Worldview Flux: Perplexed Values for Postmodern Peoples

The most salient feature of the postmodern world, believe geographers Jim Norwine and Jonathan M. Smith, is a new set of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that are not yet well developed or widely diffused, so that few if any postmodern people are entirely of the new world or the old. People are perplexed, their values inchoate. Worldview Flux defines and describes the nature of perplexity and documents the shifts and changes of the postmodern world that lead to it, attending especially to the ways changes are experienced in particular places and human communities. In theoretical chapters contributors explain the reasons for our disoriented and disorienting world; empirical chapters describe strategies developed by individuals and communities to preserve, recover, or reinvent lost values, meaning, and identity. This volume is an accessible, engaging, and thought-provoking exploration of cultural geography in our time.