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

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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 on human
soul comes forth from the hidden divine
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 As it is practiced today, the academic
field of geography spans the entire spec
attitude toward the mystical dimension
trum of disciplines, from the physical
of religion, the study of mysticism has
revealed a rich tradition of artworks that and biological, through the social and
economic, to the humanistic. It is weak
continue to intrigue us by their paradox
ical effort to make the invisible some est today, however, at the humanistic
end, and I have often thought that my
how accessible to our gaze.
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 is diffuse, familiar what is unfamiliar.
phy and biogeography, adding to our Nature is vast, complex, and threaten
knowledge of plants, animals, and the ing. It seems less so when we can predi
earth. He also added significantly to our cate it on parts of our body, which we
knowledge of what I call 'human geogra know intimately. So we say: headlands,
phy' through his histories of landscape foothills, mouth of a river, spine of a
painting and nature poetry. All he lacked ridge, shoulder of a valley, arm of the
as a humanist, so his older brother Wil sea, and so on.
helm said, was "a quiet contentment in Even the objects we manufacture our
himself and in thinking." A quiet and selves can seem distant and coolly indif
persistent thinking is certainly one ferent. To minimize that possibility, we
virtue that I have tried to exemplify in bind artifacts to our anatomy, saying:
my own contributions to the field of hu eye of a needle, spine of a book, hands of
man geography. a clock, legs of a table, house as body,
I have explored a number of different and body politic. Not just metaphors,
topics in the ten books I have published, but the full resources of language are
but three themes are recurrent: the felt available to us as poets - and we are all
quality of place, the psychology of pow poets to some degree - to firm up the
er, and culture as imagination. emotional bonds between ourselves and
One way to approach the felt-quality the world.
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
not to follow this path, addressing the more abstract entities such as space and
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
children because it helps them to locate nese poet in the second century B.C. and
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 nese poet writes, "Who knows when we
older and acquire a certain fluency in shall meet again? / The Hu horse leans
language, synesthesia weakens, its func into the north wind ; / the Y?eh bird
tion to enrich the world being taken over nests in southern branches : / day by day
by the metaphorical powers of language. our parting grows more distant." In
Defined in parallel with synesthesia as Wordsworth's poem, just how solitary is
the blending of images or concepts, met the Solitary Reaper? How vast is the

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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 jacks and weights - to distort plants and
human transformation of the earth. Ever 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.
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
Dominance and Affection : The Making of
Pets (1984). Water, I say, becomes a pet
when we make it dance for us. And we
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
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,
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
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
were comely, enjoyed the status of pets
in slave-owning and other strongly hier
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
brothers' in the impoverished and devel
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
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
up stakes and move - and do so again peans had to wait for the construction of
and again. Culture as I have character
ized it here is potentially progressive.
From this general standpoint, I raise a
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
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
Hadrian's Pantheon (118 -128 A.D.) to
acquire, for the first time, the sense of an
interior space that was formally elegant,
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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