Modernity in Question? Culture and Religion in an Age of Global Modernity

Abstract

I would like to present an analytical framework that seeks to make sense of two seemingly contradictory developments over the last two decades: economic and political globalization that is taken generally to point to unprecedented global integration, and the resurgence of religions or, more broadly, traditionalisms, that create new political and cultural fractures, or reopen old ones. Most discussions of global developments privilege one or the other of these phenomena. We are all familiar with the by now prolific literature on globalization offering visions (or threats) of impending global integration and homogenization, in which the divisiveness introduced by religious revivals appears merely as a legacy of the past, one that is likely to be bridged by an irresistible globalization that reshapes the world. On the other side are analyses in which religious revivals are everything, not as remnants of the past but as products of modernity that point to multiple modernities or “clashes of civilizations” as the human fate for the foreseeable future. Emphasis on one or the other precludes recognition that integration and fragmentation—or homogenization and heterogenization—may be contradictory aspects of the same processes that are restructuring the globe.