ABSTRACT
This chapter involves a new understanding of 'regionalization'. If one accepts this postulate, one must first clarify the ontological status of 'space'; and secondly, one needs to specify the relevant kinds of meaningful performances and types of social conditions. The chapter discusses this from an analytical perspective, and then turns to the everyday level. It proposes to distinguish three main types of interpretations in formal and in classificatory respects: a rational, a normative and a communicative interpretation. The chapter argues that this confusion lies in the fact that the basic distinctions in Husserl' s definition of 'life-world' have not been transferred with enough accuracy to the social sciences. It briefly reconstructs the reception of Husserl's key concept in the social and cultural sciences. An action-based social geography aims to reconstruct the everyday regionalizations of the life-world by the subjects. It critically examines the assumptive geographical representations of the world that are so often mobilized politically by regionalist and nationalist discourses.
