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In 2011 a tsunami over 20 meters high struck Japan's northeastern coastline. Along with causing close to 20,000 deaths, it destroyed many buildings, leaving behind a landscape of ruins. In the years since the disaster, various groups in Japan have interpreted these ruins as a way to work through “what went wrong.” Some pointed to local officials’ failure to properly prepare for the disaster, as well as the form of economic development that they had promoted. Others, however, particularly state officials, argued that the ruins of failed development reveal something that can be used to stimulate economic recovery and legitimize further development. Ironically, these groups mobilized the debris of “progress” to advance progress itself, complicating theories of recent ruins as “counter-sites.” This shows that actors can construct and leverage the truth content of ruins in support of the very ideologies and processes that caused their ruination in the first place. [3.11, disaster, governance, materiality, modernity, ruination, Japan]

Taxi drivers in Hawassa, Ethiopia, have come into conflict with government administrators over the strict regulation of their three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, known as Bajaj. Their conflict with the government is best conceptualized not through a state-market binary but in relation to competing moral discourses concerning modernity, reciprocity, and the right to a livelihood. Such discourses are mediated by the particular characteristics of the Bajaj, an inexpensive, flexible, and labor-dependent transportation technology. These discourses have emerged in a context in which urban Ethiopians and their social networks act as the infrastructure that enables cities to function. The encounter between these social networks and vital technologies such as the Bajaj is fundamental to the politics of infrastructure. [state, market, transportation, infrastructure, Ethiopia, Africa]

That the news matters is a fundamental postulate of modernity. Yet the ways people talk about the news varies across cultures and over time. In this article, I examine how such “metapragmatic” speech about the news changed across a 15-year period, during which India underwent seismic shifts in its political and economic order. By unpacking and contextualizing five metapragmatic utterances collected between two fieldwork periods, 1992–93 and 2007–08, I examine how people used the tension between the concepts of “news as public good” and “news as commodity” to indexically position themselves as democratic citizens in a changing nation. Furthermore, I explore how and why these discursive practices changed during the Indian economy's so-called liberalization.

What does ontological anthropology promise, what does it presume, and how does it contribute to the formatting of life in our present? Drawing from our respective fieldwork on how Indigenous alterity is coenvisioned and how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized, we develop an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology. This essay, then, provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity. In it, we examine the methodological and conceptual investments of ontological anthropology. The figure of the ontological as commonly invoked, we argue, often narrows the areas of legitimate concern and widens the scope of acceptable disregard within social research. We chart how this paradigm's analytical focus on the future redefines the coordinates of the political as well as anthropology's relation to critique. Finally, we formulate three conceptual theses that encapsulate our criticism and open this discussion to further debate.

In this article, I examine the contradictory ideals and practices of North American gay sex tourists in Brazil. Even as gay travel can be an edifying search for broader community, gay tourists I met also argued that their travel and spending encourage local communities to become more tolerant of gay subjectivities. Gay tourists were attracted by “exotic” and “different” local models for same-sex desire, but they simultaneously promoted the universality of “gay identity” to sex workers as a matter of modernity and gay rights, thereby attempting to delegitimize the very sexual difference that initially attracted them. Moreover, tourists’ efforts to link consumer capability to sexual identification and civil rights reflect a larger and even more dangerous tendency to cede ethically grounded claims for equal rights to market-based ones.

In this article, I examine how urban missional evangelicals in the United States cultivate a sense of place. Being “missional” refers to the desire to be a missionary in one's own society, an idea that has spread widely through the Emerging Church movement. Proceeding from an ethnographic analysis of two urban pastors, I argue that being an urban missional evangelical means having an intricate, nuanced, but ultimately mediate sense of place. Grounded in a cultural logic that seeks distance from suburban evangelicalism, the urban missional sense of place exists as a lived critique of modernity, which I explore through Mary Douglas's classic analysis of purity and danger.

In this article, I seek to contribute to the anthropology of embodied practice by asking, what would embodied practical mastery that mandates constant differentiation look like, and what would be its cultural and social determinants? In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a postsecondary jazz school in the United States. Through an exploration of how jazz educators cope with the paradoxical task of training the body and liberating it, I inquire into the challenge of negotiating the tension between the two key modernist ideas of rationalized schooling and Romantic creativity in contemporary institutional contexts.

