ABSTRACT
Social reality as we encounter it is neither a body of objective facts nor of discourses, but a meaningful unity consisting of layers of experience accumulated over time – Meaning refers to the way in which experience is orchestrated as a coherent structure, and is related to its character as connected, contextual and historical – Five dimensions of context and connection are especially important for the creation of meaning: to our physical surroundings, natural biophysical cycles, the accumulated experience of the past, intimate circles of social relations, and our innermost self and identity – Immanent meaning inheres in concrete clusters of relationships, practices and significance anchored in everyday life – Transcendent meaning attempts to rearticulate, at the level of symbolism and language, a unity of experience which has been broken – It is possible to identify at least four distinct patterns of meaning-making, namely mythological, theological, ideological and anomic, associated with different epochs of social development – Globalising processes tend to fragment localised worlds of meaning while localising processes recreate them.
