So far I have discussed a point of reference (the modern, the moment without precedent), a process (modernization as the shedding of tradition), and a cultural movement characterized by certain kinds of cultural product (modernism). Finally we arrive at a condition of the world -modernity. At its most general, modernity may serve as a broad synonym for capitalism, or industrialization, or whatever institutional and ideological features are held to mark off the modern West from other, traditional societies. With the political demise of Marxism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and the academic ascendancy of postmodernism, ‘modernity’ has become an increasingly fashionable term in revisionist social theory.
Paradoxically, because most theorizing about modernity and the modern has been conducted at a lofty level of generalization, the possibilities for an anthropological approach to modernity are extremely rich. Since the late 1970s there has been a growing number of ethnographic studies of quintessentially modern institutions and practices—scientific laboratories, capitalist corporations, consumer cultures, as well as the studies of architecture and planning already mentioned—both within and outside the ‘West’. Needless to say, empirical scrutiny reveals that supposedly modern institutions fail to live up to Weberian expectations of impersonality and rationality, and the anthropology of modernity might go no further than repetitive, if amusing, empirical challenge to Western self-images of modern life. As such it would remain parasitic on those self-images, rather as much other anthropology has remained dependent on *Occidentalist stereotypes of ‘the West’, ‘Western thought’ and ‘Western institutions’.
There is, however, another more radical possibility. Developing his own empirical research in the history and ethnography of science, Bruno Latour ([1991] 1993) has argued that the very idea of the modern world is based on a set of impossible intellectual distinctions—between the objective knowledge of nature and the subjective world of culture, between science and politics, between the modern and the traditional. Empirical research swiftly shows these distinctions to be untenable: science and politics are connected in complex social networks, while our public life is increasingly concerned with hybrids, objects and problems which are at once social and natural. An anthropology of modernity would employ ethnographic holism to dissolve the illusions that convince us that ‘we’ are modern, unprecedented but objective observers of other people’s cultural worlds. As yet such an anthropology hardly exists, and it is difficult to imagine quite what an ‘amodern’ (rather than postmodern) intellectual landscape would look like, except to say that it would be far more empirically challenging and far more genuinely ‘decentred’ than any of the oddly Eurocentric products of scholastic postmodernism.
