Reflections on Yi-Fu Tuan

Varve

Geographer. Poet.

Reflections on Yi-Fu Tuan

Reflections on Yi-Fu Tuan

by

Yi-Fu Tuan died on August 10th, 2022 at the age of 91. He was my PhD supervisor and a friend. We remained in touch since I graduated in 1992. My wife Carol (also an Yi-Fu student – for her Masters degree) and I took two of our children, Alice and Maddy, to meet him in 2019 before we left the USA to return to the UK. We had a lovely lunch in the dining room of his retirement home. He was on good form, laughing frequently between stories about the indignities of old age and the lectures he was planning for his fellow retirees – including one on the geopolitics of US – China relations.

Yi-Fu meant a lot to me. I was an undergraduate at UCL, sleepwalking through a geography degree I was only mildly interested in. I had really wanted to study literature but, at the time, there was no way I was going to get into a good English programme with my A-level grades. I thought I would take geography and switch if I got the chance. In the second year (1984-1985) I had the good fortune of taking the course “Humanistic Geography” taught by Peter Jackson and Jacquie Burgess and everything changed. Geography came alive in that classroom. One of the reasons it came alive is that we were introduced to Yi-Fu Tuan’s books Topophilia (1974) and Space and Place (1977). I was suddenly in a very different world and geography meant something to me. The writing was always interesting and the themes were always profoundly relevant. I found it much easier to be engaged by questions of what it is to make a home on this beautiful but troubled earth than, for instance, the problems with central planning in the Soviet Union. Perhaps because the latter is but one instance of an attempt at the former. I loved the way Yi-Fu wrote. It was clearly “deep” in its philosophical questioning, yet it was engaging and gentle in the way arguments were constructed and examples were used. It did not seem to conform to whatever the expectations of academic writing were that were evident in most of the other material we read. It made me reflect on my own life and my attachments (or lack of them) to places. Reading Yi-Fu’s work in 1984-1985 changed everything for me and most certainly led to me becoming a geographer and pursuing the questions that have driven me ever since. 

By the end of my degree at UCL I knew I wanted to do a PhD thanks to Peter and Jacquie’s class and ones that followed in the third year. Peter suggested I write to the geographer who inspired me most, so I wrote to Yi-Fu. He wrote back with a lovely letter. Rather than simply a list of information (tuition costs, TA salaries etc. which, in hindsight, might have been helpful) he responded to my clumsy attempt at a brief proposal. The letter was the beginning of a conversation and suggested that this hero of mine had taken my words seriously. So, I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1986 to undertake a Master’s degree and a PhD with Yi-Fu as my supervisor. Meeting Yi-Fu was scary. He was, by then, a giant of a figure in my mind and I had no idea what to expect. And the meetings were difficult. Anyone who has spoken to Yi-Fu knows that he did not do small talk and that a conversation would include many long, extended, moments of silence. In response to something I said, Yi-Fu would lean back in his chair, perhaps stare sideways out of the window, and put his hands behind his head and… nothing. There would be silence. I was not particularly good at silence, so would attempt to fill it. Our first meetings were probably just me speaking endlessly. The point of the silence, though, was to think. And just as Yi-Fu’s letter to me gave my own letter the honour of a thoughtful response, so Yi-Fu’s silence was preparation for a considered response to whatever I had just said. It took me six years to really get used to this and to sit with the silence while Yi-Fu gathered his thoughts. It was usually worth the wait. A similar pattern emerged as I began to hand in writing. I would wait for a few days, and then an envelope would appear in my mailbox with my name in Yi-Fu’s writing. Inside would be a page or two of thoughts which responded to what I had written. It was not line by line, or focused on details, it was part of this ongoing conversation which often challenged me to think about the implications of what I was writing. It did not conform to any of the prescribed ways we might now think of giving feedback. Sometimes this was uncomfortable. As well as being inspired by Yi-Fu at UCL I had also been inspired by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams and the key figures in what became the new cultural geography. Politics was on my agenda and was reflected in the work I was handing in to Yi-Fu (work that became In Place/Out of Place (1996)). This was not part of Yi-Fu’s agenda. So, we had disagreements that were uncomfortable. These disagreements made my writing better as I tried to explain my perspective in a way that Yi-Fu would approve of even if he did not agree. At one point I wanted to leave and wrote to Peter Jackson asking if I could finish my PhD at UCL. Peter advised me to stick with it and that I was lucky to have Yi-Fu as a supervisor. It was good advice. I often wonder if I could supervise a student whose perspectives I disagreed with as much as Yi-Fu would disagree with mine. I doubt I could be that generous.

