Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Frequently, the term “modernity” is used without the need to specify global location, since it is understood that it implies the West or a universal standard. Since modernization has long been considered Western and originally rooted in European Enlightenment, the term “modernization” has acquired a kind of hegemonic cultural value in the West. As “modernization” and “development” are often mutually associated, the terms attached to them are produced within and by a particular context, that of the so-called West, generating a particular discourse about them. As such, many non-Western countries have challenged the “normative” status of Western modernity and advocated a different view of modernity and a particular path of modernization, characterized by local needs and cultural traits. Yet how has culture become an important role in the notion of “modernization”? This paper presents a comparative study of how the West understands non-Western modernization in a dichotomous way, including Chinese modernization, and how China asserts their own at the official as well as at the popular/nationalist level.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: McGlone and Hopkins will discuss how the classical myth of the hero’s journey is rediscovered in modern storytelling, specifically the modern documentary. They will introduce Joseph Campbell’s concept of the monomyth, the seventeen-stage hero’s journey of departure (separation), initiation, and return, as it applies to a modern documentary where the journey of ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations can be interpreted in light of this model.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: One of the principal issues addressed by Max Weber was the question of why modern "rational" industrial capitalism emerged in the "West" and nowhere else. The answer, he asserted, was to be found in the legal and political characteristics unique to Western civilization. In his unfinished "Sociology of Law", Weber attempted a comparative study of the legal structures of other "cultural" systems in order to determine why these provided for institutional pre-conditions unfavorable to the development of modern industrial capitalism.

Largely overlooked in subsequent decades because of its association with Orientalist scholarship, the recent emergence of popular discourses concerning Islam's compatibility with democracy, capitalism and "modernity" in general has spurred renewed academic interest in this aspect of Weber's thought. Following in the model of the Sociology of Law, and building upon the work of Bryan S. Turner and Wolfgang Schlucter, this paper will reconstruct a "Weberian" paradigm for Islamic legal and institutional development. It will be shown that Weber judged Islamic societies to possess a "substantively irrational" legal system and "patrimonial" political structure fundamentally opposed to the "formally rational" legal system and the "legal state" that emerged in Europe alongside modern industrial capitalism. Following thereafter will be a discussion of the critique developed by Patricia Crone, which demonstrates how the legal rationale underlying Weber's thesis could be entirely inverted to the same dim conclusion concerning Islamic societies. This paper intends to show that legal systems are not monolithic and immutable, but rather develop organically in response to the currents of society.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: This paper argues that resistance to “modernity,” i.e., cultural transformation of society, in rural Pakistan was fueled by unequal distribution of “modernization,” i.e., material transformation of society. Advancing the critique of modernization theory, especially one offered by structuralists and dependency theorists, the paper further argues that modernization, which forms the foundation of modernity, encourages “traditional” sectors of life to coexist with “modern” sectors of life to serve the needs of capitalist growth with cheap and docile labor. As such, it is not the “tradition” that is at issue; it is rather “selective distribution of modernization” that nurtures tradition alongside modernity. Is Pakistan too “traditional” to allow for modernity? Or has modernization been selectively used to permeate only in the targeted sectors of Pakistani society?