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2010 10: 321Anthropological TheoryBjørn Thomassen

Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate  

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Anthropological Theory

10(4) 321–342

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DOI: 10.1177/1463499610386659

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Article

Anthropology, multiplemodernities and the axialage debate

Bjørn ThomassenAmerican University of Rome, Italy

Abstract

This article suggests a need to link the anthropological debate of multiple modernities

more closely to Weberian social theory, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadt

and Eric Voegelin. This implies readdressing the question concerning the anthropological

contribution to the understanding of modernity, forcing a link to historical-social theory.

In this context, the article discusses the growing axial age debate in social theory, which

was indeed an important background to the very idea of ‘multiple modernities’.

Keywords

axial age, ecumenic age, liminality, modernity, multiple modernities, social theory

There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last for ever, and which

feel themselves to be final. And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that,

in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.

Karl Jaspers (1953: 231)

Anthropology beyond modernity?

There is something logical about the fact that anthropologists have embraced theconcept of multiple or alternative modernities. After all, anthropology was fromthe outset about multiple and alternative ways of constructing societies and humanlife worlds. Yet, anthropology never had an easy relationship with the concept ofmodernity in the first place. In the 1980s that relationship became an explicit object

Corresponding author:

Bjørn Thomassen, Department of International Relations, American University of Rome, Via Pietro roselli 4,

Rome 00153, Italy

Email: bjorn_thomassen@yahoo.co.uk

of analysis and reflection. The ‘reflexive turn’ which developed during the 1980sand 1990s tackled the concept of modernity as a culturally constructed narrativeunderlying Western assumptions of self and other – assumptions that needed to beunpacked and left behind. The debate was an essential part of a disciplinary reflex-ivity reconsidering anthropology’s epistemological and political roots in that verymodernity. Indeed, it was argued, both the anthropological ‘self’ and its researchobject, the ‘native’, had been created through the looking-glass of modernity(Trouillot 1991).

From the 1980s that modernity was largely considered a dying horse. Its deathwas announced as an epistemological, methodological and certainly also ethicalstep forwards, a ‘progress’ in a world without progress. The only problem was whatto do with the corpse, for heavy it was. On the one hand, the problem was whetherwe could any longer say anything about anyone. There was nowhere to speak from.Solipsism and narcissism were lurking around the corner, and quite a few plungedinto it, academizing the cult of the self. On the other hand, the idea of having cometo maturity, freed from the bounds of modernity, led to almost revolutionarydeclarations of a new ‘non-scientific science’ free of false foundations: a ‘new’and gate-opening anthropology, ‘beyond modernity’.

There was thus a curious element of optimism in the midst of the post-modern pessimism that characterized the 1980s and early 1990s. Anthropologyhad come to a new type of reflexive maturity, aware of its own premises. Havingdeconstructed ‘traditional anthropology’,1 creating a void, a new departure becamepossible. The hubristic and slightly gnostic tendency entailed the historically char-acteristic claim to a new type of self-foundation: a discipline raising itself out of itsown hinges by looking inward. There was an anthropology ‘beyond anthropology’(McGrane 1989). Through self-reflexivity we could once again speak to the world.2

However, during the 1990s modernity was, perhaps surprisingly, reintroduced inanthropological circles. James Faubion’s article, ‘Possible Modernities’ (1988), waslikely the first attempt to suggest a link between the ‘post-modern’ unmasking ofmodernity and the emergence of ‘many modernities’. Faubian offered little indica-tion as to what these ‘other’ modernities might amount to, but a trend was set.During the 1990s modernity was pluralized into a variety of forms: possible mod-ernities, multiple modernities, parallel modernities, manifold modernities, alterna-tive modernities, competing modernities, reflexive modernities – the list is stillunfolding. Today these concepts figure on course lists all over the world. Thereis hardly an anthropological conference that does not have some version of a pluralmodernity in its invitation, and the terms figure in an escalating number of pub-lications. Anthropology has certainly contributed to what has indeed become a‘fetishism of modernities’ (Yack 1997).

This change of vocabulary is far from innocent. The development has beenpositively accompanied by a shift from the rather auto-referential disciplinarydebates of the 1980s to attempts to analyse the ways in which modernities areactually lived and shaped in concrete ethnographic contexts (Miller 1995).However, the relative lightness with which this conceptual change took place

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does indicate that the original rejection of modernity only scratched the surface anddid not think through its own critique. It also indicates that the ‘many modernities’paradigm needs substantiation. There is indeed a difference between claiming the‘end of modernity’ and the existence of ‘many modernities’. After all, to invoke‘alternative modernities’ still means to analyse people and events through the prismof modernity, like it or not. And so the question remains: what exactly is it thatmakes plural modernities so attractive or even necessary to current anthropology?There is a flip side to that question which needs equal attention: what exactly couldbe anthropology’s contribution to the analysis of multiple modernities – or tomodernity in the singular?

This article is of course not the first one to question what Mitchell (2000) called‘the easy pluralism of alternative modernities’ (see also Foster 2002). For one, thestrategy of pluralizing easily sidesteps asymmetries of power in the global system,by injecting everyone with ‘agency’ and creating an illusion of equity. At the levelof representation, it can also be argued that to speak of multiple modernities mayin fact turn into yet another construct of other cultures as essentialist ‘others’, thistime as ‘differently modern’ others. Without disregarding these critiques, the pointI wish to pursue here is a different one: that in our insistence on pluralizing moder-nity we often omit to take a theoretical stance toward modernity.

In short, this article argues that if anthropologists wish to embrace the conceptof multiple modernities, we could profitably do so by taking more seriously theintellectual trajectory that paved the way for this concept. This trajectory movesoutside anthropology as a discipline, and has important roots in Max Weber’scomparative historical sociology, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadtand Eric Voegelin, who will be discussed later. The argument represents an implicitrecognition that comparative or ‘systemic’ views of modernities and globalizationcan find their inspiration outside Marxist-inspired approaches, but certainly with-out neglecting economic and political aspects.

The conclusion will be of a conservative nature: we are not the first to doempirical work on the trajectories of modernity. The coming to terms with moder-nity was indeed the raison d’etre of sociology and some branches of politicaltheory, and the comparative study of modernity was at the centre of MaxWeber’s mature works. This readdresses the question concerning the anthropolog-ical contribution to the understanding of modernities, forcing a link with historical-social theory, and especially with the growing axial age debate in social theory,which was the original background to the very idea of ‘multiple modernities’.The article is therefore also meant as a modest contribution to the axial agedebate, a debate that draws on anthropology, that poses evident challenges toanthropology, but a debate that still awaits an answer from anthropologists.

