Conclusion

Abstract

Since the days immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, scholars, journalists, and everyday pundits have frequently invoked the term “modernity” in their speculations about the underlying causes of that day’s violence.¹ Regardless of the merits to their arguments, “modernity,” a word that was once restricted to scholarly debate, has now infiltrated mainstream parlance. The growing usage of this word, as in the case of another neologism, “globalization,”² requires a more nuanced, multilocational, and transtemporal understanding of the term’s meaning. This book provides one piece in the constellation of efforts to understand modernity from different vantage points. Viewing the modern era from the locations of those labeled traditional and primitive reveals that conventional understandings of modernity, whose relational meaning relies on its opposition to the traditional, have been selective and myopic.