal, and formal rationalism, he seeks to “counterbalance”

8. For a discussion of the origin of Malay-Islamic modernism thatmakes it almost contemporary with the European Enlightenment,see Milner (1995).




such images by showing how in the case of Greece onecan produce a portrait of “another modernity,” one cen-tred on a historically specific discourse and set of prac-tices about the “reform and reformation” of Greek so-ciety. In Faubion’s words (p. xiii):

What I found in Greece led me to conclude that ourprevailing portraits of modernity were in need notsimply of revision but of a counterbalance, of theportraiture of “another modernity.” . . . Weber lo-cated modernity—or at least its dominant, north-westerly modality—in the practice of what he cameto call “formal” or “technical” rationalism. I havelocated its Greek modality, “the Greek modern,” inthe practice of what I have called “historicalconstructivism.”

Similarly, Aihwa Ong (1999:23) captures something ofthe combination of economic dynamism and intenseself-confidence that has characterized much of PacificAsia in recent decades, again by arguing for a concept of“another modernity”:

New narratives of Asian modernity, spun from theself-confidence of vibrant economies, cannot be re-duced to pale imitation of some Western standard(for instance, full-fledged democracy combined withmodern capitalism). Ascendant regions of the worldsuch as the Asia Pacific region are articulating theirown modernities as distinctive formations. The his-torical fact of Western colonialism, ongoing geopolit-ical domination, and ideological and cultural influ-ences are never discounted (only minimized) inthese narratives, but they should nevertheless beconsidered alternative constructions of modernity inthe sense of moral-political projects that seek tocontrol their own present and future. Such self-theo-rization of contemporary non-Western nation-states,while always in dialogue and in tension with theWest, are critical modes of ideological repositioningthat have come about with shifting geostrategicalignments.

If, then, as Wagner reminds us, modernity is alwaysand everywhere embedded in particular circumstances,then modernity must be pluralized. There can never bea single but only multiple modernities. Modernist eth-nographers have arrived at much the same conclusion.There is no modernity in the singular—only Greek, Chi-nese, Asian, Chinese, African, and other modernities.But what are the implications for theory of such a re-lativized and pluralized modernity? If modernity cannever be disembedded from particular historical con-texts, can it ever be conceptualized in the singular with-out retreating to the formalistic and procedural notionof a pure modernity? If the modern cannot be abstractedfrom context and singularized, is there any use in speak-ing of modernity at all? Why speak of a Greek, Asian,or Islamic modernity at all if the singular is unimagin-able? Nothing at all is to be gained by adding the term,since it can have no meaning on its own. The ethno-

graphic argument in favour of an embedded modernityends up being the same as the Englund and Leach ar-gument for an ethnography of modernity’s others, forcingus in spite of the use of a common term away fromengaging with modernist metanarrative in precisely themanner envisaged by its critics. The ethnographer’s in-sistence on the primacy of context, by relativizing andpluralizing modernity, leads us to reject any general andsingular understanding of modernity and invites us toabandon the concept as caught in a hopeless contra-diction.

Critical Theory and Expressivism

Many of the dilemmas posed by the ethnographer’s en-counter with modernity may stem from a failure to ac-knowledge the presence of diverse, even conflicting,traditions within modernist thought. This failure ap-pears to generate the compulsion among modernity’scritics to seek an escape route out of modernity alto-gether—a tendency that is manifest in the renewal oftraditional understandings of ethnography within criti-cal anthropology but also implied in the popular notionof multiple modernities. Having accepted unidimen-sional notions of modernity and modern subjectivity de-rived either from classical liberalism or from its post-structuralist critics, there appears to be no alternativebut to embrace modernity wholeheartedly or reject it outof hand. And yet neither seems possible for an anthro-pology forced into encounters with the modern at everyturn. Perhaps, then, there are other traditions of theo-rizing the modern more pertinent to the project of con-temporary anthropology.

The critical modernist narratives that emerge out ofthe Hegel-Marx-Weber heritage in social theory, gener-ally neglected by anthropologists,9 are a case in point. Inthis tradition modernity is generally construed as anidentifiable socio-historical process of transformationout there in the world, one that began in the 16th centuryin western Europe. Such theorists have tended to drawon Hegelian and Marxist notions of alienation and com-modification and Weber’s discussions of modern pro-cesses of rationalization, which they see as building onthem.10 Here modernity is broadly understood (Turner1990:6) as the result of a

process of modernization, by which the social worldcomes under the domination of asceticism, seculari-zation, the universalistic claims of instrumental ra-tionality, the differentiation of the various spheres ofthe lifeworld, the bureaucratization of economic, po-

9. This too is obviously an overgeneralization, and there are cer-tainly exceptions. A case in point is the work of Michael Taussig,which from the start built on the more “Hegelian” elements of theMarxist tradition, and the insights of Walter Benjamin.10. It is interesting in this respect that 20th-century critical the-orists from Lukacs to the members of the Frankfurt School see inthe work of Max Weber less a rejection of Marxism than an elab-oration or development of some of its key themes.




litical and military practices, and the growing mone-tarization of values. Modernity therefore [is seen toarise] with the spread of western imperialism in thesixteenth century; the dominance of capitalism innorthern Europe . . . in the early seventeenth cen-tury; the acceptance of scientific procedures . . .; andpre-eminently with the institutionalization of Cal-vinistic practices and beliefs in the dominant classesof northern Europe. We can follow this process fur-ther through the separation of the family from thewider kinship group, the separation of the householdand the economy, and the creation of the institutionof motherhood in the nineteenth century. Althoughthe idea of the citizen can be traced back to Greektimes via the independent cities of the Italian states. . . the citizen as the abstract carrier of universalrights is a distinctly modern idea.

Jurgen Habermas, a key figure in the 20th-century crit-ical tradition, for example, understands the “modern” asmore than a grab bag of social and cultural traits, as aprocess of social differentiation, on the one hand, andcultural autonomization, on the other (Habermas 1987,Outhwaite 1996; see also Giddens 1990, Giddens andPierson 1998, Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1995). Criticaltheorists of course differ, for example, on the issue ofperiodization (see Smart 1990, Castoriadis 1991) and onthe question of whether the modern has come to an end.In general, they have concluded that what French the-orists and the American ones following them have called“postmodernity” describes not a totally new worldviewor a new historical epoch but a critique of modernismfrom within or a new phase in the development of mod-ern society, as it were.

The term “modernism” here is somewhat more prob-lematic. It is typically used to refer to an aesthetic sen-sibility and hence a movement (or set of movements)within the arts (Lash 1990:66):

Modernism, for its part, rejects history in order toembrace movement and change. Modernism in Vi-enna, Paris, Berlin and a number of other Europeancities, as the nineteenth century drew to a close,was ushered in by a series of effective “secession”movements. These movements consisted of a rejec-tion of “academic” standards by artists and archi-tects. This was at the same time a rejection of state-sponsored art. . . . French Impressionism (andrealism), Viennese Art Nouveau . . . and German Ex-pressionism, all took from the institutional contextof the reaction against historical art. In each casethe rejection was in favour of a modernist or proto-modernist aesthetic of working through the possibil-ities of aesthetic materials.

In such usages there is the general implication that, fol-lowing Habermas (1987), modernism refers to a culturalmovement or sensibility to which modernity gives rise.

A somewhat different account of this link is suggestedby Castoriadis, who prefers to restrict the use of the term“modernity” precisely to the development of a modern

aesthetic sensibility or what might be called a particularaesthetic discourse on the modern, suggesting a ratherdifferent relationship between the modern’s “objective”and “subjective” dimensions. Castoriadis (1991:225)writes, for example: “What has been called modernity issomething which reached its climax between 1900 and1930, and which ended after World War II. . . . In music,Schonberg, Webern, and Berg had invented atonal andserial music . . .. Dada and surrealism were in existenceby 1920. And if I were to begin the following list, Proust,Kafka, Joyce . . . would you please tell me how you wouldcontinue?” That modernism might in fact constitutemodernity rather than the other way around is a possi-bility to which I shall return.

Although it can be argued that critical modernism, likeclassical liberalism, contains an exclusionary impulse,the result of confronting Western critical narratives andnon-Western “realities” may not be the terminal either/or impasse generated by classical liberalism. Ultimatelythis is because critical theory is already a result of suchencounters, a fact that becomes evident when we lookmore closely at the multidimensional vision of modern-ity that has developed within the tradition of Hegel,Marx, and Weber. Here attention is focused on “differ-entiation” as a multidimensional process of separationboth within and between separate spheres of modern ex-istence. The result is a reading of the history of Westernmodernity that, unlike liberal evolutionism, is not in-evitably unilineal or teleological (cf. Arnason 1987, Hel-ler 1990, Luhmann 1982). It is not surprising, therefore,that some critical modernists have also called for a no-tion of “multiple modernities” (cf. Arnason 1987, Eisen-stadt 2000a, Wittrock 2000), echoing similar concernswithin anthropology. Summarizing these somewhat di-verse revisionary trends, Johann Arnason writes that crit-ical theory has produced an “understanding of modernityas a loosely structured constellation rather than a sys-tem, and . . . a stronger emphasis on the role of culturalpremises and orientations in the formation of differentversions [of modernity] within a flexible but not amor-phous framework” (2000:65).

Of particular interest here is the emphasis on the dis-tinctiveness of modern “cultural premises and orienta-tions” found in critical theory. This sense of modernityas specifiable cultural processes is captured by PeterWagner, who has described modernist social theorists inthe 20th century as those who build on “the double no-tion of autonomy and rationality” (Wagner 1999). Toquote Arnason once again (2000:65):

One of the most important—but not yet fully ex-plored—implications of this culturalist and pluralistview has to do with the recognition of conflict as in-herent and essential to modernity. . . . the most sus-tained and interesting variation on this theme—pioneered by Max Weber and developed most re-cently by Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain Tou-raine—stresses the conflict between two equally ba-sic cultural premises: on the one hand, the vision ofinfinitely expanding rational mastery; on the other




hand, the individual and collective aspiration to au-tonomy and creativity. . . . On this view, the cul-tural orientations characteristic of modernity areembodied in institutions, but not reducible to them.. . . [they] are mutable enough to translate into dif-ferent institutional patterns, and at the same timesufficiently autonomous to transcend all existing in-stitutions and allow the construction of critical al-ternatives as well as utopian projections.

The “discovery” of culture in critical theory has two verysignificant implications for the understanding of mo-dernity. First, and partly in response to antipositivisttrends in social theory more broadly, it shifts from anobjective to a subjective emphasis. The consequence isa view that puts modern subjectivity at the core of ourunderstanding of what it is to be modern, making mo-dernity as much a state of mind as a set of objectivehistorical processes. Modernity can be seen to be insep-arable from the modern imaginaries that make it pos-sible, to adapt Castoriadis’s term. Modernity, in otherwords, and contra Habermas, cannot in any simple sensebe said to pre-date modernism. Modernism constructsmodernity as much as modernity provides the conditionsfor modernism’s emergence. Modernity can never be un-ambiguously defined except in the context of its con-struction in an ambivalent/interrogating modernism.

Secondly, as Arnason argues, modernity should be seenas a product of contradictory or conflicting cultural pro-cesses. This heralds a significant break with liberal nar-ratives of modernization (as well as those of their critics),which, as we have seen, construct modernity as (bor-rowing Wagner’s [1994] terms) a single cultural move-ment of liberty or discipline. Such single-logic notionsof cultural modernization are completely incapable ofproducing a theory of modern culture understood as themeanings and performative values of actual people livingunder modern conditions. Surely reducing modern sub-jectivity to any single logic cannot then account for thecultural lives of modern peoples. At the same time, sin-gle-logic notions of cultural modernization fail to pro-vide for the possibility of modernist theory itself. Howis it possible for the theorist to see modernization as aloss of meaning when everyone else is a slave preciselyto a single logic of rationalization? Only by rejectingsingle-logic notions of modernization as either liberty ordiscipline but never both can a genuinely reflexive mod-ernism ever be achieved. Only in this way can modern-ism—as a culture of ambivalence—ever be understood.

