Caging/Self-Caging: Materiality and Memes as Tools for Geopolitical Analysis

Abstract

Human beings, both individually and collectively, are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of the ongoing process of caging (more related to iconographies and power) and self-caging (which is more subjective and individual, related to both iconographies and movement). The independent and difficult-to-control action of memes has the function of circulation, and favours the composition, decomposition and re-composition of human groups in societies, perhaps constituting the primary fuel for the ‘imagination’ mechanisms that (trans)form cultural islands and cultural drift. This ongoing dynamic shows itself and crystallizes in physical space, which is what geographers must carefully observe. This is particularly true for political geographers, who also analyse the same dynamics from the perspective of those socio-economic pyramids that are states or whatever other power structure that has been formally declared and/ or socially recognized – and perhaps with some subjective aspiration to contribute to the processes of resolution/management of human conflict.