Tuan, Yi-Fu (1930–)

The works of the Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan represent a major contribution to geographical scholarship. His huge corpus of writings reflects a humanistic-geographical approach that in the 1960s and 1970s went against the grain of positivistic studies that were reflected in the so-called quantitative revolution.

Tuan was born in Tanjin, China. The work of his father, a diplomat, required the family to move frequently between continents, and Tuan was educated in China, Australia, Britain, and the United States. For much of his early life, therefore, his “home” was rarely static; he never lived in one place for more than 5 yrs. (years) until he was 38 yrs. of age, when he became based at the University of Minnesota. He completed his academic career at the University of Wisconsin but has continued writing and researching. Tuan sees himself as a “cosmopolite” and, on balance, feels that such a life is better than the “safeness of the hearth.”

Tuan's post-high school education commenced at Oxford University. He gained his undergraduate degree at the age of 20, and at Oxford, he developed a penchant for physical geography, a field that he developed further in his postgraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His studies focused on pediments in southeastern Arizona, with his fieldwork undertaken between 1953 and 1955.

The bulk of Tuan's work may be described as humanistic or phenomenological geography. His writing has been inspired by the studies of the American scholar John Kirkland Wright and his notion of “geopiety” (meaning the relationship between humans and nature) and those of the conservationist Aldo Leopold. Carl Sauer and J. B. Jackson were other inspirations. Tuan is well-known for his use of an eclectic range of authors, and he is willing to draw on literary as well as academic sources, both of which have influenced his intellectual development.

It can be argued that Tuan's reputation was built on two key books that have been used and applied over the past 30 years or more. The first of these is Topophilia (1974), a path-making work that focused on the links between human beings and place. It is regarded by his peers as a “classic [Page 2891]in human geography,” though it is erroneously believed that he coined the neologism topophilia (W. H. Auden and Gaston Bachelard used the word before him). However, there is no doubt that he popularized a concept that has been subsequently applied to a wide range of themes that deal with the “sense of place,” or the cognate idea of genius loci. A study of “negative” senses of place (“topophobia”), Landscapes of Fear (1979), is less well-known. He returned to the power of place in Space and Place (1977), another definitive work that sees place as inhabited space.

Although Tuan is considered by some as an academic “outsider,” it is possible to see in his work illuminations of writing by Michel Foucault and other eminent scholars. For example, Tuan's Segmented Worlds and Self (1982) stresses the changing spatial structures in society in relation to society's varied forms of control. Later work saw Tuan define geography as a “moral science”; for example, in Dominance and Affection (1984), perhaps his most pessimistic book, his foci are pets and gardens. In this fascinating work, he wrestles with the possibility that affection—indeed, love—may be seen as an extreme form of domination.

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