Yi-Fu taught me many things. He insisted that I write in a way that would be appealing and intelligible to a general educated audience rather than just my PhD committee. He pointed out when I was doing otherwise. He kept bringing me back to big geography questions of space, place, landscape, and mobility – questions I have pursued ever since as fundamental aspects of what it is to be human on earth. Asking such questions is not to deny politics and difference but to insist on the power of geography in ongoing struggles over how we make a home in the world and how we should make a home in the world. Such a project is more than outlining how spaces, places, and journeys are socially constructed and contested. It is to ask why it is important to construct and contest them. Yi-Fu taught me that “evidence” could be found just about anywhere. He would be writing about child psychology one minute and Sherlock Holmes the next. Big geographical questions were apparent everywhere Yi-Fu looked. He gave me permission, through his example, to conduct research and writing in ways that was not easy to teach in a methods course.  A considered life was Yi-Fu’s version of fieldwork.  I am grateful to Yi-Fu for these lessons and many more besides.

It is easy to think that humanistic geography existed in a moment in time – around the mid 1970s to the early 1980s and that Yi-Fu’s influence can be restricted to that moment. Few geographers would now call themselves humanistic geographers and now many of the central figures from that moment are dead – Anne Buttimer, Donald Meinig, and David Lowenthal among others. I think this way of thinking does not serve us well. The possibility of doing geography differently that Yi-Fu and others opened up is visible in so much of what cultural geographers do today. Their influence is there in the questions we are now allowed to ask, in the forms of evidence we choose to draw on, and in the styles of writing we are permitted to experiment with. 

On the times we met since I graduated,  Yi-Fu and I spoke about serious things but also laughed a lot. Yi-Fu was constantly amused by the world and anyone who knew him will remember his laugh. Yi-Fu attended our wedding, sent cards and gifts when our children were born, wrote short letters on a regular basis and kept sending little self-produced books. The last arrived earlier this year. A little yellow book simply titled Geography: From 1947 to 2022 – A Travelogue. In it, he reflects on his published books and what he sees as their contributions at the end of his life. In the final paragraph, he attempts to sum things up noting how geographers were, for so long, seemingly uninterested in what it is to be human – a failing he blames on “subservience to the popular paradigms of the time”. With this in mind he writes, in what are perhaps his last words intended for (semi) public consumption:

Hence, once more, young traveler, have the guts to steer your own ship with only the baffling hints of life below and the stars above as your guide.[1]

I am ever grateful for Yi-Fu’s influence on my own life, for his friendship, his example, and his writing. I am sad that I will not hear his infectious laugh again but happy that he led such a long, full, and considered life. Rest in Peace. 

[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, 2022, Geography From 1947 to 2022: A Travelogue. Self published. Madison, WI. p. 50.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. I never met Yi-Fu Tuan, but have been heavily influenced by, and owe much to, his work. Than you for this beautifully written reflection.

  3. Thank you for that. It brought it all back to me–his long silences, his laugh, and his flashes of insight.

  4. Thank you for writing such a thoughtful memorial.

    As a Ph.D. student, newly arrived to geography, I found much of what I read all brain and no heart. Rarely did it capture my mind and my spirit. Tuan’s work was amongst the exceptions. When eventually a book resulted from that thesis, I sent a copy to him as thanks, for his work had given me permission to cast aside convention. His letter of response was such an unexpected surprise. Geography has lost someone important.

