Yi-Fu Tuan (Chinese: 段義孚; December 5, 1930 – August 10, 2022) was a Chinese-born American geographer and writer. He was one of the key figures in human geography and an important originator of humanistic geography.
Yi-Fu Tuan | |
|---|---|
| 段義孚 | |
 Tuan in 2012 | |
| Born | December 5, 1930 Tianjin, China |
| Died | August 10, 2022 (aged 91) Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Citizenship | American |
| Education |
|
| Occupation | Geographer |
Early life and education
Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China to an upper-class family, he was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He attended University College London, but later moved to the University of Oxford, where he graduated from University College, Oxford, with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955, respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Tuan taught at the University of New Mexico from 1959 to 1965. From New Mexico he moved to Toronto, teaching from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Toronto. He became a full professor at the University of Minnesota in 1968. In the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was while he was at Minnesota that he became known for his work in humanistic geography, but his forays into this approach began earlier with an article on topophilia that appeared in the journal Landscape. In a 2004 "Dear Colleague" letter he described the difference between human geography and humanistic geography:
Human geography studies human relationships. Human geography's optimism lies in its belief that asymmetrical relationships and exploitation can be removed, or reversed. What human geography does not consider, and what humanistic geography does, is the role [relationships] play in nearly all human contacts and exchanges. If we examine them conscientiously, no one will feel comfortable throwing the first stone. As for deception, significantly, only Zoroastrianism among the great religions has the command, "Thou shalt not lie." After all, deception and lying are necessary to smoothing the ways of social life. From this, I conclude that humanistic geography is neglected because it is too hard. Nevertheless, it should attract the tough-minded and idealistic, for it rests ultimately on the belief that we humans can face the most unpleasant facts, and even do something about them, without despair.
After 14 years at the University of Minnesota, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin and continued his professional career at University of Wisconsin–Madison as the J.K. Wright and Vilas Professor of Geography (1985–1998). He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1986, of the British Academy in 2001 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Tuan was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1987 and the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2012.
After Tuan became an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he would still occasionally gave lectures, continue to write his "Dear Colleague" letters and to publish new books on geosophy. His most recent books are Human Goodness (2008) and Religion: From Place to Placelessness (2010). He resided in Madison, Wisconsin.
Personal life
Yi-Fu Tuan stayed single throughout his life. In his autobiography, Tuan revealed his gay sexuality for the first time:
As a schoolboy in Australia, I was drawn to another boy. But no alarm bell rang, for other boys ... were also drawn to him. ... But my feeling toward another boy, an athlete with the sleek beauty of a well-oiled machine, was another matter. I couldn't persuade myself even then that it was just displaced longing for female loveliness. ... I was then fifteen.
Tuan has not focused on either his ethnicity or his sexual orientation in his research. Rather than stress axes of difference or social power relations, he has attempted to capture universal human experiences. He works to show nuances of common phenomena such as the experience of "home" that cut across cultural divides even as they reveal distinct manifestations in different places and times.
Tuan died on August 10, 2022, at the age of 91.
Key ideas and approaches
Humanism
Tuan describes his approach as humanist, however his humanism does not entail replacing spirituality with rationalism or promoting human beings as wholly self-directed. Instead, he sees humanist geography as a way to reveal "how geographical activities and phenomena reveal the quality of human awareness" and to show "human experience in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity". To do so requires empathy, and for this he seeks assistance from literature, the arts, history, biography, social science, philosophy, and theology. Tuan's approach is qualitative, but more narrative and descriptive than philosophical, in light of his concern that a philosophical theory can become "so highly structured that it seems to exist in its own right, to be almost 'solid,' and thus able to cast (paradoxically) a shadow over the phenomena it is intended to illuminate" whereas he prefers for theories to "hover supportively in the background."
Contradictions and paradoxes
Tuan is most interested in ambivalent human experiences that resonate with the opposing pulls of space and place, the intimate and the distant. His approach is suggested by titles such as Segmented Worlds and Self, Continuity and Discontinuity, Morality and Imagination, Cosmos and Hearth, Dominance and Affection, and above all, Space and Place. These existential dialectics propel people between a pole of experience characterized by rootedness, security and grounding, on the one hand, and a pole characterized by outreach, potentiality and expansiveness, on the other hand. These opposites interact: there is a certain distance in what is nearby and a certain nearness in what is far away. Therefore, ambivalence is the norm when it comes to the human experience of dwelling in the world with its existential pulls between space and place, mobility and stasis, the distant view and embodied engagement.
