Progress in

Human Geography
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Cultural/humanistic geography
David Ley
Prog Hum Geogr 1981 5: 249
DOI: 10.1177/030913258100500205
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Progress reports

Cultural/humanistic geography
by David Ley

If there is one feature distinguishing human geography on each side of the Atlantic
then it is surely provided by the enigma of cultural geography. In France it appears
that the passing of the subject has been sounded (Kofman, 1980), in Britain its
popularity has been slender and its survival is uncertain (Area, 1980), but in North
America cultural geography remains a major focus of research and teaching; in 1979
more than one in six members of the Association of American Geographers identified themselves as a cultural geographer. Until the 1970s, the subject remained
closely tied to Carl Sauers Berkeley tradition, perhaps the major research school
that has arisen in North American geography (Leighly, 1979; Parsons, 1979). However, during the 1970s the humanistic movement added a disparate and lively contribution which has included both endorsement and challenge to conventional work
in cultural geography. In this first review of cultural and humanistic work, we shall
range more broadly through its development and emerging themes during the
1970s; subsequent commentaries will provide a narrower discussion around a
smaller focus of research priorities.

The

Cultural

Berkeley connection

geography

as set

down

by

Sauer continues to exert considerable influence

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250
on the West Coast (Parsons, 1977; Spencer, 1978).
among its adherents there is a sense that perhaps the best years are
past, that there are important shortcomings and omissions to the perspective, that
a redefinition is required (Wagner, 1975). The traits of Berkeley geography include
an historical orientation, an emphasis on mans agency on the physical environ.
ment, a preoccupation with material artefacts, a rural and preindustrial bias, a
heavily empirical field tradition, and a tendency to non-cumulative unique studies
(Mikesell, 1978). These features bear a similar inventory of strengths and weaknesses to French regional studies (Buttimer, 1978), which have properly been
regarded as a European counterpart to Sauers cultural geography.
For so empirical a subfield, the Berkeley school has recently received criticism
from an unfamiliar quarter. Duncan (1980a) has developed a detailed argument
which strikes at the heart of the Sauerian tradition, claiming that its concept of
culture is theoretically and philosophically unsophisticated. Culture is regarded as
superorganic, as a conceptual a priori, rather than as the active construction of men
and women, who are instead treated as its passive carriers. Thus, ironically, cultural
geography is one of the geographies without an active view of man (Ley, 1980a).
Wagner (1975) implies the same criticism, adding the necessity for an expansion of
studies to contemporary urbanized society, for an emphasis on process, for the
identification of the intents of key actors, for the specification of lines of communication and the development of subcultures, and for the treatment of institutions
and their effects. All of these objectives are being pursued under the broad rubric
of humanistic geography.

in North

America, particularly

However,

II

The

even

development of the humanistic movement

the association of some of its major contributers, such as Yi-Fu Tuan,

with the Berkeley tradition, humanistic work did not initially set out to reform
cultural geography. Rather, in a classic opposition between thesis and antithesis, it
represented a reaction against the quantitative juggernaut of spatial analysis as it
gathered speed in the 1960s. The determinism, economism, and abstraction of the
early quantitative publications seemed to abolish human intentionality, culture, and
man himself. At best human variability, where it entered the analysis at all, was cast
in the uncomplimentary guise of Brownian motion, random perturbations around
a basic pattern. Bronowskis unflattering characterization of society like a stream
of gas and the individual like an atom of gas (Haggett, 1965, 25-26) was not
allayed by the reassurance that because stochastic uncertainty existed in the physical sciences it might also be admitted to human geography. Not only the form
but also the logic of such a philosophy appeared profoundly dehumanizing.
In such an intellectual milieu it is not surprising that a counter current would
emerge which would highlight the distinctively human components of mind,
consciousness, values, or more briefly perception, which would seek affinities with
the humanities, including artistic and literary endeavours, and which would adduce

Despite

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251
in such philosophies of meaning as phenomenology,
and
existentialism,
pragmatism.
These intellectual connections clustered around the relation of man, or more
accurately, mind, and landscape, and as such did indeed represent a direct extension
of Berkeley geography into the realm of environmental perception. Landscape interpretation or environmental appreciation, to follow Meinigs (1971) preferred
term, raised perception to a central theoretical position and the interpretation of
meaning to the major methodological task (Lowenthal, 1975; 1977; Butzer, 1978;
Meinig, 1979). The quest for the essential character of place drew a number of
geographers to the inspired intuition of the artist, whether regional novelist or
landscape painter, so that not only was geography becoming art, but also art was
becoming geography (Salter and Lloyd, 1976; Rees, 1976). So too intellectual
histories of authors, poets, architects or philosophers might show a sensitivity of
method or insight which might assist geographers in their own interrogation of

