Demodernization

A Future in the Past

Mikhail Minakov, Yakov Rabkin

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838293561
• Index: Social Sciences

Medical doctors driving taxis, architects selling beer on street corners, scientific institutes closed down amid rusting carcasses of industrial plants—these images became common at the turn of the 21st century in many once modern "civilized" countries. In quite a few of them, long-time neighbours came to kill each other, apparently motivated by the newly discovered differences of religion, language, or origin. Civil nationalism gave way to tribal, ethnic, and confessional conflict. Rational arguments of geopolitical nature have been replaced by claims of self-righteousness and moral superiority. These snapshots are not random. They are manifestations of a phenomenon called demodernization that can be observed from the banks of the Neva to the banks of the Euphrates, from the deserts of Central Asia to the English countryside and all the way to the city of Detroit. Demodernization is a growing trend today, but it also has a history. Seventeen scholars, including historians, philosophers, sociologists, and archaeologists, offer their well substantiated views of demodernization. The book is divided into three parts dedicated to conceptual debates as well as historical and contemporary cases. It book provides a wealth of empirical materials and conceptual insights that provide a multi-faceted approach to demodernization.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Foreword
• Undoing Years of Progress
• Ancient Modernities and Societal Decline
• What Kind of Modernity at the End of the Middle Ages? Problems and Definitions
• Museology of Demodernization: Ruins of a Mining Village in Northern Chile
• Reborn Savages: Demodernization in Modern Iraq
• Demodernization as Orientalization: The Case of Iraq
• Demodernization versus Modernization in the Wake of the Iraq-Iran War
• The Many Faces of Demodernization: The Case of Palestine
• Demodernization in Abruzzo: How Modernization Produced Tradition
• Demodernization in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe
• Tajikistan: The Elusiveness of a National Consciousness
• Demodernization in Post-Soviet Literature
• Is Protestantism More or Less than Modern?
• Demodernization and Democratization: Traditional Leaders in Postapartheid South Africa
• The Nation-State and its Refugees: Is Abuse of Human Rights Inevitable?
• Which Modernity? Which Demodernization?
• Customary Law and Informal Institutions: A Challenge to the Concept of Demodernization
• From Demodernization to Degrowth
• Information about the Contributors
• Copyright