Modernity

An essay that digests some of the themes in my new book entitled Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self.
A version of this essay was delivered at the September Symposium of the English department at the University of Houston - Downtown in 2019.

This article studies Cypriot LGBs' identity construction processes and understandings of politics amidst the sociopolitical environment within which they are articulated. It does so by addressing a question that is central to gender and sexuality research: How are gender and sexual identities formed, and how do these formations inform gender and sexuality politics in contexts caught between tradition and modernity? Employing a qualitative research design, it thematically analyzes data from interviews with Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot LGBs. It marks intra-ethnic and interethnic in-group exclusions. It argues that these exclusions are reinforced by local notions about modernity, expressed through the “Europe/west–versus the–rest” opposition. Nonetheless, it also finds that the successes of the Cypriot LGBTI movement have been based on opportunities created by Europeanization. Therefore, it helps develop our understanding of the implications of conceptions of nationhood, gender, and sexuality on gender and sexuality politics where the “rest” meets the “west.”

KEYWORDS: Gender, Sexuality, Identity, Politics, Modernity, Cyprus

The limits of the planet and of natural  resources  impede  pursuing  the  modern  project  based  on  permanent
growth  and  represent  a  major  challenge  for  humanity.  Drawing on an  agency-centred  approach,  this paper addresses two two  major  questions:
‘Who are the social actors who challenge the normative orientation at the core of modernization and promote alternative values and practices that may contribute to the rise of a global age, or may embody glimpses of a global age society?’ and ‘Can we grasp some dimensions of life and society in the global age  by studying current social movements?  ’

https://classiques-garnier.com/l-histoire-et-la-question-de-la-modernite-chez-antonio-gramsci.html

Le marxisme ouvert d’Antonio Gramsci permet de redéfinir la philosophie de l’histoire en échappant à tout dogmatisme. Gramsci cherche en effet à penser le processus historique dans sa consistance tout en accordant un rôle central à l’activité et aux luttes humaines, en particulier grâce aux notions de praxis, d’hégémonie et de rapports de forces. L’auteur des Cahiers de prison s’attache ainsi à comprendre la complexité de la modernité européenne, depuis ses origines jusqu’à la crise organique qui marque son temps, et s’arrête notamment sur la Renaissance, la Réforme, la Révolution française, le Risorgimento, l’américanisme, le fascisme et le socialisme soviétique.

While the very possibility of a philosophy of history has been widely questioned, this book shows that Antonio Gramsci’s open Marxism gives it new life, away from all dogmatism. Gramsci seeks to conceive the historical process in its consistency while giving a central role to human agency and struggles, thanks to notions such as praxis, hegemony and relations of force. His determination to understand both the coherence and the complexity of European modernity leads him to trace its development from its origins to the organic crisis it was undergoing in his time, from the Renaissance and the Reformation to Americanism, Fascism and Soviet socialism, via the French Revolution and the Risorgimento.

In this essay I seek to explore the icon of the Fighting Cock movement (Khorus Jangi) and of its Manifesto, " The Slaughterer of the Nightingale, " in order to consider its implications and imagistic allusions. In outlining the background of the Khorus Jangi and associated movements, I discuss the imagery of the khorus both in ancient Iran and globally, and in the context of the ideology of the Khorus Jangi. The Manifesto is discussed and analyzed and it is seen that the khorus prefigured the Manifesto, and heralded the appearance of a new movement in painting, as distinct from what had already happened in surrealist and modernist circles in writing. The manifestation of surrealist and modernist ideology in imagery seems to have been a response to this wake-up call of the Khorus Jangi.

