Environmental &

Architectural
Phenomenology
Vol. 34 ▪ No. 1 ISSN 1083–9194 Winter/Spring ▪ 2023

Special issue in memoriam

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1930–2022)

T
his issue of EAP marks the start reviews psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s complements his earlier EAP essay on the
of 34 years of publication and be- 2009 The Master and His Emissary, a book holiness of mountains (winter/spring
gins with conference information that provocatively considers the neurolog- 2022).
and citations received. The last ical and psychological groundings of holis-
EAP issue was an “in memoriam” for ar- tic understanding. In providing a comple- Below: A “house of spirit” (San Pra Pum)
chitect Christopher Alexander and phi- ment to his essay in the winter/spring 2022 outside a home in Thailand and actualizing
losopher Robert Mugerauer, both of EAP, zoologist Stephen Wood continues the Buddhist belief that the land is always
whom died in 2022. Now, in August, 2022, his consideration of becoming familiar owned in concert with land spirits. Inhab-
we have lost another eminent figure—ge- with a natural place. His focus is the phe- iting these miniature houses, the land spir-
ographer Yi-Fu Tuan, distinguished for nomenon of noticing and the question of its protect dwellers and keep them safe
his insightful writings on place, lived how directed awareness of the natural from outside, harmful forces. The spirit
space, and modes of environmental under- world unfolds. houses are consecrated by Buddhist
standing and encounter. The second essay this issue is anthropol- monks. Photograph by photographer Mar-
To honor Tuan, this issue includes my ogist Jenny Quillien’s vivid, first-person tha A. Strawn and included as one of sev-
introduction to his work and tributes by ethnography of her recent residence in eral in Yi-Fu Tuan’s 2009 Religion: From
philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic Alaska. We end with religious-studies Place to Placelessness, p. 132. Tuan died in
and geographers Edward Relph, Stanley scholar Harry Oldmeadow’s portrait of August 2022; see the “in memoriam” in
Brunn, and Xu Huang. We include ex- the sacredness of deserts, a theme that this EAP issue, pp. 8–19.
cerpts from four of Tuan’s many arti-
cles, chapters, and books. Of all geog-
raphers of his generation, Tuan was
probably the best known because of
his clear, compelling writing style
that focused on a remarkable range of
environmental and geographic phe-
nomena, often spotlighted in their eth-
ical and philosophical dimensions.
Along with Relph, Anne Buttimer,
David Ley, and Marwyn Samuels,
Tuan was a founding figure of a re-
search tradition that came to be called
“humanistic geography,” though one
can readily argue that his method and
point of view were implicitly phe-
nomenological, emphasizing human
beings’ lived geographies via space,
place, and other lived aspects of envi-
ronmental experience and meaning.
This issue includes one book re-
view and three essays. Andrea Hiott
 Conferences 2023
The conference situation remains fluid in
2023, and readers should check organiza-
tion webpages for schedules and formats
(actual, virtual, or hybrid). In the past, we
have regularly covered the following con-
ferences:
Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality
Forum (ACSF);
Back to the Things Themselves!
(BTTTT!);
Environmental Design Research Asso-
ciation (EDRA);
Interdisciplinary Coalition of North
American Phenomenologists (ICNAP);
International Association of Environ-
mental Philosophy (IAEP);
International Human Science Research
conference (IHSR);
International Making Cities Livable
conference;
Society for Phenomenology and Exis-
tential Philosophy (SPEP);
Society for Phenomenology and the Hu-
man Sciences (SPHS).
Gernot Böhme (1937–2022)
German philosopher Gernot Böhme died
January 20, 2022, at the age of 85. He was
one of the major thinkers to develop the in-
terdisciplinary field of atmosphere and am-
bience studies. He was Professor of Philos-
ophy at the Technical University of Darm-
stadt, Germany, where, since 2005, he had
been the Director of the Institute for Praxis
of Philosophy. He wrote over 70 books and
more than 400 articles. Recently, two of his
books on atmosphere were published in
English: Atmospheric Architectures
(Bloomsbury, 2020); and The Aesthetics of
Atmospheres (Routledge, 2018). Follow-
ing, we publish two excerpts from the in-
troduction of The Aesthetics of Atmos-
pheres, edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud.
“They bring a certain mood”
[The] “feeling well or not” in a certain
environment clearly is an indicator of
its aesthetics. This is the point where
aesthetics come into ecology. The ele-
ments of the environment are not only
causal factors that affect human beings
[physically] but they produce an im-
pression on their feeling (Befindlich-
keit). And what mediates objective fac-
tors of the environment with aesthetic
feelings of a human being is what we
call atmosphere. The atmosphere of a
certain environment is responsible for
the way we feel about ourselves in that
environment.
Atmosphere is what relates objec-
tive factors and constellations of the
environment with my bodily feeling in
that environment. This means: atmos-
phere is what is in between, which me-
diates the two sides. Two main traits of
the theory of atmospheres arise from
this. Namely, first, that atmosphere is
something in between subject and ob-
ject and can therefore be approached in
two different ways: either from a per-
ception aesthetics or a production aes-
thetics viewpoint. Atmospheres are
quasi-objective, namely they are out
there; you can enter an atmosphere and
you can be surprisingly caught up by
an atmosphere.
But on the other hand, atmospheres
are not beings like things; they are
nothing without a subject feeling them.
They are subjective facts …: to talk
about atmospheres, you must charac-
terize them by the way they affect you.
They tend to bring you into a certain
mood, and the way you name them is
by the character of that mood. The at-
mosphere of a room may be oppres-
sive, the atmosphere of a valley may be
joyful. But on the other side, you can
argue about atmospheres, and you even
can agree with others about what sort
of atmosphere is present in a certain
room or landscape. Thus, atmospheres
are quasi-objective or something exist-
ent intersubjectively.
But … you can approach the phe-
nomenon of atmospheres not only from
the side of perception aesthetics but
also from that of production aesthetics.
This is why stage design is a kind of
paradigm for the whole theory and
practice of atmospheres: you can learn
from a stage designer what means are
necessary to produce a certain climate
or atmosphere on the stage: what the
2
sound should be like, how the stage is
illuminated, what materials, colors, ob-
jects, signs should be used, and in what
way should the space of the stage itself
be arranged. The art of stage setting
again proves that atmospheres are
something quasi-objective. If each
member of the audience were to per-
ceive the climate of the stage in a dif-
ferent way, the endeavor of stage set-
ting would be useless (pp. 1–2).
Architecture and atmosphere
One of the main applications of the
aesthetic theory of atmospheres is ar-
chitecture and design, which have al-
ways produced atmospheres ….
[W]hat interests us here is the shift in
thinking both in architecture and de-
sign as a consequence of the theory of
atmospheres. We said: atmospheres are
something spatial and at the same time
something emotional. If you are explic-
itly considering atmospheres in archi-
tecture and city planning, the main
topic of considerations is space.
Architecture is not just about build-
ings but essentially about spaces. Ar-
chitecture is opening and closing
spaces. It sets points of concentration
and therefore of orientation in space: it
determines directions, it frames out-
looks. And all this for people visiting
or dwelling there. This means that the
way people feel in rooms and spaces,
and how they move around, how they
can follow bodies and lines of build-
ings is the main point of interest.
The situation is comparable in the
art of design. Here a shift of considera-
tion took place that again is determined
by the perspective of [users]. Whereas
in traditional design theory, one dis-
cussed shape and the properties of
things, the focus is now about “ecsta-
sies.” I use the Greek word ecstasies to
indicate the way things are radiating
into space and thus contributing to the
formation of an atmosphere. Ecstatics
is the way things make a certain im-
pression on us and thus modifying our
mood, the way we feel… (p. 5).
 Citations received
Seda Arikan, 2022. Establish-
ing the Places of Care for the
Older People in The Diaries
of Jane Somers by Doris Les-
sing. Journal of Aging Stud-
ies, Vol. 63, pp. 1–5.
This literature scholar considers the mean-
ing of care as portrayed in Nobel-prize
novelist Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of
Jane Somers (1984). Arikan argues that the
novel “reveals that human flourishing is
based on responsibility.” The article’s aim
is “to create awareness through literature
about caring for older, sick, and dying peo-
ple by establishing or sharing the places of
care, such as older people’s homes, rooms,
beds, bathrooms, and even deathbeds.”
Arikan explains that the novel is “both a
moral and a hopeful understanding of how
the needs of elders should be responded to
in society.”
