Possible Modernities

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Possible Modernities

Author(s): James FaubionSource: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 365-378Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656483 .

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Possible ModernitiesJames Faubion

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of California, Berkeley

Furtherdiacriticsof the modern?Perhaps hose we have areenough. A listof only the most frequentlycited of themwould have to includea wide rangeoforganizationalprocesses: industrialization,democratization,bureaucratization,andthe differentiation f occupationalroles, amongothers. Itwouldalso havetoinclude such demographicprocesses as urbanization ndpopulationalcondensa-tion. It would, in addition,have to makereferenceto such sociotechnicalcom-plexesasalphabetic iteracy,masscommunication,andpanopticism.Themodernas we currentlyknow it is also a matterof politico-ethicalprinciples: ecularism,meritocracism,and egalitarianism.It is a matterof such epistemic patternsasthose of rationalism,scientism, andhistoricism.It is a matterof dispositions: o-wardparticipationalism, owardindividualism,and towardempatheticcosmo-politanism.It is a matterof aestheticschools:primitivist,realist, surrealist, unc-tionalist,fragmentalist,andfuturist,againamongothers.Modernity s, if nothingelse, multidimensional.Opinionson which of itsdimensionsare moredefinitive, which are less, significantlydiffer. Opinionsonwhen, andwhere, andwith whomthe moderneramightbegin accordinglydifferas well. For Burckhardt,and for many othersof his generation,that era has itsstartingpointin theItalianRenaissance.ForWeber, it is apparently orn, in nearearnestat least, with the Calvinists.For HansBlumenberg,quite precisely, it isoriginally ncarnate n GiordanoBruno.ForFoucault,it has its practical naugu-rationwith the reformersof the late 18thcenturyandits ethicalandphilosophicalone, as for Habermasand perhapsfor Schluchter,with Kant. For a variety ofliteraryscholarsfrom Barzunto Kern, it has its outset in some painteror meta-physicianor poet active at or around his century'sturn.KarlLowithlocates therootsof themodern n medievalism.HaroldBloom locatesthem in the Hellenisticperiod. Nietzsche appears o locate them in the Ionia andAtticaof the fifth andfourth centuries B.c.'

Burckhardt,Weber,Blumenberg,Lowith,Nietzscheand therestmayenrichas much as they undermineone another.But they cannot, stricto sensu, all beright-not, at least, if whatthey are all talkingaboutis a "concrete universal"inmoreor less preciseontologicalanalogywithanyother.Featurallyambiguous,however, the modern s ontologicallyambiguousas well. Sometimes it is in facttreated, n the usualhistoriographicalmanner,as a concreteuniversal.As often,though,it is treatedas a strict, if complex, particular. n the social sciences, es-

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pecially in the last 30 years, it has been treatedstill differently:as a perfectlygeneralor generalizable tructure r system, instancesof which mighttakeholdjust aboutanywhere.If hermeneutics an neverachieve more thanpartialspeci-ficity, if it can neverfullyexhaust ts object, thehermeneutics f the modemcan-not seem even to fix one.The indeterminacy f the modem is, however, commensuratewith the in-determinacy f theobjects(orwhatever hey mightbe) to which talk of modernityalmost invariablyalludes:the present;and the self. It is even unlikely that wewould talk of modernityatall, unlikelyat least thatwe would conceive of it quiteso diversely, were we not also uncertainaboutthe characterof the present,andof ourplacewithin it.

Anthropology,witnessto the evermorerapidwaningof the "primitive"andthe "traditional,"cannotavoid the moder as easily as it was once able to do. Sofar, however, it has takenvery little accountof the discursivenessof modernity(a social fact, afterall), even less of the existentialuncertaintybeneath. It hasinstead argelyfollowed recent(andnot so recent)2 ocial scientificprecedent npresuming hat,ultimatelyanyway, modernity s indeeda generalizedstructure,or system, or design for living distinct from "primitivity" or "tradition"butamenable o the sameanalyticseven so. It has not perhapsproliferateddiacriticsbeyondthose alreadyavailable. But it has not, amongotherthings, as yet seri-ouslyconsideredwhethermodernityhas as muchto do with "dysfunction," dis-ruption,disagreement,anddisintegration,discursiveandpractical,as with any-thingelse. It has instead,withonly a few exceptions,3 argelyfocused upononeoranotherof modernity'sputative"crystallizations,"andhas largelytakenas itsanalyticalarchetypeone or anotherof modernity'sputativelybetterwroughtanddemonstrably table socioculturalformations-a ratherabstractUnited Statesprominent mongthem.Evenwhenit hasaddressed onflict, it has tendedto ren-derit more or less necessarilyephemeral.Even Geertz'sdivisive "age of ideol-ogy" (1973:254)wouldappear o be a less than ully modernand, if perhaps ong,a nevertheless ransitional ne.Whetheror notmodernityhas firstor as muchas anything o do withdisrup-tionanddisagreementanddisintegration, t in anycase has somethingto do withthem,andsomething hat,as Foucault'seffortshavesurelyestablished,4no Man-chesterianmethodologyis likely entirelyto capture.Whetheror not, moreover,modernity anproperlybe attributedo anysocialor cultural"system" whatever,it mustat least be ascribedless to those thathave settled upon theirdesign forlivingthanto those thathaveforone reasonor another ettledupondoingwithoutone. The point, thoughelaborated n the past two decadesby both FoucaultandBlumenberg, s in some measureoriginallyWeber's:thatmodernity,before