The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a “modernist chronotope” that pits “progress” against “tradition,” producing images of space–time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-a-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology—a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class]

With recognition that historical consciousness, or “historicity,” is culturally mediated comes acknowledgment that periodization of history into epochs is as much a product of cultural practice as a reflection of historical “fact.” In this article, I examine popular “modernist” invocations of epoch in rural France—those positing traditional pasts against fluid presents with uncertain futures—which scholars frequently subordinate to analyses of collective memory and identity politics. Submitting this “response” to French modernity to temporal analysis reveals an additional critique in this periodization, one that valorizes enduring social time over processual temporalities, with implications for the temporal frameworks and ideology of anthropologists.

In this article, we analyze a crisis that resulted when a vehicular road was illegally cut through a corner of southern Colombia's San Agustin Archaeological Park, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage site, by a nearby reindigenizing Yanacona community and its neighboring campesino allies. In numerous meetings addressing the crisis, Yanacona leaders, performing on a transnational and cosmopolitan stage, have asserted and justified their position by creatively combining local and “authentic” discourses with significantly scaled-up heritage, developmentalist, and environmentalist ones. Yanacona articulate and adapt their ethnicity to an evolving global reification of diversity as well as fashion a symbolics of citizenship that critiques modernity but cannot be called “traditional.”[reindigenization, heritage, performativity, state–indigenous relations, politics of culture, cultural tourism, Colombia]

In this article, I shed light on linkages among neoliberalism, technology, modernity, postmodernity, and cultural practice. I analyze divination, for example, evil-eye exorcism and coffee-cup reading, and related involuntary gestures of the body as practices of holistic, embedded, multisensory exchange in Greece. I show how involuntary gestures refract and register the impact of the social nervous system on the individual and become the media that, in turn, enable the reading of that nervous system. The concept of the “nervous system” originated with Michael Taussig as the sensorial somatic registration of both everyday life and the effects of the social structure. In this study, it is descriptive of involuntary gestures of the body as a form of intersubjective communication that is not part of the mass media apparatus or of dominant public culture. [divination, (post)modernity, media, body, involuntary gestures, sensory exchange, remediation]

The projects of modernity and revolution tend to marginalize and erase the experiences and intentions of their local subjects. Focusing on a women-led uprising against the “people's government” formed by Maoist rebels in one of the western hill districts of Nepal, I examine the disjuncture between external ideological practice and local cultural worlds. I conclude that the radical encounter in this case was culturally mediated, as was the resistance to it. The outcome of the uprising points to “the event” as critical in causing structural indeterminacy—to the possibility that human agency and the contingent can alter the presumed linearity of even the most compelling projects by inserting themselves within structural interstices. [resistance, Maoism, Nepal, peasant, funeral, event, structure]

In this article, I ethnographically trace how Arab, mainly Palestinian, poets have modernized their literary tradition during the last seven decades. Shortly after the 1948 Israeli occupation of Palestine, the reign of the classical Arabic ode collapsed, and the modern forms of free verse and, later, the prose poem became dominant. Aiming to contribute to the ethnography of modernity, I examine how poets have adopted and abandoned poetic forms by analyzing their narratives on rhythm. I explore the political salience of rhythmical transformations and argue that the secular has been a vital and complex force in the modern abandonment of metrical discipline. The secular affects how poets seek to modernize their rhythm, vocabulary, and relation to public. It also affects, I conclude, the ways in which anthropologists can and do write about modernity. [poetic form, modernity and secularism, Palestine–Israel]

In this article, we explore the social process of modernization through an examination of the transformation in the delivery of antiwitchcraft services that has occurred in southern Tanzania under the pervasive influence of transnational ideoscapes of market liberalization and public-sector reform. We argue that the anthropological association of witchcraft with the modern in Africa overlooks witchcraft's explicitly unmodern associations in popular discourse and state policy. These latter associations contrast with the practice of antiwitchcraft specialists who seek to enable the realization of modernity both through dealing with witchcraft and through the self-conscious adoption of specifically modernizing practices.

In this article, I use a jazz structure (made up of a chorus, solo, and coda) to explore both the versions of black modernity advanced in South African jazz discourse and the particular ways in which these are manifest in the journalism of Todd Matshikiza. I set various global flows of the imaginary alongside their local appropriation and manipulation to show how South African writers made use of the jazz episteme to construct tactical (if evanescent) alternatives to the ponderous singularities and teleology of apartheid ideology. In doing so, I seek to describe ways in which jazz generated a parallel textuality in which local versions of freedom and social hope could be imagined and expressed.

