On Human Geography.pdf

On Human Geography Author(s): Yi-Fu Tuan Source: Daedalus, Vol. 132, No. 2, On Time (Spring, 2003), pp. 134-137 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027849 Accessed: 20-12-2018 04:19 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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need for using "images to cast out im ages" in the path to union with God. He commissioned a dozen pictures for the Exemplar, the definitive edition of four mystical treatises he produced not long before his death. To illustrate the final

Yi-Fu Tuan

chapter of his Life of the Servant, Suso created a picture manifesting how the soul comes forth from the hidden divine

on human geography

abyss through the action of the Trinity and finally flows back again through the three persons into the darkness of God. This image not only attempts to visual ize invisible mysteries, but also provides a synoptic view of the Dominican's

teachings. The revival of mysticism in recent de cades may appear puzzling to those who see religion as an uncomfortable survi vor in a scientific world. Whatever one's attitude toward the mystical dimension of religion, the study of mysticism has revealed a rich tradition of artworks that continue to intrigue us by their paradox ical effort to make the invisible some

how accessible to our gaze.

As it is practiced today, the academic field of geography spans the entire spec trum of disciplines, from the physical

and biological, through the social and economic, to the humanistic. It is weak est today, however, at the humanistic end, and I have often thought that my field might have avoided this fate if we

modern geographers had drawn more inspiration from the Humboldt broth ers - Wilhelm the humanist (1767 -1835) and Alexander the explorer and natural

scientist (1769 -1859). Alexander von

A Fellow of the American Academy since 2002, Yi-Fu Tuan has received honors from the Associa tion of American Geographers, the National

Council for Geographic Education, and the Amer ican Geographical Society, and was elected a Lau r?at d'Honneur of the International Geographical Congress. He is perhaps best known for his land

mark study of "Space and Place : The Perspective of Experience" (1977), a work that not only estab lished the discipline of human geography, but also has proved influential in such diverse fields as the atre, literature, anthropology, psychology, and

theology.

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Humboldt of course made lasting contri aphor enables us to make concrete what butions to the fields of physical geogra phy and biogeography, adding to our knowledge of plants, animals, and the earth. He also added significantly to our

knowledge of what I call 'human geogra phy' through his histories of landscape painting and nature poetry. All he lacked as a humanist, so his older brother Wil

helm said, was "a quiet contentment in himself and in thinking." A quiet and persistent thinking is certainly one virtue that I have tried to exemplify in my own contributions to the field of hu

man geography. I have explored a number of different topics in the ten books I have published, but three themes are recurrent: the felt

is diffuse, familiar what is unfamiliar.

Nature is vast, complex, and threaten ing. It seems less so when we can predi cate it on parts of our body, which we know intimately. So we say: headlands, foothills, mouth of a river, spine of a ridge, shoulder of a valley, arm of the

sea, and so on.

Even the objects we manufacture our selves can seem distant and coolly indif ferent. To minimize that possibility, we bind artifacts to our anatomy, saying: eye of a needle, spine of a book, hands of a clock, legs of a table, house as body, and body politic. Not just metaphors, but the full resources of language are available to us as poets - and we are all poets to some degree - to firm up the emotional bonds between ourselves and the world.

quality of place, the psychology of pow er, and culture as imagination. One way to approach the felt-quality of place is to do a detailed study of a par The world is made up of specific ob ticular place in novelistic detail. I chose jects (foothills, tables, etc.), but also of more abstract entities such as space and not to follow this path, addressing the felt-quality instead from the opposite di spaciousness. How does language cope rection - that is to say, from the universal with spaciousness, making it more real human endowments of synesthesia and and vivid to us ? One way is to use the language. Synesthesia is the blending of specialized vocabulary of numbers. For the senses such that, for example, when example, South English Legendary, a popu one hears a sound one also sees a color. lar medieval work, conveys the vastness (Language points to its synesthetic of space by saying, "If a man could travel grounding when we say, for instance, upwards at the rate of more than 40 "What a loud tie you have" or "It's bit miles a day, he still would not have terly cold.") To synesthesia many ob reached highest heaven in 8,000 years." jects owe their particular vividness in But more common is to use a geo our imaginations. graphical vocabulary that can stimulate Synesthesia is an advantage to young our imagination, as an anonymous Chi nese poet in the second century B.C. and children because it helps them to locate and fixate on the world's objects ; when Wordsworth in 1805 do in two poems strongly developed, however, it pro that bear striking similarities. The Chi

motes hallucination. As children grow

older and acquire a certain fluency in language, synesthesia weakens, its func tion to enrich the world being taken over by the metaphorical powers of language. Defined in parallel with synesthesia as the blending of images or concepts, met

nese poet writes, "Who knows when we shall meet again? / The Hu horse leans into the north wind ; / the Y?eh bird

nests in southern branches : / day by day our parting grows more distant." In

Wordsworth's poem, just how solitary is the Solitary Reaper? How vast is the D dalus Spring 2003

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Note by space that envelops her ? For answer, Yi-Fu Tuan Wordsworth evokes, to one side,

"... weary bands / Of travellers in some shady haunt, / Among Arabian sands," and, to the other, "...the cuckoo-bird, / Breaking the silence of the seas / Among the farthest Hebrides. "

A theme well known to geographers long before it was taken up by the envi ronmental movement of our time is the human transformation of the earth. Ever

mais, and human beings. An outstanding example of violently abusing plants for our entertainment is topiary art. An other is the miniature garden, and bon

sai.

