Boundless Worlds

Book excerpt: Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.