Yi-Fu Tuan

What are the links between environment and world view? Topophilia, the affective bond between people and place, is the primary theme of this book that examines environmental perceptions and values at different levels: the species, the group, and the individual.Yi-Fu Tuan holds culture and environment and topophilia and environment as distinct in order to show how they mutually contribute to the formation of values. Topophilia examines the search for environment in the city, suburb, countryside, and wilderness from a dialectical perspective, distinguishes different types of environmental experience, and describes their character.

A study of the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time.“Since it is the breadth and universality of his argument that concerns Yi-Fu Tuan, experience is defined as ‘all the modes by which a person knows and constructs reality,’ and examples are taken with equal ease from non-literate cultures, from ancient and modern oriental and western civilizations, from novels, poetry, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties of experience and yet avoids the pitfalls of arbitrary classification and facile generalization. For these reasons, and for its general tone and erudition and humanism, this book will surely be one that will endure when the current flurry of academic interest in environmental experience abates.” Canadian Geographer

Acclaimed cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers humanity's enduring desire to escape reality― and embrace alternatives such as love, culture, and Disneyworld In prehistoric times, our ancestors began building shelters and planting crops in order to escape from nature's harsh realities. Today, we flee urban dangers for the safer, reconfigured world of suburban lawns and parks. According to geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, people have always sought to escape in one way or another, sometimes foolishly, often creatively and ingeniously. Glass-tower cities, suburbs, shopping malls, Disneyland―all are among the most recent monuments in our efforts to escape the constraints and uncertainties of life―ultimately, those imposed by nature. "What cultural product," Tuan asks, "is not escape?" In his new book, the capstone of a celebrated career, Tuan shows that escapism is an inescapable component of human thought and culture.

To be human is to experience fear, but what is it exactly that makes us fearful? Here is one geographer's striking exploration of our landscapes of fear as they change throughout history. Yi-fu tuan investigates landscapes of the natural environment which are threatening, and landscapes filled with the dark images of the mind; fears of drought, flood, famine, and disease, shared by all members of a community, and fears of the particular ghosts which haunt the individual imagination. In this lucidly written ground-breaking survey, Professor Tuan delves into many cultures and reaches back into our prehistory to discovery what is universal and what is particular in our inheritance of fear. Starting with fear in animals, he raises and explores a variety of questions. What is specifically human about fear? To what extent are we born with certain fears? Is there or has there ever been a 'fearless' society? Professor Tuan examines the specific forms fear takes in the mind of the child, among hunters and agriculturalists, inside the walls of a medieval Chinese city, among Navaho Indians and American immigrants. He explores the ways in which authorities create landscapes of terror to instill fear in their own populations; and he proves the most basic of all contradictions between the need for human security and the fear of human nature.

Who Am I? is the bittersweet memoir of a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America’s most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment. This unusually introspective autobiography mixes Yi-Fu Tuan’s reflections on a life filled with recognition, accolades, and affection with what he deems moral failings, his lack of courage—including the courage to be open about his homosexuality.

Is it cruelty or playfulness to breed a variety of goldfish with dysfunctional bulging eyes? Was it an urge for dominance or benevolence that led ladies of eighteenth-century England to keep finely dressed black boys as their pets? Can we be said to abuse a plant when part of our pleasure lies in twisting its stem into the shape of an animal? This is a provocative book about the psychological impulse to “make pets”―to tame and control inanimate nature, animals, and other humans. Yi-Fu Tuan has amassed a wealth of evidence to show that the human urge for domination―even in the cultural and aesthetic realm―has exhibited itself repeatedly through the ages. He contends that we fail to understand the true nature of pleasure, play, and art unless we put power as well as affection somewhere close to its center. When we view the beauty of a man-made landscape, we tend to forget that it was often initiated as an exercise in power; in the case of Louis XIV’s Versailles, for example, 30,000 soldiers had to labor day and night to bring water to the arid palace grounds. In the same way, the creation of topiary art and bonsai can be viewed in a dual as a playful, pleasurable activity or as a deliberate reminder of our ability to command and impose. Our relationship with animals is another vivid example of our inclination to control. Tuan contends that cruelty to animals is extremely breeding animals for aesthetic purpose and training them to perform are not only favored hobbies but examples of delight in willful manipulation. The abuse of power is also seen in the treatment of those human members of a household who become patronized as pets. Children, women, servants, and entertainers have been at different times both highly valued and severely controlled―trained to approach the obedience of inanimate matter or mechanical toys. Dominance and Affection is likely to change the way we look at ourselves and our “pets.” If it is sobering in the questions it raises about human nature, it is also irresistible in the nature of the varied and fascinating material it lays before the reader.

