Read more
"Critically Modern makes a critical intervention in one of the great debates of the moment. It offers a variety of rich and fascinating empirical analyses of 'modern' phenomena from diverse societies, and contributes a powerful (and largely missing) voice to the growing literature on globalization and modernity outside anthropology."
-Charles Piot
"In these essays theory and ethnography are presented in ways that make them mutually enriching. The volume should appeal to scholars across the entire range of disciplines that deal with modernity and/or globalization."
-Edward LiPuma
Are there multiple ways of being "modern" in the world today? How do people in various parts of the world become modern in their own distinct ways? Does the current focus on modernity in the social sciences resurrect a series of dichotomies ("traditional" and "modern," "the West" and "the Rest," "developed" and "undeveloped") that social theorists have sought to move beyond in recent years? Or do inflections of modernity capture key features of ideology and influence in the contemporary world? Combining rich ethnographic analysis with incisive theoretical critiques, this timely volume is certain to make an important mark in anthropology and in all related fields in which modernity is a central problematic.
Contributors: Donald L. Donham, Robert J. Foster, Jonathan Friedman, Ivan Karp, John D. Kelly, Bruce M. Knauft, Lisa B. Rofel, Debra A. Spitulnik, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Holly Wardlow.
List of contents
Preliminary Table of Contents:
Preface
Critically Modern: An Introduction Bruce M. Knauft
PART I
1. Bargains with Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Elsewhere Robert J. Foster
2. Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse Ivan Karp
3. Trials of the Oxymodern: Public Practice at Nomad Station Bruce M. Knauft
4. "Hands-Up"-ing Buses and Harvesting Cheese-Pops: Gendered Mediation of Modern Disjuncture in Melanesia Holly Wardlow
PART II
5. Modernity's Masculine Fantasies Lisa B. Rofel
6. Accessing "Local" Modernities: Reflections on the Place of Linguistic Evidence in Ethnography Debra A. Spitulnik
7. The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot Michel-Rolph Trouillot
PART III
8. On Being Modern in a Capitalist World: Some Conceptual and Comparative Issues Donald L. Donham
9. Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to "Modernity"?: Getting Out of the Modernist Sublime John D. Kelly
10. Modernity and Other Traditions Jonathan Friedman
Contributors
About the author
Bruce M. Knauft is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and Director of the Vernacular Modernities Program.
Summary
An exploration of the meaning of modernity in contemporary ethnography.
