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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. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. 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. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society.
The population in Kerala, India is frequently displayed as more literate, more educated, healthier and less poverty struck than those of other Indian states. Women's high development scores are particularly often brought to the forefront when general information about Kerala is distributed. Kerala thus, might seem like a perfect display of social development, a success story for women's emancipation in an 'underdeveloped' part of the world. This book explores critical feminist voices questioning the results of modern emancipation and suggests the critique launched by feminists in Kerala to be relevant when re-examining gender equality in Scandinavia.
Connecting post-colonial and feminist scholarship to economic theory, this book explains how modern economics has helped to constitute an expert discourse of development that marginalizes alternative perspectives and practices. It assesses theories of modernization, structural adjustment, and globalization.
This book analyses the impact of the Western idea of 'modernity' on development and underdevelopment in Africa. It traces the genealogy of the Western idea of modernity from European Enlightenment concepts of the universal nature of human history and development, and shows how this idea was used to justify the Western exploitation and oppression of Africa. It argues that contemporary development, theory and practice is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and that Africa can only achieve real development by rejecting Western modernity and inventing its own forms of modernity. The book is divided into four sections. The first section provides an outline of the theory of modernity in the Enlightenment project. In the second section, an attempt is made to trace the genealogy of the idea of development as modernity and how the African development process gets entangled with it. Here, its evolution is mapped through three periods: early modernity, capitalist modernity and late modernity. Zeroing in on the current era of late or hypermodernity, the book contests the idea that there is something new in globalisation and its neo-liberal development paradigm. The third section turns to the complex but pertinent question of how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa can transcend the impasse of modernity. The fourth and final section sums up the argument and points the way forward.
With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book - a postcolonial critique of urban studies - traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.
Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.
After a period of relative confidence about the future of modernizing societies, scholars are now questioning with renewed urgency the directions of the modernization trend. This book, the result of nearly a decade of collaborative efforts by scholars in twelve countries, examines the modernization process with particular attention to how it is affected by cultural–and especially socioeconomic–variables. The authors describe major theoretical approaches to the idea of modernity and point to the sociological issues interlinked with modernization. They also consider specific factors such as nationalism, ethnicity, and traditional institutions and show how they can determine differing modernization trajectories. The concluding section of the book focuses on nation- and culture-specific examples of modernization, presenting case studies that illustrate the range of modernization attempts. The authors also explore the extent to which modernization may in fact be a generalization of the American way of life.
By tracing out the intersection between the imagined space of the national economy and the gendered construction of "expert" knowledge in development thought, Suzanne Bergeron provides a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice. By elaborating a framework of including/excluding economic subjects and activities in development economics, she provides a rich account of the role that economists have played in framing the contested political and cultural space of development. Bergeron's account of the construction of the national economy as an object of development policy follows its shifting meanings through modernization and growth models, dependency theory, structural adjustment, and contemporary debates about globalization and highlights how intersections of nation and economy are based on gendered and colonial scripts. The author's analysis of development debates effectively demonstrates that critics of development who ignore economists' nation stories may actually bolster the formation they are attempting to subvert. Fragments of Development is essential reading for those interested in development studies, feminist economics, international political economy, and globalization studies.
The book is divided into three parts.
The author provides a new, systematic and interdisciplinary approach that reinterprets the premises behind Italy's imagined geography or modernity."--Jacket.