The colonial encounter has been a defining moment in the making of the contemporary world. It has made a particular world and established cognitive patterns for knowing the world, yet the colonial encounter is missing in most sociological accounts of modernity. In recent times, increasing significance has been given to global phenomena. Acknowledging the complexity brought by globalization and interdependence has led theorists to contend that a new approach to modernity is needed. A shift from the singular trajectory of modernity to multiple modernities has been recommended (Arnason 2000; Delanty 2004; Eisenstadt 2000, 2001, 2004; Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998; Wittrock 1998, 2000). However, I argue that a more thoroughgoing analysis is still needed: one that reappraises the underlying assumptions upon which the discourses and practices of modernity are premised and one that addresses colonialism and other interconnections within a truly global social inquiry.

Globalization: The Universalization of Western Particularities

This chapter contends that the worlds we inhabit, just like the worlds that have been inhabited in the past, are the products of historical flows of people, goods and ideas that intersect and transcend particular localities. Cultural forms and social practices are both interconnected and constituted in those interconnections. There are no entities that are not hybrid, that are not always and already hybrid. Yet, as Trouillot (2003) argues, our understandings of the world are rarely posited in these terms.