Humanistic geography. The approach of the humanistic geographer is to give
center stage to human awareness, human inventiveness, and individual percep-
tion of place. Humanistic geography is somewhat connected with early French
human geography, but it has a closer tie with contemporary social geography.
Humanistic geography emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the mech-
anistic approaches of the Quantitative Revolution. A key question asked by
humanistic geographers is “why do people act as they do?” Implicit in this ques-
tion is a searching for attitudes, perceptions, and awareness in humans that
help to explain how they behave, individually and collectively, in the spatial
context. An important reversal of emphasis occurred in humanistic geography
from the notion of the “spatial confinement of people and societies” to “ones
concerned with the human and social construction of space”
Yi-Fu Tuan, an early advocate of humanistic geography, suggested that
achieving a more thorough understanding of humans was the main goal of the
discipline. Tuan also compared the scientific approach to the study of humans,
which paid little attention to the role of human awareness, and the approach of
the humanistic geographer, which emphasizes human awareness and links it to
spatial activities. Tuan, originally from China, was a longtime geography pro-
fessor at the University of Minnesota and is now retired.
Humanistic geographical approaches were radically different from that of
the accepted geographies of the 1970s. Physical geographers especially were
critical of the new forms of explanation offered by humanistic geographers. In
the new approach, empirically based hypotheses supported by analysis and ob-
jectivity were replaced by subjective conclusions and methodologies that were
seen as intellectually suspect.
Humanistic geographers address the role of evaluating human awareness of
the environment and consequent activities within it. Most important, humanistic geography emphasizes the importance of the subjective view and the mer-
its of the individual human being existing within spatial bounds.
HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY
Humanism is a term that encompasses a variety
of philosophical positions that go back to the
Renaissance, when scholars such as Erasmus and
Petrarch offered views of the social world that put
people in the center, in contrast to the prevailing
religious interpretations. Closely associated with
humanism is hermeneutics (from Hermes, the Greek
messenger of the gods), which is essentially the study
of meanings. Originating from medieval attempts to
find the one “true” meaning of the Bible, hermeneutics
became extended to include the multiplicity of
meanings inherent within all literary texts and social
actions.
Two closely related approaches to humanistic
thought have characterized it over time: phenomenology
and existentialism. Both are concerned with the shape
of human experience—the nature of subjectivity—and
there is considerable overlap. Whereas phenomenology
tends to emphasize the nature of human experience
and meaning, existentialism is more often
concerned with the ethical conduct of life.
Several giants in the history of philosophy invoked
these lines of thought. Danish Christian existentialist
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) offered a Romantic
critique of the Enlightenment, claiming that objectivity
is a myth and that all people faced an agonizing choice
between faith and reason, between the sacred and the
profane, between ethics and pleasure. Edmund Husserl
(1859–1939) formed a transcendental phenomenology,
noting that the view of science as an objective map of
the outer world reduced the human observer to a passive
receptor. He argued that objects do not have meanings
in and of themselves; rather, meanings are
constructed by the human mind. Husserl called for a
science of phenomenology that would strip away the
biases that the mind creates in its perceptions of the
world in order to see essences—the reality of things in
themselves. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) asked the apparently simple question, “What does it mean to be?”
and offered a very complex answer. His view rested on
the notion of the hermeneutics of being (Dasein), the
understanding of which meant an escape from abstract
theorizing. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) attempted a
merger of existentialism and Marxism, noting that in
contemporary capitalism the human condition is depersonalized
and alienated.
Essentially, all of these views maintain that objectivity
is a hurdle to effective understanding and that
there is no privileged conceptual vantage point; every
view is a view from somewhere and is inescapably
laden with biases. We cannot know the world except
for the meanings that people give to it. Thus, human
subjectivity is not a barrier to understanding the world
but rather the only route to knowing it. Meanings are
essentially arbitrary phenomena, and logic cannot
inform our moral choices. Despite this predicament,
as Sartre noted, humans are “condemned to freedom”;
that is, they must make choices even if there are no
firm grounds for doing so.
Thus, the project of a humanistic social science
was to put people back in the center of social analysis,
that is, to reveal the things that make people human
(i.e., consciousness). Social science has long had a
poor conception of the human subject—a flaw that
humanism attempts to overcome. It is consciousness
that makes us subjects rather than objects, that is,
allows us to be actors in the world with will and volition.
