Grounding world society: Spatiality, cultural heritage, and our world as shared geographies

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of world society has elicited sharp criticism for being too diffuse and amorphous owing to its synonymy with all transborder social relations, equability with humankind, or conflation with solidarist international society. To overcome these shortcomings, this article reconfigures world society by attaching otherwise unmoored social activity to an understanding of the world as comprised of shared social spaces. This spatialised reading foregrounds constellations of relations that have emerged in conjunction with discrete geographies – natural, economic, cyberspatial, cultural, anthropic – within which humans interact, and demonstrates that the world has become an actionable, political concept generative of activities peculiar to the space itself. A review of English School literature extracts four theses – purposive, plural, spatial, and stewardship – that invite conceptual reconstruction of world society. The article then addresses the discursive construction of cultural heritage as a worldly space populated with distinctive institutions and cognitive and normative commitments, and is followed by reflections on the added value of such an approach and directions for future research.