Yi-fu Tuan

Topophilia and Topophobia' offers timely reflections on the human habitat in the 20th century. The expression of topophilia and topophobia belong to our time, an ambivalence between the love and aversion for a place has been a recurrant paradox in human history

A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values

Topophilia

Y. F. Tuan

Fear is important to us: deprived of it we would soon die. It is, too, one of the most potent weapons employed by church and state in spiritual and social control. As an emotion it differs little whether inspired with reason or without: bathroom spiders excite similar feelings either English black or Australian red. This book is an examination of fear among different cultures and people from prehistory to the present. Professor Tuan begins by comparing animal and human fear and by tracing its development in children. He examines the roles of fantasy, superstition, magic and religion in creating and counteracting fear. The author then discusses Man's fear of Man. He describes, for example, the association of witchcraft with 'landscapes of the cursed' and of ghosts and spirits with the haunted realm. He shows that it is a short step from these dreaded places to the fears associated with the everyday landscapes of town and countryside. Our physical and mental surroundings may not only excite fear but be shaped by it. The author argues that every human construction is a component in a landscape of fear in that it exists to keep out chaos: walls, fences and frontiers on the one hand and fairytales and philosophical system on the other are all shelters within which we can, we hope, be at rest, if only temporarrily, from the siege of inimical experience and of doubt. -- Book jacket.

Landscapes of Fear

Greil Marcus

Erika Doss

Neil Harris

The Architecture of Reassurance

Designing Disney's Theme Parks

Robert Bruce Silberman

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

While many modern artists have been fascinated by the formal richness, the conceptual foundations, and the social significance of maps, cartographers have long used the techniques of artists to create maps that express much more than how to get from one place to another. World Views is the companion volume to an exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum that is the first to combine maps, contemporary art that uses map forms and strategies, and commissioned works of art based on the idea of map making. Densely illustrated with full-color reproductions, World Views shows how maps are a vehicle for examining cultural issues ranging from personal identity to international politics. Maps from around the world and throughout history along with works by artists such as Jasper Johns and Nancy Graves are joined by art created especially for the exhibition. Although maps are supposedly objective, they incorporate cultural values and political beliefs. Essays by Robert Silberman and eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explore further the complex relationship between the changing world, map making, and art.

Maps & Art : 11 September 1999-2 January 2000

World Views

Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1998

A Life of Learning

Man and Nature

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality - world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict - from riots in U.S. cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the "cosmopolitan hearth," that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one's own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being "at home in the cosmos."

A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint

Cosmos & Hearth

Yi-fu Tuan

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