The immediate sources for this critical understandingof modernization as rationalization are, as Arnason sug-gests, the writings of Weber and, following him, the the-orists of the so-called Frankfurt School. But its roots aremuch deeper; indeed, it could be said that the core ofthe culturalist model of modernity lies in what can becalled the first critical intellectual encounter with mod-ernization—the romantic critique of Enlightenment phi-losophy and particularly of its instrumentalist notionsof human reason. More particularly I have in mind whatCharles Taylor calls the “expressivist” conception of hu-

man life that develops as a reaction and hence an alter-native to an Enlightenment vision of man based uponan “associationist psychology, utilitarian ethics, atom-istic politics of social engineering, and ultimately amechanistic science of man” (Taylor 1975:539).11 Ratherthan seeing human life and activity as essentially with-out meaning, expressivism sees them as “expressions,”realizations of a purpose or an idea. In modern expres-sivism meaning is thus seen to unfold within humansubjectivity. “Expressivism therefore represents simul-taneously an embrace and a critique of an Enlightenmentanthropology (in the philosophical sense of the term). Itposits a self-creating modern subject but locates it in amodern world that is objectified and potentially withoutmeaning.”

Expressivists decried the rift between humans and na-ture created by Enlightenment instrumentalism, but, asTaylor’s discussion of Herder shows, they also decriedthe rifts among humans created by the Enlightenmentvision of human nature. As Taylor (1975:27–28) pointsout,

what has been said of communion with nature ap-plies with the same force to communion with othermen. Here too, the expressivist view responds withdismay and horror to the Enlightenment vision ofsociety made up of atomistic, morally self-sufficientsubjects who enter into external relations with eachother, seeking either advantage or the defence of in-dividual rights. They seek for a deeper bond of feltunity which will unite sympathy between men withtheir highest self-feeling, in which men’s highestconcerns are shared and woven into community liferather than remaining the preserve of individuals.

The very notion of freedom espoused by Enlightenmentphilosophers and the French revolutionaries was, ac-cording to the expressivists, therefore only negative andhence meaningless.

Expressivism in this sense is clearly present, as Taylorargues, in Hegel’s critique of civil society, a critiquetaken up in the more radical rejections of “bourgeois”rationality by the Young Hegelians and in Marx’s ownwritings on human alienation under capitalism. It ap-pears also in 19th-century German critiques of politicaleconomy and then neoclassical economics, from whereit first posed the problem of the historical specificity ofcapitalist rationality to a young Max Weber (Kahn 1990).An expressivist sensibility is clearly articulated in thework of the Frankfurt School, which sprang as muchfrom the concerns of Weber as from the vision of Marx.And it serves to define the ambivalence to modern ra-tionalism and rationalization that informs the project ofcontemporary modernist social theory. Here, in thewords of Habermas, modernization (understood as ra-tionalization) is not so much rejected as counterbalancedby an expressive (communicative) rationality in the un-finished “project” of modernity. In a distinctive, al-

11. I have discussed the significance of expressivist currents inmodern thought in Kahn (1995).




though parallel, argument, Castoriadis sees in the searchfor autonomy a virtuous counter to the West’s concur-rent obsession with rational mastery. What critical the-orists therefore share is what Bauman describes as a pro-found ambivalence towards the modern—a deep uneasewhen confronted by its claims to a superior/abstract ra-tionality but at the same time the sense that we areinevitably enmeshed in it. This is coupled with someidea of its also generating possibilities for forms of hu-man community not characterized by the continualsearch for advantage and personal gain (cf. Bauman 1991).

There are good reasons that a notion of modernity asthe intersection of the contradictory cultural processesof rationalization and autonomy should resonate sostrongly with anthropologists in their encounters withSoutheast Asian modernity. The theme of reconcilingthe apparently contradictory processes of rationalization(“globalization”) and expressive meaning (understood asthe expressive values of a particular people or what weare wont to call their culture) is absolutely central tocontemporary Southeast Asian debates. It is clearly man-ifest in Mahathir’s project of reconciling “development”and “Asian values” (see, e.g., Mahathir and Ishihara1995), but it is by no means confined to the pronounce-ments of a single man, no matter how powerful.

Non-Muslim ethnographers in Malaysia can hardlyavoid the question of the similarities and differences be-tween “us” and “them” framed almost inevitably byconflicting values of rationalization and autonomy. Ifthis is not imposed on them by disciplinary tradition orby the unconscious demands of framing ethnographicquestions or describing observations (both of which aredeeply affected by the binary logic of selfhood and oth-erness), it is forced upon them by virtually all the MalayMuslims with whom they come into contact. To para-phrase the responses of urban and suburban Malays tomy questions about the role and value of Malay cultureand Islam in their everyday lives: “You in the West maybe good at the application of scientific knowledge or atmaking money, but in your blind pursuit of technologicaladvance, money, and power you neglect moral values,spirituality, and meaning.” “Asians (or Muslims, or Ma-laysians) can be just as good as you Westerners at de-velopment, but we can develop and not neglect our fam-ilies, our personal obligations, or our religion.” Or,alternatively and less frequently, “Life in the West isbetter than it is in Malaysia, because individuals thereare free of meaningless traditions and traditional obli-gations.” These comparisons between “East” and“West” are an inevitable part of ethnographic interactionat all levels of modern Malay society, and all are in-formed in one way or another by a consideration of therelationship between the contradictory cultural pro-cesses that modernist theorists call rationalization andautonomy.

As a consequence, reflecting on the nature and func-tion of anthropological knowledge of Malaysia does notrequire familiarity with sophisticated academic debatesover the epistemological status of ethnographic writing,since one hardly meets a Malay who does not subject

ethnographers to severe and continuous interrogationover the value, even the possibility, of an outsider’s everbeing able to understand the expressive meanings of Ma-layness or the values of Islam. At issue inevitably in suchconversations are contrasts between science, reason, andinstrumentalism, on the one side, and culturally mean-ingful (expressive) values and orientations, on the other.One might even say that the very definition of insider-hood and outsider-hood for contemporary Malays isframed by these opposing cultural principles. As pointedout above, an ethnographer in Malaysia will find thatmodernity is something that people are moved to discussand debate, but these debates are increasingly shaped bystrong ambivalence. Most Malaysians profess a desire formaterial advance, but village-based and urban Malaysalmost all also worry that modernity may bring with itthe overemphasis on individual material advance thatmany see epitomized in the West.

The parallels between the concerns of critical mod-ernism and those of large numbers of Malaysians are justone example of the resonances that develop when criticaltheory and Malaysian modernity are brought into en-counter. It can also be argued that critical theory’s mul-tidimensional understanding of the processes of mod-ernization makes far greater sense of the coexistence ofuniversalizing and particularizing impulses in the mod-ern history of state and nation building in the region.Much the same is true when we attempt to analyse thecoexistence of apparently contradictory processes of de-personalization and personalization of economic and po-litical relations (for example, in the rise of impersonalmarket links and depersonalized forms of bureaucraticrule at the same time as the development of cronyismin the economic sphere and “patriarchalism”12 in mod-ern systems of governance). And, finally, critical mod-ernist theory provides the grounding for precisely thekinds of reflexive-critical discourse on the modern thatEnglund and Leach wish anthropology to become. Thereare therefore good reasons to suppose that anthropologyneeds to come to terms with its own modernist rootsand the modernity of its object and that it cannot do soby refusing to engage with all meta-narratives of mo-dernity. There are also good reasons to suggest that en-gaging with modernist narratives in the tradition of He-gel, Marx, and Weber might prove particularly fruitful.

This is not, as I have already pointed out, to say thatsuch an encounter is or should necessarily be a peacefulone. Just as viewing Southeast Asia through the lens ofcritical modernism forces a reconsideration of certainkey aspects of contemporary Southeast Asia culture andsociety, so the Southeast Asian experience of moderni-zation must be used to prise open the modernist gridthat we impose through the application of theory. Bring-ing modernist narratives into confrontation with eth-

12. Woodiwiss, for example, follows Weber in labelling SoutheastAsian state systems “patriarchal,” but in contrast to Weber he sug-gests that, however distasteful to liberals, they must be viewed asequally valid alternatives to liberal systems for ensuring basic hu-man rights (cf. Woodiwiss 1998).




nographic knowledge allows us also to turn modernityback upon itself, as it were, providing the impetus alsoto look again at Western modernity. The first conse-quence of such a confrontation is the challenge to a West-ern vision of modernity as abstract and universal ratherthan concrete and particular. But just as this leads us toconclude that modernity in a place like Malaysia or In-donesia is inevitably “contaminated” by particularisticcultural and historical conditions, we need to see thatthis is also the case of the West. Far from assuming, asmany theorists of multiple modernity have done, thatthe Western spaces of modernity have always and every-where been governed by the pure operation of instru-mental rationalism, impersonal market relations, a sep-aration of economic and political spheres, and the riseof secular rationalism—which leads to the conclusionthat where this is not the case we have to do with anothermodernity—Wagner’s critique now compels us towardsan ethnographic engagement with modernity in the Westas well as the East. This is something that should be ofcentral importance to a new modernist anthropology but,interestingly, is something that the notion of multiplemodernities appears to discourage almost as much as didan earlier division of academic labour between sociolo-gists embracing modernist narratives and processes andanthropologists who avoided them. The encounter witha critical modernist narrative thus feeds back into a newanthropology of the West, forcing a rethinking of thevision of an abstract, universal condition called modern-ity and an engagement with the particular dimensionsof modern existence in the West as well as in the East.This may lead us to reconsider modernity in both Eastand West as part of a single historical process of mod-ernization that was global from the outset.

This confrontation between modernist narratives andethnographic knowledge forces another shift in the self-understandings of critical modernism, a shift away fromthe avant-gardist conception of modern culture on whichmost modernist narratives are based—a shift from whatI have termed an exemplary to a popular modernism (seeKahn 2001).13 Exemplary modernism is very far from pro-viding us with a true theory of modern culture and sub-jectivity except in the normative sense. It is in no waya theory of the subjectivity of people living in modernsociety, those people with whom ethnographers ofSoutheast Asia—or indeed of Britain or America—dealon a daily basis in their research. Yet, as ethnographersof modern society will inevitably discover, the tendencyto interrogate, criticize, and build upon the modern isby no means restricted to the avant-garde, despite the

13. The philosophies of Kant and Hegel have both been proposedas early versions of such exemplary modernism, but “it is the workof Baudelaire which is frequently considered to provide the turningpoint in the development of an understanding of modernity.” It isBaudelaire’s ambivalent recognition of the good and bad sides ofthe modern condition, his discussion of its “transient, fleeting, andcontingent character” (Habermas’s terms), and his critique of“bourgeois” visions of a triumphal modernity (see Smart 1990:17)that make him a candidate for the role of pioneer of exemplarymodernism.

recognition that it is a part of a project of constitutingmeaning and a meaningful basis for the performance ofa self-consciously modern life under conditions of socialdifferentiation and cultural autonomization. The an-thropology of modernity reveals, on the contrary, thepresence of this same sensibility in everyday popular cul-ture and performance. Such popular modernism cannotbe dismissed as merely traditional, meaningless, or lack-ing a critical edge or as a substandard version of the more“sophisticated” modernism of aesthetic and intellectualelites.

Conclusions

Two final points about the encounter between anthro-pology and modernity seem appropriate. These arise outof critical musings on the usual construction of the prob-lem of the anthropological encounter as a confrontationbetween “the West and the Rest.” It is evident that thisis a tremendous oversimplification, obscuring the factthat critical theory is itself already a precipitate of suchconflicts between central-eastern Europe and north-western Europe, between the “cores” and “peripheries”of nations and empires in the 19th century, or, adaptingBauman’s terminology, between mainstream moderns inthe centres of power and ambivalent moderns on the“margins” in the early part of the modern age. In otherwords, the tension between expressivism and instru-mentalism that constitutes critical modernism has beenmanifest in modernity from the start, and this is whythe critical theory of modernity resonates so strongly inplaces like Malaysia. It may explain precisely the per-tinence of concepts developed within the heritage of He-gel, Marx, and Weber to more recent encounters withrationalizing, instrumentalizing, and impersonal forcesof “globalization.”