.a

philosophical underpinning

place (Cosgrove, 1979).

less focused manner, Tuan (1974; 1977; 1979), Relph (1976) and others
the sense of place of geographical settings both ancient and modern.
The subjectivity of landscape was carried a stage further in the revival bf J.K.
In

explored

Wrights geosophy (Wright, 1966) by cultural and historical geographers in their

examination of the geographic dogmas and fantasies which have influenced the
course of geographic exploration and settlement (Lowenthal and Bowden, 1976).
To evoke perception and values as major influences upon thought and action implied that for the analysis to be consistent it should also be directed at geography
and geographers themselves (Ley, 1977a). In an important monograph, Buttimer
(1974) introduced the sociology of knowledge to human geography, asking reflexively what were the dominant values embodied within academic geography.
Were they values of self-awareness, of environmental harmony, or of technical
and managerial control?
The inclination of geographic work toward the humanities was represented
also by the discovery of the philosophies of meaning. The potential contributions
of the phenomenologists Heidegger (Buttimer, 1976), Schutz (Ley, 1977b), and
Merleau-Ponty (Seamon, 1979), the existentialists Sartre and Buber (Samuels,
1971; 1978a; Kobayashi, 1980), the interactionist Mead (Duncan, 1978), and even
the surrealists (Olsson, 1975; 1978) have been explored. This literature, though
experimental, is significant in that it has attempted to provide a credible philosophical underpinning to humanistic work which would match the positivist
foundation of spatial analysis. The potential fruitfulness of this work is suggested
by the first formal link between humanistic geography and philosophy, a workshop
on Geography as science of the life-world organized by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at its annual conference in 1980.

III

Humanistic

In retrospect

geography: problems and prospects

some

problems of emphasis

run

through

much of the literature

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we

252
have reviewed. A complete assessment is not of course possible in the constraints
of a short paper, but in general it seems as if the literature is sometimes guilty
of overstatement. In retrieving man from virtual oblivion in positivist science,
humanists have tended to celebrate the restoration perhaps too much. As a result
values, meanings, consciousness, creativity, and reflection may well have been
overstated, while context, constraint, and social stratification have been underdeveloped (Cosgrove, 1978; Ley, 1978). In short there is the danger that humanistic
work errs toward voluntarism and idealism. A preoccupation with perception and
meaning rather than with contexts, both antecedents and effects, runs the risk of
a fixation upon consciousness which eclipses equally relevant preconditions and
consequences of thought and action. By way of illustration, Olssons (1975) major
work has been challenged by a reviewer as failing to situate human thought and
action within a wider social and historical totality, a fault which takes us straight
to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (Scott, 1976; compare Zaret, 1980), while Tuans most
recent volume has been criticized as beyond empiricism and off into an abstract,
mystical world where the &dquo;forces for chaos&dquo; do battle with the &dquo;force for order&dquo;
(Duncan, 1980b). Whenever meanings or perceptions are free-floating and ungrounded in social or historical context, then one has engaged a thinly veiled
idealism. Such idealism is rightly challenged, for it offers too restricted a basis to
humanistic social science.
A second limitation concerns the methodology of aspects of the work which
was appropriately described by Entrikin (1976) as focused intuition. In its eclectic
and illustrative use of facts and anecdotes its empirical contribution has an essen.
tially heuristic character, and its style is a far cry from the detailed fieldwork of
the Berkeley school. A sometimes excessive celebration of man may be accompanied by an overly subjective methodology withdrawn from conventional empirical data collection. Iliore recent research involving various forms of participant
observation (Rowles, 1978; Gibson, 1978), unobtrusive observation, interviews,
and more structured survey methods are correcting this imbalance. In the future
more formal connection with the philosophy and methodology of hermeneutic
social science is likely to occur (Rose, 1977).
A third issue concerns the vexed oppostion between understanding and explanation. Humanists have correctly criticized the instrumental approach to explanation by geographic positivists which blurs the distinction between prediction
and explanation. But neither is the humanist quest for understanding the intents
and perceptions of decision-makers, necessary though this is, always identical with
the uncovering of causal relations. Action is a product of a set of inner and outer
contexts which may well carry explanation beyond the conscious intentionality
of a single individual or group. Among humanistic geographers, Samuels (1978b;
1979) has stressed as much as anyone the intentionality of a key individual in
reflecting geographic change, by applying the great man of history thesis to what he
calls the biography of landscape. But even a sympathetic analyst, studying the
impact of Mao Tse-tung, the Great Helmsman, upon the remaking of the Chinese
landscape, has to make reference to contingency in, for example, the constraints of
-

