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
䉷 2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4205-0003$3.00
Anthropology and
Modernity 1 dernity may have been substantially pluralized and re-
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 arm’s length, neglecting the potential fruitfulness of
juxtaposing Western and non-Western experiences of what Ha-
bermas has called the project of modernity. The encounter be-
tween anthropology and modernity is generated on the one 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, con-
firms the need to recognize anthropology’s own modernist ori-
gins. 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 Univer-
sity (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 inter-
ests include development, social change, nation building, and
identity in Indonesia and Malaysia and the history of anthropol-
ogy. 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 ac-
cepted 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.
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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 mo-
lativized in recent anthropology (see, e.g., Comaroff and
Comaroff 1993, 1999; Appadurai 1996; Rofel 1999; Ong
1999), but Englund and Leach still find modernist an-
thropology guilty of merging the “concerns of ethnog-
raphy with those of Western sociology.” Such a merger,
they argue, serves to devalue if not erase the 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 ethnographer’s in-
terlocutors a measure of authority in producing an un-
derstanding of their life-worlds” (Englund and Leach
2000:225–26).
I want to argue here precisely for the need to reesta-
blish the conversation between anthropology and social
theory and hence between “non-Western” and “West-
ern” 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 re-
cent anthropology is problematic not because it sub-
sumes 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 eth-
nographic knowledge poses significant challenges to that
theory. Yet to suggest that we should withdraw from the
dialogue because of supposedly deep-seated incompati-
bilities between the “West and the Rest,” self and other,
the proper disciplinary concerns of sociology and an-
thropology, or the radical differences between 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 an-
thropology is, for better or worse, forced into an en-
counter with both Western modernity and Western nar-
ratives of modernization. This involves also 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 mo-
dernity that appear particularly pertinent to an anthro-
pology of modernity. Finally, I shall examine the chal-
lenges to both theorist and ethnographer posed by 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 ethnographer’s 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 mod-
ernist 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 pro-
voked 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 en-
counter dates back to the years before that when the U.S.
government attempted but failed to send me to South-
east Asia for less peaceful activities. I returned with my
partner, Maila Stivens,2 to a Malay village in the Malay-
sian state of Negeri Sembilan for an extended period in
1975–76. 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 col-
leagues and postgraduate students in Australia as super-
visors, conference organizers, and collaborators in a va-
riety of research and publishing projects (see, e.g., 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 re-
define our ethnographic project as an anthropology of
modernity. The story of Malaysian modernization, par-
ticularly since the state-led policies of industrialization
2. I am extremely grateful to the following bodies for funding re-
search in Indonesia and Malaysia over the years: the London-Cor-
nell Projects, the British Social Science Research Council, the Brit-
ish Academy, The Leverhulme Foundation, The British Institute in
Southeast Asia, and The Australian Research Council.
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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 cul-
tural indicators that are typically associated with mod-
ernization 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 de-
velopments 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 consid-
ered—by ethnographers and Malay nationalists
alike—the locus classicus of premodern Malay society
and culture.
Already by the mid-1970s and certainly when we re-
turned during the 1980s, it was evident that a good deal
of the economic action was taking place outside the rice-
farming 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 develop-
ments, 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 land-
scapes 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 Malaysia’s ur-
ban centres, the widespread appearance of shopping cen-
tres, malls, restaurants, and multinational fast-food out-
lets in city centres and suburban fringes, the building of
highways, toll roads, and bridges and a huge increase in
car ownership and accompanying traffic snarls through-
out 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 build-
ing of theme parks, entertainment complexes, and lei-
sure centres. These developments were accompanied by
high levels of pollution and environmental degrada-
tion—the 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 per-
manent or temporary basis in the new urban centres,
where we often met them either by chance or design.
These meetings brought home to us the extent to which
the boundaries between “our” world and “theirs” were
far more permeable in both directions than the tradi-
tional vision of ethnography might suggest.
Not unexpectedly, the material trappings of late-20th-
century modernity were accompanied by major upheav-
als in the lives of all Malaysians. Between 1970 and 1990,
the patterns of social stratification that had prevailed in
the colonial and early postcolonial period were radically

transformed. Wage labour was not uncommon in the vil-
lages 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 bor-
row a term coined to describe the effects of late capi-
talism 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 liv-
ing in villages in Negeri Sembilan. Particularly signifi-
cant 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-ori-
ented 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 Ma-
lays in a range of new middle-class occupations on hous-
ing estates on the fringes of Seremban (the capital of
Negeri Sembilan) during the late 1980s. These peo-
ple—among them the children, siblings, and cousins of
villagers among whom we had earlier done our “eth-
nography”—were 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 else-
where, 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 ec-
onomic transformation, there have been significant
changes to both political and cultural/religious land-
scapes. The growth in the size, functions, and modern-
izing 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 immi-
grants, both legal and illegal, from poorer regions of Southeast Asia
(including Sumatra) who came in Malaysia’s boom times. At the
same time, economic growth has thrown up new kinds of business
elites—Chinese and Malay—with extremely close links to the po-
litical parties (cf. Gomez 1990, Heng 1992, Sieh 1992, Gomez and
Jomo 1997).
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 653
Putrajaya is perhaps the grandest expression of a state-
directed 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 profes-
sional politicians, a growing number of Malay-educated
small and medium-level businessmen, and—the real
power brokers—the 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 com-
mercial interests (see Rustam 1993). Following UMNO’s
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 signifi-
cant, 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 Mus-
lims and non-Muslims. These were part of what is usu-
ally 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:x–xi). The so-
called Islamic revival and parallel developments among
other religious groups have been less a spiritual move-
ment 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 wit-
nessed the emergence of a highly commodified “life-
style” 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.
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
Islamic beliefs and religio-political hierarchies that pre-
vailed in the first decade after independence.5
This rather simplistic story of modernization has im-
portant implications for the doing of anthropology in
Malaysia. At a practical level, as have many of our con-
temporaries 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 “trans-
migrant”) villagers and their urban-based offspring, an
increasingly bureaucratized and “rationalized” national
political machine, and the “performance” of Malay cul-
ture and Islamic doctrine in film, popular music, adver-
tisements, and the ceremonies of state.6 This has taken
place mainly because of a transformation in the Malay
kampong (village) itself—the traditional object of an an-
thropology 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 self-
sufficiency—its constituting a significant space from
which the economic, social, and cultural forces that con-
stitute Malay life emanate—have clearly been shattered.
At the same time, the self-sufficient and virtuous kam-
pong republic continues to reappear in virtual form 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 Ma-
lay but including foreign ethnographers with their ro-
manticized images of a rural Malay cultural “otherness.”
Like it or not, the ethnographer of Malaysia is 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 “re-
mote” parts of Malaysia itself. However, one does not
5. The classic study of a peasantist Malay Islam is Clive Kessler’s
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 “re-
vival” 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 Ma-
lay 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 industriali-
zation (Stivens 1996) and modern politics (Stivens 1991), the de-
velopment 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).
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have to look too far beneath the surface even in sup-
posedly “remote” areas to discover the transformative
effects on village life of commodification, land aliena-
tion, bureaucratization, and religious rationalization.
Therefore, ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, as
in many other parts of the world, has led to a new un-
derstanding of the anthropological project—no 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 anthropology’s reflexive
project.
Reflexivity and the Modern Spaces of
Tradition
By “reflexivity” I mean the implications of the “discov-
ery” by anthropologists and their critics that the knowl-
edge which anthropology produces is not innocent—that
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 com-
pels 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 eth-
nography 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 peo-
ple 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 ethnography’s interlocutors in the construc-
tion of knowledge about themselves must not blind us
to the far more authoritative role played by ethnogra-
phers themselves and, more important, by the modern
discourse of ethnography in this process. What makes
an account of such an encounter ethnography—as op-
posed to anecdote, fiction, journalism, travel writing, ad-
vertising copy, or the scrawlings of amateurs—has very
little to do with the scrutiny of particular interlocutors
or even the personal characteristics of individual eth-
nographers. It derives instead from unambiguously mod-
ern spaces governed by institutions such as universities,
publishers, academic/professional journals, and funding
bodies that determine what is and what is not valid eth-
nographic knowledge, what is or is not “good ethnog-
raphy.” To put this another way, the reflexive imperative
demands that we evaluate ethnography less in the con-

text of the singular dialogue between individual ethnog-
raphers and particular informants on the supposedly non-
modern terrain on which individual acts of ethnography
are carried out than as part of a sustained project of
knowledge production and consumption within modern-
ity. 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 anthro-
pological knowledge circulates in modern spaces and the
implications of such knowledge for the world in which
it circulates. Of course, since the discipline of anthro-
pology 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 imper-
ative is not altered by the fact that since that time an-
thropology has been globalized and, hence, that the prac-
tising anthropologist is as likely to be a 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 anthro-
pologists.
