Anthropology and Modernity

Anthropology and Modernity
Author(s): JoelS.Kahn
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 5 (December 2001), pp. 651-680
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o 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 and
Modernity
1
by Joel S. Kahn
Against those who have taken anthropologists to task for flirting

with the meta-narratives of modernity, this article argues that
it is incumbent on them to engage with both modernity and
modernist narratives far more directly and explicitly than in the
past. This holds even, or especially, for those who, in positing a
notion of multiple modernities, have managed to hold modernist
narrative at arms length, neglecting the potential fruitfulness of
juxtaposing Western and non-Western experiences of what Habermas has called the project of modernity. The encounter between anthropology and modernity is generated on the one hand
by changes in the lives of the subjects of ethnographic research,
but the fact of these changes raises more searching questions
about whether ethnographers ever studied genuinely premodern
peoples and cultures. The reflexive imperative, moreover, confirms the need to recognize anthropologys own modernist origins. Finally it is argued that it is critical modernist theory in
the Hegel-Marx-Weber tradition that is the most pertinent to the
ethnographic encounter and that the exercise of bringing together
critical 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 University (Melbourne 3083, Australia [j.kahn@latrobe.edu.au]). Born in
1946, he was educated at Cornell University (B.A., 1967) and the
London School of Economics and Political Science (M.Phil., 1969;
Ph.D., 1974). He has taught at University College London, the
University of Sussex, and Monash University. His research interests include development, social change, nation building, and
identity in Indonesia and Malaysia and the history of anthropology. Among his publications are Constituting the Minangkabau:
Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia (Oxford
and 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 accepted 23 v 01.
1. An early version of this paper was presented at a symposium I

organized at the University of Sussex. I thank the participants for
their comments and criticisms, which helped me to clarify my
thinking on these issues. In particular, I want to thank Zygmunt
Bauman, Filippo Osella, and Jon Mitchell for their contributions to
the discussions. Christopher Houston and Maila Stivens read and
commented on a draft of this paper. I am extremely grateful to both
of 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. Their
comments were, nonetheless, invaluable. Finally, I thank Francesco
Formosa for valuable research assistance in the rewriting of the
paper for publication.
In a recent assessment of the pertinence of theories of

modernity to the practice of anthropology. Englund and
Leach criticize anthropologists for flirting with the
meta-narratives of modernity. The concept of modernity may have been substantially pluralized and relativized in recent anthropology (see, e.g., Comaroff and
Comaroff 1993, 1999; Appadurai 1996; Rofel 1999; Ong
1999), but Englund and Leach still find modernist anthropology guilty of merging the concerns of ethnography with those of Western sociology. Such a merger,
they argue, serves to devalue if not erase the particular
contribution of ethnography as a practice of reflexive
knowledge production. This, they imply, would be a
great loss, since the knowledge practices of ethnography
. . . are unique in that they give the ethnographers interlocutors a measure of authority in producing an understanding of their life-worlds (Englund and Leach
2000:22526).
I want to argue here precisely for the need to reestablish the conversation between anthropology and social
theory and hence between non-Western and Western experiences (and narratives) of modernity that has
been neglected in recent years. Specifically, I want to
insist on the value of a more systematic dialogue with
those critical theorists who have attempted to redefine
or reconceptualize Western modernity in the aftermath
of postmodernism. Against the claims of Englund and
Leach, moreover, I will maintain that the notion of plural
or multiple modernities as it has been developed in recent anthropology is problematic not because it subsumes the ethnographic project to classical modernist
narratives but precisely because it fails sufficiently to
engage with them. I am not suggesting that a dialogue
between anthropology and modernist social theory is or
should be a harmonious one. I agree with Englund and
Leach and recent modernist anthropologists that ethnographic knowledge poses significant challenges to that
theory. Yet to suggest that we should withdraw from the
dialogue because of supposedly deep-seated incompatibilities between the West and the Rest, self and other,
the proper disciplinary concerns of sociology and anthropology, or the radical differences between Western
and non-Western experiences of modernity is to fail to
recognize that it is precisely out of such an encounter
that all such apparently contradictory entities arise in
the first place. I shall argue that the encounter with a
critical theory of modernity is peculiarly pertinent to a
genuinely reflexive ethnography.
In what follows I will examine the ways in which anthropology is, for better or worse, forced into an encounter with both Western modernity and Western narratives of modernization. This involves also looking
briefly at the ways in which contemporary modernist
ethnography has handled this encounter, through either
a rejection or a relativization of modernity. I will then
discuss briefly those aspects of the critical theory of modernity that appear particularly pertinent to an anthropology of modernity. Finally, I shall examine the challenges to both theorist and ethnographer posed by the
juxtaposition of modernist theory and ethnographically
651

652 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001
based knowledge of contemporary Southeast Asia. The

concept of multiple modernities that has emerged out of
such encounters proves to be a problematic response to
the ethnographers need to bring the contextual and the
popular dimensions of modernity into frame.
Provoking this confrontation, in other words, forces us
to rethink both the ethnographic understanding of
Southeast Asia and the received notions of modernity
that have been developed in Western contexts in ways
that are fruitful for both. This allows us to return to the
reflexive imperative urged on us by Englund and Leach
and the notion of multiple modernities but suggests that
only by engaging directly with both modernity and modernist theory can ethnography ever truly claim to be
reflexive.
Encountering Modernity
Ethnography in its broadest sense doubtless remains a
cornerstone of the discipline of anthropology, but of
equal importance are the theoretical considerations provoked by the ethnographic confrontation between self
and other. The following brief discussion of Southeast
Asia is therefore aimed at raising these theoretical issues
in a context that may be broadly typical of many such
encounters.
My own research began in the early 1970s with two
years of ethnography in Minangkabau villages in both
highland and coastal areas in the Indonesian province of
West Sumatra (see Kahn 1980, 1993), although the encounter dates back to the years before that when the U.S.
government attempted but failed to send me to Southeast Asia for less peaceful activities. I returned with my
partner, Maila Stivens,2 to a Malay village in the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan for an extended period in
197576. Since that time we have returned to Malaysia
together or separately every year or so for periods ranging
from a few days to several months, during which times
we have done further research, attended conferences,
given seminar papers, and visited postgraduate students
carrying out their own dissertation research. At the same
time we have welcomed Malaysian and Indonesian colleagues and postgraduate students in Australia as supervisors, conference organizers, and collaborators in a variety of research and publishing projects (see, e.g., Kahn
and Loh 1992, Kahn 1999, Sen and Stivens 1998, Hilsdon
et al. 2000).
In the time since the first research, developments in
Malaysia have so clearly transformed our ethnographic
subject that we have been increasingly compelled to redefine our ethnographic project as an anthropology of
modernity. The story of Malaysian modernization, particularly since the state-led policies of industrialization
2. I am extremely grateful to the following bodies for funding research in Indonesia and Malaysia over the years: the London-Cornell Projects, the British Social Science Research Council, the British Academy, The Leverhulme Foundation, The British Institute in
Southeast Asia, and The Australian Research Council.
and social reconstruction lumped under the heading of

the New Economic Policy (NEP) began to make their
mark in the early 1970s, does not need retelling here. It
is enough to note that economic growth over a period of
almost three decades, punctuated by brief downturns in
the early 1980s and more during the Asian financial crisis
of 1997, has been consistently high, and this has been
accompanied by changes in most of the social and cultural indicators that are typically associated with modernization and development. The NEP was expected to
contribute both to national economic growth and to a
loosening of the connection between economic function
and race bequeathed by colonialism. The economic developments and restructuring of this period had a very
significant impact on the Malay villages where we
started our research, which up to then had been consideredby ethnographers and Malay nationalists
alikethe locus classicus of premodern Malay society
and culture.
Already by the mid-1970s and certainly when we returned during the 1980s, it was evident that a good deal
of the economic action was taking place outside the ricefarming Malay village republics, in a landscape rapidly
dominated by factories and small- and medium-scale
manufacturing plants in free-trade zones and industrial
parks scattered throughout the country. Such developments, moreover, were not offstage from the point of
view of the villagers; most of them were either working
in these factories or reliant on the income of a family
member who was. This shift was accompanied by the
growth of cities and towns and of modern urban landscapes of office towers, hotels, and condominiums in the
Klang Valley and in regional towns, the mushrooming
of housing estates on the fringes of all of Malaysias urban centres, the widespread appearance of shopping centres, malls, restaurants, and multinational fast-food outlets in city centres and suburban fringes, the building of
highways, toll roads, and bridges and a huge increase in
car ownership and accompanying traffic snarls throughout the country, the expansion of banking, share trading,
and consumer credit and the growth of all branches of
the media and the popular entertainment industries, an
increase in tourist arrivals and departures, and the building of theme parks, entertainment complexes, and leisure centres. These developments were accompanied by
high levels of pollution and environmental degradationthe other side of modernization. Many of the same
people whom we had previously encountered in our
village in Negeri Sembilan were now living on a permanent 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 which
the boundaries between our world and theirs were
far more permeable in both directions than the traditional vision of ethnography might suggest.
Not unexpectedly, the material trappings of late-20thcentury modernity were accompanied by major upheavals in the lives of all Malaysians. Between 1970 and 1990,
the patterns of social stratification that had prevailed in
the colonial and early postcolonial period were radically

k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 653
transformed. Wage labour was not uncommon in the villages where we carried out our research, but since around
1970 we have witnessed the development of wage labour
into the quasi-universal form of distribution, to borrow a term coined to describe the effects of late capitalism in Europe (see Sulkunen 1992). The emergence of
a Malay working class, a significant proportion of which
is young and female, has directly or indirectly affected
the lives of almost all rural Malays, including those living in villages in Negeri Sembilan. Particularly significant in terms of their implications for rural Malays have
been the specific character of the new capitalist work
processes in the burgeoning, labour-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing sector and the impact of the ethnic
restructuring aims of the Malaysian state. These have
meant that more and more Malay villagers, including
substantial numbers of young women, have taken up
employment as unskilled labourers in nearby factories,
with some abandoning village residence altogether for
the modern lifestyle (kaki jolly) of the factory girl.
At the same time, there has been a substantial increase
in the relative size of what sociologists are wont to call
(problematically) the new middle classes, a development
that has also affected a large proportion of Malays who
were previously living in Malay villages (cf. Kahn 1996).
We did ethnography and carried out interviews with Malays in a range of new middle-class occupations on housing estates on the fringes of Seremban (the capital of
Negeri Sembilan) during the late 1980s. These peopleamong them the children, siblings, and cousins of
villagers among whom we had earlier done our ethnographywere still to varying degrees bound up in
village life. Many of them had until quite recently lived
in peasant villages either in Negeri Sembilan or elsewhere, most of them kept up close ties with kin and
friends in their villages of origin, some had left their
children behind with their own parents in the village,
and many expected at some point to return to village
residence, at least on retirement. More successful urban
residents were expected to send cash remittances and/
or do favours for village kin. Some saw it as their duty
as pious Muslims to bring true Islamic teachings and
practices to their villages.3 Many consciously attempted
to re-create the best features of village life in their new
middle-class housing estates.
Apart from changes associated most directly with economic transformation, there have been significant
changes to both political and cultural/religious landscapes. The growth in the size, functions, and modernizing mission of the Malaysian state proceeded apace
during 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 rural
areas of new underclasses mainly drawn from the ranks of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from poorer regions of Southeast Asia
(including Sumatra) who came in Malaysias boom times. At the
same time, economic growth has thrown up new kinds of business
elitesChinese and Malaywith extremely close links to the political parties (cf. Gomez 1990, Heng 1992, Sieh 1992, Gomez and
Jomo 1997).
Putrajaya is perhaps the grandest expression of a statedirected modernization project. The political parties
have also been transformed. Malaysia is governed, as it
was when independence was granted by the British in
1957, by a coalition of race-based parties dominated by
the United Malay National Organization (UMNO).
UMNO has developed into a party of full-time professional politicians, a growing number of Malay-educated
small and medium-level businessmen, andthe real
power brokersthe so-called New Malays, the wealthy
and influential businesspeople, financiers, and managers
of large business conglomerates who have benefited the
most from government policies favouring Malay commercial interests (see Rustam 1993). Following UMNOs
lead, all the parties in the coalition have followed this
path of greater professionalism, on the one hand, and
closer links with big business, on the other. Again, the
implications of this particular modernizing process for
village residents and migrants alike have been significant, as all Malaysian citizens have come more directly
under the scrutiny of rational, bureaucratic state and
party apparatuses, with an accompanying decline in the
personalized and localized political hierarchies of the
earlier period.
There have been parallel shifts in the cultural/religious
landscape. As did Lisa Rofel in China, we found that
modernity was something that many people from all
walks of life felt passionately moved to talk about and
debate (Rofel 1999:xi). At the same time, the rise in the
1970s of the so-called dakwah (Islamic missionary)
movements marked the beginning of significant shifts
in the style and language of religious debate among Muslims and non-Muslims. These were part of what is usually described as a religious revival in politics and in
society more widely but might be more accurately
termed a new phase of modernist Islamization of both
state and society (cf. Hussin Mutalib 1993:xxi). The socalled Islamic revival and parallel developments among
other religious groups have been less a spiritual movement than a process of religious rationalization through
the establishment of closer links between religion and
worldly social processes, both political and economic.4
Alongside the greater involvement of Islam in politics
and the bureaucracy, for example, the period has witnessed the emergence of a highly commodified lifestyle Islam, particularly among the new Malay middle
classes (see Stivens n.d.). The spread of these rationalized
Islamic practices and of new Islamic lifestyles into Malay
villages on the peninsula has tended to follow the links
between 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 have

separately drawn my attention to this aspect of Malaysian
Islamization.

