Cultures:Modernization:E Asia

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar will explore the meanings of the elusive term “modernization” and the things that were done in its name in twentieth-century Asia, where one country after another became a laboratory for experiments to transform agriculture, industrial production, and the ways people lived their lives. “Modernize” in this context is a transitive verb, describing intentional action, not merely a natural process of becoming. With the help of historians and anthropologists, as well as works of fiction and film, we will examine acts of modernizing and being modernized at the level of local and individual experience. How did modernizers view the people they were seeking to modernize? How did modernization campaigns affect communities and households, and class and gender relations within them? What ideals and dangers did modernization represent for individuals caught in the middle of rapid social change? Unlike the twentieth-century American social scientists who sought to define a universal paradigm of “modernization,” we will excavate the multiple, distinct meanings invested in the idea in different times and places by different historical actors, including the social scientists themselves.