Episode 03: A SENSE OF DIRECTION
In the week of his 90th Birthday, I spoke to YI FU TUAN, a Chinese scholar and philosopher. He invented the phrase ‘humanist geography’ as a way to explore "how geography reveals the quality of awareness’. He writes about the contradictions of space and place as the necessary tension of the human experience for both freedom and security..... for movement and pause. With simple personal stories and observations, we are led us into his world.
His family migration from China to Australia as a result of the Chinese famine in the 1940’s was the beginning of a lifelong nomadic experience. Yi Fu now lives in the American Heartland and is a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at the University of Oxford,England and then at the University of California in Berkeley, his lifelong work writing and teaching, intertwines a love of landscape with the philosophical questions of existence.
Among the long list of his books are Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Landscape of Fear, Morality and Imagination, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature and Culture, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, Place, Art and Self, Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress, Human Goodness, Religion: From Place to Placelessness, Who Am I?: An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit, and Coming Home to China.
He has won many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences and Cullum Geographical Medal. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.
To find out more about Yi Fu Tuan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi-Fu_Tuan
https://ls.wisc.edu/news/belonging-to-this-place-a-conversation-with-yi-fu-tuan
Instagram: yifutuan Facebook: Yi-Fu Tuan
TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT
“In 1977, you wrote your probably most known work. You have written so many books, but in the book Space and Place, one starts to see this kind of exploration, and comfort or discomfort with contradictions. You define space as adventure, openness, freedom, danger. And you define place, as something more stable and safe, nurturing, and not necessarily fixed, but rooted. Space is movement, and place is pause. And, I thought that was beautiful because you said we are attached to one, but we long for the other. And this is the tension of the human experience for everyone. I think some people might choose to live in a much more stable way. And some people want to be more adventurous, but there's always this tension, and it's like the breath, really, of life. That's what you're talking about. We have to breathe out and breathe in. One cannot exist, right, without the other. I'm curious about these contradictions. If you could speak a little bit more about that….it appears in a lot of your work.” FOR FULL TRANSCRIPT READ HERE