ABSTRACT
Modernization theory, in the versions available thirty or forty years ago, in the 1950s and 1960s, did not appeal very much to anthropologists, compared to many other social scientists. Neither its more or less ethnocentric assumption of a single path to progress, nor its tendency to make analytical abstractions either in structural or in psychological terms, would attract those who were inclined to value cultural diversity in its own right, and who specialized in describing it, analyzing it, and theorizing about it. Apart from all that, it is true that even now, when the modernity concept has returned to somewhere near the center of social thought, we may still find it rather unwieldy as a totality, and more than most concepts strained between analytical and rhetorical uses.
