Yi-Fu Tuan

Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective

Space and place together define the nature of geography. Spatial analysis or the explanation of spatial organisation is at the forefront of geographical research. Geographers appear to be confident of both the meaning of space and the methods suited to its analysis. The interpretation of spatial elements requires an abstract and objective frame of thought, quantifiable data, and ideally the language of mathematics. Place, like space, lies at the core of geographical discipline. Indeed an Ad Hoc Committee of American geographers (1965, 7) asserted that “the modern science of geography derives its substance from man’s sense of place”. In the geographical literature, place has been given several meanings (Lukermann, 1964; May, 1970). As location, place is one unit among other units to which it is linked by a circulation net; the analysis of location is subsumed under the geographer’s concept and analysis of space. Place, however, has more substance than the word location suggests: it is a unique entity, a ‘special ensemble’ (Lukermann, 1964, p. 70); it has a history and meaning. Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.

Children and the Natural Environment

Children are prepubertal human beings. The definition seems clear-cut. But what is the natural environment? And when we use the expression “children and the natural environment,” what kinds of relationships do we postulate? These appear to be straightforward questions but are not because the key terms have meanings that are elusive and laden with culturally biased values of which we may not be aware. It is necessary that we be aware of them and of our culturally conditioned categories of thought before we attempt detailed descriptive analyses.

Perceptual and cultural geography: A commentary

P erceptual geography reached a peak of popularity in the 1960s. David Lowenthal played a key role in its rise with three contributions: two papers and an edited volume. The two papers are ‘‘Geography, Experience, and Imagination’’ (1961) and ‘‘English Landscape Tastes,’’ which he wrote with Hugh Prince (1965). The edited volume, Environmental Perception and Behavior (Lowenthal 1967), contains contributions from eight authors. These three works of the 1960s have been remarkably fruitful in promoting a psychologically grounded geography. Predictably, branches have developed from them that, over time, have come to have little to do with one another. Hazards perception, behavioral geography, and human/cultural geography—all represented within the covers of that slim volume Lowenthal edited thirty-five years ago—have taken on independent and productive lives of their own. What I intend to do here is to trace the path of one branch, cultural/human geography, as it came under the influence of the perceptual approach, taking Lowenthal’s work of the 1960s as a point of departure. I will show how perceptual geography led back to cultural geography insofar as it helped to understand identity and self-esteem, and, ultimately, to a topic far beyond perceptual geography: namely, the politically sensitive issue of equality. Before the 1960s, American human geography in the non-regional-science mold was essentially a cultural geography that emphasized group ways and values. Culture, so the idea went, strongly influenced how a people perceived and appraised their external environment. What the perceptual ‘‘revolution’’ did was to introduce certain psychological terms into the study of culture—terms such as ‘‘perception,’’ ‘‘behavior,’’ ‘‘taste,’’ and ‘‘imagination.’’ Those who followed the psychological path found themselves examining human individuals as well as groups. Lowenthal’s 1961 paper ‘‘Geography, Experience, and Imagination’’ pioneered this turn to the individual. True, he drew on the works of anthropologists to remind us of how groups perceived reality differently. Moreover, as a historian, he showed that each historical period might have its own worldview shared by a significant segment of the population. Nevertheless, the most striking novelty of his paper lay in directing geographers to a body of psychological and neurological literature that forced them to recognize the uniqueness of individual perceptions, the privacy of individual worldviews. Geographers, however, were unsympathetic toward this turn to the individual, for it promised no productive generalization, only endless itemization of difference. ‘‘So what if no two persons perceive alike?’’ geographers might say. Our traditional concern is with the group. And so, despite Lowenthal’s inviting signpost, we have not moved into individual psychology. Rather, since the 1970s, we have returned to studying group values or culture almost exclusively—but with this difference: culture is now seen as necessary to our understanding of personality, selfesteem, and identity. In other words, our understanding of culture has become more psychological, following society’s own growing inclination to analyze itself psychologically. A fairly common belief of the late twentieth century was that people need to have a strong sense of who they are, which they can have only when they are rooted in the customs and habits of a particular place. We geographers welcome this belief, for it supports our own bias and draws the public’s attention to our field. Place matters because, among other things, it is a repository of the past. ‘‘Who we are’’ depends on ‘‘who we were.’’ That sounds like common sense, but why the past should provide self-esteem is less self-evident, and it is surprising that so many people both within and outside of the academic community have accepted the idea in recent decades. Why can the present and the future not be the source of self-esteem and identity? After all, not so long ago, ordinary Americans defined themselves by what they

Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture

Conventional wisdom suggests that aesthetic experiences - those moments when the senses come to life - are important only after more basic needs have been met. In this inspiring wealth of provocative ideas, Yi-Fu Tuan demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential parts of life and society. The aesthetic is shown to be not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and the physical world, the authors exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. Tuan starts by examining the building blocks of aesthetic experience - sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste - and gradually expands his analysis to include the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and landscape. This leads him to the realm of politics, where he grapples with the fundamental question of the relationship between goodness and beauty, and of how the aesthetic can become a moral force within society. To guide the reader along this journey, the author describes how the aesthetic operates in four widely disparate cultures: Australian aboriginal, Chinese, medieval European, and modern American. Yi-Fu Tuan, one of our most influential and original thinkers, brilliantly conveys the profound fascination of multisensory reality, and in so doing enables us to make connections among even the most diffuse elements of our lives. While Tuan does not ignore human folly, Passing Strange and Wonderful is a celebration of the world around us, our experiences, and our creations.

Essay Reviews: Environmental Attitudes

John N. Black, The Dominion of Man: the Search for Ecological Responsibility. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970. t 6g pp., £ t .50. Frederick Elder, Crisis in Eden: a Religious Study of Man and Environment. New York : Abingdon Press, 1970. 172 pp.,

Space and place : the perspective of experience

3.95. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Encounter of Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Mod ern Man. London : George Allen and Unwin, t g68. 151 I pp., £2.10. Lynn White, Jr., Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, i Q68. t 86 pp.