ABSTRACT
Understanding modernity and late modernity in the context of Asia is the subject of extensive academic debate (Sen and Stivens 1998; Kahn 1993). Modernity is understood to be later in Asia than in the West and central to the debates around modernity have been the concepts of the ‘Asian family’ and ‘Asian values’. As Stivens (1998a: 10) notes:
… These modernities are probably best characterized as neo-modernities: that is, the current developments in the region qualify more as Asian versions of modernity … The modernities of metropolitan China, Indonesia, Singapore, and of the peripheral Yangtze River basin or the mining town of Soroako, we argue, cannot be plotted across a single historical trajectory. There are many ‘Asias’ and as many modernities.
