Yi-Fu Tuan

In the 25 years since its original publication, Space and Place has not only established the discipline of human geography, but it has proven influential in such diverse fields as theater, literature, anthropology, psychology, and theology. Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers 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. He suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. Whether he is considering sacred versus "biased" space, mythical space and place, time in experiential space, or cultural attachments to space, Tuan's analysis is thoughtful and insightful.

The Perspective of Experience

Space and Place

Topophilia and Topophobia' offers timely reflections on the human habitat in the 20th century. The expression of topophilia and topophobia belong to our time, an ambivalence between the love and aversion for a place has been a recurrant paradox in human history

A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values

Topophilia

Y. F. Tuan

Fear is important to us: deprived of it we would soon die. It is, too, one of the most potent weapons employed by church and state in spiritual and social control. As an emotion it differs little whether inspired with reason or without: bathroom spiders excite similar feelings either English black or Australian red. This book is an examination of fear among different cultures and people from prehistory to the present. Professor Tuan begins by comparing animal and human fear and by tracing its development in children. He examines the roles of fantasy, superstition, magic and religion in creating and counteracting fear. The author then discusses Man's fear of Man. He describes, for example, the association of witchcraft with 'landscapes of the cursed' and of ghosts and spirits with the haunted realm. He shows that it is a short step from these dreaded places to the fears associated with the everyday landscapes of town and countryside. Our physical and mental surroundings may not only excite fear but be shaped by it. The author argues that every human construction is a component in a landscape of fear in that it exists to keep out chaos: walls, fences and frontiers on the one hand and fairytales and philosophical system on the other are all shelters within which we can, we hope, be at rest, if only temporarrily, from the siege of inimical experience and of doubt. -- Book jacket.

Landscapes of Fear

"(Tuan) does a masterful job exploring the condescending human treatment of animals as 'playthings' that exist only for our entertainment. He charts the malevolent history of male domination over women and children and the sad chronicle of slaves, dwarfs and other 'freaks' treated as human appliances or toys. This provocative study of power in the world of pleasure, play and art is a tour de force." -Cultural Information Service "A brilliant book that will appeal to a wide audience. The volume provides excellent material for school and college seminar debates on humankind's place in nature and attitudes toward other living things. . . . (A) penetrating analysis. . . . Readable at all levels."-Choice

The Making of Pets

Dominance and Affection

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 Search of the Sublime Landscape

Romantic Geography

Greil Marcus

Erika Doss

Neil Harris

The Architecture of Reassurance

Designing Disney's Theme Parks

Robert Bruce Silberman

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

While many modern artists have been fascinated by the formal richness, the conceptual foundations, and the social significance of maps, cartographers have long used the techniques of artists to create maps that express much more than how to get from one place to another. World Views is the companion volume to an exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum that is the first to combine maps, contemporary art that uses map forms and strategies, and commissioned works of art based on the idea of map making. Densely illustrated with full-color reproductions, World Views shows how maps are a vehicle for examining cultural issues ranging from personal identity to international politics. Maps from around the world and throughout history along with works by artists such as Jasper Johns and Nancy Graves are joined by art created especially for the exhibition. Although maps are supposedly objective, they incorporate cultural values and political beliefs. Essays by Robert Silberman and eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explore further the complex relationship between the changing world, map making, and art.

Maps & Art : 11 September 1999-2 January 2000

World Views

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.

An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit

Who Am I?

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.

Escapism

Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1998

A Life of Learning

Man and Nature

To be human is to experience fear, but what is it exactly that makes us fearful? Landscapes of Fear—written immediately after his classic Space and Place—is renowned geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s influential exploration of the spaces of fear and of how these landscapes shift during our lives and vary throughout history. In a series of linked essays that journey broadly across place, time, and cultures, Tuan examines the diverse manifestations and causes of fear in individuals and societies: he describes the horror created by epidemic disease and supernatural visions of witches and ghosts; violence and fear in the country and the city; fears of drought, flood, famine, and disease; and the ways in which authorities devise landscapes of terror to instill fear and subservience in their own populations. In this groundbreaking work—now with a new preface by the author—Yi-Fu Tuan reaches back into our prehistory to discover what is universal and what is particular in our inheritance of fear. Tuan emphasizes that human fear is a constant; it causes us to draw what he calls our “circles of safety” and at the same time acts as a foundational impetus behind curiosity, growth, and adventure.

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."

A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint

Cosmos & Hearth

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.

Aesthetics Nature And Culture

Passing Strange and Wonderful

“[Tuan] explores answers to an old and unanswerable question: 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 D: Society and Space

Yi-Fu Tuan

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