Humanistic Approach in Geography (Humanism)

• Humanistic geography is an approach to human geography that gives a central and active role to human awareness, agency, consciousness and creativity.
  • It seeks to understand the meaning, value and human significance of life events and places, not to find general laws.
• It took shape in the 1970s as the most searching of the reactions against the positivism of the quantitative revolution, and became a major strand of the critical revolution.
• Its aim is a “people’s geography”: about real people and for people. It studies the earth as the home of humankind, as people experience, feel and interpret it.

Development of Humanistic Geography

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Roots Before the 1970s

• Human beings as agents of change is an old idea. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (18th century) described humankind remaking nature. Immanuel Kant’s physical geography gave the human being a place beside nature.
  • Kant held that knowledge comes through the senses: an outer sense perceiving nature and an inner sense perceiving the human mind or soul. Geography needed both.
• Carl Ritter’s Erdkunde made the earth the home of man and studied the reciprocity of nature and people.
• Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie turned human geography into a systematic field. Its second volume (1891) stressed how culture and technology change the environment.
• French possibilism stressed human choice.
  • Paul Vidal de la Blache’s genre de vie showed ways of life shaping their milieu, with nature only an “adviser”.
  • Jean Brunhes carried the idea further, and Lucien Febvre named it possibilism (1922).
  • Vidal still treated human geography as a natural science, with a strong functional streak. Humanists later took his holism and regional sensitivity, not his functionalism.
• The anarchist geographers Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, and in Britain H. J. Fleure, wrote with a strong humane concern for people and community.
• Richard Hartshorne (1939) kept geography close to history in the Kantian sense. S. W. Wooldridge wanted historical geography to see the countryside through the farmer’s eyes.
• Carl Sauer’s “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925) treated landscape as shaped by culture. John Kirtland Wright (1947) proposed geosophy, the study of geographical ideas in people’s minds.
• William Kirk (1952) set the perceived behavioural environment against the phenomenal one. David Lowenthal (1961) wrote on geography, experience and imagination.

The Reaction Against Spatial Science

• Positivism’s path into geography: Auguste Comte’s positivism, revived as logical positivism in the 1920s, reached geography through Fred K. Schaefer’s attack on exceptionalism (1953) and the quantitative revolution.
  • Mid-century positivism sought to remove every anthropomorphic element from knowledge. People were “naturalised” and studied like objects.
• By the late 1960s, spatial science treated people as dots on maps, data on graphs and numbers in equations, governed by geometric laws of distance and location.
• Humanists rejected four of its postulates: rational economic man, geography as pure geometry, the isotropic surface, and the person as a point on that surface.
• David Ley and Marwyn Samuels (Humanistic Geography, 1978) set the wider context:
  • Science and technology, once seen as the road to progress, were now blamed for environmental despoliation and alienation.
  • Specialised sciences had broken people into fragments. The humanist project was to “put man back together again”.
• For J. Nicholas Entrikin, its first task was to make geographers aware of the hidden assumptions of their methods. It also sought to restore geography’s synthetic character and its interest in unique events.
• Its aim was to reconcile social science with the human being: understanding with explanation, subjectivity with objectivity, idealism with materialism.
  • Geography should study the social organisation of space, not merely the spatial organisation of society.
• It began alongside behavioural geography, but the two soon parted. Humanists accepted the subjectivity of both researcher and researched and rejected behaviourism’s formal, positivist structures.
  • Behaviouralists treated people as responding to stimuli in ways that could be modelled. Humanists saw each person–environment interaction as a particular case, studied to help people understand themselves rather than to predict them.

Key Figures and Works

• Yi-Fu Tuan:
  • “Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature” (1971).
  • Topophilia (1974).
  • “Humanistic Geography” (Annals of the AAG, 1976), which named and defined the field. It sought to understand the human world through people’s relations with nature, their geographical behaviour, and their feelings and ideas about space and place.
  • Space and Place (1977).
• Edward Relph: brought phenomenology into geography (1970) and wrote Place and Placelessness (1976).
• Anne Buttimer: “Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld” (1976). She revived the Vidalian tradition, urging that regions be understood from the inside, through local perspective and history.
  • She saw phenomenology as a path to informed planning, clarifying the values built into people’s everyday ways of life.
• Leonard Guelke: “An Idealist Alternative in Human Geography” (1974).
• J. Nicholas Entrikin: “Contemporary Humanism in Geography” (1976), a sympathetic critique.
• David Seamon: A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), on the routines of everyday movement.

Philosophical Foundations

Phenomenology

• Founded by Edmund Husserl. It holds that there is no objective world apart from human experience: all knowledge arises from the lived world (lifeworld).
• Consciousness is intentional: things mean something to someone. The researcher brackets out his own presuppositions and describes the world as the subject experiences it.
• Phenomenologists describe rather than explain, since explanation imposes the observer’s constructs on the data of consciousness.
• Alfred Schutz’s “taken-for-granted world” showed that most everyday behaviour is habitual, built on typifications each person creates and communities come to share.
• In geography: Relph’s and Tuan’s studies of place, Buttimer’s lifeworld, and Seamon’s “body-ballets” and “place-ballets” of habitual movement.
• Kirk’s two environments map onto this view. The behavioural environment is the part of the phenomenal environment that a person perceives and gives meaning to.

