Editors’ Foreword
Medical doctors driving taxis, architects selling beer on street corners, scientific institutes closed down amid rusting carcasses of industrial plants, prisoners beheaded in front of cameras—these images have become all too common since the turn of the twenty-first century. Functioning states such as Iraq, Lybia, and Syria were destroyed and set back by decades, if not centuries, in their development.
Prostitution serving wealthy foreigners came to be considered a desirable career choice for women in Yeltsin’s Russia, where 60 percent of high school girls were reported ready to exchange sex for foreign currency (Avgerinos 2006).
In other countries, longtime neighbors killed each other, apparently motivated by the newly discovered incompatibilities of religion, language, or origin. Civic nationalism gave way to tribal, ethnic, and confessional identities in Europe, not only in the East, where nationalism is congenitally ethnic, but also in countries like the Netherlands and Finland, hitherto considered paragons of tolerance and civility.
Nativism came back in Canada and the United States. Rational arguments of a geopolitical nature were replaced by claims of self-righteousness and moral superiority (e.g., “Axis of Evil”). Fake news became ubiquitous, spreading instantly around the world by the most modern means of communication.
Language came to spell magic rather than inform, and mass media became “a tool of obscurantism,” undermining rational thinking (Кара-Мурза 2017, 350).
These snapshots are not random: They are all manifestations of demodernization, a phenomenon that can be observed from the banks of the Neva to the valleys of the Euphrates and over to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope and from the deserts of Central Asia to the Spanish countryside, all the way to the city of Detroit. It brings together seemingly disparate trends and helps us form a picture that shows what continues to affect everyday life in the context of neoliberal globalization, whose slogan could well be a parody on Marx: “Capitalists of the world, unite!”
Author(s): Yakov Rabkin, Mikhail Minakov
Edition: Print
Publisher: Ibidem-Verlag
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 428 Se
City: Stuttgart
Tags: Sociology, Social Theory, Demodernization, Neoliberal Globalization
Contents
Editors’ Foreword by Yakov M. Rabkin and Mikhail Minakov .......... 7
Yakov M. Rabkin
Undoing Years of Progress ................................................................. 15
Fabian D. Zuk
Ancient Modernities and Societal Decline ......................................... 45
Philippe Genequand
What Kind of Modernity at the End of the Middle Ages?
Problems and Definitions ................................................................... 81
Francisco Rivera
Museology of Demodernization:
Ruins of a Mining Village in Northern Chile .................................... 107
Orit Bashkin
Reborn Savages: Demodernization in Modern Iraq ......................... 137
Detlev Quintern
Demodernization as Orientalization: The Case of Iraq .................... 161
Hitoshi Suzuki
Demodernization versus Modernization
in the Wake of the Iraq–Iran War ...................................................... 177
Ilan Pappé
The Many Faces of Demodernization: The Case of Palestine ......... 189
Guy Lanoue
Demodernization in Abruzzo:
How Modernization Produced Tradition ......................................... 205
Mikhail Minakov
Demodernization in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe ............................ 237
Richard Foltz
Tajikistan: The Elusiveness of a National Consciousness .............. 257
Marc Jeandesboz
Demodernization in Post-Soviet Literature ...................................... 283
Olivier Bauer
Is Protestantism More or Less than Modern? ................................... 311
5Jo-Ansie van Wyk
Demodernization and Democratization:
Traditional Leaders in Postapartheid South Africa .......................... 329
Meir Amor
The Nation-State and its Refugees:
Is Abuse of Human Rights Inevitable? ............................................ 345
Jean-Luc Gautero
Which Modernity? Which Demodernization? ................................... 371
Marc Goetzmann
Customary Law and Informal Institutions:
A Challenge to the Concept of Demodernization ............................ 385
Bertrand Cochard
From Demodernization to Degrowth ............................................... 405
Information about the Contributors .................................................. 419
