ABSTRACT
Space is both an object and category of analysis for many disciplines. Discussions about spatial semantics and concepts have been taking place in geography, a discipline that was established at universities, for a long time. Anthropology’s contributions to spatial analysis can be delineated with difficulty, since geographers have also integrated anthropological aspects into their approaches. In the early 1990s, some anthropologists could lament that the spatial aspect had been too little theorized in anthropology. In sociological debates on the theory of modernization and globalization, the spatial dimension plays a role, if at all, in moments when processes of despatialization or of the dissolution of traditional spatial entities are thematized. Social space emerges from the “field of forces, whose necessity is imposed on agents who are engaged in it”. Reinhart Koselleck uses a bifurcated concept of space—both metaphysical and constructivist or historical.