Existentialism

• Its maxim, from Jean-Paul Sartre, is “existence precedes essence”: people first exist, then make themselves through free choice, decision and commitment.
• It rejects any view that makes people mere products of environment, and so opposes determinism of every kind.
• In geography:
  • Existential space is space given meaning by human projects.
  • Landscapes are biographies. For every landscape someone can be held accountable, and it can be read backwards to its makers (Marwyn Samuels).
  • The scale runs from one person’s home to the works of whole civilisations. Human geography becomes the story of people’s encounter with themselves in the world they build.
  • Jay Appleton’s prospect–refuge idea (1975) linked landscape taste to needs to see and to shelter.
  • Indian example: Chandigarh, planned by Le Corbusier in the 1950s, can be read as a biography of the modernist hopes of newly independent India.
• Dwelling, in Martin Heidegger’s sense of living closely with places and caring for them, led humanists to see geography as something lived. In this view every person who perceives and acts in space is a geographer.

Idealism

• Reality is mind-dependent, and the world is known only through ideas. Mental activity has a life of its own, not controlled by material processes.
• Cole Harris (1971), Guelke’s colleague at Toronto, likened geography to history: both synthesise whole complexes of phenomena, and the historical mind is contextual, not law-seeking.
• Guelke (1974), drawing on R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history, asked geographers to rethink the thoughts behind human actions.
  • The explanation of a field pattern, a settlement or a cleared forest is complete once the actor’s goals and beliefs are recovered. The geographer needs no theory of his own.
  • It suits historical and regional geography, grouping people by shared worldview. Forts once built for defence that are now tourist sites show how meanings change.
• With T. Bunting, Guelke (1979) attacked two behavioural assumptions: that environmental images can be measured, and that images match behaviour.
• Critique: it ignores unconscious behaviour and the material consequences of action, and its explanations are hard to verify.
  • Akin Mabogunje urged better theories that include differing value systems, rather than a retreat to special explanations for each case.

Pragmatism and Hermeneutics

• Pragmatism (William James, John Dewey) defines meaning by its role in experience and problem-solving. Knowledge is fallible and revised through action.
  • In practice, much humanistic research owed more to pragmatism than to formal philosophy. Participatory fieldwork judged the truth of a social reality by its consequences for those who live it.
  • With the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago school, it shaped much humanistic fieldwork, which treats meanings as social and constantly reconstructed.
• Hermeneutics, from the German human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), is the theory of interpretation.
  • Its “double hermeneutic”: the researcher interprets people who are themselves interpreting their world.
  • It offers a way to read regions, landscapes and texts and to rebuild regional geography on culture and language.

Concepts and Themes

Characteristics

• Anthropocentrism: people, their experience and their meanings are the core of inquiry. Space becomes place through human existence.
• Holism: phenomena are seen in their total context, as in Vidal’s regional synthesis.
• Subjectivity and particularity: unique events and places matter more than spurious generalisations.
• Four emphases run through the literature:
  • Agency: people act and change their world with their tools and technology, close to the possibilist view of man as an active agent.
  • Consciousness: they reflect on their world through perceptions and mental images, the ground shared with behaviouralism.
  • Awareness: they know its limits and possibilities and act accordingly, the existentialist strand. Environmental awareness grows with experience.
  • Creativity: they invent new tools and ways of living and remake a neutral environment. Creativity varies with circumstance: behaviour in a crowd differs from behaviour in privacy.

Place, Topophilia and Placelessness

• Space and place (Tuan): undifferentiated space becomes place as we come to know it and endow it with value. Space means freedom and movement; place means security and pause.
• Topophilia (Tuan, 1974): the affective bond between people and place, coupling sentiment with setting. It can be aesthetic, tactile, or rooted in home and memory.
  • Indian examples: the ghats of Varanasi for pilgrims and residents; the village kuldevta shrine; the longing of displaced communities for lost homelands.
• Sense of place and insideness (Relph): people experience places from varying degrees of insideness or outsideness, from the stranger’s detached view to the deep, unselfconscious belonging of existential insideness.
• Placelessness (Relph): mass culture, standardised planning and tourism produce inauthentic, interchangeable places. Examples are identical malls, highway strips and airport terminals.
• Lifeworld (Buttimer, Seamon): the taken-for-granted world of everyday routines, in which places are made through repeated movement.
• Sacred groves such as Maharashtra’s devrais, Kerala’s kavus and Rajasthan’s orans show topophilia and religion protecting nature through meaning, not law.
• Indian sacred geography: pilgrimage networks, tirthas and river goddesses bind the subcontinent into a meaningful whole (Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, 2012). Rana P. B. Singh’s studies of Banaras read the city as a sacred cosmos. Surinder Bhardwaj’s Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India (1973) mapped pilgrim fields by the meaning places held for devotees.

