ABSTRACT
Demarcating social domains is a way of categorizing the 'parts' of social life in general. It is a way of making claims about empirical life in the broadest possible sense. The four domains chosen as primary in the Circles approach, such as economics, ecology, politics and culture, have been derived as the minimal number of domains that are together useful for giving a complex sense of the whole of social life. Each the domains are understood as always located in relation both to each other and to nature. Although the categories of ecology, economics, politics and culture are modern, so long as the limits of the historically specific modern standpoint that makes the analysis possible is kept to the fore, the metaphor of domains can nevertheless be coherently deployed for analysing sociality and sustainability across the human condition, both present and past.
