Stressing the variations in meaning of modernity and tradition, this work shows how in India traditional structures and norms have been adapted or transformed to serve the needs of a modernizing society. The persistence of traditional features within modernity, it suggests, answers a need of the human condition. Three areas of Indian life are analyzed: social stratification, charismatic leadership, and law. The authors question whether objective historical conditions, such as advanced industrialization, urbanization, or literacy, are requisites for political modernization.

Tradition and Modernity focuses on how Christians and Muslims connect their traditions to modernity, looking especially at understandings of history, changing patterns of authority, and approaches to freedom. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts from 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, from John Henry Newman to Tariq Ramadan, accompanied by illuminating commentaries.

Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times, and shows how Western philosophical concepts help in addressing a wide range of specifically African problems.

Although the ideas of “tradition” and “modernity” may seem to be directly opposed, David Ellenson, a leading contemporary scholar of modern Jewish thought, understood that these concepts can also enjoy a more fluid relationship. In honor of Ellenson, editors Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers have gathered contributors for Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition to examine the permutations and adaptations of these intertwined forms of Jewish expression. Contributions draw from a range of disciplines and scholarly interests and vary in subject from the theological to the liturgical, sociological, and literary. The geographic and historical focus of the volume is on the United States and the State of Israel, both of which have been major sites of inquiry in Ellenson’s work. In twenty-one essays, contributors demonstrate that modernity did not simply replace tradition in Judaism, but rather entered into a variety of relationships with it: adopting or adapting certain elements, repossessing rituals that had once been abandoned, or struggling with its continuing influence. In four parts—Law, Ritual, Thought, and Culture—contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the role of reform in Israeli Orthodoxy, traditions of twentieth-century bar/bat mitzvah, end-of-life ethics, tensions between Zionism and American Jewry, and the rise of a 1960s New York Jewish counterculture. An introductory essay also presents an appreciation of Ellenson's scholarly contribution. Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.

The Question for Twentieth-Century China has been the integration of tradition and modernity. In this collection of essays written over a period of some twenty years (1987-2006), Chen Lai reflects on the question in an informative and original way. He reads behind the political slogans and engages with the thought both of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons and Western sociology, and representative Chinese thinkers, notably Feng Youlan and Liang Shuming. While the focus is on China, the book also appeals to anyone interested in this fascinating question of how to modernise whilst retaining the positive values of tradition. Chen Lai s unique and balanced grasp of society marks him out as the foremost thinker in China on this topic today.

The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernisation, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations from the 1930s to the present day. He argues that modernisation is not a secular, progressive process, that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is a legitimising discourse. It is an idiom which Greek Cypriots employ to represent, and contest, relationships between social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernisation, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of Europe.

While in some cases modernity may place "traditional" forms of expression at a disadvantage, in others, the modern is embraced as a welcome source of new ideas that can be incorporated into "tradition" in order to change it, while remaining within its own parameters. This is actually likely to help a tradition survive. Maintaining a strong and distinct cultural identity with the help of modernity helps representatives of that identity cope with the modern world more generally. Assimilation to a dominant culture marked as modern, by contrast, is clearly associated with not only the loss of a distinct identity, but also its specific forms of cultural expression. This book explores the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The chapters question to what extent traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further developments.