Phenomenology

Phenomenology entered the field of geography during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when geographers began to draw from this philosophical tradition to critique spatial science. Phenomenologist geographers argued that a spatial scientific approach based on an objective epistemology failed to account for subjective human experiences of place. These geographers, often called humanistic geographers, wanted to shift geography's attention away from a spatial science of pattern and process and toward a deeper understanding of place meaning and, in some ways, back to analyses of human communities and the cultural landscape. Since its appropriation by geographers, some scholars in the field have debated the efficacy of this particular philosophical tradition in geography, its application to geographic inquiry, and geographers' interpretations of this tradition.

Phenomenology, in the simplest terms, can be defined as the study of both material and immaterial phenomena. Its emergence as a philosophy can be traced back to 19th-century critiques of positivism and empiricism. Phenomenologists argue that positivistic science and empiricism cannot account for normative questions, which are integral to the human condition, and thus positivists and empiricists fail to understand the conscious and unconscious self. Geographers drawn to this particular approach during the 1970s interpreted the work of philosophical phenomenologists, such as Edmund Hussrel, to mean that we should reject empirical science. Drawing also from the theories of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, geographers set out to refocus geography's attention, perhaps naively, on self-defined geographic experiences. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer, and Edward Relph argued that a geography based in phenomenology moved the field away from models of humans as rational actors that establish clear patterns and laws that could be measured mathematically across space; instead, geography should focus on the study of place as feeling, emotion, rootedness, and community, all of which are tied to an authentic (i.e., genuine, natural, and presocially constructed) experience of place. The challenge, of course, is that one's “sense of place” often is tied into unconscious thought. Situating phenomenological analyses of place in the unconscious raised the question of how to go about studying what often are taken-for-granted understandings of locale or community.

While some phenomenologists in the field have focused their attention on the unconscious essences that constitute place, others have turned their attention to the conscious phenomena, or experiences, that also construct and lend meaning to place. In so doing, it is[Page 354] possible to extend the dialogue of community beyond the flat notions of object–subject relations across space that are part of an objective scientific geography. Treating objects and subjects as oppositions in a binary fails to capture the intersubjective nature of subject–subject experience and interactions. This intersubjectivity is not only between human subjects but also between subjects and their place in the world. Thus, the focus of many phenomenologist (humanistic) geographers has been on subjective experiences while shying away from causal models, theory building, and scientific inquiry. As such, this approach to human geography has been critical of modernization and the rapidity with which many people experience space and spatial relations. They argue that place is breaking down as people are being made marginal and becoming detached from lived experience of their home, town, and community.

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