One important role played by anthropological knowl-
edge in the West has been as part of a project of cultural
critique. The case of classical American cultural anthro-
pology 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 anthro-
pology, 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 im-
perative 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 con-
stituted by their relationships with modernist narra-
tives—even when mobilized within a critique of a par-
ticular version of modernism, namely, techno-instru-
mental rationalism.
Yet one thing that both the insistence on 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 im-
plicated in a set of relations between the “us” and the
“them” of ethnographic discourse. In other words, eth-
nography is more than decontextualized knowledge per-
forming the function of cultural critique far from its
point of production. Ethnographers of Malaysia, for ex-
ample, would find it impossible to avoid this conclusion
not so much because of the individual actions of their
traditional interlocutors as because intellectuals, poli-
ticians, and others are coming to speak forcefully, and
with authority, for or on behalf of those interlocutors.
Allowing “informants” to become “interlocutors” pro-
duces a very limited degree of reflexivity when there are
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 655
so many “native” voices with the authority to interro-
gate ethnography who would thereby be bypassed be-
cause they are not the voices of ethnography’s traditional
informants but those of academics, intellectuals, poli-
ticians, and others. Ironically, now that there are “na-
tives” with real power to act as gatekeepers in the cir-
culation of ethnographic knowledge, their contributions
are completely erased by a vision of a non-modern eth-
nography that denies them authenticity presumably be-
cause they are too caught up in the meta-narratives 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 anthro-
pologists. Nor can foreign anthropologists any longer eas-
ily escape these voices when they come back home,
given the intensification of cultural globalization and the
powerful sensitivity to the concerns of postcolonial in-
tellectuals 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 pro-
duction of ethnographic knowledge still permits met-
ropolitan anthropologists to ignore almost completely
the crucial question of the role and function of ethno-
graphic 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 mo-
dernity 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,” be-
tween “us” and “them”—in 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 South-
east Asia that are somehow outside modernity or
whether these remote traditions are similarly the “in-
ventions” of a colonial society that was by any measure
of rationalization, social differentiation, commodifica-
tion, and bureaucratization itself already modern. Were
not the “traditional” spaces in the apparently remote
corners of the world being colonized by classical eth-
nography 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, urbaniza-
tion, and industrialization—including the supposedly re-
mote areas of Malaysia itself and the “outlying” regions
656 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
of neighbouring Indonesia (for this reason more favoured
by foreign ethnographers in search of “real” other-
ness)—any less modern for all that?
My archival research on the colonial history of central
Sumatra in the 1980s, for example, suggests that the ap-
parent otherness-to-modernity of economy, culture, and
society in “remote” regions of the Netherlands East In-
dies 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 Minang-
kabau as they became known to an earlier generation of
ethnographers were actually a historical product of spe-
cific patterns of modern state formation, colonial land
alienation, and the growth of a capitalist economy. In-
sights into how this happened within a modernizing
Dutch empire is provided by Albert Schrauwers’s 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 pro-
cesses of rationalization and modernization that began
in the period of high colonialism.
Schrauwers’s 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 thor-
ough 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 under-
stood as combining elements from the past and the pre-
sent. Instead it is an integrated whole representing a par-
ticular regional form of modernity. 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 Suharto’s “New Order” state, are not
those “between a secular modern state and a succes-
sionist ethnic periphery whose identity is rooted in ‘pri-
mordial’ sentiments” as is so commonly assumed.
Rather, “local identities are anchored in ‘religion’, itself
a recent, transethnic phenomenon” (Schrauwers 2000:
228–29).
This reorientation of the problematic of Indonesian
nationalism radically subverts the self/other and tradi-
tional/modern polarities that served to underwrite many
earlier ethnographic encounters, even those that focused
on “capitalist penetration” or “social change” after West-
ern contact (cf. Kahn 1985). Like those of some of his
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contemporaries, Schrauwers’s study suggests instead
that “traditionalization” and “modernization” are part
of the same historical process and that this process in-
volved metropolitan Europe, colonial indigenes, and eth-
nographers from the outset. As a consequence Schrau-
wers always keeps the regional specificities 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 func-
tion of ethnography itself. As Schrauwers’s study dem-
onstrates, the practice of ethnography in Sulawesi was
part of a process that constructed seemingly non-modern
terrains within a sea of modernizing institutions and
practices—in 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 there-
fore again led towards rather than away from an en-
counter with modernity, suggesting that it would do well
to engage directly, however critically, with existing mod-
ernist 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 Ro-
man, pagan past” (Smart 1990:17). From the 16th century
“modern” acquired a new comparative/historical sense,
this time to provide a contrast with “medieval.” 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
1983:108–9). Related and more specialized terms such as
“modernize” and “modernist” did not appear in system-
atic usage until the 19th century or even later. According
to Barry Smart, the “first positive references to modern-
ism are to be found in 1888 in [the Nicaraguan poet
Rubén] Dario’s praise of the work of a Mexican writer,
Ricardo Contreras, and subsequently in 1890 in refer-
ences to modernismo as a movement in Latin America
for cultural emancipation and autonomy from Spain”
(Smart 1990:18). This is rather uneven ancestry for a rig-
orous analytic concept.

In Anglophone social science in particular, the term
derives much of its meaning from a source that has come
to be widely despised, at least by large numbers of an-
thropologists—modernization 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 pro-
cess. Here civilization was understood as a universal tra-
jectory of individual emancipation and constantly evolv-
ing rational mastery. This tradition is manifest in 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 un-
derpinning 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 in-
tellectuals 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 clas-
sical 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 en-
counter with modernity, many ethnographers, under the
influence of poststructuralist and postcolonial currents
in the discipline, renewed the earlier critical stance to-
wards modernization. Influenced particularly by the
work of Foucault, who in a very different context asso-
ciated modernity with discursive and hence power-sat-
urated techniques of surveillance and discipline, the eth-
nographic critics of modernity now came to view
modernization negatively as a set of discursive processes
associated especially with Western domination. A par-
ticularly nuanced and interesting such study is Fergu-
son’s analysis of the discourse of development in Lesotho
(Ferguson 1990; see also Escobar 1995).
But the salient point is that in most of this literature
7. This is clearly a sweeping generalization that would require more
careful argument than is possible here. To argue that much recent
social theorizing remains within this tradition involves tracing con-
nections between Comte’s social determinism, Spencer’s 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 Durkheim’s contention that individ-
uation 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 “de-
centre” the modern subject. I am indebted to both Martha Mac-
intyre and John Morton for this particular way of tracing the con-
tinuities from structuralist into poststructuralist anthropologies.
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 657
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 modernity—this time understood
as a negative rather than a positive experience—have
retained the particular understanding of modernization
formulated within the Western liberal tradition, revers-
ing only its normative evaluation. This is at the heart
of the new defence of ethnography articulated by an-
thropologists 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 con-
frontation 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 modern-
ization, Southeast Asia will always be found wanting:
modern perhaps, but incompletely modern at best. Ma-
laysia and Indonesia have modern states but states which
appear deficient because of the absence of full democ-
racy. Malaysia and Indonesia have rational bureaucra-
cies, but they also seem to be characterized by the “sur-
vival” of elements of a premodern political order in
which the system of government was coterminous with
personalized ties between patrons and clients. Malaysia’s
and Indonesia’s 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 em-
ployer 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 de-
veloped, 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 (how-
ever 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 par-
ticular 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 anti-
Chinese sentiment punctuate recent Indonesian history,
and Indonesia as a nation now appears to be fragmenting
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
along “primordial” ethnic and religious fault lines. Sim-
ilarly, race remains a primary principle of identity and
identification in the everyday lives of most Malaysians.
