Yi-Fu Tuan (Redirected from Y.-F. Tuan)
Yi-Fu Tuan was born December 5, 1930 in Tientsin, China. He was the son of a middle-class diplomat and was part of the educated class in the then Republic of China.
Tuan graduated from Oxford University in 1951 at the age of 21. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of California, Berkeley.
When asked why he became a geographer, Tuan says he responds with one of three different answers, depending on who is asking. The first, reserved for times when a lazy answer would be warranted, is stated thus: 'As a child, I moved around a great deal...and there is nothing like travel to stimulate one's appetite for geography.' A lazy answer indeed, but indeed it is sufficient enough of an answer to satisfy most people curious as to why anyone would think to be a geographer. His second response would be as follows: 'I have always had an inordinate fear of losing my way...to be lost is to be paralyzed, there being no reason to move one way rather than another...life, with no sense of direction, is drained of purpose. So even as a child, I concluded that I had to be a geographer so as to ensure that I should never lose my way.' His third, and more lengthy answer would comprise of the following: 'I took up geography, because I have always wondered...about the meaning of existence: I want to know what we are doing here, what we want out of life...I began my quest at the down-to-earth level of how people make a living in different places and environments...' This response continues to question the axiom that survival is all there is and he wonders at what is beyond survival, which he says is the 'vocabulary of nature and of ecological studies'.
This follows to his thoughts on nature. He says he jokes to environmentalists that, 'unlike them, I am a genuine lover of nature. But by nature, I mean the whole planet Earth, not just its veneer of life-and the whole universe, which is overwhelmingly unorganic.' This statement characterizes the man Yi-Fu Tuan quite well, and displays as well his concepts of geography and nature.
Tuan's major field of study in his earlier years of academia was geomorphology, or the study of landforms. This goes with his love of the desert and inorganic nature, which also stems from his aversion to being disoriented, as the desert provides 'an open map, with the sun serving as a dependable marker of east and west, and with sharply etched landforms-visible from miles away-that unmistakably tell the visitor where he or she is.' He has likened the desert to 'purity' while likening the rainforest to 'decay'.
He followed his love for the desert and landforms to New Mexico where he was employed as a
tenure-track professor, doubling the size of the University of New Mexico's geography department. There he got the motivation and inspiration he needed from the starkness and remoteness of the New Mexico desert. As a member of a two-person deaprtmentTuan had a large teaching schedule, but little if any pressure to produce material for publication. This gave Tuan ample time to focus his attentions back to human geography.
In addition to the New Mexico landscape and isolation, Tuan received inspiration from J.B.
Jackson, who published Landscape in Santa Fe. This magazine combined geography with philosophy, or as I like to call it philogeosophy, which translated and modified from English to Greek to English could mean ‘lover of the earth’s wisdom’. But again I might change it a bit to be philocosmosophy, which is what I see Tuan’s intellectual and spiritual philosophies to be.
From New Mexico Tuan moved to eventually become a full professor at the University of Minnesota in the
late 1960’s. There he began his focus on systematic humanistic geography. He describes the content of human geography from his wonderings of ‘the glories and miseries of human existence, observable on the streets as well as in colleges…also at the common routines of cooking and washing, planting and harvesting, buying and selling, the flowing and ebbing of traffic in city streets…’ etc.
After fourteen years at the University of Minnesota, he then moved to Madison, Wisconsin,
citing the impending doom of a mid-life crisis that turned out to be mild. Tuan concluded his professional career at UW, Madison. His career is one of modesty and brilliance, transforming the geographic discipline and expanding its patterns of thought into what today is one of the most diverse and all-engrossing disciplines in academia. He gave us our modern conception of space and place as well as a more enlightened way to view human geography.
Today Yi-Fu Tuan is a retired professor-emeritus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He gives many lectures and has recently published the book titled Place, Art and Self. He resides in Wisconsin.
A notable contribution of his to the field of geography is the concept of topophilia, presented in his book: Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. He said it: "...can be defined widely so as to include all emotional connections between physical environment and human beings."
External link
- Yi-Fu Tuan's homepage (http://www.geography.wisc.edu/~yifutuan/index.htm) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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