Islamic beliefs and religio-political hierarchies that prevailed in the first decade after independence.5
This rather simplistic story of modernization has important implications for the doing of anthropology in
Malaysia. At a practical level, as have many of our contemporaries we have felt compelled to go beyond the
narratives of social change that had previously been
tacked onto most ethnographies, enlarging the scope of
our village-based research to include cities, industrial
workers, and wage work among emigrant (and transmigrant) villagers and their urban-based offspring, an
increasingly bureaucratized and rationalized national
political machine, and the performance of Malay culture and Islamic doctrine in film, popular music, advertisements, and the ceremonies of state.6 This has taken
place mainly because of a transformation in the Malay
kampong (village) itselfthe traditional object of an anthropology of the Malays. In the decades since our first
ethnographic research the kampong has not disappeared
from the rural landscape, but any illusions about its selfsufficiencyits constituting a significant space from
which the economic, social, and cultural forces that constitute Malay life emanatehave clearly been shattered.
At the same time, the self-sufficient and virtuous kampong republic continues to reappear in virtual form in
the imaginations of mainly city dwellers (and foreign
tourists) in large part because of the growth industry
feeding an urban-based Malay nostalgia. This nostalgia
is fed in turn by academics and intellectuals, largely Malay but including foreign ethnographers with their romanticized images of a rural Malay cultural otherness.
Like it or not, the ethnographer of Malaysia is dragged
inexorably into a direct encounter with modernity at the
same time as its peoples have been enmeshed in modern
processes of commodification, instrumentalization, and
rationalization.
The impact of these changes has apparently been less
dramatic in places like Sumatra or supposedly more remote parts of Malaysia itself. However, one does not
5. The classic study of a peasantist Malay Islam is Clive Kesslers
superb ethnographic account of the growth of the Pan Malay Islamic
Party (the PMIP, now PAS) in rural Kelantan in the 1960s. Kessler
showed that the success of the PMIP in capturing a substantial
proportion of the UMNO vote was mainly a consequence of rural
discontent with the leadership and policies of the UMNO elite,
who in the immediate postindependence period claimed to be the
main guardians of Malay interests (Kessler 1978). The Islamic revival since the 1970s, by contrast, has been overwhelmingly urban,
even global, in origin, spread to rural areas mainly by returning
migrants, educated members of the dakwah movements, and the
media (cf. Jomo and Cheek 1992, Stivens n.d.).
6. The results of some of this refocused ethnography are published
elsewhere, in discussions of the discourse of Malaysian intellectuals
on Malay identity (Kahn 1994) and of the constitution of Malayness
in Malay film and popular music (Kahn 2001:chap. 4), modern Malay urbanism, tourism, and the heritage movement in Penang (Kahn
1997), the formation of the new Malaysian middle classes (Kahn
1996), the gender dimensions of agrarian change and industrialization (Stivens 1996) and modern politics (Stivens 1991), the development of modern notions of motherhood (Stivens 1998a), the
moral panics generated by consumption in modern shopping malls
(Stivens 1998b), and the emergence of a universalizing discourse of
human rights (Stivens 2000).
have to look too far beneath the surface even in supposedly remote areas to discover the transformative
effects on village life of commodification, land alienation, bureaucratization, and religious rationalization.
Therefore, ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, as
in many other parts of the world, has led to a new understanding of the anthropological projectno longer as
an anthropology of premodernity but as an anthropology
of modernity. The experience drives us towards rather
than away from existing modernist narratives, but there
is a second, equally compelling reason for anthropology
to engage with Western modernist narratives, this one
stemming from what is seen as anthropologys reflexive
project.
Reflexivity and the Modern Spaces of

Tradition
By reflexivity I mean the implications of the discovery by anthropologists and their critics that the knowledge which anthropology produces is not innocentthat
it is not a simple reflection of a pre-given social and
cultural reality out there in the world. Recognition of
the constructedness of ethnographic knowledge compels ethnographers to include that knowledge within
their field of investigation rather than merely reflect on
it and therefore to ask about not only the conditions
which make it possible but its role in the production of
the very social and political spaces within which ethnography operates. This is to accept, at least in part, the
assertion by Englund and Leach that ethnographic
knowledge is in some sense a construction involving
both ethnographers and their ethnographic objects,
now seen as active subjects of ethnographic knowledge.
That the processes of selection and constitution by
which an ethnography is produced ideally allow the people under investigation some role in the production of
knowledge about themselves is essentially what is
meant by the concept of ethnography as a dialogical
exercise.
But this, surely, is not the end of the story. Stressing
the role of ethnographys interlocutors in the construction of knowledge about themselves must not blind us
to the far more authoritative role played by ethnographers themselves and, more important, by the modern
discourse of ethnography in this process. What makes
an account of such an encounter ethnographyas opposed to anecdote, fiction, journalism, travel writing, advertising copy, or the scrawlings of amateurshas very
little to do with the scrutiny of particular interlocutors
or even the personal characteristics of individual ethnographers. It derives instead from unambiguously modern spaces governed by institutions such as universities,
publishers, academic/professional journals, and funding
bodies that determine what is and what is not valid ethnographic knowledge, what is or is not good ethnography. To put this another way, the reflexive imperative
demands that we evaluate ethnography less in the con-

text of the singular dialogue between individual ethnographers and particular informants on the supposedly nonmodern terrain on which individual acts of ethnography
are carried out than as part of a sustained project of
knowledge production and consumption within modernity. To recognize that ethnographic knowledge is itself
modernist is to accept that the reflexive imperative
forces us to consider the social relations (including, but
not exclusively, power relations) within which anthropological knowledge circulates in modern spaces and the
implications of such knowledge for the world in which
it circulates. Of course, since the discipline of anthropology in the strict sense has its origins in the West, the
modern world within which anthropological knowledge
has circulated has been a Western one. But this imperative is not altered by the fact that since that time anthropology has been globalized and, hence, that the practising anthropologist is as likely to be a postcolonial
intellectual in the West or the East. The relationship
between native anthropologists and their informants
is of the same order as that involving Western anthropologists.
One important role played by anthropological knowledge in the West has been as part of a project of cultural
critique. The case of classical American cultural anthropology is perhaps the most commonly cited instance of
this (Marcus and Fisher 1986). But this embedding of
notions of cultural otherness within a critique of modern
instrumentalism was certainly not restricted to anthropology, being part of a much broader movement among
artists, intellectuals, and even wider parts of the new
middle classes in the Americas, Europe, and Asia in the
interwar years (see Kahn 1995). Surely the reflexive imperative demands an analysis of this movement, one
based on careful examination of the changing role and
function of intellectuals in different periods of modern
history, the significance of modern cultural debates and
conflicts over rationality and its limitations, and the like.
This kind of reflexivity is possible only when we accept
that the results of ethnography have always been constituted by their relationships with modernist narrativeseven when mobilized within a critique of a particular version of modernism, namely, techno-instrumental rationalism.
Yet one thing that both the insistence on ethnography
as dialogue and the postcolonial emphasis on its role in
governing relations between the West and the Rest
forcefully remind us of is that ethnography is also implicated in a set of relations between the us and the
them of ethnographic discourse. In other words, ethnography is more than decontextualized knowledge performing the function of cultural critique far from its
point of production. Ethnographers of Malaysia, for example, would find it impossible to avoid this conclusion
not so much because of the individual actions of their
traditional interlocutors as because intellectuals, politicians, and others are coming to speak forcefully, and
with authority, for or on behalf of those interlocutors.
Allowing informants to become interlocutors produces a very limited degree of reflexivity when there are
so many native voices with the authority to interrogate ethnography who would thereby be bypassed because they are not the voices of ethnographys traditional
informants but those of academics, intellectuals, politicians, and others. Ironically, now that there are natives with real power to act as gatekeepers in the circulation of ethnographic knowledge, their contributions
are completely erased by a vision of a non-modern ethnography that denies them authenticity presumably because they are too caught up in the meta-narratives of
modernity to speak in the unmediated subaltern voice.
The best-known critic of Western representations of
Malaysia is none other than Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad, although his vigilance is shared now by a
wide range of Malaysian intellectuals, including anthropologists. Nor can foreign anthropologists any longer easily escape these voices when they come back home,
given the intensification of cultural globalization and the
powerful sensitivity to the concerns of postcolonial intellectuals in what remain the metropolitan centres of
anthropological knowledge production. Not surprisingly,
as the example of the voice of Mahathir suggests, these
native voices are not ones anthropologists are always
happy to hear, if only because they do not fit our notion
of what it is appropriate for natives to say. Insisting on
the integrity of interlocutors located at the sites of production of ethnographic knowledge still permits metropolitan anthropologists to ignore almost completely
the crucial question of the role and function of ethnographic knowledge in places like modern Malaysia and
hence to sidestep what are far more significant reflexive
dilemmas than those posed by traditional ethnography.
At the same time, theorizing Malaysia as a site of modernity and redefining our task as an anthropology of
modernity compels us to take these voices seriously. It
forces us to probematize the relation between insiders
and outsiders, between foreigners and natives, between us and themin other words, to engage in a
project that is genuinely rather than spuriously reflexive.
What, then, might the role of ethnography be in a place
like modern Malaysia? This question can be broached
only if we reconsider the proposition that ethnography
speaks of places outside modernity.
Being forced to confront the essential modernity of
contemporary Malaysia leads one to question whether
there nonetheless remain remote spaces within Southeast Asia that are somehow outside modernity or
whether these remote traditions are similarly the inventions of a colonial society that was by any measure
of rationalization, social differentiation, commodification, and bureaucratization itself already modern. Were
not the traditional spaces in the apparently remote
corners of the world being colonized by classical ethnography in the 1920s and 1930s in fact already part of
the same world that had given rise to anthropology and
anthropologists in the first place? And are those parts of
the Third World that, unlike peninsular Malaysia, have
not achieved high rates of economic growth, urbanization, and industrializationincluding the supposedly remote areas of Malaysia itself and the outlying regions

of neighbouring Indonesia (for this reason more favoured

by foreign ethnographers in search of real otherness)any less modern for all that?
My archival research on the colonial history of central
Sumatra in the 1980s, for example, suggests that the apparent otherness-to-modernity of economy, culture, and
society in remote regions of the Netherlands East Indies was in fact a precipitate of a particular trajectory of
colonial modernization from the last decades of the 19th
century (see Kahn 1993). In other words, the Minangkabau as they became known to an earlier generation of
ethnographers were actually a historical product of specific patterns of modern state formation, colonial land
alienation, and the growth of a capitalist economy. Insights into how this happened within a modernizing
Dutch empire is provided by Albert Schrauwerss superb
study of economy, society, power, and religion among
Pamona villagers in the highlands of Central Sulawesi
(Schrauwers 2000). This ethnography shows clearly that
the To Pamona as a distinctive cultural group, apparently
with distinctive indigenized forms of Christian belief
and practice, is no premodern survival in an otherwise
modernized world but in fact has its origins in the processes of rationalization and modernization that began
in the period of high colonialism.
Schrauwerss case for the distinctively modern origins
of To Pamona social and religious traditions is all the
more convincing precisely because it is based on a thorough ethnographic study of forms of production, kinship,
patronage, and ritual in To Pomona villages, combined
with a reading of important materials from the colonial
missionary archives. Schrauwers offers us a detailed
analysis of the interrelations between tradition and
modernity in highland Sulawesi, examining the links
between commodified and non-commodified forms of
production and exchange, between administrative power
(both secular and religious) and the personalized power
relations that we are accustomed to seeing as traditional
types of patronage, and between Christian doctrine and
indigenous religious practice. This all points to the
conclusion that To Pomona culture cannot be understood as combining elements from the past and the present. Instead it is an integrated whole representing a particular regional form of modernity. Schrauwers
compellingly concludes that the conflicts associated
with modernization, particularly those that have
emerged as a result of the power vacuum associated with
the collapse of Suhartos New Order state, are not
those between a secular modern state and a successionist ethnic periphery whose identity is rooted in primordial sentiments as is so commonly assumed.
Rather, local identities are anchored in religion, itself
a recent, transethnic phenomenon (Schrauwers 2000:
22829).
This reorientation of the problematic of Indonesian
nationalism radically subverts the self/other and traditional/modern polarities that served to underwrite many
earlier ethnographic encounters, even those that focused
on capitalist penetration or social change after Western contact (cf. Kahn 1985). Like those of some of his
contemporaries, Schrauwerss study suggests instead

that traditionalization and modernization are part
of the same historical process and that this process involved metropolitan Europe, colonial indigenes, and ethnographers from the outset. As a consequence Schrauwers always keeps the regional specificities of
modernization in Sulawesi and the Netherlands within
the same analytic frame.
This in turn provides us with a starting point in a
search for answers to questions about the modern function of ethnography itself. As Schrauwerss study demonstrates, the practice of ethnography in Sulawesi was
part of a process that constructed seemingly non-modern
terrains within a sea of modernizing institutions and
practicesin other words, it was directly implicated in
the traditionalizing and particularizing phases that are
as much part of modernizing processes in the West as
they are in places like Indonesia. Anthropology is therefore again led towards rather than away from an encounter with modernity, suggesting that it would do well
to engage directly, however critically, with existing modernist meta-narratives.
The factors that drive an ethnography of Southeast
Asia into this encounter with modernism are in many
ways typical of those experienced by a large number of
contemporary ethnographers. What are the implications
of processes such as those described here for the project
of ethnography? Do we gain anything by saying that
Southeast Asia is a site of modernity and that our task
should now be recast as an anthropology of modernity?
What could this mean?
Meanings of the Modern

Obviously the term modern and its derivatives have
had many meanings. According to Raymond Williams,
the word modern came into English from the French
moderne, meaning just now. The French usage was
itself derived from the 5th-century Latin modernus, used
to distinguish an officially Christian present from a Roman, pagan past (Smart 1990:17). From the 16th century
modern acquired a new comparative/historical sense,
this time to provide a contrast with medieval. From
the 18th century modern was used mainly to describe
architecture, fashion, and behaviour. It was only in the
19th century that it came to be used favourably to mean
improved, satisfactory, or efficient (Williams
1983:1089). Related and more specialized terms such as
modernize and modernist did not appear in systematic usage until the 19th century or even later. According
to Barry Smart, the first positive references to modernism are to be found in 1888 in [the Nicaraguan poet
Ruben] Darios praise of the work of a Mexican writer,
Ricardo Contreras, and subsequently in 1890 in references to modernismo as a movement in Latin America
for cultural emancipation and autonomy from Spain
(Smart 1990:18). This is rather uneven ancestry for a rigorous analytic concept.

In Anglophone social science in particular, the term

derives much of its meaning from a source that has come
to be widely despised, at least by large numbers of anthropologistsmodernization theory. The notion of the
modern deployed in modernization theory drew most
heavily on a particular liberal and techno-instrumental
vision of what was earlier thought of as a civilizing process. Here civilization was understood as a universal trajectory of individual emancipation and constantly evolving rational mastery. This tradition is manifest in the
persistent influence of the thought of Comte, Spencer,
and Durkheim in contemporary social theory.7 Although
modernization theory went out of fashion in academic
circles, the particular understanding of modernity underpinning it was not substantially altered. In other
words, while the positive valuation of modernization
that derived from its liberal-evolutionist origins fell into
widespread disrepute, especially among left-leaning intellectuals with an interest in the Third World, these
critics shared with modernization theorists the vision of
modernity as a process of emancipation and continuous
technological change. The difference was that for the
critics modernization had failed to deliver on both
promises.
This negative stance towards both modernity and classical narratives of social modernization was transformed,
again without altering the underlying understanding of
modernity, as evidence began to accumulate that at least
parts of the former Third World seemed to be breaking
out of the cycles of poverty and underdevelopment to
which many critics of modernization theory had argued
they were condemned. Thus drawn into a renewed encounter with modernity, many ethnographers, under the
influence of poststructuralist and postcolonial currents
in the discipline, renewed the earlier critical stance towards modernization. Influenced particularly by the
work of Foucault, who in a very different context associated modernity with discursive and hence power-saturated techniques of surveillance and discipline, the ethnographic critics of modernity now came to view
modernization negatively as a set of discursive processes
associated especially with Western domination. A particularly nuanced and interesting such study is Fergusons 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 more
careful argument than is possible here. To argue that much recent
social theorizing remains within this tradition involves tracing connections between Comtes social determinism, Spencers linking
of biological ideas about functional differentiation, the discussions
in classical political economy of the modern division of labour,
and ideas about the evolution of the modern individual, and the
way these are put together in Durkheims contention that individuation is a product of an organicist type of social structure. These
notions, strengthened by structural linguistics, found their way into
an antihumanist structuralism and, with renewed critical edge,
into structural Marxist and then poststructuralist attempts to decentre the modern subject. I am indebted to both Martha Macintyre and John Morton for this particular way of tracing the continuities from structuralist into poststructuralist anthropologies.
it is precisely a liberal or techno-instrumental vision of

the modern that is under attack. What is clear, then, is
that many recent attempts on the part of anthropologists
to come to grips with modernitythis time understood
as a negative rather than a positive experiencehave
retained the particular understanding of modernization
formulated within the Western liberal tradition, reversing only its normative evaluation. This is at the heart
of the new defence of ethnography articulated by anthropologists like Englund and Leach, but their advocacy
of a more traditionalist understanding of ethnography as
an escape from the terrain of the modern has not been
the only reaction. Instead, some have been led to a rather
new understanding of modernity and modernization as
plural rather than singular phenomena.
Pluralizing the Modern

