Modernity

05/24/13 • 8 min

Some would argue that 'modernity' encapsulates your and my experience of being alive now, in the 21st century. So what is 'modernity'? In this episode, we cover the basics. I divide the modern era into three periods: mercantile (or early modern); modern; and late-modern (or post-modern).

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Nation and Nationalism

Many of us, whether from Macedonia or Malaysia, Mexico or Madagascar, identify strongly with our nation. Implicitly, we understand the nation as a group of citizens whose rights and responsibilities are mediated by state. This idea emerged from France and the US in the late 1700s, replacing the certainties of “King and Country” and “Christendom”. The idea is that the people of a nation possess something real which ties them together. However, anthropologists think that the nation is actually a product of the imagination.

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Mind and Matter

According to a modern world view, things exist which can be measured in terms of weight, length, volume, time, temperature, etc.. A spoon or a stone has all these qualities. We call such things “matter” and we have made “science” the proper study of them. The other kind of thing that exists includes consciousness, soul, thought, and feeling. We do not think a spoon or a stone possesses these qualities. We call such thinking-things “mind”. This mind-matter distinction is not made in all cultures. Indeed, things like stones and spoons may have mind. Stones may be, as the Ojibwa see it, non-human persons—certain humans can talk with them. Among the Mardu Aborigines, Tonkinson shows us, some sacred “stones are revered as metamorphosed parts of the bodies of ancestral beings” who created the world as we know it. As such these stones may have a vital power or life essence.