Shmul Eisenstadt and multiple modernities

The claim that modernity was never a monolithic unit and singular event in historyhas been argued by Shmul Eisenstadt in several writings (see for example 1999,

Thomassen 323

2000a, 2000b).3 This needs to be spelled out in more detail as it was Eisenstadt whointroduced the concept of multiple modernities into social theory.

According to Eisenstadt, modernity is an inherently contradictory and contin-gent series of open-ended processes. Eisenstadt very explicitly set up the ‘multiplemodernities’ scenario in contrast to other meta-narratives of the post-Cold Warera, such as Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory or Fukuyama’s ‘End ofHistory’ thesis. Eisenstadt has been strongly criticized for moving the analysis to alevel of abstraction that ends up neglecting real-world situations and their ethno-graphic and historical complexities (see for example Macfarlane 1998). However,Eisenstadt’s approach is clearly meant as an orientation to empirical research, andEisenstadt is actually one of the few social theorists who systematically refers toand draws on anthropological work. Conversely, and more seriously, Eisenstadt’stheoretical luggage has been almost completely disregarded as anthropologistsappropriated the concept of multiple modernities.

First of all, Eisenstadt invoked the notion of multiple modernities in the foot-steps of Max Weber. Eisenstadt arrived at the multiple modernities framework alsothrough Karl Jaspers’ development of Weber’s fragestellung, which concerned thequestion of the particularity of the West in a world historical comparative frame-work. This is important to stress for the simple reason that Eisenstadt’s thinking isan inherent part of the wider theoretical and historical framework that Jaspers(1949) called the axial age.

Weber plunged into the comparative study of religion after he had written hisfamous essays on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1995),partly because he had realized that the question of salvation and ascetic life-con-duct were by no means peculiar to the West. Weber intuited that there was a seriesof similarities between the world religions. Articulating these similarities and dif-ferences was the guiding spirit of The Economic Ethic of the World Religions and ledhim to write the ‘books’ on China, India and ancient Judaism (Weber 1963), leav-ing uncompleted the projected works on Islam and early Christianity.

It is possible to point out some of the parallels that Weber evidenced. The worldreligions are built on prophecy (Weber 1978: 439–67), which became a key term inWeber’s mature sociology, closely linked to the notion of charisma. A prophecy iseventually codified as a religious world-view becomes institutionalized. The worldreligions arose as protest movements in difficult political situations and against thebackground of expanding empires, although some of them ended up becoming theofficial faith of new expanding empires (as happened most paradigmatically withChristianity). This happened as the charisma of its founders and of the foundingmoments was ‘routinized’, in a wider process of bureaucratization. According toWeber (and perhaps overstressed by Eisenstadt), the world-views transmitted bythe founders of the world religions elaborated a tension between the this-worldlyrealm and the other-worldly realm, although with different stresses. Weber setinner-worldly asceticism (innerweltliche askese) against world-rejecting asceticism(Mittendorfer 1998). In our attitudes to the world, according to Weber, religionmay advocate indifference (as Weber read the ethics of the Gospel), rejection

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(Hinduism) or full appraisal (ascetic Protestantism). The world-experience dependson the historical moment and on the ‘professional group’ ‘stamping’ a certain ethosonto the wider society, and certainly cannot be explained without due reference tothe ‘socio-economic structure’. These different world-relations offer a clue to thedevelopment of a specific Western trajectory based on the social/historical elabo-rations of Christianity, for example the monastic experiences, and how the searchfor salvation eventually led to what Weber termed ‘this-worldly asceticism’.4

The world religions all posited the ‘other realm’ as higher, and they all madesome kind of claim that the goal of life is to seek escape from the world. ForWeber, this opened up the universal question of salvation and its means of accom-plishment: for how salvation can be reached remains open to cultural elaboration.The notion of salvation from the world was expressed by Weber with one of his keytheoretical terms, ‘the religious rejections of the world’, which was a sociologicalelaboration of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism (on the ‘Nietzschean Weber’ seeSzakolczai 1998). A further key concept here was what Weber called the religiousrejections of the world and their directions (Weber 1991: 323–58).5 It is the analysisof those directions that represents Weber’s standing contribution to the study ofcomparative religion and comparative civilization. Weber’s analytical and method-ological framework therefore contained the multiple modernity idea in nuce: thereare different ways of ‘rationalizing the world’ and those ways depend upon a‘starting point’, in the genealogical sense, and that starting point has to be locatedin certain religious ideas, the ‘contents of their annunciation’ (Weber 1991: 272),and their institutional elaboration.

Max Weber, Karl Jaspers and the axial age framework

Eisenstadt’s application of Weber was inspired by the elaboration of Weber byKarl Jaspers. It is partly due to this ‘alternative’ use of Weber (the ‘mainstream’Weber was the one that Parsons translated and introduced to the English-speakingaudience) that Eisenstadt managed to develop an alternative approach, and onethat took Weber’s research in antiquity and comparative religion much more seri-ously. In his comparative essays on the world religions, Weber made allusions tothe strange contemporaneity of the most important developments in thought andspirituality in Israel, Greece, India and China, but leaving this ‘coincidence’ with-out a full discussion. It was Karl Jaspers who, in the aftermath of the SecondWorld War, came up with the explicit idea that the period 800–200 BC shouldbe considered as the ‘axis time’ of history.

To Weber, the world religions somehow departed from a prior experience ofrupture with an established order, leading to an ‘out-of-ordinary situation’ thatcalled for new charismatic leaders. In such a situation, the world could come to beseen as ‘alien’ to the individual person. Now this is not a universal experience, andit is not simply a ‘human condition’, as Heidegger and other existentialist philos-ophers would later assume (and even posit as the condition for being). As KarlJaspers suggested in his Vom Urspruch und Ziel der Geschichte (translated as

Thomassen 325

The Origin and Goal of History, 1953), in what could be considered the perhapsmost direct follow-up to Max Weber’s studies of comparative religion, this expe-rience of ‘alienation’ and standing against the existing world was intimately relatedto the breakthrough of religions based on a clash and tension between a transcen-dental and mundane order, which, as Nietzsche had indicated in his On theGenealogy of Morality (1994), related to real historical experiences of a collapseof order. From this tension arose the problem of how to bridge the chasm betweenthe transcendental and the mundane orders, and thus the idea of salvation fromthis world, which, as anthropologists know well, is not a universal predicament.

