Publisher's Synopsis
"Modernity and identity" is a collective work which announces a radical new departure within contemporary debates on modernism and postmodernism.;While dominant conceptions of both modernism and postmodernism are centred around notions of stasis and fixity, for most of the otherwise quite diverse writers in this book modernity is a matter of "movement", or "flux", or "change", and of "unpredictability".;Modernity and postmodernity are shown to mean, not the "end of the subject", but instead the transformation and creation of new forms of subjectivity. Anthropological concepts are brought squarely into the heart of the modernity controversies, which are then recast in the context of tradition, of globalization, and of the crises of identity in a newly de-centred world system.;The book opens up the possibility of a "third way", rejecting the opposition between the impersonal rationality of high modernism and the irrationalist anti-ethics of postmodernism. The vision in this book is that of "another" modernity, which counterposes Baudelaire to Rousseau, and localist ethics to abstract bluebrints for social and political re-organization.
