Stressing the variations in meaning of modernity and tradition, this work shows how in India traditional structures and norms have been adapted or transformed to serve the needs of a modernizing society. The persistence of traditional features within modernity, it suggests, answers a need of the human condition. Three areas of Indian life are analyzed: social stratification, charismatic leadership, and law. The authors question whether objective historical conditions, such as advanced industrialization, urbanization, or literacy, are requisites for political modernization.
While in some cases modernity may dominate 'traditional' forms of expression, in others, the modern is embraced as a welcome source of new ideas that can modify 'tradition' while still keeping it within its own bounds. Maintaining a strong and distinct cultural identity with the help of modernity helps representatives of that identity cope with the modern world more generally. By contrast, assimilation to a dominant culture marked as modern is clearly associated with not only the loss of a distinct identity, but also its specific forms of cultural expression. This book explores the consequences of the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The contributors examine how traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further cultural developments, and to what extent this approach is likely to help a tradition survive.
Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times, and shows how Western philosophical concepts help in addressing a wide range of specifically African problems.
Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.
What does it mean to be modern? This study regards the concept of ‘society’ as foundational to modern self-understanding. Identifying Arabic conceptualizations of society in the journal al-Manar, the mouthpiece of Islamic reformism, the author shows how modernity was articulated from within an Islamic discursive tradition. The fact that the classical term umma was a principal term used to conceptualize modern society suggests the convergence of discursive traditions in modernity, rather than a mere diffusion of European concepts.
"As Professor Fazlur Rahman shows in the latest of a series of important contributions to Islamic intellectual history, the characteristic problems of the Muslim modernists—the adaptation to the needs of the contemporary situation of a holy book which draws its specific examples from the conditions of the seventh century and earlier—are by no means new. . . . In Professor Rahman's view the intellectual and therefore the social development of Islam has been impeded and distorted by two interrelated errors. The first was committed by those who, in reading the Koran, failed to recognize the differences between general principles and specific responses to 'concrete and particular historical situations.' . . . This very rigidity gave rise to the second major error, that of the secularists. By teaching and interpreting the Koran in such a way as to admit of no change or development, the dogmatists had created a situation in which Muslim societies, faced with the imperative need to educate their people for life in the modern world, were forced to make a painful and self-defeating choice—either to abandon Koranic Islam, or to turn their backs on the modern world."—Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books "In this work, Professor Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual tradition of Islam: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. Over the voices advocating a return to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide for action, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? More importantly, how does one get to 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims claim it to be—comprehensive in scope and efficacious for every age and place—Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their methodology and hermeneutics. In spelling out the necessary and sound methodology, he is at once courageous, serious and profound."—Wadi Z. Haddad, American-Arab Affairs
Indonesia, with its mix of ethnic cultures, cosmopolitan ethos, and strong national ideology, offers a useful lens for examining the intertwining of tradition and modernity in globalized Asia. In Inventing the Performing Arts, Matthew Isaac Cohen explores the profound change in diverse arts practices from the nineteenth century until 1949. He demonstrates that modern modes of transportation and communication not only brought the Dutch colony of Indonesia into the world economy, but also stimulated the emergence of new art forms and modern attitudes to art, disembedded and remoored traditions, and hybridized foreign and local. In the nineteenth century, access to novel forms of entertainment, such as the circus, and newspapers, which offered a new language of representation and criticism, wrought fundamental changes in theatrical, musical, and choreographic practices. Musical drama disseminated print literature to largely illiterate audiences starting in the 1870s, and spoken drama in the 1920s became a vehicle for exploring social issues. Twentieth-century institutions—including night fairs, the recording industry, schools, itinerant theatre, churches, cabarets, round-the-world cruises, and amusement parks—generated new ways of making, consuming, and comprehending the performing arts. Concerned over the loss of tradition and "Eastern" values, elites codified folk arts, established cultural preservation associations, and experimented in modern stagings of ancient stories. Urban nationalists excavated the past and amalgamated ethnic cultures in dramatic productions that imagined the Indonesian nation. The Japanese occupation (1942–1945) was brief but significant in cultural impact: plays, songs, and dances promoting anti-imperialism, Asian values, and war-time austerity measures were created by Indonesian intellectuals and artists in collaboration with Japanese and Korean civilian and military personnel. Artists were registered, playscripts censored, training programs developed, and a Cultural Center established. Based on more than two decades of archival study in Indonesia, Europe, and the United States, this richly detailed, meticulously researched book demonstrates that traditional and modern artistic forms were created and conceived, that is "invented," in tandem. Intended as a general historical introduction to the performing arts in Indonesia, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indonesian performance, Asian traditions and modernities, global arts and culture, and local heritage.
The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernisation, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations from the 1930s to the present day. He argues that modernisation is not a secular, progressive process, that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is a legitimising discourse. It is an idiom which Greek Cypriots employ to represent, and contest, relationships between social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernisation, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of Europe.