Tara Coleman and Janine
Wiles, 2018. Being With Ob-
jects of Meaning: Cherished
Possession sand Opportuni-
ties to Maintain Aging
in Place. The Gerontologist,
Vol. 60, pp.41–49.
These health researchers examine the im-
portance of cherished possessions for older
persons. Drawing conclusions from in-
depth interviews, the authors conclude that
“Cherished possessions… play a phers and Don’t Care about
significant role in opportunities to main-
tain aging in place.”
Vikas Mehta, 2023. Public
Space: Notes on Why It Mat-
ters, What We Should Know,
and How to Realize Its Poten-
tial. London: Routledge.
This planner integrates “the key ideas that
encompass the social, political, and physi-
cal issues in the making and experiencing
of public space.” Vikas is the author of The
Street (Routledge, 2008).
Edward S. Casey, 2011.
Strangers at the Edge of Hos-
pitality. In Richard Kearney
and Kascha Semonovitch,
eds., Phenomenologies of the
Stranger: Between Hostility
and Hospitality, pp. 39–48.
NY: Fordam Univ. Press.
This philosopher of place argues that, at
base, hospitality is “the enactment of a
unique and often urgent edge-game in
which strangers present themselves at
gates and in which gates are there to open
or keep shut” (p. 48).
Miguel Guitart, 2022. Behind
Architectural Filters: Phe-
nomena of Interference. Lon-
don: Routledge.
This architect considers building envelops,
examining the edges of a building and sug-
gesting they are integral to the essence of
architecture. How do envelopes work? Are
they skins, shields, porous connections, or
something else? What do building edges
become if they are no longer structural?
The focus is how buildings articulate, me-
diate, and intensify lived relationships with
places and world.
Branko Mitrović, 2022. Archi-
tectural Principles in the Age
of Fraud: Why so Many Archi-
tects Pretend to be Philoso-
how Buildings Looks. No-
vata, California: Oro Editions.
This architectural theorist argues that most
architectural theory today is incomprehen-
sible and largely useless for real-world de-
sign. He identifies six major ways in which
architectural theory misrepresents archi-
tectural design and architectural experi-
ence: (1) obfuscation plain and simple
(“incomprehensible sentences by using
terms that readers are supposed to recog-
nize … and thus indicative of profound
thoughts”); (2) profound banality (“a fairly
3
simple and banal through is dressed up in a
terminology that makes it appear pro-
found”); (3) pretentious falsity (“making
obviously false statements that pretend to
say something profound”); (4) Jargon of
profundity (“value-laden dismissal or ap-
proval in situations where the author has no
arguments to present”); (5) “salads”
(“clusters of unrelated … obfuscatory
claims, statements, or citations placed to-
gether to achieve a cumulative obfuscatory
effect”); (6) cumulative banalities (“a large
number of banal observations are clustered
together to give the impression of profound
insights”).
Mitrović’s two major literatures of criti-
cism are architectural deconstruction and
architectural phenomenology. In regard to
the latter, his examples include Christian
Norberg-Schulz and Alberto Pérez-
Gómez. Puzzlingly, Mitrović appears to be
unaware of phenomenological thinkers
who have sought to make their writings ac-
cessible, clear, and practical, for example,
the writings of Karsten Harries, Robert
Mugerauer, and Thomas Thiis-Evensen.
Edward Relph, 2021. Elec-
tronically Mediated Sense of
Place. In Changing Senses of
Place: Navigating Global
Challenges. Edited by Chris-
topher M. Raymond, Lynne C.
Manzo, Daniel R. Williams,
Andrés Di Masso, and Timo
von Wirth. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, pp. 247–
258.
Relph considers how digital technologies
and social media affect human experience
and life, arguing that these developments
have impacted sense of place but, they
have “not affected all aspects of sense of
place equally. Neurological and ontologi-
cal aspects appear to have been relatively
unaffected by electronic media, whereas
person, social, and public aspects have
been influenced in diverse ways, especially
by the dramatic developments since 1990
in digital devices and related applications”
(p. 249). See sidebar, next page.
 A freedom of the world directly
The fact that so many substantial inno-
vations in electronic media are so re-
cent and continuing to happen means
that conclusions about broader conse-
quences for sense of place have to be
regarded as tentative.
In some ways, it seems that sense of
place is historically contingent, be-
cause it is related to technological de-
velopments that change both the nature
of places and how people related to
them. In other ways, sense of place ap-
pears to be immune to technological
innovations … This in turn suggests
that sense of place, although it is uni-
fied in our experiences of the world,
has plural aspects, some rooted, others
malleable.
From the practical perspective of
everyday life, it is these malleable as-
pects that are causes for concern be-
cause misinformation, manipulation,
and surveillance have become preva-
lent on the Internet, and these under-
mine those aspects of sense of place
that involve a freedom of the world di-
rectly, whether by ourselves or in asso-
ciation with others.
We may not always be explicitly
aware of sense of place, but it is neces-
sarily parts of our memories, inten-
tions, and encounters with the particu-
lar realities of the world. As social me-
dia, search engines, and smartphones
have made electronic media increas-
ingly popular and participatory, they
also appear to have become unwitting
agents of political and corporate power
that indirectly treat sense of place as a
resource that can be exploited and thus
erode its freedom (p. 256).

John Stanislav Sadar, 2016.
Through the Healing Glass:
Shaping the Modern Body
through Glass Architecture,
1925–35. NY: Routledge.
This architect tells the story of “Vita
glass,” an effort by glass companies in the
mid-1920s to market the health and medi-
cal benefits of a new kind of glass that
would “admit the beneficial, therapeutic ultraviolet light. Above is a Vita glass ad-
ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight into build- vertisement from Architectural Review,
ings.” Sadar reviews the development and January 1935.
eventual failure of Vita glass. He argues
that the Vita glass promoters portrayed the
human body as needy, “appealing to a
body that had been deprived of a healthy
carefree childhood in the past.” The aim
was to offer that body a “promise of a
healthy future” through the beneficence of

4
Book Review
Beyond Dichotomy
Andrea Hiott
Iain McGilchrist, 2009. The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the
Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press [new ex-
panded edition, 2019].
I
n 2021, psychotherapist Iain
McGilchrist published his second
book, The Matter with Things, a two-
volume encyclopedic publication in
which the author aims to awaken readers
from an increasingly mechanized, reduc-
tionist mode of thinking. In this review, I
discuss his earlier The Master and His Em-
issary, published in 2009.
On the surface, this book is a deep dive
into the left and right brain hemispheres
and a compendium of research about their
differences. McGilchirst’s more resonant
message, however, has little to do with the
left and right hemispheres but with getting
beyond such dichotomies. Focusing on
hemispheres as if they were opposites is a
left-brain trap that, as McGilchrist, warns,
could take over as master if one isn’t
aware.
As others have noted, however (see Ru-
pert Read’s 2010 review in Phenomenol-
ogy and the Cognitive Sciences),
McGilchrist ultimately falls into this same
error, using a left-brain approach to de-
scribe the right and—as the book’s awk-
ward title makes clear—giving the brain a
masculinist cast. Even so, the book is an
honest attempt to move beyond this tricky,
sticky proclivity to dichotomize. At its
best, the book indicates that there is no rea-
son to pit left against right, whether physi-
cally or symbolically. Just as the left and
right hemispheres can be viewed as some-
what autonomous systems operating to-
ward a cohesive, embodied life, so too can
we begin to view traditional dichotomies
of “reason” and “belief” as distinct ap-
proaches nested within one life. Taking
“spirituality” broadly—not as religion or
rules but as intuition and belief—one rec-
ognizes that it is often considered as an op-
posite to experiment-based science and lin-
earity. McGilchrist’s book is a step toward
getting beyond this dichotomy.
For many Western people today, an ei-
ther/or mentality has come to scaffold the
way the world is experienced. In fact, that
same scaffolding is the reason it took me
over a decade to read McGilchrist. As a
student of neuroscience, I was told to avoid
his work because it was not a serious expli-
cation of hemispheric differences. These
instructions came from well-meaning indi-
viduals who had not read the book but ex-
pressed a common visceral reaction among
neuroscientists to ignore and censor any
mention of the hemispheres as personali-
ties—for example, McGilchrist’s parable-
like framing of brain hemispheres as “mas-
ter” and “emissary.”
