From the issue dated March 16, 2001
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i27/27a01401.htm
Lost in Place
Yi-Fu Tuan may be the most influential scholar you've never heard of
By PETER MONAGHAN
Madison, Wis.
During the winter break of 1952, Yi-Fu Tuan and some Chinese graduate-school chums decided that they should be more all-American -- so they tried camping.
They drove east from Berkeley, broke down south of Fresno, and didn't reach Death Valley until 3 a.m. Too tired and unskilled to pitch their tents in the dark, they slept in the wind and dust.
By morning, the elements had died down. Just as the sun rose to light a range of mountains across the valley, Mr. Tuan recalls, "I awoke to lunar beauty," to "a phantasmagoria of shimmering mauves, purples, and bright golds, theatrically illuminated."
He felt, he writes in Who Am I?: An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), "not only wonder but an intoxicating happiness." He was "in a supernal realm and yet, paradoxically, also at home, as though I had returned after a long absence."
Upon revisiting the desert two years later, this time in Arizona, the shy young doctoral student in geography would discover in the vast, uninhabited space a second element that would, along with his vision of a transcendent earth, serve to animate his scholarship for the balance of his career: the simple pleasures of good company, the human element of geography.
For several weeks, he and David Harris, now a well-known British geographer, were in the field working on their dissertation projects -- Mr. Tuan's subject was the strange desert landform, the pediment. The two men ate canned food, sat out under the stars at night, and "talked of everything under the sun," Mr. Tuan recalls.
Influential and Idiosyncratic
Those weeks rate, still, as among the most pleasant of Mr. Tuan's life, and they set him on course to becoming one of the most influential and idiosyncratic geographers of the century. His distinguished career has been far from a matter of awed contemplation of rocks and stones and trees -- of crystalline, inanimate, and dehumanized nature. Rather, the desert focused Mr. Tuan's determination to grandly describe how humans inhabit and shape the earth, not just with their bodies, but with their emotions, minds, and spirits.
Mr. Tuan, who retired in 1998 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been praised from both within and without his discipline. And he will be honored again in two volumes of essays, one that has just appeared, another to be published next year. Writing in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (University of Minnesota Press, February 2001), J. Nicholas Entrikin, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, calls Mr. Tuan "a critical voice and liberating spirit" who has stimulated his discipline to explore such topics as environmental perception, symbolic landscapes, geographic aesthetics, environmental ethics, and cultural fantasy. He has undertaken a synthesis of the discipline's vast expanse -- nature and culture -- that has rarely been attempted by any one person since Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century founder of modern physical geography. "The humanistic tradition in geography has had many important contributors, but its principal contemporary architect has been Yi-Fu Tuan," says Mr. Entrikin. And that humanistic approach has profoundly influenced the direction of the half of geography that looks at human habitation of the earth, as distinct from the physical earth itself.
But perhaps the most curious aspect of Mr. Tuan's career is how unaware most modern geographers are of his importance in their discipline. Most of the new schools, including a whole slate of poststructuralist movements, barely give a nod, until prompted, to their forebear. That lack of recognition persists, even for someone the historian Simon Schama once called "one of the most remarkable and creative forces in the intellectual life of our time."
So as his career draws to its close, the geographer's own question, "who am I?" has prompted colleagues, too, to ask: Who is this geographer who has focused more on the mind than on the land; who has forged so unusual a path; who is only half joking when he writes that he is more Greek than Chinese because "like Socrates and Plato, my passion was for the beauty of the extremes -- the heavens at one end and the human individual at the other"?
And Mr. Tuan himself raises darker questions in his memoir -- about where a meaningful life of the mind, a life devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and still vital in many ways, has left him: unhappy. How is it that this leading figure in his field has come to inhabit a personal world as constrained and isolated as his intellectual world and scholarly legacy are large? What happened, he asks in his autobiography, as, after a boyhood transformed by world events, "my world shrank to academia and a small corner of it at that"?
