Modernizaiton as a Problem: An Anthropological View

Abstract

Modernization, as a concept, has been widely used in social science. It has experienced definition and redefinition in its use as a tool to help explain social and cultural change. This article tentatively examines the concept as used in anthropology and suggests a "strategy for study" about an on-going, historical process.When a concept or idea in social science has been in use for more than 25-50 years, it tends to follow a cycle of definition, redefinition, defense, attack and virtual abandonment as a guide for research or new formulation, and finally finds a reduced place in the accepted budget of theoretical discourse. Modernization, as a process of social change, has gone through all but the final phase in the vicissitudes of the conceptual cycle. This paper is, in part an attempt to place the concept of modernization in the accepted armory of devices pointing to continued and fruitful research and generalization. The approach is to view modernizaiton, in the light of more than 25 years research, as a problem, and to see what an anthropological perspective does for the solution of that problem.Modernization, as a process of social change, has long been a problem to all of the social sciences. In fact, social science, as a disciplined systematic inquiry into the life of man in rule governed groups, was born from the 19th century concern with the movement of Western society from traditional to modern, or more precisely, from feudal, hierarchial, rural, and agricultural social forms to capitalistic, class, urban, and industrial forms. The hierarchial, organic, and static traditional society had become the class structured, agonistic, individualistic, and mobile dynamic society. This change, incremental and centuries long, was viewed by 19th century intellectuals tand many in the 20th century) as a watershed divide in history, the problem of social change to be accounted for, explained, celebrated, or deplored. The 19th century sociologists, many of them, and certainly the most influential among them, tended to think in polar opposites, in social dichotomies, in ideal types, paralleling the great divide theory of social change, and, of course, the evident success and power of the industrial