This knee-jerk reaction arose partly be-
cause of self-help programs of the 1980s
and 1990s that often drew on left-brain ver-
sus right-brain personalities and offered
5
ways of personal balance through hemi-
spheric awareness—i.e., the right brain
sees the big picture, connects, and believes,
while the left brain focuses only on details,
walks its own predefined path, and remains
skeptical. Though these self-help programs
were often diluted and exaggerated, they
nonetheless sprang from legitimate,
groundbreaking brain studies showing a
seeming split personality arising in people
whose hemispheres had been separated.
These famous experiments, partly be-
cause of which neuropsychologist Roger
Sperry received a Nobel Prize in 1981, are
extraordinary in that they demonstrate how
one and the same body can express widely
divergent behaviors when the hemispheres
have been severed and so operate inde-
pendently.
This research began in the 1960s, when
Sperry and colleague Michael Gazzaniga
conducted experiments with people whose
corpus callosums had been clipped as treat-
ment for severe epilepsy. The corpus col-
losum is the part of the brain that connects
the two hemispheres, so when it was
clipped, the brain operated more like two
separate units. In a 1967 issue of Scientific
American, Sperry and Gazzaniga pub-
lished “The Split Brain in Man,” which
discussed how the two halves of the human
brain could function independently, and
how they might be responsible for different
abilities that manifest in the human body.
Experiments like this had never been
done before. These researchers learned
that, when the hemispheres were discon-
nected and only one hemisphere was in
play, the person acted differently and even
contradictorily to the way she acted when
the other hemisphere predominated. Even
more remarkably, the person seemed not to
notice or register this difference and was
unable to access the activity taking place
by way of the other hemisphere. In other
words, when the hemispheres were sev-
ered, the body seemed to become a stage
that could only be taken by one hemisphere
at a time and that could no longer cross-
reference its actions.
The more generalized notion that the
hemispheres have opposing personalities
was not entirely correct but did provide a
simplified way to understand these experi-
ments. This version of split-brain science
assumed that left and right were opposites
and largely ignored the fact that most hu-
mans do not actually have split brains but
healthy intact corpus collosums and two
connected hemispheres that communicate.
Until recently, most neuroscientists ig-
nored hemispheric differences, and many
still recoil from the topic because of the
“self-help” angle. The most meaningful
message in McGilchrist’s book is its illus-
trating that we must respect both hemi-
spheres if we want a shift in mental and en-
vironmental health. He writes:
The right hemisphere, the one that be-
lieves, but does not know, has to depend
on the other, the left hemisphere, that
knows, but doesn't believe. It is as though
a power that has an infinite, and therefore
intrinsically uncertain, potential Being
needs nonetheless to submit to be delim-
ited—needs stasis, certainty, fixity—in or-
der to Be. The greater purpose demands
the submission. The Master needs to trust,
to believe in, his emissary, knowing all the
while that that trust may be abused. The
emissary knows, but knows wrongly, that
he is invulnerable. If the relationship
holds, they are invincible; but if it is
abused, it is not just the Master that suf-
fers, but both of them, since the emissary
owes his existence to the Master
(McGilchrist, 428).
This “greater purpose” and “relation-
ship” is, of course, the whole body, but this
wholeness sometimes gets lost in the text.
Near the middle of the book, McGilchrist
reiterates his main point, namely that there
is a “degree of specialization” in the brain
that leads the left hemisphere “to focus
more narrowly on detail” with “the right
hemisphere supporting sustained attention
across a broad field.” He uses a Darwinian
argument grounded in the “survival ad-
vantages” of a brain that can focus nar-
rowly and widely. He presents many stud-
ies that illustrate how this focusing ability
has “consequences at the phenomenologi-
cal level of experience,” such that, by ex-
amining the various tasks associated with
the different hemispheres, we can learn
something important about these two
modes of being in the world.
It is obvious that McGilchrist is still
working in a binary manner—seeing the
modes as two rather than a wide, nested
spectrum of potentials—though, in an up-
dated preface added in 2019, he states that
the hypothesis at the heart of his book is
not about such binaries:
The hemisphere hypothesis transcends
and replaces, and is not a perpetuation of,
the old dichotomies: reason v. feeling, ra-
tionality v. intuition, ‘system I v. system
II’, male brain v. female brain. Each hem-
isphere plays its part on either side of
each of those dichotomies (McGilchrist,
xii).
He also makes it clear that neither hemi-
sphere incorporates a monopoly on any
one trait:
It is … just not true that the left hemi-
sphere is unemotional, perhaps a bit bor-
ing, but at least down- to-earth and relia-
ble: in fact, the left hemisphere is more
likely than the right hemisphere to get an-
gry, or dismissive, jump to conclusions,
become deluded, or get stuck in denial.
Equally it’s not true that the right hemi-
sphere has no language (it usually has no
speech, a different matter): it understands
many of the subtlest and most important
elements of language better than the left
(McGilchrist, xii).
Still, McGilchrist cannot skirt his own
left-brain pattern simply by awareness of
it. Though he talks about embodied phe-
nomenology, what he too often forgets is
that these two hemispheres do not have
their own phenomenology but rather oper-
ate through the phenomenology of a com-
mon body—that they operate as one multi-
faceted phenomenology, not two.
No doubt this story of our need for
awareness of possible perspectives is eas-
ier understood when presented in a dichot-
omous language, so it is no wonder that
McGilchrist falls into the same trap he
points out. He aims to move beyond the di-
chotomy of making opposites of the hemi-
spheres, but he makes this move by casting
them as separate bodies rather than parts of
6
a shared body, thus dismissing what is cru-
cial for phenomenology—for what the
whole sensory body experiences due to its
collective systems. Instead, throughout the
book, McGilchrist discusses the phenome-
nological world as if it is the world of a
brain hemisphere. He often uses terms like
“right hemisphere phenomenology” and
discusses “the phenomenology of the hem-
ispheres.” For example:
At the end of Part I, I spoke of the pro-
gress of the sleepwalking left hemisphere,
always going further in the same direc-
tion, “ambling toward the abyss.” The
tendency to keep on progressing, inflexi-
bly, always in the one direction may have
to do with a subtle feature of the “shape”
of the world as seen by the left hemi-
sphere, compared with that experienced
by the right hemisphere. It has often been
said that the left hemisphere is the hemi-
sphere of “linear processing”; its cogni-
tive style is sequential, hence its propen-
sity to linear analysis, or to mechanical
construction, taking the bits apart, or put-
ting them together, one by one. This is in
keeping with its phenomenological world
being one of getting, of utility—of always
having an end in view … (McGilchrist,
446).
This is well said but still assumes a di-
chotomous model of either/or that takes at-
tention away from the wholeness of the
embodied, emplaced awareness that
McGilchrist champions elsewhere. As he
makes clear, we do not have to choose
hemispheres but awaken to them—the
body can become aware of its patterns, and
must, if we want to find a dynamic har-
mony between our differing potentials. To
truly change our patterns will require
change at the level of the body’s phenom-
enological encounter with itself, with other
beings, and with the places we are part of
in our most essential sense.
Tagging the phenomenological experi-
ence to a brain hemisphere misses the
chance of revealing the necessity of a
whole-body shift in phenomenology. It is
this shift that offers a way of balance and
agency over future mental and environ-
mental paths. Really grasping this shift
means expanding our mindset by way of
that awareness so that left and right, or sci-
ence and spirituality, are understood as au-
tonomous positions without being oppo-
sites, as connected without being the same.
 No wonder McGilchrist could find no
magic formula for writing in such a way,
as few if anyone has. It is extremely diffi-
cult and nearly impossible to use current
language, built up through binaries, to go
beyond dichotomy. One is reminded of
writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who suggested
that the “test of a first-rate intelligence is
the ability to hold two opposing ideas in
mind at the same time and still retain the
ability to function.” Holding opposites
means understanding that what you are
holding are not really opposites at all, but
nested positions in a shared space that you
needed to cast as opposites to awaken to.
In that sense, McGilchrist’s book shows us
this new space, even if he cannot describe
it.
As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson
famously put it, this understanding means
that “it takes two to know one.” The brain
is built in two hemispheres because this
structure allows it to operate at levels of
complexity that evolve its ability to navi-
gate as that body and open a path beyond
dichotomy. In this way, both science and
spirituality offer help toward awakening to
our ecological, emplaced position in a
larger whole. The ecological is not a right-
brained trait. Rather, it is a phenomenolog-
ical awareness of the body in conversation
with its encounter that, in the words of psy-
chologist J.J. Gibson, “cuts across the di-
chotomy of subjective-objective and helps
us understand its inadequacy” (Gibson,
1979, 129).