The experiences out of which these worldviews developed were linked to suffer-ing, but carried a potential for almost explosive social dynamics. The chasm madepossible a series of boundary constructions, starting from the general separation ofsociety from its place in a larger supernatural-universalist scheme (Eric Voegelinonce called this the ‘breaking of the cosmological shell’), which again allowed for asplit between natural and social laws, the emergence of a new type of individualsubjectivity and reflexivity, and the explosion of human creativity resulting fromthe standing tension between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ (on these boundary con-structions, see also Friedman 1994: 46–8). The chasm, moreover, widened the spacefor human artistic and linguistic interpretation. Looking from the in-between, theindividual thinker could set out to explore the very limits of humanity, provokingexistential anxiety and doubt as to his or her place in the world, but also openingup to new and boundless possibilities emerging in the horizons of the (human-made) future. Far from celebrating this new ‘individualism’, a central message inmuch of axial thought involved a re-anchoring of the human person in the recog-nition of a divine ground.

In ancient Greece this can best be seen by the stress put on the notion ofhubris in mythology, i.e. an overt confidence in human capability duly punishedby nemesis, the wrath of the gods. It is in this context one must understand Plato’sstruggle against the Sophists and their ‘liberal’ use of free speech. Indeed, whileConfucianism, Buddhism, and Socratic philosophy all directed themselves towardthe individual and his awakening (often in contrast to ‘abstract’ and officialdogma), arguing that each person must live the right way, always searching for‘right practice’ in our dealing with the empirical world, they did so by asking peopleto de-emphasize or even eliminate their ego (as in Buddhism), searching forbalance.

The chasm between the mundane and transcendental orders was articulatedalongside a more radical separation of past, present, and future, and the possibilityof a new forward-oriented horizon of time. The idea of ‘writing history’ from thevantage point of the present emerged. Noting the striking similarities of such spir-itual or cultural revolutions in Greece, Persia, China and India within a relativelyrestricted period between 800 BC and 200 BC, and concentrated around the middleof the first millennium BC, Jaspers drew the conclusions and baptised this periodthe ‘axial age’ of world history, in contrast to the Christian calendar and its place-specific year 0 (Jaspers 1953).

326 Anthropological Theory 10(4)

Axial philosophies were made possible by a previous shaking of the ‘taken-for-granted’, without of course coming up with a unified answer to the crisis within anyof the axial regions. On the contrary, the axial period was for the most part char-acterized by the proliferation of heterodoxy and sectarianism, leading to a battle-field between different types of sages, scholars and mystics. At stake was how torelate to the world in the most general sense, and a diversity of competing ‘isms’and ‘schools’ of thought developed as an answer. Those ‘isms’ taken together,rather than any single philosophy, came to form what Jaspers saw as the spiritual‘foundations’ of humanity. Jaspers’ inclusion of Greek philosophy as an axialphilosophy supplemented Weber’s pre-dominant focus on religion, and his relativeneglect of philosophical ideas as historical ‘switchmen’.

Jaspers bluntly stated that the dynamic of the axial age became historically all-embracing, and that only peoples who directly or indirectly (through culture con-tact) became involved in it took part in universal history (1953: 7). Probably mostanthropologists would find this view unacceptable, as it resembles older tendenciesto depict small-scale societies (or even pre-axial larger civilizations such as ancientEgypt or Assyria) as being ‘without history’. At a superficial glance, Jaspers’ vocab-ulary does resemble other long discredited dichotomies suggested by anthropolo-gists, such as those between ‘pre-logical’ and ‘rational’ societies (Levy-Bruhl), orbetween ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies (Levi-Strauss). However, in contrast to bothLevy-Bruhl and Levi-Strauss, Jaspers at the least suggested a historical and socio-logical context that created this difference, and that may in fact render such dichot-omies sociologically meaningful. Considering the fact that the axial age thesis hasbeen at the forefront of social theory during the last decade, it is at any rate strangethat no critical examination of Jaspers’ axial age hypothesis has taken place withreference to the anthropological record of non-axial or pre-axial cultures.

The axial breakthroughs (Jaspers also called them ‘leaps’) must of course beanalysed against their social-historical conditions of emergence, which is exactlywhat Jaspers (although a philosopher and not a sociologist) sought in The Originand Goal of History, without presenting a complete or fully convincing contextualanalysis. While not overlooking differences, Jaspers saw direct parallels betweenBuddhism, Confucianism, Hebrew prophecy and Greek philosophy, but alsoclaimed that their contemporaneity and their commonalities remained a ‘mystery’that could never be fully explained (1953: 8–22). Their shared conditions of emer-gence, however, included a historical situation of ‘troubled times’. Jaspers used aWeberian approach in the setting up of the argument: he recognized a structuralsimilarity in the type of truth-claims and visions found in the axial age religions andphilosophies, pointed to their shared conditions of emergence, and then went on todiscuss the wider sociological effects of the axial age breakthroughs (1953: 51–61),i.e. the ‘stamp’ they left within the various civilizational contexts. This extremelycourageous thesis, or ‘suggestion’, was never really taken up by social scientists inthe post-war period, except for a very few thinkers, all of them somewhat periph-eral to mainstream functionalism that came to dominate post-war social and polit-ical science.

Thomassen 327

Yet it was the historical-comparative framework of the axial age that Eisenstadtbuilt on as he theorized the present as ‘multiple modernities’. The concept was,from the very beginning, not even remotely similar to ‘postmodernist’ celebrationsof diversity: Eisenstadt stayed within a Weberian comparative method and analyt-ical framework, arguing for long-term dependencies and ‘historical continuitywithin discontinuity’. Eisenstadt’s ‘Introduction’ to The Origins and Diversity ofAxial Age Civilizations (1986: 1–28) is arguably the most dense presentation of aWeberian theoretical framework for arguing any notion of multiple modernities;yet anthropologists have so far bypassed this work.

