If anthropology's self-consolidating Other has been distant cultures, then sociological theory's Other has been Western society. Yet, if anthropology could keep the "field" at bay through an act of temporal distancing (Johannes Fabian), then what is the correlate for this operation in sociology? Andreas Langenohl traces operations of sociology's distancing from, and re-inscription into, society in recent work in modernization theory, in particular revisiting works assembled around the theorem of "reflexive modernization."

Andreas Langenohl is the director of the research team "Idioms of Social Analysis" at the Center of Excellence "Cultural Foundations of Integration", University of Konstanz. The group is dedicated to the interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural framings of social analyses in literature, literary criticism, and the social sciences, and pays particular attention to the performativity of those analyses. Langenohl's related research projects deal with the different uses and trajectories of the methodological categories of "reflexivity" and of the "case" in the social sciences. He has also been working on issues in the borderlands between cultural sociology, anthropology, and cultural theory, such as practices of collective memory in post-Soviet Russia, modernization theory, the sociology of financial markets, and the history of the social sciences. Besides regular publications in German and English, his work has been translated into Russian, Polish, and Czech.