The rejection of such a dialogue because of the irrec-oncilability of the “West and the Rest” further obscuresthe degree to which what we call modernity is somethingthat encompasses the West and the Rest from the verystart. In this view it would be a mistake to invoke eithera plurality of modernities or the globalization and thenre-localization of modernity as a means of accountingfor anthropological realities. After all, as we have alreadyhad occasion to note, modernization and traditionali-zation are very often simultaneous processes.

If this is the case, then apparently thorny questionsabout when modernity began and whether modernity isWestern or universal, plural or singular, abstract or con-crete, emic or etic, are much less problematic and per-haps even open to empirical investigation and debate.Modernity becomes a far less elusive concept, as well asbeing a social and cultural form far more open to ethicaland political critique, than might otherwise have ap-peared. The encounter between theories of the modernand ethnographic realities ends up being far more pro-ductive than we might have assumed at the start.

Bringing into confrontation a particular body of theory




that has emerged in what is mainly a European traditionwith knowledge constructed in other contexts—non-Protestant, rural, female, outside northwestern Eu-rope—almost inevitably produces conflicting interpre-tations of the kind traced out here. Moreover, there isno question that this confrontation will result at leastin significant revisions to the versions of “modernity”with which we operate in our own theoretical traditions,moving us away from a notion of modernity as an ab-stract, disembedded project of the aesthetic and philo-sophical elite to a notion of modernity as something con-crete, embedded in particular institutions and culturalformations, but also a singular process that is global andmulticultural from its inception.

But, in conclusion, we might revisit one final objectionto reconstituting the anthropological project as some-thing inherent to modernity itself—that in so doing weare somehow avoiding having to engage with that whichis truly other to us. There is a strong sense in argumentslike those of Englund and Leach that to insist on theengagement between ethnography and modernist nar-ratives is to trade away the possibility of an encounterwith the great richness of human diversity for sterile andpared-down “explanations” that reduce everything to asingle all-encompassing meta-narrative. On reflection,however, we can recognize that this fear is based on theinsidious assumption that once modernized the otherbecomes incapable of culture building and innovation,doomed merely to repeat the performances of modernlife of countless generations of Westerners. Yet surelyAsian moderns are as capable of culture and performativecreativity as anyone else. That they have become en-meshed in processes of commodification and rationali-zation does not mean that they will lose any ability toconstruct creative responses to modern life. Can we notinstead expect that they will come up with solutions tosome of the worst dilemmas posed by moderniza-tion—violence, extreme inequalities, environmental de-struction, deprivation, racial exclusion? Or must we con-tinue to constitute them as exotic objects of a study thatthey may have played a small part in producing but thatwe ultimately control once it has been accepted as goodethnography? The final result of an anthropology of mo-dernity might be the possibility of a genuine culturalcritique. Clearly a key problem with the classical formof anthropological critique is that its proponents had verylittle idea of how a modern America might somehow betransformed into a premodern Samoa or Bali or whateverexotic other seemed at the time to have avoided the vicesof modernity. This was utopianism in its worst sense. Itmay be that an anthropology of modernity will, instead,provide us with utopias that are in fact achievable. Thatwould be a very real ethnographic contribution indeed.

Comments

johann p. arnasonDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, La TrobeUniversity, Melbourne, Victoria 3086, Australia([email protected]). 18 vii 01

There is no reason to disagree with Kahn’s main claims:A dialogue between anthropology and social theory ismuch needed by both sides; the question of modernityshould be at its centre; the most interesting current signof contact is the emerging problematic of multiple mod-ernities. The following remarks, coming from a non-an-thropologist, will focus on some specific theoretical as-pects of the debate.

The ancestry of the notion of modernity may be con-tested but is perhaps not as “uncertain” as Kahn sug-gests. However controversial some parts of the story maybe, there seems to be a definite record of successive ep-ochs in Western history described as “modern” to de-marcate them from preceding phases. This contextualmeaning links the first use of the word modernus in lateantiquity (in contrast to pagan predecessors) to the se-mantics of the western European exit from a medievalworld, as well as to the more controversial debate onclassics and moderns on the eve of the Enlightenment.It was logical for this generic signifier of epochal noveltyto become more closely associated with cultures and so-cieties which detached themselves from the past andembraced change more emphatically than any earlierones had done. The sociological classics use the term“modern” in this broad but loosely defined sense, al-though their specific concerns do not call for any explicittheorizing of modernity as such. A decisive step in thatdirection was taken by modernization theory. At its best,as formulated—for example—by Talcott Parsons, it com-bined the advocacy of Western models with a clear com-mitment to reform within their framework. The align-ment with existing modernity allowed for a certaindistance from current modernizing practices, and thisreflexive moment was also evident in the efforts madeto theorize an overall epochal shift which the classicshad analyzed only from certain angles.

This understanding of modernization theory as an ep-isode in a much longer hermeneutical narrative—and asa genuine if self-limiting reflexive turn within that con-text—is relevant to the discussion of alternative views.As Kahn sees it, “critics shared with modernization the-orists the vision of modernity as a process of emanci-pation and continuous technological change” butclaimed that the inbuilt promises had not been fulfilled.Who are these critics? The context suggests that Kahnis referring to the Frankfurt School and Foucault, butneither of these two models for critical theory took shapethrough a critique of modernization theory. The ideaswhich Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) developed in theDialectic of Enlightenment were—for both—an alter-native to an earlier version of unorthodox Marxism,




which had already been critical of the progressivist main-stream. As for Foucault, his communist phase was longerand more significant than he later liked to admit, andhis earliest publications grew out of a settling of accountswith the Marxism of the party and its fellow travellers;the shift from Marx to Nietzsche was decisive (DidierEribon’s [1989] biography of Foucault is very illuminat-ing on this point). The explicit critique of modernizationtheory came later—in the 1970s and early 1980s—andwas in the most interesting cases combined with anequally thorough critique of the Marxist alternative. Jur-gen Habermas, Alain Touraine, and Anthony Giddens(in his pre-Third Way incarnation) published seminalworks in this vein, but mention should also be made ofS. N. Eisenstadt, the only prominent modernization the-orist who went on to develop an original and powerfulcritique of modernization theory. None of these theoristscan be said to have retained the premises of moderni-zation theory in a negative mode. Rather, they decon-structed the paradigm of modernization from within andproposed to replace the underlying image of modernitywith a more complex one. This debate is still in progress,and it remains to be seen how closely it can be linkedto the legacy of critical theory, Frankfurt- or Foucault-style. The most ambitious attempt to synthesize the twoagendas—Habermas’s theory of communicative ac-tion—has come under telling criticism from severalangles.

In short, the dialogue which Kahn envisages is to bewelcomed, but I would like to see it situated in a morepluralistic theoretical field. An overgeneralized idea ofcritical theory does not seem very useful. The same ap-plies to streamlined models of tradition. I am not con-vinced that it makes sense to speak of a Hegel-Marx-Weber tradition: Weber was surely not wholly wrongwhen he said that nothing was as opposed to his visionof history as the Hegelian one. And although there is nospace for further discussion, I would like to register astrong objection to the idea of a Comte-Spencer-Durk-heim tradition. The critical potential in Durkheim’swork is far greater than this label would suggest.

s . n . e i senstadtDepartment of Sociology, Hebrew University,Jerusalem IL-91905, Israel. 11 vii 01

I am very much in sympathy with Kahn’s general ori-entation or premises, namely, that what we call mo-dernity “is something that encompasses the West andthe Rest from the very start.” I also agree with him thatthe tension between tendencies to rationalization andwhat, following Taylor, he calls expressivist orientationshas been inherent in modernity from its very beginningand is “reproduced,” as it were, with the expansion ofmodernity and that these themes have constituted en-during foci of the intellectual, academic, and “on-the-ground” discourse of modernity. But in some ways hisanalysis does not go far enough, nor does it fully confront

some of the problems to which the emphases on “mul-tiple modernities” are addressed.

First of all, he does not recognize that the tension be-tween rationalization and expressivism is not the onlyone inherent in the cultural programme of modernity.Of no smaller importance has been the tension betweenabsolutizing, totalizing tendencies and more pluralistic,multifaceted visions and practices.

In modern political discourse and practice this tensionhas crystallized around the problem of the totalizing ide-ologies, nationalistic communal and/or Jacobian, whichdenied the legitimacy of such pluralities. It has also man-ifested itself in the construction of collective identitiesand collectivities, around which developed continualstruggles between forces pressing for the homogeniza-tion of social and cultural spaces and proponents of theconstruction of multiple spaces allowing for heteroge-neous identities. The tension has also been expressed inthe construction of rationalities, where there is opposi-tion between the acceptance of the existence of differentvalues, commitments, and rationalities and the confla-tion of such different values and rationalities in a total-istic way, with a strong tendency towards their absolu-tization—between, as Toulmin (1990) has shown,totalizing ones, of which the Cartesian is possibly thebest illustration, and pluralistic ones developed, for in-stance, by Erasmus or Montaigne.

This tension was inherent in modernity as a distinctcivilization (Eisenstadt 2001) which emerged in the Westbut, as Kahn points out, changed “the West” as well asother civilizations. In all these civilizations this pro-gramme generates the “loss of markers of certitude” andthe constant search for them in which these tensionsbecome fully articulated (Lefort 1988).

It was these characteristics that constituted the coreof the premises of modernity as a distinct civilization.But just as in the cores of other civilizations (for instance,the Islamic one), the concrete ways in which these prem-ises were institutionalized, interpreted, and reflectedupon varied greatly in the different societies whichshared it. As in the case of Islam, so also Western mo-dernity constituted a model and reference point—whilein fact constituting one of many modernities. The first“multiple” non-European modernities developed, as ina way de Tocqueville recognized, in the Americas.

The recognition of the development of constantlychanging multiple modernities does not deny theirstrong common core but only emphasizes their changingdynamics. In such dynamics the West—first Europe, thenthe United States—has always constituted an ambiva-lent reference point around which many of the tensionsinherent in modernity were played out. It is with respectto this dimension that we have seen the very importantchanges found—but perhaps not fully explicated—insome of Kahn’s illustrations from Malaysia.

Thus lately there have developed throughout the worldnew interpretations of modernity, promulgated espe-cially by new religious movements and, significantly,including many of the postmodern ones which haveemerged in the West, which have attempted to dissociate




Westernization from modernity completely—to deny themonopoly or hegemony of Western modernity and theacceptance of the Western modern cultural program asthe epitome of modernity. In the context of these newinterpretations, the confrontation with the West is notan effort to become incorporated into hegemonic civi-lization on their own terms but an attempt to appropriatethe new international global science, indeed, modernity,for themselves. They intend to diffuse modern idiomswithin their traditions as the former are ceaselesslypromulgated and reconstructed under the impact of theirongoing encounter with the West (Eisenstadt 2000b).

harri englundThe Nordic Africa Institute, P.O. Box 1703, 751 47Uppsala, Sweden ([email protected]). 16 vii 01

When Leach and I penned our intervention into debateson ethnography and modernity, we expected to encoun-ter polemic, albeit not the kind of convenient straw manthat Kahn has crafted. It should not surprise us, however,that Kahn does not discuss our argument in any detail.The thrust of his own intervention clearly depends onidentifying a “traditionalist understanding” of ethnog-raphy, never mind if the existence of such an understand-ing is hard to pinpoint in current anthropology. Whattroubles me more is that some of our contentions arefired back at us as if they were not also ours.

