It is impossible not to discuss these words in anything other than sweeping terms. The self-conscious use of the word ‘modern’ has its roots in European intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not coincidentally, the concern with ‘modern life’ as a cultural and intellectual problem, coincides with the florescence of classic social theory in the works of †Marx, †Durkheim, †Simmel and †Weber. Classic social theory is predicated on the assumption that there is something radically new about the modern world and its social and intellectual arrangements. Our era has no precedent, so the models of the past can only serve as contrasts to what we now have, and all we know for sure about the future is that it too promises to be different in equally unprecedented ways. The use of contrast as a means to come to terms with the present is the source of many of our most pervasive theoretical structures—tradition and modernity, †status and †contract, †mechanical and organic solidarity, †Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, †hot and cold societies.
But in applying such contrasts to empirical situations in the present we displace our subjects to another time—the primitive, savage, premodern—omewhere in our past.
In this respect, *evolutionary assumptions have lingered on in anthropology long after the demise of grand nineteenth-century theories of social evolution. This is most obvious in the anthropology of development, a term which itself implies a process of regular qualitative change through time. In the first phase of the Cold War, so-called modernization theory dominated social scientific understandings of development. In its crudest version, modernization theory treated development as a unilinear process toward the ‘modern’ (an imaginary telos apparently located in the suburban United States, but with its intellectual roots in Weber’s account of the growing rationalization of capitalist societies) and away from the traditional. This process involved both social and cultural change, particularly the shedding of those aspects of traditional culture which served as a hindrance in progress to the modern.
For some anthropologists (for example those, like †Clifford Geertz and Lloyd Fallers, involved with the University of Chicago’s Committee for the Study of the New Nations in the 1960s), modernization theory took them into close inter-disciplinary collaboration with economists and political scientists, and opened up areas such as the study of *education and intellectuals, popular culture, mass politics and postcolonial *nationalism (Geertz 1963). But the cruder versions of modernization theory received their richly deserved comeuppance from radical critics in the 1960s and 1970s who pointed out that there were structural features in the world economy which might provide better explanations for ‘backwardness’, in which case attributing poverty to some irrational attachment to traditional culture was rather missing the point. Unfortunately, modernization theory’s empirical concerns went down along with its theoretical pretensions, not least because its intellectual successors such as structural *Marxism and *world-systems theory showed little interest in the study of such quintessentially modern topics as mass education or urban popular culture outside the West.
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