Measured against the yardstick of modernist narra-
tives, 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 oth-
erness was constituted as historically anterior to and, as
a result, an incomplete or immature version of the mod-
ern, civilized self (see Kahn 2001). Southeast Asia appears
at best perversely modern, or to manifest various per-
verse forms of modernity. These may be explained away
as premodern survivals or invented traditions, but nei-
ther 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 tra-
dition. 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 Eu-
ropean social theory (Wagner 1999), Wagner argues that
modernist theory has tended to represent America pre-
cisely as such a sphere of “pure modernity.” This treat-
ment leads to an assessment of America as superior 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 sensa-
tions that come from the socio-historical world to
establish what they hold to be those very few indu-
bitable 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 sec-
ond move creates a pure image of the world, of sci-
entific 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 be-
tween 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 de-
void 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
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of the modern are particularistic, they may also be ex-
clusionary, 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 colo-
nialism 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 asso-
ciated 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 ar-
gues 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. Modern-
ity can, writes Yang (pp. 37–38),
be spoken of in the singular because it issues from
the Western Enlightenment and Industrial Revolu-
tion. 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 genera-
tor of the types of power found in modernity. Mo-
dernity in China was triggered by western and Japa-
nese imperialism in the nineteenth and 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 im-
ported elements . . .
But did the key elements of modernity really appear
first in the West, only then to be transported and indi-
genized elsewhere? Evidence can certainly be produced
to demonstrate that the modernization of the West and
at least parts of the non-West—Russia, Japan, China, the
centres of the Islamic world (or even apparently remote
corners of the Islamic world such as Malaya)—were con-
temporary 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 Fau-
bion (1993) argues that Greek modernity is more than
an indigenized version of something that came from out-
side. Citing Weber’s characterization of Western Euro-
pean civilization as dominated by technical, instrumen-
tal, and formal rationalism, he seeks to “counterbalance”
8. For a discussion of the origin of Malay-Islamic modernism 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 cen-
tred on a historically specific discourse and set of prac-
tices about the “reform and reformation” of Greek so-
ciety. In Faubion’s words (p. xiii):
What I found in Greece led me to conclude that our
prevailing portraits of modernity were in need not
simply of revision but of a counterbalance, of the
portraiture of “another modernity.” . . . Weber lo-
cated modernity—or at least its dominant, north-
westerly modality—in 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 re-
duced 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 his-
torical fact of Western colonialism, ongoing geopolit-
ical domination, and ideological and cultural influ-
ences 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-theo-
rization 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 eth-
nographers have arrived at much the same conclusion.
There is no modernity in the singular—only Greek, Chi-
nese, Asian, Chinese, African, and other modernities.
But what are the implications for theory of such a re-
lativized and pluralized modernity? If modernity can
never be disembedded from particular historical con-
texts, can it ever be conceptualized in the singular with-
out 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 speak-
ing of modernity at all? Why speak of a Greek, Asian,
or Islamic modernity at all if the singular is unimagin-
able? Nothing at all is to be gained by adding the term,
since it can have no meaning on its own. The ethno-
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 659
graphic argument in favour of an embedded modernity
ends up being the same as the Englund and Leach ar-
gument for an ethnography of modernity’s 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 ethnographer’s in-
sistence 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 contra-
diction.
Critical Theory and Expressivism
Many of the dilemmas posed by the ethnographer’s en-
counter with modernity may stem from a failure to ac-
knowledge the presence of diverse, even conflicting,
traditions within modernist thought. This failure ap-
pears to generate the compulsion among modernity’s
critics to seek an escape route out of modernity alto-
gether—a tendency that is manifest in the renewal of
traditional understandings of ethnography within criti-
cal anthropology but also implied in the popular notion
of multiple modernities. Having accepted unidimen-
sional notions of modernity and modern subjectivity de-
rived either from classical liberalism or from its post-
structuralist critics, there appears to be no alternative
but to embrace modernity wholeheartedly or reject it out
of hand. And yet neither seems possible for an anthro-
pology forced into encounters with the modern at every
turn. Perhaps, then, there are other traditions of theo-
rizing the modern more pertinent to the project of con-
temporary anthropology.
The critical modernist narratives that emerge out of
the Hegel-Marx-Weber heritage in social theory, gener-
ally 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 com-
modification and Weber’s discussions of modern pro-
cesses 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, seculari-
zation, the universalistic claims of instrumental ra-
tionality, the differentiation of the various spheres of
the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of economic, po-
9. This too is obviously an overgeneralization, and there are cer-
tainly exceptions. A case in point is the work of Michael Taussig,
which from the start built on the more “Hegelian” elements of the
Marxist tradition, and the insights of Walter Benjamin.
10. It is interesting in this respect that 20th-century critical the-
orists from Lukács to the members of the Frankfurt School see in
the work of Max Weber less a rejection of Marxism than an elab-
oration or development of some of its key themes.
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
litical and military practices, and the growing mone-
tarization 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 cen-
tury; the acceptance of scientific procedures . . .; and
pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Cal-
vinistic practices and beliefs in the dominant classes
of northern Europe. We can follow this process fur-
ther 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.
Jürgen Habermas, a key figure in the 20th-century crit-
ical 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 the-
orists 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 mod-
ern society, as it were.
The term “modernism” here is somewhat more prob-
lematic. It is typically used to refer to an aesthetic sen-
sibility and hence a movement (or set of movements)
within the arts (Lash 1990:66):
Modernism, for its part, rejects history in order to
embrace movement and change. Modernism in Vi-
enna, 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 rejec-
tion of “academic” standards by artists and archi-
tects. This was at the same time a rejection of state-
sponsored art. . . . French Impressionism (and
realism), Viennese Art Nouveau . . . and German Ex-
pressionism, all took from the institutional context
of the reaction against historical art. In each case
the rejection was in favour of a modernist or proto-
modernist aesthetic of working through the possibil-
ities of aesthetic materials.
In such usages there is the general implication that, fol-
lowing Habermas (1987), modernism refers to a 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
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aesthetic sensibility or what might be called a particular
aesthetic discourse on the modern, suggesting a rather
different relationship between the modern’s “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,
Schönberg, 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 possi-
bility 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 modern-
ity that has developed within the tradition of Hegel,
Marx, and Weber. Here attention is focused on “differ-
entiation” as a multidimensional process of separation
both within and between separate spheres of modern ex-
istence. The result is a reading of the history of Western
modernity that, unlike liberal evolutionism, is not in-
evitably unilineal or teleological (cf. Arnason 1987, Hel-
ler 1990, Luhmann 1982). It is not surprising, therefore,
that some critical modernists have also called for a no-
tion of “multiple modernities” (cf. Arnason 1987, Eisen-
stadt 2000a, Wittrock 2000), echoing similar concerns
within anthropology. Summarizing these somewhat di-
verse revisionary trends, Johann Arnason writes that crit-
ical theory has produced an “understanding of modernity
as a loosely structured constellation rather than a sys-
tem, 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 amor-
phous framework” (2000:65).
Of particular interest here is the emphasis on the dis-
tinctiveness of modern “cultural premises and orienta-
tions” found in critical theory. This sense of 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 no-
tion of autonomy and rationality” (Wagner 1999). To
quote Arnason once again (2000:65):
One of the most important—but not yet fully ex-
plored—implications of this culturalist and pluralist
view has to do with the recognition of conflict as in-
herent and essential to modernity. . . . the most sus-
tained and interesting variation on this theme—
pioneered by Max Weber and developed most re-
cently by Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain Tou-
raine—stresses the conflict between two equally ba-
sic cultural premises: on the one hand, the vision of
infinitely expanding rational mastery; on the other

hand, the individual and collective aspiration to au-
tonomy and creativity. . . . On this view, the cul-
tural orientations characteristic of modernity are
embodied in institutions, but not reducible to them.
