This paper claims that architecture is a contingent discipline, despite the fact that its contingency has long been denied through a retreat to Vitruvian writing. It is evident that contingency is rejected not only by architecture but also by modernity as a whole. Vitruvius attempted to cover the entire field of architecture in a systematic form in order to bring the whole body of this great di...

This article discusses new uses of interpretative repertoires of risk, especially those related to adventure. The author argues that the language of risk as adventure has multiple uses, as both a hedge against de-traditionalizing processes typical of late modernity and a figure of speech for new sensitivities stemming from the imperative of coping with the imponderability and volatility of mode...

As reproduction becomes increasingly biomedicalized throughout the globe, reproductive technologies are used in unique ways and imbued with different meanings. This article explores why lower-class women in south India in the 1990s were demanding to have childbirth labors induced with oxytocin drugs while rejecting anesthesia. Cultural constructions of women's reproductive power are evoked and ...

This article reports of two studies addressing the meaning of primary and secondary control beliefs for transition to modernity and modern adoles­ cents. Study 1 participants (N = 365) were Malaysian (transition to mod­ ernity), and German and North American (modern) adolescents. Study 2 participants (N = 757) were Israeli Druze (transition to modernity) and Israeli Jewish (modern) adolescents....

This paper explores women inheritance as a cultural paradigm of the intersection between modernity and tradition in Francis Imbuga’s Aminata. It pinpoints such through lens post-colonialism. The Kenyan native is influenced by British imperial modernity. Therefore, it demonstrates dichotomy traditions because natives reject any foreign interference their affairs, which not sufficiently tackled p...

In his 1996 article ―Enduring Substances, Trying Theories‖, Sidney Mintz returned to a theme that has been central to his work on the Caribbean, that of the region‘s fundamental and historically specific modernity. Discussing the rise of the plantation system from the sixteenth century onwards and the importation of enslaved and indentured labour, he observes as follows: The enterprises for whi...

This article lays out an agenda for research on the establishment of psy cultures in Latin America. It begins by analyzing some of the debates on the nature of psychoanalysis, a discipline located between the sciences, philosophy and common sense. It argues that the place of psy cultures needs to be problematized as emerging out of modernity in a cultural space like Latin America, where the ver...

This essay examines President Nixon’s drug policy during the early 1970s, specifically the government’s reaction to heroin use by American soldiers in Vietnam. The official response, discursively (through the employment of the drugs-as-a-disease metaphor) and on the policy level, illustrated how issues of nationaland self-identity, othering, and modernity intersected in the formulation and impl...

When we had the good fortune to study the Klasies River Mouth Cave remains at the South African Museum in 1989, the isolated partial zygomatic KRM 16651 presented us with a morphometric challenge. The face of the bone appeared quite large, but only a small portion of the inferior border was preserved, and that mostly under the temporal process. No measuring points allowed standard comparisons t...

This collection, the editors believe, is the first volume to bring together the themes of war, medicine and modernity. By contrast to cultural historians for whom "modernityand modernism becomes little more than a prelude to the invention of post-modernity", theirs is the modernity of Max Weber rather than of Igor Stravinsky-a nexus of government, bureaucracy, the military, and the professions....