Optimism
Tuan is fundamentally an optimist. Even Tuan's gloomiest book, Landscapes of Fear, concludes that things were worse in the past. For Tuan, historical changes have been for the better overall: "In the larger view, the human story is one of progressive sensory and mental awareness ... culture, through laborious and labyrinthine paths traversed over millennia, has greatly and variedly refined our senses and mind." Progress itself depends on particular ways of dealing with the tensions between space and place, cosmos and hearth, dominance and affection, morality and imagination. The promise of the future lies in recognizing the existential poles of nearness and remoteness and how they are reflected in each other.
Constructionism
Tuan has foregrounded the importance of language in the making of place. Throughout his works, texts such as poems, novels, letters, and myths are understood as integral elements in the creation of a sense of place. Human communications form the basis for the social processes of imagining, understanding, planning and conceiving places. Representations guide the human and material interactions creating, sustaining, and destroying places. Tuan's deep reflection on the role of representation in the creation of place forms an important foundation for the geography of media and communication.
Selected bibliography
- Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape. 2013. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. ISBN 978-0-299-29680-3
- Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search for Meaning. 2012. George F. Thompson Publishing, Staunton, VA. ISBN 978-0-9834978-1-3
- Religion: From Place to Placelessness. 2010. , Chicago, IL. ISBN 978-1-930066-94-6
- Human Goodness. 2008. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. ISBN 978-0-299-22670-1
- Coming Home to China. 2007. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. ISBN 0-8166-4992-8
- Place, Art, and Self. 2004. University of Virginia Press, Santa Fe, NM, in association with Columbia College, Chicago, IL. ISBN 1-930066-24-4.
- Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations. 2002. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. ISBN 0-8166-4055-6.
- Who am I?: An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit. 1999. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. ISBN 0-299-16660-0.
- Escapism. 1998. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. ISBN 0-8018-5926-3.
- Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint. 1996. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. ISBN 0-8166-2730-4.
- Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture. 1993. Island Press, Shearwater Books, Washington, DC. ISBN 1-55963-209-7.
- Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress. 1989. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. ISBN 0-299-12060-0.
- The Good Life. 1986. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. ISBN 0-299-10540-7.
- Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. 1984. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. ISBN 0-300-03222-6.
- Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness. 1982. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. ISBN 0-8166-1109-2.
- Landscapes of Fear. 1979. Pantheon Books, New York, NY. ISBN 0-394-42035-7.
- Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. 1977. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. ISBN 0-8166-0808-3.
- Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. 1974. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. ISBN 0-13-925248-7.
- The Climate of New Mexico. 1973. State Planning Office, Santa Fe, NM.
- Man and Nature. 1971. Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC. Resource paper #10.
- "China." 1970. In The World's Landscapes. Harlow, Longmans. ISBN 0-582-31153-5.
- The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God. 1968. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont. ISBN 978-0-8020-3214-0.
References
- "Curriculum Vitae Yi-Fu Tuan" (PDF). April 8, 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 2, 2011. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
- "Yi-Fu Tuan". China Who's Who. Retrieved February 12, 2018.
- Brinely, Amanda. "A Biography of the Famous Chinese-American Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan". ThoughtCo. Retrieved February 12, 2018.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1961). "Topophilia: or, Sudden Encounter with the Landscape". Landscape. 11: 29–32.
- "Yi-Fu Tuan – Dear Colleague".
- Tuan, Yi-fu (1999). Who am I?: An autobiography of emotion, mind, and spirit. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 84. ISBN 0-299-16660-0.
- "Obituary". Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Beijing Normal University. August 11, 2022. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
- 张进 (August 12, 2022). "段义孚：为避免幽闭恐惧症，人类需要将整个宇宙当成游乐场｜逝者". The Beijing News (in Chinese (China)). Retrieved August 14, 2022.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1976). "Humanistic Geography". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 66 (2): 266–276. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1976.tb01089.x.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1991). "Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 81 (4): 684–696. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01715.x.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1982). Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1984). "Continuity and Discontinuity". Geographical Review. 74 (3): 245–256. Bibcode:1984GeoRv..74..245T. doi:10.2307/214937. JSTOR 214937. S2CID 163836652.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1989). Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1996). Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Perspective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1979). Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1993). Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture. Washington DC: Island Press.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu (1991). "Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 81 (4): 684–696. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01715.x.