. . . [they] are mutable enough to translate into dif-
ferent institutional patterns, and at the same time
sufficiently autonomous to transcend all existing in-
stitutions and allow the construction of critical al-
ternatives as well as utopian projections.
The “discovery” of culture in critical theory has two very
significant implications for the understanding of mo-
dernity. 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 mo-
dernity as much a state of mind as a set of objective
historical processes. Modernity can be seen to be insep-
arable from the modern imaginaries that make it pos-
sible, to adapt Castoriadis’s term. Modernity, in 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 modernism’s emergence. Modernity can never be un-
ambiguously defined except in the context of its con-
struction in an ambivalent/interrogating modernism.
Secondly, as Arnason argues, modernity should be seen
as a product of contradictory or conflicting cultural pro-
cesses. This heralds a significant break with liberal nar-
ratives of modernization (as well as those of their critics),
which, as we have seen, construct modernity as (bor-
rowing Wagner’s [1994] terms) a single cultural move-
ment of liberty or discipline. Such single-logic 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 sub-
jectivity to any single logic cannot then account for the
cultural lives of modern peoples. At the same time, sin-
gle-logic notions of cultural modernization fail to pro-
vide for the possibility of modernist theory itself. 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 mod-
ernism ever be achieved. Only in this way can modern-
ism—as a culture of ambivalence—ever be understood.
The immediate sources for this critical understanding
of modernization as rationalization are, as Arnason sug-
gests, the writings of Weber and, following him, the the-
orists of the so-called Frankfurt School. But its roots 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 mod-
ernization—the romantic critique of Enlightenment phi-
losophy and particularly of its instrumentalist notions
of human reason. More particularly I have in mind what
Charles Taylor calls the “expressivist” conception of hu-
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 661
man life that develops as a reaction and hence an alter-
native to an Enlightenment vision of man based upon
an “associationist psychology, utilitarian ethics, atom-
istic politics of social engineering, and ultimately a
mechanistic science of man” (Taylor 1975:539).11 Rather
than seeing human life and activity as essentially with-
out meaning, expressivism sees them as “expressions,”
realizations of a purpose or an idea. In modern expres-
sivism meaning is thus seen to unfold within human
subjectivity. “Expressivism therefore represents simul-
taneously 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 na-
ture created by Enlightenment instrumentalism, but, as
Taylor’s discussion of Herder shows, they also decried
the rifts among humans created by the Enlightenment
vision of human nature. As Taylor (1975:27–28) points
out,
what has been said of communion with nature ap-
plies 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 in-
dividual rights. They seek for a deeper bond of felt
unity which will unite sympathy between men with
their highest self-feeling, in which men’s 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, ac-
cording to the expressivists, therefore only negative and
hence meaningless.
Expressivism in this sense is clearly present, as Taylor
argues, in Hegel’s critique of civil society, a critique
taken up in the more radical rejections of “bourgeois”
rationality by the Young Hegelians and in Marx’s own
writings on human alienation under capitalism. It ap-
pears 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 ra-
tionalism and rationalization that informs the project of
contemporary modernist social theory. Here, in the
words of Habermas, modernization (understood as ra-
tionalization) is not so much rejected as counterbalanced
by an expressive (communicative) rationality in the un-
finished “project” of modernity. In a distinctive, al-
11. I have discussed the significance of expressivist currents in
modern thought in Kahn (1995).
662 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
though parallel, argument, Castoriadis sees in the search
for autonomy a virtuous counter to the West’s concur-
rent obsession with rational mastery. What critical the-
orists therefore share is what Bauman describes as a pro-
found ambivalence towards the modern—a deep unease
when confronted by its claims to a superior/abstract ra-
tionality 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 hu-
man 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 man-
ifest in Mahathir’s project of reconciling “development”
and “Asian values” (see, e.g., Mahathir and Ishihara
1995), but it is by no means confined to the pronounce-
ments of a single man, no matter how powerful.
Non-Muslim ethnographers in Malaysia can hardly
avoid the question of the similarities and differences be-
tween “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 oth-
erness), it is forced upon them by virtually all the Malay
Muslims with whom they come into contact. To para-
phrase 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 Ma-
laysians) can be just as good as you Westerners at de-
velopment, but we can develop and not neglect our fam-
ilies, our personal obligations, or our religion.” Or,
alternatively and less frequently, “Life in the West is
better than it is in Malaysia, because individuals there
are free of meaningless traditions and traditional obli-
gations.” These comparisons between “East” and
“West” are an inevitable part of ethnographic interaction
at all levels of modern Malay society, and all are in-
formed in one way or another by a consideration of the
relationship between the contradictory cultural pro-
cesses that modernist theorists call rationalization and
autonomy.
As a consequence, reflecting on the nature and func-
tion 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
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ethnographers to severe and continuous interrogation
over the value, even the possibility, of an outsider’s ever
being able to understand the expressive meanings of Ma-
layness or the values of Islam. At issue inevitably in such
conversations are contrasts between science, reason, and
instrumentalism, on the one side, and culturally mean-
ingful (expressive) values and orientations, on the other.
One might even say that the very definition of insider-
hood and outsider-hood for contemporary Malays 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 mod-
ernism 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 en-
counter. It can also be argued that critical theory’s mul-
tidimensional understanding of the processes of mod-
ernization makes far greater sense of the coexistence of
universalizing and particularizing impulses in the mod-
ern history of state and nation building in the region.
Much the same is true when we attempt to analyse the
coexistence of apparently contradictory processes of de-
personalization and personalization of economic and po-
litical 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 “patriarchalism”12 in mod-
ern systems of governance). And, finally, critical mod-
ernist 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 mo-
dernity. There are also good reasons to suggest that en-
gaging with modernist narratives in the tradition of He-
gel, Marx, and Weber might prove particularly fruitful.
This is not, as I have already pointed out, to say 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 moderni-
zation must be used to prise open the modernist grid
that we impose through the application of theory. Bring-
ing modernist narratives into confrontation with eth-
12. Woodiwiss, for example, follows Weber in labelling Southeast
Asian state systems “patriarchal,” but in contrast to Weber he sug-
gests that, however distasteful to liberals, they must be viewed as
equally valid alternatives to liberal systems for ensuring basic hu-
man 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 conse-
quence of such a confrontation is the challenge to a West-
ern 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 In-
donesia 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 every-
where been governed by the pure operation of instru-
mental rationalism, impersonal market relations, a sep-
aration of economic and political spheres, and the rise
of secular rationalism—which leads to the conclusion
that where this is not the case we have to do with another
modernity—Wagner’s 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 sociolo-
gists 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 modern-
ity 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 mod-
ernization that was global from the outset.
This confrontation between modernist narratives and
ethnographic knowledge forces another shift in the self-
understandings of critical modernism, a shift away from
the avant-gardist conception of modern culture on which
most modernist narratives are based—a shift from what
I have termed an exemplary to a popular modernism (see
Kahn 2001).13 Exemplary modernism is very far from pro-
viding us with a true theory of modern culture and sub-
jectivity except in the normative sense. It is in no way
a theory of the subjectivity of people living in modern
society, those people with whom ethnographers of
Southeast Asia—or indeed of Britain or America—deal
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
Baudelaire’s ambivalent recognition of the good and bad sides of
the modern condition, his discussion of its “transient, fleeting, and
contingent character” (Habermas’s terms), and his critique of
“bourgeois” visions of a triumphal modernity (see Smart 1990:17)
that make him a candidate for the role of pioneer of exemplary
modernism.
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 663
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 an-
thropology of modernity reveals, on the contrary, the
presence of this same sensibility in everyday popular cul-
ture and performance. Such popular modernism cannot
be dismissed as merely traditional, meaningless, or lack-
ing 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 anthro-
pology and modernity seem appropriate. These arise out
of critical musings on the usual construction of the prob-
lem 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 north-
western Europe, between the “cores” and “peripheries”
of nations and empires in the 19th century, or, adapting
Bauman’s 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 instru-
mentalism 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 per-
tinence of concepts developed within the heritage of He-
gel, Marx, and Weber to more recent encounters with
rationalizing, instrumentalizing, and impersonal forces
of “globalization.”
