Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

March 15, 2005

Dear Colleague,

I have lived long enough to see some striking changes in geographical fashion. In the 1950s, for example, the statistical analysis of slopes was feverishly pursued in geomorphology. The fever cooled in the 1960s, and geomorphology returned to the sanity of empiricism backed by theoretical insights. Another case: What could be more fashionable, from 1960 to 1980, than quantitative and mathematical analysis in economic geography? When I came to UW in 1983, we struggled to find the topnotch mathematical economic geographer to join our faculty. We failed. Disaster for UW geography? No. To the contrary, the national ranking of our department rose from number 4 in 1982 to number 2 in 1993. Apparently, even while we searched for the ideal mathematical geographer, mathematical geography's glamor was fading.

Where research in geography is driven by a political position, its popularity is likely to have a much longer lifetime, unless it is too extreme. Marxism was too extreme, and Marxist geography fell with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if it is not too extreme, its prospect for survival is good. This means that if your political sympathies are leftish, you can count on your societal views receiving a better than fair hearing in the academic journals. If your position is rightish, given the climate of academia, it will not be easy to find a publication outlet. But--and this is my point--it will always be represented in a social-science or geography department, if only as a barely tolerated minority, because society at large (that is, democratic society at large) is split politically between left and right, and there is no sign that either position will permanently disappear.

What's new since the 1980s? Women's Studies is new, as is feminist theory. The two are not, however, the same. Women's Studies is an attempt to understand half of the world's population, neglect of which is increasingly seen as absurd if one is to know what makes society click. Neglecting women in a social-science department is a bit like ignoring the Chinese and the Indians, who together also make up half the world's population, in a geography department that claims to know the regions of the world. Feminist theory is something else. It is not a theory--not in any sense that a scientist understands--and it is not a theory in the original Greek sense "spectator"--someone who can see clearly because he stands above the fray. Do feminist scholars really want to stand above the fray? Don't they want to be activists, rhetorically persuasive, rather than spectators (theorists) that present an overarching view, or multiple points of view that can blight the rosy hue of action? Women's Studies is here to stay, and academia is richer for it. As for feminist theory, will it still be around in 2028, the year of our department's centenary?

Humanistic geography made a splash in the 1970s and early 1980s. Now it is in the dog house. Maybe its fate provides a lesson for feminist geography. Humanistic geography wilted intellectually because it was too narrow, ideological, and political. It advocated a particular way of life--Carl Sauer's and Heidegger's. To counter it, I had to be ideological and political too, and so I wrote Cosmos and Hearth: The Cosmopolite's Viewpoint. But what I really should have done--what all humanist geographers should do--is to probe exhaustively (as an ideal) into the heights, depths, and pure ordinariness of being human.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu