Sundanese Karawitan And Modernity

Karawitan sebagai seni tradisi hingga saat ini masih digemari masyarakat. Pada konteks keberadaannya di dalam masyarakat sekarang, seni tradisi dihadapkan semacam paradoks. Disatupihak, untuk bertahan hidup membutuhkan daya tarik dan pesona, berupa inovasi-inovasi kreatif yang bersumber dari tradisi itu sendiri; di pihak lain, melakukan Perubahan dan inovasi dari tradisi samaartinya dengan menghapus tradisi itu sendiri, karena tradisi tidak mentolelir transformasi.Metode yang digunakan pada penelitian ini bersifat kualitatif dengan landasan berfikir fenomenologis interpretif yang berorientasi pada kebenaran yang bersifat subjektif dari sumber penelitian. Pengumpulan data denganmenggunakan wawancara mendalam (in-depth interview)merupakan pengumpulan data utamadalam penelitian ini.Saat ini ada kecenderungan proses kombinasi baru antarseni tradisi dengan seni modern. Modernisasi bukan untukdihindari, melainkan harus dimanfaatkan untuk memutakhirkan keseniantradisional.Upaya ini sebenarnya penyiasatan agar kesenian tradisional tetap bertahan.Banyak kesenian tradisional yang dapat bertahan justru karena mengikuti arusmodernisasi dan globalisasi itu.Katakunci: Karawitan, SeniTradisi Sunda, Inovas

Europe and the emergence of modernity. The entanglement of two reference cultures

This article offers a theory of the notion ‘reference culture’ by taking as major examples modernity and Europe. Both constitute reference cultures and while different are closely related. A certain entanglement took place between the emergence of modernity and the formation of European culture whereby the latter came to be one of the main carriers of modernity. However, they need to be separated in that Europe, while being the first major expression of modernity, is not the only embodiment of modernity. Modernity can be termed a first-order reference culture and Europe a second-order one. While there have been many second-order reference cultures, the European one was an influential and powerful one, but it was also a temporary one. This article sets out the main features that define the specificity of Europe. Against accounts that emphasize a master narrative or an underlying cultural unity to Europe, it is argued that crucial to the making of Europe was the formation of modes of communication that enabled common practices to develop across a range of different cultures. In this way, it is argued, Europe consolidated as a consequence less of endogenous factors than exogenous ones. Important, too, was the mobile nature of European culture which facilitated translation into other cultures and which was also receptive to modernity. The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of other varieties of modernity and the global decline of the European mode

Modernity and Sustainability

Since always sociology disclaimed about the role of science and technique. First, it used to analyse the firms, making some critics, during their period of the highest expansion and industrialisation, and later focussing on their unpredictability and uncontrollability. Science and technique follow the fate of modernity. The human activities through science and technique modify the society and, as it’s happening any time more, they create risks even more uncontrollable. From the risk hypothesis we pass into the threat until arriving to a real crisis. From the different crisis of the post-modernity era, the most severe seems to be the environmental one. This work analysis how, through the risks linked to the unpredictability of human actions we arrive to the modernity and post-modernity crisis. Attention is put on the consequences of this crisis, driving men to solve the existing problems, creating from the beginning the base principles of the society itself, in a sustainable path

The Construction of Touristic Modernity in Xizhou

Tim Oakes’ (1998) concept of touristic modernity accurately describes how the Chinese national discourse surrounding tourism, as both a tool for economic growth and nation-building, has shaped what the local reality has become for many towns and villages in the peripheral regions of China, especially those with large populations of ethnic minorities. Specifically in the Dali Bai Autonomous Region, foreign tourism followed by nostalgia-fueled domestic tourism has transformed Dali into a commercialized tourist destination, which has begun to spill out to other towns around the lake such as Xizhou. Touristic modernity is not, however, a singular homogenous force that culturally and physically transforms a given location overnight; instead, the construction of touristic modernity is a process that involves multiple contributing actors. In Xizhou, where the construction of touristic modernity is in its beginning stages, three main actors who are contributing to this process can be identified: domestic tourists, the Linden Centre, and local people