Geography is useful, indeed necessary, to survival. Everyone must know where to find food, water, and a place of rest, and, in the modern world, all must make an effort to make the Earth—our home—habitable. But much present-day geography lacks drama, with its maps and statistics, descriptions and analysis, but no acts of chivalry, no sense of quest. Not long ago, however, geography was romantic. Heroic explorers ventured to forbidding environments—oceans, mountains, forests, caves, deserts, polar ice caps—to test their power of endurance for reasons they couldn't fully articulate. Why climb Everest? "Because it is there." Yi-Fu Tuan has established a global reputation for deepening the field of geography by examining its moral, universal, philosophical, and poetic potentials and implications. In his twenty-second book, Romantic Geography , he continues to engage the wide-ranging ideas that have made him one of the most influential geographers of our time. In this elegant meditation, he considers the human tendency—stronger in some cultures than in others—to veer away from the middle ground of common sense to embrace the polarized values of light and darkness, high and low, chaos and form, mind and body. In so doing, venturesome humans can find salvation in geographies that cater not so much to survival needs (or even to good, comfortable living) as to the passionate and romantic aspirations of their nature. Romantic Geography is thus a paean to the human spirit, which can lift us to the heights but also plunge us into the abyss.

In this rich and rewarding work, Yi-Fu Tuan vividly demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential components of life and society. The aesthetic is not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and his physical world, Tuan's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. His initial evaluation of the building blocks of aesthetic experience (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) develops gradually into a wide-ranging examination of the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and more.

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. His latest book, Humanist Geography , is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer. In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws.

In his many best-selling books, Yi-Fu Tuan seizes big, metaphysical issues and considers them in uniquely accessible ways. Human Goodness is evidence of this talent and is both as simple, and as epic, as it sounds. Genuinely good people and their actions, Tuan contends, are far from boring, naive, and trite; they are complex, varied, and enormously exciting. In a refreshing antidote to skeptical times, he writes of ordinary human courtesies, as simple as busing your dishes after eating, that make society functional and livable. And he writes of extraordinary courage and inventiveness under the weight of adversity and evil. He considers the impact of communal goodness over time, and his sketches of six very different individuals—Confucius, Socrates, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, John Keats, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Simone Weil—confirm that there are human lives that can encourage and lead us to our better selves. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before. He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing. In this enchanting volume, Tuan’s childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan’s interactions with his hosts, with his colleague’s children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self. At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity’s complex roots in history, geography, and language. Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place, all from Minnesota. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.

"What do place, art, and self have in common? To what extent do place and art define who we are?" In Place, Art, and Self, the renowned humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan tackles this large question in a small, accessible, beautifully illustrated book. Through memoir and the insights gained from a peripatetic life as an international scholar, Tuan explores the idea of attachment through place and art and the role of attachment in shaping, defining, and expanding the self. Inasmuch as a place contains sources of "nurture and identity," Tuan writes, so, too, does a painting, photograph, poem, novel, motion picture, dance, or piece of music. "The arts are likewise emblematic and revelatory. The ones I strongly like and dislike expose me, make me feel naked before the public eye, which is why I am guarded in my confessions." Drawing from a lifetime spent thinking and writing about the connection between geography and our spiritual needs, Tuan presents a compelling and meditative foray into how place, home, and homelessness condition us as humans. Complementing his essay is a gallery of fine-art black-and-white and color plates by four emerging contemporary photographers, whose work accords with Tuan’s message.