Much hinges on how the imperative of “engagement”is understood. Leach and I conceived our project preciselyas an engagement with the ethnographer’s lived expe-rience during fieldwork and with the intellectual-bu-reaucratic-political conditions within which ethnogra-phers generally work. Our “interlocutors” are not onlythose whom we encounter in the field but also our ac-ademic colleagues, past and present social theorists,funding agencies, and political authorities, to name buta few. The tired distinction between “us” and “them”is not, therefore, ours. Crucial to our argument is, in-stead, the contention that the practice of ethnographyinvolves following certain intellectual and bureaucraticprocedures, all of which are potentially political and rep-resent legacies of a colonial and imperialist world his-tory. In this sense, what is important is not so muchwhether the ethnographer is “native” or outsider, maleor female, black or white, “remote” or “near,” as howthe ethnographer deals with the problematic legaciesthat are intrinsic to the metier of ethnography. Our callwas for a renewed respect for the reflexive insights intosituated life-worlds afforded by ethnographic fieldworkat its best, however the sites and subjects of the “field”are defined in a project, however many interpretive au-thorities there are in the “field,” and whoever conductsthe fieldwork. Engagement, in our argument, entails con-fronting social theories on the basis of this reflexive ex-perience. Dialogue with social theory, occasionally cul-minating in a confrontation, is not optional. It imposesitself on any trained ethnographer, sometimes—as in thecase of modernity’s meta-narratives—seriously clashing

with the ethnographer’s reflexive experience. Newknowledge is predicated on this tension, not on a simplerejection of social theory, if only because all advances inunderstanding are reframings of existing awareness. Ourintent was to make the tension explicit.

Another way of highlighting Kahn’s difficulties in ren-dering our position is by pointing out that the crux ofour argument is the notion of meta-narratives. Beyonddispute is the abundance of narratives on progress, fail-ure, development, exploitation, and, yes, modernity inthe contemporary world. Ethnography, as a distinct modeof knowledge production, ought to involve due attentionto the contexts and concerns of these discourses. Socialtheory provides us with both critical insight and unex-amined meta-narratives with which to think through ourethnographic encounters. Yet there is no reason that“modernity,” as defined by one or the other social the-orist, should provide the optimal translation for a widerange of historically specific preoccupations, includingthe kaki jolly of Malays. From whose perspective, forexample, does the increasing involvement of Islam inpolitics appear as “religious rationalization”? Unless itis confronted with the ethnographer’s reflexive experi-ence, the profound secularism of social science is likelyto erase from view deeply contextual passions in relig-ious politics. This is why Leach and I suggested thatmore theoretical attention be devoted to issues of con-text and personhood, another aspect of our argumentwhich Kahn forgets to mention.

I ask Kahn to acknowledge two of our key conten-tions—that dialogue with social theory is intrinsic toethnography and that “modernity” is only one of manytheoretical constructs for apprehending the contempo-rary world—and to explain how these contentionsamount to a “traditionalist understanding” of ethnog-raphy. As for those who have not read our article, I invitethem to consult it before taking it as a representative ofthe position that Kahn attributes to it.

beng-lan gohSoutheast Asian Studies Program, Faculty of Arts andSocial Sciences, National University of Singapore,Singapore ([email protected]). 10 vii 01

While the challenge to rethink modernity is not new,Kahn’s recourse to critical revisions of social theory andthe ethnography of contemporary Southeast Asia bringsrefreshing perspectives to the debate. Kahn challengesthe idea that a rethinking of modernity can be positionedwithin or outside the West. Drawing on critical ideasdeveloped within the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and We-ber and actual historical and ethnographic evidence ofmodernity, Kahn relocates modernity within the tem-porality of contradictory but simultaneous processes ofrationalization and cultural autonomization—processeswhich, he argues, were global from the outset but nowmore than ever offer an occasion for a dialectical en-counter between the West and the non-West. By com-plicating the traditional distinctions between the West




and the non-West and the unfolding logic of modernity,Kahn opens a way out of the conundrums about the ir-retrievability of indigenous experience and the paradox-ical restoration of Western agency/power posed by psy-choanalytic and power-based critiques of modernity thatdefine it in terms of discursive processes associated withWestern experience and authority.

Kahn’s use of Southeast Asian narratives to rethinkmodernity is important in at least two ways. First, theregion has received relatively little attention in the de-bates on modernity. Second, and more important, thequestion of Southeast Asian modernity calls for an ex-amination of the social comparison between the so-called East and West. As an anthropologist based in andworking on the region, I have been frustrated by mean-ingless comparisons between the “East” and the “West”in which Southeast Asian developmental experiences areoften judged in terms of “Western” categories and mean-ings. Yet I am aware that the practice of treating the Westas normative is not necessarily confined to the West. Itis equally prevalent in Southeast Asia, albeit camou-flaged in different forms. Despite an escalating anti-Westrhetoric as scholars, intellectuals, and politicians in theregion negotiate their social positions in the contem-porary world, the desire for things and values Westernhas not vanished. In Malaysia, for instance, while it maybe clear that Prime Minister Mahathir is anti-West, hehas no difficulty promoting “Western” forms of archi-tecture, technology, infrastructure, and urban develop-ment in the country. In fact, the mixing of Eastern andWestern cultural forms is common in the search for aparticular “indigenous” Malaysian modernity: the Pe-tronas Tower and its Islamic symbolism is one such ex-ample. These eclectic manifestations may be seen lessas ultimate expressions of “indigeneity” than as ways ofaddressing contestations over what is indigenous in thecomplex interaction between local and global forces oftransformation.

Kahn’s identification of an expressive/autonomousimpulse in the popular/everyday processes of commod-ification and rationalization that presents an occasionfor coeval and creative encounters between the West andthe East is compelling. In locating modern subjectivitiesat the intersection of everyday experiences of commod-ification, Kahn provides a way out of the usual fixationon the teleological structures of nationalist and coloni-alist power in interpretations of Southeast Asian mo-dernity. By simultaneously creating an analytical spacefor local autonomy and disrupting dominant moderni-zation narratives, Kahn succeeds in making the subjectof Southeast Asian modernity a parallel and not merelya response to existing theories.

I would like to raise two points to contribute to thisdebate. The first, alluded to by Kahn but not developed,is the question of violence and inequalities in modernSoutheast Asia. It needs to be pointed out that strugglesover new subjectivities in contemporary Southeast Asiaare as much about contesting the cultural and materialorders of the West as they are about the construction ofdifference within the modern present of local societies.

The Southeast Asian quest for modernity is accompaniedby tumultuous spatial, material, and symbolic changesin the complex interaction between local and globalforces of transformation. Yet it is precisely the everydayprocesses of violence and upheaval that provide a spacefor political agency. Such contestations over the un-evenness of modernity are precisely what make contem-porary Southeast Asian modernity fascinating, for theyare the very spaces from which creative possibilitiescould emerge. Second, I would like to draw attention togrowing regional identity formations shaped by the po-sition of Southeast Asia as a new center in the worldeconomy that disrupts the notion of the single influenceof the West. New regionalist imaginations and materialand mass cultural practices are emerging as comparableto those of the West in constituting subjectivities in con-temporary Southeast Asia. Far from being passive “oth-ers,” local elites are equally active in manipulating re-gional and global schemes of cultural difference. Thus,with Kahn, I see that a questioning of modernity mustexplore both the displacements opened up by Westernand non-Western experiences and the ways in whichthese experiences are made to appear distinct under theaegis of various types of agency.

james leachDepartment of Social Anthropology, University ofCambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF,U.K. ([email protected]). 10 vii 01

Kahn’s article is a call to take seriously some of theissues Englund and I raised. I am grateful for his pointsabout reflexivity and interlocution and for a chance toclarify our position. Ethnographers are indeed workingin places where their understandings, generated throughclose relationships with a small number of people, arechallenged by the scale of the society they write aboutand the power relations within that society. The atten-tion to context that we recommended should make theseconditions apparent. Ethnography promises a groundedunderstanding rendered as a particular perspective on so-cial processes in each setting. The work of our articlewas precisely to engage the contextless, universalizingprinciples behind “multiple modernities” with ethno-graphically generated understandings of social life. Thisengagement was, crucially, inspired by our fieldwork inplaces which seemed to fit perfectly with the encom-passing impetus of a sociological version of modernityin its culturally refracted forms. Our recommendationwas to take such appearances as part of what needs an-alysing (as opposed to the departure point of analysis). Itconcerns me that this centrepiece of our argument didnot come across to Kahn. We argued for the engagementof anthropology with modernist meta-narratives ratherthan the organization of ethnography through thosemeta-narratives.

The charge that we advocated a “traditionalist under-standing” of ethnography is, however, not accurate.What can ethnography be, asks Kahn, in a place like




modern Malaysia? This question, he answers, “can bebroached only if we reconsider the proposition that eth-nography speaks of places outside modernity.” Our in-tervention said nothing about doing research outside mo-dernity. We are obviously discussing the influence ofwhat some people call modernity—money, commodi-ties, born-again Christianity, and so forth. Kahn’s argu-ment here degenerates into a rhetorical construction of“the other” that has no basis in our text. Our articlecontains no suggestion of withdrawing from studyingpeople who live in an interlinked world.

Apparently we criticize others for “flirting” with themeta-narratives of modernity. This is not our criticism.Rather, we warn against the wholesale adoption of a the-ory of modernity without realizing the power of themeta-narratives contained within it to organize knowl-edge production. Kahn is not careful enough to distin-guish meta-narratives (understood as assumptions builtinto a focus on the processes of modernity) from thenarrative of modernity itself, which we indeed have noobjection to in itself. Kahn is right to say that it is thishistory that conditions the production and consumptionof anthropological knowledge.

Englund and I are not concerned with divisions be-tween academic disciplines or between the West and theRest. We are concerned with the understanding possiblebetween “interlocutors,” be they from distant parts ofthe globe or next-door neighbours, metropolitan, pow-erful, or “subaltern.” We suggest that with close atten-tion to the relationship in which knowledge is produced,it is possible to know more than by assuming that acommon language or set of motifs means the same thingto different people. This is the reflexivity we call for.And it should indeed come in conversation and dialoguewhich problematizes simple divisions between inform-ants and anthropologist. Ethnography provides insightinto the particularity of experience. Far from a “deep-seated incompatibility” between self and other, this ap-proach relies upon the commonality of inherently socialbeings, while attending to differences in social form (his-tory) and their consequences for meaning, power, andpersonhood.

Our argument, then, was that one must not assumethat one’s critical theory will be found played out insomeone else’s practices, as Kahn points out for Malay-sians’ take on the processes which affect them. To do soundermines the possibility for recognizing creative en-gagement with the “modern” by organizing it through ameta-narrative which is encompassing. Through organ-izing knowledge, such an approach capitulates with an-other assumption—the self-generating perception of theinevitability of capitalist expansion through modern-ity—and its attendant critique. This inevitability issometimes cited as moral justification for workingwithin the system rather than taking the hard road ofthinking unconventionally. It is this “terrain” that wetry to step outside through ethnographic work, not, asKahn suggests, the world itself. Finding difference, asKahn positively desires in his conclusion, does not haveto mean a “utopian” vision of a place beyond the vices

of modernity. At the same time, people must be allowedto have their own vices! This is not an argument betweenour position and Kahn’s. In fact, his final paragraphssound like a rephrasing of what Englund and I recom-mended when we suggested that alternatives which existin this world need not be alternatives which are readilyrecognized within the meta-narratives of modernity.