Tuan’s Five Themes

• Personal geographies: every person carries ideas of space, location and resources. Groups differ in how fully they articulate them; Pacific islanders were skilled navigators without printed maps.
• Territory: foragers know territory as a network of paths and places, while settled cultivators think in bounded property. Memory and rites of birth and death turn space into home.
  • Many animals defend territory, but humans add memory and anticipation, so birthplaces and ancestral lands carry deep emotional weight.
• Crowding and privacy: density creates stress, but culture and institutions absorb it. Crowded Hong Kong was no more crime-prone than roomier Western cities, and the Kalahari San gather closely by choice without signs of stress. Privacy lets a person build an inner world.
• Livelihood: even rituals have economic consequences. Arms production gives jobs yet threatens survival.
• Religion: taken broadly as the impulse for coherence and meaning, it is universal, though its strength varies by person and culture.

Methods

• Participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups and ethnography, using logical rather than statistical inference.
• Reading texts: landscapes as repositories of meaning (landscape iconography), novels, poetry, art and travel writing.
  • Iconography reads a landscape’s symbols the way art historians read a painting. A landscape is a record of what each generation chose to keep from the past.
• Literary criticism, aesthetics and art history supply its interpretive tools. It aims to recover the world as it is lived before scientific inquiry objectifies it.
• Tuan’s model regional geographer was the Victorian novelist, who joined subjective and objective description.
• Reflexivity: researchers acknowledge their own position and values.

Evaluation

Contributions

• It put human experience, perception and action at the heart of geography, and showed people as living, thinking, acting agents who create meaning through places.
• It brought into view sense of place, attitudes and values, which positivist methods could not measure.
• It opened the debate on human agency, a central theme of 1980s social theory.
• It established the importance of local difference and particularity of place when theory still assumed an isotropic plain.
• It dissolved the fact–value split and made researchers more self-critical about their values.
• Its focus on meaning and place fed the revival of cultural geography and the “cultural turn”.
• It brought qualitative methods and “thick” description into the discipline.

Criticisms

• No proof: one can never be sure an interpretation is right. Defenders reply that natural science, too, is a history of abandoned theories.
• Methodological obscurity: “understanding experience” can justify any method, and the work is not cumulative, so progress is hard to judge.
• Unscientific to its critics: it yields no generalisations, theories or laws. Entrikin judged it best understood as a form of criticism, not a viable alternative to science.
• Splits the discipline: separating human from physical geography on methodological grounds weakens geography’s unity.
• Little applied value: subjective readings rarely give clear policy for industrial location, land use or planning.
  • Critics feared that neglecting applied work would let economics, atmospheric physics or engineering absorb geography’s applied fields.
• Much preaching, little practice: early humanistic writing was long on programme and short on empirical studies.
• Voluntarism and idealism: Marxists argued it ignores the structures of class, capital and power that constrain choice.
• Fetish of experience: David Ley himself warned against treating subjectivity as cut off from context and material life.
• Ignores the unconscious: Hays (1979) argued that idealist explanation overlooks unconscious and subconscious behaviour and the weight of objective facts.
• Static, essentialised place: post-structuralist and feminist geographers, including Doreen Massey with her “global sense of place”, saw place as open, contested and relational. Gillian Rose criticised the universal male subject behind much humanistic writing.

Decline and Continuing Influence

• From the 1980s, humanists turned from attacking positivism to criticising structuralism, and sharpened their empirical methods. Two streams emerged:
  • A humanities stream: the iconography of landscape, often in historical geography.
  • A social-theory stream: ethnography and symbolic interactionism, often in social geography.
• By the 1990s the streams had merged into the new cultural geography, and many humanists moved to postmodern, postcolonial and post-structural work. A distinct humanistic geography became hard to identify.
• Its ideas live on in space and place studies, in postmodern and feminist geographies, and in the contrast with welfare geography, which shares its concern for people but not its method.

Recent Developments

• Psychoanalytic geographies: Steve Pile’s The Body and the City (1996) used psychoanalysis to read desire and fear in urban space.
• Emotional geographies: Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies (2005), on grief, fear, joy and belonging.
• Non-representational theory: Nigel Thrift (2008) and others study embodied practice and affect, extending the phenomenological interest in the body.
• GeoHumanities: collaboration with the arts and literature, including literary and cinematic geographies.
• Perception and physical landscapes: growing work on how cultural meanings shape the care, use and transformation of landscapes, from heritage conservation to environmental movements.
• Place attachment and displacement: sense of place now informs resettlement after disasters and dams. When subsidence forced families out of Joshimath (2023), what was lost was home, not merely housing.
• Place in the digital age: debates on digital placelessness, virtual communities and the sense of place in a mobile world.