This article explores the concept of 'modernity' that is often associated with West. Using Malaysia's modernisation project as a case study, it offers insight into Malaysian modernity in post-Mahathir era. Apart from dealing question what version government intends to achieve, this also highlights issues identity, Asian values, multiculturalism and religion. It places Malaysia discourse argues ...

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often claimed as a harbinger of modernity. In this essay, I compare Ecclesiastes with two overlapping constructions of modernity, taken from Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor, focusing especially on Taylor’s motifs of inwardness, narrativity, meaninglessness, and ordinary life. I suggest that the likeness to modernity in Ecclesiastes is a complex bundle of e...

Background.The analysis of past research shows that the study of mental illness was part of the agenda of the founders of the discipline of sociology. Additionally, the sociological study of mental illness changes to reflect the mark of historical periods such as premodernity, modernity and postmodernity.Aim.The aim of this study is to compare and contrast some modern sociological theories of m...

The so-called “third world” has often experienced modernity and its version of the “city” in some of their most grotesque forms where Iran has not been an exception. In other words, North-Atlantic powers have historically played the midwife for a father-figure-like modernity and its “third world” concubines, the result of which has been the birth of “monstrosities” of all kinds. Focusing mainly...

T he motion picture medium during its first few decades offers a vivid instance of a nineteenth-century technology which simultaneously gave form to and was shaped by the conceptions of space, time and event which defined the culture of modernity. Whether we invoke modernity in Baudelaire’s sense of the transitory, the fugitive and the contingent, or the sense of the mass reproduction attendant...

Tom Misa indicates in a proposition in his chapter. This implies a further proposition about technology and modernity being interconnected. It is this idea of interconnectedness that led us to deplore the “great divide” between detailed technology studies, with their claim of situated developments and contingency, and abstract or theoretical discussions of modernity. We exaggerated a bit in ord...