120: Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia

Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values argues that because humans are the "ecological dominant," understanding the environment requires first understanding human behavior in depth, so that we can see how our attitudes, beliefs, passions and values shape and are shaped by the environment.  This claim that human perception and experience is an important component of the environment and a valid geographical topic is in direct response to the scientific reductionism of post-WWII geography; it seeks to bring human culture back into the "practical" study of the environment by putting "topophilia," or "the affective bond between people and place or setting," at the center of geographic research.

Although Topophilia intentionally does not have a stated method, it does have a theoretical framework.  Tuan sets out to examine environmental perception and values at the levels of the species, group, and individual; to hold culture (or topophilia) distinct from the environment to show how

119: Yi-Fu Tuan's Space & Place

From my notes from Spring 2012: 

In Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan develops three themes: the relationship between space and the human body; the relationship between place and space; and the range of human experience or knowledge of space and place.  He argues that human experience of the world (in all its fullness) both shapes and is shaped by space and place.  Tuan develops this humanist argument against more abstract geographical conceptions of space; this book is generally considered to be the first “human geography” book.  For Tuan, experience is both feeling and thought.  Experience consists of all the myriad ways in which humans interact with their environment: via the body (the five senses, along with “sensorimotor,” moving through a space, and “skin”), via the imagination (including myths, fantasy, narration, memory), and conceptually or rationally (a big-picture, god’s-eye view).  Space is more abstract, something that you move through and dominate; think openness, spaciousness.  Places “stay put;” they acquire value when humans pause in their movements through space and stop to experience them, to create memories there, or to otherwise create links between themselves and a physical location.  While a single human experience cannot possibly encompass the complexity of the real world, full experience of space and place, is integral to the development of human consciousness and culture and to the reintegration of body and mind (discourse).

28: Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights

In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt links the development of universal human rights - the idea that all people, as a rather formative American document puts it, "are created equal" and have "certain unalienable rights" - to two 18th-century events: the French Revolution and the rise of the epistolary novel.

The French Revolution resulted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which argues for the existence of a universal humanity - "man" - and the necessary connection between the rights of this universal body and the body politic.  If that language feels a lot like that in the Constitution, that's because it is: universal humanity and equal rights were both Enlightenment concepts, and the framers of the Constitution were Enlightenment men.

But the novel?  Hunt argues that novels, which didn't even exist before the 18th century, were hugely important in the construction of human rights because they created a sustained, intimate relationship between the reader and characters whose lives were very different from their own.  In particular, epistolary novels - especially ones about women - drew readers in with the most intimate details about characters' lives; if reading through fictionalized correspondence seems pedantic today (er, it does to me, anyway), back then, this extended snooping allowed readers to become familiar with, even attached to, people they had nothing in common with.  Arguing that familiarity breeds empathy, Hunt finds in the novel a necessary corollary to abstract concepts like "universal" and "equality:" individual empathy.  This empathy, she says, is necessary for universal human rights to work, since you can only see another person as an equal when you can see yourself in them.

Hunt thus puts a very human face on universal human rights.  While she could pay a little more attention to the lives of non-readers and the complex power structures in which they live and work, in this book she still provides a compelling intellectual and cultural history of a very formative idea.