it isanythingelse, is a conditionof loss, the loss of faith in an "ethically ordered"life world, in whatancientlywouldhavebeen called "the cosmos."5 Anthropol-ogy, preciselybecauseit is witnessto thewaningof its formeruniverseof study,is (whetherornot it acknowledges t) witnessalso, and withsingular ntimacy,tothe demographic,technological, organizational,economic, political, and noe-maticprecipitantsof thatconditionof loss, withinwhich, or in the existentially


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uncertainaftermathof which, it in any case also resides. Among those precipi-tants,the subversionperhapsnotof statusascriptionbutof the finitudeandclosureof statushierarchieswould from a varietyof scholarlysources appear o be es-pecially important.6On the otherhand, it would appear o be only one sign orsymptomof what, these days at least, may be the most widespreadmotorof so-cioculturalchange: an emergent technocracy (compare, for example, Geertz1973:236, 248-249). Typically, though not universally, technocracy's "chal-lenge," its assaultupon the sanctityor preeminenceof whateveraristocracyorplutocracyor oligarchyor other caste or castelike regime happensto be in theway, is less revolutionary hanrevisionary.Even when revolutionary,andevenwhen most successful, however, thatchallengewouldappearnot to lead to quitetheresults hatWeberhimselfmost fearedandfrom which his own horrified nter-pretation f modernity,however ust in its way, largelyderived.Nowhere, as yet,do we find ourselves in an utterlydisenchanted,utterlyroutinized"iron cage."We insteadfindourselves, or so I would submit,entangled n a rathermorecom-plex political, epistemic,and valuationaldualism:between the zweckrationalandthewertrationalperhaps;betweendecisionism andloyalism, betterput.Whetherin Japan,orthe Netherlands,or America,whether n other "older" statesor in avarietyof "newer" ones, the instauration f that dualismis in anycase no morestriking han heapparently bduratepermanenceof it. Whetherornotsuchstatesas those which we inhabitneed their shareof decisionists as much as theirshareof loyalists, they thusseem more or less withoutrespiteto have them.Withthem, the cosmos cannotpreservethe integrity t once may have en-joyed. Onthe otherhand,it appears arely, f ever, simplytodisappear.Theprob-lemthatpoliticalcumepistemiccumvaluationaldualismsfoster,theproblem,forthatmatter, hatanyrelativelysustainedclash betweendual,ortriple,orstillmorewaysof seeingandbeingtendsto foster, is atthevery leastnot one of fashioning,or refashioning,the cosmos from the groundup. It is consequentlynot the pri-mordial Problem of Meaning that Weber saw as thefons et origo of religious idea-tionand thatGeertzhas morerecentlyexpanded or us. It is not first theproblemof suffering though t is sometimesconstruedas one), noreven firsttheproblemof absurdity thoughit is sometimesconstruedas thatone, too), as much as it isa problemof suddenly finding onself with "beliefs," and accordingly, withdoubts. Itperhapsrests less in the merediscoverythatone's own "beliefs" differfromsomeone else's thanin the discovery thatone's own "beliefs" have beenacquiredquite differentlyfromsomeone else's. It perhapsrests less even in thatdiscoverythan in the discoverythat thebases of one's own "beliefs" maybe nobetter andno worse) thananyoneelse's. Call it the Problemof Foundations.It is by no meansexclusively modern.It may, moreover,provokea retreatfrommodernityquiteas often as it propelsa march n the otherdirection. Buttheproblemof foundations s, as we modems cannotbutbe well aware, character-isticallyandnagginglymodem even so. It is the impetus, obviously enough, ofbothconflicts and innumerable rystallizations,manyof which we have alreadyseen, manyof which(it couldbe supposed)we have not. Once itgainsa foothold,it seemsto be no less transitoryhanabiding.Ithasnot, I think,receivedremotely


