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Abstract

The Present as a Part of the Past or as the Beginning of the New? Theories of Modernity Revisited The article aims to examine key concepts and arguments in the debate about modernity and postmodernity and to show how such ideas have been misread by ethnologists and others. A crucial factor in this debate is whether the present is seen as a part of the past, and then analyzed on the same terms as the earlier stages of modernity, or if it is explicitly perceived as the beginning of a late- or postmodern era, which has to be understood on its own terms. Theories of the first kind often entail devolutionary ideas about contemporary society, that are absent in late-modernist or post-modernist outlooks. Thereby, different notions of the relationship between the present and the past also imply different conditions for social criticism. Whereas devolutionary theories tend to juxtapose a present society in a state of crisis with a harmonious past, more or less explicitly seen as the solution to the contemporary situation, post-modernists jettison both past and future utopian models. Social criticism, then, is pursued without either nostalgia or visionary politics. Finally, history fulfills different functions in these perspectives on contemporary society. In theories of the first kind, history is perceived as the key to a proper understanding of present conditions, while post-modernist theories tend to employ history methodologically as a means to make visible the unique character of the present, which then has to be explained synchronically without the interference of historical forces. These implications have too often remained unnoticed. As a result, post-modernist theories have sometimes been charged with nostalgia and devolution and with an exaggerated occupation with disintegration. The article argues that this critical view tends to confuse post-modernist theories with outlooks that deny the existence of a recent historical rupture. It seems like this misinterpretation can be understood as the outcome of the critic’s propensity to read the basic ideas of latemodernist or post-modernist thought from the opposite standpoint. What is basically intended as an account of the rise of a postmodern condition then becomes grasped as a depiction of the withering away of modernity.