Throughout the world many scholars in the humanities and social sciences work on the contemporary situation.Some highlight the diversity they see in a world with ever increasing kinds of connections. The local is part of theglobal; particular situations are created out of the engagement of global forces and local conditions. Many others seea common endpoint toward which all of us are moving. Some proponents of the common future with similar traitssee us reaching this point by a common path of change, while others consider multiple paths leading to a singlecluster of traits defining a universal modernity. Scholars disagree over whether modernity is best conceivedprincipally as a common set of conditions arrived at by a single or multiple paths or whether modernities are pluraland created out of the engagement of local and global factors. This paper will stress the other main conceptualchoice we can take for framing the processes and endpoints of historical change. This approach focuses on the waysthat different histories define different trajectories of change that make possible the possibilities for diverseendpoints to history. Of course these endpoints are connected to each other through global economic, political andcultural connections, but the connections themselves are only part of the story. If we think of some local point ofstudy and consider the ways in which it is connected to the global without also pondering how the local is itself thecontinuing product of dynamics beyond the local but not by any means global we make it too easy to ignore thehistories that continue to shape the realities in which people construct their lives today.
展开▼