Part of the answer lies in his own personality. In an academic era when scholars trade on their "marginal" identities to become central, Mr. Tuan shrugs off labels. He is equally impatient with all orthodoxies, and far more interested in quiet subtleties than in rousing polemic. But in the end, he suggests, he may have paid too steep a price for his equanimity.
An Unassuming Habitat
Yi-Fu Tuan lives in a modest, two-story apartment, with a view of Monona, the smaller of Madison's two largest lakes. It's a short walk to State Street, the town's social spindle, and to the university campus and Mr. Tuan's office in Science Hall, the imposing red-brick mansion on Lake Mendota's shore that is home to Wisconsin's geography department.
A small kitchen, a smaller dining area improvised between it and the living room -- the apartment's space is judiciously parceled. Neatly arrayed books fill tall bookcases to the brim. Nearby are several rows of classical compact disks, alphabetized by composer.
While the Yi-Fu Tuan of celebrated publications is a figure of prodigious learning, the man whom one encounters in person projects an air of both buoyant boy and sage septuagenarian. He is eager to accommodate, and content to chat. "Would you like to see my family photo album?"
He takes it to the sofa.
Falling from it are a moment in those Southwestern deserts, a favorite graduate student beaming upon graduation, a colleague's child. But those are recent insertions among the prints that Mr. Tuan's father neatly arranged when he gave each of his four children an identical album. Here is tiny Yi-Fu at 6 months, head shaved according to Chinese custom. There is a sensitive teenage Yi-Fu, sitting close to his mother.
Those images, as well as highlights of family history that were too perilous to photograph, suggest that Yi-Fu Tuan was destined to be a cosmopolite, and then a geographer whose cosmopolitanism -- away from hearth, out into cosmos -- would deeply inform his insights into how humans inhabit the earth.
The most opulent home the Tuan family of six lived in was a primitively furnished three-bedroom house outside Chongqing, where they struggled to find enough food. And yet Yi-Fu's father, Mao-Lan Tuan, enjoyed rank and privilege. He was a member of the country's tiny group of educated men who had, in addition to classical Chinese learning, higher education in a foreign country -- in his case, the United States. By the 1930's he was a worldy polyglot, and held positions ranging from director of Beijing's public telephone company to private secretary of a northern warlord.
Friends and Enemies
His close friend from childhood was Zhou Enlai -- Uncle Zhou, to the children. The Tuans had opportunities to see more of China than they might have wished, because they often had to flee the advancing Japanese occupiers -- once along a corpse-strewn Burma Road -- before finding refuge in Chongqing, China's wartime capital and last stronghold.
In 1941, when Mr. Tuan was 10, his father, determined to lift his family out of food-scarce China, took a senior consular position in bountiful Australia. In Sydney, Yi-Fu Tuan and his two brothers (both now physicists, one at the University of Cincinnati and the other at the University of Hawaii-Manoa) attended Cranbrook, a Church of England school for boys -- "a strange mix of young gentlemanly behavior and a 'Tom Brown' ethos of male roughness," Mr. Tuan recalls. There, puny, undernourished, the Tuans had to contend with the Australian boys' constant taunts of "chin chien Chinaman" before they learned to resist -- by playing cricket, and by drawing on the Chinese pride in high culture instilled in them by their parents and school in Chongqing.
At 17, after a time in the Philippines and in London, Mr. Tuan went to the University of Oxford. Then, in 1951, he headed to Berkeley for his graduate work, before beginning his academic career at Indiana University at Bloomington. He later taught at the Universities of New Mexico and, briefly, Toronto, and then for 14 years at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus before moving to Wisconsin, in 1984.
Calm Humanity
Mr. Tuan's writing, informed by his vast learning, clearly presents his provocative ideas and calm humanity. He has shown no interest in the dazzling-bordering-on-obscurantist approach of many Western humanities stars. Instead, he has lucidly set out, in 10 books and many essays and articles over 30 years, what he calls a "systematic human geography." In it, he has strained at the confines of his discipline, determined to lead it toward thinking about what makes the earth so much more than a physical, quantifiable setting for human endeavors.
