Von Interaktion zu Transaktion – Konsequenzen eines pragmatischen Mensch-Umwelt-Verständnisses für eine Geographie der Mitwelt

Abstract. Questions about how human-environment-relations can be conceptualized in a non-dualistic way have been intensively discussed throughout the last decades. The majority of the established realist and constructivist perspectives aim at explaining a given situation by analytically dissecting it. Unfortunately, such an interactionist perspective systematically reproduces the dualistic division between humans, environment and nature.

In contrast, this paper offers a transactive perspective origin in classical pragmatism and discusses its meta-theoretical consequences for human-environment-research. A transactionist perspective interprets the world as a flow of unique and entangled events. Instead of ontologically separating humans and environment, it advocates to look at their relations as being part of a "connatural world". Such a point of view raises new ethical and political questions for geographical human-environment research, argues for a renaissance of ideographic methodologies and hints to a fruitful unity of geographical inquiry.