What happens when one juxtaposes or brings into confrontation the theorization of modernity within the
Western liberal tradition and experience of ethnographic
encounters in places like late-20th-century Southeast
Asia? Certainly when measured against the yardstick
provided by any classical Western narrative of modernization, Southeast Asia will always be found wanting:
modern perhaps, but incompletely modern at best. Malaysia and Indonesia have modern states but states which
appear deficient because of the absence of full democracy. Malaysia and Indonesia have rational bureaucracies, but they also seem to be characterized by the survival of elements of a premodern political order in
which the system of government was coterminous with
personalized ties between patrons and clients. Malaysias
and Indonesias are clearly capitalist economies, but the
existence of such apparent non-market perversities as
cronyism, state-imposed controls on international
currency exchange, and personalized ties between employer and employee suggests that they still have some
way to go before they meet the standards of efficiency
expected of a fully modernized market economy. A
modern separation between church and state has developed, but the pervasiveness of political Islam suggests
that the separation is somehow incomplete. Viewed
through the lens of classical modernist theory, in other
words, Malaysia and Indonesia appear to be characterized
by an incomplete separation of public and private (however defined) or a failure of differentiation of economic
and political spheres. Both nations are urbanized, but
substantial peasantries and tribal populations seem to
survive in remote regions. While the Malaysian and
Indonesian states may seek to impose a universal form
of citizenship, preferential rights may be granted to particular cultural or religious groups, and particularistic
systems of racial identification and antagonism remain
keystones at least in the everyday lives of the majority
of citizens. Periodic and often violent outbreaks of antiChinese sentiment punctuate recent Indonesian history,
and Indonesia as a nation now appears to be fragmenting

along primordial ethnic and religious fault lines. Similarly, race remains a primary principle of identity and
identification in the everyday lives of most Malaysians.
Measured against the yardstick of modernist narratives, then, Malaysia and Indonesia become other to the
modern in significant ways, forcing us back into the
language of a liberal social evolutionism in which otherness was constituted as historically anterior to and, as
a result, an incomplete or immature version of the modern, civilized self (see Kahn 2001). Southeast Asia appears
at best perversely modern, or to manifest various perverse forms of modernity. These may be explained away
as premodern survivals or invented traditions, but neither explanation does much to come to grips with what
is apparently unique to such places.
One reason for this state of affairs has to do with an
understanding of modernization as some sort of pure,
disembedded process uncontaminated by culture and
history that prevails particularly within the liberal tradition. The implications of such a vision have recently
been nicely exposed by Peter Wagner in a rather different
context. In an article on the image of America in European social theory (Wagner 1999), Wagner argues that
modernist theory has tended to represent America precisely as such a sphere of pure modernity. This treatment leads to an assessment of America as superior to
Europe in a technical-economic and sociopolitical sense
but inferior in a moral and philosophical sense. All such
approaches, he says (p. 43),
have in common a double intellectual move. They
first withdraw from the treacherous wealth of sensations that come from the socio-historical world to
establish what they hold to be those very few indubitable assumptions from which theorizing can
safely proceed. And subsequently, they reconstruct
an entire world from these very few assumptions.
Their proponents tend to think that the first move
decontaminates understanding, any arbitrary and
contingent aspects being removed. And that the second move creates a pure image of the world, of scientific and/or philosophical validity from which
then further conclusions, including practical ones,
can be drawn. (Whatever dissonance there may be
between sensations and this image will then be
treated as the secondary problem of the relation between theory and empirical observation.)
Such an operation is bound to fail, Wagner maintains,
because concepts such as autonomy and rationality, so
central to the modernist interpretation of the world, are
never pure, or merely procedural and formal, never devoid of substance. As a consequence, they cannot mark
any unquestionable beginning, and doubts can be raised
about any world that is erected on their foundations, that
is, about the consequent second move. To understand
modernity as always embedded in culture, inevitably
contaminated by history, is to go against the Western
quest for universal principles by which we must all live
and to accept that, precisely because our own meanings
of the modern are particularistic, they may also be exclusionary, even racist, however well-intentioned (Kahn
2001).
The alternative has been to attempt to reconceptualize
modernity in the plural. Some such notion of multiple
modernities has been developed, often independently,
in a wide range of anthropological accounts. A first step
in this pluralization of modernity is the argument that,
while modernity is a singular phenomenon of Western
origin, once spread to non-Western contexts by colonialism it became indigenized and hence diverged
from the Western trajectory in significant ways. Mayfair
Yang, for example, examines the intricate networks of
personalized relationships and informal practices associated with the phenomenon of guanxi/guanxixue in
China as a way of gaining a window on the formation
of modernity in that country, a modernity that differs in
many respects from the modern patterns of the West
(Yang 1994). Guanxi relationships, ideas, and practices
have recently (re)emerged in the Chinese context and
become increasingly widespread and influential. Yang argues that these form a sort of gift economy that is
located within (and is just as much constitutive of) the
modernity that has emerged in socialist China. Modernity can, writes Yang (pp. 3738),
be spoken of in the singular because it issues from
the Western Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. But when the force of modernity impinges on
and interacts with hitherto more discrete cultural or
political-economic zones, it produces not one form
but many. . . . For a long time, the West has ceased
to be the only site of modernity or the only generator of the types of power found in modernity. Modernity in China was triggered by western and Japanese imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. [But i]t gave rise to, and its direct impact
was diffused and overtaken by, new social forces
that were a complicated mixture of native and imported elements . . .
But did the key elements of modernity really appear
first in the West, only then to be transported and indigenized elsewhere? Evidence can certainly be produced
to demonstrate that the modernization of the West and
at least parts of the non-WestRussia, Japan, China, the
centres of the Islamic world (or even apparently remote
corners of the Islamic world such as Malaya)were contemporary processes rather than being merely cases of
early Westernization, raising the possibility of more
genuinely parallel, multiple, or plural modernities.8
In his monograph on Greece, for example, James Faubion (1993) argues that Greek modernity is more than
an indigenized version of something that came from outside. Citing Webers characterization of Western European civilization as dominated by technical, instrumental, and formal rationalism, he seeks to counterbalance
8. For a discussion of the origin of Malay-Islamic modernism that
makes it almost contemporary with the European Enlightenment,
see Milner (1995).

such images by showing how in the case of Greece one

can produce a portrait of another modernity, one centred on a historically specific discourse and set of practices about the reform and reformation of Greek society. In Faubions words (p. xiii):
What I found in Greece led me to conclude that our
prevailing portraits of modernity were in need not
simply of revision but of a counterbalance, of the
portraiture of another modernity. . . . Weber located modernityor at least its dominant, northwesterly modalityin the practice of what he came
to call formal or technical rationalism. I have
located its Greek modality, the Greek modern, in
the practice of what I have called historical
constructivism.
Similarly, Aihwa Ong (1999:23) captures something of
the combination of economic dynamism and intense
self-confidence that has characterized much of Pacific
Asia in recent decades, again by arguing for a concept of
another modernity:
New narratives of Asian modernity, spun from the
self-confidence of vibrant economies, cannot be reduced to pale imitation of some Western standard
(for instance, full-fledged democracy combined with
modern capitalism). Ascendant regions of the world
such as the Asia Pacific region are articulating their
own modernities as distinctive formations. The historical fact of Western colonialism, ongoing geopolitical domination, and ideological and cultural influences are never discounted (only minimized) in
these narratives, but they should nevertheless be
considered alternative constructions of modernity in
the sense of moral-political projects that seek to
control their own present and future. Such self-theorization of contemporary non-Western nation-states,
while always in dialogue and in tension with the
West, are critical modes of ideological repositioning
that have come about with shifting geostrategic
alignments.
If, then, as Wagner reminds us, modernity is always
and everywhere embedded in particular circumstances,
then modernity must be pluralized. There can never be
a single but only multiple modernities. Modernist ethnographers have arrived at much the same conclusion.
There is no modernity in the singularonly Greek, Chinese, Asian, Chinese, African, and other modernities.
But what are the implications for theory of such a relativized and pluralized modernity? If modernity can
never be disembedded from particular historical contexts, can it ever be conceptualized in the singular without retreating to the formalistic and procedural notion
of a pure modernity? If the modern cannot be abstracted
from context and singularized, is there any use in speaking of modernity at all? Why speak of a Greek, Asian,
or Islamic modernity at all if the singular is unimaginable? 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 modernity

ends up being the same as the Englund and Leach argument for an ethnography of modernitys others, forcing
us in spite of the use of a common term away from
engaging with modernist metanarrative in precisely the
manner envisaged by its critics. The ethnographers insistence on the primacy of context, by relativizing and
pluralizing modernity, leads us to reject any general and
singular understanding of modernity and invites us to
abandon the concept as caught in a hopeless contradiction.
Critical Theory and Expressivism

Many of the dilemmas posed by the ethnographers encounter with modernity may stem from a failure to acknowledge the presence of diverse, even conflicting,
traditions within modernist thought. This failure appears to generate the compulsion among modernitys
critics to seek an escape route out of modernity altogethera tendency that is manifest in the renewal of
traditional understandings of ethnography within critical anthropology but also implied in the popular notion
of multiple modernities. Having accepted unidimensional notions of modernity and modern subjectivity derived either from classical liberalism or from its poststructuralist critics, there appears to be no alternative
but to embrace modernity wholeheartedly or reject it out
of hand. And yet neither seems possible for an anthropology forced into encounters with the modern at every
turn. Perhaps, then, there are other traditions of theorizing the modern more pertinent to the project of contemporary anthropology.
The critical modernist narratives that emerge out of
the Hegel-Marx-Weber heritage in social theory, generally neglected by anthropologists,9 are a case in point. In
this tradition modernity is generally construed as an
identifiable socio-historical process of transformation
out there in the world, one that began in the 16th century
in western Europe. Such theorists have tended to draw
on Hegelian and Marxist notions of alienation and commodification and Webers discussions of modern processes of rationalization, which they see as building on
them.10 Here modernity is broadly understood (Turner
1990:6) as the result of a
process of modernization, by which the social world
comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claims of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of the various spheres of
the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of economic, po9. This too is obviously an overgeneralization, and there are certainly exceptions. A case in point is the work of Michael Taussig,
which from the start built on the more Hegelian elements of the
Marxist tradition, and the insights of Walter Benjamin.
10. It is interesting in this respect that 20th-century critical theorists from Lukacs to the members of the Frankfurt School see in
the work of Max Weber less a rejection of Marxism than an elaboration or development of some of its key themes.

litical and military practices, and the growing monetarization of values. Modernity therefore [is seen to
arise] with the spread of western imperialism in the
sixteenth century; the dominance of capitalism in
northern Europe . . . in the early seventeenth century; the acceptance of scientific procedures . . .; and
pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Calvinistic practices and beliefs in the dominant classes
of northern Europe. We can follow this process further through the separation of the family from the
wider kinship group, the separation of the household
and the economy, and the creation of the institution
of motherhood in the nineteenth century. Although
the idea of the citizen can be traced back to Greek
times via the independent cities of the Italian states
. . . the citizen as the abstract carrier of universal
rights is a distinctly modern idea.
Jurgen Habermas, a key figure in the 20th-century critical tradition, for example, understands the modern as
more than a grab bag of social and cultural traits, as a
process of social differentiation, on the one hand, and
cultural autonomization, on the other (Habermas 1987,
Outhwaite 1996; see also Giddens 1990, Giddens and
Pierson 1998, Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1995). Critical
theorists of course differ, for example, on the issue of
periodization (see Smart 1990, Castoriadis 1991) and on
the question of whether the modern has come to an end.
In general, they have concluded that what French theorists and the American ones following them have called
postmodernity describes not a totally new worldview
or a new historical epoch but a critique of modernism
from within or a new phase in the development of modern society, as it were.
The term modernism here is somewhat more problematic. It is typically used to refer to an aesthetic sensibility and hence a movement (or set of movements)
within the arts (Lash 1990:66):
Modernism, for its part, rejects history in order to
embrace movement and change. Modernism in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and a number of other European
cities, as the nineteenth century drew to a close,
was ushered in by a series of effective secession
movements. These movements consisted of a rejection of academic standards by artists and architects. This was at the same time a rejection of statesponsored art. . . . French Impressionism (and
realism), Viennese Art Nouveau . . . and German Expressionism, all took from the institutional context
of the reaction against historical art. In each case
the rejection was in favour of a modernist or protomodernist aesthetic of working through the possibilities of aesthetic materials.
In such usages there is the general implication that, following Habermas (1987), modernism refers to a cultural
movement or sensibility to which modernity gives rise.
A somewhat different account of this link is suggested
by 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 particular

aesthetic discourse on the modern, suggesting a rather
different relationship between the moderns objective
and subjective dimensions. Castoriadis (1991:225)
writes, for example: What has been called modernity is
something which reached its climax between 1900 and
1930, and which ended after World War II. . . . In music,
Schonberg, Webern, and Berg had invented atonal and
serial music . . .. Dada and surrealism were in existence
by 1920. And if I were to begin the following list, Proust,
Kafka, Joyce . . . would you please tell me how you would
continue? That modernism might in fact constitute
modernity rather than the other way around is a possibility to which I shall return.
Although it can be argued that critical modernism, like
classical liberalism, contains an exclusionary impulse,
the result of confronting Western critical narratives and
non-Western realities may not be the terminal either/
or impasse generated by classical liberalism. Ultimately
this is because critical theory is already a result of such
encounters, a fact that becomes evident when we look
more closely at the multidimensional vision of modernity that has developed within the tradition of Hegel,
Marx, and Weber. Here attention is focused on differentiation as a multidimensional process of separation
both within and between separate spheres of modern existence. The result is a reading of the history of Western
modernity that, unlike liberal evolutionism, is not inevitably unilineal or teleological (cf. Arnason 1987, Heller 1990, Luhmann 1982). It is not surprising, therefore,
that some critical modernists have also called for a notion of multiple modernities (cf. Arnason 1987, Eisenstadt 2000a, Wittrock 2000), echoing similar concerns
within anthropology. Summarizing these somewhat diverse revisionary trends, Johann Arnason writes that critical theory has produced an understanding of modernity
as a loosely structured constellation rather than a system, and . . . a stronger emphasis on the role of cultural
premises and orientations in the formation of different
versions [of modernity] within a flexible but not amorphous framework (2000:65).
Of particular interest here is the emphasis on the distinctiveness of modern cultural premises and orientations found in critical theory. This sense of modernity
as specifiable cultural processes is captured by Peter
Wagner, who has described modernist social theorists in
the 20th century as those who build on the double notion of autonomy and rationality (Wagner 1999). To
quote Arnason once again (2000:65):
One of the most importantbut not yet fully exploredimplications of this culturalist and pluralist
view has to do with the recognition of conflict as inherent and essential to modernity. . . . the most sustained and interesting variation on this theme
pioneered by Max Weber and developed most recently by Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain Tourainestresses the conflict between two equally basic cultural premises: on the one hand, the vision of
infinitely expanding rational mastery; on the other