Defying a Stereotype
Beginning his career by studying pediments in the desert might seem an odd way to approach that. Learning to describe the earth's physical processes did interest him, early on, but he admits that he was in the desert to be a contrarian. Some Berkeley geographers had presumed to suggest that an appropriate topic for him might be Chinatown. He was so appalled at that stereotyping that he determined to earn his stripes as a geomorphologist.
Reedy as a youth, sapling-legged and barely less slight than he is now at age 70, he had piercing eyes and an aesthete's hands that were surely never designed for scrambling over rock formations. In his writing from that time, the only hint one finds of a budding devotee of the humanist tradition is in the elegant balance with which he relates the flinty geological facts.
But Mr. Tuan was from the outset intent on expanding geography beyond the physical toward the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic. He was inspired by von Humboldt, "a hero" and a towering figure who, while predominantly known for explaining the physical world, was "among the first to use landscape painting and poetry to extend the range of geographical experience -- feeling, emotion, and concept," as Mr. Tuan writes in Who Am I?
The then-meager body of humanist work had been revived in the 1940's by John Kirkland Wright, a visionary director of the American Geographical Society, in New York, who had advocated "geosophy," the study of how humans understand their world. In the 1950's, Carl O. Sauer at Berkeley and Marston Bates, a University of Michigan zoologist, continued the project. They were determined to make sense of the connections between the physical and built environments, the "cultural landscape."
Opening Up Geography
Their prominent inheritors in the great expansion of humanistic geography in the 1970's were Mr. Tuan; David Lowenthal, an American geographer working in London; Edward C. Relph at the University of Toronto; and Anne Buttimer at University College Dublin. Collectively, they opened up geography to include an array of phenomena: human attitudes and values; the ways our senses perceive our environment; and how such responses are reflected in and shaped by a broad range of cultural expression, from art to common artifacts of the material world.
Mr. Tuan was among those particularly influenced by phenomenology, the philosophical movement that rejected positivism and instead sought universal laws that underlie human psychology.
From the mid-1960's into the early 1970's, while still known primarily as a geomorphologist, he edged toward announcing a vision for humanistic geography in a few of his many journal papers. Most widely noticed of those early writings was "Mountains, Ruins, and the Sentiment of Melancholy," in which he analyzed late-19th-century artistic and cultural expression to show how advances in the earth sciences made Americans aware of the age of the earth, and led them to view mountains and landscapes as ravaged ruins, rather than as monuments to permanency.
He wrote about similar phenomena in Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974, Prentice-Hall; reissued 1990, Columbia University Press). Appearing at a time when American society still clung to the myth of an open, unconquered frontier, it examined humans' emotional ties to place. The material environment, he wrote in the preface to the 1990 edition, was "not just a resource base to be used or natural forces to adapt to, but also sources of assurance and pleasure, objects of profound attachment and love." Geographers had rarely, if ever, noted that.
The full trajectory of a research agenda appeared in 1977, in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (University of Minnesota Press). In it, Mr. Tuan complained that the geographer "writes as though people were endowed with mind and vision but no other sense with which to apprehend the world," and he proposed that, instead, the discipline should "describe and try to understand what 'being-in-the-world' is truly like."
Attachments to Space
Space and Place shifted markedly from Topophilia's focus on attachments to place -- in part, Mr. Tuan says, because he was bored by America's then-reviving fascination with family, home, rootedness, and heritage. Instead, he dealt with place by exploring not only obvious built environments such as towns, cities, neighborhoods, and houses, but also such artifacts as fireplaces and favorite armchairs, or ships at sea. Place could also take the form of classical music (portable culture) or even human beings, such as "mother."