The contribution of Eric Voegelin: multiple modernities,political religions, ecumenic age

Jaspers was far from alone in his ‘discovery’. Lewis Mumford arrived at verysimilar conclusions in the years following the Second World War, although hismain work relating to the axial age was published slightly later (TheTransformations of Man appeared in 1957). The little known Hungarian thinkerBela Hamvas also discussed the axial age during and after the Second World War.Hamvas wrote Scientia Sacra in 1943–4, but the work was only published in 1988,20 years after his death (see Szakolczai 2005). Here, however, I would like toemphasize the contributions made by Eric Voegelin.

Eric Voegelin is not part of any anthropological debate. This omission is farfrom strange: Eric Voegelin (1901–85) was clearly a political theorist and with nointerest in the ethnographic record. Besides, Voegelin’s work (running into 34 vol-umes) was always surrounded by an aura of mysticism and is hardly known eveninside mainstream political theory. However, we ignore Voegelin at our own peril.There are at least three reasons why Voegelin may be considered crucial to ourcurrent discussions of modernities, and possibly to anthropological theory ingeneral.

First, it needs to be known that the recognition of historically contingent, mul-tiple and shifting articulations of modernity was suggested already during the 1940sby Voegelin, in his early drafts that formed part of History of Political Ideas, aproject Voegelin eventually abandoned. Voegelin talked here of two spatio-tem-poral specific modernities, the ‘Mediterranean’ and the ‘Atlantic’ modernities,where the latter succeeded and replaced the former. To my knowledge, Voegelinwas the first thinker to pluralize modernities. Voegelin introduced the notion of a‘Mediterranean modernity’ in his discussion of the political thinker Jean Bodin(1530–96).6 Bodin was a 16th-century transition figure trying to articulate amodern political theory after the waning of the Middle Ages and before thetriumph of the 17th-century rational-scientific worldview. Voegelin analysedBodin as a ‘modern’ who had not broken definitively with the MedievalChristian world-view. In his political writings, Bodin provided the constitutionaltradition of governments and institutions established from a rationally definedplatform. He theorized the national state and used a juristic method to arrange

328 Anthropological Theory 10(4)

governmental forms. At the same time, Bodin’s cosmology was still inspired by therichness of the Platonic and Hellenistic traditions, contemplating the order of thesoul and its place in the polis. It was exactly this idea that a well-ordered soul couldserve as the source or order in the polity that was very categorically slaughteredfrom Hobbes onwards, installing what Voegelin called a new ‘materialistic meta-physics’, based on the idea of political order as rooted in the negativity of theperson or in the mechanical body, as would happen in the ‘Atlantic modernity’ –our modernity.

In this context, Voegelin made the very general point that the actual time struc-ture of the Western world is more complicated than we are used to think: theWestern world ‘does not move in an even flow’ (1998: 182): ‘Modernity is a his-torical process, extending over centuries, in which the medieval, spiritual-temporalorder of Western mankind gradually dissolves – earlier in some regions, moreslowly in others’ (p. 182).

Substantially, therefore, Voegelin diagnosed modernity as a dissolution of order.Voegelin argued that we mistakenly take for granted what is in fact a late andgeographic-specific phase of modernity as the modernity. Voegelin wanted us toreconsider the French-Dutch-English modernity of the 17th and 18th centuries asone ‘branch’ of a development, incidentally the one that was institutionalized(which is why we are blindfolded by it), absorbing as it did both scientism andsecularism (1998: 183). For Voegelin this Atlantic modernity is a specific ‘figura-tion’ (to use Elias’ word) that should not be mistaken for ‘modernity’ but shouldinstead be seen as one specific (and highly problematic) development of ‘it’. WhileVoegelin would to some extent leave behind or reformulate these insights, they domerit our attention.

Second, it is of some importance that Voegelin was the one who most explicitlytook up Weber’s approach and applied it to the study of modern political move-ments. As argued by Szakolczai (2008), Voegelin’s work on political religionsindeed represents a ‘missing classic’ in the study of nationalism that can nolonger be overlooked. Indeed, while Weber wanted to identify the ‘spirit of capi-talism’, Voegelin tried to do the same, searching for the ‘moving forces’ in politics.Voegelin’s analysis of modern politics partly came to rest on his concept of ‘intra-mundane eschatology’, which has a strong affinity with Weber’s notion of ‘this-wordly asceticism’: in both cases a religious experience was immanentized as itcame to direct this-worldly action. This, for Voegelin, was a crucial feature of‘Atlantic modernity’.

Third, in his discussion of the axial age,7 Voegelin introduced the expression ‘theecumenic age’, meaning the age where the first global empires tried to expandacross the entire planet.8 As Jaspers argued in Origin and Goal of History, theaxial breakthroughs took place in regions and moments characterized by thethreat of political instability and the spread of warfare. Arguably, the situationwas most clear-cut in the eastern Mediterranean with the long-standing imperialgrowth of Egypt, Assyria and Persia. This culminated in the rise of the PersianEmpire and its conquest of Egypt in 525 BC.

Thomassen 329

The most important forms of resistance to these empires came from two specificregions: ancient Israel and Greece. This resistance was sometimes military (mostimportantly, of course, the defeat of the Persians in 490 BC by Athens), but itslong-term significance resides in the development of thought and spirituality.In terms of ‘effective answers’ these regions developed, respectively, the Hebrewprophetic and Greek philosophical and democratic traditions. In a sense this is ofcourse commonplace: every history textbook says that the Western world – all its‘isms’, all its main achievements in law, science and the arts – is based upon theJudeo-Christian and Greek-Hellenic traditions. But Voegelin’s analysis provides aslightly different twist to the tale: far from those traditions developing in a polit-ically calm period or in a prosperous area, they instead took place in in-betweenregions, squeezed and threatened by overwhelming powers and imperial expansion.

Quite in line with Jaspers, Voegelin clearly saw the axial age developments inthought and spirituality as a resistance against rising global empires, as attempts tore-establish meaningful human life vis-a-vis an all-menacing situation, finding mea-sures to ‘cool down’ human matters in the midst of a spiral of violence and limitlessmilitary-economic expansion. Voegelin here re-invoked Thucydides’ diagnosticterm of the Persian expansion: kinesis. The term is not easy to translate butrefers to a sudden eruption of a spiralling and unsettling force, a feverish movementof disintegration and destruction, a constant breaking down of any boundary, thedisappearance of limits to growth, and the loss of a centre of balance to moderatehuman desires. To stress how this virulent frenzy emanated from and had effectsupon both the personal-psychological and societal-political levels, Voegelin alsoused the term ‘concupiscental expansion’ (1974: 313). Following Thucydides,Voegelin saw kinesis as a moving force of the entire ecumenic age (Szakolczai2006). The parallels with the current global age are simply too important to beoverlooked.

