Mr.
...to become similar to a globe. Here, the globe in question is the earth. Constructed scientifically and ascertained by experience, it is hardly possible for man to change the image of the earth's shape. In fact, globalize means to build an image of the integration of things produced by man that is closer to the geographic reality of the ground, which he now completely masters. If the globe was represented as an analogical image of the earth before any verification (i.e., a representation unrelated to direct human experiences, except for those of people who had gone around the world), it is because it had been conceived by astronomers using the technical inventions that made possible transcontinental navigation. Thus, the first globes appeared during the last decades of the 15th century, before the discovery of America, as documented by a globe with an admittedly imaginary outline of continents made in Italy before Columbus' discovery of the New World.
Only Westerners have represented the earth in the form of a globe--as a continuous field, where navigation proved to be unifiable. So the earth became the stage where men, gradually unified by Europeans, would play their future. The world leaned toward one single whole interpreted as the ontological basis and the goal, the primary principle and the final end of the upcoming modernity. In 1492, the step that allowed Westerners to set foot on an unknown continent--at that time mistaken for another one--was enough to discover people just as unknown, with strange customs (at the time European doxa called them monstrous), and to grasp their radical difference. Thus, the Western appropriation of the world goes from the theoretical hypothesis of a representation of reality to the reality of an almost daily practice. In other words, slowly, but irreversibly, a new history appears: the history of a completely...
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