Making his geographical arguments, Mr. Tuan often seems as much psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist, although he has insisted that that is simply because geography must lay claim to those fields' perspectives, too. Few writers, of course, could convincingly command the intellectual and bibliographic firepower to make that claim stick. In Mr. Tuan's case, as his books' careful titles suggest, he has also been able to deploy a poet's concern for allusion, evocation, and conception.
The crystal clarity of his writing at times obscures the fact that his ideas can be quite quixotic -- even contrary. In Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), he links the progressive partitioning of space -- the need for privacy and the provision of it -- to the evolution of such everyday modes of social cohesion as table manners or caressing. In Dominance & Affection: The Making of Pets (1984), he suggests that the "petification" of animals, gardens, servants, zoos, dwarves, castrati, comedians, and even fountains and other petlike construances of water (the sweep of cultural reference is typical Tuan) is not, as many believe, moving closer to nature. Rather, he argues, through pets we creatively distort nature to indulge feelings of power, a touch of eroticism, or even mild sadomasochistic tendencies.
It's a counterintuitive thesis with which a zillion owners of capricious, bossy cats might disagree.
Or, agree. As Mr. Lowenthal writes in Textures of Place, the work is Mr. Tuan's "most enigmatically persuasive book." A fellow pioneer of humanistic geography, now an emeritus professor of geography at University College London, Mr. Lowenthal makes the case that Mr. Tuan has created a synthesis that suggests the full range of "humanity's reshaping -- and misshaping -- of the face of the earth."
Mr. Tuan's last academic book, Escapism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), provocatively suggests that human beings long both to connect with and flee from nature -- from their animality -- but that our yearning, while universal, is impossible to fulfill. One part of that claim is unexceptionable: Escapism typically involves getting away from built or everyday environments, into the outdoors, closer to nature. But the converse, Mr. Tuan argues, is equally possible: all culture is escapism -- escape from nature. To close the circle, escape into nature is itself an escape into culture -- "that is, into a world of culturally derived meanings encapsulated in such words as 'countryside,' 'landscape,' and 'wilderness.'"
The books reflect a career that has attracted top honors from the American Geographical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Geographical Union. Mr. Tuan has received similar acclaim in other fields, such as landscape architecture.
But he recalls less-public expressions of admiration more enthusiastically than the public accolades. "Warm respects" in a letter from the towering cultural critic Lewis Mumford, to whom he had sent a copy of an early monograph; Margaret Mead's characterization of one of his essays as "delicious." This delight in such kudos seems apt for a geographer whose landscapes, as he notes in Who Am I?, "are 'inscapes,' as much psychological conditions as material arrangements."
Inspired by the Young
The three former graduate students who edited Textures of Place -- Karen E. Till at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Paul C. Adams at Texas A&M University, and Steven D. Hoelscher at the University of Texas at Austin -- depict Mr. Tuan as a famously expansive teacher. His version of that is typically arch: "One of the things I always tried to do," he says, "was to get students to close their minds -- not to be so accepting of so many casual or lazy ideas."
In fact, Mr. Tuan thrives on the company of young people -- his colleagues' and friends' children, some of whom are now graduate students. He delights in joining them at the Sunroom Cafe and Gallery on State Street -- "my seminar room" -- to witness their progress. "I derive a powerful aesthetic pleasure from watching students think," he says.
No wonder, as Ms. Till relates, that Mr. Tuan's classes were always popular, even though students sometimes felt uncomfortable when he maintained many seconds of silence, as he still does, until he had formulated his best answer.
A 'Lack of Vitality'
When he discusses the more-sensitive issues in his autobiography, Who Am I?, with its repeated confessional note, the pauses are fraught with his own discomfort. The upshot, he insists, is that he has serious "deficiencies," including being alone, with no family, and no secure love -- in general, suffering from a "lack of vitality."