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the anthropologicalattention it merits. It has not been recognized, either, forwhat, I think, it is: if not exclusively moder, still the fairly precisepointof de-parture or anythingwe might reasonably dentify as a modem bent or turning.Theproblemof foundationsdoes not, however, have a distinctivelymodern so-lution.Rather hecontrary:t is one thatmodernitymanages,sometimesexploits,sometimesembraces,but one thatit distinctively eaves unsolved.Inother erms,theproblemof foundations s quiteso characteristicallymod-ernbecause t imposesthoseveryphenomenologicalboundaries gainstwhichthe"modernsensibility"has, in several distinctvariants,arisen and in veiled or ex-plicitreference o which thatsamesensibilityhas, again n severalvariants,comeintoits own. Theproposalat least has the virtueof a certain ntuitiveappeal,andhence of being plausiblyclose to what "we" moders take "our" modernity obe. Because of and beyond that, it perhapshas the virtueof offering about asconcise a fulcrumfor comparingnot only one and anothernative view of mod-ernitybutalso one and anothermodernnative's views as can atpresentbe hoped.Beyond that, it has the virtue of being neitherentirely speculativenor entirelynew. It is, after a fashionanyway, also the working hypothesisof Blumenberg'sThe Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). As its title indicates, the treatise ispolemical.It is strictlyhistoriographical;t is, moreover,strictlyandsolely con-cernedwith the historyof certain Westernideas: "curiosity," originality, freewill, andprogress,amongothers. All the same, it is concernedwith a periodre-markable or its many political and epistemic and valuationaldualisms, and itbegins not from an ideational coalescence but ratherfrom a precursoryhiatus:between the Hellenistic doctrineof the Deus absconditusandits "anti-gnostic"Medievaldenial. Of thathiatus, "modernity"(as Blumenbergunderstandst) ispreciselynot a bridging,not a synthesis, not a resolutionof any sort at all. It isinsteadan alternative, oundeduponor flowingfrom "self-assertion":

An existentialprogram,according o which [one] positshis existence in an historicalsituationand indicates o himself how he is going to deal with thereality surroundinghimand whatuse he will make of the possibilitiesthat areopento him. [1983:138]

The program, otherwise put, is simply one of getting along, more or less in the"hereand now" (cf. also Foucault1984:40ff),withoutbenefitof theguidanceofethical or intellectualabsolutes.Every conceptionof modernity s a sociocultural act, an imbedded nstal-lationin the inventionof the very thingto which it refers;every conceptionis, tosomedegree,likely compromisedby its imbeddedness.Blumenberg's onception

of when, and where, and even how modernitybegins is, accordingly, open todispute.His conceptionof self-assertion,however, if also opento dispute, is stillinstructive,not least because it incidentallyunderscoresa numberof other con-ceptionsandvantagesandpracticesthatthe anthropologyof modernity,indeedanthropology,has as yet barely touched. Among them, those that are, like thepracticeof self-assertion,notsimply "in history"butproductivelyandreproduc-tively "historicizing" are perhapsthe most neglected.7Indeed, all the ethno-


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graphicresearch rom Malinowski forward nto one or anothersense of a mythicor legendarypastremainsstill almostentirelyuncomplementedby research ntotheecology or the semioticsof one or anotherantinecessitarianense of the con-tingencyof both thepastandthepresent,the sensethatperhaps hingsdo nothaveto bejust as they are. The lacunais a ponderousone. Not least, it leaves us stillquitepoorly versed in either the social precipitants,the representational trate-gies, or the material mplicationsof what is arguably he most perduringof spe-cificallymodem debates:between one or anotherexpressionof positivisticcon-structivismand one oranotherexpressionof factitiousor scientisticdeterminism.It consequently eaves us poorlyversedin what is arguably he most "peculiar"of specifically modem achievements; the legitimation and, however circum-scribed,the institutionalization f debates and othercriticalperformances imed,manifestlyand, it wouldseem, also substantively, ess at the maintenance han atthe "improvement"and "overcoming" of the socially andculturallygiven-attimes, even of "the social" and "the cultural" themselves.Howeverpeculiar, such achievementssuggest at least thatcertaintypes ofconflict,of intermittent isharmony,areno more eccentricanaspectof modernitythancertain ypesof consonance andconstancy.Perhaps heyalso suggestsome-thingof whatis involved in inhabiting he less certain,moreperspectival,moreprovisionalphenomenologicalandsocial regionsthatappear o unfoldin the ab-sence of ready absolutes. They obviously do not compel one to conclude thatmodernitys inherentlywithouteitherstabilityor systematicity.Butperhaps heysuggestinstead that a portionat least of modernity'sactualstabilityandsystem-aticity ies in a commitment o socioculturaldeconstruction ndreconstruction-a commitment,at least, to consideringthatproject.Whetheror not the commit-ment was whatLevi-Strausshadin mind when he distinguishedprimitivesocie-ties fromtheir "hotter" (and more modern)contraries,whetheror not that dis-tinction is even justifiable, a certain resortto post-structuralist,"post-textual"hermeneuticswould, thoughfor the interpretation f some aspectsof modernitymore thanothers, in any case appearto be obligatory.8Whateverelse the her-meneuticsof modernitymayor maynot have to be, however, it mustcertainlybea hermeneuticsof self. "We," of course, are modern.So, too, of course, andwhetherwe like it ornot, is anthropology,one legitimatedand nstitutional riticalperformanceamong many academicothers. Shortof being in bad faith, neitherwe noranthropology anbe much of anythingelse. Fortheanthropology f mod-ernityat least, the comfortingdichotomybetween self andother, even betweensubjectandobject,tends not to dissolve butsurelyto be blurredas a consequence.How to proceed?Certainlynotby reinstating ome latter-dayversion of a missioncivilisatrice,guidedby the convictionthat,all of us being equal, we can demandof anyonewhat we can demandof ourselves. We may all be existing, or be soonto exist, in the shadows of the samecondition,thesameloss, thesame existentialproblematic.But oursituationscontinue, in manyotherrespects,radically o dif-fer. Onemayhopethey always will. On to dialogue, to pluralvoices? The end isadmirable.But I confess that, afterseveral monthsin the field, I find it largelyutopian.People are, for very good reasons, often distrustfulof dialogue. Even


