Violent Modernities

It is believed that law and violence generally share an antithetical relationship in liberal democracies. Lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed as a means to resist and undo that. Violent Modernities attempts to establish that this relationship is not one of animosity, but of a deep, counterintuitive intimacy and is at the base of what makes India a modern nation-state. Delving into the patterns of law and violence through the cultural imaginaries of justice, marked by the combined rise of neoliberalism and Hindutva—the book argues that legal imagination in India does not only emanate from courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but is also lived in the practices of ordinary disobediences and everyday failures. The author suggests that it is only when law can be re-imagined as such, that the violence at the foundations of state law can be unsettled.

While the diffusion of modernity and the spread of development schemes may bring prosperity, optimism and opportunity for some, for others it has brought poverty, a deterioration in quality of life and has given rise to violence. This collection brings an anthropological perspective to bear on understanding the diverse modernities we face in the contemporary world. It provides a critical review of interpretations of development and modernity, supported by rigorous case studies from regions as diverse as Guatemala, Sri Lanka, West Africa and contemporary Europe. Together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the crucial importance of looking to ethnography for guidance in shaping development policies. Ethnography can show how people's own agency transforms, recasts and complicates the modernities they experience. The contributors argue that explanations of change framed in terms of the dominantdiscourses and institutions of modernity are inadequate, and that we give closer attention to discourses, images, beliefs and practices that run counter to these yet play a part in shaping them and giving them meaning. Anthropology, Development and Modernities deals with the realities of people's everyday lives and dilemmas. It is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and development studies. It should also be read by all those actively involved in development work.

Urban violence has become a major threat in big cities of the world. Where the orthodox protection through the police and individual target hardening remain inefficient, the population must organize itself. This book contains first-hand accounts on a selection of the most innovative experiences in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Arab region and is of interest likewise for academics and urban practitioners, policy makers, international cooperation experts or travelers preparing a visit of one of the affected countries. With a preface by Caroline Moser.

The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

The transformations Buddhism has been undergoing in the modern age have inspired much research over the last decade. The main focus of attention has been the phenomenon known as Buddhist modernism, which is defined as a conscious attempt to adjust Buddhist teachings and practices in conformity with the modern norms of rationality, science, or gender equality. This book advances research on Buddhist modernism by attempting to clarify the highly diverse ways in which Buddhist faith, thought, and practice have developed in the modern age, both in Buddhist heartlands in Asia and in the West. It presents a collection of case studies that, taken together, demonstrate how Buddhist traditions interact with modern phenomena such as colonialism and militarism, the market economy, global interconnectedness, the institutionalization of gender equality, and recent historical events such as de-industrialization and the socio-cultural crisis in post-Soviet Buddhist areas. This volume shows how the (re)invention of traditions constitutes an important pathway in the development of Buddhist modernities and emphasizes the pluralistic diversity of these forms in different settings.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

Arab Modernities is a critical interrogation of some of the ideologies of so-called modernity and modernization in the post-colonial Arab world, with a specific focus on three political ideologies: liberalism, nationalism, and Islamism. By providing a critical analysis of the work of major Arab intellectuals/activists (namely, Abdallah Laroui, Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, and Abdessalam Yassine), Arab Modernities brings together three political ideologies that have hitherto been considered competing and even incompatible in the Arab world. This much-needed intervention is also best understood as an inquiry into one of the central paradoxes of post-colonial Arab societies (and Middle Eastern societies more generally): the rise of Islamism and Islamist fundamentalism at a time when global neo-liberalism has declared «the end of history». Arab Modernities is a sophisticated attempt to «name» contemporary Islamism and Arab nationalism and liberalism - to delineate the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions under which they first emerged, evolved, and ultimately failed, and thereby to shed light on Arab-Islamic societies at the current historical conjuncture. Arab Modernities argues against facile analyses that attribute the rise and subsequent decline of liberalism and nationalism, as well as the current rise of Islamism, to purely cultural, religious, or ideological factors and provides a rigorous, complex materialist critique, where Arab ideologies of modernity are placed in the context of the particular historical formation within which they have developed and to which they have responded.

Seminar papers.