That last seems a bizarre notion. "He is too hard on himself," writes his friend and former colleague at the University of Minnesota, Philip W. Porter, a professor emeritus of geography there, in a review of the autobiography. Mr. Tuan's series of books, Mr. Porter says, "is testament to his intellectual vitality, deeply informed scholarship, daring originality, incandescent insight, and largeness of spirit."
But Mr. Tuan is intent on making the case against himself, lamenting, for example, that he did not respond more actively to the free-speech, civil-rights, and environmental movements -- "the great good things that happened in my lifetime." He had reasons. He was conflicted -- by pessimism about whether the progress would hold; by discomfort with naive good-guy/bad-guy dichotomies; and, tellingly, by "any display of triumphalism."
"Whenever an idea is dominant, I find that maybe I shouldn't stay in that camp," he says.
Most centrally, "lack of vitality" appears a self-critical euphemism for a low-grade, persistent melancholy, borne of his detachment from society. In Who Am I?, he writes, "Socially, I am ... adrift and for a simple reason -- I am single. The one portable soil -- family -- in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me."
Lethargy, or some other shortcoming, could explain why he is without family and children, but not as well as does his homosexuality.
Obliquely, by degrees, he outs himself in Who Am I? "I cannot risk falling in love," he writes enigmatically, early in the book, but provides his reasons only later.
None of his friends knew. "The idea of Yi-Fu and homosexuality never crossed my mind," Mr. Porter writes in his review.
For many years, Mr. Tuan hardly knew, himself. "I don't know if this is a boast or a confession but, believe it or not, I was actually an intellectual. I was so taken by ideas that I quite successfully repressed this other ... what would seem a vital human need.
"Part of it, I may as well admit it, was ambition. Not so much that I had aspirations to be full professor and so on, but just to get something done, and a sense of achievement. This was very overpowering."
And then he realized, "God, I missed all this, and it's not going to happen, it's too late."
A long pause follows, like those that made his students uneasy.
To be sure, there was a professional and societal context for remaining closeted during his early career. Not all his colleagues followed the model set by Mr. Tuan's instructors at Oxford, who were explorers, plain and simple. But most were vigorous, khaki-clad men clambering over rocky outcroppings in machismo display. The discipline resonated with heterosexuality, palpable and presumed.
Mr. Tuan says he decided to reveal his homosexuality now because "finally, there is the notion that I'm getting on in years, and one doesn't live forever. I can just imagine in those five minutes before death, you think, 'Well, I haven't been honest about myself, and it's gone. The opportunity is gone.'"
To join the gay-rights movement wouldn't have been him, he says. The movement has been, he fears, "truly ironic" because "in the process of liberating themselves, gays seem to have produced their own ghetto."
He remained closeted to avoid closeting.
He says he doubts that gay studies can do as much justice to the issues it tackles as can, say, geography, anthropology, and sociology.
Still, he writes of "my most aching desire for the warmth of another human being's body." Like his hero von Humboldt, also a foiled homosexual, he lacks "one thing that ought to be every human being's birthright -- namely, a beloved person to share cookies with before turning in to bed."
A Sense of Regret
"Oh, Yi-Fu, how sad," says Ms. Till with affecting tenderness, reliving the moment when she read that sentence in Who Am I?
Her sentiment seems to spill from a profound attachment to her mentor. She was his last formal graduate student.
Down the hallway at Minnesota, Mr. Porter, roughly Mr. Tuan's age, and a scruffy, gnomish figure whom one can easily imagine unshaven and weeks into a field trip, says he now sees with regret what once escaped his notice -- hints of loneliness in letters, or passing comments. But during Mr. Tuan's many years on the Minnesota campus, the department saw only a social colleague: "Yi-Fu contributed immensely to our sense of community."
Colleagues have been affectionately supportive of Mr. Tuan in his late-stage coming out. Despite his reservations, Mr. Tuan says, the book drew more varied reader responses than any of his others -- from geographers, including some like Mr. Harris, in England, who had been largely out of touch for 30 years, as well as from complete strangers. "I'm really touched," he says.
