ABSTRACT
In recent years, the theories of modernity and modernisation have been criticised for their Eurocentric perspective. It is often argued that they give a priority to time rather than space. Spatial differences are subsumed under a singular developmental time of western modernity. Now that many non-western countries have achieved a certain degree of modernisation, the emphasis is being put more on space and academics are becoming engaged in discussing modernities ‘plural’ (for example, Featherstone et al. 1995). The same trend can be discerned in the discussion of ‘globalisation’. Few would still argue that globalisation just facilitates homogenisation of the world based on western modernity. What is becoming commonly held among scholars is, as William Mazzarella shows in his chapter on an Indian KamaSutra condom campaign, an idea that two contradictory forces such as global-local, homogenisation-heterogenisation and sameness-diversity, operate simultaneously and interpenetrate one another (cf. Appadurai 1990; Featherstone et al. 1995; Robertson 1995; Hannerz 1996).