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality - world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict - from riots in U.S. cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each.Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the "cosmopolitan hearth," that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one's own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being "at home in the cosmos."

“[Tuan] explores answers to an old and unanswerable how should we live? . . . The Good Life is a little anthology of good feeling, touchstones of joy . . . These pleasures make the book a pleasure, not of conviction or belief, but of conversation’s meandering exploration.”—New York Times Book Review“Tuan, after all, is one of the few geographers who can be read for pleasure, and by the public as well as by the professional. But read not merely for pleasure, nor yet to mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Rather, consider Tuan’s challenge to identify your concept of the good life, and then try to construct that life.”—Environment and Planning Society and Space

Nice, clean copy./lh

"Maybe the most influential scholar you've never heard of" was how a feature article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently described Yi-Fu Tuan, a widely traveled Chinese-American geographer whose letters to his friends and colleagues, distilling observations, ideas, and experiences, have carried Tuan's insights, and his reputation, far beyond his chosen field. Culling the most characteristic thoughts and compelling moments from these prized letters, Dear Colleague at long last gives readers near and far the opportunity to share what Tuan's correspondents have already experienced-and to discover the pleasures of the underlined passages in a book of life at once edifying, entertaining, and exemplary. Reflecting on personal encounters and impersonal forces, Tuan conducts us along a path that leads from nature to human nature, through society and culture, geography and history, morality and religion, life and death. By turns playful and aphoristic, these letters hold revelations both humorous and harrowing. Whether browsed for their considerable incidental pleasures or perused in depth from beginning to end, they afford their reader the rare interior knowledge of another human being and his world, and an even rarer glimpse of the connections between sensation and intellect that lie at the very heart of the humanistic enterprise. Imparting the insights of a renowned scholar, revealing the tensions-and contradictions-that exist between life and thought, remarking on ideas from other thinkers, and expanding on perennial matters of morality and meaning, religion and ritual, pleasure and pain, Dear Colleague maps Tuan's own humanity in a lucid, elegant, and memorable way. Yi-Fu Tuan is professor emeritus in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin. He is widely considered the founder of human geography, and is the author of many books including Cosmos and Hearth (1996) and Space and Place (new edition, 2001), published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is also the author of books on desert landforms, China, the history of ideas, and an autobiography, Who Am I? (1999).

Can the individual and society be both moral and imaginative? In Western society the moral person tends to be regarded as either simple and naive or narrow and bigoted. In contrast, the imaginative person is looked on as someone not bound by the customs of the group and therefore likely to be fanciful and out of touch with reality.

Yi-Fu Tuan has spent a lifetime as a writer, teacher, and scholar exploring the relationship between the places and spaces that surround us and the inner self. In particular, he has shown, in his twenty-two previous books, what it means to achieve human dignity within the varied communities we create.Although we humans, by nature, may be flawed, as evidenced by war and injustice and environmental destruction, Professor Tuan affirms that all of us, by virtue of our remarkable senses and even more remarkable minds, are able to savor the wonders of our earthly home, as no other species can. Moreover, we humans are, by nature, moral beings. For this reason, we find true fulfillment and ultimate happiness by doing good, an emptying of the self in service to others that, paradoxically, enriches and extends the self as few other ways can.In The Last Launch, Professor Tuan's final book, we are given his views on a vast and complicated array of topics that would seem to require volumes to explore. Yet his essays, expressed straightforwardly, also have their place in conveying big ideas—especially to the often impatient yet deeply curious young at heart, whatever their age. And it is to them that these unforgettable messages in the bottle, tossed hopefully into the sea, are addressed. Who knows what hearts and minds they may stir to life?"I was in Panama in 1959 studying the coastline. I needed to go to a sandbar separated from the mainland by a stretch of mangrove swamp. I waited for the tide to withdraw, so I could walk across. Hours later, having competed my survey of the sandbar, I packed my notebooks, camera, and compass for the return trip."To my surprise, I was confronted by an unfamiliar landscape. A rising tide had covered the swamp in one-to-two feet of water, and I would have to wade through the water and mud to get back to solid land."As I reluctantly prepared myself to take on the tide, a young fisherman approached, pushing an old bike. On its handlebar was a row of fish, which he no doubt intended to sell on the mainland. He spoke a language I didn't understand. His gestures, however, made it clear that he wanted me to sit on his bike so that he could push me through the swamp."He had to push hard. I could see his strained muscles and smell his sweat. As soon as we reached dry land, I got off the bike and dug into my wallet for a few dollars to give him. I looked through the sheaf of bills to find the right amount. When I turned around, he was nowhere to be seen. I have never forgotten his kindness. He was doing good."—Yi-Fu Tuan, from is chapter "Encounters with Goodness"