To live ecologically, we do not need to
choose between hemispheres, and indeed
we cannot—as embodied beings, we are
both. In a similar sense, science and spirit-
uality can be cast as trajectories toward un-
derstanding the lifeworlds of living beings
and the larger ecological movement we are
positions within.
This may be too radical or too direct a
statement for the McGilchrist that wrote
The Master and His Emissary, but I won-
der if it is for the man who has, more than
a decade later, written The Matter with
Things. I look forward to finding out.
References
Bateson, G., 1972. Steps to an Ecology of
Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
de Haan, E.H.F., Corballis, P.M., Hillyard,
S.A. et al., 2020. Split-Brain: What We
7
Know Now and Why This is Important for
Understanding Consciousness. Neuropsy-
chological Review 30, 224–233.
Gazzaniga, M.S., 1967. The Split Brain in
Man. Scientific American, 217 (2), 24–29.
Gibson, J.J. 1966. The Senses Considered
as Perceptual Systems. NY: Houghton
Mifflin.
Read, R., 2012. The Master and his Emis-
sary [book review]. Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences, 11, 119–24.
Andrea Hiott is a cognitive scientist and
Doktorand at the University of Heidelberg
in the department of phenomenology
where she works with colleagues to de-
velop a philosophy of “Waymaking,” a
new understanding of embodied, emplaced
cognition that interprets mind as continu-
ous with movement. For more information,
see www.ecologicalorientation.com. an-
drea.hiott@uni-heidelberg.de. © Andrea
Hiott 2023.
In Memoriam: Yi-Fu Tuan (1930–2022)
David Seamon, Editor, EAP
G
eographer Yi-Fu Tuan
died in Madison, Wis-
consin, on August 10,
2022. He was 92 years
old and defined his discipline as
“the study of the earth as the home
of people” (Tuan 1991, p. 99).
This simple definition provides a
clear picture of his central re-
search interest: the interrelation-
ships among human beings, their
homes, and the Earth.
Tuan was born in Tientsin,
China in 1930 and educated in
China, Australia, the Philippines,
and England, where he received a
BA and MA from Oxford Univer-
sity. He moved to the United
States in 1951 and completed his
PhD in Geography at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley in 1957.
From 1984 until his retirement in 1998,
he taught Geography at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison.
As one of the founders of a research tra-
dition that came to be called “humanistic
geography,” Tuan gave primary attention
to human beings’ lived relationships with
all aspects of the geographical world, in-
cluding nature, space, and place. His fo-
cus was human action, awareness, and
meaning as they both sustain and are sus-
tained by such environmental, spatial, and
place phenomena as home, mobility,
landscape, region, and the natural and hu-
man-made environments.
In a 1976 article in the Annals of the As-
sociation of American Geographers,
Tuan first formally coined the term “hu-
manistic geography” which he described
as “an understanding of the human world
by studying people’s relationship with na-
ture, their geographical behavior as well
as their feelings and ideas in regard to
space and place” (Tuan 1976, p. 266).
T
hough he generally avoided con-
ceptual designations like “phe-
nomenological,” “hermeneutic,”
or “existential,” these philosophical tradi-
tions clearly informed his work, and he
can readily be called an environmental
and place phenomenologist. In most of
his writings, however, he did not discuss
conceptual and methodological matters
explicitly but instead moved directly to
the specific real-world topic at hand.
One of his few explicit discussions of
phenomenology was a 1971 Canadian
Geographer article that he summarized as
“An attempt to apply the phenomenolog-
ical method to a few general types of ge-
ographical experience, namely ‘front and
back regions’ and ‘home and journey’”
(Tuan 1971, p. 192). He concluded that
“The phenomenologist studies neither
[people] in the abstract nor the “world” in
the abstract, but “[people]-in-the-world
…. This perspective is no less important
to geographers, for their quest—broadly
conceived—is also the understanding of
“[people]-in-the-world” (Tuan 1971, p.
191).
In many of Tuan’s writings, a favorite
thematic device is environmental and
place dialectics, for instance, space vs.
place; home vs. journey; hearth vs. cos-
mos; individual vs. group, localism vs.
cosmopolitanism, and so forth. As he
wrote, “The human mind appears to be
disposed to organize phenomena not only
8
into segments but to arrange them
in opposite pairs” (Tuan 1974, p.
16).
One example is his last book,
Romantic Geography (Tuan
2013), a title referring to the hu-
man desire to encounter environ-
ments and places that are remote,
exotic, or dangerous. To interpret
these “romantic geographies,”
Tuan drew on a dialectic that he
called “polarized binaries”—
lived opposites that included
darkness and light; chaos and
form; low and high; house and
city; and brain and brawn. He
claimed that these binaries are
useful because they highlight
lived extremes rather than a mid-
dle range of human experience.
These binaries “affect our feelings and
judgments toward objects and people in
the ordinary encounters of life, but also—
and more central to romantic geogra-
phy—in the envisioning and experiencing
of large, challenging environments …”
(Tuan 2013, p. 10).
Beyond his home discipline, Tuan was
perhaps the best-known geographer of his
generation because of his clear writing
style and eclectic research interests, solid-
ified in over twenty books with titles like
Space and Place (1977), Landscapes of
Fear (1979), Segmented Worlds and Self
(1982), and Dominance and Affection:
The Making of Pets (1984). His best-
known work (partly because of its allur-
ing title) is probably Topophilia (Tuan
1974b), subtitled “A study of environ-
mental perception, attitudes, and values.”
Tuan defined topophilia as attachment to
and love of place; the book’s central aim
was awakening readers’ environmental
awareness:
Without sell-understanding we cannot
hope for enduring solutions to environ-
mental problems, which are fundamen-
tally human problems. And human prob-
lems … hinge on the psychological pole
of motivation, on the values and attitudes
that direct energies to goals (Tuan
1974b, p. 1).
I only met Tuan a few times at national
meetings of the Association of the
American Geographers in the late
1970s and early 1980s. The one encounter
I remember clearly was having dinner at
an International House of Pancakes. I be-
lieve that meeting was in Minneapolis,
and I think we dined there because Tuan
at the time was a professor at the Univer-
sity of Minnesota and happened to like
this particular IHOP. Whatever the rea-
son, we had an intense discussion on the
significance of place in geographical
studies. He said to me, “David, your work
will be remembered because you’ve
coined a concept—“place ballet”—that
all sorts of people can readily understand.
It’s a structure embedded in human life,
and people readily see this.”
I was flattered by what he said, though
Tuan, of course, can be given the same
compliment, since a good number of con-
cepts that he developed in his work—e.g.,
topophilia, public symbols, places of
care—continue to be used by both aca-
demics and the lay public. I particularly
admire public symbols and places of care ______. 1974a. Space and Place: Human-
with the former referring to places readily istic Perspective, Progress in Geography,
known because of their striking visibility; Vol. 6, C. Board, R. J. Chorley, P.
and the latter marking ordinary, often
humdrum environments mostly known
only by their users (Tuan 1974a; see the
excerpt, p.17).
To honor Tuan’s trailblazing work, we
Haggett, and D. R. Stoddart, eds. London:
Edward Arnold, pp. 213–52.
______. 1974b. Topophilia. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
______. 1976. Humanistic Geography.
include tributes from Edward Relph, In- Annals of the Association of American
grid Leman Stefanovic, Stanley Brunn, Geographers, 66: 266–76.
and Xu Huang. These tributes are fol- ______. 1991. A View of Geography. Ge-
lowed by excepts from four of Yi-Fu’s ographical Review, 81 (1): 99–107.
writings, including his exceptional de- ______. 2013. Romantic Geography: In
scription of public symbols vs. places of Search of the Sublime Landscape. Madi-
care. The first excerpt, written in 1965 for son, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
the journal, The Professional Geogra-
pher, is prescient in its early explication
of how Martin Heidegger’s phenomeno-
logical understanding of human-being-in-
the-world might have crucial significance
for geographical thinking (Tuan 1965).
References
Tuan, Y.-F., 1965. “Environment” and
“World.” The Professional Geographer,
17 (5): 6–8.
______. 1971. Geography, Phenomenol-
ogy, and the Study of Human Nature, Ca-
nadian Geographer, 15: 181–92.
9
A Transformative Encounter
Edward Relph
Relph is Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto and a key founder of research that has come to be identified as “phenome-
nologies of place.” His books include Place and Placelessness (1976; reprinted 2008); Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geog-
raphy (1981; reprinted 2016); and Toronto: Transformations in a City and its Region (2013). Ted.relph@gmail.com. © 2023 Ed-
ward Relph.