The re-emergence of axial age theory in the post-ColdWar period

Most studies of the axial age were relatively ignored in the post-war period, and ageneral debate never arose. It was therefore very much thanks to Eisenstadt thatJaspers’ axial age idea was re-introduced to the social sciences. Based on his long-standing interest in the comparative analysis of empires, Eisenstadt published in1982 a path-breaking article on the axial age in Archives Europeenes de Sociologie(Eisenstadt 1982), picking up the threads from Weber and Jaspers, and noting theparallels to Voegelin. A major concrete event was a conference and a follow-upbook publication edited by Eisenstadt called The Origins and Diversity of the AxialAge Civilizations, from 1986. While for some time this had huge effects on scholarsof antiquity, Sinologists and Indian scholars, from the late 1990s it was taken up bysocial theorists like Giesen (Eisenstadt and Giesen 1995), Arnason (1997), Lambert(1999), Wittrock (2001), Therborn (2003), Assman (2005), Szakolczai (2006) and,during the last couple of years, by many others, including Jeffrey Alexander.

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There are good reasons to understand the timing of this return reflexively. Theaxial age debate took off in the aftermath of the Second World War. Karl Jaspers’idea of the axial age and his search for ‘the origin and goal of history’ was directlyrelated to his generation’s experience of a total collapse of order, and the subse-quent search for order in the midst of the possibly most extreme hopelessnesshumanity has ever faced: Germany at the end of the Second World War. Thisshould certainly not be reduced to a ‘psychological function’. The reflexive exercisegoes much beyond the experiences of the single person, although those experiencesare indeed both real and vital, and absolutely necessary to understand. Jaspershimself repeatedly emphasized the centrality of reflexivity: he found it constitutiveof the very spirit of the axial age period, but despite the enormous difficulties of hisown historical moment he also believed in a ‘new historical consciousness’ of thepresent period, and this was informed by his view of history: ‘History is at one andthe same time happening and consciousness of this happening’ (1953: 234). Thepenultimate chapter in Origin and Goal of History was called ‘Our ModernHistorical Consciousness’. Jaspers clearly saw Weber’s work as a crucial endeavourtoward such a consciousness, made possible also by ‘the heights reached byKierkegaard and Nietzsche’ (1953: 133).

This all indicates that the search for a new historical-global perspective wasintimately linked to an experience of a collapse of order; it implied a search fora perspective of the present as rooted in an understanding of human history takenin its widest depth and globality. Axial age theory and long-term historical researchwere sidelined from the 1950s, when the much more dogmatic functionalist para-digms established themselves, leading to the dominance of modernization theory.The axial age discussion re-emerged in the context of the end of the Cold Warperiod, and a historical experience of contingency and ‘loose structures’. While theexperience was no longer tied to the apocalyptic events of the Second World War, itdid – and does – imply a radical sense of ‘boundlessness’ and uncertainty, and anew search for ‘placing the present’.

Post-war mainstream social and political theory had worked from a centralpremise: that the modern world could and should be studied on its own terms.This had produced what Elias (1987) identified as the ‘retreat of sociologists intothe present’. The return of the axial age idea implies a questioning of this temporalboundary line. If ‘modernity’ relates to critical reflexivity and, indeed, to the emer-gence of history in the sense of the epoch in human existence that is characterizedby a reflexive, historical consciousness, the standard view of European modernityas located between 1750 and 1850, or even in the ‘Waning of the Middle Ages’,simply is not broad-ranging enough and does not go to the core of the question.However – and this has been much less considered – the same view of modernity asa self-contained and radically different world, with its own logics and with itsparticular social arrangements, was also what had led to the quite radical separa-tion of sociology and anthropology in the post-war period. While it is becomingincreasingly recognized – indeed, mainstream – that social theory needs history,back to the axial age and beyond, the possible role of anthropology in theorizing

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modernity seems far less obvious. Let me on the basis of the above discussion offera few ideas in that direction.

Anthropology of modernity?

The current discourse on globalization and its many modernities tends to overlookearlier periods in intellectual history where the Eurocentric and single modernitynarrative was replaced by attempts toward a global history. The period just afterthe Second World War was exactly one such critical period, and it led, amongothers, to the axial age perspective. The return to axial age theory and globalhistory represents a challenge to anthropology. What are we to make of thischallenge?

Of course, as always, an important role of both history and anthropology willremain to question the empirical foundation of over-generalized social theory, byinsisting on the particularity of concrete societies and their lived realities. Besideslifting fingers, however, the role played by anthropology could possibly also bestated more positively. Historically oriented sociologists argue (correctly, in myview) that the modern world needs to be considered from vantage points of his-torical difference. Weber understood quite clearly that in order to answer the ques-tion concerning the particularity of the West he had to move outside the temporalframework of European modernity. Weber started his study of the modern worldby focusing on the inner-worldly asceticism of Christian sects, which in his viewbecame conducive to the breakthrough of modern capitalism. But rather thanmoving his focus forwards in time, from around 1910 onwards, Weber’s empiricalresearch became focused on historical periods prior to the modern one. It deservessome attention that the same reorientation back in time was made by such impor-tant theorists of modernity as Eric Voegelin and Michel Foucault, both of whomdedicated their last period of work to the study of antiquity.9

This is in itself of huge importance, but a supplementary argument can perhapsbe made: if ‘history’ is necessary for theorizing modernity, there is possibly someextent to which anthropology may represent another vantage point from where toquestion the taken-for-granted forms of modern existence. The purpose of histor-ical sociology and historically anchored social theory is to show continuities andruptures over time and to point out what may constitute the unique specificities ofthe modern world. This exercise is becoming all the more important at the momentthat some of these modern forms are spreading to the entire globe (that is at leastone dimension of the current global age). To render clear the uniqueness ofEuropean modernity, a proper perspective should of course involve a comparativestudy of civilizations, as in Weber and Eisenstadt. But here we may have to gofurther: the historical turn in social theory may be complemented with an ‘anthro-pological turn’ in a more ample sense, moving theories of modernity well beyondreflections by social theorists on their own society, and including a full-range com-parative perspective, drawing on the entire ethnographic record of both existingand extinct cultures.

