$26.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Paperback with gatefold flaps
196 pages and 2 color photographs
6.0″ x 9.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978-0-9834978-1-3
Published in July 2012
Distributed by the University of Wisconsin Press
www.uwpress.wisc.edu
by Yi-Fu Tuan
with photographs by Richard Misrach
For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography—what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy―to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning, his latest and last book, is a final testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer.
In returning to and reappraising his entire career, from his time as a student to his life’s work as an esteemed writer and university professor, Tuan emphasizes how humanistic geography can offer a younger generation of teachers, students, and scholars a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the creative study of geography and of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as they are understood by the senses.
This makes the book rather personal, but Tuan’s intent is to show how wonderful life on our small planet can be, even as we must deal with nature’s stringencies and our own deep flaws. And so his view of the future is hopeful, despite the life-long challenges that face us as individuals and societies. As for the individual, Tuan asks, “What are we humans to do?” “Is the individual the ‘quintessence of dust’ or the ‘paragon of animals, noble in action but apprehensive like an angel’?” The answer, he says, depends on whether our view of the individual is purely secular or one that is grounded in religious faith.
Tuan opts for the latter, a personal blending of Buddhist traditions and a Christian outlook. It is his path to finding meaningful answers as to why we humans are here on Earth. Implicit in the book are the questions, “What is your way of searching?” “What is your path to understanding your place in the world?” To Tuan, humanist geography and the study of place can lead the way.
About
(Photograph: A-Xing Zhu)
About the Author
Yi-Fu Tuan was born in Tianjin, China, in 1930, attended grade schools in China, Australia, and the Philippines before earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in geography, respectively, at Oxford University and the University of California at Berkeley. For many years he taught geography at the University of Minnesota, and from 1984 until his “official” retirement in 1998 he held two endowed chairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serving as the John K. Wright Professor of Geography and the Vilas Research Professor of Geography. Professor Tuan is a Fellow of both the British Academy and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was a founding board member of the Center for American Places from 1990-1996. He is the author of more than twenty seminal book publications, including The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God: A Theme in Geoteleogy (Toronto, 1968), Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Prentice-Hall, 1974), Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (Minnesota, 1982), Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (Yale, 1984), Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress (Wisconsin, 1989), Escapism (Johns Hopkins, in association with the Center for American Places, 1998), Place, Art, and Self (Center for American Places, 2004), Human Goodness (Wisconsin, 2008), and, with photographer Martha A. Strawn, Religion: From Place to Placelessness (Center for American Places, 2009). Professor Tuan passed away in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2022. His website is: www.yifutuan.org.
Slide Show
Jinting Wu (education policy, cultural anthropology).Humanist geography is a study of how humans experience, imagine, and transform places and landscapes as they intertwine with the social, cultural, and existential horizons of human society. Sitting at the crossroads of Earth science, social science, and the humanities, humanist geography is multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary by nature. The focus of humanist geography, as exemplified by Yi-Fu Tuan’s pioneering works, is through the lenses of religion, philosophy, arts, literature, and psychology to examine how human values, perceptions, and consciousness are embedded in places and spaces. 
Conrad Wiles (sociology, social welfare).Yi-Fu became my informal mentor during my undergraduate career, and he informally taught me about humanist geography. I believe I have a greater understanding and appreciation for how we are shaped by our physical environment and how we shape our physical environment. Each of us sees the world differently in part because we experience different physical environments. I think humanist geographers have a holistic understanding of the relationship between humans and the land and how this relationship has evolved over time. 
Kevin Warnke (political science, African studies, sign language).As someone who has never taken a geography course, my only exposure to humanist geography has been through my conversations with Yi-Fu or a layman’s reading of his books. To me, humanist geography means appreciating that human interactions with space and place are worth studying, whether they take place in the wilds of a jungle or in a family’s home, in a Leo Tolstoy novel or in the words of a pastor’s sermon. Our relationship to space and place is not an obscure or arcane topic; it is fundamental to how we as a species understand ourselves and our place in the world. 
Matthew O’Brien (chemistry, political science, African studies).“Geography” conjures images of maps, sceneries, and landscape stills, detached representations that reduce people to subjective smudges outside the frame. One would expect such sights to line the walls of an emeritus geography professor’s office, marking the places he has been and the contributions he has made. However, upon entering Yi-Fu Tuan’s office one is struck by the utter lack of such hallmarks. The only trophies—displayed on a tack board that catches the eyes of visitors—are of friends, family, and colleagues. “Humanist geography” embodies this ideal by placing people with their perspectives and ideals back in the frame and on the wall. 
