Contemporary Humanism in Geography∗

Abstract

Geographers emphasizing an existential phenomenological perspective in their research have referred to their work as humanistic geography. Some humanist geographers argue that their approach offers an alternative to, or a presuppositionless basis for, scientific geography. A review of the philosophies espoused by humanist geographers and an examination of their interpretations of these philosophies suggests that humanistic geography is best understood as a form of criticism.HE contemporary "humanist" approach in T geography has received increasing attention from geographers and has paralleled the growth of humanist perspectives in other human sciences.l The humanist approach in geography is best illustrated in the work of geographers such as Tuan, Buttimer, Relph, Mercer, and PowelL2 The philosophy which underlies their DI.

Meanings of place and aspects of the Self: an interdisciplinary and empirical account

“…Building on the intuitions of humanistic geographers, with whom a short collaboration was indeed inaugurated in the early 1970s (Kitchin et al 1997, p. 558), environmental psychologists have further explored notions of place identity, place attachment, place dependence, and sense of place. Emphasis on human behavior and positivistic hypothesis testing, though, have in time drawn environmental psychologists closer to behavioral geographers (Spencer and Blades 1986;Kitchin et al 1997) than to humanistic geographers, whose research method, originally, was explicitly non-empirical (Entrikin 1976). Today, environmental psychologists still adopt an empirically grounded hypothesis-testing approach and some of them continue to be interested in human behavior; yet, their studies on the relationship between people and place might offer theoretical insights which can certainly interest geographers.…”

“…The fact that humanistic geography largely drew on phenomenology and existentialism (Entrikin 1976) brought about an emphasis on human experience and on what Heidegger (1962) had called Dasein, the human subject's mode of being, which is always 'being-in-the-world', 'being in place'. This situatedness of the subject, in turn, explains the primacy of place in one's life, as the very existence of the Self is possible only in relation to a place (Casey 1996;Malpas 1999).…”

Problems in Place: Using Discursive Social Psychology to Investigate the Meanings of Seasonal Homes

“…Many descriptions of sense of place combine two somewhat distinct ideas. For example, Entrikin (1976) defined place as a "center of meaning or a focus of human emotional attachment" (p. 616). Likewise, Hummon (1992) defined sense of place as "dual in nature involving both an interpretive perspective on the environment and an emotional reaction to the environment" (p. 262).…”

Éléments pour une prospective du milieu

“…Dans les années 1970, la géographie humaniste a privilégié une lecture du milieu centrée sur l'intentionnalité humaine (Tuan, 2006) aux dépens d'un vécu dont la complexité réside aussi dans sa dimension matérielle (Entrikin, 1976). Plus récemment, Berque en a proposé une lecture plus globale : le milieu désigne autant les conditions de l'action que ses produits et la façon dont ceux-ci nous affectent en retour (Berque, 2000a).…”