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The contention of this paper is that organic farming, the movement and ideology, challenges sociological theory of the nature–culture relation (environmental issues, the role of science). The idea is discussed and explored in two ways. Firstly the paper gives a 'diagnosis' of organic farming in terms of modernization. The organic farming movement is a social movement having some success in a period when the power of social movements in general seems low. It is also a movement with a radical view on environmental issues and the man–nature relationship. Recently, several researchers have written about the institutionalization of organic farming, where institutionalization might be understood as a kind of modernization. How can we understand the organic farming movement in terms of modernization? Is the organic farming movement a movement opposing modernity, arguing for pre‐modern structures of society? Is it perfectly modern in the classical sense? Or is the existence of the organic farming movement rather a frontier empirical example of the reflexive state of modern society? The Danish organic farming movement serves as an example for the discussion. The 'diagnosis' depends on the theoretical point of departure – which theory of modernity is used. This leads to the second approach, namely the comparison of Ulrich Beck's theory of risk society and Bruno Latour's theory of actor‐networks. Both theories are dealing explicitly with the nature–culture relation in late (or 'post' or 'reflexive') modern societies.

What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam's modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form.

This article rereads Paul Virilio, drawing on the distinction between topography and topology to argue a case for Virilio as a rewriter of modernity. Invoking Jean-François Lyotard's notion of rewriting modernity as an unbroken process of accumulation founded on affective life in "Re-writing Modernity" and "Argumentation and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis," it enlists topology as a horizontal spatial structure that enables us to rethink space, time, and modernity outside the limits of the "squared horizon," where the "squared horizon" is viewed as a spatial and textual metaphor for framing perspectives on the past, present, and future. The analysis deconstructs the topography of the "squared horizon" as a relationality in an unfolding continuum, where spaces exist ontologically and where the immaterial forces of the dromospheric and the atmospheric generate a relational and historical connectedness.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Claude Lefort's 'Dante's Modernity' presents a detailed and highly original interpretation of Dante's Monarchia. Lefort casts Dante as the first political thinker with a concept of humanity defined as the whole of the human race, the first to imagine a universal society in political terms, and the first to reveal the formative role of force, of wars and division in the advent of such a political unity. Tracing the career of Dante's innovations in the political thought and praxis of the succeeding centuries, Lefort then shows how what is 'new' in Dante cannot be separated from its later avatars — from the varied realizations, distortions, and misapplications it would inspire at later historical junctures. Any contemporary realization of the potential inherent in Dante's innovative idea of sovereignty would require the project of 'disentangling' the links between universalism, imperialism, and nationalism that have been instituted in its name. ; Claude Lefort, 'Dante's Modernity', in Claude Lefort, Dante's Modernity: An Introduction to the 'Monarchia'. With an Essay by Judith Revel , ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer, trans. by Jennifer Rushworth, Cultural Inquiry, 16 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 1–85

Behavioural Modernity explores the changing politics of representation and ethics of care in curatorial practice, necessitated by an increasing blurring of boundaries between the human, the technological, and the planetary.

A barbarian, primitive, bloodthirsty, in short, non-rational unknown currently fouls our air. Its presence leads us to reflect upon the fact that a thing may be true, without being, however, good, beautiful or fair. As a perverse compensation for the "intimate terror" of a city that has bowed down to the ghost of social asepsis, and also as a perverse compensation for the lethal boredom in which that same city agonises, a latent insurrection takes place in it: terrorism, all kinds of tribal wars, archaic beliefs, and fundamentalisms of many sources and loyalties. I believe that civic absenteeism, everyday sedition and terrorist escalade are all part of the same disastrous eroticism, a kind of allergic reaction of an impoverished and uprooted social body, given over to the abyss of total bartering in a flat, immaterial ...

