Bruno Latour shows us how the history of modernity represents modern Western culture. The author uses his construct as a metaphor for modern culture and its relationship to the world around it. [Sources: 0, 7]
Dutton also analyzes how new forms of social identity have emerged in the culture of consumerism and urban modernity. Chakrabarty provinces the history of modern culture and its relationship to the world around it by examining the relationship between modernism, modern society and the modern world as a whole. To pluralize our understanding of “modernity,” Woodside attributes modernization in China, Vietnam, and Korea to sophisticated bureaucratic and political systems, as well as a lack of cultural diversity. [Sources: 2]
In the 1990s, some Chinese art critics were convinced that a single Eurocentric modernity could only be conceived and imitated. In short, there is a tendency to transform a general deconstruction of the modern world into a one-dimensional representation of Western culture and culture. The absoluteness of “Western modernizations” was constructed, and myth became the determining reality. [Sources: 6]
On the one hand, there were those who wanted to resist international and Western cultural influences in their own way and who recognized and asserted the importance of the international for the development of modern art and culture in China and elsewhere. Modern artists tried to overcome the local and ecclesiastical conditions and to create a formal language valid for all times and places. The school of Paris and the international modern movements meant everything that the word “national” could contain. [Sources: 6, 9]
The second argument places modernity in the context of Vietnam’s history and its transformation from pre-colonial to modern times. Woodside and Dutton reject the chronology of colonial modernizations and emphasize the importance of local history for the development of Vietnam’s modern art and culture. In other words, this approach to Western-initiated modernization overemphasizes the fact that Vietnam has moved from “pre-modernity” to “modernity.” By locating modernity in pre-colonial Vietnam, Wood D Sutton shows the need to emphasize the role of local history and local cultural and political conditions in modern culture in this country. [Sources: 2]
The following group of Vietnam scholars presents modernity in the context of local history and the local cultural and political conditions in Vietnam’s history. [Sources: 2]
This introduction briefly explains the theory of cultural modernity, and the scholars discuss Chakrabarty’s attempt to explain the intertwined processes of modernization and modernization. By rethinking the concept of modernity, including multiple modernity, we are introducing the theories of “cultural” and “modernity” in the context of Vietnam’s cultural history. This essay questions the relationship between modernism and cultural modernisation in Vietnam and other parts of the world and will argue for the importance of refraining from the idea of a one-to-one connection between the two, partly overlapping and partly competing patterns of human history and culture. [Sources: 2, 5, 11]
Social change studies focus on modernity, but their reference to it is very casual, and they focus only on cultural modernisation, not on social change itself. [Sources: 8]
In other words, the authors characterize the tendency to view the process of modernization and social change as reflective and judgmental. Modernity is understood as a process in which the term “culture” stands for human culture, language and practice, defined by a specific understanding of the social background. It follows that culture is redeemed in one aestheticization (present) and in the other (past), where social modernization fragments culture. The first represents the modernisation of culture in its modern form and the second represents the cultural modernisation of society. [Sources: 2, 11]
As an analytical concept and normative ideal, modernity is closely linked to the political and intellectual currents that overlapped with the Enlightenment. In general, it is illustrated by the period of the subsequent onset of modern warfare, which characterized the two world wars and was replaced by postmodernism. [Sources: 12, 13]
Post-modernists argue that postmodern society differs from modern societies in that it requires a new way of thinking, new ways of living and new forms of social relations. While traditional structuralist theories such as Marxism and feminism are no longer relevant, it is important to understand what a “postmodern society” is, as postmodern theorists propose new methods of sociology and new approaches to social theory. [Sources: 14]
The theory of modernization that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s suggests that societies have converged and gradually abandoned their traditional values. One might think that the idea of universal modernity has become democratized, splitting its cultural and social elements into their technological and economic elements, while we reflect on the material apparatus of industrial and financial modernization. [Sources: 4, 10]
Although most scholars do not directly problematize the use of the term “modern,” they rely on the ambiguous term “modernity” to explain the historical process of cultural and political identity. In contrast to tradition, which is usually characterized as a fixed and static social structure, modernizations are characterized by being more fluid and fluid in nature and thus more open to change. From the slightly paraphrased Lyotard to the modernist and postmodern concepts of progress of the 20th century, each conception of “progress” traces different aspects and discourses of modernity. [Sources: 1, 2, 3]
Sources:
[0]: http://www.arjunappadurai.org/publications/
[1]: https://nnngo.org/essays-on-tradition-against-modernity
[2]: https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/09/modern-modernity-vietnam/
[3]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00003/full
[4]: http://www.guilhermenucci.com.br/sem-categoria/tradition-vs-modernity-essay
[5]: https://www.drishtiias.com/mains-practice-question/question-675
[6]: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/21/somewhere-and-nowhere-between-modernity-and-tradition-towards-a-critique-of-international-and-indigenous-perspectives-on-the-significance-of-contemporary-chinese-art
[7]: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199604456.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199604456-e-006
[8]: https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/essay/modernity-essay-an-useful-essay-on-modernity-in-india/39838
[9]: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-masteryart1/chapter/reading-defining-art-from-modernity-to-globalization/
[10]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0118
[11]: https://www.e-ir.info/2010/05/12/the-west-islam-and-modernity/
[12]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
[13]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity
[14]: https://revisesociology.com/2016/04/09/from-modernity-to-post-modernity/