hand, the individual and collective aspiration to autonomy and creativity. . . . On this view, the cultural orientations characteristic of modernity are
embodied in institutions, but not reducible to them.
. . . [they] are mutable enough to translate into different institutional patterns, and at the same time
sufficiently autonomous to transcend all existing institutions and allow the construction of critical alternatives as well as utopian projections.
The discovery of culture in critical theory has two very
significant implications for the understanding of modernity. First, and partly in response to antipositivist
trends in social theory more broadly, it shifts from an
objective to a subjective emphasis. The consequence is
a view that puts modern subjectivity at the core of our
understanding of what it is to be modern, making modernity as much a state of mind as a set of objective
historical processes. Modernity can be seen to be inseparable from the modern imaginaries that make it possible, to adapt Castoriadiss term. Modernity, in other
words, and contra Habermas, cannot in any simple sense
be said to pre-date modernism. Modernism constructs
modernity as much as modernity provides the conditions
for modernisms emergence. Modernity can never be unambiguously defined except in the context of its construction in an ambivalent/interrogating modernism.
Secondly, as Arnason argues, modernity should be seen
as a product of contradictory or conflicting cultural processes. This heralds a significant break with liberal narratives of modernization (as well as those of their critics),
which, as we have seen, construct modernity as (borrowing Wagners [1994] terms) a single cultural movement of liberty or discipline. Such single-logic notions
of cultural modernization are completely incapable of
producing a theory of modern culture understood as the
meanings and performative values of actual people living
under modern conditions. Surely reducing modern subjectivity to any single logic cannot then account for the
cultural lives of modern peoples. At the same time, single-logic notions of cultural modernization fail to provide for the possibility of modernist theory itself. How
is it possible for the theorist to see modernization as a
loss of meaning when everyone else is a slave precisely
to a single logic of rationalization? Only by rejecting
single-logic notions of modernization as either liberty or
discipline but never both can a genuinely reflexive modernism ever be achieved. Only in this way can modernismas a culture of ambivalenceever be understood.
The immediate sources for this critical understanding
of modernization as rationalization are, as Arnason suggests, the writings of Weber and, following him, the theorists of the so-called Frankfurt School. But its roots are
much deeper; indeed, it could be said that the core of
the culturalist model of modernity lies in what can be
called the first critical intellectual encounter with modernizationthe romantic critique of Enlightenment philosophy and particularly of its instrumentalist notions
of human reason. More particularly I have in mind what
Charles Taylor calls the expressivist conception of hu-
man life that develops as a reaction and hence an alternative to an Enlightenment vision of man based upon
an associationist psychology, utilitarian ethics, atomistic politics of social engineering, and ultimately a
mechanistic science of man (Taylor 1975:539).11 Rather
than seeing human life and activity as essentially without meaning, expressivism sees them as expressions,
realizations of a purpose or an idea. In modern expressivism meaning is thus seen to unfold within human
subjectivity. Expressivism therefore represents simultaneously an embrace and a critique of an Enlightenment
anthropology (in the philosophical sense of the term). It
posits a self-creating modern subject but locates it in a
modern world that is objectified and potentially without
meaning.
Expressivists decried the rift between humans and nature created by Enlightenment instrumentalism, but, as
Taylors discussion of Herder shows, they also decried
the rifts among humans created by the Enlightenment
vision of human nature. As Taylor (1975:2728) points
out,
what has been said of communion with nature applies with the same force to communion with other
men. Here too, the expressivist view responds with
dismay and horror to the Enlightenment vision of
society made up of atomistic, morally self-sufficient
subjects who enter into external relations with each
other, seeking either advantage or the defence of individual rights. They seek for a deeper bond of felt
unity which will unite sympathy between men with
their highest self-feeling, in which mens highest
concerns are shared and woven into community life
rather than remaining the preserve of individuals.
The very notion of freedom espoused by Enlightenment
philosophers and the French revolutionaries was, according to the expressivists, therefore only negative and
hence meaningless.
Expressivism in this sense is clearly present, as Taylor
argues, in Hegels critique of civil society, a critique
taken up in the more radical rejections of bourgeois
rationality by the Young Hegelians and in Marxs own
writings on human alienation under capitalism. It appears also in 19th-century German critiques of political
economy and then neoclassical economics, from where
it first posed the problem of the historical specificity of
capitalist rationality to a young Max Weber (Kahn 1990).
An expressivist sensibility is clearly articulated in the
work of the Frankfurt School, which sprang as much
from the concerns of Weber as from the vision of Marx.
And it serves to define the ambivalence to modern rationalism and rationalization that informs the project of
contemporary modernist social theory. Here, in the
words of Habermas, modernization (understood as rationalization) is not so much rejected as counterbalanced
by an expressive (communicative) rationality in the unfinished project of modernity. In a distinctive, al11. I have discussed the significance of expressivist currents in
modern thought in Kahn (1995).

though parallel, argument, Castoriadis sees in the search

for autonomy a virtuous counter to the Wests concurrent obsession with rational mastery. What critical theorists therefore share is what Bauman describes as a profound ambivalence towards the moderna deep unease
when confronted by its claims to a superior/abstract rationality but at the same time the sense that we are
inevitably enmeshed in it. This is coupled with some
idea of its also generating possibilities for forms of human community not characterized by the continual
search for advantage and personal gain (cf. Bauman 1991).
There are good reasons that a notion of modernity as
the intersection of the contradictory cultural processes
of rationalization and autonomy should resonate so
strongly with anthropologists in their encounters with
Southeast Asian modernity. The theme of reconciling
the apparently contradictory processes of rationalization
(globalization) and expressive meaning (understood as
the expressive values of a particular people or what we
are wont to call their culture) is absolutely central to
contemporary Southeast Asian debates. It is clearly manifest in Mahathirs project of reconciling development
and Asian values (see, e.g., Mahathir and Ishihara
1995), but it is by no means confined to the pronouncements of a single man, no matter how powerful.
Non-Muslim ethnographers in Malaysia can hardly
avoid the question of the similarities and differences between us and them framed almost inevitably by
conflicting values of rationalization and autonomy. If
this is not imposed on them by disciplinary tradition or
by the unconscious demands of framing ethnographic
questions or describing observations (both of which are
deeply affected by the binary logic of selfhood and otherness), it is forced upon them by virtually all the Malay
Muslims with whom they come into contact. To paraphrase the responses of urban and suburban Malays to
my questions about the role and value of Malay culture
and Islam in their everyday lives: You in the West may
be good at the application of scientific knowledge or at
making money, but in your blind pursuit of technological
advance, money, and power you neglect moral values,
spirituality, and meaning. Asians (or Muslims, or Malaysians) can be just as good as you Westerners at development, but we can develop and not neglect our families, our personal obligations, or our religion. Or,
alternatively and less frequently, Life in the West is
better than it is in Malaysia, because individuals there
are free of meaningless traditions and traditional obligations. These comparisons between East and
West are an inevitable part of ethnographic interaction
at all levels of modern Malay society, and all are informed in one way or another by a consideration of the
relationship between the contradictory cultural processes that modernist theorists call rationalization and
autonomy.
As a consequence, reflecting on the nature and function of anthropological knowledge of Malaysia does not
require familiarity with sophisticated academic debates
over the epistemological status of ethnographic writing,
since one hardly meets a Malay who does not subject
ethnographers to severe and continuous interrogation

over the value, even the possibility, of an outsiders ever
being able to understand the expressive meanings of Malayness or the values of Islam. At issue inevitably in such
conversations are contrasts between science, reason, and
instrumentalism, on the one side, and culturally meaningful (expressive) values and orientations, on the other.
One might even say that the very definition of insiderhood and outsider-hood for contemporary Malays is
framed by these opposing cultural principles. As pointed
out above, an ethnographer in Malaysia will find that
modernity is something that people are moved to discuss
and debate, but these debates are increasingly shaped by
strong ambivalence. Most Malaysians profess a desire for
material advance, but village-based and urban Malays
almost all also worry that modernity may bring with it
the overemphasis on individual material advance that
many see epitomized in the West.
The parallels between the concerns of critical modernism and those of large numbers of Malaysians are just
one example of the resonances that develop when critical
theory and Malaysian modernity are brought into encounter. It can also be argued that critical theorys multidimensional understanding of the processes of modernization makes far greater sense of the coexistence of
universalizing and particularizing impulses in the modern history of state and nation building in the region.
Much the same is true when we attempt to analyse the
coexistence of apparently contradictory processes of depersonalization and personalization of economic and political relations (for example, in the rise of impersonal
market links and depersonalized forms of bureaucratic
rule at the same time as the development of cronyism
in the economic sphere and patriarchalism12 in modern systems of governance). And, finally, critical modernist theory provides the grounding for precisely the
kinds of reflexive-critical discourse on the modern that
Englund and Leach wish anthropology to become. There
are therefore good reasons to suppose that anthropology
needs to come to terms with its own modernist roots
and the modernity of its object and that it cannot do so
by refusing to engage with all meta-narratives of modernity. There are also good reasons to suggest that engaging with modernist narratives in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber might prove particularly fruitful.
This is not, as I have already pointed out, to say that
such an encounter is or should necessarily be a peaceful
one. Just as viewing Southeast Asia through the lens of
critical modernism forces a reconsideration of certain
key aspects of contemporary Southeast Asia culture and
society, so the Southeast Asian experience of modernization must be used to prise open the modernist grid
that we impose through the application of theory. Bringing modernist narratives into confrontation with eth12. Woodiwiss, for example, follows Weber in labelling Southeast
Asian state systems patriarchal, but in contrast to Weber he suggests that, however distasteful to liberals, they must be viewed as
equally valid alternatives to liberal systems for ensuring basic human rights (cf. Woodiwiss 1998).

nographic knowledge allows us also to turn modernity

back upon itself, as it were, providing the impetus also
to look again at Western modernity. The first consequence of such a confrontation is the challenge to a Western vision of modernity as abstract and universal rather
than concrete and particular. But just as this leads us to
conclude that modernity in a place like Malaysia or Indonesia is inevitably contaminated by particularistic
cultural and historical conditions, we need to see that
this is also the case of the West. Far from assuming, as
many theorists of multiple modernity have done, that
the Western spaces of modernity have always and everywhere been governed by the pure operation of instrumental rationalism, impersonal market relations, a separation of economic and political spheres, and the rise
of secular rationalismwhich leads to the conclusion
that where this is not the case we have to do with another
modernityWagners critique now compels us towards
an ethnographic engagement with modernity in the West
as well as the East. This is something that should be of
central importance to a new modernist anthropology but,
interestingly, is something that the notion of multiple
modernities appears to discourage almost as much as did
an earlier division of academic labour between sociologists embracing modernist narratives and processes and
anthropologists who avoided them. The encounter with
a critical modernist narrative thus feeds back into a new
anthropology of the West, forcing a rethinking of the
vision of an abstract, universal condition called modernity and an engagement with the particular dimensions
of modern existence in the West as well as in the East.
This may lead us to reconsider modernity in both East
and West as part of a single historical process of modernization that was global from the outset.
This confrontation between modernist narratives and
ethnographic knowledge forces another shift in the selfunderstandings of critical modernism, a shift away from
the avant-gardist conception of modern culture on which
most modernist narratives are baseda shift from what
I have termed an exemplary to a popular modernism (see
Kahn 2001).13 Exemplary modernism is very far from providing us with a true theory of modern culture and subjectivity except in the normative sense. It is in no way
a theory of the subjectivity of people living in modern
society, those people with whom ethnographers of
Southeast Asiaor indeed of Britain or Americadeal
on a daily basis in their research. Yet, as ethnographers
of modern society will inevitably discover, the tendency
to interrogate, criticize, and build upon the modern is
by no means restricted to the avant-garde, despite the
13. The philosophies of Kant and Hegel have both been proposed
as early versions of such exemplary modernism, but it is the work
of Baudelaire which is frequently considered to provide the turning
point in the development of an understanding of modernity. It is
Baudelaires ambivalent recognition of the good and bad sides of
the modern condition, his discussion of its transient, fleeting, and
contingent character (Habermass 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 exemplary
modernism.
recognition that it is a part of a project of constituting

meaning and a meaningful basis for the performance of
a self-consciously modern life under conditions of social
differentiation and cultural autonomization. The anthropology of modernity reveals, on the contrary, the
presence of this same sensibility in everyday popular culture and performance. Such popular modernism cannot
be dismissed as merely traditional, meaningless, or lacking a critical edge or as a substandard version of the more
sophisticated modernism of aesthetic and intellectual
elites.
Conclusions
Two final points about the encounter between anthropology and modernity seem appropriate. These arise out
of critical musings on the usual construction of the problem of the anthropological encounter as a confrontation
between the West and the Rest. It is evident that this
is a tremendous oversimplification, obscuring the fact
that critical theory is itself already a precipitate of such
conflicts between central-eastern Europe and northwestern Europe, between the cores and peripheries
of nations and empires in the 19th century, or, adapting
Baumans terminology, between mainstream moderns in
the centres of power and ambivalent moderns on the
margins in the early part of the modern age. In other
words, the tension between expressivism and instrumentalism that constitutes critical modernism has been
manifest in modernity from the start, and this is why
the critical theory of modernity resonates so strongly in
places like Malaysia. It may explain precisely the pertinence of concepts developed within the heritage of Hegel, Marx, and Weber to more recent encounters with
rationalizing, instrumentalizing, and impersonal forces
of globalization.
The rejection of such a dialogue because of the irreconcilability of the West and the Rest further obscures
the degree to which what we call modernity is something
that encompasses the West and the Rest from the very
start. In this view it would be a mistake to invoke either
a plurality of modernities or the globalization and then
re-localization of modernity as a means of accounting
for anthropological realities. After all, as we have already
had occasion to note, modernization and traditionalization are very often simultaneous processes.
If this is the case, then apparently thorny questions
about when modernity began and whether modernity is
Western or universal, plural or singular, abstract or concrete, emic or etic, are much less problematic and perhaps even open to empirical investigation and debate.
Modernity becomes a far less elusive concept, as well as
being a social and cultural form far more open to ethical
and political critique, than might otherwise have appeared. The encounter between theories of the modern
and ethnographic realities ends up being far more productive 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 tradition

with knowledge constructed in other contextsnonProtestant, rural, female, outside northwestern Europealmost inevitably produces conflicting interpretations of the kind traced out here. Moreover, there is
no question that this confrontation will result at least
in 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 abstract, disembedded project of the aesthetic and philosophical elite to a notion of modernity as something concrete, embedded in particular institutions and cultural
formations, but also a singular process that is global and
multicultural from its inception.
But, in conclusion, we might revisit one final objection
to reconstituting the anthropological project as something inherent to modernity itselfthat in so doing we
are somehow avoiding having to engage with that which
is truly other to us. There is a strong sense in arguments
like those of Englund and Leach that to insist on the
engagement between ethnography and modernist narratives is to trade away the possibility of an encounter
with the great richness of human diversity for sterile and
pared-down explanations that reduce everything to a
single all-encompassing meta-narrative. On reflection,
however, we can recognize that this fear is based on the
insidious assumption that once modernized the other
becomes incapable of culture building and innovation,
doomed merely to repeat the performances of modern
life of countless generations of Westerners. Yet surely
Asian moderns are as capable of culture and performative
creativity as anyone else. That they have become enmeshed in processes of commodification and rationalization does not mean that they will lose any ability to
construct creative responses to modern life. Can we not
instead expect that they will come up with solutions to
some of the worst dilemmas posed by modernizationviolence, extreme inequalities, environmental destruction, deprivation, racial exclusion? Or must we continue to constitute them as exotic objects of a study that
they may have played a small part in producing but that
we ultimately control once it has been accepted as good
ethnography? The final result of an anthropology of modernity might be the possibility of a genuine cultural
critique. Clearly a key problem with the classical form
of anthropological critique is that its proponents had very
little idea of how a modern America might somehow be
transformed into a premodern Samoa or Bali or whatever
exotic other seemed at the time to have avoided the vices
of modernity. This was utopianism in its worst sense. It
may be that an anthropology of modernity will, instead,
provide us with utopias that are in fact achievable. That
would be a very real ethnographic contribution indeed.
Comments
johann p. arnason
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe
University, Melbourne, Victoria 3086, Australia
(j.arnason@latrobe.edu.au). 18 vii 01
There is no reason to disagree with Kahns main claims:
A dialogue between anthropology and social theory is
much needed by both sides; the question of modernity
should be at its centre; the most interesting current sign
of contact is the emerging problematic of multiple modernities. The following remarks, coming from a non-anthropologist, will focus on some specific theoretical aspects of the debate.
The ancestry of the notion of modernity may be contested but is perhaps not as uncertain as Kahn suggests. However controversial some parts of the story may
be, there seems to be a definite record of successive epochs in Western history described as modern to demarcate them from preceding phases. This contextual
meaning links the first use of the word modernus in late
antiquity (in contrast to pagan predecessors) to the semantics of the western European exit from a medieval
world, as well as to the more controversial debate on
classics and moderns on the eve of the Enlightenment.
It was logical for this generic signifier of epochal novelty
to become more closely associated with cultures and societies which detached themselves from the past and
embraced change more emphatically than any earlier
ones had done. The sociological classics use the term
modern in this broad but loosely defined sense, although their specific concerns do not call for any explicit
theorizing of modernity as such. A decisive step in that
direction was taken by modernization theory. At its best,
as formulatedfor exampleby Talcott Parsons, it combined the advocacy of Western models with a clear commitment to reform within their framework. The alignment with existing modernity allowed for a certain
distance from current modernizing practices, and this
reflexive moment was also evident in the efforts made
to theorize an overall epochal shift which the classics
had analyzed only from certain angles.
This understanding of modernization theory as an episode in a much longer hermeneutical narrativeand as
a genuine if self-limiting reflexive turn within that contextis relevant to the discussion of alternative views.
As Kahn sees it, critics shared with modernization theorists the vision of modernity as a process of emancipation and continuous technological change but
claimed that the inbuilt promises had not been fulfilled.
Who are these critics? The context suggests that Kahn
is referring to the Frankfurt School and Foucault, but
neither of these two models for critical theory took shape
through a critique of modernization theory. The ideas
which Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) developed in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment werefor bothan alternative to an earlier version of unorthodox Marxism,