M
y life overlapped with Yi-Fu
Tuan in very significant
ways. Apart from some brief
encounters at conferences,
however, we met only once, at the Univer-
sity of Toronto in 1967, where I was a
graduate student in a class he was co-teach-
ing (with colleague Joe May) about the
philosophy of geography. That class redi-
rected my academic interests and changed
how I look at the world.
I am no longer certain about which par-
ticular discussion triggered this shift, but I
think it probably had something to do with
the fact that Yi-Fu talked about a book he
had just finished writing—The Hydrologic
Cycle and the Wisdom of God (1968). The
title alone suggested an original way of
thinking about environments that stepped
well beyond the research into floods and
natural hazards that I had planned.
Indeed, the book went beyond all the es-
tablished conventions of human and phys-
ical geography. Yi-Fu's interests had noth-
ing to do with the then-current enthusiasm
about transforming geography into a spa-
tial science with methodological founda-
tion of statistics and quantification. In-
stead, Yi-Fu’s work showed me an intel-
lectual approach based on wide reading
and careful thinking that could reveal the
rich variety of ways people relate to the
world.
In fact, Yi-Fu's contributions to that
class were limited to just a few sessions be-
cause he moved to the University of Min-
nesota in the middle of the academic year.
Nevertheless, his point of view made me
realize that my intellectual inclinations did
not lean toward spatial science. The re-
maining sessions, taught by Joe May, rein-
forced this recognition by showing me that
phenomenology offered a philosophical
foundation and method for explicating the
older notion of geography as the study of
places.
A few years later, the outcome was my
doctoral thesis on The Phenomenon of
Place (published in 1976 as Place and
Placelessness). Yi-Fu agreed to be the the-
sis’s external examiner, but, unfortunately,
he was unable to attend the oral and sub-
mitted his assessment in writing.
For the next few years my writing about
phenomenology, place, and humanistic ge-
ography followed a roughly parallel track
to Yi-Fu's publications, though his always
had a quality of scholarship and an opti-
mistic view of people and culture that mine
seemed to lack. In 1976, I accepted his of-
fer to teach his courses on space and place
at the University of Minnesota while he
was away on academic leave. I had the
privilege of using his office, but again we
had no opportunity to meet because our
time in Minneapolis did not overlap.
Apart from the short yet transformative
encounter in Toronto, it was through his
writing that I came to know Yi-Fu Tuan. I
find his writing consistently remarkable,
filled with original insights about how we
encounter the diversity of the world around
us. He drew on a wealth of reading in di-
verse fields and always leant toward the
better aspects of human nature.
I may have missed something but, to the
best of my knowledge, he never discussed
models or speculated about theory; he
10
made no policy recommendations. Nor did
he write much about methodology, though
I think his books and articles were all in-
formed by an implicit phenomenology that
offers a rich, descriptive commentary on
various aspects of place, space, environ-
ment, and landscape. And he always rec-
ognized that there were ambiguities in how
these phenomena are experienced because
human beings are regularly inconsistent.
I ndeed, I suspect that, in much of his
writing, Yi-Fu aimed to reconcile a
tension in his own mind between the
delight he took in community and place on
one hand, and his work as a cosmopolitan
scholar on the other hand. Being rooted in
a place, he suggested (“In Place Out of
Place,” 1984, p. 9), offers routines and hab-
its necessary for sanity. We need a sense of
place because it offers a unique capacity
for appreciation of the world around us.
But these features of place can also be
constraints. “Plants have roots, human be-
ings have feet and minds” he wrote in Cos-
mos and Hearth (1996, p. 187). And in the
same book: “Bonding based on propin-
quity and kinship is natural to us. By con-
trast, kindness to strangers who may not re-
ciprocate, and civility in impersonal trans-
actions are a watermark of civilization.” (p.
140).
This is a principle that I wish everybody
lived by. Yi-Fu Tuan may be gone, but the
deep humanity of his insights endures in
everything he wrote.
Remembering Yi-Fu Tuan
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
Stefanovic is Professor Emerita, University of Toronto; and Professor and Dean Emeritus, Simon Fraser University. Her books in-
clude Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development (2000); The Natural City (2015); and The Wonder
of Water (2020). www.ingridstefanovic.com; ingrid.stefanovic@utoronto.ca. © 2023 Ingrid Leman Stefanovic.
S
ense of place? It’s all empty non-
sense! These were the words of an
elderly, well-respected psycholo-
gist, as we were riding an elevator
together at an environmental design con-
ference many years ago. As we chatted, I
quickly concluded that my colleague had
never read the works of Yi-Fu Tuan. Had
he done so, there is no doubt in my mind
that dismissing place research in this way
simply would have been unthinkable.
I am not a geographer and yet, I know
well that Tuan transformed the landscape
of his own discipline, embracing a human-
istic element that had not been part of the
common discourse. I never met him in per-
son, although I understand that he was well
loved by students and colleagues alike.
That fact is not surprising to me, given that
his writings reveal the heart of a discerning
man, one who quietly, though decisively,
changed the course of interdisciplinary
thinking on place and space.
Tuan was one of the early thinkers who re-
alized that geography was not simply the
study of physical landscapes as much as it
was better devoted to understanding rela-
tionships—relations between humans and
the environment, between space and place,
between intimacy and distance.
His book, Space and Place, was one of
the first classic texts on the subject I read
as a philosophy student in the 1970s. I was
fascinated with the ways in which a geog-
rapher was able to so meaningfully engage
questions about the significance of home
and community, place and time, lived ex-
perience, and “all the modes by which a
person knows and constructs reality.”
Certainly, as many of us know, describ-
ing place is not a simpleminded matter of
classification and definition: place is fluid,
and eludes preconceived boundaries and
reductionist categories. But it is precisely
its effusive character that gives meaning to
these rich words, “space” and “place.”
11
Tuan was deeply aware that articulating
meaningful aspects of a sense of place was
no easy job. But he also knew that if
“something is of sufficient importance to
us, we usually find the means to give it vis-
ibility.”
Yi-Fu Tuan’s legacy is that he gave vis-
ibility to the essential notions of home,
place, space, and time. And he did so in a
way that transformed the essence of the ge-
ographic discipline, while opening the
door to meaningful interdisciplinary col-
laborations.
In the context of place research, there are
few in the world who made a more signifi-
cant contribution. And for such a gift,
many of us will always remain deeply
grateful.
Legacies Aplenty
A Memorial to Yi-Fu Tuan
Stanley D. Brunn
Brunn is Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington. He is a past editor of the Annals,
Association of American Geographers and the Professional Geographer. His recent books focus on urbanization, mega-engineering,
religion, language, LGBTQ issues, and COVID-19. One current project focuses on time journeys. stan.brunn@uky.edu.© 2023 Stan-
ley D. Brunn.
S
cholarly communities advance
through a series of miscellaneous
geographies and geometries.
These can include individual and
group efforts, internal and external kindred
spirits, and scholarly communities and in-
dividual initiatives. They can progress the
theoretical thinking and practical results
with financial backing or simply through
ongoing efforts of persistence and pa-
tience. Regardless of the origins and the
networks involved in new directions, the
outcomes of these creative efforts are
likely the result of a mix of personal attrib-
utes and responses by known and unknown
friends, scholars, and strangers providing
invisible, silent support for what one is
seeking.
This framework is particularly fitting
when evaluating the lifelong contributions
of Yi-Fu Tuan. Tributes to his half-cen-
tury-plus contributions to geography can
and should come from those who knew
him well as a friend, a teacher, a colleague,
and a research collaborator.
While those tributes will be paid by
those who knew him for what they have
seen in writing and in presentations, it is
impossible for outsiders to know about his
upbringing in China and Australia and how
these places influenced his lifelong experi-
ences and learning. Too often in writing
memorials of solitary scholars, we are un-
familiar with early childhood experiences,
elementary and high school teachers, and
non-family members who likely played
key roles in how they approached learning,
doing, and growing in various settings.
In writing about Yi-Fu’s impact on ge-
ography and other scholar communities, I
focus here on his efforts as a professional
geographer, knowing that, to answer all the
“whys and wheres” of his career fully, one
needs to explore pre-professional life ex-
periences, friendships, students, advisees,
and travels.