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when they are willing to converse, they are often unwilling to be quoted. Wecannot n anycase insistupon symposia.We canlisten, on the otherhand,thoughless in the simplenameof recording heOther'svoice than n thenameof puttingour own into question. Habermassuggests that enlightenmentdepends upon a"therapeuticself-critique" (1984:21). The anthropologyof modernitycan, Ithink,aspireatpresent o that.Conflicts, rifts, in diversedomains,even of the most chasmicsort, are noth-ingnew toGreece,which has adevastating ivil war less than ourdecadesbehindit, and which has remainedverymuchin socioculturalmotion ever since. InJan-uaryof 1987, forexample,PresidentSartzetakis' efusal o commute he sentenceof a certain ChristosRoussos, convicted in 1976 and under circumstances hathave repeatedlybeen examined and discussed of the murderof his male lover,met with an unheardof public backlash, a subsequent, conciliatorystatementfromthe courts, anda qualifieddenouncement,some few weeks later, fromtheEuropeanParliament's irstpanelon discrimination gainsthomosexuals.Duringthe same period, the popularmedia, at the urgingand with the partialfinancialsupportof the government,initiated a determinedand fairly sober instructionalcampaignagainst he contractionandspreadof AIDS, which neverthelessdid notentirelydo awaywith a generalsentimentof fear andsuspicionand which did notpreventa groupof registerednursesandlaw enforcementagentsfromseizing andquarantining Spanish singerwho arrived n the countryto false claims that shewassuffering romthedisease. A disputeovereducational undinganduniversityadmissions esulted nseveralhostileencountersbetweentheresponsibleMinisteranddiscontentedstudents. Prime MinisterPapandreou,amid widespreadcom-plaint,insistentcalls forelectionfroma resurgentRight, and a series of strikes noppositionto a long-standingandsupposedly anti-inflationary olicy of litotita,"austerity,"significantlyreorganizedhis Cabinet andhas since significantlyre-organized t again). In the spring, a Soviet-sponsoredplan to constructan alu-minum oundrywithintheboundaries f theDelphiclandscapewas, after engthylocal debateandpersistentdisapproval rom variousof the membersof the Eu-ropeanEconomicCommunity,finallytabled, andthe projectedplant'ssite relo-catedelsewhere. Thepresenceof Americanmilitarybases anddisagreements ur-roundingGreece's membershipn NATO continued o provokeunrest,the moreso when theAmericanambassador vertlyaccused certainhighGreekofficials ofhaving bargainedwith terrorists.A furious contestationbetween the OrthodoxSynod and the governmentover the Church'sadministrativeprovince stirredaspectacularmass outcry and the virtualsecession of a cohort of Mount Athosmonks. More orless concomitantly,arrangementshathadbeenyearsinthemak-ing were finalizedfor the releasingof nationalratio stationsfrom statecontrol.Theplace, in short, is changing,andindeedchangingso rapidlyas to makeanyresort o a singular"native's pointof view" daringatbest and to make mostresorts o the ethnographicpresentnot simply artificialbutpositively laughable.On the otherhand, Greece is still Greece, and what might, roughlyor heuristi-cally, be spokenof as its centralcontemporarycene is, by mostof the more facilestructural-functionaleckoningsanyway, now as before straightforwardlymod-