Mapping human consciousness allows us to
move past the sterile models of human behavior such
as Homo economicus to recover the sensuous nature
of experience—the ways in which the self, the environment,
and others are framed symbolically. This
task involves some understanding of intentionality—
our deeply human desires and motivations, anticipations
and expectations.
Uncovering the multiple dimensions of human consciousness,
however, is no simple task. It is essential
to avoid simplistic and biologically reductionist notions
of “human nature.” In the broadest sense, consciousness
is what makes us human. In some respects, human
consciousness differs qualitatively from animal consciousness
(e.g., in humans’ sense of self, time, humor,
and death), although with many primates this difference
is a matter of degree. Constructing a humanistic understanding
of consciousness has also invoked various
psychological understandings of sensation, perception,
and cognition, leading to intersections with behavioral
approaches. Consciousness includes our emotions and
memories, pleasures and fears, sexuality, hopes for the
future, and more—both rational and irrational. This
view sees humans as active creative actors and stresses
their constructive role in making the world. Social reality
does not simply happen to individuals “behind their
backs” or “above their heads”; individuals make the
world that makes them. Thus, humanistic social science
is unapologetically anthropocentric, antinaturalist (it
objects to using the same means to understand the natural
world and the social world), and antideterminist,
noting that people’s actions render social structures
ever changing and contingent.
Humanistic thought emphasizes the central role of
language as a set of signs that we use to negotiate the
world and share meanings. Language is how we bring
the world into consciousness, and thought is always
linguistically structured. As linguists and philosophers
such as Wittgenstein have demonstrated, language is
an opaque medium of understanding with a structure
of its own. There is no language-free theory, and language
limits and constrains the ways in which meanings
are constructed, at times letting them escape their
authors. The intersections of humanistic thought and
literature in the form of textual deconstruction
allowed every system of signs (e.g., a text, a landscape)
to be pulled apart.
Like positivism and empiricism, the humanistic
approach begins with the individual and experience in
the construction of knowledge. The task of social
science is to enter into another’s taken-for-granted
world, to see reality through the other’s eyes, and to
acknowledge the other’s view as a valid source. Truth
is found in the subjective meanings that people assign
to their worlds, and explanation is the recovery of
their intentions. Thus, humanism advocated a selfconsciously
empathetic social science that did not
strive for the holy grail of objectivity but rather confronted
its own inevitable assumptions and biases.
This approach forces researchers to acknowledge both
the subjectivity of the observer and the subjectivity of
the observed—to question their own assumptions and
biases—rendering the old subject/object dichotomy
false and inserting the researcher into the research
process. In so doing, humanism confronted social
science with the need to clarify the ethics and morals
of the observer, making clear his or her positionality
in the research process. It also legitimated the use of
qualitative research methods, such as participant
observation and case studies, that sought to uncover
the views of subjects Humanistic thought has a long history in the discipline
of geography. During the early 20th century,
French cultural geography owed much to Paul Vidal
de la Blache, who studied the unity of culture and
landscape in terms of the lifestyles (genres de vie) in
small rural areas called pays, uniting land and life
through an understanding of how consciousness and
the earth are deeply intertwined. During the 1960s and
1970s, several authors made major contributions to
the American literature on humanistic geography.
Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness was concerned
with the cultural impacts of mass production
and consumption, the homogenization of capitalist
landscapes, and resulting alienation. Ann Buttimer
introduced the notion of lifeworlds, a phenomenological
recovery of genres de vie that took as its point of
departure the multiple ways in which consciousness
was preconsciously sutured to locales in the intimate
rhythms of everyday life. David Lowenthal wrote on
landscape tastes and perceptions and on the relationship
between history and cultural heritage. David Ley
offered richly detailed urban ethnographies of the
inner city and social geographies of Canadian cities.
Yi-Fu Tuan, who coined the term humanistic geography,
held pride of place in this pantheon. Tuan’s
contributions included the widely popular notion of
“sense of place”, that is, the highly subjective set of
feelings and impressions that individuals attach to
specific locales. In this reading, places are intangible
webs of meaning, not simply physical points. Sense of
place, for example, makes a house into a home, makes
a church into a building with deeply religious meanings,
or defines a gang’s turf. Tuan applied this set of
notions, broadly grouped under the label topophilia,
to studies of nature versus wilderness, spaces of pain
and torture, sacred places, patriotism, pets, and more.