which had already been critical of the progressivist mainstream. As for Foucault, his communist phase was longer
and more significant than he later liked to admit, and
his earliest publications grew out of a settling of accounts
with the Marxism of the party and its fellow travellers;
the shift from Marx to Nietzsche was decisive (Didier
Eribons [1989] biography of Foucault is very illuminating on this point). The explicit critique of modernization
theory came laterin the 1970s and early 1980sand
was in the most interesting cases combined with an
equally thorough critique of the Marxist alternative. Jurgen Habermas, Alain Touraine, and Anthony Giddens
(in his pre-Third Way incarnation) published seminal
works in this vein, but mention should also be made of
S. N. Eisenstadt, the only prominent modernization theorist who went on to develop an original and powerful
critique of modernization theory. None of these theorists
can be said to have retained the premises of modernization theory in a negative mode. Rather, they deconstructed the paradigm of modernization from within and
proposed to replace the underlying image of modernity
with a more complex one. This debate is still in progress,
and it remains to be seen how closely it can be linked
to the legacy of critical theory, Frankfurt- or Foucaultstyle. The most ambitious attempt to synthesize the two
agendasHabermass theory of communicative actionhas come under telling criticism from several
angles.
In short, the dialogue which Kahn envisages is to be
welcomed, but I would like to see it situated in a more
pluralistic theoretical field. An overgeneralized idea of
critical theory does not seem very useful. The same applies to streamlined models of tradition. I am not convinced that it makes sense to speak of a Hegel-MarxWeber tradition: Weber was surely not wholly wrong
when he said that nothing was as opposed to his vision
of history as the Hegelian one. And although there is no
space for further discussion, I would like to register a
strong objection to the idea of a Comte-Spencer-Durkheim tradition. The critical potential in Durkheims
work is far greater than this label would suggest.
s. n. eisenstadt
Department of Sociology, Hebrew University,
Jerusalem IL-91905, Israel. 11 vii 01
I am very much in sympathy with Kahns general orientation or premises, namely, that what we call modernity is something that encompasses the West and
the Rest from the very start. I also agree with him that
the tension between tendencies to rationalization and
what, following Taylor, he calls expressivist orientations
has been inherent in modernity from its very beginning
and is reproduced, as it were, with the expansion of
modernity and that these themes have constituted enduring foci of the intellectual, academic, and on-theground discourse of modernity. But in some ways his
analysis does not go far enough, nor does it fully confront
some of the problems to which the emphases on multiple modernities are addressed.
First of all, he does not recognize that the tension between rationalization and expressivism is not the only
one inherent in the cultural programme of modernity.
Of no smaller importance has been the tension between
absolutizing, totalizing tendencies and more pluralistic,
multifaceted visions and practices.
In modern political discourse and practice this tension
has crystallized around the problem of the totalizing ideologies, nationalistic communal and/or Jacobian, which
denied the legitimacy of such pluralities. It has also manifested itself in the construction of collective identities
and collectivities, around which developed continual
struggles between forces pressing for the homogenization of social and cultural spaces and proponents of the
construction of multiple spaces allowing for heterogeneous identities. The tension has also been expressed in
the construction of rationalities, where there is opposition between the acceptance of the existence of different
values, commitments, and rationalities and the conflation of such different values and rationalities in a totalistic way, with a strong tendency towards their absolutizationbetween, as Toulmin (1990) has shown,
totalizing ones, of which the Cartesian is possibly the
best illustration, and pluralistic ones developed, for instance, by Erasmus or Montaigne.
This tension was inherent in modernity as a distinct
civilization (Eisenstadt 2001) which emerged in the West
but, as Kahn points out, changed the West as well as
other civilizations. In all these civilizations this programme generates the loss of markers of certitude and
the constant search for them in which these tensions
become fully articulated (Lefort 1988).
It was these characteristics that constituted the core
of 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 premises were institutionalized, interpreted, and reflected
upon varied greatly in the different societies which
shared it. As in the case of Islam, so also Western modernity constituted a model and reference pointwhile
in fact constituting one of many modernities. The first
multiple non-European modernities developed, as in
a way de Tocqueville recognized, in the Americas.
The recognition of the development of constantly
changing multiple modernities does not deny their
strong common core but only emphasizes their changing
dynamics. In such dynamics the Westfirst Europe, then
the United Stateshas always constituted an ambivalent reference point around which many of the tensions
inherent in modernity were played out. It is with respect
to this dimension that we have seen the very important
changes foundbut perhaps not fully explicatedin
some of Kahns illustrations from Malaysia.
Thus lately there have developed throughout the world
new interpretations of modernity, promulgated especially by new religious movements and, significantly,
including many of the postmodern ones which have
emerged in the West, which have attempted to dissociate

Westernization from modernity completelyto deny the

monopoly or hegemony of Western modernity and the
acceptance of the Western modern cultural program as
the epitome of modernity. In the context of these new
interpretations, the confrontation with the West is not
an effort to become incorporated into hegemonic civilization on their own terms but an attempt to appropriate
the new international global science, indeed, modernity,
for themselves. They intend to diffuse modern idioms
within their traditions as the former are ceaselessly
promulgated and reconstructed under the impact of their
ongoing encounter with the West (Eisenstadt 2000b).
harri englund
The Nordic Africa Institute, P.O. Box 1703, 751 47
Uppsala, Sweden (harri.englund@nai.uu.se). 16 vii 01
When Leach and I penned our intervention into debates
on ethnography and modernity, we expected to encounter polemic, albeit not the kind of convenient straw man
that 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 on
identifying a traditionalist understanding of ethnography, never mind if the existence of such an understanding is hard to pinpoint in current anthropology. What
troubles me more is that some of our contentions are
fired 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 precisely
as an engagement with the ethnographers lived experience during fieldwork and with the intellectual-bureaucratic-political conditions within which ethnographers generally work. Our interlocutors are not only
those whom we encounter in the field but also our academic colleagues, past and present social theorists,
funding agencies, and political authorities, to name but
a few. The tired distinction between us and them
is not, therefore, ours. Crucial to our argument is, instead, the contention that the practice of ethnography
involves following certain intellectual and bureaucratic
procedures, all of which are potentially political and represent legacies of a colonial and imperialist world history. In this sense, what is important is not so much
whether the ethnographer is native or outsider, male
or female, black or white, remote or near, as how
the ethnographer deals with the problematic legacies
that are intrinsic to the metier of ethnography. Our call
was for a renewed respect for the reflexive insights into
situated life-worlds afforded by ethnographic fieldwork
at its best, however the sites and subjects of the field
are defined in a project, however many interpretive authorities there are in the field, and whoever conducts
the fieldwork. Engagement, in our argument, entails confronting social theories on the basis of this reflexive experience. Dialogue with social theory, occasionally culminating in a confrontation, is not optional. It imposes
itself on any trained ethnographer, sometimesas in the
case of modernitys meta-narrativesseriously clashing
with the ethnographers reflexive experience. New

knowledge is predicated on this tension, not on a simple
rejection of social theory, if only because all advances in
understanding are reframings of existing awareness. Our
intent was to make the tension explicit.
Another way of highlighting Kahns difficulties in rendering our position is by pointing out that the crux of
our argument is the notion of meta-narratives. Beyond
dispute is the abundance of narratives on progress, failure, development, exploitation, and, yes, modernity in
the contemporary world. Ethnography, as a distinct mode
of knowledge production, ought to involve due attention
to the contexts and concerns of these discourses. Social
theory provides us with both critical insight and unexamined meta-narratives with which to think through our
ethnographic encounters. Yet there is no reason that
modernity, as defined by one or the other social theorist, should provide the optimal translation for a wide
range of historically specific preoccupations, including
the kaki jolly of Malays. From whose perspective, for
example, does the increasing involvement of Islam in
politics appear as religious rationalization? Unless it
is confronted with the ethnographers reflexive experience, the profound secularism of social science is likely
to erase from view deeply contextual passions in religious politics. This is why Leach and I suggested that
more theoretical attention be devoted to issues of context and personhood, another aspect of our argument
which Kahn forgets to mention.
I ask Kahn to acknowledge two of our key contentionsthat dialogue with social theory is intrinsic to
ethnography and that modernity is only one of many
theoretical constructs for apprehending the contemporary worldand to explain how these contentions
amount to a traditionalist understanding of ethnography. As for those who have not read our article, I invite
them to consult it before taking it as a representative of
the position that Kahn attributes to it.
beng-lan goh
Southeast Asian Studies Program, Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences, National University of Singapore,
Singapore (seagohbl@nus.edu.sg). 10 vii 01
While the challenge to rethink modernity is not new,
Kahns recourse to critical revisions of social theory and
the ethnography of contemporary Southeast Asia brings
refreshing perspectives to the debate. Kahn challenges
the idea that a rethinking of modernity can be positioned
within or outside the West. Drawing on critical ideas
developed within the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber and actual historical and ethnographic evidence of
modernity, Kahn relocates modernity within the temporality of contradictory but simultaneous processes of
rationalization and cultural autonomizationprocesses
which, he argues, were global from the outset but now
more than ever offer an occasion for a dialectical encounter between the West and the non-West. By complicating 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 irretrievability of indigenous experience and the paradoxical restoration of Western agency/power posed by psychoanalytic and power-based critiques of modernity that
define it in terms of discursive processes associated with
Western experience and authority.
Kahns use of Southeast Asian narratives to rethink
modernity is important in at least two ways. First, the
region has received relatively little attention in the debates on modernity. Second, and more important, the
question of Southeast Asian modernity calls for an examination of the social comparison between the socalled East and West. As an anthropologist based in and
working on the region, I have been frustrated by meaningless comparisons between the East and the West
in which Southeast Asian developmental experiences are
often judged in terms of Western categories and meanings. Yet I am aware that the practice of treating the West
as normative is not necessarily confined to the West. It
is equally prevalent in Southeast Asia, albeit camouflaged in different forms. Despite an escalating anti-West
rhetoric as scholars, intellectuals, and politicians in the
region negotiate their social positions in the contemporary world, the desire for things and values Western
has not vanished. In Malaysia, for instance, while it may
be clear that Prime Minister Mahathir is anti-West, he
has no difficulty promoting Western forms of architecture, technology, infrastructure, and urban development in the country. In fact, the mixing of Eastern and
Western cultural forms is common in the search for a
particular indigenous Malaysian modernity: the Petronas Tower and its Islamic symbolism is one such example. These eclectic manifestations may be seen less
as ultimate expressions of indigeneity than as ways of
addressing contestations over what is indigenous in the
complex interaction between local and global forces of
transformation.
Kahns identification of an expressive/autonomous
impulse in the popular/everyday processes of commodification and rationalization that presents an occasion
for coeval and creative encounters between the West and
the East is compelling. In locating modern subjectivities
at the intersection of everyday experiences of commodification, Kahn provides a way out of the usual fixation
on the teleological structures of nationalist and colonialist power in interpretations of Southeast Asian modernity. By simultaneously creating an analytical space
for local autonomy and disrupting dominant modernization narratives, Kahn succeeds in making the subject
of Southeast Asian modernity a parallel and not merely
a response to existing theories.
I would like to raise two points to contribute to this
debate. The first, alluded to by Kahn but not developed,
is the question of violence and inequalities in modern
Southeast Asia. It needs to be pointed out that struggles
over new subjectivities in contemporary Southeast Asia
are as much about contesting the cultural and material
orders of the West as they are about the construction of
difference within the modern present of local societies.
The Southeast Asian quest for modernity is accompanied

by tumultuous spatial, material, and symbolic changes
in the complex interaction between local and global
forces of transformation. Yet it is precisely the everyday
processes of violence and upheaval that provide a space
for political agency. Such contestations over the unevenness of modernity are precisely what make contemporary Southeast Asian modernity fascinating, for they
are the very spaces from which creative possibilities
could emerge. Second, I would like to draw attention to
growing regional identity formations shaped by the position of Southeast Asia as a new center in the world
economy that disrupts the notion of the single influence
of the West. New regionalist imaginations and material
and mass cultural practices are emerging as comparable
to those of the West in constituting subjectivities in contemporary Southeast Asia. Far from being passive others, local elites are equally active in manipulating regional and global schemes of cultural difference. Thus,
with Kahn, I see that a questioning of modernity must
explore both the displacements opened up by Western
and non-Western experiences and the ways in which
these experiences are made to appear distinct under the
aegis of various types of agency.
james leach
Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF,
U.K. (jgl20@cam.ac.uk). 10 vii 01
Kahns article is a call to take seriously some of the
issues Englund and I raised. I am grateful for his points
about reflexivity and interlocution and for a chance to
clarify our position. Ethnographers are indeed working
in places where their understandings, generated through
close relationships with a small number of people, are
challenged by the scale of the society they write about
and the power relations within that society. The attention to context that we recommended should make these
conditions apparent. Ethnography promises a grounded
understanding rendered as a particular perspective on social processes in each setting. The work of our article
was precisely to engage the contextless, universalizing
principles behind multiple modernities with ethnographically generated understandings of social life. This
engagement was, crucially, inspired by our fieldwork in
places which seemed to fit perfectly with the encompassing impetus of a sociological version of modernity
in its culturally refracted forms. Our recommendation
was to take such appearances as part of what needs analysing (as opposed to the departure point of analysis). It
concerns me that this centrepiece of our argument did
not come across to Kahn. We argued for the engagement
of anthropology with modernist meta-narratives rather
than the organization of ethnography through those
meta-narratives.
The charge that we advocated a traditionalist understanding of ethnography is, however, not accurate.
What can ethnography be, asks Kahn, in a place like

modern Malaysia? This question, he answers, can be

broached only if we reconsider the proposition that ethnography speaks of places outside modernity. Our intervention said nothing about doing research outside modernity. We are obviously discussing the influence of
what some people call modernitymoney, commodities, born-again Christianity, and so forth. Kahns argument here degenerates into a rhetorical construction of
the other that has no basis in our text. Our article
contains no suggestion of withdrawing from studying
people who live in an interlinked world.
Apparently we criticize others for flirting with the
meta-narratives of modernity. This is not our criticism.
Rather, we warn against the wholesale adoption of a theory of modernity without realizing the power of the
meta-narratives contained within it to organize knowledge production. Kahn is not careful enough to distinguish meta-narratives (understood as assumptions built
into a focus on the processes of modernity) from the
narrative of modernity itself, which we indeed have no
objection to in itself. Kahn is right to say that it is this
history that conditions the production and consumption
of anthropological knowledge.
Englund and I are not concerned with divisions between academic disciplines or between the West and the
Rest. We are concerned with the understanding possible
between interlocutors, be they from distant parts of
the globe or next-door neighbours, metropolitan, powerful, or subaltern. We suggest that with close attention to the relationship in which knowledge is produced,
it is possible to know more than by assuming that a
common language or set of motifs means the same thing
to different people. This is the reflexivity we call for.
And it should indeed come in conversation and dialogue
which problematizes simple divisions between informants and anthropologist. Ethnography provides insight
into the particularity of experience. Far from a deepseated incompatibility between self and other, this approach relies upon the commonality of inherently social
beings, while attending to differences in social form (history) and their consequences for meaning, power, and
personhood.
Our argument, then, was that one must not assume
that ones critical theory will be found played out in
someone elses practices, as Kahn points out for Malaysians take on the processes which affect them. To do so
undermines the possibility for recognizing creative engagement with the modern by organizing it through a
meta-narrative which is encompassing. Through organizing knowledge, such an approach capitulates with another assumptionthe self-generating perception of the
inevitability of capitalist expansion through modernityand its attendant critique. This inevitability is
sometimes cited as moral justification for working
within the system rather than taking the hard road of
thinking unconventionally. It is this terrain that we
try to step outside through ethnographic work, not, as
Kahn suggests, the world itself. Finding difference, as
Kahn positively desires in his conclusion, does not have
to mean a utopian vision of a place beyond the vices
of modernity. At the same time, people must be allowed

