The idea of modernity is a pervasive, pernicious error. There is no such thing as modernity in the sense that some societies are objectively different or more advanced than other societies. Although a lot of people use this word - modern - if you look closely at how they use it, you can see that it doesn't really mean anything, and just reflects their own biased, limited view of the real world. Even when anthropologists use it, they put it in “scare quotes”. It's not their word, but someone else's, and they want us to be skeptical of it. Here are some key points about what's wrong with using the concept of modernity as a theory of society:

• Even though all societies do change over time, societies do not travel the same single road of progress, or go through the same steps over history.
• Societies cannot be ranked on a single scale of modernity or progress. This is ethnocentric in the same way that evolutionary theories of culture are.
• Modernity is like race. Just as race does not exist biologically, modernity is not objective either. However, just as racial ideologies influence how people understand human differences, the Western narrative of progress also influences people's understanding of history. The ideology of modernity masks how societies really change, and it serves to make certain kinds of structural domination seem natural and permanent.
• Social change is never just a from-to story, e.g. from tradition to modernity, from gift system to capitalism, from rural to urban, from isolated to connected, or from cultural diversity to monoculture, or from happy harmony to chaos and suffering.
• Social change is a both-and story, e.g. In contemporary societies, we see both gifts and commodities coexisting, and people simultaneously occupy many different kinds of systems at once which all depend on each other.