World binding

From Geography

Benno Werlen is the founder of the concept of 'world binding'. It is the key concept of action/agencycentered human/social geography and helps to understand the everyday geography-making. The basic idea of world binding is that we are behaving in a absolute and material space and our behaviour is determined by that space. This space is also described as 'the container space', derived from Newton's ideas of absolute space.

Not only the behaviour of human could be studied by this concept of world binding, but also societies and cultures. To study the agents in their container space, you need to have in mind the way of regionalizations. Regionalization is the concept of how people relate to the world around them. An important term concerning regionalization is territorialism. Also important to world binding is the knowledge about 'the specific forms of appropriations and specific power' (Werlen, 2009).

In the respect of world binding Benno Werlen makes the following conclusion. 'An objective view of space is difficult to obtain, because humans always act with a subjective view.'

Source

• Werlen, B., Structurasionist Geography ( Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, 2009 Elsevier )

By Meryl Burger s0801704