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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 153

he traces at least five structures of awareness: the archaic, the magical,
the mythological, the mental, and finally the integral. For him, all cultures
contain these structures, although what provides a cultural uniqueness is
the predominance of one structure over the others. Such a structure
plays a dominant role for interpreting other structures. Thus in a
mythological structure, mind or rationality may play a subordinate
calculative role in practical affairs, while magic in rational culture may
turn out to be purely technological: while designed rationally, military
and political organizations are deemed necessary to protect and enhance
the vital interests.
For Gebser, as for Weber, modernization is rationalization and
homogenization of all phenomena, with an added presumption of rational
universality. This modernization process, specifically in its reading of
rationality as instrumental, i.e., technical, tends to abolish cultural
differences and national identities. This produces, for Gebser, and, we
may add, for Husserl, vast cultural crises. The latter emerge on the
background of one mode of awareness, such as quantitative reductionism,
into the exclusion of other modes. For Gebser, such crises appear in the
cultural practices of reversion to archaizations, magical ritualizations. New
Agisms, as efforts to achieve authenticity and identity. One could say that
the search for authenticity of Heidegger and his deconstructionist
followers is premised on this reversion.
Gebser's investigations overcome the binary logic of the researchers
mentioned above, although his thesis is in partial accord with Weber's
and Husserl's assessment of Western modern rationality. His essential
contribution for our issue is not only the tracing of multiple symbolic
designs, but preeminently in his showing what modaUties of awareness
appear within modernizing processes when the latter become homogeniz-
ing and reductionist. Given the current modernizing processes, it is
necessary to address modernity as a context within which the quests for
ethnic and national identity are located.

II. Modernization

Modernizations, whether ancient or current, possess complex cultural
designs. Such designs may maintain invariants that clash and even move
in opposite directions. Modernizations postulate individualism and its

(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984), Part 1, Chapter 3, § 2.