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er. An industrialdemocracy, urban,largely literate,participationist, ndowedwith its fair shareof institutionsof critique,in those respectsGreece looks alto-gether ike its WesternEuropean isters.Amongthe "culturalelite," the stratumto whichmy own fieldworkwas largelyconfined, there aremoreoverthose whoare as gracefullycosmopolitan, as intentupon one or anotherprogramof self-assertion,as accustomed o gettingalongwithoutbenefitof theguidanceof ethicaland intellectual absolutes as any soi-disant "modem" could ever hope to be.Amongthem, thereare even quite a few who are passionatelyinterested n thevery topic of "modernity"itself. The twist, however, in what mightotherwiseseem a quiteconsistenttableauarisesprecisely there: the topic of "modernity"is not, as it were, a traditional ne. It is a relativelyrecentimport.There are dif-ficultiesevenwiththe lexeme:modernikotita, ometimesused, haslargelyartisticovertones,andis not "good Greek";themorepurelyDemoticneoterikotita,am-biguous between "modernism" and "modernity," is a just-born coinage ofhardlyany currencywhatever.Thetopic is not theonly import,either.Theagentsof industrialization ave, since the late '50s, been no more often nativethan for-eign.9The constitutionallydemarcatedapparatuses f governmentareprimarilyderived,thoughnotquiteso recently, from those of FranceandBelgium. Hence,Greeceis in manyrespectsmodem without, so to speak, havingbecome so.Any institutional mportationor invasion is likely to spawn paradox.Withits most commonparadox, hatof "poly-mentality,"Greekshave been burdenedfor centuries;with it, they have, from the authorof the Byzantine epic Diyenis("Double-born")Akritas o Nikos Kazantzakis,provenquiteadept.Theparadoxof an importedor invasive modernityis, however, less tractable.The ironyimbeddedwithin t is aboveall theironyof whatin Bourdieu's 1984:120ff) sensemustbe nameda "dominated"freedom. Oneof my native interlocutors nce putthe matter n severe summary or me. "Politically," he said, "we arenot a col-ony. Culturally,we are."The forceof that ronyis of coursefelt beyondGreece, butwithinit perhapsmost acutely by the culturalelite, the stratummost frequentlycalled upon notsimplyto face it but to makesome articulateassizementof it as well. The ironyis inanycase importantly esponsible ormaking he taskof defininganddirectingthe Greeksituationquiteas fraughtwithuncertaintyandquiteas exasperatingasin fact it is. It is correlativelyresponsiblefor complicatingthat task with the cat-egorial requisitealso of definingand directingGreece's relation to the severalterritoriesof "the West"-a nonentity, perhaps,but a practicallyunavoidableone all the same. On this matteras on so many others, views are diverse. Themost gracefullycosmopolitan,the least absolutist of those with which I am ac-quainted s far less preoccupiedwith either "hellenicity" or "occidentality" assuch than with the creativeand re-creativepotentialof juxtaposingthe hellenic"here" withone or anotheroccidental "there." Indeed,if thereis a stylisticallyintegral"Greekmodem," whether n the artsor in politicsor in the no less vividdomainof personaldeportment, ts contentat least would seem to flow quitepre-cisely fromthat(oftenironic) uxtaposition.If there s sucha specifiably"Greek"modernity,it would, in my acquaintance,also seem to be wroughtby a quite


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uniformcadre. Not to be equatedwith the socioculturalupperclass, that cadrewouldneverthelessappear o be largelyif notentirelycomposedof personswho,in copious possessionof both social and culturalcapital,do in factbelong to theupperclass."Thatconjunctions by no means coincidental.Sophisticationn thehandlingof thejuxtapositionof thehellenic "here" andtheoccidental "there" is in fact aquiteself-conscious andquiteinexpendableuppercompetency,reflectingamongotherthings the very prodigioussanctiongiven to that sort of polylingual andpolycultural luency that can only be acquiredby those who have or who knowhow to obtainresourcessufficientto enablethem to travel,to live, andabove allto be educatedabroad-particularly in Paris,but also in Berlin, in London, andon the AmericanEast Coast. Sophistication n the exploitationof that uxtaposi-tion, in the (usuallypartial) nstrumentalizationf the "here" and the "there"and in the creativeplaying off of the one against the other, is also a self-con-sciously uppercompetency.No doubt it reflects, in some measure,a still domi-nated reedom. But it also reflects theconfidencepreciselyof thatsocial segmentthat,havingleast cause to worryover either the securityor the dominanceof itsnative standing, is consequently least likely to see either the "here" or the"there" as a preternaturalgency to be adoredor to be despisedbut in any casealtogetherbeyond being manipulatedor put to use. The several ethoses of thatsegmentcould not, in thatrespect, be in more strikingcontrast o those ethosestypicalof segments immediatelyunderneath. f the Greekmiddleclass has evenmore cause to worryover the securityof its (dominated)nativestanding han thelower ones, that is in partbecause it has moreto lose. If, on the otherhand, itslife chances are no less dependentuponthe convolutionof internationalogisticsthanthose of its lower analogues, they are less easily calculable, and the lifechancesof theolder,proprietaryractionof the middleclass inanycase calculabledifferently romthose of the newer, managerial raction. Middlereadingsof therelationsbetweenGreece and the West arecorrespondingly ense, andfrequentlyatodds. Someare moreworldlythanothers.Butmanyof thembetraya decidedlypretematuralizingeactionagainstvictimization, imagined, threatened,or real,fromwithin, fromwithoutor fromboth. Mystificationsperhaps,in partat least,such modelsof andmodelsforself-preservation re neverthelessobjectivelymo-tivated.Theydo not implya returnof the cosmos; in Greeceas mosteverywhereelse, traditionalism f that sortis largelydead.InGreece as most everywhereelse, on the otherhand, isolationism s not atall dead. In Greeceparticularly, he least mystifyingandleast mystified expres-sionsof it aretypicallyalso the mostexplicitly political. Hence, forexample, theplatformof the moderate,"interiorist"wing of the CommunistLeft. Somewhattooambivalent ver theworthof industrializationo be strongly"developmental-ist" (cf. Schneider,Schneider,and Hansen1972:340), thatplatform n anycasefavorsaftodhiakhirisi the self-managementof foreign enterprise,see Manezis1986:37)andtopiki aftodhiikisi "local self-government":a sortof administra-tive federalism irstbrought o Greekcountrysideby the Leftistresistanceduringthe Second WorldWar). It favorseducationalas well as most othersorts of self-