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There are several dimensions to this debate. First of all, as Joel Kahn put it, anew anthropology of modernity ‘compels us towards an ethnographic account ofmodernity in the West’ (2001: 663). In short: ethnography is needed. But there is noreason to restrict the role of anthropology to a question of methods or to theintrinsic value of its bottom-up approach. There are several theoretical insightsgained by anthropologists that may indeed be of some importance to a fullerunderstanding of modernity and its dynamics. I refer to anthropology here inthe very classical understanding as the comparative study of the most diverse exist-ing cultures of the planet. Although Durkheim’s approach leaves much to bedesired, his basic idea that the study of even the ‘smallest’ social group caninform our theoretical understanding of modern society is far from outdated.

Throughout the 20th century a series of anthropologists became aware thatsome of their main concepts developed in their encounter with extra-Europeansocieties had an importance well beyond their geographic location. A very impor-tant ‘reflexive’ tradition here goes back to Marcel Mauss, and especially to hisstudy of gift relations (1990). Mauss came to realize that gift relations lay at theheart of meaningful social relations in any society. However, for the context ofthe current discussion, the perhaps single most important anthropological conceptis that of liminality. In making reference to this concept I will attempt to drawtogether the discussions opened so far.

Axial renaissances and liminality

The concept of liminality is well known, and I have elsewhere tried to reconstructits intellectual history since Arnold van Gennep introduced the term in 1909(Thomassen 2009). The point worth making here is that the axial age can be under-stood as a liminal historical period and that the axial age breakthroughs happenedin geographically liminal areas. The further point I wish to suggest, following herethe analysis of Arpad Szakolczai, is that decisive ‘rupture points’ in civilizationalhistory can be understood as ‘axial renaissances’ or ‘axial moments’ and thatmodernity on this account can best be diagnosed as a form of ‘permanent limin-ality’ (Szakolczai 2000: 215–27).

There is indeed nothing novel about these suggestions. Karl Jaspers’ descriptionof the axial age at places used a vocabulary which is almost identical to the oneoriginally proposed by Van Gennep (a work that Jaspers did not know, of course).Jaspers described the axial age as an in-between period between two structuredworld-views and between two rounds of empire building (1953: 51); it was an age ofcreativity where ‘man asks radical questions’, and where the ‘unquestioned graspon life is loosened’ (1953: 3); it was an age of uncertainty and contingency: an agewhere old certainties had lost their validity and where new ones were still not ready.It was a period where individuals rose to the test and new leadership figuresemerged. In particular, the axial age gave birth to a new sub-stratum of persons:‘free-standing’ intellectuals (see again Eisenstadt 1986 for the comparative analysisof these figures). Finally, referring to the spatial co-ordinates, the axial ‘leaps’ all

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happened in in-between areas between larger civilizations, in liminal places: not atthe centres, nor outside reach of main civilizational centres but exactly at themargins, and that quite systematically so in the eastern Mediterranean, Chinaand India.

Liminality is not just another word for the same thing. When Victor Turnerstumbled upon the term in 1963 he immediately realized that liminality served notonly to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand thehuman reactions to liminal experiences: the way in which personality was shapedby liminality, the sudden foregrounding of agency in specific moments, and thesometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience.10 In trying to indi-cate the importance of liminality for modern, Western societies, Turner came upwith the concept of the ‘liminoid’. This concept and Turner’s analysis of leisure andart inspired much of the ‘performative turn’ in anthropology. For reasons I havediscussed elsewhere (Thomassen 2009: 15), far from representing any breakthroughthis development of the term rather took away much of its potential, especially as itdownplayed exactly what liminality was originally meant to account for: transitionand personality/culture change. Nor was this development the only one possible.It is a significant part of the story that Eisenstadt’s comparative-historicalapproach to the study of civilizations was much influenced by his Weberian readingof the ‘symbolic anthropologists’ and in particular his collaboration with VictorTurner in the early 1980s, when they jointly organized a seminar on ‘ComparativeLiminality and Dynamics of Civilizations’, leading to a series of publications (see inparticular Eisenstadt 1995). Eisenstadt realized that the concept of liminality couldre-address the question of change and continuity also in large-scale-settings.

If historical periods can be considered liminal, it follows that the crystallizationof ideas and practices that take place during this period must be given specialattention. In liminality, the very distinction between structure and agency ceasesto make meaning; and yet, in the hyper-reality of agency in liminality, structurationtakes place. Turner had himself introduced the term ‘institutionalization of limin-ality’ in reference to monastic orders (1969: 107). In terms of historical applicationof the axial age framework, Jaspers suggested the term ‘axial renaissances’ (1953: 7)to account for moments in history where societies or whole civilizations livedthrough and reacted to a collapse of order and a loss of stable reference points.However, as indicated by the axial age thesis itself, such ideas would almost alwaysbe drawn from the toolkit provided by the axial period proper (which is whyEisenstadt (1986) called them ‘secondary breakthroughs’). It was in this sensethat Voegelin provocatively said that ‘nothing much has happened during thelast 2500 years’ (1974: 331).

At this point we can return to the framework proposed by Eric Voegelin, knit-ting together two inter-related points. The first is substantial, and has of course todo with the fact that European modernity, according to Voegelin, institutionalizedas a very specific kind of answer given to a particular period of uncertainty at the‘waning of the Middle Ages’. The second point is methodological, and in itself notwithout relevance to anthropological theory, as it stresses the role of experience.

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Voegelin recognized that political thought had to be understood as symbolizationsof real human experiences (see Voegelin 1974, 1990). To Voegelin, thoughts are notsimply second-order reflections of ‘reality’ but are themselves part of a historicalprocess, and to be placed within them. Voegelin was particularly interested inhuman experiences during crisis periods where the taken-for-granted order hadbecome a question. Taking Weber further, he therefore focused upon the waysin which individual thinkers (‘philosophers’) lived through a certain period,attempting to make sense of their experiences. Voegelin was particularly interestedin two types of experience: experiences of dissolution and chaos, and the oppositeexperiences of order. It was precisely these ‘experiences of order’ against a worldof decay that Voegelin diagnosed as gnostic, to the extent that human beings‘artificially’ sought to create order out of disorder through their own orderingdevices, claiming participation in some ‘mystery of being’ (Voegelin’s oft usedexpression).