External links
- Yi-Fu Tuan's homepage
- June 24, 2007 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the professor
Yi Fu Tuan Chinese 段義孚 December 5 1930 August 10 2022 was a Chinese born American geographer and writer He was one of the key figures in human geography and an important originator of humanistic geography Yi Fu Tuan段義孚Tuan in 2012Born 1930 12 05 December 5 1930 Tianjin ChinaDiedAugust 10 2022 2022 08 10 aged 91 Madison Wisconsin U S CitizenshipAmericanEducationUniversity College Oxford BA MA University of California Berkeley PhD OccupationGeographerEarly life and educationBorn in 1930 in Tianjin China to an upper class family he was educated in China Australia the Philippines and the United Kingdom He attended University College London but later moved to the University of Oxford where he graduated from University College Oxford with a B A and M A in 1951 and 1955 respectively From there he went to California to continue his geographic education He received his Ph D in 1957 from the University of California Berkeley CareerTuan taught at the University of New Mexico from 1959 to 1965 From New Mexico he moved to Toronto teaching from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Toronto He became a full professor at the University of Minnesota in 1968 In the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship It was while he was at Minnesota that he became known for his work in humanistic geography but his forays into this approach began earlier with an article on topophilia that appeared in the journal Landscape In a 2004 Dear Colleague letter he described the difference between human geography and humanistic geography Human geography studies human relationships Human geography s optimism lies in its belief that asymmetrical relationships and exploitation can be removed or reversed What human geography does not consider and what humanistic geography does is the role relationships play in nearly all human contacts and exchanges If we examine them conscientiously no one will feel comfortable throwing the first stone As for deception significantly only Zoroastrianism among the great religions has the command Thou shalt not lie After all deception and lying are necessary to smoothing the ways of social life From this I conclude that humanistic geography is neglected because it is too hard Nevertheless it should attract the tough minded and idealistic for it rests ultimately on the belief that we humans can face the most unpleasant facts and even do something about them without despair After 14 years at the University of Minnesota he moved to Madison Wisconsin and continued his professional career at University of Wisconsin Madison as the J K Wright and Vilas Professor of Geography 1985 1998 He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1986 of the British Academy in 2001 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 Tuan was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1987 and the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2012 After Tuan became an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin Madison he would still occasionally gave lectures continue to write his Dear Colleague letters and to publish new books on geosophy His most recent books are Human Goodness 2008 and Religion From Place to Placelessness 2010 He resided in Madison Wisconsin Personal lifeYi Fu Tuan stayed single throughout his life In his autobiography Tuan revealed his gay sexuality for the first time As a schoolboy in Australia I was drawn to another boy But no alarm bell rang for other boys were also drawn to him But my feeling toward another boy an athlete with the sleek beauty of a well oiled machine was another matter I couldn t persuade myself even then that it was just displaced longing for female loveliness I was then fifteen Tuan has not focused on either his ethnicity or his sexual orientation in his research Rather than stress axes of difference or social power relations he has attempted to capture universal human experiences He works to show nuances of common phenomena such as the experience of home that cut across cultural divides even as they reveal distinct manifestations in different places and times Tuan died on August 10 2022 at the age of 91 Key ideas and approachesHumanism Tuan describes his approach as humanist however his humanism does not entail replacing spirituality with rationalism or promoting human beings as wholly self directed Instead he sees humanist geography as a way to reveal how geographical activities and phenomena reveal the quality of human awareness and to show human experience in its ambiguity ambivalence and complexity To do so requires empathy and for this he seeks assistance from literature the arts history biography social science philosophy and theology Tuan s approach is qualitative but more narrative and descriptive than philosophical in light of his concern that a philosophical theory can become so highly structured that it seems to exist in its own right to be almost solid and thus able to cast paradoxically a shadow over the phenomena it is intended to illuminate whereas he prefers for theories to hover supportively in the background Contradictions and paradoxes Tuan is most interested in ambivalent human experiences that resonate with the opposing pulls of space and place the intimate and the distant His approach is suggested by titles such as Segmented Worlds and Self Continuity and Discontinuity Morality and Imagination Cosmos and Hearth Dominance and Affection and above all Space and Place These existential dialectics propel people between a pole of experience characterized by rootedness security and grounding on the one hand and a pole characterized by outreach potentiality and expansiveness on the other hand These opposites interact there is a certain distance in what is nearby and a certain nearness in what is far away Therefore ambivalence is the norm when it comes to the human experience of dwelling in the world