In his groundbreakingNationalism Reframed,Rogers Brubaker challenges conventional understandings of nations and nationalism by advancing a distinctive, if not innovative, approach to the subject. Drawing on recent theoretical developments that problematize the realist ontology implicitly assumed in previous literatures, Brubaker calls for an institutionalist approach to the study of nations and nationalism. As he points out, nation and nationhood can be better understood not as substance but as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, and not as entity but as contingent event (1996:18). He then employs this approach to analyze the breakdown of the Soviet Union. According to Brubaker, nationhood and nationality were institutionalized in the Soviet Union in two different modes: political-territorial and the ethno-personal. While the incongruence between these two modes led to tensions and contradictions within Soviet society, the dual legacy of such an institutionalization, manifesting itself as unintended consequences, eventually shaped the disintegration of the Soviet Union and continues to structure nationalist politics in the successor states today.
This article offers a framework for exploring the relevance of modernity to contemporary East Asia. I first examine different conceptualizations of modernity, paying special attention to Eisenstadt's influential concept of multiple modernities. Second, I point out the limitations and flaws of Eisenstadt's theory by drawing on nationalist politics in East Asia as an illustrative case. In particular, I examine the so‐called “history perception problem,” which has been created by war and shaped by the legacies of war, to demonstrate the peculiar features of modernity in East Asia. Third, I use the works by three scholars as examples to show how intellectuals in China, South Korea, and Taiwan respond to the tensions between universalism and particularism, which, as a whole, reflect what can be called “East Asian modernity.” And finally, I try to respond to the controversial but fashionable question that is peculiar to East Asia: can modernity be overcome? It is argued that East Asia can be understood through the lens of modernity, and vice versa. Nowadays, modernity has become a global condition in both geographical and topological senses. It is not something to be overcome, but a condition that we all live in and should learn to live with, here and now.
The essay reviews the trajectories of cultural sociology in three East Asian societies, namely Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, which show interesting parallels and distinctive developments within their respective social and historical contexts. Sociologists in these societies in general, and cultural sociologists in particular, have endeavored to reflect on the cultural ramifications of the social and political changes wrought by the processes of modernization, (de-)colonization and democratization. By building on the efforts of their predecessors and taking inspiration from new theoretical ideas from the West, cultural sociologists in these Asian societies have blazed a long trail beyond the conventional approach of the sociology of culture. By seriously considering the analytic autonomy of culture, their works have sought to wrestle with the issues of meaning, identity, morality, trust, everyday life, collective consciousness, community and resistance under the increasing influences of state power, markets and global hegemony.
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