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents in Brief -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface: Origins and the Analysis of Modernity -- Acknowledgments -- Part One History of Modern Social Forms -- 1 Modern Selves and Fashion -- Medieval Identity -- The Black Death -- Modern Subjectivity -- Burgundian Fashion and Moral Worth -- Italian Fashion and the Distant Self -- Spanish Fashion and the Christian Warrior -- Dutch Fashion and Consumer Culture -- French Fashion and the Theater of Power -- Fashionable Dress and Modern Selves -- 2 Communities of Strangers and Infrastructure -- Print Infrastructure and the Wars of Religion -- The Parisian Water Supply -- 3 Cultural Imaginaries and Modern States -- Immersive Theater and Political Spectacle -- Learning by Doing -- The Power of the Artisans -- The Modern State -- 4 Discursive Modernity and Global Industrial Capitalism -- Philosophical Modernities -- Modern Nation States -- Modern Cities -- The Experimental Self -- Part Two Genealogies of Modern Social Types -- 5 Geopolitics and Discourses of Race -- Monogenesis and Moral Differences (Cell A) -- Monogenesis and Degree of Civilization (Cell B) -- Polygenesis and Difference of Temperament (Cell C) -- Polygenesis and Racial Supremacy (Cell D) -- The Legacy of Racial Imaginaries -- 6 Property, Labor, and Discourses of Gender -- Gendered Differences -- Natural Man and Artificial Woman -- Gender, Property, and Labor -- Gender Culture and Industrial Labor -- 7 The Ascent of Man and Discourses of Childhood -- Modern Versions of Childhood -- Developmental Childhood -- Animals and Monsters -- The Problem of Modern Selves -- Part Three Popular Tools of Modern Life -- 8 Digital Games and Navigating Modernity -- Games as Pedagogical Tools -- Serious Games of Military Simulation

This study examines the tunic designed by Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường—most often cited as the precursor to the modern áo dài—as a physical entity and as a historical and abstract symbol of modernity. My argument is twofold: first, that Lemur was the first modern Vietnamese designer, evidenced by his engagement in two modern fashion practices—the establishment of an institutionalized system and his proposal for a Vietnamese national costume. Second, I argue that despite protestations of its insignificance, dress served as a ground on which weighty social and cultural battles—such as gender, class, national identity, aesthetics, and modernity itself—were fought.

The paper focuses on the Latin American perspective on modernity, especially on the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano's notion of coloniality. Coloniality is explained as a theoret- ical framework for critical reflection of modernity with an emphasis on the forms of knowledge (episteme) and on non-Western, more specifically Latin American historical experiences and perspectives. The aim is to introduce some Latin American efforts to critically understand coloniality as the other face of modernity and to develop a distinctive critique of capitalism, globalisation and Eurocentrism in their historical dynamics, In the first part, the paper briefly introduces Latin America as a geocultural place and a object of social research in a historical perspective. Special attention is paid to the question of racial classification and authenticity. In the second part, the paper focuses on the notion of coloniality as it was conceptualised by A. Quijano and by other Latin American authors. In the third and fourth parts, the paper deals with the problem of coloniality in wider epistemic contexts of modern social sciences and in relation to the notion of alterity and to the question of decolonisation of social scientific thinking. The final discussion addresses some of inspirational and problematic points of this conception such as problems of decolonisation, intellectual dependency and critique, and the problem of conceptualisation of differences in scientific discourses.

Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty--which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco

Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty--which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco.

Departing from the notion of 'the stranger' in classical sociological literature (Alfred Schutz and Georg Simmel), the paper discusses the significance of two paradigmatic approaches, one of which has discursively branched off into modernity. In a world where the search for roots has become widespread - from the new social movements to the building of new nation-state, from identity politics to national identities - the multiple expression of exclusion has spread. A new kind of European citizen, a 'stranger', is being constructed. I argue that scientific discourses related to the intellectual heritage of Alfred Schutz have helped to create the 'stranger' and the 'non-stranger'. It is further argued that Simmel's approach is an alternative well worth highlighting.

This book examines recent debates on the political dynamics of cosmopolitanism, particularly in its connection with European civil society and the public sphere. The aim of the volume is to trace to what extent cosmopolitanism corresponds to «second modernity», with the latter concept referring to the potential for consensus, the creation of multiple political alternatives and the recognition of otherness. The book accordingly explores questions about democratic legitimacy and the formation of social and political institutions and presents empirical research on phenomena such as global violence.The volume is intended to constitute a cosmopolitan project in itself, comprising contributions from scholars with very diverse approaches. Together, these contributions provide a stimulating analysis of what cosmopolitanism can offer to socially and politically diverse twenty-first-century societies

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China - Hanchao Lu -- 2. The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China - Rebecca Karl -- 3. Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories - Wang Hui -- 4. The Modernity of Savings, 1900-1937 - Brett Sheehan -- 5. Reimagining China: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity - James A. Cook -- 6. Shanghai's China Traveler - Madeleine Yue Dong -- 7. Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value - Yan Hairong -- 8. The Remains of the Everyday: One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing - Joshua Goldstein -- 9. From Provision to Exchange: Legalizing the Market in China's Urban Water Supply - Alana Boland -- Contributors -- Index.