First paragraph: The creeping expansion of a Western-normative modernity has posed a challenge both for non-Western societies and for scholars of those regions. For the societies, the struggle is to adapt to the disruptive trends of individualization, commoditization, technological transformation, and others while still maintaining the characteristics that mark their cultural difference. For scholars, the task is not just to document the struggle of non-Western societies, but more to understand the essential characteristics of the “modern age” and “modernity” without essentializing these two down to contemporary Western practice or denying their existence. This book, edited by the anthropologists Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn, attempts to use observations from Muslim societies in Southeast Asia (in the states of Malaysia and Indonesia, but certainly not focused on those state identities) to probe current definitions of modernity. 

First paragraph: The creeping expansion of a Western-normative modernity has posed a challenge both for non-Western societies and for scholars of those regions. For the societies, the struggle is to adapt to the disruptive trends of individualization, commoditization, technological transformation, and others while still maintaining the characteristics that mark their cultural difference. For scholars, the task is not just to document the struggle of non-Western societies, but more to understand the essential characteristics of the “modern age” and “modernity” without essentializing these two down to contemporary Western practice or denying their existence. This book, edited by the anthropologists Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn, attempts to use observations from Muslim societies in Southeast Asia (in the states of Malaysia and Indonesia, but certainly not focused on those state identities) to probe current definitions of modernity.