The rejection of such a dialogue because of the irrec-
oncilability 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 traditionali-
zation 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 con-
crete, emic or etic, are much less problematic and per-
haps even open to empirical investigation and debate.
Modernity becomes a far less elusive concept, as well as
being a social and cultural form far more open to ethical
and political critique, than might otherwise have ap-
peared. The encounter between theories of the modern
and ethnographic realities ends up being far more pro-
ductive than we might have assumed at the start.
Bringing into confrontation a particular body of theory
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
with knowledge constructed in other contexts—non-
Protestant, rural, female, outside northwestern Eu-
rope—almost inevitably produces conflicting interpre-
tations of the kind traced out here. Moreover, there 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 ab-
stract, disembedded project of the aesthetic and philo-
sophical elite to a notion of modernity as something con-
crete, embedded in particular institutions and 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 some-
thing inherent to modernity itself—that 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 nar-
ratives 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 en-
meshed in processes of commodification and rationali-
zation 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 moderniza-
tion—violence, extreme inequalities, environmental de-
struction, deprivation, racial exclusion? Or must we con-
tinue to constitute them as exotic objects of a study 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 mo-
dernity 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.
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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 Kahn’s 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 mod-
ernities. The following remarks, coming from a non-an-
thropologist, will focus on some specific theoretical as-
pects of the debate.
The ancestry of the notion of modernity may be con-
tested but is perhaps not as “uncertain” as Kahn sug-
gests. However controversial some parts of the story may
be, there seems to be a definite record of successive ep-
ochs in Western history described as “modern” to de-
marcate them from preceding phases. This contextual
meaning links the first use of the word modernus in late
antiquity (in contrast to pagan predecessors) to the se-
mantics 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 so-
cieties 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, al-
though 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 formulated—for example—by Talcott Parsons, it com-
bined the advocacy of Western models with a clear com-
mitment to reform within their framework. The align-
ment with existing modernity allowed for a 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 ep-
isode in a much longer hermeneutical narrative—and as
a genuine if self-limiting reflexive turn within that con-
text—is relevant to the discussion of alternative views.
As Kahn sees it, “critics shared with modernization the-
orists the vision of modernity as a process of emanci-
pation and continuous technological change” 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 were—for both—an alter-
native to an earlier version of unorthodox Marxism,

which had already been critical of the progressivist main-
stream. As for Foucault, his communist phase was 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
Eribon’s [1989] biography of Foucault is very illuminat-
ing on this point). The explicit critique of modernization
theory came later—in the 1970s and early 1980s—and
was in the most interesting cases combined with an
equally thorough critique of the Marxist alternative. Jür-
gen 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 the-
orist 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 moderni-
zation theory in a negative mode. Rather, they decon-
structed 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 Foucault-
style. The most ambitious attempt to synthesize the two
agendas—Habermas’s theory of communicative ac-
tion—has 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 ap-
plies to streamlined models of tradition. I am not con-
vinced that it makes sense to speak of a Hegel-Marx-
Weber tradition: Weber was surely not wholly 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-Durk-
heim tradition. The critical potential in Durkheim’s
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 Kahn’s general ori-
entation or premises, namely, that what we call mo-
dernity “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 en-
during foci of the intellectual, academic, and “on-the-
ground” discourse of modernity. But in some ways his
analysis does not go far enough, nor does it fully confront
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 665
some of the problems to which the emphases on “mul-
tiple modernities” are addressed.
First of all, he does not recognize that the tension be-
tween rationalization and expressivism is not the 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 ide-
ologies, nationalistic communal and/or Jacobian, which
denied the legitimacy of such pluralities. It has also man-
ifested itself in the construction of collective identities
and collectivities, around which developed continual
struggles between forces pressing for the homogeniza-
tion of social and cultural spaces and proponents of the
construction of multiple spaces allowing for heteroge-
neous identities. The tension has also been expressed in
the construction of rationalities, where there is opposi-
tion between the acceptance of the existence of different
values, commitments, and rationalities and the confla-
tion of such different values and rationalities in a total-
istic way, with a strong tendency towards their absolu-
tization—between, as Toulmin (1990) has shown,
totalizing ones, of which the Cartesian is possibly the
best illustration, and pluralistic ones developed, for in-
stance, 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 pro-
gramme 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 prem-
ises were institutionalized, interpreted, and reflected
upon varied greatly in the different societies which
shared it. As in the case of Islam, so also Western mo-
dernity constituted a model and reference point—while
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 West—first Europe, then
the United States—has always constituted an ambiva-
lent 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 found—but perhaps not fully explicated—in
some of Kahn’s illustrations from Malaysia.
Thus lately there have developed throughout the world
new interpretations of modernity, promulgated espe-
cially by new religious movements and, significantly,
including many of the postmodern ones which have
emerged in the West, which have attempted to dissociate
666 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
Westernization from modernity completely—to 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 civi-
lization 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 encoun-
ter 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 ethnog-
raphy, never mind if the existence of such an understand-
ing 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 ethnographer’s lived expe-
rience during fieldwork and with the intellectual-bu-
reaucratic-political conditions within which ethnogra-
phers generally work. Our “interlocutors” are not only
those whom we encounter in the field but also our ac-
ademic 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, in-
stead, the contention that the practice of ethnography
involves following certain intellectual and bureaucratic
procedures, all of which are potentially political and rep-
resent legacies of a colonial and imperialist world his-
tory. In this sense, what is important is not so 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 métier 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 au-
thorities there are in the “field,” and whoever conducts
the fieldwork. Engagement, in our argument, entails con-
fronting social theories on the basis of this reflexive ex-
perience. Dialogue with social theory, occasionally cul-
minating in a confrontation, is not optional. It imposes
itself on any trained ethnographer, sometimes—as in the
case of modernity’s meta-narratives—seriously clashing
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with the ethnographer’s 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 Kahn’s difficulties in ren-
dering 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, fail-
ure, 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 unex-
amined 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 the-
orist, 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 ethnographer’s reflexive experi-
ence, the profound secularism of social science is likely
to erase from view deeply contextual passions in relig-
ious politics. This is why Leach and I suggested that
more theoretical attention be devoted to issues of con-
text and personhood, another aspect of our argument
which Kahn forgets to mention.
I ask Kahn to acknowledge two of our key conten-
tions—that dialogue with social theory is intrinsic to
ethnography and that “modernity” is only one of many
theoretical constructs for apprehending the contempo-
rary world—and to explain how these contentions
amount to a “traditionalist understanding” of ethnog-
raphy. 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,
Kahn’s 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 We-
ber and actual historical and ethnographic evidence of
modernity, Kahn relocates modernity within the tem-
porality of contradictory but simultaneous processes of
rationalization and cultural autonomization—processes
which, he argues, were global from the outset but now
more than ever offer an occasion for a dialectical en-
counter between the West and the non-West. By com-
plicating the traditional distinctions between the West

and the non-West and the unfolding logic of modernity,
Kahn opens a way out of the conundrums about the ir-
retrievability of indigenous experience and the paradox-
ical restoration of Western agency/power posed by psy-
choanalytic and power-based critiques of modernity that
define it in terms of discursive processes associated with
Western experience and authority.
Kahn’s 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 de-
bates on modernity. Second, and more important, the
question of Southeast Asian modernity calls for an ex-
amination of the social comparison between the so-
called East and West. As an anthropologist based in and
working on the region, I have been frustrated by mean-
ingless comparisons between the “East” and the “West”
in which Southeast Asian developmental experiences are
often judged in terms of “Western” categories and mean-
ings. 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 camou-
flaged in different forms. Despite an escalating anti-West
rhetoric as scholars, intellectuals, and politicians in the
region negotiate their social positions in the contem-
porary 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 archi-
tecture, technology, infrastructure, and urban develop-
ment 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 Pe-
tronas Tower and its Islamic symbolism is one such ex-
ample. 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.