Biological variables in forager fertility performance: a critique of Bongaarts' model

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 60During the period of the 1960s and 1970s, a considerable amount of scholarly energy was devoted to studying the process of "modernization." Scholars, particularly political scientists and anthropologists, theorized extensively over exactly what modernization was and debated how it could best be quantified and measured.1 By the 1980s, however, the very notion of the "modern," along with its antithesis, the "traditional" was falling out of favor. Indeed, by declaring the new era "post-modern," the academic avant-guard signaled that the concept of modernity had effectively been relegated to the past. The past, however, is the turf of historians, so perhaps now that the concept of modernity has become old-fashioned it is time for historians to take their turn at examining its meaning. This paper will approach the concept of the "modern" by examining the role of advertising in creating notions of modernity in independence-era Ghana. Ghana, at the time of independence in 1957, was a country of supreme optimism about the future. Not only did Ghanaians see themselves as being on the cutting edge politically (as the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence), but they also believed that independence would bring a new era of economic development and wealth. Ghana, as a country, was "going places." The new nation's optimism found many manifestations, but this paper will focus on only one aspect of this exuberance—representations of transportation as modernity in the advertisements and articles of Ghana's premier newspaper, the Daily Graphic. As stated before, early scholarship on modernization was concerned primarily with developing a way of measuring the demise of the traditional and the rise of the modern. Such studies focused on examining populations of "traditional" or "transitional" peoples to attempt to discern just how "modern" they had or had not become. What the previous studies did not consider, and what this paper seeks to examine, is exactly how modernity was presented to and by such populations. No single factor seems to represent modernity more than motion itself—be it actual movement across space or be it social and economic change. Indeed, Daniel Lerner, the prominent scholar of modernity, defined the key aspect of being modern as having... [TRUNCATED

Book Review: Paul Michael Garrett, Social work and social theory: Making connections. The Policy Press: Bristol, 2013, ISBN 9781847429605

It is important to state at the outset that I enjoyed this book, or at least large sections of it, but I also found it rather frustrating. The book is made up of 11 chapters and following an introductory chapter, is split into two parts. The first is concerned with ‘debating modernity’ made up of four chapters which critically analyse some of the most high-profile social theorists of recent times and their approaches to understanding contemporary society and recent social change – Giddens, Beck and Bauman in particular – together with some of the social work writers who have drawn on this body of work. The remaining two chapters in part one are then concerned with drawing on Marx, particularly Das Capital, for making sense of modernity and convincingly argues for replacing the concept of modernity with an explicit use of

Indonesia, Modernity and Some Problems of Religious Adaptation

This article discusses the challenges of adaptation for Indonesian religion. It describes the ways that the major Indonesian religions have changed to fit the requirements of being recognized religions, and focuses as an example on the ways that Balinese Hinduism has changed to become Agama Hindu Dharma Indonesia. It also examines the traditional theological problem of “faith and works” in the Indonesian context, and the concerns used to balance modernization and religious freedom

On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

Brazil: Modernity and Mobility

This essay examines the field of Brazilian mobility studies, concentrating mainly on recent (2010-2013) scholarship by Portuguese-speaking Brazilian academics published in English-language journals. The mass demonstrations and violent protests that have erupted in Brazilian urban centres over the past one hundred years demonstrate the importance of mobility to Brazil’s traveling public. Several strikes by transport workers have occurred since 1903 and, over the past fifty years, there have been numerous passenger revolts too: in São Paulo in 1947, in Rio de Janeiro in 1974-5, and most recently in 2013, when protests over a proposed twenty centavos (eight US cents) increase in the price of a bus ticket broke out in more than a dozen cities. While Brazilians care deeply about their public transport, they also like their cars. The nation has had a love affair with the car since the 1920s that shows no sign of diminishing