Modernity has been a powerful notion for more than a century, in anthropology as in many other fields. Early diffusion theories have taken it for granted that Western modernity slowly penetrates and takes over every region on this planet, and social scientists such as Durkheim, Weber, Parsons and Elias saw the conflict of tradition versus modernity as critical for the evolution of humanity. The idea that modernization inevitably and effectively destroys cultural diversity lies at the heart of many anthropologists’ endeavours, from Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) to Margaret Mead (1995) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1965). In the perspective of modernization theories from