Kahn’s identification of an expressive/autonomous
impulse in the popular/everyday processes of commod-
ification 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 commod-
ification, Kahn provides a way out of the usual fixation
on the teleological structures of nationalist and coloni-
alist power in interpretations of Southeast Asian mo-
dernity. By simultaneously creating an analytical space
for local autonomy and disrupting dominant moderni-
zation 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.
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 667
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 un-
evenness of modernity are precisely what make contem-
porary 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 po-
sition 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 con-
temporary Southeast Asia. Far from being passive “oth-
ers,” local elites are equally active in manipulating re-
gional and global schemes of cultural difference. Thus,
with Kahn, I see that a questioning of modernity 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
Kahn’s 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 atten-
tion to context that we recommended should make these
conditions apparent. Ethnography promises a grounded
understanding rendered as a particular perspective on so-
cial processes in each setting. The work of our article
was precisely to engage the contextless, universalizing
principles behind “multiple modernities” with ethno-
graphically generated understandings of social life. This
engagement was, crucially, inspired by our fieldwork in
places which seemed to fit perfectly with the encom-
passing impetus of a sociological version of modernity
in its culturally refracted forms. Our recommendation
was to take such appearances as part of what needs an-
alysing (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 under-
standing” of ethnography is, however, not accurate.
What can ethnography be, asks Kahn, in a place like
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
modern Malaysia? This question, he answers, “can be
broached only if we reconsider the proposition that eth-
nography speaks of places outside modernity.” Our in-
tervention said nothing about doing research outside mo-
dernity. We are obviously discussing the influence of
what some people call modernity—money, commodi-
ties, born-again Christianity, and so forth. Kahn’s argu-
ment here degenerates into a rhetorical construction of
“the other” that has no basis in our text. Our 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 the-
ory of modernity without realizing the power of the
meta-narratives contained within it to organize knowl-
edge production. Kahn is not careful enough to distin-
guish 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 be-
tween 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, pow-
erful, or “subaltern.” We suggest that with close atten-
tion to the relationship in which knowledge is produced,
it is possible to know more than by assuming that 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 inform-
ants and anthropologist. Ethnography provides insight
into the particularity of experience. Far from a “deep-
seated incompatibility” between self and other, this ap-
proach relies upon the commonality of inherently social
beings, while attending to differences in social form (his-
tory) and their consequences for meaning, power, and
personhood.
Our argument, then, was that one must not assume
that one’s critical theory will be found played out in
someone else’s practices, as Kahn points out for Malay-
sians’ take on the processes which affect them. To do so
undermines the possibility for recognizing creative en-
gagement with the “modern” by organizing it through a
meta-narrative which is encompassing. Through organ-
izing knowledge, such an approach capitulates with an-
other assumption—the self-generating perception of the
inevitability of capitalist expansion through modern-
ity—and 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
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of modernity. At the same time, people must be allowed
to have their own vices! This is not an argument between
our position and Kahn’s. In fact, his final paragraphs
sound like a rephrasing of what Englund and I recom-
mended 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 people’s 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
Kahn’s stimulating and broadly cast essay is offered as
a rejoinder to Englund and Leach’s recent “Ethnography
and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity,” so I begin by
reviewing key points emphasized by the latter. Englund
and Leach’s 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 on—and at times
fetishize—preconceived and insufficiently contextuali-
zed abstractions that undergrid the “meta-narratives of
modernity” (“rupture,” “commodification,” “individu-
alization,” 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 al-
ternative] 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 tenden-
cies devalue the practice of intensive and sustained eth-
nographic inquiry as well as the cumulative store of eth-
nographic knowledge and that in doing so they
contribute to “ethnographic ignorance” and the delegi-
timization and demise of (sociocultural) anthropology’s
unique methodological and intellectual contributions as
a social science. But Englund and Leach do not advocate
a return to an unreflexive “anthropology of the premod-
ern”; indeed, the rich ethnographic data from contem-
porary 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 re-
alities 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 be-
cause 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 “rees-
tablish the conversation between anthropology and so-
cial theory”; and (3) that we must “bring the contextual
and popular dimensions of modernity into frame,” es-
pecially 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 inter-
locutors, 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 anthro-
pologists to attend to “the big questions” posed by clas-
sical sociology because much contemporary sociology is
preoccupied with quantification and methodology.
Kahn’s 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., Budi-
man 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 Kahn’s essay is intended as a clarion call to develop
social theory through genuinely reflexive critical en-
gagement with both the ideas of politics and the politics
of ideas.
The curiously decontextualized and disembodied di-
mensions of Kahn’s 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 knowl-
edge in places like modern Malaysia.” None of the an-
thropologists implicated in these types of unsubstan-
tiated assertions are identified. Who are they? More
serious is that with one or two partial exceptions (e.g.,
a passage from Ong), Kahn does not cite any of the eth-
nographically grounded work of Malaysian, Indonesian,
or other Southeast Asian scholars (such as Raymond Lee,
Noraini Othman, Shamsul A. B., and Yao Souchou) that
is directly relevant to the questions of theory and prac-
tice he is addressing—and 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 metro-
pole. In sum, retheorization of the meta-narratives of
modernity and anthropology’s 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-
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 669
ined “rupture” vis-à-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 Brası́lia,
Brası́lia, 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
Kahn’s provocative and stimulating work, I consider cen-
tral the question whether modernity is universal. First,
it relates to the future of anthropology as a discipline
that claims to be universal in spite of its Western his-
torical 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 partic-
ularism 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 histori-
cally 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 peo-
ples 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-
670 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
ogy of premodernity—a Western construction—ever ex-
isted. Although it has not been an issue for many of
them, anthropologists have always been part of “mo-
dernity” or students of its many facets and reflections.
We need to envision anthropology as a set of relational
practices and discourses supposing encounters in which
power positions differentiating the people involved from
the ethnographer should be dissolved.
Anthropology’s 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 ethno-
graphic 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 thought—that
the other is always irreducible? Or, conversely, do dis-
cussions such as these prefigure a day when it will be
impossible or irrelevant to trace the origins of “univer-
sals” 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. Dif-
ference will never disappear. Its production is a function
of power inequalities, of the symbolic and linguistic uni-
verses in which human beings exist, and of the relation-
ships 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 anthro-
pologist anywhere that defines nativeness. Such anthro-
pological views were based on Eurocentric and Ameri-
canocentric perspectives of the “universal.” I would
rather believe, following Laclau (1992), that the relation-
ship 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 ho-
mogenization 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
Kahn’s paper presents anthropology with another oppor-
tunity to overcome its endemic parochialism. Like it or
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not, anthropology is born of and operates within mo-
dernity and must engage with the main body of socio-
logical reasoning which both expresses and seeks to the-
orize modernity.
Anthropology will not become modernity’s hand-
maiden as a result of accepting these realities. This is
because a self-critical, disconsolate, divided conscious-
ness—consuming the material fruits of instrumental ra-
tionality while yearning to be released from its Weberian
“iron cage”—is, according to Kahn, at the very core of
modernity. This antinomic attitude is precisely what—
again, according to Kahn—is embodied in the “Hegel-
Marx-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 “re-
flexivity” which understand the problems of anthropol-
ogy to be derived from the epistemological limitations
of fieldwork or authorship are, at best, hopelessly naı̈ve.
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 pa-
tronized as “interlocutors” and has difficulty discerning
what is to be gained by engaging in “dialogue” with an-
thropologists, especially those branded as “foreign.” Par-
adoxically, this challenge, if taken up, leads to a rein-
vogorated anthropology of equals—a real-world “reflex-
ivity”—rather than a rhetorical pseudo-reflexivity art-
fully constructed by the condescending anthropologist.
This is an absolutely vital point in Kahn’s paper, but will
more anthropologists take it up?
Kahn’s approach is deeply imbued with Weberian
thinking, though more that of the Nietzschean and neo-
Kantian than of the “Marxist” Weber (Mommsen 1989:
24–43). His typically Weberian assertion that the prin-
cipal contradiction of modernity is the tension 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 per-
haps have dismissed this brand of modernist agonizing
as the height of intellectualist self-indulgence.
