Recalcitrant space: modeling variation in humanistic geography

Abstract

In the past decade humanistic geography has been roundly criticized by influential geographers for offering essentialist conceptions of place. In this paper it is argued that essentialism is not intrinsic to these conceptions, and a model of ‘recalcitrant space’ is presented to show how amenable humanistic geographies are to constructivist adaptations that foreground variation in subjective encounters with place.

Keywords:

• humanistic geography
• space
• place
• Yi-Fu Tuan

Notes

1. A striking illustration of the declining status of humanistic conceptions of place among even the most sympathetic geographers can be seen by comparing two influential texts published just five years apart. The first, Agnew et al.'s Human Geography: An Essential Anthology (1996) excerpts a wide range of humanistic work spanning the twentieth century. The nearly 700-page book is divided into five sections, one of which is ‘Region, Place and Locality.’ This section contains an excerpt from Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977). Space and Place is, of course, a landmark text in which Tuan elaborated many of his core ideas about place. That Agnew et al. chose to excerpt this text as ‘essential’ human geography seems unsurprising. However, what is surprising is that in 2001 Adams et al. made quite different editorial choices in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Textures is a collection of papers inspired by and reflecting upon Tuan's life's work. Yet the editors distance themselves from the unmodified ‘humanistic’ label, terming the essays “critical humanist geographies” (Adams et al. 2001, p. xvi). The book is organized into four parts, each based on a theme identified with a particular book by Tuan. The parts are: ‘Landscapes of Dominance and Affection,’ ‘Segmented Worlds and Selves,’ ‘Moralities and Imagination’ and ‘Cosmos Versus Hearth.’ While these are all important examples of Tuan's work, it seems odd that a work inspired by the sum of Tuan's geographic oeuvre organized this way, and with the word ‘place’ in its title, granted neither Space and Place (1977) nor Topophilia (1974) its own section. That Textures contains seven papers under the rubric of ‘Landscapes of Dominance and Affection’ (one of which is titled ‘Sense of Place as a Positional Good: Locating New Bedford in Space and Time’ (Duncan and Duncan 2001)) but none under ‘Space and Place’, a vastly more influential text than Tuan's work on “the making of pets” – is notable. Taken together, the two books document how humanistic conceptions of place underwent a significant revaluation in geography in the late 1990s. While Tuan's specific conception of place was presented as ‘essential’ geography in 1996, its profile had sunk to the status of permeating sub-theme within his own corpus of work by 2001.

2. In the past decade Sack (1997, 2003) has developed an alternative, and quite powerful theory of place conceived as the product of ‘strands’ from the realms of nature, social relations and meaning. While acknowledging Sack's enormous contributions to humanistic thinking about place, the paper here advances a constructivist perspective precisely to avoid the charge of essentialism that a realist approach – such as Sack's – might attract.