ABSTRACT
Case-by-case descriptions and analysis of social change and modernization may be the hearth on which policy is forged, but there is the inevitable intellectual urge to transcend the particular in search of the general. The anatomy of modernization, in the context of interpretation, becomes a different sort of conceptual instrument —an abstraction used to find underlying relations among surface phenomena by using the meta-language of anthropological theory. To take the general building of an anatomy of modernization in Southeast Asia first is to expound the assumptions, concepts, and intellectual commitments on which it is built. Modernization is an inherently unfinished business, and even the most modern and developed of social systems can be said to be in some sort of fifth phase, sometimes called the postmodern society. The process of modernization cannot be fully apprehended without a balance toward the most populous nations of the globe —India and China.