That this kind of nostalgia for Gemeinschaft and Hei-
mat—originally the preserve of German anticapitalist ro-
manticism—is now emerging even more acutely in “the
East” is unsurprising. Both are cases of very rapid late-
capitalist 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 com-
monplace 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 outrages—the 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 cat-
egorical moral and epistemological confines of his neo-
Kantian imperatives. Yet it is precisely this failure to put
ends at the center of theory which allows means ration-
ality to be placed so completely at the disposal of irra-
tional ends. From this viewpoint also, whether modern-
ity is capitalist or socialist is not too important, except
that socialism travels even farther down the road of an
all-encompassing rationality and thus greatly accelerates
the decline of personal autonomy.
Kahn’s approach obscures a larger difficulty which an-
thropology, 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 op-
posite directions. Many trends (predominant in anthro-
pology and antiglobalization and among Greens) seek to
recover community by dismantling international eco-
nomic relations and reverting to some form of small-
scale living. Other trends (infinitely weaker) regard large-
scale international economic relations, cleansed of
capitalism, as the very foundation for overcoming the
contradictions of modernity, including those of personal
autonomy. Urging anthropology’s engagement with crit-
ical theories riven by such irreconcilables is a huge ad-
vance over where the discipline is today but will 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 con-
ception of modernity in raising the question of an ap-
propriate 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 nar-
rative 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 em-
pirical constraint that is also “constructed” by one or
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 671
another narrative about it. There is no uninterpreted so-
cial 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 devel-
opment 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 de-
rived from Western conceptual models, Kahn’s answer
is twofold. He is favorably disposed to the idea that al-
ternative narratives can be constructed about the objects
of social science, such as Malaysian villages, which sug-
gests 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 construc-
tion of alternative, discrete, even incompatible narra-
tives about a given social group always presupposes a
continuous process in terms of which they can be dif-
ferentiated. In denying the possibility of grand narratives,
what Lyotard calls a méta-récit, “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. Kahn’s 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, con-
cerns cognition of the continuous historical process, or
what it is that we know when we know. It makes em-
inent 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 be-
cause we never know that we know mind-independent
reality. What we know through empirical research is al-
ways and inevitably a construct or an artifact of one or
another conceptual scheme. Paradoxically, then, we
must presuppose the existence of an uninterpreted re-
ality which we cannot know as a condition of knowing
on the basis of conceptual frameworks keyed to the em-
672 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
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 mo-
ment. 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
Kahn’s paper reflexively highlights the intellectual ge-
nealogy of anthropology as “expressivist” critique of mo-
dernity. This approach takes into account recent con-
cerns with the plurality of modernity, the lack of 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 the-
oretical 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 implica-
tions 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 hege-
monic now appears a fragile victim of “primordial” re-
ligious and ethnic tensions; its goal of developing a uni-
fied national citizenry and a modern economy lies 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 eth-
ical implications of the historical use of anthropological
knowledge in the creation of these “primordial” senti-
ments. A localized ethnography of the sort called for by
Englund and Leach offers “improperly contextualized”
stories—stories 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
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is no basis to assume that the histories of the repressed,
in themselves, hold a special key to revelation; the dis-
courses of the dominant also yield vital insights into the
contexts and processes of which they were a part” (Com-
aroff and Comaroff 1991:17).
Kahn points out that modernization and traditionali-
zation are simultaneous processes which cannot be dis-
entangled; pluralizing the modern or focusing upon glob-
alization and then relocalizing modernity disguises the
ways in which the construction of “tradition” provides
the meta-narratives of liberal “modernity” with their es-
cape clause, their means of separating us from them and
“blaming the victims.” If by modern we mean the prod-
uct of instrumental reason, even we “have never 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 pro-
ject, 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 met-
ropolitan 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 anthropology’s own modernist lineage
that we can assess the political implications of anthro-
pological power/knowledge in its various institutional
settings. An ethnography of modernity in the expressiv-
ist vein should be, in other words, politically engaged—a
point which does not emerge strongly in Kahn’s 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
Kahn’s article does indeed describe current ethnographic
encounters that are “broadly typical,” especially for an-
thropologists who have worked in the same place 20
years or more. I have maintained research contact for 30
years in western Guatemala, which resembles Kahn’s
ethnographic region only superficially, being much less
“modern” in economic, political, and social terms. Yet
Kahn’s description of Malaysian modernity and the var-
ied concerns of Malays about it resonates with my ex-

perience with Maya in Guatemala. The major current
issue in Guatemala concerns the impact of modern-
ity—whether defined as economic development or as
Western values—on traditional (especially Maya) cul-
ture. What Maya wish to avoid is what many Western
scholars consider the features of modern life that bring
about economic development—individualistic values,
shrinking, unstable family life, and the weakening hold
of a moral community. Maya leaders active in the cul-
turalist 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 co-
existing with the maintenance of a relatively intact (tra-
ditional or non-Western) culture (see, e.g., de Hart 2001).
What I find curious is Kahn’s hesitation to go 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 Weber’s concerns with modernity.
Western scholars have done little to build on Weber’s
insights concerning the impact of capitalism on social
systems and cultures—an impact Weber recognized as
being far from monolithic or teleological but with de-
cided consequences. What I am suggesting is that we
spend less time defining modernity, globalism, and local
identities/cultures and more time trying to explain con-
crete examples of modernity, which will always vary be-
cause they will have been affected by a host of 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 im-
ports brought in by particular cultural agents whose mi-
grations to other parts of the world encouraged capital-
ist expansion. Two interrelated features of modernity
brought on by capitalism that have been socially-cul-
turally 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 de-
crease 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 iden-
tity 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 strength-
ened rather than weakened by proletarianization and mi-
gration. For example, migratory Chinese men have left
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 673
wife and children behind with paternal kin for centuries;
and whether or not they visited regularly or sent remit-
tances back for family support, their children were in-
corporated into a related “traditional” patriarchal house-
hold. There has been little systematic attempt to 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
features—shrinking household size and interdepen-
dence, marital instability, recourse to other kinds of fam-
ily formation and/or sexuality—also lack any single form
which can be linked to the “requirements” of capitalism
and modernity. Surely we can be more precise in ex-
plaining 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 for-
mation 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” lo-
calities, governed mainly by patriarchal norms of com-
munity, “modern” communities are divided by class, ed-
ucation, ethnic consciousness, sometimes politics, and
especially religion—each 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 ways—which 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 his-
torical specifics of “capitalist penetration.”
There is little to dispute in Kahn’s argument that an-
thropologists must “reconsider modernity in both [West-
ern and non-Western societies] as part of a single his-
torical process of modernization that was global from
the outset.” But does this mean it would “be a mistake
to invoke either a plurality of modernities or the glob-
alization and then re-localization of modernity, as a
means of accounting for anthropological realities”? I
think the real issue is tracing the particularities of mul-
tiple “modernization(s)” as they involve both local and
global processes and both general and particular histor-
674 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
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, People’s 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 modern-
ist “meta-narratives.” I agree. Anthropologists invariably
encounter modernity, at least as a perceived phenome-
non 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 Guang-
dong, expresses modernity.
Indeed, modernity is experienced even in remote vil-
lages. In Borneo, while logging has a negative impact on
the indigenous people, logging roads do link remote vil-
lages 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 some-
thing 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 hu-
man societies (urban planning, provision of public facil-
ities) 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 gov-
ernments. Pluralizing modernity (e.g., “Asian modern-
ity”) 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 technol-
ogy, 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 eth-
nically polarized Malaysia, Malays and Chinese have dif-
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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 Chi-
nese and other Malaysians, and by their historical mem-
ory of colonialism. Thus Prime Minister Mohamad Ma-
hathir’s 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 an-
thropology 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 ö r n w i t t ro c k
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social
Sciences, Götavägen 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 non-
Western, the stagnant and the dynamic. Implicitly it was
also premised on a view of the world that took the ex-
periences of one particular country in one particular his-
torical period, notably the United States in the
post–World 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. Further-
more, 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 interac-
tions have become so prominent and immediately visible
as to make obvious the existence of distinctly modern
yet clearly different societies across the globe. Paradox-
ically, 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 re-
placed notions of structures with notions of networks,
but they tend to preserve core assumptions of modern-
ization theory in terms of a functional evolutionary ac-
count of history and a functional and non-agential ac-
count of society.