To Voegelin, the transition to modernity never really implied a process of ‘sec-ularization’, as mainstream social theory always claimed. Eisenstadt has in severalwritings followed up on this perspective, confirming Voegelin’s vision of the gnosticnature of modernity. In Eisenstadt’s view, the political revolutions that came tocharacterize political modernity in the West from the 17th century onwards repre-sented ‘the most dramatic and possibly the most successful attempt in the history ofmankind to implement on a macro-social scale utopian visions with strong Gnosticcomponents’ (Eisenstadt 2005: 156).

Voegelin called the period from the early 16th century to the middle of the 17thcentury ‘The Great Confusion’ (the subtitles given to Volumes IV (‘Renaissanceand Reformation’) and V (‘Religion and Modernity’) of his History of PoliticalIdeas). The chaos created by the Lutheran schism (and the controversy and revo-lution that followed) produced a variety of attempts at restoring intellectual orderas it became increasingly clear that a restoration of scholastic modes of thought inpolitics and science could not cope with the situation (Voegelin 1998: 17–28). Theperiod remained a ‘fluid field of sentiments and ideas’, until a new systematic viewof man and the world took shape, and this ‘crystallization into systematic formtakes place only in the 17th century’ (1998: 134).11

The question then concerns this crystallization and its modalities, and the way inwhich the chaos and constant warfare – international and civil – of the 16th and17th centuries was somehow replaced with a system that was on the one handamazingly productive and efficient, and on the other hand also inherently unstable.

‘Modernity’ cannot be pinned down with reference to any specific institutionalor ideational structure, as modernity at its most general refers to transition andcontingency. In terms of historical semantics, it refers to a temporal experience ofthe ‘present’ as having ‘overcome’ the past, seeing the future as an open horizon(Koselleck 1979). As Baudelaire said, modernity is ‘the transitory, the fugitive, thecontingent’ (quoted in Delanty 2007: 269). In the realm of thought, this involved aspecific kind of systematic, institutionalized uncertainty where, not surprisingly, thefaculties of radical doubt and scepticism became the cardinal values of knowledge

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and science, from Cartesian epistemology to post-structuralist theories of flexiblemodernity.12 As Giesen has recently argued (2009), modernity is a continuoustransgression of boundaries and the breaking down of traditions, and thereforeinvolves, as stressed by Bauman (1991), a deep-bound sense of ambivalence.

This can also be put differently. European modernity is a peculiar answer givento a liminal moment: it is an answer that instead of replacing the ‘fluidity’ of themoment turned the perhaps most critical aspects of liminal experiences into foun-dation. Those experiences are the ones that anthropologists since Van Gennep haverecognized in their study of human experiences during ritual passages, and sovividly depicted in the studies of the Ndembu by Victor Turner: fear, doubt, scep-ticism; role reversal and role play via playful imitation, including gender transgres-sion; the breaking of any existing boundary or sacred taboo; fundamental doubt asto the character of one’s person and one’s identity; repeated testing and rehearsalsof self-overcoming. While such experiences are near-universal, in all societies ofwhich we have record, they remained carefully tied to spatial and temporal frames.In modernity such experiences were permanentized and turned into a model.The lack of any ritual of re-integration implied the very productive-oriented, con-tinuous testing of the self that Weber had already noticed in the Protestant ascetics.Weber also noted that this life attitude could carry on even when freed from itsreligious-ethic foundations. Permanent liminality, from this perspective, alsoinvolved the loss of any anchorage point in reliable ceremony masters.

Conclusion

There are four final points to make. First of all, the Weberian framework proposed,and as elaborated by Eisenstadt and others, does not represent a privileging ofcultural meaning, ideas or symbolism over and above economic structures andpolitical processes. Nor, however, do questions pertaining to ‘grand theory’ neces-sarily mean a return to a stricter reliance on socio-economic structures and ‘hardfacts’. We do indeed need to come to terms with the harsh realities of capitalismand nationalism, and the increasing fervour of religious fundamentalism and polit-ical violence. However, the peculiarity of Western modernity lies not so much in itsinstitutional structures but more in the kind of ‘ethos’ or ‘spirit’ with which theyconstantly become injected, involving, shaping and re-casting the human person:what Foucault called the modern ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988). It wasthe discovery of certain religious world-views and attitudes and their link to thebreakthrough of modern capitalism that led Weber to investigate how in otherworld religions a certain ethic had stamped economic and political development.For Weber there was a link between the ‘type of human being’ and institutionaldevelopment. The most promising developments in ‘grand theory’ during the 20thcentury came from authors like Eric Voegelin and Norbert Elias who, in the foot-steps of Weber, linked human experiences and empirically observable types of ‘lifeconduct’ (often developed in ‘closed institutions’ like the court, monastery or

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military) with larger institutional and even civilizational developments. The focuson ‘self’ and ‘identity’ that has characterized anthropology since the 1980s needsembedding, not abandoning.

The second point relates to the role of theorizing, and the perspective gainedby the axial age. While the axial age certainly produced many of the founda-tional ‘isms’ that have since shaped the world, and in many ways must be seenas ‘revolutionary’, what characterizes axial thought is at the same time somethingvery different: a respect for and indeed a return to ‘tradition’. What unites suchdiverse figures as Lao-Tse, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Plato – besides thefact that they more or less lived in the same period – is their search for the unchang-ing, and their insistence that human beings cannot, and should not, create every-thing anew. Confucius called himself a traditionalist (Jaspers 1962: 43) andsearched for the eternal truths in history. Socrates believed in the traditionalgods, and against the Sophists he always confirmed historical foundations (1962:10). In the midst of political disintegration and epistemological uncertainty, axialphilosophers tried to re-create a balance, searching for a measure. Against theSophists, Plato argued that such a ‘measure’ could not be the human being, asthis would only lead to imbalance. The measure must be divine, and human beingscan only find the balance by recognizing and participating in the chain of the divine(on Plato’s Ion, see Thomassen 2008). For axial philosophers, this meant a self-restraint or ‘civilized directing’ of the most basic human instincts, searching for apath of moderation, taming greed, hate, uncontrolled lust and violence. They allturned away from what they saw as the excessive reliance on material welfare andthe pursuit of the pleasure principle. They also preached a genuine sense of hum-bleness before the beauty and orderliness of the world, urging humans not toexaggerate their role in the universe. And they also turned their philosophy intoa way of life through what Weber called ‘exemplary prophecy’. I state all this as anempirical fact, though not disregarding its possible normative implications. To theextent that we have anything to learn from axial philosophies, it must be recognizedthat the spirit of axial thought was deeply anti-revolutionary, and involved a per-sonal conversion away from the excess and spiral logics of the ecumenic age.