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sufficiency.It is converselyandquiteunderstandablygainstdependency,andisaccordinglyagainstGreece'sdeeplyentrenchedpoliticaland economicties to thecapitalistempires, especially the United States. Unlike its pro-Soviet, "exteri-orist"counterpart, nd rathermorelike theplatformof Papandreou's ulingPan-hellenic Socialist Movement, the interioristplatform s neutralist.Like the plat-form of all otherGreekparties,it is unabashedlynationalist.Withlittlechanceof enactment, t is moreoveralmostexclusively aplatformof principle,and it is in principleandby principleneither"vulgarly" Marxistnor"vulgarly"enthusiasticabout "cultural" revolutions.Its most usualproponentsaccordinglycome not from the proletariatbut from varioushigherclass sectors:the culturallydominant but economically dominatedliterati, the culturallyre-spectable"liberalprofessionals," and theculturallyrespectfulpetite bourgeoisie(Manezis1986:37). Its metataxicappeal,odd in some respects,is in anycase dueperhapsess to itsbeing stringentlyCommunist infactit is not)than o itsofferingacogentrepresentationaltrategyof resistance-and notsimplyagainsteconomicdomination,either. Beyond at least one military unta, beyond urbanpollutionandurbansprawl, beyond one of Europe'shighest rates of unemployment,de-pendency and peripheralizationhave also stimulatedand exacerbateda wide-spreadandself-suspectingcomplexof "relativedeprivation"-more preciselyof"cultural allenness" ordegradation. 2Thehighlyselective andoccasionallydis-approving aze of thetouristandtheforeignscholarhasonly reinforced hatcom-plex. The literati,the liberalprofessionals,andthepetite bourgeoisiehave alikesuffered from it most. Against it as well, the interioriststrategyis, briefly put,less negational han nversional.Itsabidingpostulate: f Greeceis fallen, thecap-italistWest has made it fall even further.

Isolationism, however, also has expression-still typically middling, butmoremystified, certainly ess literal andpoliticalthansymbolicandsentimental,considerably ess resistive thanmerelyreactive-in nostalgism,andparticularlyin a nostalgiafor the rustic and insularpuritiesof a Greece thatexisted, or sup-posedlyexisted, sometimein the not too distantpast:before thejunta, before in-dustrialization, uring he interludebetweenthe First andSecondWorldWars.Itis occasionallydisplaced into a love of everythinglaiko ("laic," "popular")."Essentialist" nGeertz'sprecisesense of thatterm(1973:241), it is occasionallydisplacedas well into a rathermore abstractpreoccupationwith the "true" sub-stanceof ellinikotita "Hellenicity," "Greekness"). It is, on theotherhand,dia-metricallyopposedto thestridentlyantinostalgic enomaniaorxenolatria("mad-ness for the foreign," "worshipof the foreign": often heardin Demotic) char-acteristicof those fractionsof the newermiddle class whose store of economic,social, andculturalcapitalis almostentirelyderivedby association,direct or in-direct,with one or anothermanufactural r academicenterprise f orin theWest.Both sorts of sentiment indaneasy enough objectin theethnographer-this oneat least. Evidently enough Western, I not infrequentlydiscoveredmyself in therole of the corrosiveinvader;andperhaps,anthropology till being, in our sup-posedly postcolonialera, a largelyunilateralundertaking, not infrequentlywas.No less frequently,however, I discoveredmyself in the role of the enviableem-