Some of the depth and breadth of his
lifetime contributions can be traced to his
graduate days at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, where he had contacts with
human, physical and human/physical ge-
ography and geographers. His doctoral dis-
sertation on arid land geomorphology was
not a major thread of his research career,
but it provided a background for exploring
human/environmental intersections as a
major thread throughout his lifetime. He
would probably be among the first to admit
that such intersections are important in
providing a holistic view of looking at hu-
mankind in past and present contexts. That
he was comfortable moving beyond a
strictly physical-geographical context ex-
hibited early that he wanted to explore new
topics and seek ways to move geography
ahead in some new directions and dimen-
sions.
His entry into disciplinary history oc-
curred in the mid-1960s and 1970s when
the discipline was taking turns into spatial
and behavioral directions. These evolu-
tionary directions in focus, language, and
methodology in the discipline were wel-
comed by some but unwelcomed by many
others. The spatial tradition was evident in
graduate-student training, in hiring priori-
ties, in research funding, and in some re-
search journals. Amidst these “turns,”
there were a few geographers who were
somewhat uncertain about what these new
directions meant and where they were tak-
ing the discipline.
Among the “non-quantifiers,” as they
were called, were a few who suggested that
the discipline should be more concerned
with human experiences, human welfare,
and social well-being. Yi-Fu was one of
12
those pioneers who, along with other geog-
raphers like Anne Buttimer, David Ley,
David Lowenthal, Ted Relph, and Merwyn
Samuels, advocated for a more human ge-
ography based on places, landscapes, and
emotions rather than spatial analysis and
quantitative methods. Tuan’s writings dur-
ing these decades resonated with those ad-
vocating for exploring more ties to the hu-
manities and less to numerical analyses in
both human and physical geography.
Tuan’s slow but effective entries into
mainstream geographical research also
represented the entry of Chinese and East
Asian worlds of thinking into a discipline
strongly, and without question, influenced
by European thinkers of the nineteenth and
twentieth century. His early and subse-
quent articles and books portrayed the im-
portance of imagination, harmony with na-
ture, feelings and emotions that were coun-
ter to much of the spatial thinking and
quantitative methods supported by a hand-
ful of British-trained geographers in the
last few decades of the twentieth century.
His work also had relationship to the emer-
gence of social theory introduced by a
small number of European and North
American geographers in the 1980s.
Human geography became more a hu-
mane geography because of the contribu-
tions of his articles and books. Previous ge-
ographic research on religion also took a
spiritual turn with his research on studying
the self, society, communities, the environ-
ment, and landscapes. Some of these
themes were integrated by him and subse-
quent scholars via his term “topophilia”—
literally, “love of place.”
One can argue that Tuan’s research con-
tributions were a foundation of humanistic
geography and extended the thinking of
human/environmental geography beyond
abstract, ivory tower worlds to the worlds

of caring. This theme integrated his con-
cern with human welfare and the imagi-
nary worlds of children and adults and the
respect for valuing human experiences
with plants and animals and the rich herit-
ages of humankind.
While some cultural and social geogra-
phers may have been uncomfortable with
some of his thinking and writing, believing
it was not “mainstream,” it was in geogra-
phy departments and universities in the last
several decades of his professional life
where his pioneering thinking was wel-
comed. That he was also able to see his
creativity published by major university
and commercial presses was also critical in
informing and challenging the social sci-
ence and humanities disciplines. His books
addressed themes that Tuan believed
placed geography and geographers at the
intersections of landscapes, places, values,
philosophies, and feelings experienced by
individuals in both visible and silent com-
munities.
Tuan’s considerable scholarly legacy
will be measured over time. While the
number of references to a specific article or
book will never be precisely known, we
can use Google Scholar as a database to
measure his publication impact. As one ef-
fort to provide clarification, two databases
were constructed on October 28, 2022, to
identify the number of citations his books
have received and major themes in these
volumes (Wikipedia 2022; Google Scholar
2022).
The Wikipedia source briefly describes
his career and lists 21 of his books, begin-
ning in 1973.These titles were entered into
the Google Scholar database to identify the
number of citations for each book. The
leading book in citations was Space and
Place: The Perspective of Experience
(1977) with more than 16,000 citations.
Six books had 500 or more citations.
As indicated roughly by the word cloud
above, the books’ ranked counts were:
Space and Place: The Perspective of Expe-
rience (1977; 16,894 citations); To-
pophilia: A Study of Environmental Per-
ception, Attitudes and Values (1990;
8709); Place: An Experiential Perspective
(1975; 1411); Landscapes of Fear (2013;
1236); Humanist Geography (2017; 1033);
Dominance and Affection: The Making of
Pets (1984; 993); Passing Strange and
Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature and Culture
(1993; 500); Segmented Worlds and Self
(1982; 401); Escapism (2000; 382); The
Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God:
A Thesis in Geo-theology (1973; 168);
Morality and Imagination (1989; 165);
Place, The Good Life
1986 144); Man and
Nature (1971; 133);
Place, Art and Cul-
ture (1964; 129); Ro-
mantic Geography
(201; 102); The Cli-
mate of New Mexico
(1973; 95); Religion:
Place and Placeless
(2000; 81); Who Am
I? (1999; 77); Dear
13
Colleague (2002; 34); Coming Home to
China (2007; 30); and Human Goodness
(2008; 23).
In turn, Tuan’s leading articles for cita-
tions were the following: “Space and
Place: Humanistic Experience” (1979;
2424); “Language and the Making of
Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach”
(1991; 1005); and “Images and Mental
Maps” (1975; 561).
A second way to highlight Tuan’s career
draws on 69 key words in titles and subti-
tles of articles and books; these expres-
sions’ word cloud is summarized in the il-
lustration, below left, and pinpoints major
and minor themes highlighted in his work.
It is clear from even a casual look at
these word clouds that Tuan’s thinking
about geography’s intersections with the
social sciences and humanities resonated
with scholars in other disciplines and inter-
secting fields. For example, there were al-
most 35,000 citations about place; 28,000
on art, music, and values; 24,000 on lan-
guage and technology; 19,000 on architec-
ture; 14,000 on aesthetics, beauty, and cog-
nitive mapping; and 5,000 on affection,
placelessness, and topophilia.
The long-term impacts of a scholar on
his discipline are difficult to measure, but
for a productive scholar whose writing ca-
reer extended some fifty years and wrote
original articles and books, his legacy will
endure. At a time when cross- and inter-
disciplinary research are on the rise,
Tuan’s thinking about experiences, emo-
tions, perceptions, and place identify many
lacunae that merit further study.
Tuan’s legacy will endure not only via
transdisciplinary topics of interest but also
via his clarity in expressing those ideas to
nascent and lifelong scholars in many
fields. One readily imagines that future ar-
ticles and books will expand on Tuan’s
thinking about places, emotions, and expe-
riences as they relate to the fine arts as well
as to the social, earth, and planetary sci-
ences.
References
Google Scholar Search Engine. Yi-Fu
Tuan and research key words. Accessed
October 28, 2022.
Wikipedia. Yi-Fu Tuan. Accessed Octo-
ber 28, 2022.
A Geography that Opens the Memory of the Mind
Xu Huang
Xu Huang is a humanistic geographer focusing on the fields of psychological geography and literary geography. He holds a PhD
in human geography from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and is an associate professor in the Department of Human Geog-
raphy at Nanjing Normal University, China. 09432@njnu.edu.cn © 2023 Xu Huang.
Perhaps the most fascinating terrae incog-
nitae of all are those that lie within the
hearts and minds of men.
—John Kirtland Wright
Y
i-Fi Tuan was not the only hu-
manist geographer to empha-
size experience, yet he ex-
plained how he differed from
colleagues Anne Buttimer, David Ley, or
Edward Relph, calling his writings merely
personal correspondence (Tuan 2015).
But perhaps it is Tuan's spirituality that
his interests were cosmopolitan and cross-
cutting across the humanities, for he won-
derfully weaved together quotations and
observations from fiction, essays, poetry,
scientific studies, historical accounts, biog-
raphies, and religions. Tuan navigated
through a multitude of texts without adher-
ing to formal theory. He was more willing
to forge ahead than to formalize theory; he
subtly and strategically takes the reader be-
tween text and experience. This art was not
only unprecedented in the 1970s but re-
mains unique in current-day times. Tuan
never felt his way of working to be a para-
digm but merely descriptive psychological
geography (Tuan 2013).