The third point follows from the first two: whatever we may mean by ‘Westerncivilization’, it most certainly cannot be thought of as the equivalent of modernity.There are ‘sources of civilization’ (Szakolczai 2004) that not only predate the logicsof the modernity that crystallized in the 16th to 17th century but that representalternative values and world-views. Understanding modernity and its specificities isnot facilitated by a denying attitude toward everything produced by the civiliza-tional context out of which that modernity somehow grew. Nor is such an under-standing aided by the simple claim, so implicit in much current anthropology, thatthere are indeed ‘many modernities’ and that they are all unique and culture-specific. To re-inject modernity with cultural pluralism may be a sound ethno-graphic strategy, but at the level of theory it leads to a rather disabling positionthat certainly does not help to highlight and render clear social dynamics andproblematics that were and are indeed not simply everywhere and always present.

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Even if to pluralize and ‘write into history’ hitherto excluded subjects bydiscovering ‘hybrid’ or ‘alternative modernities’ is often seen as a means ofresistance to the new global (neo-liberal) order, and a call for new forms of justiceand inclusion, such a strategy is hardly going to have tranquilizing effects onmodernity’s productive/destructive capabilities – possibly quite the contrary.A recognition of axial foundations does not imply a call for a new fixity of thesubject or a return to religious or political dogmatism, nor can it imply a sheercelebration of heterogeneity or hybridity and the permanent loss of meaningfulbackground structures.

The last point is a summary of what has been said. When the axial age debatere-emerged in the 1980s, the discipline of anthropology was in its most self-reflexivemoment. With a few exceptions13 there was little mood for ‘grand theory’. Whenthe ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm started to dominate our vocabulary from the1990s and until today, the term was mostly translated into a suitable idiom forexpressing cultural diversity in a global world. This article has argued that it is timefor anthropology to bring our interest in multiple modernities in closer contact toWeberian traditions in social theory and historical sociology. Rather than a ‘turn’,this would rather represent a re-connect to theoretical debates that have shaped thediscipline for more than a century. By necessity this involves an interest in evolu-tionary dynamics, and a view towards transformative logics. However, to establisha global, comparative perspective we need analytical tools that are not simplyderived from Western civilization and modern science, but that emerged in thecontext of comparative cultural analysis. Many such tools are already there; theconcept of liminality is but one salient example. Those tools form part of a longhistory of anthropological theory and concept formation that can serve to com-plement historical sociology.

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this argument.They made me write another article. They are also the only ones who can judge if it is abetter one.

Notes

1. While one of the main ideas of the ‘new’ thinking was to deconstruct the modern-tradi-

tion divide as a false assumption of modernity itself, in referring to ‘older anthropology’,an identical divide was re-created as a self-legitimizing device: ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’anthropology had not realized its own foundations and limitations; we, representing the

‘new’, could see it all more clearly, could see our selves. It goes without saying that such adiscourse of maturity is at the very heart of modernity, if not its most straightforwarddefinition.

2. The point is worth stressing: the symbolic structure is piecemeal Cartesian.

3. The entire issue of Daedalus (2000: 129(1)) was devoted to ‘Multiple Modernities’.4. Dumont (1986) is the anthropologist who most directly took up this framework.

338 Anthropological Theory 10(4)

5. The ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’ was a zwischenbetrachtung

inserted between Weber’s empirical works on China and India, but containing in fact aframework for the entire project on comparative civilization and religion. The originalversion can be found in Schmidt-Glinzer and Kolonko (1989: 479–521). In 1915, Weber

had given the text the title ‘Stufen und Richtungen religioser Weltablehnung’. In 1920Weber added ‘Theorie der’ to the title (1989: 60). While this was lost in all Englishtranslations, it surely indicates that Weber saw the piece as a theoretical key.

6. Voegelin discusses Bodin in two different places in his manuscripts, published with some

50 years delay in the volume entitled Religion and the Rise of Modernity (1998: 158–168;180–251), volume V of his History of Political Ideas.

7. Voegelin discussed the axial age in three places: in his Introduction to The World of the

Polis (1957), in the essay ‘What Is History?’ (1990) and in the Introduction and lastchapter of The Ecumenic Age (1974)

8. Voegelin here used a concept of the first comparative historian, Polybios, an eyewitness

to the conquest of Greece by Rome. See again Szakolczai (2006).9. While Foucault started out with research on the early modern period, moving forwards

toward the 18th century during his works of the 1970s, from the late 1970s and until hisdeath in 1984 his empirical interests went almost exclusively toward the study of Greek

philosophy and early Christianity.10. Turner late in his life realized strong affinities between his own project and the philos-

ophy of Dilthey (see for example Turner 1982: 12–19; 1988: 84–97).

11. This might indeed be a suitable metaphor for understanding the liminal process: a liquidtakes definitive form as it freezes and turns into crystals. Weber’s often used term todescribe the formation of lasting forms was ‘stamping’ (pragung), which builds on

exactly the same image.12. See for example the characteristic emphasis placed on scepticism and doubt in the

classical works of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1997).

13. Noteworthy exceptions are of course theMarxist-inspired theoretical frameworks involv-ing historical-comparative analysis and long-term social evolutionary processes thatdeveloped in the 1970s; see for example Jonathan Friedman (1975, 1979); Friedmanand Rowlands (1977); Wallerstein (1980); Wolf (1982). An alternative longue duree

approach was developed by Jack Goody from the 1950s, with a research focus on literacy,production, inheritance and kinship (Goody and Watt 1963; Goody 1977, 1983).

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Bjørn Thomassen is Associate Professor in the Department of InternationalRelations at the American University of Rome, where he teaches anthropology,sociology and political theory. He has a BA and MA in anthropology from theInstitute of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and a PhD from theEuropean University Institute, Florence. He has done fieldwork in Istria (Italy/Croatia/Slovenia) and in Catalonia. His research interests include the anthropologyof borders, nationalism, urban anthropology, globalization and comparative civi-lization. He is co-founder and co-editor of the journal International PoliticalAnthropology (www.ipa3.org).

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