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issaryof an enviable land whose bounties could be but dreamed.I was in factonce told, by an up-and-coming ightistandnewer middlepoliticianwhose un-dauntedpro-Westerism I was busilyattempting o debunk,that"hegemonywasjust fine"; andwhetheror not othersof his same class cohortwould be quite soconvincedof hegemony'sgoodnesses, a greatmanyof themhave surrenderedoits seductionsall the same. That surrender s manifestin the mannerismand themimeticismof many of the accoutrementsand denizens of Athens' more chicquartiers.It is manifest n thenationaldebt, which has steadilyclimbed as moreandmoremoneyhas been spenton Western rappingsand Western uxuries. It ismanifestsometimesin an antipopulist nobbery,sometimesin a "taste" for thefolk.As elsewhere, so, too, in Greece, the convolutionsof internationalogisticsthuspressanalreadyoperativeschizmogenesisnotsimplytowardsentimentalbutalso towardstylisticextremes. Not coincidentally,the symbolic isolationistandhis orher "modernistic"alter show an almostcompulsivescorn forone another,all the morehostileperhapsbecauseboth are in competitionfor the same socio-cultural esources-in anyevent, forthe samesociocultural"space."'Anti-West-ernism, is, in the nameof authenticityamongotherthings, a weaponfrequentlywielded inthat nternal ontest;pro-Westemism s, usuallyinthenameof an "es-cape frombackwardness," requentlywielded as well. If a meetingof minds isunlikely,that s perhapsbecausesociocultural esourcesandsociocultural pacesareindeedscarce.Not everyoneis at leisure to gamblewithwhathe or she has.Nostalgiaand its opposite are, in Greece as perhapselsewhere, sentimentsof duress.Neithernostalgicnorantinostalgic,neither"essentialistic" nor"mod-ernistic," forthatmatterneither"epochalistic" (Geertz1973:241)nornecessar-ily "developmentalistic"either, the Greekmodem is somewhere moreleisurelyin between. The lesson is not that, in Greece or anywhereelse, what might bespokenof perhapsnot as anethos, certainlynot as anideology,13butinstead,andmoreabstractly,as the modem "alternative" s likely to be of little socioculturalimpact.InGreece atleast, inpartbecauseof the endowmentsof those whopursue

it, thatalternative s of no meanimpactat all. The lesson, perhaps, s rather hatthe taskof being and becoming modern is likely to be quite differentfrom oneplaceto thenext, andhence thatmodernity tself is likely to be not one butmanythings.The lesson, perhaps, s also thatthe task of being andbecomingmodern,however it mightdifferfromplace to place, is likely to be arduouseverywhere.A decidedlyunsettlingethnographic andof courseethnocentric)condescensionhas on severaloccasions alreadyresulted from makingfar too little of that ar-duousness.The issue is not, however, whether we can be free of all bias. Wecannotbe. We can, on the otherhand,atleastremindourselves thata self-servingreverenceof modernity s bound to do no more anthropologicalgood thantheorientalizingromanticizationof the primitive has already done. The issue iswhetherandto what extent it mightbe plausiblethatthe "modernalternative" sparticularlyuited,perhapsnot to what the world once was butto what, in all itsunisolated,frantic,andrelentlesslyweirdsplendor,it is now; andthatin its suit-ability-which is somethingelse besides either its effortlessnessor its adaptabil-ity-not simplyits anthropologicalbut its moralweight in fact lies.


