FUTURES OF MODERNITY

Spuren Zygmunt Bauman

INDIVIDUALIZATION COSMOPOLITANIZED


You can download the video in high quality: (Quicktime 195 MB)

Individualization is both releasing individuals from traditional structures and re-embedding them in new social relations. In consequence, a paradox "force to freedom" appears. However, individualization is not confined to European borders or the Western World.

Rather, we have to consider simultaneous varieties of individualization that interact in different ways in a global world. This is the reason why we have to understand and define individualization in a cosmopolitan perspective.


Keynote Speaker: Yunxiang Yan

Anthropologist, Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. Being a leading figure in the cultural anthropology of rural China, Yan taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993, and then at Johns Hopkins University from 1994 to 1996.

His book "Private Life under Socialism" (2003) was awarded with the Joseph Levenson Prize for the Best Book on Post-1900 China. His research interests include economic anthropology, social change and development, family and kinship, peasant study and cultural globalization. His studies on the Chinese path of individualization have significantly added to our understanding of multiple modernities and the mapping of diverse individualization processes.

The title of his lecture will be: "The Chinese Path to Individualization."


Discussants: Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Navid Kermani, Erzbischof Reinhard Marx, Hans-Georg Soeffner, Ulrich Beck

Chair: Angelika Poferl


Literature:


Back to program overview >>>