In the mid-1990s, young Polynesian men emerged at the frontlines of proindependence sentiment and mobilization in the Society Islands of France's “overseas territory,” French Polynesia. In this article, I ask why. In pursuing that question, I argue for the theoretical and empirical productivity of shifting the associations between masculinity and nationalist struggle out of the realm of common sense and into that of the sociological; that is, of moving away from the analytics of gender foundationalism and into interrogations of the very social processes through which gender differences, masculinities more specifically, are produced. Through ethnographic analysis of gendered labor practices and their mediation by and through households, I track how young men's positioning within those most local arenas of social action shaped their engagements with competing local formulations of “tradition” and “modernity” and, through those engagements, their commitments to large-scale nationalist struggle.

Since the late 1990s Turkish consumers have purchased pictures of Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and the most potent symbol of the Turkish state, as popular commodities, displaying them in homes and private businesses. In this article, I argue that these consumer citizens seek to reconcile the memory of Ataturk's state-led modernity of the 1930s with recent international pressure to achieve a market-based modernity. As citizens try to mask the authority of secularist state institutions with consumer choice, the market carries state symbolism into new, private spheres, which it previously had not been able to infiltrate.

When some five hundred people in eastern Venezuela died from cholera in 1992–93, officials responded by racializing the dead as “indigenous people” and suggesting that “their culture” was to blame. Stories that circulated in affected communities talked back to official accounts, alleging that the state, global capitalism, and international politics were complicit in a genocidal plot. It is easy to attribute such conspiracy theories to differences of culture and epistemology. I argue, rather, that how political economies position different players in the processes through which public discourses circulate, excluding some communities from access to authoritative sources of information and denying them means of transforming their narratives into public discourse, provides a more fruitful line of analysis. In this article I use—and talk back to—research on science studies, globalization, and public discourse to think about how conspiracy theories can open up new ways for anthropologists to critically engage the contemporary politics of exclusion and help us all find strategies for survival.

This review essay considers recent work on sexuality and modernity, broadly conceived. Examining two studies from China and two from parts of Latin America, I suggest that fruitful research and writing is focusing on regions that are undergoing economic transitions marked by growing private sectors and market reform as a consequence of globalization. In these areas one finds both economic and sexual “opening up” to change, with diverse cultural and political implications at the local and the national levels.

Romance has been theoretically associated with the estrangements created by modern individualism. As demonstrated in courtship stories told by young men from the Murik Lakes in Papua New Guinea, the relationship of Murik culture to modernity has not resulted in narratives that privilege a construction of courtship in which the self merges with the beloved. Desire is not defined in terms of romantic love but is set amid events that are scrupulously fixed in the foregrounds of specific times and exact locations. In these tales, representations of personhood are organized by a Homeric chronotope rather than by a romantic one. Although masculinity in Murik culture has undergone important transformations in the 20th century, its sociology has not given way to the discourse of modern individualism.

Written to honor the memory of Sharon Stephens as an exceptional anthropologist this article focuses on her groundbreaking work of critically theorizing children and childhoods in relation to the politics of late capitalism and structures of modernity. Stephens's research into the contested category of childhood is here linked specifically to the location and uses of the figure of "the child" in the gendered politics of globalization, [children, childhood, globalization, gender, late capitalism, modernity, Cold War, "national security" discourses]

Rumors about disease and illness draw on the rich symbolism of the body and are a way for social groups to express concerns about their relationships to the community and state. The Indonesian "AIDS Club" rumors are part of a corpus of contemporary legends about AIDS that have circulated globally. In their local form, however, they speak to particular concerns that urban Indonesians have about modernity and the power of the Indonesian state. [AIDS, rumors, Indonesia, New Order, disease and illness, violence, body politic, somatization]

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide an ideal context in which to examine the production and reproduction of identities and modernities in the contemporary world because they tend to concentrate within themselves ideas, people, and resources drawn from various sites in the world system. In this article, I examine the practice of memory among NGO activists, village leaders, and farmers in Nan Province, northern Thailand. Assessing the impact of NGOs on the cultural constitution of Thai modernity, I trace contending representations of the rural past to different social concerns with identity and interests that have emerged in the era of planned development and increasing global interconnectedness. [Thailand, NGOs, development, globalization, memory, modernity]