Yi-Fu Tuan died on August 10th, 2022 at the age of 91. He was my PhD supervisor and a friend. We remained in touch since I graduated in 1992. My wife Carol (also an Yi-Fu student – for her Masters degree) and I took two of our children, Alice and Maddy, to meet him in 2019 before we left the USA to return to the UK. We had a lovely lunch in the dining room of his retirement home. He was on good form, laughing frequently between stories about the indignities of old age and the lectures he was planning for his fellow retirees – including one on the geopolitics of US – China relations. Yi-Fu meant a lot to me. I was an undergraduate at UCL, sleepwalking through a geography degree I was only mildly interested in. I had really wanted to study literature but, at the time, there was no way I was going to get into a good English programme with my A-level grades. I thought I would take geography and switch if I got the chance. In the second year (1984-1985) I had the good fortune of taking the course “Humanistic Geography” taught by Peter Jackson and Jacquie Burgess and everything changed. Geography came alive in that classroom. One of the reasons it came alive is that we were introduced to Yi-Fu Tuan’s books Topophilia (1974) and Space and Place (1977). I was suddenly in a very different world and geography meant something to me. The writing was always interesting and the themes were always profoundly relevant. I found it much easier to be engaged by questions of what it is to make a home on this beautiful but troubled earth than, for instance, the problems with central planning in the Soviet Union. Perhaps because the latter is but one instance of an attempt at the former. I loved the way Yi-Fu wrote. It was clearly “deep” in its philosophical questioning, yet it was engaging and gentle in the way arguments were constructed and examples were used. It did not seem to conform to whatever the expectations of academic writing were that were evident in most of the other material we read. It made me reflect on my own life and my attachments (or lack of them) to places. Reading Yi-Fu’s work in 1984-1985 changed everything for me and most certainly led to me becoming a geographer and pursuing the questions that have driven me ever since. By the end of my degree at UCL I knew I wanted to do a PhD thanks to Peter and Jacquie’s class and ones that followed in the third year. Peter suggested I write to the geographer who inspired me most, so I wrote to Yi-Fu. He wrote back with a lovely letter. Rather than simply a list of information (tuition costs, TA salaries etc. which, in hindsight, might have been helpful) he responded to my clumsy attempt at a brief proposal. The letter was the beginning of a conversation and suggested that this hero of mine had taken my words seriously. So, I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1986 to undertake a Master’s degree and a PhD with Yi-Fu as my supervisor. Meeting Yi-Fu was scary. He was, by then, a giant of a figure in my mind and I had no idea what to expect. And the meetings were difficult. Anyone who has spoken to Yi-Fu knows that he did not do small talk and that a conversation would include many long, extended, moments of silence. In response to something I said, Yi-Fu would lean back in his chair, perhaps stare sideways out of the window, and put his hands behind his head and… nothing. There would be silence. I was not particularly good at silence, so would attempt to fill it. Our first meetings were probably just me speaking endlessly. The point of the silence, though, was to think. And just as Yi-Fu’s letter to me gave my own letter the honour of a thoughtful response, so Yi-Fu’s silence was preparation for a considered response to whatever I had just said. It took me six years to really get used to this and to sit with the silence while Yi-Fu gathered his thoughts. It was usually worth the wait. A similar pattern emerged as I began to hand in writing. I would wait for a few days, and then an envelope would appear in my mailbox with my name in Yi-Fu’s writing. Inside would be a page or two of thoughts which responded to what I had written. It was not line by line, or focused on details, it was part of this ongoing conversation which often challenged me to think about the implications of what I was writing. It did not conform to any of the prescribed ways we might now think of giving feedback. Sometimes this was uncomfortable. As well as being inspired by Yi-Fu at UCL I had also been inspired by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams and the key figures in what became the new cultural geography. Politics was on my agenda and was reflected in the work I was handing in to Yi-Fu (work that became In Place/Out of Place (1996)). This was not part of Yi-Fu’s agenda. So, we had disagreements that were uncomfortable. These disagreements made my writing better as I tried to explain my perspective in a way that Yi-Fu would approve of even if he did not agree. At one point I wanted to leave and wrote to Peter Jackson asking if I could finish my PhD at UCL. Peter advised me to stick with it and that I was lucky to have Yi-Fu as a supervisor. It was good advice. I often wonder if I could supervise a student whose perspectives I disagreed with as much as Yi-Fu would disagree with mine. I doubt I could be that generous. Yi-Fu taught me many things. He insisted that I write in a way that would be appealing and intelligible to a general educated audience rather than just my PhD committee. He pointed out when I was doing otherwise. He kept bringing me back to big geography questions of space, place, landscape, and mobility – questions I have pursued ever since as fundamental aspects of what it is to be human on earth. Asking such questions is not to deny politics and difference but to insist on the power of geography in ongoing struggles over how we make a home in the world and how we should make a home in the world. Such a project is more than outlining how spaces, places, and journeys are socially constructed and contested. It is to ask why it is important to construct and contest them. Yi-Fu taught me that “evidence” could be found just about anywhere. He would be writing about child psychology one minute and Sherlock Holmes the next. Big geographical questions were apparent everywhere Yi-Fu looked. He gave me permission, through his example, to conduct research and writing in ways that was not easy to teach in a methods course. A considered life was Yi-Fu’s version of fieldwork. I am grateful to Yi-Fu for these lessons and many more besides. It is easy to think that humanistic geography existed in a moment in time – around the mid 1970s to the early 1980s and that Yi-Fu’s influence can be restricted to that moment. Few geographers would now call themselves humanistic geographers and now many of the central figures from that moment are dead – Anne Buttimer, Donald Meinig, and David Lowenthal among others. I think this way of thinking does not serve us well. The possibility of doing geography differently that Yi-Fu and others opened up is visible in so much of what cultural geographers do today. Their influence is there in the questions we are now allowed to ask, in the forms of evidence we choose to draw on, and in the styles of writing we are permitted to experiment with. On the times we met since I graduated, Yi-Fu and I spoke about serious things but also laughed a lot. Yi-Fu was constantly amused by the world and anyone who knew him will remember his laugh. Yi-Fu attended our wedding, sent cards and gifts when our children were born, wrote short letters on a regular basis and kept sending little self-produced books. The last arrived earlier this year. A little yellow book simply titled Geography: From 1947 to 2022 – A Travelogue. In it, he reflects on his published books and what he sees as their contributions at the end of his life. In the final paragraph, he attempts to sum things up noting how geographers were, for so long, seemingly uninterested in what it is to be human – a failing he blames on “subservience to the popular paradigms of the time”. With this in mind he writes, in what are perhaps his last words intended for (semi) public consumption: Hence, once more, young traveler, have the guts to steer your own ship with only the baffling hints of life below and the stars above as your guide. I am ever grateful for Yi-Fu’s influence on my own life, for his friendship, his example, and his writing. I am sad that I will not hear his infectious laugh again but happy that he led such a long, full, and considered life. Rest in Peace.