Aida Foroutan, “Why the Fighting Cock? The Significance of the Imagery of the Khorus Jangi and its Manifesto ‘The Slaughterer of the Nightingale,’” Iran Namag, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 2016), XXVIII-XLIX.

https://www.irannamag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1.1-English-Foroutan-Iran-Namag.pdf

The paper discusses the major characteristics of modernity and post-modernity presented in Passion of the Western Mind by contemporary depth psychologist and philosopher Richard Tarnas. The essay, created for a course taught by Dominican theologian Fr. Edward Krasevac on the nature and history of Western thought, summarizes Tarnas's view of the larger cultural and historical contexts in which the dominant epistemologies and perspectives of modernity and post-modernity evolved and serves as a basic introduction to some of the distinctive features of modern and post-modern philosophical criticism.

This paper has two broad concerns, both of which are primarily pursued with reference to Hegel's philosophy of history. Firstly, it examines if Hegel can help explain the difficulty we have in modernity to respond to climate change and ecological crisis. It argues that Hegel provides a useful analysis of this problem, since the model of self-determination that he appeals to is comprehensively embedded in embodied forms of culture. This helps explain why even a self-correcting world-view like modernity is obdurate in the face of this crisis. Secondly, Hegel claims that the defining attribute of spirit is its capacity for self-production. Modernity is characterized by the emerging and widespread knowledge that spirit is self-producing. Modernity develops institutions that facilitate and provide an objective reality for spirit's self-production and its freedom. This aspect of the paper examines if the distinctive capacity of spirit for self-determination, which is realized in modernity, is subject to the same atrophying conditions by which Hegel says all other historical shapes of spirit are characterized. It asks if the present ecological crisis, something that is directly attributable to spirit itself, represents the limits of self-producing spirit. The paper concludes by examining the difficult position of those countries that cannot be considered as responsible for the emergence of the Anthropocene but whose actions in the present will amplify its impact.

The article describes the development of research of the deserted village settlement from the early Middle Ages to the 20th century. It mentiones the most important researched localities and the methods of non-destructive research. The article describes also the currect trends of research in the field of new documentation methods (lidar), use of environmental archeology and finally the research of villages deserted since 1945.

O periódico A Casa, revista das construções modernas, como chegou a ser chamado, foi fundado no Rio de Janeiro em 1923, encer- rando-se em 1940. A partir da análise crítica da sua visualidade e de seu conteúdo, em quase 20 anos de tiragem, procuramos com- preender como as ideias de modernidade fo- ram apresentadas e negociadas, tendo as ca- sas e seus ambientes como lugares privilegia- dos de discussão. Ancorados pelos estudos de cultura visual, intertextualidade e história da arte, foram avaliados discursos visuais e textuais ofertados ao leitor como construto- res de sentido, percebendo as variadas facetas de representação da modernidade e os modos de conquistá-la na decoração do lar.The journal A Casa (The House), magazine of modern buildings, how it came to be called, was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1923, ending in 1940. Based on the critical analysis of its visuality and its contents, in almost 20 years of circulation, we seek to understand how modern ideas were presented and negotiated, with the houses and their environment as privileged spaces of discussion. Based on studies of visual culture, intertextuality and history of art, we appreciate visual and textual discourses that were offered to the reader as constructors of meaning, realizing the various facets of representation of modernity and the ways of conquering it in the decoration of the home.

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ – that is, sheer life – becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time, and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized.

In ‘¿Género ínfimo?: el cuplé y la cupletista como desafío’, Pepa Anastasio focuses on the relation of women to the production of both popular and mass culture by looking to the female singers of the cuple´, in order to understand the role of this increasingly commercialized musical form as one means for women to enter the public sphere. Studying the lives of the cuple´ performers, their location in the music halls of Spain’s main urban areas, and normative practices in music and literature, Anastasio argues for a complex reading of popular song as a subversive practice that because, not in spite, of its supposedly frivolous character and apparent compliance with a male entertainment system, offered women a vehicle for economic and artistic self-empowerment. Paying special attention to the performance of cuple´ in Barcelona in the early twentieth century, Anastasio addresses the way in which this gendered form of communication not only countered normative sexual expectations, but also established notions of what type of cultural manifestations should be representative of the nation (in this case Catalonia).