to have their own vices! This is not an argument between
our position and Kahns. In fact, his final paragraphs
sound like a rephrasing of what Englund and I recommended when we suggested that alternatives which exist
in this world need not be alternatives which are readily
recognized within the meta-narratives of modernity.
Thus our article cannot be read as a recommendation
that one must not work in certain places or on certain
topics. The grounded perspective of ethnographic work
gives a reason for engagement with social theory, based
on the possibilities that Kahn cites as peoples creative
potential for engaging with their situation. I fail to see
what is insidious in such an understanding of
ethnography.
michael g. peletz
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Colgate
University, Hamilton, N.Y. 13346, U.S.A.
(mpeletz@mail.colgate.edu). 27 vii 01
Kahns stimulating and broadly cast essay is offered as
a rejoinder to Englund and Leachs recent Ethnography
and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity, so I begin by
reviewing key points emphasized by the latter. Englund
and Leachs reservations about the ways anthropologists
have engaged the predominantly sociological debates on
globalization and modernity have to do partly with the
perception that they focus too much onand at times
fetishizepreconceived and insufficiently contextualized abstractions that undergrid the meta-narratives of
modernity (rupture, commodification, individualization, etc.). The other part of the problem according
to Englund and Leach is that in their rush to delineate
the relevance of wider contexts and multiple [or alternative] modernities, anthropologists of modernity
(e.g., Appadurai, Ong, the Comaroffs) give short shrift to
the situated knowledge they produce in the course of
fieldwork and also gloss over or ignore the ethnographic
record. Englund and Leach maintain that such tendencies devalue the practice of intensive and sustained ethnographic inquiry as well as the cumulative store of ethnographic knowledge and that in doing so they
contribute to ethnographic ignorance and the delegitimization and demise of (sociocultural) anthropologys
unique methodological and intellectual contributions as
a social science. But Englund and Leach do not advocate
a return to an unreflexive anthropology of the premodern; indeed, the rich ethnographic data from contemporary Malawi and Papua New Guinea they adduce make
it clear that their critique does not entail a retreat from
an engagement with the theories or lived, embodied realities of modernity.
It is against such a position that Kahn develops his
basic thesis, which seems to be threefold: (1) that the
notion of plural or multiple modernities as it has been
developed in recent anthropology is problematic not because it subsumes the ethnographic project to classical
modernist narratives but precisely because it fails suf-

ficiently to engage with them; (2) that we need to reestablish the conversation between anthropology and social theory; and (3) that we must bring the contextual
and popular dimensions of modernity into frame, especially by making better provision for the experiences,
aspirations, and ambivalences of those we encounter in
the field. In presenting these and ancillary arguments,
Kahn provides an overview of his fieldwork in Malaysia
and Indonesia since the 1970s; he also refers to other
parts of Southeast Asia, since much of his essay is offered
as a critique of the literature on multiple modernities in
that expansive region.
Concerning the first two sets of issues, I concur with
Kahn that more extensive dialogue with the works of
classical social theorists (Marx, Weber, critical theorists
associated with the Frankfurt school, and their interlocutors, for starters) will enhance our ethnographic and
theoretical contributions as anthropologists and scholars
of the human condition. Although Kahn does not make
the point, it is arguably all the more crucial for anthropologists to attend to the big questions posed by classical sociology because much contemporary sociology is
preoccupied with quantification and methodology.
Kahns assertions concerning the purported deficiencies
of the literature on multiple modernities in Southeast
Asia are more difficult to evaluate, for he does not really
engage any of the relevant scholarship (e.g., Ong 1999;
Ong and Nonini 1997) or any of the equally pertinent
literature on civil society in Southeast Asia (e.g., Budiman 1990; Hefner 1993, 1997, 2000). In fact, he barely
refers to any of this literature, even in passing. In light
of the lost opportunities that result, these intellectual
moves are unfortunate. They are also curious and ironic,
since Kahns essay is intended as a clarion call to develop
social theory through genuinely reflexive critical engagement with both the ideas of politics and the politics
of ideas.
The curiously decontextualized and disembodied dimensions of Kahns intellectual positioning become all
the more striking when one is told that metropolitan
anthropologists almost completely ignore the crucial
question of the role and function of ethnographic knowledge in places like modern Malaysia. None of the anthropologists implicated in these types of unsubstantiated assertions are identified. Who are they? More
serious is that with one or two partial exceptions (e.g.,
a passage from Ong), Kahn does not cite any of the ethnographically grounded work of Malaysian, Indonesian,
or other Southeast Asian scholars (such as Raymond Lee,
Noraini Othman, Shamsul A. B., and Yao Souchou) that
is directly relevant to the questions of theory and practice he is addressingand this despite his justly critical
observations that the voices of natives with real power
to influence the practices of ethnography . . . are [often]
completely erased by anthropologists from the metropole. In sum, retheorization of the meta-narratives of
modernity and anthropologys relation to them is a
broadly collective enterprise. To be truly compelling and
pluralized it will need to make provision for native
voices and intellectual continuity, not just real or imag-
ined rupture vis-a`-vis the ethnographic and theoretical

contributions of others.
g u s t a v o l i n s r i b e i ro
Department of Anthropology, University of Braslia,
Braslia, D.F. 70910-900, Brazil (gustavor@umb.br).
16 vii 01
This welcome piece offers an engaging opportunity to
recognize the power of modernity to resurface and
prompt complex discussions. Of the many facets of
Kahns provocative and stimulating work, I consider central the question whether modernity is universal. First,
it relates to the future of anthropology as a discipline
that claims to be universal in spite of its Western historical foundations. Second, with the deepening of the
processes of globalization, the relationships between the
universal and the particular need to be rethought if we
are to escape centrisms of all kinds. Third, in a context
in which multicultural and postcolonial positions
abound, the tensions between universalism and particularism have become increasingly politicized.
Categories such as civilization, progress, development,
globalization, and modernity are part of a genealogy of
discourses that prefigure empire (Hardt and Negri
2000)the constitution of a supposedly single, systemic
totality of legal, economic, political, and cultural forms
of exerting global power. Modernity needs to be
thought about in the framework of capitalist expansion
and its related ideologies and according to the historically unequal distribution of power in a world system
that 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 meanings
of modernity while peasantries and indigenous peoples tend to be less so (or almost completely unaware).
To put it another way, familiarity with modernity is
closely related to participation in the capitalist system
and exposure to time-space compression and circuits of
power that are potentially inter- or transnational. Like
other ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990), modernity is subject
to indigenization, but this does not amount to saying
that it is a native category.
The ethnographer of Malaysia or, for that matter, any
other place in the world going through similar processes
of transformation is not dragged into a direct encounter
with 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 direct
encounter with capitalist expansion and its multifarious
direct/indirect effects. In 2001, we cannot be surprised
by discovering that rationalization, proletarianization,
commodification, etc., cause radical changes in all
spheres 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 is
not whether anthropologists speak of places outside or
within modernity. In reality, nothing like an anthropol-

ogy of premodernitya Western constructionever existed. Although it has not been an issue for many of
them, anthropologists have always been part of modernity or students of its many facets and reflections.
We need to envision anthropology as a set of relational
practices and discourses supposing encounters in which
power positions differentiating the people involved from
the ethnographer should be dissolved.
Anthropologys task is often metaphorically described
as an attempt to establish dialogues between different
peoples (cultures, classes, identities, etc.). This calls for
taking into account all the participants in interaction
and admitting that conversations may prompt change
and transformation. Hybridity, a term Kahn seems to
avoid, is a common outcome of dialogical encounters
(including, evidently, all others and not just the ethnographic encounter). But is it enough to propose that we
consider anthropology a kind of hybrid discourse? Can a
truly universal anthropology exist? Or should we accept
a fundamental aporia of anthropological thoughtthat
the other is always irreducible? Or, conversely, do discussions such as these prefigure a day when it will be
impossible or irrelevant to trace the origins of universals such as modernity, since there will be no more
indigenizing particulars?
All these questions raise the issue of difference as a
main axis that supports the anthropological project. Difference will never disappear. Its production is a function
of power inequalities, of the symbolic and linguistic universes in which human beings exist, and of the relationships between social representation and individual
representation, to frame it as Durkheim did. However,
the modes, contexts, and conditions whereby differences
are produced are subject to change. Those who have only
recently discovered that we are all natives now have
not perceived that all of us have always been natives of
a place. It is not the absence or presence of an anthropologist anywhere that defines nativeness. Such anthropological views were based on Eurocentric and Americanocentric perspectives of the universal. I would
rather believe, following Laclau (1992), that the relationship between universalism and particularism is always
incomplete, a field of tensions, a struggle for an empty
place that, once occupied, tends to colonize other places
that, in turn, will struggle against their reduction to the
images 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 needs
to be understood within regimes of production of homogenization and heterogenization and not singled out
as the yardstick against which difference and sameness
are measured.
d o n a l d ro b o t h a m
Anthropology Program, The Graduate Center, City
University of New York, New York, N.Y. 10016-4309,
U.S.A. (dkrobotham@aol.com). 29 vi 01
Kahns paper presents anthropology with another opportunity to overcome its endemic parochialism. Like it or
not, anthropology is born of and operates within modernity and must engage with the main body of sociological reasoning which both expresses and seeks to theorize modernity.
Anthropology will not become modernitys handmaiden as a result of accepting these realities. This is
because a self-critical, disconsolate, divided consciousnessconsuming the material fruits of instrumental rationality while yearning to be released from its Weberian
iron cageis, according to Kahn, at the very core of
modernity. This antinomic attitude is precisely what
again, according to Kahnis embodied in the HegelMarx-Weber critical sociological tradition. It is also a
sensibility increasingly to be found at the popular level
in countries in the East (and elsewhere) experiencing
rapid modernization.
Kahn convincingly demonstrates that notions of reflexivity which understand the problems of anthropology to be derived from the epistemological limitations
of fieldwork or authorship are, at best, hopelessly nave.
Would that these could be overcome by resorting to
clever rhetorical devices such as multivocality, which,
of course, leave the actual relationships of inequality
firmly intact (Robotham 1997:364)! Kahn points out that
all anthropologists (not only those from the West) will
have to abandon such transparent textual maneuvers.
Whether native or foreign, anthropologists will be
compelled to engage with this rising intelligentsia out
there although not in the field. This intelligentsia
has little inclination to be used as informants or patronized as interlocutors and has difficulty discerning
what is to be gained by engaging in dialogue with anthropologists, especially those branded as foreign. Paradoxically, this challenge, if taken up, leads to a reinvogorated anthropology of equalsa real-world reflexivityrather than a rhetorical pseudo-reflexivity artfully constructed by the condescending anthropologist.
This is an absolutely vital point in Kahns paper, but will
more anthropologists take it up?
Kahns approach is deeply imbued with Weberian
thinking, though more that of the Nietzschean and neoKantian than of the Marxist Weber (Mommsen 1989:
2443). His typically Weberian assertion that the principal contradiction of modernity is the tension between
personal autonomy and instrumental rationality, rather
than that between widespread global immiseration
amidst stupendous wealth, must be unintended, for it
borders on the scandalous. Hegel and Marx would perhaps have dismissed this brand of modernist agonizing
as the height of intellectualist self-indulgence.
That this kind of nostalgia for Gemeinschaft and Heimatoriginally the preserve of German anticapitalist romanticismis now emerging even more acutely in the
East is unsurprising. Both are cases of very rapid latecapitalist transformation of rural societies driven from
above by more or less autocratic regimes. Similarly, the
claims around Asian values are eerily reminiscent of
the arguments for a superior German Sonderweg commonplace among the nationalistic German intelligentsia
of the late 19th century.

This approach defines modernity by its ethic of means

rationality rather than by its mode of production, class
relations, or control of the state. Ethically it concentrates
on means rationality at the expense of ends rationality.
This paralyzes it in the face of the defining 20th- and
21st-century outragesthe systematic use of the most
exquisitely rational means to pursue brutally irrational
ends. Weber certainly recognized this contradiction, but
he could not effectively interrogate ends within the categorical moral and epistemological confines of his neoKantian imperatives. Yet it is precisely this failure to put
ends at the center of theory which allows means rationality to be placed so completely at the disposal of irrational ends. From this viewpoint also, whether modernity is capitalist or socialist is not too important, except
that socialism travels even farther down the road of an
all-encompassing rationality and thus greatly accelerates
the decline of personal autonomy.
Kahns approach obscures a larger difficulty which anthropology, like the antiglobalization and environmental
movements, will have to confront. The critical social
theories (not theory) of modernity conceal profoundly
contradictory premises which lead in diametrically opposite directions. Many trends (predominant in anthropology and antiglobalization and among Greens) seek to
recover community by dismantling international economic relations and reverting to some form of smallscale living. Other trends (infinitely weaker) regard largescale international economic relations, cleansed of
capitalism, as the very foundation for overcoming the
contradictions of modernity, including those of personal
autonomy. Urging anthropologys engagement with critical theories riven by such irreconcilables is a huge advance over where the discipline is today but will create
new and even more intractable dilemmas.
t o m ro c k m o r e
Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University,
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15282, U.S.A. (rockmore@dug.edu).
8 vii 01
In remarks on field research in Southeast Asia, Kahn
suggests that ethnography cannot dispense with a conception of modernity in raising the question of an appropriate model. His paper presupposes that we must
have in mind a conception of modernity in order to study
different social groupings but that the cognitive object
is altered by economic and other processes that in turn
inform any study of the social world. This suggests that
the ability to ascertain so-called facts presupposes a narrative appropriate to pick them out. It further suggests
that in any given case more than one narrative is
possible.
I believe that both suggestions are correct. Facts can
never be isolated from a conceptual framework within
which they are meaningful. The framework, which has
no truth value, serves as the context within which truth
claims can be made. The social world provides an empirical constraint that is also constructed by one or
another narrative about it. There is no uninterpreted social object that can be cognized, known, or interpreted
as it is in itself. All interpretation, all cognition, is always
relative to a conceptual scheme. And there is no way to
show that the social world mandates a single possible
interpretation. Plural, disparate narratives are always
possible. A choice between them cannot be made on
merely empirical grounds; it also cannot be made other
than from one or another extraempirical point of view.
By modernity Kahn means in the first place the
changes in social structures resulting from the development of a market-oriented economy, what is often
called capitalism. Which model should one employ? In
pointing out that our ideas of modernity are mainly derived from Western conceptual models, Kahns answer
is twofold. He is favorably disposed to the idea that alternative narratives can be constructed about the objects
of social science, such as Malaysian villages, which suggests that we must reject anything like a single, univocal
logic of modernization in studying such societies. Yet he
also suggests that modernity, East and West, is part of
one continuous historical process.
I think it would be simplistic to think that Kahn is
contradicting himself or that he is caught in a vicious
circle. We can paraphrase his point as that the construction of alternative, discrete, even incompatible narratives about a given social group always presupposes a
continuous process in terms of which they can be differentiated. In denying the possibility of grand narratives,
what Lyotard calls a meta-recit, positivist historians
like Foucault typically insist on the formation of discrete
cultural formations, or epistemes, which come into and
go out of existence. Foucault means to prevent anything
like History with a capital H in thinking difference as
primary. Yet difference can only be thought on the basis
of the very unity that a positivist approach to history
means to deny. Kahns insight seems to be that in the
domain of social science different types of narratives
must be understood in terms of a continuous historical
process on which they provide alternative perspectives.
The deeper problem, which he does not mention, concerns cognition of the continuous historical process, or
what it is that we know when we know. It makes eminent good sense to hold that we can provide different
alternative narratives of the real historical process. If
there were nothing there, it could not be described. If
our descriptions do not relate to an object, there cannot
be knowledge of it. But the cognitive object cannot be
known other than through alternative narratives. In
other words, there must be something there in order to
describe it in different ways, but what there is can never
be known other than through alternative descriptions.
We never know that we know social reality as it is because we never know that we know mind-independent
reality. What we know through empirical research is always and inevitably a construct or an artifact of one or
another conceptual scheme. Paradoxically, then, we
must presuppose the existence of an uninterpreted reality which we cannot know as a condition of knowing
on the basis of conceptual frameworks keyed to the em-

