Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
modernism, modernity and modernization
The word ‘modern’ has served as an important, if shifting, point of reference in anthropology’s developing sense of disciplinary identity and purpose. So, for example, anthropology may be thought of as the work of ‘modern’ people studying other ‘traditional’ (or ‘premodern’, or †‘primitive’) people. The people it studies may be thought of as undergoing a process of ‘modernization’ in the course of economic *development. Anthropology itself may be treated as part of a broader intellectual and cultural movement in the West known as ‘modernism’.
And, in recent years at least, those social, cultural and intellectual features which mark out the West as distinctive may be collectively referred to as ‘modernity’, a condition which could be investigated ethnographically like any other.
These different projects and terms overlap in meaning, and have been deployed differently at different points in anthropological history. Nevertheless we can discern a broad historical movement from the first example (modern anthropologists studying traditional societies), which covers the greater part of the work done in the first half of the twentieth century, through the second (modernization as a process and an intellectual problem), which most obviously covers work done in postcolonial societies in the 1950s and 1960s, on to the third (anthropology as one kind of modernism), which is a view propagated by self-consciously *postmodern anthropologists in the 1980s, culminating for now in the fourth position (modernity as an ethnographic object), which is only beginning to take shape in areas such as the anthropology of *science, *capitalism, *consumption and the *mass media. There is some continuity linking these different usages: even when we study the most apparently different and non-modern society, we seem to be implicitly asking what it is about ‘us’ that marks us off as ‘modern’? In other words, understanding our condition as modern people is—usually implicitly but occasionally explicitly—one part of the anthropological problem. Nevertheless there has been an important change in recent years as ‘our’ sense of ‘ourselves’ as modern has become increasingly problematic and open to empirical critique. One possible consequence of the ethnographic study of modernity is a quite radical undermining of fundamental, mostly unarticulated, assumptions about anthropology, anthropologists and their place in the world.
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