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy:

“[Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy] is more than an anthology. It is a wisely crafted collection of classic and contemporary scholarship noting that what many are seeking is what has always been, a perennial philosophy, that remains foundational. As one of the authors, Tage Lindbom, properly notes, ‘Secularization is a fish in troubled waters.’ This book claims the waters and is essential reading for all those who may have forgotten or are simply ignorant of the rich foundation provided by the perennial philosophy.”
—Ralph W. Hood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, past president of the Psychology of Religion division of the American Psychological Association, co-founder of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and co-author of The Psychology of Religion

“A necessary and bracing critique of the assumptions and limitations of contemporary Western psychology, this generous volume is also a passionate call and learned guide towards a truer perspective that embraces man's spiritual nature.”
—Gabor Maté, M.D., and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Knowing the nature of the mind is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, especially in today’s world. To comprehend the nature of mind one needs to turn to the domain of religion and spirituality. Yet the truth of the mind and its complexity cannot explicitly be defined in words. Inner or transcendent wisdom sees the mind’s own nature without the duality of the seer. Suchness (tathatā) of mind is only experiential and not expressible. The words used to describe thought are themselves a product of thought, which is conditioned and limited. Thus, differences and contradictions are unavoidable. Therefore, a comparative study of different viewpoints and commentaries is immensely important to awaken the inner intelligence to see the mind as it is. Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is an outstanding effort in this direction.”
—Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa) of the Tibetan Government-in-exile, author of Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today’s World

“The rise of psychology has impacted the study and practice of spirituality, the experiences and attitudes relevant to ultimate human values that transcend ordinary behavior. Each chapter of this remarkable book demonstrates this interaction in a unique and provocative way. But rather than using psychology to reduce and ‘psychologize’ spiritual topics, its authors demonstrate how directives from the spiritual traditions can enhance and even illuminate the enduring importance of psychology in the 21st century.”
—Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University, co-author of Spiritual Dimensions of Healing

“The work at hand is a thinking and debating man’s delight. If you have any interest at all in attempting to include an educated and enlightened view of man’s higher functions in your purview of the world, you will learn from and enjoy this collection of essays. If you already have some knowledge in this area, brace yourself: you may see some of your favorites sharply criticized. A thought-provoking work.”
—Bruce W. Scotton, University of California, San Francisco, co-editor of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology

“This book, superbly edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, is a masterful critique of the field of psychology and its loss of the sacred ground in which it once was rooted. It offers depth psychologists an opportunity to contemplate timeless truths echoed through the centuries by perennial philosophers who have always claimed psyche is subordinate to Spirit. Although ignored in depth psychology’s early years due to prejudice and lack of understanding, this is a message today’s psychotherapists must take seriously. Human beings need a deeper and wider transpersonal vision of who and what we are, which the saints and sages of the world’s spiritual traditions have always pointed to. In psychotherapy with a therapist committed to such a vision, patients penetrate into their unconscious depths and not infrequently awaken to the Ground of all Being. Their suffering itself occurred because they had turned away from Spirit. Above all, this volume passionately calls upon depth psychology to remember its origin in the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religions. There is something of a polemic in these pages. It deserves to be considered by depth psychologists of all persuasions.”
—Bryan Wittine, Transpersonal psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst

“This anthology from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a must reference for anyone who is interested in psychology and its relationship to spirituality, and in developing an inclusive dialogue between disciplines that favor an integral outlook on the person and his or her potential. Selections in this anthology will inspire us to reexamine the metaphysical underpinnings of psychology, and remind us how important it is to rise above science’s attempt to reduce the human being to an epistemic object.”
—Sangeetha Menon, National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore, India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Beyond Experience: Consciousness in Bhagavad Gita

“This anthology has some of the most discerning essays and reviews on spirituality and psychology, which provide much-needed care and caution to all those engaged in bringing them together or who wish to do so in future. Therefore, it is a must-read for all those who teach, research, consult, or study in such frontier areas as transpersonal psychology, states of consciousness, mind-body relation, holistic health, Indian psychology, and so on. It will be an invaluable textbook for courses in these and other related areas. I congratulate the editor of the book.”
—Kiran Kumar K. Salagame, University of Mysore (India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Psychology of Meditation: A Contextual Approach

