Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization

Current debates on globalization often have the counter-intuitive effect of undermining the sense of a common world. Globalization is seen predominantly as an anonymous, actorless process against which a defensive reaction is the best possible. In contrast, Varieties of World-Making aims to move attention towards diverse projects of giving meaning to the world as unity, and the accompanying idea that there is a valuable plurality of ways of knowing these projects of world-making. The contributors are guided by such questions as: Can several worlds co-exist? Can a world be made from human social bonds? How can we frame a world in common?

The emphasis on world-making sets this volume against the dominant idea of neo-liberal and mass-cultural globalization as running its course and against the revival of theories of conflicts between closed cultural communities. However, the contributors also eschew any facile prescription of a combination of flexibility and reflexivity that will catapult humanity into a free and peaceful cosmopolitan future. Varieties of World-Making starts out from a systematic rethinking of the ways in which human beings relate to each other and to the world by emphasizing the plurality of bonds between them in their experience and their interpretation, and the essays apply this perspective to the varieties of ways in which the contemporary global situation is interpreted across the world.