with its existential pulls between space and place mobility and stasis the distant view and embodied engagement Optimism Tuan is fundamentally an optimist Even Tuan s gloomiest book Landscapes of Fear concludes that things were worse in the past For Tuan historical changes have been for the better overall In the larger view the human story is one of progressive sensory and mental awareness culture through laborious and labyrinthine paths traversed over millennia has greatly and variedly refined our senses and mind Progress itself depends on particular ways of dealing with the tensions between space and place cosmos and hearth dominance and affection morality and imagination The promise of the future lies in recognizing the existential poles of nearness and remoteness and how they are reflected in each other Constructionism Tuan has foregrounded the importance of language in the making of place Throughout his works texts such as poems novels letters and myths are understood as integral elements in the creation of a sense of place Human communications form the basis for the social processes of imagining understanding planning and conceiving places Representations guide the human and material interactions creating sustaining and destroying places Tuan s deep reflection on the role of representation in the creation of place forms an important foundation for the geography of media and communication Selected bibliographyRomantic Geography In Search of the Sublime Landscape 2013 University of Wisconsin Press Madison WI ISBN 978 0 299 29680 3 Humanist Geography An Individual s Search for Meaning 2012 George F Thompson Publishing Staunton VA ISBN 978 0 9834978 1 3 Religion From Place to Placelessness 2010 Chicago IL ISBN 978 1 930066 94 6 Human Goodness 2008 University of Wisconsin Press Madison WI ISBN 978 0 299 22670 1 Coming Home to China 2007 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis MN ISBN 0 8166 4992 8 Place Art and Self 2004 University of Virginia Press Santa Fe NM in association with Columbia College Chicago IL ISBN 1 930066 24 4 Dear Colleague Common and Uncommon Observations 2002 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis MN ISBN 0 8166 4055 6 Who am I An Autobiography of Emotion Mind and Spirit 1999 University of Wisconsin Press Madison WI ISBN 0 299 16660 0 Escapism 1998 Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore MD ISBN 0 8018 5926 3 Cosmos and Hearth A Cosmopolite s Viewpoint 1996 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis MN ISBN 0 8166 2730 4 Passing Strange and Wonderful Aesthetics Nature and Culture 1993 Island Press Shearwater Books Washington DC ISBN 1 55963 209 7 Morality and Imagination Paradoxes of Progress 1989 University of Wisconsin Press Madison WI ISBN 0 299 12060 0 The Good Life 1986 University of Wisconsin Press Madison WI ISBN 0 299 10540 7 Dominance and Affection The Making of Pets 1984 Yale University Press New Haven CT ISBN 0 300 03222 6 Segmented Worlds and Self Group Life and Individual Consciousness 1982 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis MN ISBN 0 8166 1109 2 Landscapes of Fear 1979 Pantheon Books New York NY ISBN 0 394 42035 7 Space and Place The Perspective of Experience 1977 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis MN ISBN 0 8166 0808 3 Topophilia a study of environmental perception attitudes and values 1974 Prentice Hall Englewood Cliffs NJ ISBN 0 13 925248 7 The Climate of New Mexico 1973 State Planning Office Santa Fe NM Man and Nature 1971 Association of American Geographers Washington DC Resource paper 10 China 1970 In The World s Landscapes Harlow Longmans ISBN 0 582 31153 5 The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God 1968 University of Toronto Toronto Ont ISBN 978 0 8020 3214 0 References Curriculum Vitae Yi Fu Tuan PDF April 8 2008 Archived from the original PDF on October 2 2011 Retrieved February 20 2011 Yi Fu Tuan China Who s Who Retrieved February 12 2018 Brinely Amanda A Biography of the Famous Chinese American Geographer Yi Fu Tuan ThoughtCo Retrieved February 12 2018 Tuan Yi Fu 1961 Topophilia or Sudden Encounter with the Landscape Landscape 11 29 32 Yi Fu Tuan Dear Colleague Tuan Yi fu 1999 Who am I An autobiography of emotion mind and spirit Madison University of Wisconsin Press p 84 ISBN 0 299 16660 0 Obituary Faculty of Geographical Sciences Beijing Normal University August 11 2022 Retrieved August 15 2022 张进 August 12 2022 段义孚 为避免幽闭恐惧症 人类需要将整个宇宙当成游乐场 逝者 The Beijing News in Chinese China Retrieved August 14 2022 Tuan Yi Fu 1976 Humanistic Geography Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66 2 266 276 doi 10 1111 j 1467 8306 1976 tb01089 x Tuan Yi Fu 1991 Language and the Making of Place A Narrative Descriptive Approach Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 4 684 696 doi 10 1111 j 1467 8306 1991 tb01715 x Tuan Yi Fu 1977 Space and Place The Perspective of Experience Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press Tuan Yi Fu 1982 Segmented Worlds and Self Group Life and Individual Consciousness Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press Tuan Yi Fu 1984 Continuity and Discontinuity Geographical Review 74 3 245 256 Bibcode 1984GeoRv 74 245T doi 10 2307 214937 JSTOR 214937 S2CID 163836652 Tuan Yi Fu 1989 Morality and Imagination Paradoxes of Progress Madison University of Wisconsin Press Tuan Yi Fu 1996 Cosmos and Hearth A Cosmopolite s Perspective Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press Tuan Yi Fu 1979 Landscapes of Fear New York Pantheon Books Tuan Yi Fu 1993 Passing Strange and Wonderful Aesthetics Nature and Culture Washington DC Island Press Tuan Yi Fu 1991 Language and the Making of Place A Narrative Descriptive Approach Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 4 684 696 doi 10 1111 j 1467 8306 1991 tb01715 x External linksWikiquote has quotations related to Yi Fu Tuan Yi Fu Tuan s homepage June 24 2007 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the professor
