This book investigates, compares and contrasts the experience of entering into and engaging in modernity and the modern era in many parts of the Asian continent. It focuses on the coming into being, development, and transformation of major urban centers from Tokyo to Mumbai from the late 19th century to the present, providing a broad overview of this crucial period of transition in Asia, not only from diverse geographical and historical perspectives, but also incorporating a broad range of further disciplines.

“Places of risk” and “sites of modernity” refer not merely to physical locations, but also objects and institutions that stand at the center of contemporary debates on security and risk. These are social and political domains where energy and infrastructure are produced, where domestic security is pursued and maintained, and where citizens encounter the state in its punitive or monitory roles. Taking a wide view of the period from the 1970s to today, this volume brings together innovative, interdisciplinary case studies of sites of modernity that promise to provide security and safety, yet at the same time are deemed responsible for creating new risks. With a particular contemporary interest in the technocratic changes of security and risk control the contributors to Sites of Modernity — Places of Risk position the 1970s as a turning point in the path from industrial to post-industrial modernity.

The debate on modernity and postmodernity has awakened interest in the importance of the spatial for cultural formations. But what of those spaces that exist as much in the imagination as in physical reality? This book attempts to develop an alternative geography and sociology of space by examining `places on the margin'.

Through more than 100 structures, most of which are open to tourism, this volume makes it possible to experience the historical and architectural vestiges of the "New Architecture." Besides the famous buildings, it presents insider tips for sites to visit throughout Germany.

Modernizing and colonizing forces brought nineteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhists both challenges and opportunities. How did Buddhists deal with social and economic change; new forms of political, religious, and educational discourse; and Christianity? And how did Sri Lankan Buddhists, collaborating with other Asian Buddhists, respond to colonial rule? To answer these questions, Anne M. Blackburn focuses on the life of leading monk and educator Hikkaduve Sumangala (1827–1911) to examine more broadly Buddhist life under foreign rule. In Locations of Buddhism, Blackburn reveals that during Sri Lanka’s crucial decades of deepening colonial control and modernization, there was a surprising stability in the central religious activities of Hikkaduve and the Buddhists among whom he worked. At the same time, they developed new institutions and forms of association, drawing on pre-colonial intellectual heritage as well as colonial-period technologies and discourse. Advocating a new way of studying the impact of colonialism on colonized societies, Blackburn is particularly attuned here to human experience, paying attention to the habits of thought and modes of affiliation that characterized individuals and smaller scale groups. Locations of Buddhism is a wholly original contribution to the study of Sri Lanka and the history of Buddhism more generally.

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its-kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present. Published in cooperation with the Society for Historical Archaeology