Lindy Nelson (environmental studies, landscape architecture).I don’t believe I’m alone in my perception of our world as a messy, complicated place. The more we advance in our understanding of it, the more the relationship between “man” and nature is difficult to comprehend at every level. Tensions in the struggle for scarce resources, competitive world-views, and personal direction appear to grow as we become more aware of them. Humanist geography is the one rational, interdisciplinary approach I’m aware of that can bridge all areas of knowledge in an attempt to clarify our place and inform us socially, personally, and spiritually. If you’re wondering how, read Yi-Fu Tuan. 
Andrew Miller (law, English, music).Humans have always shaped the places they live, but those places and spaces shape people and society as well. My impression of humanist geography is that it explores the back-and-forth between people and places, as they impact each other. What’s interesting is that the impact of place on people and societies is all encompassing, just as human impact on place is shaped across the full spectrum of perceptions and experiences. 
Melanie McCalmont (communication geography, sociology of science).Animals and humans alike communicate about their experience of place. The physical planet knows we are here, too, and responds to human activity. But, unlike the glacier, the deer, the forest fire-we’ve forgotten how to share a place. Humanistic geography is self-consciousness of our impact on place. The glacier does not apologize to the mountain, nor the deer to the sapling. Yet humans stopped natural forest fires until finally we listened, understood that we must share our place with fires. Humans used to communicate apologies and thanks in campfire rituals of joyful dancing and cautionary storytelling. As our impact has increased, we communicate our apologies with a global eletronic network of satellites dancing in the sky and internet stories on how to reduce and repair our technological damage. Does she hear us? 
Hongnian Huang (mathematics, philosophy).In Professor Tuan’s words, “humanist geography achieves an understanding of the human world by studying people’s relations with nature, their geographical behavior, as well as their feelings and ideas in regard to space and place.” I am a young researcher pursuing my ideas in geometry. It is very interesting for me to relate Professor Tuan’s ideas to my own experiences in the mathematical world. Many geometers spend their entire lives to understand space, but they do not care how their theory can be applied to real lives. In many cases, the motivation to do mathematics is only for its beauty. On the other hand, when it is applied, does it do any good? For example, does the complicated machinery built up in Wall Street do any good to the financial market? 
Michael Hsu (Chinese literature, environmental studies) with Professor Tuan.Other geographers study ways through the world and others the ways of the world, while the humanist geographer wonders why we endeavor to do so at all. Often existential in its questions and experiential in its answers, it is a field of study that is both intellectually rewarding and personally satisfying. Humanist geography is academe’s most elegant proof that our Odyssean quests are returns to the self. 
Steven Holescher (American studies, historical geography, photographs as archives).Humanist geography isn’t just an academic field; it’s also, and more importantly, a way of being in the world. It’s about continually opening your senses of vision, hearing, and smell to the grand diversity of humanly constructed places. It’s also about trying to understand those experiences and then communicate their multiple meanings in evocative ways. Although humanist geography is not the province of any scholarly community—indeed, the novels of John Updike, the symphonies of Beethoven, the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, and the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson have helped me with this life-long project—I learned the most from a geographer: my teacher, mentor, and friend, Yi-Fu Tuan. 
Andrew Grant (cultural geography, China, explorer).Humanist geography holds a mirror to human experience. Never resorting to mystifying or obscure language, the humanist approach illuminates experiences both mundane and profound, showing how they relate to the basic human conditions of belonging and separation. Yi-Fu Tuan has deftly probed subjects as diverse as perception, metaphor, emotion, anxiety, fantasy, and religion, all the while remaining accessible to both scholars and the curious reader. Above all, humanist geography reveals how humans secure themselves in a chaotic world, a task accomplished, as Tuan has shown us, by methods as diverse as inventing a cosmogony or frequenting a local coffee shop. 
Chaoyi Chang (urban planning, geography, GIS) and Professor Yi-Fu Tuan.October 15, 2011 was homecoming weekend at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the campus was flooded with people wearing red. Somehow that reminded me of the sea of red flags on China’s National Day. Two different cultures, two different worlds. Which one do I feel more at home in? My nostalgia for China began to fade as I felt more at home in the United States. If there is one discipline that raises such questions and seeks answers to them, it is humanist geography. 