Thus our article cannot be read as a recommendationthat one must not work in certain places or on certaintopics. The grounded perspective of ethnographic workgives a reason for engagement with social theory, basedon the possibilities that Kahn cites as people’s creativepotential for engaging with their situation. I fail to seewhat is “insidious” in such an understanding ofethnography.

michael g. peletzDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, ColgateUniversity, Hamilton, N.Y. 13346, U.S.A.([email protected]). 27 vii 01

Kahn’s stimulating and broadly cast essay is offered asa rejoinder to Englund and Leach’s recent “Ethnographyand the Meta-Narratives of Modernity,” so I begin byreviewing key points emphasized by the latter. Englundand Leach’s reservations about the ways anthropologistshave engaged the predominantly sociological debates onglobalization and modernity have to do partly with theperception that they focus too much on—and at timesfetishize—preconceived and insufficiently contextuali-zed abstractions that undergrid the “meta-narratives ofmodernity” (“rupture,” “commodification,” “individu-alization,” etc.). The other part of the problem accordingto Englund and Leach is that in their rush to delineatethe relevance of “wider contexts” and “multiple [or al-ternative] modernities,” anthropologists of modernity(e.g., Appadurai, Ong, the Comaroffs) give short shrift tothe situated knowledge they produce in the course offieldwork and also gloss over or ignore the ethnographicrecord. Englund and Leach maintain that such tenden-cies devalue the practice of intensive and sustained eth-nographic inquiry as well as the cumulative store of eth-nographic knowledge and that in doing so theycontribute to “ethnographic ignorance” and the delegi-timization and demise of (sociocultural) anthropology’sunique methodological and intellectual contributions asa social science. But Englund and Leach do not advocatea return to an unreflexive “anthropology of the premod-ern”; indeed, the rich ethnographic data from contem-porary Malawi and Papua New Guinea they adduce makeit clear that their critique does not entail a retreat froman engagement with the theories or lived, embodied re-alities of modernity.

It is against such a position that Kahn develops hisbasic thesis, which seems to be threefold: (1) that “thenotion of plural or multiple modernities as it has beendeveloped in recent anthropology is problematic not be-cause it subsumes the ethnographic project to classicalmodernist narratives but precisely because it fails suf-




ficiently to engage with them”; (2) that we need to “rees-tablish the conversation between anthropology and so-cial theory”; and (3) that we must “bring the contextualand popular dimensions of modernity into frame,” es-pecially by making better provision for the experiences,aspirations, and ambivalences of those we encounter inthe field. In presenting these and ancillary arguments,Kahn provides an overview of his fieldwork in Malaysiaand Indonesia since the 1970s; he also refers to otherparts of Southeast Asia, since much of his essay is offeredas a critique of the literature on multiple modernities inthat expansive region.

Concerning the first two sets of issues, I concur withKahn that more extensive dialogue with the works ofclassical social theorists (Marx, Weber, critical theoristsassociated with the “Frankfurt school,” and their inter-locutors, for starters) will enhance our ethnographic andtheoretical contributions as anthropologists and scholarsof the human condition. Although Kahn does not makethe point, it is arguably all the more crucial for anthro-pologists to attend to “the big questions” posed by clas-sical sociology because much contemporary sociology ispreoccupied with quantification and methodology.Kahn’s assertions concerning the purported deficienciesof the literature on multiple modernities in SoutheastAsia are more difficult to evaluate, for he does not reallyengage any of the relevant scholarship (e.g., Ong 1999;Ong and Nonini 1997) or any of the equally pertinentliterature on civil society in Southeast Asia (e.g., Budi-man 1990; Hefner 1993, 1997, 2000). In fact, he barelyrefers to any of this literature, even in passing. In lightof the lost opportunities that result, these intellectualmoves are unfortunate. They are also curious and ironic,since Kahn’s essay is intended as a clarion call to developsocial theory through genuinely reflexive critical en-gagement with both the ideas of politics and the politicsof ideas.

The curiously decontextualized and disembodied di-mensions of Kahn’s intellectual positioning become allthe more striking when one is told that “metropolitananthropologists almost completely ignore the crucialquestion of the role and function of ethnographic knowl-edge in places like modern Malaysia.” None of the an-thropologists implicated in these types of unsubstan-tiated assertions are identified. Who are they? Moreserious is that with one or two partial exceptions (e.g.,a passage from Ong), Kahn does not cite any of the eth-nographically grounded work of Malaysian, Indonesian,or other Southeast Asian scholars (such as Raymond Lee,Noraini Othman, Shamsul A. B., and Yao Souchou) thatis directly relevant to the questions of theory and prac-tice he is addressing—and this despite his justly criticalobservations that the voices of “‘natives’ with real powerto influence the practices of ethnography . . . are [often]completely erased” by anthropologists from the metro-pole. In sum, retheorization of the meta-narratives ofmodernity and anthropology’s relation to them is abroadly collective enterprise. To be truly compelling andpluralized it will need to make provision for “nativevoices” and intellectual continuity, not just real or imag-

ined “rupture” vis-a-vis the ethnographic and theoreticalcontributions of others.

gustavo lins ribe iroDepartment of Anthropology, University of Brasılia,Brasılia, D.F. 70910-900, Brazil ([email protected]).16 vii 01

This welcome piece offers an engaging opportunity torecognize the power of “modernity” to resurface andprompt complex discussions. Of the many facets ofKahn’s provocative and stimulating work, I consider cen-tral the question whether modernity is universal. First,it relates to the future of anthropology as a disciplinethat claims to be universal in spite of its Western his-torical foundations. Second, with the deepening of theprocesses of globalization, the relationships between theuniversal and the particular need to be rethought if weare to escape centrisms of all kinds. Third, in a contextin which multicultural and postcolonial positionsabound, the tensions between universalism and partic-ularism have become increasingly politicized.

Categories such as civilization, progress, development,globalization, and modernity are part of a genealogy ofdiscourses that prefigure empire (Hardt and Negri2000)—the constitution of a supposedly single, systemictotality of legal, economic, political, and cultural formsof exerting global power. “Modernity” needs to bethought about in the framework of capitalist expansionand its related ideologies and according to the histori-cally unequal distribution of power in a world systemthat is shrinking because of time-space compression(Harvey 1989). It is not surprising, therefore, that local/national elites tend to be fairly aware of the meaningsof “modernity” while peasantries and indigenous peo-ples tend to be less so (or almost completely unaware).To put it another way, familiarity with modernity isclosely related to participation in the capitalist systemand exposure to time-space compression and circuits ofpower that are potentially inter- or transnational. Likeother ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990), modernity is subjectto indigenization, but this does not amount to sayingthat it is a native category.

The ethnographer of Malaysia or, for that matter, anyother place in the world going through similar processesof transformation is not “dragged into a direct encounterwith modernity at the same time as its peoples.” First,this encounter is not equally lived by everyone. Second,what the ethnographer is really dragged into is a directencounter with capitalist expansion and its multifariousdirect/indirect effects. In 2001, we cannot be surprisedby discovering that rationalization, proletarianization,commodification, etc., cause radical changes in allspheres of life.

We need not theorize “Malaysia as a site of modernity”and redefine our task as “an anthropology of modernity”to take local interlocutors seriously. And the problem isnot whether anthropologists speak of places outside orwithin modernity. In reality, nothing like an anthropol-




ogy of premodernity—a Western construction—ever ex-isted. Although it has not been an issue for many ofthem, anthropologists have always been part of “mo-dernity” or students of its many facets and reflections.We need to envision anthropology as a set of relationalpractices and discourses supposing encounters in whichpower positions differentiating the people involved fromthe ethnographer should be dissolved.

Anthropology’s task is often metaphorically describedas an attempt to establish dialogues between differentpeoples (cultures, classes, identities, etc.). This calls fortaking into account all the participants in interactionand admitting that conversations may prompt changeand transformation. Hybridity, a term Kahn seems toavoid, is a common outcome of dialogical encounters(including, evidently, all others and not just the ethno-graphic encounter). But is it enough to propose that weconsider anthropology a kind of hybrid discourse? Can atruly universal anthropology exist? Or should we accepta fundamental aporia of anthropological thought—thatthe other is always irreducible? Or, conversely, do dis-cussions such as these prefigure a day when it will beimpossible or irrelevant to trace the origins of “univer-sals” such as “modernity,” since there will be no moreindigenizing particulars?

All these questions raise the issue of difference as amain axis that supports the anthropological project. Dif-ference will never disappear. Its production is a functionof power inequalities, of the symbolic and linguistic uni-verses in which human beings exist, and of the relation-ships between “social representation” and “individualrepresentation,” to frame it as Durkheim did. However,the modes, contexts, and conditions whereby differencesare produced are subject to change. Those who have onlyrecently discovered that “we are all natives now” havenot perceived that all of us have always been natives ofa place. It is not the absence or presence of an anthro-pologist anywhere that defines nativeness. Such anthro-pological views were based on Eurocentric and Ameri-canocentric perspectives of the “universal.” I wouldrather believe, following Laclau (1992), that the relation-ship between universalism and particularism is alwaysincomplete, a field of tensions, a struggle for an emptyplace that, once occupied, tends to colonize other placesthat, in turn, will struggle against their reduction to theimages or projects of a dominant Other.

Modernity(ies) is one aspect of this field of tensions.As do various other such ideologies and utopias, it needsto be understood within regimes of production of ho-mogenization and heterogenization and not singled outas the yardstick against which difference and samenessare measured.

donald robothamAnthropology Program, The Graduate Center, CityUniversity of New York, New York, N.Y. 10016-4309,U.S.A. ([email protected]). 29 vi 01

Kahn’s paper presents anthropology with another oppor-tunity to overcome its endemic parochialism. Like it or

not, anthropology is born of and operates within mo-dernity and must engage with the main body of socio-logical reasoning which both expresses and seeks to the-orize modernity.

Anthropology will not become modernity’s hand-maiden as a result of accepting these realities. This isbecause a self-critical, disconsolate, divided conscious-ness—consuming the material fruits of instrumental ra-tionality while yearning to be released from its Weberian“iron cage”—is, according to Kahn, at the very core ofmodernity. This antinomic attitude is precisely what—again, according to Kahn—is embodied in the “Hegel-Marx-Weber” critical sociological tradition. It is also asensibility increasingly to be found at the popular levelin countries in the East (and elsewhere) experiencingrapid modernization.

Kahn convincingly demonstrates that notions of “re-flexivity” which understand the problems of anthropol-ogy to be derived from the epistemological limitationsof fieldwork or authorship are, at best, hopelessly naıve.Would that these could be overcome by resorting toclever rhetorical devices such as “multivocality,” which,of course, leave the actual relationships of inequalityfirmly intact (Robotham 1997:364)! Kahn points out thatall anthropologists (not only those from “the West”) willhave to abandon such transparent textual maneuvers.Whether “native” or “foreign,” anthropologists will becompelled to engage with this rising intelligentsia “outthere” although not “in the field.” This intelligentsiahas little inclination to be used as “informants” or pa-tronized as “interlocutors” and has difficulty discerningwhat is to be gained by engaging in “dialogue” with an-thropologists, especially those branded as “foreign.” Par-adoxically, this challenge, if taken up, leads to a rein-vogorated anthropology of equals—a real-world “reflex-ivity”—rather than a rhetorical pseudo-reflexivity art-fully constructed by the condescending anthropologist.This is an absolutely vital point in Kahn’s paper, but willmore anthropologists take it up?

Kahn’s approach is deeply imbued with Weberianthinking, though more that of the Nietzschean and neo-Kantian than of the “Marxist” Weber (Mommsen 1989:24–43). His typically Weberian assertion that the prin-cipal contradiction of modernity is the tension betweenpersonal autonomy and instrumental rationality, ratherthan that between widespread global immiserationamidst stupendous wealth, must be unintended, for itborders on the scandalous. Hegel and Marx would per-haps have dismissed this brand of modernist agonizingas the height of intellectualist self-indulgence.

That this kind of nostalgia for Gemeinschaft and Hei-mat—originally the preserve of German anticapitalist ro-manticism—is now emerging even more acutely in “theEast” is unsurprising. Both are cases of very rapid late-capitalist transformation of rural societies driven fromabove by more or less autocratic regimes. Similarly, theclaims around “Asian values” are eerily reminiscent ofthe arguments for a superior German Sonderweg com-monplace among the nationalistic German intelligentsiaof the late 19th century.