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253
historic precedent and geographic context, as well as to the will of a powerful and
self-conscious leader. Moreover, the construction of place is rarely as self-conscious
as the Chinese landscape ethic; it may also be unintentional, or at least the expression of an individualistic or collective ideology which is not self-consciously articulated or understood. Even here we have not exhausted the limits to the model
of purely intentional action, for the consequences of any act may not be compatible with the intent which brought it into being. Several studies of elite urban
and regional planning have stressed the deflection of initial aspirations by unforeseen events, so that as a result of unanticipated contingencies the outcome
of the planning exercise is unintended and even counterintuitive - at least to the
actors whose values gave the plan its substance (Ley, 1980b; Gibson, 1978).
What these empirical studies of place emphasize is the incompleteness of a
purely voluntarist model of human action, which exaggerates the role of the intentionality of the individual or group. Methodologically what this means is that
understanding and explanation need not be synonymous. The explanation of an
action will usually need to pass beyond the intentions of the actors to include also
factors of which they may have been unaware, as well as constraints of which they
may have had some knowledge. The nature of place and the character of social
relations are negotiated realities, a social construction by a group of actors, who
although motivated by more or less well defined intentions, are neither all-knowing

all-powerful.
Consequently current

nor

work is beginning to develop-in areas concerned with the

constraints of group interaction rather than with the voluntarism of a single group
in isolation. Illustrative is the study of Kariya (1978) on the interface between
Canadian Indians and the federal Department of Indian Affairs, as he examines how
the identity and status of the Indian are socially constructed realities, emerging as
an unforeseen consequence of the everyday practices of bureaucratic personnel. In
a similar theoretical vein, Lowman (1979) has argued for a more contextual
approach to the geography of crime which treats law and law enforcement as independent variables, commonly with unintended consequences in the incidence of
criminal acts. The themes of intergroup conflict and power relations are more
explicit in a study of not only the meaning but also the struggle for homeownership (Holdsworth, 1980), and an interpretation of locational conflict which emphasizes sociopolitical context, as urban development is regarded as the negotiated
outcome of competing interest group values (Ley and Mercer, 1980).
[V

Research directions

Humanistic

geography is a theoretical perspective, not a distinctive empirical subfield, which emerged in a particular intellectual context as a reaction to a human
geography which had been reduced to the abstract study of space and structures.
As such the humanistic perspective has revived earlier geographic traditions which
treated human values and intentionality more seriously. In important respects it has

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254
fortified such traditions by giving them a more critical and philosophically and
theoretically informed orientation. The aim is to integrate the humanities and the
social sciences, to introduce the empirical and literary strengths of Vidals or
Sauers geography to the scholarship of social theory and the philosophy of science,
as well as to the historical context of an advanced and urbanized industrial society.
Major priorities within this work include a more penetrating analysis of culture
itself, and particularly the dominant culture of our times, the culture of consumption. The lack of theoretical treatment of consumption in geography has been as
notable as the overcommitment to theories of production, but there are now several
useful starting points in social science for the development of a geography of
consumption (Hirsch, 1977; Diggins, 1977; Leiss, 1978). Secondly, and linked to
this, will be greater attention to the semiotics of landscape, the interactions be- .
tween place, identity, and social context (Godkin, 1977; Duncan, 1978; Rubin,
1979; Harvey, 1979). Thirdly, the place and nature 01 theories of power within a
humanistic perspective need to be- clarified. This is a major problem within social
theory, and is unlikely to be easily resolved within human geography. To date
much humanistic writing has followed an implicit Weberian line, akin to the managerial position in urban geography which stresses the role of institutional (especially government) decision-makers (Saunders, 1979; Ley, 1980c). These connections need to be examined more explicitly, and it is likely that they will be joined
by alternative materialist positions centred about the views of culture and society
found in the eclectic writings of Raymond Williams (1977) and E.P. Thompson
(1978). No doubt these developments will require detailed attention in later
reviews.

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,

Canada

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