pirical constraints encountered in interaction between

observers and the experienced world.
Knowledge is limited to conceptual constructs on the
basis of which we interact with empirical constraints.
We construct what we know, and we know only what
we construct. If this is correct, then social science of all
kinds illustrates the well-known constructivist thesis.
Yet since social construction is not isolated from but
rather part of the historical process, all claims to know
are indexed to time and place, or to the historical moment. With this correction, one can agree with Kahn in
maintaining that anthropology and social theory cannot
be separated, for anthropology requires a conceptual
framework or social theory as its very condition. I take
it that this is the deeper message Kahn means to convey.
albert schrauwers
Department of Anthropology, York University, 4700
Keele St., Toronto, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3
(schrauwe@yorku.ca). 14 vii 01
Kahns paper reflexively highlights the intellectual genealogy of anthropology as expressivist critique of modernity. This approach takes into account recent concerns with the plurality of modernity, the lack of fixed
boundaries of our field sites within a globalizing world,
and the multiple theoretical challenges to the isolation
of the West from the Rest. It is precisely by engaging
with the meta-narratives of modernity and reflexively
encompassing the role of the anthropological process of
Othering within them that we can construct a new theoretical project, a project based on the comparison of
similarities rather than absolute difference. As Kahn
notes, this draws attention to the authoritative role
played by ethnographers themselves and the implications of the circulation of enthnographic knowledge in
the modern spaces we all share.
Recent accounts of events in Central Sulawesi paint
a dismal picture of the Balkanization of the New Order
state. Children walk the streets with home-made guns,
and headless corpses float lazily down river. A state once
described as monolithic, invasive, totalizing, and hegemonic now appears a fragile victim of primordial religious and ethnic tensions; its goal of developing a unified national citizenry and a modern economy lies in
tatters. Yet another case of incomplete modernization?
Or, as is becoming increasingly clear in case after case
of IMF restructuring, all too modern?
Faced with such violence, we need to address the ethical implications of the historical use of anthropological
knowledge in the creation of these primordial sentiments. A localized ethnography of the sort called for by
Englund and Leach offers improperly contextualized
storiesstories shorn of modern meta-narratives and,
hence, precisely of culpability. To become something
more, these partial, hidden histories have to be situated
in the wider worlds of power and meaning that gave them
life. But those worlds were also home to other dramatis
personae, 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 discourses of the dominant also yield vital insights into the
contexts and processes of which they were a part (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:17).
Kahn points out that modernization and traditionalization are simultaneous processes which cannot be disentangled; pluralizing the modern or focusing upon globalization and then relocalizing modernity disguises the
ways in which the construction of tradition provides
the meta-narratives of liberal modernity with their escape clause, their means of separating us from them and
blaming the victims. If by modern we mean the product of instrumental reason, even we have never been
modern (Latour 1993). As Latour argues, the ideology
of modernity creates the Great Divide, to the extent
that Westerners can be lined up on one side and all other
cultures on the other, since the latter all have in common
the fact that they are precisely cultures among others.
In Westerners eyes the West, and the West alone, is not
a culture, not merely a culture (1993:97). Modernity
thus contains within itself an inherent ethnographic project, a desire to construct tradition (and hence its
Other) in which its modern indigenes are complicit. As
Pemberton (1994) demonstrates, culture is an effect
of history rather than its explanation or precondition. By
viewing traditionalization and modernization as
part of the same historical process, we implicate metropolitan Europe, colonial indigenes, and ethnographers
from the outset.
It is important to underscore that the expressivist
critique of modernity (and hence anthropology) is not
necessarily reflexive. It is only through the recognition
and assessment of anthropologys own modernist lineage
that we can assess the political implications of anthropological power/knowledge in its various institutional
settings. An ethnography of modernity in the expressivist vein should be, in other words, politically engageda
point which does not emerge strongly in Kahns paper.
Otherwise we are pushed back to an anthropology that
is little more than a description of the quaint or violent
customs of other people, or a social history that calls
talking to each other about the vulnerable giving them
voice (Sider and Smith 1997:14).
c a ro l a . s m i t h
Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A. (casmith@ucdavis.edu).
8 vii 01
Kahns article does indeed describe current ethnographic
encounters that are broadly typical, especially for anthropologists who have worked in the same place 20
years or more. I have maintained research contact for 30
years in western Guatemala, which resembles Kahns
ethnographic region only superficially, being much less
modern in economic, political, and social terms. Yet
Kahns description of Malaysian modernity and the varied concerns of Malays about it resonates with my ex-

perience with Maya in Guatemala. The major current

issue in Guatemala concerns the impact of modernitywhether defined as economic development or as
Western valueson traditional (especially Maya) culture. What Maya wish to avoid is what many Western
scholars consider the features of modern life that bring
about economic developmentindividualistic values,
shrinking, unstable family life, and the weakening hold
of a moral community. Maya leaders active in the culturalist movement argue that it is possible for them to
develop economically and still retain traditional values,
supporting the argument with the observation that Maya
have remained essentially the same for more than 500
years despite countless changes imposed on them by
Spanish conquerors. They also frequently point to Japan
as an impressive example of economic modernity coexisting with the maintenance of a relatively intact (traditional or non-Western) culture (see, e.g., de Hart 2001).
What I find curious is Kahns hesitation to go beyond
a culturalist and Western deconstruction of the meaning
of modernity. In cultural terms he actually goes much
farther than most scholars do by pointing to alternative
and critical Western theories of the modern. Perhaps he
goes no farther because it is old-fashioned to begin with
capitalism and its simultaneous influence on economic
cores and peripheries with respect to modernism. He
mentions capitalism only two or three times, and then
in the context of Webers concerns with modernity.
Western scholars have done little to build on Webers
insights concerning the impact of capitalism on social
systems and culturesan impact Weber recognized as
being far from monolithic or teleological but with decided consequences. What I am suggesting is that we
spend less time defining modernity, globalism, and local
identities/cultures and more time trying to explain concrete examples of modernity, which will always vary because they will have been affected by a host of specific
historical factors.
The particularities of modernity do not depend upon
location in the developed or underdeveloped regions of
the world, nor are they necessarily Western cultural imports brought in by particular cultural agents whose migrations to other parts of the world encouraged capitalist expansion. Two interrelated features of modernity
brought on by capitalism that have been socially-culturally realized in different ways are changing family and
sexual relations and the reconstitution of traditional
communities based on locality into other kinds of social
groupings (e.g., labor, religious, ethnic). In most of Latin
America proletarianization and migration have led to a
major increase in female-headed households and a decrease in even the pretense of patriarchy except among
elites; children of most workers and migrants remain
with their mothers, on whom they depend for both identity and economic survival (Folbre 1994). Men find other
women and often end up creating and leaving behind
many different female-headed households. In much of
Asia, in contrast, patriarchy often seems to be strengthened rather than weakened by proletarianization and migration. 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 remittances back for family support, their children were incorporated into a related traditional patriarchal household. There has been little systematic attempt to explain
this significant and consistent cultural difference in
the impact of modernity (or capitalism) on families in
other than stereotypical terms (i.e., patriarchy is more
strongly inscribed in Asia than elsewhere). Other family
featuresshrinking household size and interdependence, marital instability, recourse to other kinds of family formation and/or sexualityalso lack any single form
which can be linked to the requirements of capitalism
and modernity. Surely we can be more precise in explaining them than by pointing broadly to capitalism,
modernity, globalization, and strength of tradition. I
have worked on female-headed households in Latin
America (Smith 1995, 1998) and suggested a causal chain
for them.
Mayan traditionalists think about the shrinking and
increasingly unstable modern Maya family only in very
general terms. They are mostly troubled about the formation of social communities other than locality, which
can reproduce key cultural signifiers of Maya identity,
such as language. Attempts to create such communities
are adding to the divisions within their localities to the
point of dividing even families. Unlike traditional localities, governed mainly by patriarchal norms of community, modern communities are divided by class, education, ethnic consciousness, sometimes politics, and
especially religioneach of which helps create the
new communities. New religions seem to be a primary
source of new community associations (as in Malaysia
with the Islamic revival), and the most successful of
them in Latin America are evangelical; in Guatemala
Maya are now almost one-third evangelical, others being
divided among traditional Catholicism, Catholic Action,
and Maya forms of religious practice. On these grounds
one could argue that new religions divide more than they
create communities, but that would require believing
that the modernizing communities were not already
divided in major wayswhich is almost certainly wrong
(see, e.g., Burdick 1996). It seems, then, that we must
assume that capitalism invariably creates modern
forms of family and other social groupings, though they
are not necessarily identical. And it also seems that
while there are multiple forms of modernity, there are
ways in which we can link different forms to the historical specifics of capitalist penetration.
There is little to dispute in Kahns argument that anthropologists must reconsider modernity in both [Western and non-Western societies] as part of a single historical process of modernization that was global from
the outset. But does this mean it would be a mistake
to invoke either a plurality of modernities or the globalization and then re-localization of modernity, as a
means of accounting for anthropological realities? I
think the real issue is tracing the particularities of multiple modernization(s) as they involve both local and
global processes and both general and particular histor-

ical processes. All cultures change (modernize) all the

time, but that is hardly what we should be arguing about.
The issue is how and why.
tan chee-beng
Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University
of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China
(cbtan@cuhk.edu.hk). 23 vi 01
Kahn argues that anthropology is being led towards
rather than away from an encounter with modernity
and that it should engage directly with existing modernist meta-narratives. I agree. Anthropologists invariably
encounter modernity, at least as a perceived phenomenon or a discourse, in their research. Every site is now
a site of modernity. In Mainland China it is virtually
impossible to ignore modernity; not only does the state
promote it but people talk about it, too, and want to be
modern. They express it in their consumption, an area
to which anthropologists need to pay more attention.
Modernity is encountered and engaged in differently by
different groups of people and individuals. And modern
consumption, whether in the form of getting a new dish
sterilizer in rural Yongchun in South Fujian or adopting
a more elite style of drinking Chinese tea in rural Guangdong, expresses modernity.
Indeed, modernity is experienced even in remote villages. In Borneo, while logging has a negative impact on
the indigenous people, logging roads do link remote villages to urban centers, and people are very conscious of
their changing modern ways of life. Their desire for a
more modern lifestyle increases with their integration
into the market economy. They also express modernity
via various modes of consumption. Some of them even
buy mobile phones that can be used only when they go
to town because there is no reception in their villages.
I concur with Kahn that modernity is not only something concrete but also a singular process that is global
and multicultural. This global process of modernity is
manifested in institutional modernity, a process that
brings about more efficient (rational) management of human societies (urban planning, provision of public facilities) and the distribution of modern conveniences and
comforts and liberates individuals from oppression and
injustice. For instance, the one-person, one-vote system
of national election may have its pitfalls, but it does
permit ordinary people to have a say in choosing governments. Pluralizing modernity (e.g., Asian modernity) provides a rhetoric for oppressive regimes to reject
efforts to bring about a more open and liberal system of
government. In this sense there is a global process of
modernity affecting all human societies, brought about
by such factors as the diffusion of science and technology, modern education, and the market economy. Many
kinds of agents are involved too: government, NGOs,
political activists, and all kinds of individuals.
In Malaysia, as Kahn has shown, the local people talk
about modernity and have their own views on it. In ethnically polarized Malaysia, Malays and Chinese have dif-
ferent attitudes towards modernity. Malays want to be

on the same footing as successful Chinese and to be
proud bangsa (people) in the world. Their rhetoric of
modernity is influenced by their perception of modernity
in relation to Islam, as well as their perception of Chinese and other Malaysians, and by their historical memory of colonialism. Thus Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathirs modernity rhetoric against Western domination
is meaningful to them. Chinese Malaysians generally
take modernity for granted, and many relate it to global
mobility. Thus when the dominant Malay party
launched the New Malay (Melayu Baru) (read Modern
Malay) campaign in the 1990s, the Chinese did not know
how to respond. Some tried to call for a similar campaign,
but the Chinese could not make sense of what New
Chinese might mean. They are more concerned with
Malay 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 global
process of modernity is expressed concretely in various
forms at the state, group, and individual levels. There is
much room for exciting ethnographic research, and an
encounter with critical theory of modernity is obviously
necessary for reflexive ethnography. At the same time,
new ethnographic findings can shed new light on both
the process and theories of modernity. As to an anthropology of modernity, this seems to be a rhetoric of
emphasis. Anthropologists once disregarded tourism in
their research, but today no serious anthropologist can
afford to neglect its impact. Similarly, given the global
experience of modernity and local rhetoric, no serious
anthropologist can fail to take into account the issue of
modernity and therefore the critical theory of modernity.
What anthropologists can contribute most is analyses of
modernity in particular political economies, for the
global 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.
b j o r n w i t t ro c k
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social
Sciences, Gotavagen 4, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden
(bjorn.wittrock@scasss.uu.se). 20 vii 01
Despite decades of critique, the dominant sociological
form of theorizing about global developments remains
that of modernization theory. This type of theorizing was
explicitly premised on a set of dichotomies between the
traditional and the modern, the Western and the nonWestern, the stagnant and the dynamic. Implicitly it was
also premised on a view of the world that took the experiences of one particular country in one particular historical period, notably the United States in the
postWorld War II period, as the yardstick against which
the achievements and failures of other countries were
measured. Thus one particular trajectory to modernity
tended to be assumed rather than examined. Furthermore, long-term relationships between this trajectory

