ANTHROP 4BB3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 14: Sociocultural Evolution, Prunus Spinosa, Social Evolution
18 Dec 2019
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Document Summary
Africa comes to the q of modernity from without: scholars consider it as beyond the pale of modern or before it, not yet in the present or beyond it. Today they prefer to locate contemporary african social realities within a broader pluralized notion of the modern as constituting an alternative modernity. In the process, poor countries would overcome their poverty, share the prosperity of the developed world and take their place as equals in a worldwide fam of nations. If backwards nations are not modern, it was because they weren"t yet modern: modernity considered a universal telos, extent to which societies differed from the modern ideal neatly indexed their supposed level of development toward that ideal. Licensed the social evolutionist idea that primitive peoples might represented earlier stage of a universal human history and that historical time was progressive. Africans prob see themselves as nonmodern poverty, mine workers, decaying infrastructures (independence)