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POSSIBLEMODERNITIES75

Notes

Acknowledgments. wouldlike to thankMiaFullerforreadingandcommentinguponsev-eralearlierdraftsof thisarticle. I wouldespecially like to thankPaulRabinow,for similarreadingsandcomments,and for numerous hallengingandproductivediscussions as well.The observationsuponwhichthis articleis based were collected fromOctober1986throughJune 1987. Financialsupportwas provided by the ITT InternationalFellowshipFoundation.Beyond the Foundation,I would like to thank the staffs of the InstituteofInternationalEducationand of the AmericanEducationalFoundation n Greece for pro-vidingme withinformation nd advicebefore,during,andaftermy stayin thefield. Whilethere,I was affiliatedwiththeAcademyof Athens'Center orResearchon GreekSociety,andwouldlike to thankGrigorisGizelis, Eva Kalpourtzi,and IlianaAndonakopoulou ftheCenter or theirconsiderable nformation,advice, andpatienceas well.'See Burckhardt1954). Weber'spositionis to be found in theclosing pagesof TheProt-estantEthic(1958:180-183). ForBlumenberg'sposition, see TheLegitimacyof theMod-ernAge (1983:469ff). Foucault'sposition is quiteelegantly suggestedin the secondpartof The Orderof Things(1970:217-221), but somewhatdifferently, and more explicitlystated in Discipline and Punish (1979:105-131), in which the politico-epistemics ofreformismaregiven centerstage. On the ideationalandattitudinal ineamentsof modern-ity, see Foucault's"What is Enlightenment?" 1984). Similarly,see Habermas' irstvol-ume of The Theory of CommunicativeAction (1984:211-226). Compare WolfgangSchluchter'sRise of WesternRationalism 1981). Barzun'sClassic, Romantic,and Mod-ern, a manifestoof antimodernismandpro-Romanticism) ppearedn 1943;Kern's"rhe-torical" portraitof a "cubist" modernity,The Cultureof Timeand Space: 1880-1918(1983), precisely40 yearslater.Blumenberg'sargumentn TheLegitimacyof theModernAge is specificallydirectedagainstKarlLowith's "medievalizing" and secularizationistreadingof modernity Lowith 1949;pace, cf. Blumenberg1983:27-35). The mostrecent,andsingularlysubtle, "Hellenizing" construalof modernity,afterNietzsche (cf. 1956),hasappearedn HaroldBloom's Agon (1982).2Parsonss by far the most influential.See, in particular,Lerner(1958) and the severalessays collected in OldSocieties andNew States (Geertz,ed. 1963). Parsons' mostdevel-opedstatement ppearsasStructure nd Process inModernSocieties(1960). ComparealsoBendix'smoreparticularistic TraditionandModernityReconsidered"(1967).3See,forthoseexceptions, Bourdieu(1972) andRabinow(1975).4Aparticularlytarkportrait nddiscussion of characteristicallymodernpolitico-epistemicbattlingmaybe foundinI, PierreRiviere . .. (Foucault,ed. 1975).5Foucault poke less of "the cosmos" than, more preciselyperhaps,of the "Classical,"thecollapseof whichin anycase allowed the "modernepisteme" to emerge(cf. Foucault1970:218-220). See, comparably,Blumenberg(1983:137ff) and Weber(on disenchant-ment, mosteloquently, 1946b:139-142, 155;on the loss of the "ethicallyordered"cos-mos, 1946a:350-357).6SeeespeciallyFallers'essay in Old SocietiesandNew States(1963:158-219).7So far as I know, the first(and still virtuallythe only) analysisof the historicizingcon-sciousnessundertakenby an anthropologist s to be found in the closing chapterof The


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376 CULTURALNTHROPOLOGY

SavageMind(L6vi-Strauss1966:258ff). It is indeed much less appreciatedhan it oughtto be, though t veers in its assertion hathistoryis a methodwithoutanobject(1966:262)so far fromethnographic ealityas to undermine he force of its largerargument.Sahlins'morerecentstudy(1985) has in fact almostnothingto say about the specificallyhistori-cizing consciousness,and his continualist,processualistview of the relationbetween cul-turalconceptionsand temporalevents (cf. 1985:144ff) seems to me not to offer a verypromisingapproach o an analysisof the conditions under which that consciousness hasemergedandhas succeededin reproducingtself, either. Incontrast,andbeyondBlumen-berg, see Foucault 1970:217-221, 328ff) andHaydnWhite(1973).8Ihave inmindparticularlyHaroldBloom's "practicalpoetics." BeyondAgon, see A MapofMisreading 1975:3-6, 83-105).9For heperiodbetween 1960 and1966, forexample,fully halfof all industrial nvestmentsinGreececame from multinational orporations. n 1970, one-thirdof theGreek ndustrialsectorwas still foreign. See Yannitsis(1986:256; 1983:94).'?Thepointhas been madeby several nativescholarsas well. Amongthem, see Tsoukalas(1983:38-39)."Hereandin the pagesthatfollow I use not Marx's notionof class but ratherBourdieu's,itself a synthesisof Marx's notion and Weber'snotion of the Stand, or statusgroup. SeeBourdieu'sDistinction(1984:xi-xii).'2Onoreign,particularlyAmerican, nvolvement n the 1967junta, scholarlyopinion(see,e.g., Yanoulopoulos1977:87;Tsoukalas1981:190ff;Veremis1986:141-142) is generallycautious, at least in print. Among the Greekpublic, however, there is very little doubtaboutthe CIA's facilitativerole in bringingthe colonels to power. As for the rateof un-employment,estimatesofficial, quasi-officialandunofficialrangedduringmy stay frombetween 9 and 20%.'3Foucault1984) indeedsuggests thatmodernitybe substantivelyconstruedas an ethos.It seemsto me, as the obviousenoughdifferenceof ethos betweensucha modemas Kantandsuch a modem as Foucault tself indicates, thatmodernity,conceived as I have beenparticularly onceiving it throughout his article as a personalcondition, would betterbeconstrued s imposingcertainphenomenological onstraintspreclusiveof the formationofcertainethosesand facilitativeof theformationof avarietyof others.Similarly, modernityis not itself a "model of and model for" the managementof anyparticular racticalprob-lem whatever-not even the problemof foundations.At most, it imposes those limitswithinwhich suchmodelsmust,whatever heirpurposes,be wrought-at least if they areto be "modern."

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