“One of the finest collections of essays on the Perennial Philosophy—a must-read for all psychologists who are engaged with spirituality and transpersonal psychology. The essays which critique modern psychology (including transpersonal psychology, and the framework of Carl Jung), in the light of the Perennial Philosophy are a revelation and make compelling reading. The book serves as a corrective to the excesses of modern psychology, and to this end Sotillos has done a commendable job. I for one will include the book in some of the graduate courses that I teach.”
—Suneet Varma, University of Delhi, co-editor of Foundations of Indian Psychology

“To its credit modern science by-and-large is becoming more cognizant of the essential connection between spirituality and psychological health and well-being and most of all its positive implications within the field of psychology. While there is ample data to document this in a plethora of academic journals and books, this new book Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy adds a novel contribution to the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, which captures many nuances that for the most part go unnoticed within these discussions, and last but not least, it provides a keen eye of discernment to understand this intricate relationship on a deeper level that is crucially needed. This work will be a valuable asset to students and long term mental health practitioners and professors alike who seek to better understand the relationship between psychology and spirituality.”
—Harold G. Koenig, Duke University, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, co-author of The Handbook of Religion and Health

This article is concerned with science, spirituality, and ecology. It analyses how certain scientific based metaphors, myths, and visions are being used as new cosmologies or ‘sacred stories’; new worldviews reassessing the relationship of humanity to the environment, expressing different (possibly more spiritual, possibly more environmentally friendly) ways of relating to it than the ‘modern’ ‘secular’ worldview that may be causing environmental degradation. The paper ethnographically and qualitatively analyses three such visions - ‘Deep Ecology’, ‘Gaia’, and the ‘Epic of Evolution’ - assessing their views and arguing for them as centres of ecological dialogue, challenging dominant modern views through stimulating a re-imagining and re-evaluating of the environment based on its interconnectedness, mutuality, and sacredness, thereby (possibly) encouraging (spiritual) re-connection to it and human responsibility towards it.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

This paper aims to challenge and complicate the increasingly ossified understanding of the influence of Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life over Manet's art in art historical scholarship. It does so by first, offering an exposition of its deployment in studies of Manet as a framing device that both historicizes and interprets the painter's works, and second, by providing a close reading and critical reconstruction of three elements of the overlooked opening passage of Baudelaire's text--(1) the Louvre as process of ideological interpellation; (2) the Louvre as scene of the production, reproduction and experience of alienated labor; and (3) the relation of technologically reproducible images and the auratic value of the "masterpiece."

Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis

This paper explores a central paradox in the aims of the archaeology of the contemporary past as they have been articulated by its practitioners. On the one hand, its aim has been expressed as one of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’, of distancing the observer from their own material world; a work of alienation. On the other hand, it has also aimed to make the past more accessible and egalitarian; to recover lost, subaltern voices and in this way to close the distance between past and present. I suggest that this paradox has stymied its development and promoted a culture of self-justification for a subfield which has already become well established within archaeology over the course of three decades. I argue that this paradox arises from archaeology’s relationship with modernity and the past itself, as a result of its investment in the modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation and the idea of a past which is buried and hidden. One way of overcoming this paradox would be to emphasize an alternative trope of archaeology-as-surface-survey and a process of assembling/reassembling, and indeed to shift away from the idea of an ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ to speak instead of an archaeology ‘in and of the present’. This would reorient archaeology so that it is seen primarily as a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it. It is only by doing this that archaeology will develop into a discipline which can successfully address itself to the present and future concerns of contemporary societies. Such a move not only has implications for archaeologies of the present and recent past, but concerns the very nature and practice of archaeology
as a discipline in its broadest sense in the 21st century.

Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düşünce külliyatının Modernleşme ve Batıcılık cildini inceleyeceğiz. Bu cilt dizinin diğer kitapları gibi çeşitli düşünürlerin yazılarından oluşmaktadır. Külliyat siyasi fikirlere odaklanmışken bu cildin de Türkiye’nin batılılaşma çabasındaki siyasi durumu ele aldığı görülmektedir.

Jewish magic is thriving in present-day Israel, in spite of the supposed disenchantment of the modern world. To see how it survived from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to our own days, this essay surveys the development of Jewish magic in the modern period. It begins with the Jews of Europe, where the printing of books of popular medicine and “practical Kabbalah,” and the Enlightenment’s war on magic, led to the transformation and marginalization of many Jewish magical texts and practices, but did not entirely eradicate them. It then turns to the Jews of the Islamicate world, who were much less exposed to the impact of printing or the ideology of Enlightenment, and whose mag- ical tradition therefor remained much more conservative than that of their European brethren. When the Jews of many Jewish communities finally met, before and espe- cially after the establishment of the Jewish State, the Jews of European origin tried to disenchant the world of their “Oriental” brothers, but were only partly successful in this endeavor. And with the rise of postmodern cultural sensitivities, and of New Age religiosities, even this attempt was mostly abandoned, and the Jewish magical tradi- tion is now more vigorous, and more visible, than the founders of Zionism would ever have imagined. Finally, while claiming that in the Jewish case modernity did not lead to the disenchantment of the world, this essay also claims that the same might be true of other magical traditions, whose history often was neglected by historians of Western esotericism.

The book is a critical biography and select translation of Sahodaran Ayyappan one of the lead disciples of Narayanaguru and a pioneer of letters, journalism, democracy and human rights in Kerala. He was a champion of the dalit rights and the down trodden in Kerala renaissance struggles who is also called Pulayan Ayyappan. He was an editor, anti caste crusader, a poet, orator, legislator and public figure. He is one of the founders of modernity and rationalism in Kerala. Sahodaran also initiated the neo Buddhist movement along with Mitavadi and C V Kunjiraman in the 1920s. The book features many of his works in verse and prose including editorials and speeches. Published by Other Books Calicut in 2012. Available online on amazon.in and other sites. To read the review and buy online visit amazon.in site by using the link below: (copy paste if needed)

https://www.amazon.in/Sahodaran-Ayyappan-Towards-Democratic-Future/dp/9380081189

Many qiaoxiang in southern Fujian and Guangdong appear derelict, but from documenting the material heritage and interviewing people about its social significance, another image surfaces. The homeland of Overseas Chinese was not only found to be significant to the diaspora, but serve as an enduring reminder of a grassroots-based modernity in rural China. The qiaoxiang effectively became a transnational legacy of migration from southern China that has undergone the following stages of transformation: exodus-led emergence of a remittance landscape, sudden abandonment, and sometimes revival. Today, it has become a “repository” or “living museum” where tourists and scholars alike can visit and ponder about how humans adapted to post-rural life.

The Slussen urban project designed by architect Tage William-Olsson and engineer Gösta Lundborg between 1929 and 1935 in Stockholm, synthetically expresses the emergence of the automobile in the European cities at the beginning of the 20th century. The combination of more than thirty previous proposals highlight the evolution of a space in contradicting confrontation with infrastructure and the attempts to give an urban form to a strategic place between Gamla Stan and Södermalm. This article will summarise these declines in 5 successive  stages: from the Slussen as a discussion in hydraulic engineering to its first urban considerations, from the Slussen seen as a matter of architectural composition to the first irruptions of the road forms, from the Slussen as a “traffic machine” to the discovery of its own aesthetic, from the gray Slussen to the architecture embedded in its interstices and finally, the understanding of Slussen as a fragile and unstable piece in the urban landscape of the “Venice of the North”. This evolution allows Slussen to be highlighted as a paradigmatic record of the implosion of traffic on the European city and a pioneering example of the interesting relationship between infrastructure and urbanity.

Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.

Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger’s challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal.

This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization?