The conventional understanding of modernization suf-
fers from three crucial weaknesses: First, it is concep-
tually impoverished. Thus it presents an understanding
of modernization as consisting of changes in economic-
technological 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 partic-
ular institutional practices that modernization theory as-
sociates with modernity—be they a liberal market econ-
omy or a democratic nation-state—did not 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, mo-
dernity 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 per-
suasively argued by Kahn, normatively closed. It posits
a purely instrumentalist understanding of—to use my
own terminology (Wittrock 2000)—the promissory notes
of modernity. Paradoxically, in this respect conventional
modernization theory and a number of its poststructur-
alist critics share this interpretation. They both tend to
neglect tensions between expressivist and instrumen-
talist tendencies in modernity that existed in the artic-
ulation of modernity at least from the turn of the 18th
century onward (Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock
1996; Wagner 1994, 2001). A purely instrumentalist read-
ing of the promissory notes of modernity is historically
inaccurate, and it is vacuous as a normative theory ex-
cept in a purely formal sense. In the case of traditional
modernization theory there is simply an uncritical ad-
vocacy 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 wel-
come Kahn’s key arguments. Let me briefly highlight
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 675
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 al-
ways been in tension with each other, discursively em-
battled and differently interpreted and articulated.
3. Virtually every such articulation has occurred
against the background of a perceived threat to the prac-
tices 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 mod-
ernization” 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 cul-
tural 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 re-
mote 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 ar-
ticulated 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 en-
counter between modern and traditional societies. Nei-
ther Ching China nor Mughal India nor Safavid Persia
nor Tokugawa Japan nor Ottoman Turkey and the Bal-
kans 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 reform-
ing 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 be-
tween 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 con-
tributions of theoretically informed anthropologists
from across the world.
676 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
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 anthropolog-
ical knowledge making and Western narratives of mod-
ernization. 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 d’être 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 gen-
eralized commodification. In essence their argument is
that engaging with this particular modernist narrative is
ethnocentric, since it reads local reactions to commod-
ification through the grid of a preexisting modernist de-
bate. Instead of engaging, however critically, with the
shortcomings of this particular (one might add uni-
dimensional) narrative and exposing its shortcomings (in
the West as well as the non-West), they appeal to a field-
work “tradition” through which the ethnographer some-
how escapes into a place of radical otherness-to-mo-
dernity, allowing the fieldworker to be “transformed in
the process of inquiry” by imposing “interlocutors’ con-
cerns 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 what-
ever 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 weak-
nesses of contemporary social-theoretic discourse in the
critical tradition. Given my attempt to engage with it, I
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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 in-
sights, they are reluctant to recognize the very clear con-
tribution that anthropologists, postcolonial theorists,
multiculturalists, feminists, and others could make to
the transformation of social theory. How else could Ar-
nason be so oblivious to the long-established critical en-
gagement 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 sim-
ilar continuities in contemporary debates with two quite
different European theoretical traditions (advanced in
any case rather tentatively in the article), I remain un-
discouraged 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 singu-
lar—hence dismissing my critique of the notion of mul-
tiple modernities—does not actually make it so. On this
one point I remain unconvinced by Arnason’s own
writings.
Perhaps the problems raised with regard to the em-
beddedness of modernity and the shortcomings of “ex-
emplary” accounts of modern subjectivity are too “an-
thropological” for Arnason to take much interest in
them. And yet, while they may arise in the kind of an-
thropological encounter I describe, they prove extremely
problematic for critical theory as well. Just as anthro-
pology 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 iden-
tified in contemporary ethnography. Perhaps for obvious
reasons, then, I find Wittrock’s 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 nar-
ratives of modernization by ethnographers who have
taken the trouble to engage with them.
I find myself agreeing with Eisenstadt’s case for broad-
ening the focus of the discussion of modernist culture,
although I am not certain that the tension between to-
talization and pluralism could not be linked more closely
to the project of autonomization (in Wagner’s terms, the
tension between liberty and discipline) than he pre-
sumes. 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 ap-
proach by suggesting that modernity may have been co-
evally constituted in the West and the non-West and by
suggesting that perhaps modernity may best be under-
stood as having been “global” and multicultural from
the outset. This of course is to take issue with Eisen-
stadt’s suggestion that modernity can be thought of as a
“distinct civilization which emerged in the West,” but
his response prompts me to reexamine his important
contribution to these issues over many years.
Goh’s comments are useful, and of course she is cor-
rect to point to the importance of revised 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 an-
alysts of contemporary Southeast Asia, if only because
we are all implicated in one way or another in the pro-
cesses through which cultural identities in the region
have been formed—a point I take to underlie the work
of Schrauwers.
I confess to finding Ribeiro’s intervention somewhat
opaque and would be interested in a more worked-out
version of the themes he takes up. We disagree at a num-
ber of crucial points—for example, that modernism and
empire are as intimately connected as he appears to sug-
gest, that modernity is largely to be understood as an
ideology of elites (and that “peasantries” and “indige-
nous 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 in-
terconnection 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 wealth—a
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 perti-
nence 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. Robotham’s
recognition of the failures of socialism in this regard is,
therefore, important to my own position as well.
I appreciate Rockmore’s 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
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k a h n Anthropology and Modernity F 677
recognize the ways in which anthropology and hence the
anthropologist are implicated in the processes that pro-
duce “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 Leach’s 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, post-
structuralists, and postmodernists. All in different ways
seek an epistemological guarantee for their critiques of
modernity and its meta-narratives in some form of es-
cape 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 impli-
cated in its evils (inequality, immiseration, racism, pa-
triarchy, 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 re-
turn to some of the key arguments of the “political econ-
omists” 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
thought—the one methodological, the other theoreti-
cal—have moved me away from this kind of approach.
The former begins with a critique of objectivist ap-
proaches in the human and cultural sciences towards an
engagement with the meaningful dimensions of human
social life (à la Geertz) but then moves beyond this “ob-
jectivist subjectivism” to a recognition of the intersub-
jective 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
naı̈ve to the extent that the focus remains on the dyadic
and relatively short-term interactions that constitute in-
dividual ethnographic encounters. What is called for in-
stead, 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 long-
term 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 pre-
cisely because they seek to describe these relations in
terms of the “impact” of capitalism, the global, the mod-
ern, etc., on essentialized and timeless precapitalist or
local or premodern “communities,” positing a “tradi-
tional” baseline that continually recedes backward in
time. The evidence of local distinctiveness inevitably
uncovered by such ethnographic encounters must al-
ways be explained as a consequence of incomplete cap-
italist development, modernization, or what have you.
678 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
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 commodification—of products,
means of production, land, and finally labour power (the
point at which political economists can speak of “full-
blown” capitalism). Inevitably, however, the ethnogra-
pher “discovers” some elements of naturalized produc-
tion which are then taken to signify the influence of 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 cap-
italist “development,” a procedure that must result in
“peripheral” societies’ somehow falling short, began in-
creasingly to strike me as unsatisfactory not because it
marked a radical break with what I have termed a tra-
ditionalist narrative of ethnographic escape but precisely
because it did not break sufficiently with it. Is it rea-
sonable to argue, even in Smith’s own Central American
example, that centuries of capitalist “penetration” have
still not generated a “complete” capitalist tranforma-
tion? 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 didn’t
cite me or my friends”). While I do recognize the con-
tributions made especially by Budiman and Ong (the lat-
ter is cited in the paper), I do not think I can be 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 mul-
tiple modernities not mentioned in my paper, namely,
that it should provoke scepticism if only because it has
become embedded in the rhetoric of authoritarian re-
gimes. Although I have elsewhere entered into the so-
called Asian values debate, expressing a certain dissat-
isfaction with critiques that rest on assertions about the
universality of Western liberal narratives on human
rights, I think Tan provides an alternative and more con-
vincing 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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