/2007/01/28/the-very-short-20th-century-defining-modernity-down-part-1/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology Fri, 08 Dec 2017 18:00:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 /2007/01/28/the-very-short-20th-century-defining-modernity-down-part-1/comment-page-1/#comment-49164 Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:51:26 +0000 /2007/01/28/the-very-short-20th-century-defining-modernity-down-part-1/#comment-49164 My own inclination here is to understand “modernity” primarily as a folk term–a way people have of talking about their experiences of the present or their aspirations and fears for the future. One thing we can look at then is the way both the sense and the references of the term vary from place to place as it is used in the context of local concerns and ideas. I’m interested to see what you have to say about “reading Ivy in PNG”–since that seems to me to be one of the places where it helps to understand “modernity” as a local concept, one that might (for example) involve religion (as in Joel Robbins’s work) contra the more common equation of the the modern and the secular. One of the problems of “modernity” (and “postmodernity”) is that they can tend to become a series of evolutionary stages as Nick Thomas poijnted out in and article called “Cold Fusion” in AA a few years back.

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