In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

This review essay on Jewish "traditionalism" (Hasidism, musar, Orthodoxy,etc.) argues that, notwithstanding a past tendency among historians to magnify secularist trends within modern East European Jewry, several new works suggest a revitalization of traditionalism in the region during the modern era.

This essay reinterprets the history and theory of modern western education as a modern/colonial institution by rethinking western modernity as a predatory and colonizing civilizational project.  The purpose of this essay is to articulate a planetary interpretation of modern western education as a disciplinary institutional formation responsible for reproducing a Eurocentric cosmology. The modern/colonial world system perspective interprets modernity as a universalized civilizing/civilizational complex that emerged with the breakup of Christendom and the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  From this perspective, the purposes of education should now include unlearning the cultural enclosures of the Eurocentric worldview, particularly the western system of knowledge, and opening the modern imagination to the multiple ways of perceiving and conceiving the world that have been occluded within the modern Eurocentric imaginary.

This document critically reviews the theories of the avant-garde of both the Left and the Right put forward between the 1920s – the time of the vigorous assertion of the avant-garde – and the late 1970s – the beginning of the conservative turn led by Regan and Thatcher and reflected in cultural, change. The focus is on modern autonomous art and the historical avant-garde art movements. Art is first of all put in its place by locating it in the context of the institutional framework of modern society. This includes historical references to the emergence of the modern concept of art and of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics. The review of the theories opens with analyses of Ortega y Gassett and Poggioli’s proposals dating from 1925 and 1968 respectively. Important among the theories of the Left are those of the representatives of Critical Theory such as Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger. Among the Right, both the German and American Neo-conservatives are considered, Gehlen, Ritter and Marquard representing the former and Bell that latter. The analysis closes with final reflections on the concepts of the autonomy of art and of the avant-garde which become comprehensible only within the context of rationalised and disenchanted (i.e. disillusioned and enlightened) modern society.

This dissertation tackles one central problem: What were the intellectual and social origins of New Order Indonesia (1966-1998)? The analytical lens that this study employs to examine this society is the Indonesian middling classes’ pursuit of modernity. The dissertation comes in two parts. Part One reconstructs the evolution of the Indonesian middling classes and their search for progress. Part Two uses three case studies to analyze the middling classes’ search for Indonesian modernity under the New Order. The first explores the top-down modernization undertaken by President Soeharto’s assistants at the National Development Planning Board, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology. The second case study investigates the “bottom-up” modernization performed by the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information. The third case study deals with how several authors used popular fiction to criticize the kind of Indonesian modernity that emerged in the New Order era. This research yields several findings. First, the Indonesian middling classes championed a pragmatic, structural-functional path to modernity. Second, to modernize the country rapidly and safely, the modernizers proceeded in an eclectic and pragmatic manner. Third, between the Old and the New Order, there existed strong continuity in ideas, ideals, skills, and problems. Fourth, the middling classes’ modernizing mission was fraught with contradictions, naïvetés, ironies, and violence, which had roots in the nationalist movement in the first half of the twentieth century. The New Order was neither wholly new nor an aberration from the “normal” trajectory of Indonesia’s contemporary history. The sort of modernity that the Indonesian middling classes ended up creating was Janus-faced.

Contemporary rural gentrification – the colonization of rural communities and small-towns by members of the ex-urban middle class – is a nationwide phenomenon that contradicts nearly two centuries of US urbanization. While previous research primarily describes such counter-urbanization as representing a profound divergence from previous patterns (i.e. urbanization, mass production/consumption, etc.), I contend that rural gentrification is best understood as the product of both continuity and change relative to the ideas/practices of Modernity and current postindustrialization. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a community in south central Montana, I present evidence that the choice by middle-class newcomers to migrate to the rural US is simultaneously the product of: 1) the continued efficacy of the Modern ideals of authenticity and progress; and 2) their aspirations to distinguish themselves as members of an emerging class faction – the postindustrial middle class (PIMC)– through their emphasis upon the production and consumption of experiences.