and developments in other parts of the world tended to

be ignored or simply dismissed.
At the beginning of the 21st century, global interactions have become so prominent and immediately visible
as to make obvious the existence of distinctly modern
yet clearly different societies across the globe. Paradoxically, both traditional modernization theory and large
parts of contemporary globalization studies remain
premised on assumptions of convergence and unilinear
modernization. Thus globalization studies may have replaced notions of structures with notions of networks,
but they tend to preserve core assumptions of modernization theory in terms of a functional evolutionary account of history and a functional and non-agential account of society.
The conventional understanding of modernization suffers from three crucial weaknesses: First, it is conceptually impoverished. Thus it presents an understanding
of modernization as consisting of changes in economictechnological practices, the industrial revolution, and
in political practices, the democratic revolution, but
it neglects the fact that modernity was formed in the
wake of a profound shift in cultural and discursive
practices.
Furthermore, it is empirically untenable. The particular institutional practices that modernization theory associates with modernitybe they a liberal market economy or a democratic nation-statedid not materialize
in full-blown form anywhere, even in the context of
Western Europe, until the middle of the 20th century.
From a purely structural-institutional perspective, modernity would barely have arrived in time to witness its
own funeral. This would make a mockery of debates
throughout the 19th century in Europe about the coming
of modernity. Furthermore, as already argued, societies
across the globe are modern but exhibit differences that
cannot simply be expected to fade away in favor of a
gradual approximation to some implicit North American
yardstick.
Finally, the conventional understanding is, as is persuasively argued by Kahn, normatively closed. It posits
a purely instrumentalist understanding ofto use my
own terminology (Wittrock 2000)the promissory notes
of modernity. Paradoxically, in this respect conventional
modernization theory and a number of its poststructuralist critics share this interpretation. They both tend to
neglect tensions between expressivist and instrumentalist tendencies in modernity that existed in the articulation of modernity at least from the turn of the 18th
century onward (Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock
1996; Wagner 1994, 2001). A purely instrumentalist reading of the promissory notes of modernity is historically
inaccurate, and it is vacuous as a normative theory except in a purely formal sense. In the case of traditional
modernization theory there is simply an uncritical advocacy of a set of instrumental values, an assignment
that in a number of poststructuralist accounts has just
shifted evaluational contents.
From this perspective, there is every reason to welcome Kahns 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 be
explicitly brought into any theorizing of modernity. It
cannot be relegated to a pristine domain of ethnographic
research.
2. The cultural presuppositions of modernity have always been in tension with each other, discursively embattled and differently interpreted and articulated.
3. Virtually every such articulation has occurred
against the background of a perceived threat to the practices of a given society, a sense that it is about to be
overwhelmed not only by the values of another society
but by the sheer power of other societies. This is equally
true for what has sometimes been called defensive modernization in 19th- and 20th-century Europe (Joas 1999,
2000) as it is in the cases of 19th- and 20th-century Japan
and 20th-century China or India.
4. In all parts of the world today, articulations of cultural and institutional assumptions of modernity will
occur in virtually all geographical regions and among all
parts of the population. Such processes are not reserved
for an intellectual elite in supposedly modern settings
distinct from an allegedly traditional population in remote areas unaffected by modernity. Thus the very idea
of ethnographic accounts that may be kept separate from
theorizing about modernity is untenable.
5. The particular institutional projects that were articulated and sometimes partially realized in some parts
of Europe and North America came to impinge on the
rest of the world, but this cannot be construed either
historically or in the contemporary setting as an encounter between modern and traditional societies. Neither Ching China nor Mughal India nor Safavid Persia
nor Tokugawa Japan nor Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans was in any reasonable sense a stagnant, traditional
society. They were all undergoing profound change, had
vibrant public spaces, and were reinterpreting their own
legacies, defining their collective identities, and reforming their political orders (Eisenstadt, Schluchter, and
Wittrock 2001).
Only a focus on the connected and entangled nature
of history (e.g., Subramanyam 1997, 1998) can bring this
out. Such a focus defies any notion of a dichotomy between theorizing the modernity of European and North
American societies and ethnographically recording the
traditional and the given in other settings. There is every
reason to believe that social theories of modernity will
be greatly enriched in the coming decades by the contributions of theoretically informed anthropologists
from across the world.

Reply
joel s. kahn
Melbourne, Australia. 9 vii 01
I am gratified by the number and variety of responses to
my argument for a deepening of the encounter between
anthropology and theories of modernity, even if in a
number of cases I find myself somewhat taken aback by
the negative tone of some of the more critical comments.
In particular I was disappointed by the reactions of
Englund and Leach, whose article in an earlier issue of
current anthropology stimulated me to clarify my
own thoughts on the relationship between anthropological knowledge making and Western narratives of modernization. Instead of being pleased that their piece had
served to stimulate a serious discussion of these issues,
they appear to imagine that my own piece had as its
single raison detre a desire to attack it. And on that
front I stand accused of simultaneously misrepresenting
their arguments and claiming them for my own. (It is
extremely difficult to see how one could be guilty on
both counts at once.) In fact their article was not the
sole or even the primary stimulus for my own argument,
and I do not propose here a point-by-point refutation of
either their article or the separate comments they make
here. Perhaps instead a single example might serve to
illustrate where our disagreements are sharpest. At one
point in their article they take the Comaroffs among
others to task for operating with a covert meta-narrative
of modernity in making claims about the effects of generalized commodification. In essence their argument is
that engaging with this particular modernist narrative is
ethnocentric, since it reads local reactions to commodification through the grid of a preexisting modernist debate. Instead of engaging, however critically, with the
shortcomings of this particular (one might add unidimensional) narrative and exposing its shortcomings (in
the West as well as the non-West), they appeal to a fieldwork tradition through which the ethnographer somehow escapes into a place of radical otherness-to-modernity, allowing the fieldworker to be transformed in
the process of inquiry by imposing interlocutors concerns and interests upon the ethnographer, thereby
challenging the perceptual faculties the ethnographer
is accustomed to trust (Englund and Leach 2000:229).
This particular vision of the nature of ethnography is
precisely what I have termed a traditionalist one to
the extent that it promises an escape into a space of
radical alterity. In this sense the label traditionalist is
hardly a misrepresentation of their position. And whatever one may think of it, it is very difficult to see how
the very clear alternative I proposed can be taken to be
a case of claiming their positions as my own.
The work of my colleague Arnason has done much to
clarify my own thinking on the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary social-theoretic discourse in the
critical 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 theorists
may be happy for anthropologists to draw on their insights, they are reluctant to recognize the very clear contribution that anthropologists, postcolonial theorists,
multiculturalists, feminists, and others could make to
the transformation of social theory. How else could Arnason be so oblivious to the long-established critical engagement with modernization theory in anthropology
stimulated by the work of Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz
and the rise of dependency and world-system theory and
to the subsequent inversion of the liberal assumptions
of modernization theory in the critiques of development
of anthropologists such as Ferguson and Escobar? As for
his perfunctory dismissal of my attempt to uncover similar continuities in contemporary debates with two quite
different European theoretical traditions (advanced in
any case rather tentatively in the article), I remain undiscouraged by the statement that because Durkheim
was somehow more critical than Comte and Spencer
and Weber was unhappy with aspects of the Hegelian
system such an attempt should be abandoned. To make
this case more convincing, however, I would have had
to stray far beyond the central problems addressed in this
particular article. Finally, asserting that it is possible to
develop an abstract theory of modernity in the singularhence dismissing my critique of the notion of multiple modernitiesdoes not actually make it so. On this
one point I remain unconvinced by Arnasons own
writings.
Perhaps the problems raised with regard to the embeddedness of modernity and the shortcomings of exemplary accounts of modern subjectivity are too anthropological for Arnason to take much interest in
them. And yet, while they may arise in the kind of anthropological encounter I describe, they prove extremely
problematic for critical theory as well. Just as anthropology must benefit from an encounter with the work
of critical theorists like Arnason, he too would benefit
from a more serious engagement with the problems identified in contemporary ethnography. Perhaps for obvious
reasons, then, I find Wittrocks approach to similar issues
far more congenial. But this is not just because he finds
substantial areas of overlap between the project I have
outlined and his own work as a social theorist but also
because he appears far more willing than is Arnason to
take seriously the problems identified in Western narratives of modernization by ethnographers who have
taken the trouble to engage with them.
I find myself agreeing with Eisenstadts case for broadening the focus of the discussion of modernist culture,
although I am not certain that the tension between totalization and pluralism could not be linked more closely
to the project of autonomization (in Wagners terms, the
tension between liberty and discipline) than he presumes. I fully sympathize with the intentions of some
of those who, like Eisenstadt, have seriously worked to
pluralize the concept of modernity. Eisenstadt here at
least provides a justification by advocating one way of
singularizing the concept, arguing that modernity begins

in the West to be differently appropriated elsewhere. In

the paper, however, I point to difficulties with this approach by suggesting that modernity may have been coevally constituted in the West and the non-West and by
suggesting that perhaps modernity may best be understood as having been global and multicultural from
the outset. This of course is to take issue with Eisenstadts suggestion that modernity can be thought of as a
distinct civilization which emerged in the West, but
his response prompts me to reexamine his important
contribution to these issues over many years.
Gohs comments are useful, and of course she is correct to point to the importance of revised understandings
of modernity in theorizing both violence and struggles
for (and against) local cultural, political, and economic
autonomy, particularly in places like Indonesia. Here she
identifies what is perhaps the major challenge facing analysts of contemporary Southeast Asia, if only because
we are all implicated in one way or another in the processes through which cultural identities in the region
have been formeda point I take to underlie the work
of Schrauwers.
I confess to finding Ribeiros intervention somewhat
opaque and would be interested in a more worked-out
version of the themes he takes up. We disagree at a number of crucial pointsfor example, that modernism and
empire are as intimately connected as he appears to suggest, that modernity is largely to be understood as an
ideology of elites (and that peasantries and indigenous peoples are less aware of it, however this might
be measured), and that capitalist expansion on its own
provides an adequate understanding of the systemic interconnection between the West and its others (this last
point also argued by Smith). Yet reading his piece is, for
all that, stimulating, and I am pleased that my article
seems to have provoked such a lively response. Similarly
with the response by Robotham, who also points out gaps
in the argument of the article, including its failure to
address global immiseration and stupendous wealtha
failure that he suggests is possibly scandalous. The
same could be said of the lack of attention to racism and
violence, a point made somewhat differently by Smith,
Schrauwers, and Goh. I would agree that this is a gap in
the article under consideration, although I hope not in
other things I have written. But such comments serve
to remind me that the fact that an earlier theoretical
obsession with, particularly, the Marxism of the French
structuralists (and hence with the transhistorical pertinence of concepts like mode of production, surplus
value, class, and capitalism) failed to provide satisfactory
ways of dealing with such problems does not mean that
the problems themselves have disappeared. Robothams
recognition of the failures of socialism in this regard is,
therefore, important to my own position as well.
I appreciate Rockmores more philosophically elegant
statement of my assumptions and cannot quarrel with
his correction of them. Would that my own arguments
were really so coherently epistemologically grounded!
The point made by Schrauwers about the problems
inherent in an ethnography that either refuses or fails to
recognize the ways in which anthropology and hence the

anthropologist are implicated in the processes that produce interlocutors is a critical one, and these problems
in my view also infect a good deal of what passes for
critical theory in the West. It is for precisely this reason
that I have called certain of Englund and Leachs claims
for ethnography traditionalist, a label that in this sense
might also be applied to certain much more recent (and
apparently more radical) work by subalternists, poststructuralists, and postmodernists. All in different ways
seek an epistemological guarantee for their critiques of
modernity and its meta-narratives in some form of escape from modernity for that selective band of subjects
who are thereby able to see it for the sham it is. In this
way they conveniently escape being themselves implicated in its evils (inequality, immiseration, racism, patriarchy, violence), for which almost everyone else then
becomes responsible.
Smith engages at length with certain aspects of the
article but in spite of some positive remarks urges a return to some of the key arguments of the political economists for whom she has been such a prominent and
persuasive spokesperson. It is perhaps the assertion that
the goal of such analysis is to examine the impact of
capitalism (or modernity) on, presumably, precapitalist
or premodern communities that throws most clearly into
relief the problems in the approach she appears to favour.
Two separate but ultimately intersecting lines of
thoughtthe one methodological, the other theoreticalhave moved me away from this kind of approach.
The former begins with a critique of objectivist approaches in the human and cultural sciences towards an
engagement with the meaningful dimensions of human
social life (a` la Geertz) but then moves beyond this objectivist subjectivism to a recognition of the intersubjective or hermeneutic processes by which the subjective
states of others are constructed. But, as I have argued,
the dialogical accounts of ethnographic practice thrown
up by these assumptions can be seen to be sociologically
nave to the extent that the focus remains on the dyadic
and relatively short-term interactions that constitute individual ethnographic encounters. What is called for instead, as Schrauwers points out, is a reflexive account of
the production of anthropological knowledge and the
processes that generate both anthropological subjects
and objects, embedding them within more stable longterm relations between us and them (relations
which under certain circumstances may be classed as
imperial, although this far from exhausts the list of
possibilities).
Theoretically, political economy approaches falter precisely because they seek to describe these relations in
terms of the impact of capitalism, the global, the modern, etc., on essentialized and timeless precapitalist or
local or premodern communities, positing a traditional baseline that continually recedes backward in
time. The evidence of local distinctiveness inevitably
uncovered by such ethnographic encounters must always be explained as a consequence of incomplete capitalist development, modernization, or what have you.

The already-mentioned example of the meta-narrative of

capitalism as commodification with which political
economists have most frequently operated (and which
Englund and Leach rightly criticize) is a case in point.
Here the penetration of capitalism is seen to generate
an inexorable process of commodificationof products,
means of production, land, and finally labour power (the
point at which political economists can speak of fullblown capitalism). Inevitably, however, the ethnographer discovers some elements of naturalized production which are then taken to signify the influence of local
precapitalist forms and hence of an incomplete not-yet
capitalism on the periphery. This tendency of political
economists to measure their ethnographic experience
against the yardstick of a predetermined narrative of capitalist development, a procedure that must result in
peripheral societies somehow falling short, began increasingly to strike me as unsatisfactory not because it
marked a radical break with what I have termed a traditionalist narrative of ethnographic escape but precisely
because it did not break sufficiently with it. Is it reasonable to argue, even in Smiths own Central American
example, that centuries of capitalist penetration have
still not generated a complete capitalist tranformation? Or is it more reasonable to reexamine the validity
of all such unidimensional narratives of modernization
in both the cores and the peripheries of the so-called
world capitalist system?
Peletz seems to me to fail to come to grips with most
of the central arguments of the paper, choosing instead
to engage in a round of the citation game (you didnt
cite me or my friends). While I do recognize the contributions made especially by Budiman and Ong (the latter is cited in the paper), I do not think I can be accused
of failing to engage with scholars in the region. Nor do
I think the particular oversights of which I am accused
are in any way damaging to my argument.
Tan raises an important objection to the notion of multiple modernities not mentioned in my paper, namely,
that it should provoke scepticism if only because it has
become embedded in the rhetoric of authoritarian regimes. Although I have elsewhere entered into the socalled Asian values debate, expressing a certain dissatisfaction with critiques that rest on assertions about the
universality of Western liberal narratives on human
rights, I think Tan provides an alternative and more convincing critique. Pursuing this intriguing suggestion
would involve demonstrating the shortcomings of liberal
universalism in the West and Asia alike and replacing it
with a more multidimensional concept of global
modernity.
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Anthropology and Modernity

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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

Against those who have taken anthropologists to task for flirting

1. An early version of this paper was presented at a symposium I

In a recent assessment of the pertinence of theories of

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652 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

based knowledge of contemporary Southeast Asia. The

and social reconstruction lumped under the heading of

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 653

4. I am grateful to both Trevor Hogan and Wendy Smith, who have

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654 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

Reflexivity and the Modern Spaces of

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 655

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of neighbouring Indonesia (for this reason more favoured

contemporaries, Schrauwerss study suggests instead

Meanings of the Modern

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 657

In Anglophone social science in particular, the term

it is precisely a liberal or techno-instrumental vision of

Pluralizing the Modern

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658 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 659

such images by showing how in the case of Greece one

graphic argument in favour of an embedded modernity

Critical Theory and Expressivism

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660 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

aesthetic sensibility or what might be called a particular

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 661

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though parallel, argument, Castoriadis sees in the search

ethnographers to severe and continuous interrogation

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 663

nographic knowledge allows us also to turn modernity

recognition that it is a part of a project of constituting

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664 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001

that has emerged in what is mainly a European tradition

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 665

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Westernization from modernity completelyto deny the

with the ethnographers reflexive experience. New

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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 667

and the non-West and the unfolding logic of modernity,

The Southeast Asian quest for modernity is accompanied

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668 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001