Introduction

Abstract

Modernity, according to Marshall Berman and others, seems to have penetrated everywhere in the globe, overcoming physical boundaries of space and social barriers of difference. Yet the experience of modernity may be simultaneously seductive and threatening, freeing and restraining, creative and stultifying. Its power of “creative destruction” (Harvey 1989:16), destroying the old to build the new, has been a deeply ambivalent and contradictory process, a dilemma aptly summarized by the elder Maasai man.

There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience “modernity.” To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.”

—Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air

But really, I don’t want our culture to be changed, because if we change our culture we will all be stupid. But I also don’t want development to be lost, because if it is lost we will all go to the bush.

—Elder Maasai man, 1992

I am indebted to Cindi Katz and Barbara Cooper for carefully reading earlier drafts of the introduction and helping me untangle several vexing snarls of thought.