Modernity is certainly a contested concept, and most commentators recognize that it has ambiguities and tensions within it. As Miles Ogborn writes, “Its periodisation, geographies, characteristics and promise all remain elusive.” Arguments about the nature of modernity revolve around notions of newness, artificiality, order, reason, democracy, technology, and chaos. All of these are bound up in a general idea that something happened at some point in the past when life before that point could be called premodern. Few terms in contemporary social theory signify so much and so many terms that are apparently in opposition to each other.