This approach defines modernity by its ethic of meansrationality rather than by its mode of production, classrelations, or control of the state. Ethically it concentrateson means rationality at the expense of ends rationality.This paralyzes it in the face of the defining 20th- and21st-century outrages—the systematic use of the mostexquisitely rational means to pursue brutally irrationalends. Weber certainly recognized this contradiction, buthe could not effectively interrogate ends within the cat-egorical moral and epistemological confines of his neo-Kantian imperatives. Yet it is precisely this failure to putends at the center of theory which allows means ration-ality to be placed so completely at the disposal of irra-tional ends. From this viewpoint also, whether modern-ity is capitalist or socialist is not too important, exceptthat socialism travels even farther down the road of anall-encompassing rationality and thus greatly acceleratesthe decline of personal autonomy.

Kahn’s approach obscures a larger difficulty which an-thropology, like the antiglobalization and environmentalmovements, will have to confront. The critical socialtheories (not “theory”) of modernity conceal profoundlycontradictory premises which lead in diametrically op-posite directions. Many trends (predominant in anthro-pology and antiglobalization and among Greens) seek torecover community by dismantling international eco-nomic relations and reverting to some form of small-scale living. Other trends (infinitely weaker) regard large-scale international economic relations, cleansed ofcapitalism, as the very foundation for overcoming thecontradictions of modernity, including those of personalautonomy. Urging anthropology’s engagement with crit-ical theories riven by such irreconcilables is a huge ad-vance over where the discipline is today but will createnew and even more intractable dilemmas.

tom rockmoreDepartment of Philosophy, Duquesne University,Pittsburgh, Pa. 15282, U.S.A. ([email protected]).8 vii 01

In remarks on field research in Southeast Asia, Kahnsuggests that ethnography cannot dispense with a con-ception of modernity in raising the question of an ap-propriate model. His paper presupposes that we musthave in mind a conception of modernity in order to studydifferent social groupings but that the cognitive objectis altered by economic and other processes that in turninform any study of the social world. This suggests thatthe ability to ascertain so-called facts presupposes a nar-rative appropriate to pick them out. It further suggeststhat in any given case more than one narrative ispossible.

I believe that both suggestions are correct. Facts cannever be isolated from a conceptual framework withinwhich they are meaningful. The framework, which hasno truth value, serves as the context within which truthclaims can be made. The social world provides an em-pirical constraint that is also “constructed” by one or

another narrative about it. There is no uninterpreted so-cial object that can be cognized, known, or interpretedas it is in itself. All interpretation, all cognition, is alwaysrelative to a conceptual scheme. And there is no way toshow that the social world mandates a single possibleinterpretation. Plural, disparate narratives are alwayspossible. A choice between them cannot be made onmerely empirical grounds; it also cannot be made otherthan from one or another extraempirical point of view.

By “modernity” Kahn means in the first place thechanges in social structures resulting from the devel-opment of a market-oriented economy, what is oftencalled capitalism. Which model should one employ? Inpointing out that our ideas of modernity are mainly de-rived from Western conceptual models, Kahn’s answeris twofold. He is favorably disposed to the idea that al-ternative narratives can be constructed about the objectsof social science, such as Malaysian villages, which sug-gests that we must reject anything like a single, univocallogic of modernization in studying such societies. Yet healso suggests that modernity, East and West, is part ofone continuous historical process.

I think it would be simplistic to think that Kahn iscontradicting himself or that he is caught in a viciouscircle. We can paraphrase his point as that the construc-tion of alternative, discrete, even incompatible narra-tives about a given social group always presupposes acontinuous process in terms of which they can be dif-ferentiated. In denying the possibility of grand narratives,what Lyotard calls a meta-recit, “positivist” historianslike Foucault typically insist on the formation of discretecultural formations, or epistemes, which come into andgo out of existence. Foucault means to prevent anythinglike History with a capital H in thinking difference asprimary. Yet difference can only be thought on the basisof the very unity that a positivist approach to historymeans to deny. Kahn’s insight seems to be that in thedomain of social science different types of narrativesmust be understood in terms of a continuous historicalprocess on which they provide alternative perspectives.

The deeper problem, which he does not mention, con-cerns cognition of the continuous historical process, orwhat it is that we know when we know. It makes em-inent good sense to hold that we can provide differentalternative narratives of the real historical process. Ifthere were nothing there, it could not be described. Ifour descriptions do not relate to an object, there cannotbe knowledge of it. But the cognitive object cannot beknown other than through alternative narratives. Inother words, there must be something there in order todescribe it in different ways, but what there is can neverbe known other than through alternative descriptions.We never know that we know social reality as it is be-cause we never know that we know mind-independentreality. What we know through empirical research is al-ways and inevitably a construct or an artifact of one oranother conceptual scheme. Paradoxically, then, wemust presuppose the existence of an uninterpreted re-ality which we cannot know as a condition of knowingon the basis of conceptual frameworks keyed to the em-




pirical constraints encountered in interaction betweenobservers and the experienced world.

Knowledge is limited to conceptual constructs on thebasis of which we interact with empirical constraints.We construct what we know, and we know only whatwe construct. If this is correct, then social science of allkinds illustrates the well-known constructivist thesis.Yet since social construction is not isolated from butrather part of the historical process, all claims to knoware indexed to time and place, or to the historical mo-ment. With this correction, one can agree with Kahn inmaintaining that anthropology and social theory cannotbe separated, for anthropology requires a conceptualframework or social theory as its very condition. I takeit that this is the deeper message Kahn means to convey.

albert schrauwersDepartment of Anthropology, York University, 4700Keele St., Toronto, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3([email protected]). 14 vii 01

Kahn’s paper reflexively highlights the intellectual ge-nealogy of anthropology as “expressivist” critique of mo-dernity. This approach takes into account recent con-cerns with the plurality of modernity, the lack of fixedboundaries of our field sites within a globalizing world,and the multiple theoretical challenges to the isolationof “the West” from “the Rest.” It is precisely by engagingwith the meta-narratives of modernity and reflexivelyencompassing the role of the anthropological process ofOthering within them that we can construct a new the-oretical project, a project based on the comparison ofsimilarities rather than absolute difference. As Kahnnotes, this draws attention to the authoritative roleplayed by ethnographers themselves and the implica-tions of the circulation of enthnographic knowledge inthe modern spaces we all share.

Recent accounts of events in Central Sulawesi painta dismal picture of the Balkanization of the New Orderstate. Children walk the streets with home-made guns,and headless corpses float lazily down river. A state oncedescribed as monolithic, invasive, totalizing, and hege-monic now appears a fragile victim of “primordial” re-ligious and ethnic tensions; its goal of developing a uni-fied national citizenry and a modern economy lies intatters. Yet another case of incomplete modernization?Or, as is becoming increasingly clear in case after caseof IMF restructuring, all too modern?

Faced with such violence, we need to address the eth-ical implications of the historical use of anthropologicalknowledge in the creation of these “primordial” senti-ments. A localized ethnography of the sort called for byEnglund and Leach offers “improperly contextualized”stories—stories shorn of modern meta-narratives and,hence, precisely of culpability. “To become somethingmore, these partial, ’hidden histories’ have to be situatedin the wider worlds of power and meaning that gave themlife. But those worlds were also home to other dramatispersonae, other texts, other signifying practices. There

is no basis to assume that the histories of the repressed,in themselves, hold a special key to revelation; the dis-courses of the dominant also yield vital insights into thecontexts and processes of which they were a part” (Com-aroff and Comaroff 1991:17).

Kahn points out that modernization and traditionali-zation are simultaneous processes which cannot be dis-entangled; pluralizing the modern or focusing upon glob-alization and then relocalizing modernity disguises theways in which the construction of “tradition” providesthe meta-narratives of liberal “modernity” with their es-cape clause, their means of separating us from them and“blaming the victims.” If by modern we mean the prod-uct of instrumental reason, even we “have never beenmodern” (Latour 1993). As Latour argues, the ideologyof modernity creates the Great Divide, “to the extentthat Westerners can be lined up on one side and all othercultures on the other, since the latter all have in commonthe fact that they are precisely cultures among others.In Westerners’ eyes the West, and the West alone, is nota culture, not merely a culture” (1993:97). Modernitythus contains within itself an inherent ethnographic pro-ject, a desire to construct “tradition” (and hence itsOther) in which its modern indigenes are complicit. AsPemberton (1994) demonstrates, “culture” is an “effect”of history rather than its explanation or precondition. Byviewing “traditionalization” and “modernization” aspart of the same historical process, we implicate met-ropolitan Europe, colonial indigenes, and ethnographersfrom the outset.

It is important to underscore that the “expressivistcritique” of modernity (and hence anthropology) is notnecessarily reflexive. It is only through the recognitionand assessment of anthropology’s own modernist lineagethat we can assess the political implications of anthro-pological power/knowledge in its various institutionalsettings. An ethnography of modernity in the expressiv-ist vein should be, in other words, politically engaged—apoint which does not emerge strongly in Kahn’s paper.“Otherwise we are pushed back to an anthropology thatis little more than a description of the quaint or violentcustoms of other people, or a social history that callstalking to each other about the vulnerable giving themvoice” (Sider and Smith 1997:14).

carol a. smithDepartment of Anthropology, University of California,Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A. ([email protected]).8 vii 01

Kahn’s article does indeed describe current ethnographicencounters that are “broadly typical,” especially for an-thropologists who have worked in the same place 20years or more. I have maintained research contact for 30years in western Guatemala, which resembles Kahn’sethnographic region only superficially, being much less“modern” in economic, political, and social terms. YetKahn’s description of Malaysian modernity and the var-ied concerns of Malays about it resonates with my ex-




perience with Maya in Guatemala. The major currentissue in Guatemala concerns the impact of modern-ity—whether defined as economic development or asWestern values—on traditional (especially Maya) cul-ture. What Maya wish to avoid is what many Westernscholars consider the features of modern life that bringabout economic development—individualistic values,shrinking, unstable family life, and the weakening holdof a moral community. Maya leaders active in the cul-turalist movement argue that it is possible for them todevelop economically and still retain traditional values,supporting the argument with the observation that Mayahave remained “essentially” the same for more than 500years despite countless changes imposed on them bySpanish conquerors. They also frequently point to Japanas an impressive example of economic modernity co-existing with the maintenance of a relatively intact (tra-ditional or non-Western) culture (see, e.g., de Hart 2001).

What I find curious is Kahn’s hesitation to go beyonda culturalist and Western deconstruction of the meaningof modernity. In cultural terms he actually goes muchfarther than most scholars do by pointing to alternativeand critical Western theories of the modern. Perhaps hegoes no farther because it is old-fashioned to begin withcapitalism and its simultaneous influence on economiccores and peripheries with respect to modernism. Hementions capitalism only two or three times, and thenin the context of Weber’s concerns with modernity.Western scholars have done little to build on Weber’sinsights concerning the impact of capitalism on socialsystems and cultures—an impact Weber recognized asbeing far from monolithic or teleological but with de-cided consequences. What I am suggesting is that wespend less time defining modernity, globalism, and localidentities/cultures and more time trying to explain con-crete examples of modernity, which will always vary be-cause they will have been affected by a host of specifichistorical factors.

The particularities of modernity do not depend uponlocation in the developed or underdeveloped regions ofthe world, nor are they necessarily Western cultural im-ports brought in by particular cultural agents whose mi-grations to other parts of the world encouraged capital-ist expansion. Two interrelated features of modernitybrought on by capitalism that have been socially-cul-turally realized in different ways are changing family andsexual relations and the reconstitution of “traditional”communities based on locality into other kinds of socialgroupings (e.g., labor, religious, ethnic). In most of LatinAmerica proletarianization and migration have led to amajor increase in female-headed households and a de-crease in even the pretense of patriarchy except amongelites; children of most workers and migrants remainwith their mothers, on whom they depend for both iden-tity and economic survival (Folbre 1994). Men find otherwomen and often end up creating and leaving behindmany different female-headed households. In much ofAsia, in contrast, patriarchy often seems to be strength-ened rather than weakened by proletarianization and mi-gration. For example, migratory Chinese men have left

wife and children behind with paternal kin for centuries;and whether or not they visited regularly or sent remit-tances back for family support, their children were in-corporated into a related “traditional” patriarchal house-hold. There has been little systematic attempt to explainthis significant and consistent “cultural” difference inthe impact of modernity (or capitalism) on families inother than stereotypical terms (i.e., patriarchy is morestrongly inscribed in Asia than elsewhere). Other familyfeatures—shrinking household size and interdepen-dence, marital instability, recourse to other kinds of fam-ily formation and/or sexuality—also lack any single formwhich can be linked to the “requirements” of capitalismand modernity. Surely we can be more precise in ex-plaining them than by pointing broadly to capitalism,modernity, globalization, and “strength” of tradition. Ihave worked on female-headed households in LatinAmerica (Smith 1995, 1998) and suggested a causal chainfor them.