Nicholas Bauch (cultural/urban geography, Italian, photography).The value of humanist geography lies in its ability to enchant the world with meaning and purpose. It is as much about knowing the places around us as it is a guide to being in the world. Practicing humanist geography is attractive because it requires a slowness, a meditation that is antithetical to the breakneck speed at which we are asked to conduct our lives.
Praise
“The autobiographical nature of Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning captures Yi-Fu Tuan’s lifelong intellectual journey through humanist geography, a branch of geography that focuses on people and their condition by recognizing the ubiquitousness and salience of human relationships. Tuan argues that humanist geography can unearth the individual through an analysis of the various relations and tensions that permeate human experience. He embarks on the excavation of the self in an effortless narrative style more akin to an afternoon spent in friendly conversation than an academic treatise. Not only is this stylistic approach more inviting to the lay reader, but, in the spirit of humanist geography, Tuan’s tone and style initiate and nurture an intimacy with the reader that is extremely rare in formal philosophical contemplations.”
—Bartlomiej A. Lenart, Nature and Human Life (click to read the pdf of the full review here)
“Yi-Fu Tuan has written an extraordinary prose poem that embodies the search for meaning, a life-long reflection concerning the place of the individual in a world torn by war, inequality, and disaster. He explores the role of the individual in both the meaning of community and the wider cosmopolitan world, pointing constantly toward the promise of progress. This is a joyous book that is firmly rooted in the great religious traditions of both the East and the West.”
—Dominic A. Pacyga, author of Chicago: A History and Professor of History at Columbia College Chicago
“Humanist Geography is a splendid summation and advancement of Yi-Fu Tuan’s literary career, in which he reconsiders elements of all his previous books and presents them anew. For those who have followed Yi-Fu Tuan’s career over the years, this book will be a necessary and pleasurable read.”
—Denis Wood, author of Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land
My Place
Surely, Madison, Wisconsin, is one of the most beautiful and livable mid-sized cities in the world. I feel I speak with some authority, for I have lived in many cities, small and large, in a long life and have fond memories of Berkeley and Bloomington among the small and Chongqing, Sydney, and Chicago among the large. Perhaps I am biased in favor of Madison simply because it is my home for almost thirty years, exceeding by far my stay in any other city. But this cannot be the whole answer, for one can fall in love with a city as one can with a human being at first sight, and the love remains even after—and perhaps even especially after departure—for then memory sets to work, embroidering the ordinary into the extraordinary and the merely pretty into the beautiful.
Objectively, Madison has a claim to beauty. It is on an isthmus between two lakes, Mendota to the north and Monona to the south. That’s Nature’s contribution. Architecturally, it is anchored at one end by Bascom Hall, the University’s administrative center, and at the other end by the State Capitol, the former a colonnaded building that exudes academic probity and weight, the latter a soaring dome that exudes State power. The two buildings are linked by State Street, a student haunt filled with eateries, cafes, bookstores, and clothing stores mostly locally owned and operated that, in the regular academic semester, swarm with clients at all hours, from the first break of daylight to the evening when the East Campus clock reads ten and later.
Madison is a city of extremes. That’s another reason why I like it, for I am temperamentally a romantic, one with a taste for extremes of nature and culture. Let me explain what I mean. Of course, Madison’s climate is extreme, bitterly cold in winter and torridly steamy in summer, a scene of ice and snow under a pale-blue sky in January and another altogether of sailboats drifting lazily on Lake Mendota and students loafing with jugs of beer on the terrace of Memorial Union in July. Culturally? What do I mean by extremes of culture? Well, here is an example. I encounter bare-foot children smiling triumphantly with tadpoles swimming in their glass jars—a picture straight out of Mark Twain but only a stone-throw away (well, maybe a couple of stone-throws away) is one of the greatest university libraries in the world, a reminder that Madison may be only a mid-sized town, but its intellectual reach is urbi et orbi.
Lastly, Madison is home for me. Home implies a comfortable and nurturing routine, which is what I have established in my apartment, going every day from bedroom and kitchen to living room with its shelves of books and videos and returning to kitchen and bedroom at the end of the day. But downtown Madison is my home in the same sense—it is my home writ large. Every day I walk from my apartment on one side of the isthmus to Science Hall on the other side, a walk through State Street that takes me about twenty-five minutes.
Friends ask, “Why do you do that?” I answer, “But you do that, too,” the difference being that the corridor they traverse from bedroom to study and then back again is short. My corridor, for the same purpose of transforming myself back and forth from biological to cultural being, is long, being the length of State Street.
Copyright © 2013 Yi-Fu Tuan. All rights reserved.