In Tuanian geography, half of human ex-
perience is characterized by rootedness, se-
curity, and certainty, while the other half is
characterized by extensiveness, expansion,
and imagination. One pole symbolizes
stillness and the other, movement. But the
two interpenetrate, as reflected in such en-
tries as Topophilia (1974), Place and
Space (1977), Segmented Worlds and Self
(1982), Cosmos and Hearth (1996), Hu-
man Goodness (2008), Humanist Geogra-
phy (2012), and Romantic Geography
(2013).
The geographical encounter between
these two poles involves continuities and
discontinuities. Through these contrasts
and penetrations, Tuan revealed the many
ways of being in the world and provided a
prism to see through the ambiguities and
contradictions of human experience and
how they subtly and differentially mix and
intermingle: Within reach but not far away;
at the end of the world but close to the heart
(Tuan 2012).
Since he looked for a mixture of inter-
pretation and experience, one might won-
der how Tuan positioned himself between
the two poles of experience of space and
place. He made it clear, in a self-reflexive
gesture, that he was neither rooted nor
driven to encounter the world. He not only
understood, however, but felt the pull of
both positions (Tuan 2004). He also artic-
ulated his personal topophilia: in his first
encounter with the desert of Death Valley,
he seemed to experience the geographical
counterpart of the self, without the trap-
pings of human society; beauty might be
impersonal—even inanimate—to be a sol-
ace for Tuan's soul (1999, 2004). It was in
the vast desolation and silence of stone,
light, wind, and sand that he felt com-
forted, nurtured, and sheltered.
In the landscape of the mind, Tuan re-
peatedly explored what it meant to be lost,
fractured, scattered, and adrift; or claustro-
phobic, swollen, confined, and trapped.
While Segmented Worlds and Self (1982),
Morality and Imagination (1989), and Es-
capism (1998) all touch upon these heavy,
tragic themes, Landscapes of Fear (1979)
focuses on them almost entirely. Tuan ad-
mitted to being a pessimist, fascinated by
the rupture of connections between people
and places, but the integrity of the re-
bridged self was even a more magical ap-
peal (Tuan, 1999).
I am captivated by the mental landscape
created by Tuanian geography. Instead
of delineating a perfectly clear path, he
waved his hand and summoned, “There it
is,” inspiring me to explore my own psy-
chological geography. Born in the early
1980s, my early childhood was spent in a
crumbling apartment building in an eco-
nomically underdeveloped county in cen-
tral China. Many young people from my
hometown fled from there by various
14
means, either to go to college, join the mil-
itary, or enter factories to work in more de-
veloped places on the eastern coast of
China. I was one of them. In the 20 years
since I left home, I have lived in several big
Chinese cities and even had a study abroad
experience in the Netherlands. But I al-
ways seemed to have no home to which I
might return. China’s rapid, brutal urbani-
zation destroyed all the architectural land-
scapes of my childhood; the apartments I
lived in as a child were long gone; the old
buildings that remain are now ruins of bro-
ken walls.
Because of Tuanian geography, how-
ever, I can open my mind to the landscape
in the ruins. As I walk among them, the
fragments of the past remain in place, pre-
senting themselves to me, replacing the
city life of the present. As I touch each
public building and residential building in
the ruins, the coarseness of my skin imme-
diately evokes memories of my early child-
hood.
Although the cold, crumbling stones do
not bring me into direct contact with the
past, they act as a medium for memory re-
pair, creating a facilitative space. I experi-
ence multiple spatial and temporal orders:
the real fragments, the geographical im-
agery of ruins, and the renewed architec-
ture together produce a complex relation-
ship between present and past.
Overlapping this spatial and temporal
order are the themes of my psychological
geography: depth and surface, hidden and
revealed meanings, latent and manifest
content. I began to visit, describe, and per-
ceive the ruined landscapes of every city I
have visited through more phenomenolog-
ical and psycho-geographical methods, in-
cluding drifting, participatory observation,
tracking photography and poetry writing,
especially for the old, abandoned neigh-
borhoods that preserved the architectural
landscape of the 1980s.
The ruins create my psychological geog-
raphy: the sense of the ruins as an archive
of the past integrates my memory, allowing
the self to have a continuous, temporal
vein, where time is layered in the soil ra-
ther than discarded on the horizon. In the
structure of my mind, the ruins are not
erased with the accumulation of new expe-
riences but pushed deeper into the ground,
strengthening the relationship between self
and place, becoming a fossil of time. The
ruins disturb the notion of linear time and
space: the ruins emerge from spatial and
temporal dislocation and enter my life-
world through the wounds of the city.
At the same time, the creativity of
memory bursts forth in the ruins and in all
the past that provides a passage for my
journey into the ruins. The passage of life
and the crystallization of silent existence
become frozen fragments as I delve into
the ruins: a broken window of a residential
building crashes through a moment of my
childhood. I grab a fence and see the train
below, imagining a world far away. With
this crystallization, the ruins converge into
a separate, safe field of memory. I feel
warmth in the associative environment of
my childhood memories and the sheltered
feeling of inhabiting the world. I find my
geographical counterpart in the bare ruins
of the old neighborhood.
This counterpart soothes me by reinforc-
ing memories already existing, albeit po-
tentially. The presence of my childhood
home as a subconscious archetype means
that I can find an identity with each new
encounter with the old buildings. By expe-
riencing the pathway from germination to
extinction, the ruins dramatically reenact
the epochal structure of my life's journey:
from modernity's intervention in the tradi-
tional settlement, to its successive set-
backs, to its gradually dying spatial forms.
I have seen the relationship between mo-
dernity and urbanization give way to disin-
tegration, decay, and erosion. The final
stage of the memory movement is a kind of
rebirth: the ruins, as a mapping of a former
home, end up stubbornly existing as a land-
scape of death, illuminating the self as I ap-
proach rootlessness and homelessness. Ul-
timately, in the process of internalizing the
landscape of ruins, I feel the potential land-
scape of mind that ruins create for me, the
motivational mechanism that helps me re-
alize my self-integrity.
My personal nostalgia for ruins is related
to Tuan's topophilia for the desert, both ex-
periences trying to cure a certain anxiety of
modernity. The decaying, desolate aesthet-
ics of the desert or ruins suggest that the
process of desolation and decay is a decon-
struction of the illusion of rationality—that
one might inhabit the place of desolation or
ruins, whereby the anxiety of modernity
dissipates. Although only briefly, space
and time remain misaligned, and one en-
counters a temporary relief from Martin
Heidegger’s homelessness. The journey of
memory into the ruins is like a dream, try-
ing to capture images and meanings no
longer existing in the present.
Psychological geography becomes a
way to understand the dreamlike, spatial
qualities of the ruins: its scenes and associ-
ations, its juxtapositions and simultanei-
ties, the compatibility between past and
present. Walking through the ruins allows
a combination of temporal and spatial frag-
ments, pieced together, given a sequence
and narrative by the journey itself. The ex-
perience alters time and space so that nei-
ther is its original self but has the potential
to create the integrity of the self in the
place of the mind. My ruin experiences are
surprising encounters between self and
world, like Tuan’s geographical encounter
one morning waking up, young and vi-
brant, in a desert called Death Valley.
A
lthough Tuan said goodbye to the
world this August, he revealed
with astonishing grace the ambi-
guity and contradiction of the human expe-
rience of “dwelling-in-the-world” and the
inseparability of self, place, and world.
Tuan opened himself to the world and used
his individual place experience to travel
through the wormhole of life and light up
the landscape of the mind. If the fire of life
experience were left behind, I would feel
that all the theoretical interpretations of hu-
manistic geography were just empty shells,
leaving only ashes.
Tuanian geography can be entered in
two ways. On one hand, Tuan’s descriptive
psychological geography wonderfully
weaves together materials and artworks
from the various humanities to interpret the
psychic experience of all human beings in-
habiting the earth. On the other hand,
Tuan’s geo-poetics uses his own narrative
of experience to illuminate the poles of ge-
ographical experience and to navigate be-
tween them with the fire of life, forming a
unique stream-of-consciousness style of
geographical prose poetry.
15
Inspired by Tuan's Coming Home to
China (2007), I would like to express my
sorrow and high respect for Yi-Fi Tuan, in
a poem.
Here, no need to answer who I am
The sublime vastness romanticized in the
heart
Sadness in spring, new beginnings or
abandoned pets?
Life in death, death in life, fire in the tomb
Water in the womb or mere man?
With all the world, trying to make a gift of
sentiment
Casting the drifting bottle to attachment
and longing
That invisible self, silenced for fear
You can finally close the gaze of escape
Into a place of complete disarming
You're home, in this millennium of divinity
References
Tuan, Y.-F. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of
Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and
Values. NY: Columbia Univ. Press.