Mayan traditionalists think about the shrinking andincreasingly unstable modern Maya family only in verygeneral terms. They are mostly troubled about the for-mation of social communities other than locality, whichcan reproduce key cultural signifiers of Maya identity,such as language. Attempts to create such communitiesare adding to the divisions within their localities to thepoint of dividing even families. Unlike “traditional” lo-calities, governed mainly by patriarchal norms of com-munity, “modern” communities are divided by class, ed-ucation, ethnic consciousness, sometimes politics, andespecially religion—each of which helps create the“new” communities. New religions seem to be a primarysource of new community associations (as in Malaysiawith the Islamic revival), and the most successful ofthem in Latin America are evangelical; in GuatemalaMaya are now almost one-third evangelical, others beingdivided among traditional Catholicism, Catholic Action,and Maya forms of religious practice. On these groundsone could argue that new religions divide more than theycreate communities, but that would require believingthat the “modernizing” communities were not alreadydivided in major ways—which is almost certainly wrong(see, e.g., Burdick 1996). It seems, then, that we mustassume that capitalism invariably creates “modern”forms of family and other social groupings, though theyare not necessarily identical. And it also seems thatwhile there are multiple forms of modernity, there areways in which we can link different forms to the his-torical specifics of “capitalist penetration.”

There is little to dispute in Kahn’s argument that an-thropologists must “reconsider modernity in both [West-ern and non-Western societies] as part of a single his-torical process of modernization that was global fromthe outset.” But does this mean it would “be a mistaketo invoke either a plurality of modernities or the glob-alization and then re-localization of modernity, as ameans of accounting for anthropological realities”? Ithink the real issue is tracing the particularities of mul-tiple “modernization(s)” as they involve both local andglobal processes and both general and particular histor-




ical processes. All cultures change (modernize) all thetime, but that is hardly what we should be arguing about.The issue is how and why.

tan chee-bengDepartment of Anthropology, The Chinese Universityof Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China([email protected]). 23 vi 01

Kahn argues that anthropology is being led “towardsrather than away from an encounter with modernity”and that it should engage directly with existing modern-ist “meta-narratives.” I agree. Anthropologists invariablyencounter modernity, at least as a perceived phenome-non or a discourse, in their research. Every site is nowa site of modernity. In Mainland China it is virtuallyimpossible to ignore modernity; not only does the statepromote it but people talk about it, too, and want to be“modern.” They express it in their consumption, an areato which anthropologists need to pay more attention.Modernity is encountered and engaged in differently bydifferent groups of people and individuals. And modernconsumption, whether in the form of getting a new dishsterilizer in rural Yongchun in South Fujian or adoptinga more elite style of drinking Chinese tea in rural Guang-dong, expresses modernity.

Indeed, modernity is experienced even in remote vil-lages. In Borneo, while logging has a negative impact onthe indigenous people, logging roads do link remote vil-lages to urban centers, and people are very conscious oftheir changing modern ways of life. Their desire for amore modern lifestyle increases with their integrationinto the market economy. They also express modernityvia various modes of consumption. Some of them evenbuy mobile phones that can be used only when they goto town because there is no reception in their villages.

I concur with Kahn that modernity is not only some-thing concrete but also “a singular process that is globaland multicultural.” This global process of modernity ismanifested in institutional modernity, a process thatbrings about more efficient (rational) management of hu-man societies (urban planning, provision of public facil-ities) and the distribution of modern conveniences andcomforts and liberates individuals from oppression andinjustice. For instance, the one-person, one-vote systemof national election may have its pitfalls, but it doespermit ordinary people to have a say in choosing gov-ernments. Pluralizing modernity (e.g., “Asian modern-ity”) provides a rhetoric for oppressive regimes to rejectefforts to bring about a more open and liberal system ofgovernment. In this sense there is a global process ofmodernity affecting all human societies, brought aboutby such factors as the diffusion of science and technol-ogy, modern education, and the market economy. Manykinds of agents are involved too: government, NGOs,political activists, and all kinds of individuals.

In Malaysia, as Kahn has shown, the local people talkabout modernity and have their own views on it. In eth-nically polarized Malaysia, Malays and Chinese have dif-

ferent attitudes towards modernity. Malays want to beon the same footing as successful Chinese and to beproud bangsa (people) in the world. Their rhetoric ofmodernity is influenced by their perception of modernityin relation to Islam, as well as their perception of Chi-nese and other Malaysians, and by their historical mem-ory of colonialism. Thus Prime Minister Mohamad Ma-hathir’s modernity rhetoric against Western dominationis meaningful to them. Chinese Malaysians generallytake modernity for granted, and many relate it to globalmobility. Thus when the dominant Malay partylaunched the New Malay (Melayu Baru) (read ModernMalay) campaign in the 1990s, the Chinese did not knowhow to respond. Some tried to call for a similar campaign,but the Chinese could not make sense of what “NewChinese” might mean. They are more concerned withMalay political dominance and racial discrimination,and they do not know how to relate modernity to them.

It is obvious from the above discussion that the globalprocess of modernity is expressed concretely in variousforms at the state, group, and individual levels. There ismuch room for exciting ethnographic research, and anencounter with critical theory of modernity is obviouslynecessary for reflexive ethnography. At the same time,new ethnographic findings can shed new light on boththe process and theories of modernity. As to “an an-thropology of modernity,” this seems to be a rhetoric ofemphasis. Anthropologists once disregarded tourism intheir research, but today no serious anthropologist canafford to neglect its impact. Similarly, given the globalexperience of modernity and local rhetoric, no seriousanthropologist can fail to take into account the issue ofmodernity and therefore the critical theory of modernity.What anthropologists can contribute most is analyses ofmodernity in particular political economies, for theglobal process of modernity does not exist in a vacuum.In this context one can analyse other cultural issues,including the negotiation of tradition and modernity.

bj orn wittrockSwedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the SocialSciences, Gotavagen 4, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden([email protected]). 20 vii 01

Despite decades of critique, the dominant sociologicalform of theorizing about global developments remainsthat of modernization theory. This type of theorizing wasexplicitly premised on a set of dichotomies between thetraditional and the modern, the Western and the non-Western, the stagnant and the dynamic. Implicitly it wasalso premised on a view of the world that took the ex-periences of one particular country in one particular his-torical period, notably the United States in thepost–World War II period, as the yardstick against whichthe achievements and failures of other countries weremeasured. Thus one particular trajectory to modernitytended to be assumed rather than examined. Further-more, long-term relationships between this trajectory




and developments in other parts of the world tended tobe ignored or simply dismissed.

At the beginning of the 21st century, global interac-tions have become so prominent and immediately visibleas to make obvious the existence of distinctly modernyet clearly different societies across the globe. Paradox-ically, both traditional modernization theory and largeparts of contemporary globalization studies remainpremised on assumptions of convergence and unilinearmodernization. Thus globalization studies may have re-placed notions of structures with notions of networks,but they tend to preserve core assumptions of modern-ization theory in terms of a functional evolutionary ac-count of history and a functional and non-agential ac-count of society.

The conventional understanding of modernization suf-fers from three crucial weaknesses: First, it is concep-tually impoverished. Thus it presents an understandingof modernization as consisting of changes in economic-technological practices, “the industrial revolution,” andin political practices, “the democratic revolution,” butit neglects the fact that modernity was formed in thewake of a profound shift in cultural and discursivepractices.

Furthermore, it is empirically untenable. The partic-ular institutional practices that modernization theory as-sociates with modernity—be they a liberal market econ-omy or a democratic nation-state—did not materializein full-blown form anywhere, even in the context ofWestern Europe, until the middle of the 20th century.From a purely structural-institutional perspective, mo-dernity would barely have arrived in time to witness itsown funeral. This would make a mockery of debatesthroughout the 19th century in Europe about the comingof modernity. Furthermore, as already argued, societiesacross the globe are modern but exhibit differences thatcannot simply be expected to fade away in favor of agradual approximation to some implicit North Americanyardstick.

Finally, the conventional understanding is, as is per-suasively argued by Kahn, normatively closed. It positsa purely instrumentalist understanding of—to use myown terminology (Wittrock 2000)—the promissory notesof modernity. Paradoxically, in this respect conventionalmodernization theory and a number of its poststructur-alist critics share this interpretation. They both tend toneglect tensions between expressivist and instrumen-talist tendencies in modernity that existed in the artic-ulation of modernity at least from the turn of the 18thcentury onward (Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock1996; Wagner 1994, 2001). A purely instrumentalist read-ing of the promissory notes of modernity is historicallyinaccurate, and it is vacuous as a normative theory ex-cept in a purely formal sense. In the case of traditionalmodernization theory there is simply an uncritical ad-vocacy of a set of instrumental values, an assignmentthat in a number of poststructuralist accounts has justshifted evaluational contents.

From this perspective, there is every reason to wel-come Kahn’s key arguments. Let me briefly highlight

five points on which I take his understanding and mine(Wittrock 2000, 2001a, b) to coincide:

1. The cultural constitution of modernity has to beexplicitly brought into any theorizing of modernity. Itcannot be relegated to a pristine domain of ethnographicresearch.

2. The cultural presuppositions of modernity have al-ways been in tension with each other, discursively em-battled and differently interpreted and articulated.

3. Virtually every such articulation has occurredagainst the background of a perceived threat to the prac-tices of a given society, a sense that it is about to beoverwhelmed not only by the values of another societybut by the sheer power of other societies. This is equallytrue for what has sometimes been called “defensive mod-ernization” in 19th- and 20th-century Europe (Joas 1999,2000) as it is in the cases of 19th- and 20th-century Japanand 20th-century China or India.

4. In all parts of the world today, articulations of cul-tural and institutional assumptions of modernity willoccur in virtually all geographical regions and among allparts of the population. Such processes are not reservedfor an intellectual elite in supposedly modern settingsdistinct from an allegedly traditional population in re-mote areas unaffected by modernity. Thus the very ideaof ethnographic accounts that may be kept separate fromtheorizing about modernity is untenable.

5. The particular institutional projects that were ar-ticulated and sometimes partially realized in some partsof Europe and North America came to impinge on therest of the world, but this cannot be construed eitherhistorically or in the contemporary setting as an en-counter between modern and traditional societies. Nei-ther Ching China nor Mughal India nor Safavid Persianor Tokugawa Japan nor Ottoman Turkey and the Bal-kans was in any reasonable sense a stagnant, traditionalsociety. They were all undergoing profound change, hadvibrant public spaces, and were reinterpreting their ownlegacies, defining their collective identities, and reform-ing their political orders (Eisenstadt, Schluchter, andWittrock 2001).

Only a focus on the connected and entangled natureof history (e.g., Subramanyam 1997, 1998) can bring thisout. Such a focus defies any notion of a dichotomy be-tween theorizing the modernity of European and NorthAmerican societies and ethnographically recording thetraditional and the given in other settings. There is everyreason to believe that social theories of modernity willbe greatly enriched in the coming decades by the con-tributions of theoretically informed anthropologistsfrom across the world.




Reply

joel s . kahnMelbourne, Australia. 9 vii 01

I am gratified by the number and variety of responses tomy argument for a deepening of the encounter betweenanthropology and theories of modernity, even if in anumber of cases I find myself somewhat taken aback bythe negative tone of some of the more critical comments.

