ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, much work has been put into elaborating and discussing critical epistemologies that account for a perspective beyond methodological nationalism and conceptual Occidentalism. While these efforts to ‘re-orient’ social sciences have been groundbreaking and opened many paths for rethinking concepts, re-approaching current phenomena and processes, less attention has been paid to the fact that the underlying binaries – ‘Global North and South’, ‘West and East’, ‘Occident and Orient’, ‘West and Rest’ – are spatial concepts. In this contribution, I discuss how binaries imply spatial divisions that foreground an understanding of meaningful contexts shaping the (social) ‘world’ in its entirety. The binaries discussed here are ‘Global North and South’, ‘West and East’, ‘Occident and Orient’, ‘West and Rest’, as well as ‘Urban and Rural’. What they all have in common is that they insinuate that by adding up the socio-spatial contexts thereby described, the entire (social) ‘world’ is laid out, and they – at least initially – imply that a person, an action can be situated either in one or the other, not in both. I scrutinize these binaries as spatial, normative, and analytical divisions and in their relation to one another by asking questions such as: What sort of categories are they? What kind of spaces are indicated by those categories? How are these spaces ‘produced’? What are their underlying mechanisms? What functions or purposes do they serve? What can we see when looking at the ‘world’ through these binaries? What is obscured?