The Chinese earth is pervasively humanized through long occupation. Signs of man's presence vary from the obvious to the extremely subtle. The building of roads, bridges, dams, and factories, and the consolidation of farm holdings alter the Chinese landscape and these alterations seem all the more conspicuous because they introduce features that are not distinctively Chinese. In contrast, traditional forms and architectural relics escape our attention because they are so identified with the Chinese scene that they appear to be almost outgrowths of nature. Describing the natural order of human beings in the context of the Chinese earth and civilization, "A Historical Geography of China" narrates the evolution of the Chinese landscape from prehistoric times to the present.Tuan views landscape as a visible expression of man's efforts to gain a living and achieve a measure of stability in the constant flux of nature. The book ranges the period of time from Peking man to the epoch of Mao Tse-tung. It moves through the ancient and modern dynasties, the warlords and conquests, earthquakes, devastating floods, climatic reversals, and staggering civil wars to the impact of Western civilization and industrialization. The emphasis throughout is on the effect of a changing environment on succeeding cultures.This classic study attempts to analyze and describe traditional Chinese settlement patterns and architecture. The result is a clear and succinct examination of the development of the Chinese landscape over thousands of years. It describes the ways the Communist regime worked to alter the face of the nation. This work will quickly prove to be crucial reading for all who are interested in this pivotal nation. It goes far beyond the usual political spectrum, into the physical and social roots of Chinese history.

What does it mean to be religious in the modern world? This is the question posed by well-known human geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan in Religion: From Place to Placelessness. In this, the latest book in his long and distinguished career, Tuan turns to this specific challenge, which has been a uniting current in much of his previous work. To illustrate the modern meaning of religion, Tuan calls on the work of photographer-artist Martha A. Strawn, whose impressive gallery of photographs from around the world concludes the book.Religion, Tuan argues, is a perennial quest for safety, certainty, and spiritual elevation that began oriented in place and particular cultural practices; but, in its highest reaches, religion moves toward universalism and placelessness. Drawing examples from both Christian and Buddhist traditions, Tuan explores, with his characteristic grace, sensitivity, and insight, the ultimate placelessness of religious experience. Tuan’s meditations combine with the elegance of Strawn’s photographs to create a book that is both thought-provoking and quietly beautiful.

This is the first volume of a new series of research publications in geography which is published for the Department of Geography, University of Toronto. The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God traces the development of the idea of the hydrologic cycle in the context of natural theology. The notion that "all creation exhibits the wisdom of the Creator" was once a widely held belief in the Western world. However, unlike stars and biological organisms, the physical features of the earth, with their evident lack of pattern, were difficult to reconcile with God's wisdom until scholars and scientists, at the end of the seventeenth century, found a satisfactory solution in the concept of the hydrologic cycle. The concept served to explain the earth's features so well that in the process it explained away one of them-the great deserts. This work shows the growth and eventual decay of a concept which attempts to relate the broad range of seemingly little-connected phenomena that physical geographers, in their several capacities, are still committed to study. It will be of interest to physical geographers and all scholars who are concerned with historical attitudes towards man's physical environment.(University of Toronto Department of Geography Publications No. 1)