Is bonsai a fine art? What kind of fine art is it that regularly uses instruments of torture - knives and scalpels, wires and wire cutters, trowels and tweezers,

jacks and weights - to distort plants and prevent their natural growth? Making since Alexander von Humboldt, geogra pets of animals is a familiar story. Some phers have studied how forest and scrub what less familiar is the way they are

land, steppe and swamp, have been

turned into arable fields, towns, and cit

ies. This transformation speaks of eco nomic, political, and technological

power.

made through techniques of selective breeding into grotesque and dysfunc tional shapes, purely for human fancy.

From a psychological viewpoint, pow er reaches a peak - a peak charged with

sadistic-erotic pleasure - when one can

But largely unconsidered by both ge ographers and environmentalists is the exercising of power for pleasure - the pleasure that is to be had in making gar dens and pets. Geographers, like most people, tend to see gardens and pets as belonging to an area of innocence, in sharp contrast to large works of engi neering and economic development. Yet, isn't playing with nature and human beings - treating them as aesthetic ob jects or 'fun' things - even more driven by power, by a power that is not even constrained by economic ends? Play is not as innocent as we think. I developed that idea in a book called

were comely, enjoyed the status of pets in slave-owning and other strongly hier

Dominance and Affection : The Making of Pets (1984). Water, I say, becomes a pet when we make it dance for us. And we

brothers' in the impoverished and devel

can only make it dance through the exer cising of irresistible power - the power of hydraulic engineering and of large la bor teams organized along military lines.

Fountains, which charm our senses, are

blatantly unnatural, and I can just imag ine future hydrophiles trying to liberate them from their servile state.

From water, which is alive only in a figurative sense, I move on to plants, ani

turn other people into playthings.

Renaissance potentates kept dwarfs, whom they dressed up, slobbered over, passed around at the dinner table, or presented as gifts to influential friends.

Household slaves and servants, if they

archical societies. Women were decora tive objects and sexual toys in the Orien tal harem. Even in 'enlightened' Western societies, women were legally children -

child-wives in dollhouses - until a centu

ry or so ago. Today, the temptation to patronize remains and is directed largely at racial minorities and 'our little brown oping parts of the world. A third theme in my work has been culture considered as a product of imagi

nation. By imagination I mean the abili ty to see what isn't there. A carpenter

looks at a wooden plank and sees a bench ; Michelangelo looks at a marble block and sees David. Animals migrate when they are pushed. Humans, likewise. But humans also migrate under the lure of a pull -

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that is, when they envisage a place 'out there' - say, the New World - that is more attractive. Or they may decide to stay put in the Old World. The pull, then, is an image or plan in their minds that they try to turn into a three-dimen sional, material reality. People are never wholly content with what already exists.

Having moved to the New World, mi

and enclosed - varies enormously, de- Human pending on a people's access to great geography works of architecture. Ancient Egyptians knew the sublimity of exterior space (think of the pyramids under moon light), but interior space for them was darkness and clutter. Ancient Greeks had the Parthenon on top of the Acropo lis to lift their spirit, but its interior was

grants may in time grow dissatisfied, hardly more spacious than the interior imagine a better place further west, pick of an Egyptian mortuary temple. Euro peans had to wait for the construction of up stakes and move - and do so again

and again. Culture as I have character

Hadrian's Pantheon (118 -128 A.D.) to

ized it here is potentially progressive. From this general standpoint, I raise a

acquire, for the first time, the sense of an interior space that was formally elegant,

question that comes naturally to a geog rapher, namely, What might be the rela tionship between the quality of environ ment and the quality of life? As swamps are drained and malaria is conquered, the quality of human life undoubtedly improves. Likewise in a built environ ment, as peeling walls are repainted, drains are unclogged, and rooms and household amenities are added. But at what point does adding more rooms and amenities cease to improve, and maybe even detract from, the quali ty of life - a life that is not only material ly but also intellectually and spiritually

rewarding? Material things can enslave

rather than liberate. But is the same also true of works of art, philosophy, and

religion?

Consider an elemental aesthetic expe

rience known to all human beings - that of interior space. The quality of that ex perience - of what it means to be inside

yet sublime - a vast hemisphere illumi nated by the rotating sun. Architecture and, with it, the human appreciation of interior space continued to evolve. This story of architectural/aesthetic progress leads me to ask, What about

moral rules and systems? All societies have moral rules, but only a few have elaborated them into systems - into what might be called moral edifices. Are people who live under such edifices large, complex, subtle, and in some ways beautiful - better off, more able to real ize fully their potential as moral beings, than people who live in structures of simpler design - lean-tos, huts, and shel

ters?

This is the sort of question that de serves quiet and persistent thinking and makes me hopeful that the humanis tic spirit of the Humboldt brothers may yet enrich and expand the field of geog raphy today.

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