More than anything, he is relieved that few readers seem to have picked up on what he considers the book's more-serious revelation.
"It's something a little more aggressive, and it's a little unfortunate, which is deep in me. And that's that I'm kind of anti-family."
His antipathy began in childhood, with complex feelings toward his egotistical father, whose dutiful love permitted an occasional "look of distaste" for his children. In 1980, his father died, but Mr. Tuan did not travel from Minnesota to Taiwan for the funeral.
In his more recent life, too, Mr. Tuan has found reasons for "a somewhat jaundiced view of family."
There was an incident in the late 1980's. One Saturday afternoon, he thought he was having a heart attack. Panicked, rather than dialing 911, he tried to reach friends. Finally, he found one who was home, but who said he could not transport Mr. Tuan to the hospital. A family obligation.
That devastated Mr. Tuan -- he rarely made demands of friends. "I learned that, for all the friendliness of my colleagues, how marginal and unimportant I am to them."
Now, he allows that his reaction to the incident may have been extreme, and that, over all, he is probably simply immature. "I have skipped two critical stages of life -- marriage and parenthood. I have grown old without having grown up," he says.
Simplicity and Solitude
In his apartment, one finds hardly any art. In fact, there's just one tiny framed photograph of a leaf in snow, a gift from a student, and, on the coffee table, one crystal apple, which Mr. Tuan believes is the only "totally nonfunctional object" he has bought, ever. Its translucent beauty, he writes in Who Am I?, reminds him that "not everything in God's creation is passion and struggle or suffers putrescent decay."
One crystal apple. One photo album. Come to think of it, wouldn't a senior professor, eminent in his field, living in a college town of plentiful single-family dwellings, be expected to own a house?
For Mr. Tuan, not splurging on, say, a second objet d'art acknowledges a moral imperative: "There ought to be a parallel between one's material circumstances and one's moral standing," he says. In his academic life, he interpreted this form of noblesse oblige to mean that he should be kinder to students, a better teacher. Here at home, it produces a mixture of self-deprivation and geographical peculiarity: He purposely uses every area of his apartment, every day. Even "every chair, I will be sitting in at some time during the day, and that's how I like it. I would feel uncomfortable if there's a room that I'm not us ing. It haunts me. It accuses me of something."
Mr. Tuan will not write about geography again. He claims he has said what he wanted to say in his "systematic human geography."
"My talent -- such as it is -- has been used up, thanks to society's unstinting support," he writes. "I still can't quite believe my good fortune."
Yet he admits that the divorce has not been quite so amicable, or final.
He is particularly exercised about an academic climate in which, he believes, writing that states the obvious -- about, for example, societal wrongs -- is acclaimed while more subtle ideas are disparaged.
He sees identity politics as a particularly aggravating expression of that, and believes that his own ethnicity is one reason he does not figure among all the academics who have some claim on people's attention -- the "public intellectuals."
"I feel like the things I do are not acceptable. Yet if I did well in an accepted field, ethnic studies or physics ..."
The subject steams him; he has to stop discussing it. But it shades how he views his reception by his own discipline. Why, he asks, are books like his Dominance & Affection: The Making of Pets, not cited more in, say, work about the dominance of nature and the environment? "Instead of finding students or colleagues excited by this perhaps unusual perspective, I find that they either dismiss it or think there's something wrong with me.
"That's one of the reasons the motivation to write is not there any more."
Given his acclaim and awards, it might appear that Mr. Tuan's dissatisfaction is out of proportion. Not altogether, says Mr. Entrikin of U.C.L.A., who believes that praise of Mr. Tuan has often missed the point by presenting him "as an interesting yet isolated figure in the evolution of modern paradigms." He says that human geographers of all stripes would have to acknowledge Mr. Tuan's broad and deep influence, and that he is one of the most recognized voices for geography in other disciplines. Yet overviews of geographic thought often overlook his intellectual leadership. He offers a specific case: Marxist geographers, decades ago, dismissed a focus on everyday life, but more recently have returned to it. Yet they "tend not to acknowledge an intellectual ancestry in the humanistic model associated with Tuan."
