This article analyzes the major characteristics of modernity, of modern civilization; the major analytical approaches related to the major social structures and the contemporary state. The core of this analysis is the notion of multiple modernities. This idea assumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world is for modernity to be seen as a story of continual formation, constitutio...

FINAL TEXT (as delivered 23 Sept, 2007) I have been asked to speak on “Healing, the Individual Search for Meaning, and Modernity”. This is a fascinating topic that connects with my own research on several levels. As some of you know, my first ethnographic fieldwork was an investigation of Sekai Kyusei-kyo, one of the 700 or so new religions founded in Japan in the 20 century – and a religion fo...

‘Confessional culture’ is a particularly controversial aspect of tabloidization, condemned by many within the media industry as trivial or even degrading. Others argue that, apart from the positive audience response, public explorations of the subjective are an important flexing of the boundary between the public/rational/masculine and the private/affective/female domains. Having first consider...

Our late modernity has been characterized by Zygmunt Bauman and Hartmut Rosa as, respectively, “liquid” “accelerated”. These are demanding aspects of reality that have elicited both adaptive resisting responses. While the drive to adapt generally favoured, especially corporate sector, a certain resistance tendency is also notable among ordinary citizens. It will be argued in this paper, first, ...

Rightwing populism is characterized by critique of immigration, but populist parties also address existential anxieties late or liquid modernity. I argue that regular churchgoers reject the Sweden Democrats not only because they hold different opinions on due to their strong social capital. The latter helps them cope with modern anxieties, and this makes less inclined accept message populists.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent that ordinary people in Argentina understand and believe the ideas of development, progress and modernity and use these ideas in evaluating the world in general, and family behaviour in particular. We ask whether the concept of development and modernity is known and understood by ordinary people and the extent to which ordinary people use deve...

Introduction Modernity has reached a dead end. The optimism in which the modern world was conceived and nurtured has been replaced by a thoroughgoing skepticism that denies the possibility of making meaningful truth claims, especially when those claims bear on morality and religion. The irony is that this has occurred as we have become increasingly confident of scientific utterances. Thus, as o...

Thinking about the ‘identity crisis’ of the modern institution of the university, I was wondering about the following most general questions: does the current passage to late modernity and to the information age, the decline of the role of the nation-state and the increasing power of processes of globalisation mean the inevitability of the radical reformulation of the social mission and tasks o...