Abstract

This dissertation maps out an ontology of the life world on the basis of the long term slow-moving geographical structures navigated by Braudel in his work on the Mediterranean world. The work traces the development of a civilization of marketplaces through a historical reconstruction of the objects--foods, building materials, tools etc.--found within particular social spaces. By studying the effects of climate, geography, and vegetation on the life-world, I explore the permanent forces at work within historically sedimented spaces. Our world building activities, our ways of mapping and measuring the life-world are portrayed as forms of dialogue with a living earth--an earth that does not merely subside beneath the hammering of civilizations. More specifically, I show how the historical Mediterranean came to influence not only the marketplaces of Europe, but the political practices, the aesthetic sensibilities, and the institutional forms of the cultures surrounding it. By juxtaposing the history of a rural life which changed little or not at all for the duration of centuries to the history of coastal cultures attuned to the sea, I re-consider the different ways the trading life has both renewed and perpetuated cultural archaisms. In summary, the dissertation extends the Husserlian project of an ontology of the life world to the life world reconnoitred by history and the social sciences, and proposes a "Geo-ontology"--a general material ontology which takes into account the "deep structures" at work in our experience of geographical and historical realities