The most flattering way of putting this might be to say that Mr. Tuan enjoys a rare kind of acknowledgement: He is so present that he is invisible, informing others at a deeper-than-footnotable level.
The editors of Textures of Place agree, noting that the concept of "place" -- locality, landscape, territory -- would not now be fashionable in the humanities and social sciences but for Mr. Tuan.
Humanistic geography as a whole, however, has suffered from disparagement or neglect by cultural geography, its more-prominent successor. Cultural materialism, feminism, postcolonialism, and other modern schools of thought swept precursor humanistic approaches away in a wash of "cultural hegemony," "power relations," and "situated or relative truth."
For critics like Gillian Rose, the author of Feminism and Geography: The Limits to Geographical Knowledge (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Mr. Tuan and other geographers of his generation are guilty of blindness to questions of gender. She argues that Mr. Tuan may make claims for humankind, but in fact, in his writing, "Man is actually a man."
The newer approaches also tar humanistic geography's claims on universal truths as elitist and reactionary. Little matter that the humanists, too, stressed the socially constructed nature of landscapes and other geographically mediated experiences.
And Mr. Tuan's distaste for triumphalism does not always play well among colleagues, he says. In classes, too, "students expected me to denounce Western civilization. But I tend to muddy the picture by pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of all cultures."
He is also sometimes criticized for not being sufficiently theoretical. He and his advocates grant that while he is not driven by theory, he does take full account of it. At the same time, his writing has been fertile ground for theoreticians such as Robert D. Sack, Mr. Tuan's colleague at Wisconsin, in his well-received writing on the philosophy of geography. "Tuan's inclination has been not to make these structural relations very visible," says Mr. Sack.
Mr. Tuan, for his part, raises objections to postmodernism. It is not that it asks unreasonable questions, but that it appears to want to reduce the achievements of high culture to "miniworks of preliterate people, folks, peasant immigrants, ethnics."
Indirectly Imitated
Whatever the merits of such disagreements, Mr. Tuan lacks a "school" of the kind that has grown up around, say, David Harvey, the acclaimed professor of geography at the Johns Hopkins University, who has been able to link geography to a tradition of Marxist thought.
Says Mr. Adams, the Textures of Place co-editor from Texas A&M: "A lot of people in and out of the discipline consider Yi-Fu to be an inspirational figure. But it strikes me that his role has been less to inspire direct imitation than to inspire people to do things that don't look exactly or much like his work."
Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon adds to Mr. Tuan's dissatisfaction, which his affability cannot conceal. His remedy is to stop writing -- though not to abandon his past writings: he is now preparing for publication excerpts from a series of regular "faculty letters," or anékdota, that he wrote during his last 30 years as a professor, and which gained a sort of cult following among friends and interested colleagues around the country. He hopes the letters, in reprise, will again spark campus conversation, which, he believes, needs sparking. Decreasingly deferential (the privilege of emeritus status?), he says, "I find it very frustrating that the university advocates diversity, yet, in areas where the university should show that diversity -- that is, the area of ideas -- there's so little of it."
Friends are glad to learn that Mr. Tuan is going ahead with a new book project -- he had said Escapism would be his last, in 1998, then that Who Am I? would be. They believe his retirement was premature; his writing was still at its peak. So, while Mr. Tuan may write ominously in the last of his anékdota that "oblivion," for him, "means that I will at last join the majority -- my dust mixing with the dust of the billions who have also lived unremarkable and unnoted lives," friends believe that the act of continuing to write will, itself, keep him vital.
"He can't stop!" exclaims Mr. Porter. "Maybe he won't die if he keeps having to write another book."
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
