THE GEOCULTURAL IMAGINATION: SCENARIOS AND STORY LINES
The geocultural imagination engages in a kind of mapmaking, seeking to grasp the distribution of things cultural over territories and their human populations, in the past, present, and future. Such thinking has an extensive history in the cultural sciences. Recently the geocultural imagination has become more volatile, readily crossing the boundaries between academic and public arenas. Since the 1990s a number of global scenarios have appeared – “clash of civilizations”, “the coming anarchy”, “Empire” – primarily with geopolitical intent, but often based on geocultural assumptions. Such scenarios have reached large transnational audiences, leading to critiques and debates. They also interact with the need of global journalism for steady story lines, to guide news reporting from various regions. This mixed genre of scholarship and journalism can be scrutinized at two levels. The writings can be evaluated with regard to their acceptability as scholarship concerned with cultural organization and process. They can also be viewed as significant components in an emergent transnational collective consciousness, a set of representations of the world which circulate in a world-wide web of social relationships.