In particular I was disappointed by the reactions ofEnglund and Leach, whose article in an earlier issue ofcurrent anthropology stimulated me to clarify myown thoughts on the relationship between anthropolog-ical knowledge making and Western narratives of mod-ernization. Instead of being pleased that their piece hadserved to stimulate a serious discussion of these issues,they appear to imagine that my own piece had as itssingle raison d’etre a desire to attack it. And on thatfront I stand accused of simultaneously misrepresentingtheir arguments and claiming them for my own. (It isextremely difficult to see how one could be guilty onboth counts at once.) In fact their article was not thesole or even the primary stimulus for my own argument,and I do not propose here a point-by-point refutation ofeither their article or the separate comments they makehere. Perhaps instead a single example might serve toillustrate where our disagreements are sharpest. At onepoint in their article they take the Comaroffs amongothers to task for operating with a covert meta-narrativeof modernity in making claims about the effects of gen-eralized commodification. In essence their argument isthat engaging with this particular modernist narrative isethnocentric, since it reads local reactions to commod-ification through the grid of a preexisting modernist de-bate. Instead of engaging, however critically, with theshortcomings of this particular (one might add uni-dimensional) narrative and exposing its shortcomings (inthe West as well as the non-West), they appeal to a field-work “tradition” through which the ethnographer some-how escapes into a place of radical otherness-to-mo-dernity, allowing the fieldworker to be “transformed inthe process of inquiry” by imposing “interlocutors’ con-cerns and interests upon the ethnographer,” therebychallenging “the perceptual faculties the ethnographeris accustomed to trust” (Englund and Leach 2000:229).This particular vision of the nature of ethnography isprecisely what I have termed a “traditionalist” one tothe extent that it promises an escape into a space ofradical alterity. In this sense the label “traditionalist” ishardly a misrepresentation of their position. And what-ever one may think of it, it is very difficult to see howthe very clear alternative I proposed can be taken to bea case of claiming their positions as my own.

The work of my colleague Arnason has done much toclarify my own thinking on the strengths and weak-nesses of contemporary social-theoretic discourse in thecritical tradition. Given my attempt to engage with it, I

am a little surprised by the negative tone of his response.Perhaps this just demonstrates that while social theoristsmay be happy for anthropologists to draw on their in-sights, they are reluctant to recognize the very clear con-tribution that anthropologists, postcolonial theorists,multiculturalists, feminists, and others could make tothe transformation of social theory. How else could Ar-nason be so oblivious to the long-established critical en-gagement with modernization theory in anthropologystimulated by the work of Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintzand the rise of dependency and world-system theory andto the subsequent inversion of the liberal assumptionsof modernization theory in the critiques of developmentof anthropologists such as Ferguson and Escobar? As forhis perfunctory dismissal of my attempt to uncover sim-ilar continuities in contemporary debates with two quitedifferent European theoretical traditions (advanced inany case rather tentatively in the article), I remain un-discouraged by the statement that because Durkheimwas somehow more “critical” than Comte and Spencerand Weber was unhappy with aspects of the Hegeliansystem such an attempt should be abandoned. To makethis case more convincing, however, I would have hadto stray far beyond the central problems addressed in thisparticular article. Finally, asserting that it is possible todevelop an abstract theory of modernity in the singu-lar—hence dismissing my critique of the notion of mul-tiple modernities—does not actually make it so. On thisone point I remain unconvinced by Arnason’s ownwritings.

Perhaps the problems raised with regard to the em-beddedness of modernity and the shortcomings of “ex-emplary” accounts of modern subjectivity are too “an-thropological” for Arnason to take much interest inthem. And yet, while they may arise in the kind of an-thropological encounter I describe, they prove extremelyproblematic for critical theory as well. Just as anthro-pology must benefit from an encounter with the workof critical theorists like Arnason, he too would benefitfrom a more serious engagement with the problems iden-tified in contemporary ethnography. Perhaps for obviousreasons, then, I find Wittrock’s approach to similar issuesfar more congenial. But this is not just because he findssubstantial areas of overlap between the project I haveoutlined and his own work as a social theorist but alsobecause he appears far more willing than is Arnason totake seriously the problems identified in Western nar-ratives of modernization by ethnographers who havetaken the trouble to engage with them.

I find myself agreeing with Eisenstadt’s case for broad-ening the focus of the discussion of modernist culture,although I am not certain that the tension between to-talization and pluralism could not be linked more closelyto the project of autonomization (in Wagner’s terms, thetension between liberty and discipline) than he pre-sumes. I fully sympathize with the intentions of someof those who, like Eisenstadt, have seriously worked topluralize the concept of modernity. Eisenstadt here atleast provides a justification by advocating one way ofsingularizing the concept, arguing that modernity begins




in the West to be differently appropriated elsewhere. Inthe paper, however, I point to difficulties with this ap-proach by suggesting that modernity may have been co-evally constituted in the West and the non-West and bysuggesting that perhaps modernity may best be under-stood as having been “global” and multicultural fromthe outset. This of course is to take issue with Eisen-stadt’s suggestion that modernity can be thought of as a“distinct civilization which emerged in the West,” buthis response prompts me to reexamine his importantcontribution to these issues over many years.

Goh’s comments are useful, and of course she is cor-rect to point to the importance of revised understandingsof modernity in theorizing both violence and strugglesfor (and against) local cultural, political, and economicautonomy, particularly in places like Indonesia. Here sheidentifies what is perhaps the major challenge facing an-alysts of contemporary Southeast Asia, if only becausewe are all implicated in one way or another in the pro-cesses through which cultural identities in the regionhave been formed—a point I take to underlie the workof Schrauwers.

I confess to finding Ribeiro’s intervention somewhatopaque and would be interested in a more worked-outversion of the themes he takes up. We disagree at a num-ber of crucial points—for example, that modernism andempire are as intimately connected as he appears to sug-gest, that modernity is largely to be understood as anideology of elites (and that “peasantries” and “indige-nous peoples” are less aware of it, however this mightbe measured), and that “capitalist expansion” on its ownprovides an adequate understanding of the systemic in-terconnection between the West and its others (this lastpoint also argued by Smith). Yet reading his piece is, forall that, stimulating, and I am pleased that my articleseems to have provoked such a lively response. Similarlywith the response by Robotham, who also points out gapsin the argument of the article, including its failure toaddress global immiseration and stupendous wealth—afailure that he suggests is possibly “scandalous.” Thesame could be said of the lack of attention to racism andviolence, a point made somewhat differently by Smith,Schrauwers, and Goh. I would agree that this is a gap inthe article under consideration, although I hope not inother things I have written. But such comments serveto remind me that the fact that an earlier theoreticalobsession with, particularly, the Marxism of the Frenchstructuralists (and hence with the transhistorical perti-nence of concepts like mode of production, surplusvalue, class, and capitalism) failed to provide satisfactoryways of dealing with such problems does not mean thatthe problems themselves have disappeared. Robotham’srecognition of the failures of socialism in this regard is,therefore, important to my own position as well.

I appreciate Rockmore’s more philosophically elegantstatement of my assumptions and cannot quarrel withhis “correction” of them. Would that my own argumentswere really so coherently epistemologically grounded!

The point made by Schrauwers about the problemsinherent in an ethnography that either refuses or fails to

recognize the ways in which anthropology and hence theanthropologist are implicated in the processes that pro-duce “interlocutors” is a critical one, and these problemsin my view also infect a good deal of what passes forcritical theory in the West. It is for precisely this reasonthat I have called certain of Englund and Leach’s claimsfor ethnography traditionalist, a label that in this sensemight also be applied to certain much more recent (andapparently more “radical”) work by subalternists, post-structuralists, and postmodernists. All in different waysseek an epistemological guarantee for their critiques ofmodernity and its meta-narratives in some form of es-cape from modernity for that selective band of subjectswho are thereby able to see it for the sham it is. In thisway they conveniently escape being themselves impli-cated in its evils (inequality, immiseration, racism, pa-triarchy, violence), for which almost everyone else thenbecomes responsible.

Smith engages at length with certain aspects of thearticle but in spite of some positive remarks urges a re-turn to some of the key arguments of the “political econ-omists” for whom she has been such a prominent andpersuasive spokesperson. It is perhaps the assertion thatthe goal of such analysis is to examine the “impact” ofcapitalism (or modernity) on, presumably, precapitalistor premodern communities that throws most clearly intorelief the problems in the approach she appears to favour.Two separate but ultimately intersecting lines ofthought—the one methodological, the other theoreti-cal—have moved me away from this kind of approach.The former begins with a critique of objectivist ap-proaches in the human and cultural sciences towards anengagement with the meaningful dimensions of humansocial life (a la Geertz) but then moves beyond this “ob-jectivist subjectivism” to a recognition of the intersub-jective or hermeneutic processes by which the subjectivestates of others are constructed. But, as I have argued,the dialogical accounts of ethnographic practice thrownup by these assumptions can be seen to be sociologicallynaıve to the extent that the focus remains on the dyadicand relatively short-term interactions that constitute in-dividual ethnographic encounters. What is called for in-stead, as Schrauwers points out, is a reflexive account ofthe production of anthropological knowledge and theprocesses that generate both anthropological subjectsand objects, embedding them within more stable long-term relations between “us” and “them” (relationswhich under certain circumstances may be classed asimperial, although this far from exhausts the list ofpossibilities).

Theoretically, political economy approaches falter pre-cisely because they seek to describe these relations interms of the “impact” of capitalism, the global, the mod-ern, etc., on essentialized and timeless precapitalist orlocal or premodern “communities,” positing a “tradi-tional” baseline that continually recedes backward intime. The evidence of local distinctiveness inevitablyuncovered by such ethnographic encounters must al-ways be explained as a consequence of incomplete cap-italist development, modernization, or what have you.




The already-mentioned example of the meta-narrative ofcapitalism as commodification with which politicaleconomists have most frequently operated (and whichEnglund and Leach rightly criticize) is a case in point.Here the “penetration” of capitalism is seen to generatean inexorable process of commodification—of products,means of production, land, and finally labour power (thepoint at which political economists can speak of “full-blown” capitalism). Inevitably, however, the ethnogra-pher “discovers” some elements of naturalized produc-tion which are then taken to signify the influence of localprecapitalist forms and hence of an incomplete not-yetcapitalism on the “periphery.” This tendency of politicaleconomists to measure their ethnographic experienceagainst the yardstick of a predetermined narrative of cap-italist “development,” a procedure that must result in“peripheral” societies’ somehow falling short, began in-creasingly to strike me as unsatisfactory not because itmarked a radical break with what I have termed a tra-ditionalist narrative of ethnographic escape but preciselybecause it did not break sufficiently with it. Is it rea-sonable to argue, even in Smith’s own Central Americanexample, that centuries of capitalist “penetration” havestill not generated a “complete” capitalist tranforma-tion? Or is it more reasonable to reexamine the validityof all such unidimensional narratives of modernizationin both the cores and the peripheries of the so-calledworld capitalist system?

Peletz seems to me to fail to come to grips with mostof the central arguments of the paper, choosing insteadto engage in a round of the citation game (“you didn’tcite me or my friends”). While I do recognize the con-tributions made especially by Budiman and Ong (the lat-ter is cited in the paper), I do not think I can be accusedof failing to engage with scholars in the region. Nor doI think the particular oversights of which I am accusedare in any way damaging to my argument.

Tan raises an important objection to the notion of mul-tiple modernities not mentioned in my paper, namely,that it should provoke scepticism if only because it hasbecome embedded in the rhetoric of authoritarian re-gimes. Although I have elsewhere entered into the so-called Asian values debate, expressing a certain dissat-isfaction with critiques that rest on assertions about theuniversality of Western liberal narratives on humanrights, I think Tan provides an alternative and more con-vincing critique. Pursuing this intriguing suggestionwould involve demonstrating the shortcomings of liberaluniversalism in the West and Asia alike and replacing itwith a more multidimensional concept of globalmodernity.

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