This line of thought also differentiated between
space and place. In part, the difference is a matter of
scale; space generally concerns broader domains than
the individual experiences on a daily basis. However,
space in the Western tradition often is used in a highly
abstract sense such as a Cartesian plane or isotropic
plains used in mathematical models. In contrast, place
tends to be smaller, localized, more intimately experienced,
intangible depositories of experience. The shift
from space to place—one of the major contributions
of humanistic geography—saw a transition from the
abstract disembodied space to the embodied, erotic, personal,
pungent places of individual worlds. Such a move
exhibited a concern with particularity and specificity
rather than with generality and made little effort to
search for “general laws.” Humanistic geographers
were interested in what makes places unique, how
they enter human consciousness, and how that consciousness
in turn constructs places through interpretation.
In so doing, they opened to geography linkages
to hitherto closed domains such as landscape architecture,
cultural anthropology, the sociology of the self,
and the arts and humanities.
Another topic legitimized through humanistic
geography was the geography of identity and the
body. Whereas classical theories of the human subject
portrayed identities as unitary and stable, phenomenologists
argued that identity is a multiplicity of
unstable, context-dependent traits—sometimes contradictory—
that change over time and space. Identities
are both space forming and space formed, that is, inextricably
intertwined with geographies in complex
and contingent ways. Likewise, human geographers
explored the multiple ways in which identity, subjectivity,
the body, and place are sutured together. The
interface between body and mind is an ancient topic
of philosophical consideration; the fact that we both
have bodies and are bodies confronts us with the nebulous
intersections of mind and matter. The body is
where the mind resides, the locus of consciousness,
tangible and corporeal evidence of its existence,
giving existential and phenomenological depth to
lived experience. Although bodies typically appear as
“natural,” they are in fact social constructions deeply
inscribed with multiple meanings—“embodiments”
of class, gender, ethnic, and other relations. The body
is the primary vehicle through which prevailing economic
and political institutions inscribe the self, producing
a bundle of signs that encodes, reproduces, and
contests hegemonic notions of identity, order and discipline,
morality and ethics, sensuality and sexuality.
In insisting on the primacy of the intentional subject,
humanistic scholars were adamant that geographies and
landscapes always are authored, that is, created by
people who give meaning to them. This position was
very much at odds with rival perspectives, including the
impersonal geometries of positivism. Humanists challenged
behavioral geographers to explore not only the
actions of people but also their intentions, avoiding
simplistic black-box models such as Homo economicus.
Finally, humanist thought mounted a serious challenge
to Marxism, pointing out its flawed conception of
human subjectivity and questioning its economic determinism
and teleological view of history and geography, where people are represented as finders of a world
already made. Instead, humanists argued that the social
world was open-ended and contingent, forever in the
process of becoming.
Humanistic thought, however, also had its critics.
Marxists and others pointed out that it offered no
account of social relations—of class, power, and production.
Moreover, humanism’s notion of the subject,
however rich, was a largely asocial undersocialized
account of individuals in purely personal—not interpersonal—
terms. For example, a dwelling is not just a site
of caring and memories but also a locus of social reproduction,
family relations, patriarchy, and power.
Moreover, by being silent about social relations, humanistic
thought lapsed into an uncritical view of the world
as simply structured by choice, a mythologized vision of
“free will” devoid of social constraints. Methodologically,
humanism’s critics argued that the approach
was deeply flawed; for example, it offered no means of
validating, confirming, or disproving its claims. Some
even held that humanistic thought was opposed to
science. These problems led Entrikin to conclude that humanism sufficed as a critique of other positions, a way
of unmasking presuppositions, but not as an alternative.
Humanistic thought made great contributions to the
discipline, helping to revive cultural geography and
forcing researchers to take seriously the complex question
of human consciousness. It jettisoned the myth of
objective research and made explicit discussion of values
and biases an integral part of the process. In the
end, humanistic geography, faced with serious critiques
of its own, was largely integrated into other paradigms
such as structuration theory and various poststructuralist
perspectives that arose during the 1980s and 1990s.