———. 1977. Space and Place: The Per-
spective of Experience. Minneapolis: Univ.
of Minnesota Press.
———. 1979. Landscapes of Fear. NY:
Pantheon.
———. 1982. Segmented Worlds and Self.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
———. 1989. Morality and Imagination:
Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
———. 1996. Cosmos and Hearth. Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
———. 1998. Escapism. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press.
———. 1999. Who Am I? An Autobiog-
raphy of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit. Madi-
son: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
———. 2002. Dear Colleague: Common
and Uncommon Observations. Minneap-
olis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
———. 2004. Place, Art, and Self. Santa
Fe, NM: Center for American Places.
———. 2007. Coming Home to China.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
———. 2008. Human Goodness. Madi-
son: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
———. 2012. Humanist Geography.
Staunton VA: G. F. Thompson Publishing.
———. 2013. Romantic Geography: In
Search of the Sublime Landscape. Madi-
son: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
———. 2015. The Last Launch: Messages
in the Bottle. Staunton: G. F. Thompson
Publishing.
“Environment” and “World”
Yi-Fu Tuan
T
This excerpt was originally published in The Professional Geographer, Vol. 17, No. 5, September 1965, pp. 6–8.
he words “environment” and
“world” are part of the basic vo-
cabulary of geographical dis-
course. Their shades of meaning
and, in particular, the dialectical relation of
the underlying concepts have not always
been explicitly recognized by geographers,
although they have been so recognized by
certain philosophers and theologians. It is
the aim of this note to distinguish the
meaning of these two words and to adum-
brate the philosophical implication of the
distinction ….
[The] basic difference in meaning [of
these two words] is recognized by the fact
that, when we speak of “environment,” we
tend to assume a “hard” scientific pose,
whereas when we speak of “world,” we
speak as humanists. The dialectical rela-
tion of these two words has not been sys-
tematically explored …, although it is a
theme in the system of philosophical theo-
logians like Josef Pieper and Paul Tillich.
To Pieper, a “world” is a field of relations
(Pieper 1963, p. 84). Only a being capable
of having relations, only a being of whom
“inner” as well as “outer” may be predi-
cated has a world ….
Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1957,
pp. 69-72) takes a similar view, arguing
that the basic structure of finite being is the
polarity of self and world. Only human be-
ings, however, have a completely centered
self and structured universe to which they
belong and at which they are able to look
at the same time. The human being’s deter-
mining center is liable to suffer disintegra-
tion. To the degree in which this happens,
his or her world also disintegrates. Things
no longer speak with humans; they act on
them. Humans become limited selves, in
dependence on a limited environment.
They have lost their world; they have only
their environment ….
Besides philosophical theologians like
Pieper and Tillich, philosophers with a
bent toward phenomenology also show an
interest in the concepts behind the words
“environment” and “world.” Martin
Heidegger, for instance, distinguishes be-
tween “surroundings” … and the “world.”
“Surroundings” or “environment” is for
Heidegger a mode of the world, but an in-
authentic mode which we enter through
our unselfconscious commerce with imple-
ments and things. The world, on the other
16
hand, is not a thing, nor a framework for
things. It is, as Vycinas (1961, p. 38) ex-
plains, “the realm wherein our history oc-
curs, wherein we encounter things and en-
counter ourselves. A stone … is a world-
less being because it lacks openness (it is
statically enclosed in itself). Only a being
which stands to the openness of Being, has
a world.”
References
Pieper, J., 1963. The Philosophical Act. In
Leisure the Basis of Culture. Mentor-
Omega.
Tillich, P., 1957. Systematic Theology,
Vol. 2. London.
Vycinas, V., 1961. Earth and Gods: An In-
troduction to the Philosophy of Martin
Heidegger. The Hague.
Public Symbols and Fields of Care
Yi-Fu Tuan
This excerpt was originally published in “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” a chapter in Progress in Geography, Vol. 6, edited
by Christopher Board, Richard J. Chorley, Peter Haggett, and David R. Stoddart (London: Edward Arnold, 1974, pp. 213–252).
Public Symbols
Public symbols create places by giving
prominence and an air of significance to lo-
calities. Monument building is a character-
istic of all high civilizations. Since the
nineteenth century, however, monument
building has declined and with it the effort
to generate foci of interest (places) that
promote local and national pride.
Most monuments of modern times com-
memorate heroes, but there are important
exceptions. St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, for
example, commemorates a pregnant period
in the city’s and nation’s history. Public
squares often display monuments and they
are also a type of “sacred area” in the sense
that they may be dedicated to heroic fig-
ures and transcend purely utilitarian ends.
Certain public buildings are also symbols:
the Houses of Parliament, Chartres Cathe-
dral, the Empire State Building ….
Monuments, artworks, buildings, and
cities are places because they can organize
space into centers of meaning …. What
happens is that a large monument like
Stonehenge carries both general and spe-
cific import: the specific import changes in
time whereas the general import remains.
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, for exam-
ple, has the general import of “heavenly
dome” and “gate” that transcends Ameri-
can history, but it also has the specific im-
port of a unique period in American his-
tory, namely the opening of the West to
settlement.
Enduring places, of which there are few
in the world, speak to humanity. Most pub-
lic symbols cannot survive the decay of
their particular cultural matrix: with the de-
parture of Britain from Egypt, the statues
of Queen Victoria no longer command
worlds but merely stand in the way of traf-
fic. In the course of time, most public sym-
bols lose their status as places and merely
clutter up space.
Fields of Care
Public symbols can be seen and known
from the outside; indeed, with monuments
there is no inside view. Fields of care, by
contrast, carry few signs that declare their
nature; they can be known in essence only
from within. Human beings establish fields
of care, networks of interpersonal concern
in a physical setting.
From the viewpoint that they are places,
two questions arise: One is, to what degree
is the field of care emotionally tied to the
physical setting? The other is, are the peo-
ple aware of the identity and limit of their
world? The field of care is indubitably also
a place if the people are emotionally bound
17
to their material environment, and if, fur-
ther, they are conscious of its identity and
spatial limits ….
Unlike public symbols, fields of care
lack visual identity. Outsiders find it diffi-
cult to recognize and delimit, for example,
neighborhoods that are a type of the field
of care. Planners may believe an area to be
a neighborhood, and label it as such on the
ground that it is the same kind of physical
environment and people come from a sim-
ilar socio-economic class, only to discover
that the local residents do not recognize the
area as a neighborhood: the parts within
which they identify may be much smaller,
for instance, a single street or intersection.
Moreover, though residents of an area
may have a strong sense of place, this sense
is not necessarily self-conscious. Aware-
ness is not self-awareness. Total immer-
sion in an environment means to open
one’s pores, as it were, to all its qualities,
but it also means ignorance of the fact that
one’s place as a whole has a personality
distinct from that of all other places (pp.
237-244).
Geopiety
Yi-Fu Tuan
This excerpt was originally published in “Geopiety: A Theme in Man’s Attachment to Nature and to Place,” Chapter 1 in Geographies
of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirkland Wright, edited by David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 11–39).
P
iety is a word no longer normally
used in discourse concerning rela-
tions among [humans] or between
[humans] and nature. The term is
rapidly becoming obsolete, though some of
the ideas and feelings behind it are still
meaningful; it can be argued that people
would live more in harmony with nature
could the sentiment be restored.
Piety is a feeling and an ethos character-
istic of closed systems: parents give birth
to and succor their offspring, who in turn
honor their parents and care for them in
their old age; nature nurtures [humans] and
[humans] owe it reverence. The ecological
doctrine that we should return to nature
what we have extracted and the land ethos
of a conservationist like Aldo Leopold are
modern expressions of geopiety. Ideals of
reciprocity and caring, of gratitude and re-
spect, are not quite dead, but they have lost
urgency since [people] learned to control
the present and future.
Piety is the compassionate urge to pro-
tect the fragile beauty and goodness of life
against its enemies, not the least of which
is time. Hence, care for old people as well
as old buildings and the preservation of the
past are acts of piety. Patriotism is geopi-
ety; remove its exogenous imperial cloak,
and patriotism is compassion for the vul-
nerability of one’s native soil. Roman pat-
riotism was eloquent less in its pride of em-
pire than when, in the third century before
Christ, the Carthaginian threat aroused in
the Romans a jealous love of their world.
The British Empire was too large and ab-
stract an entity to be the object of genuine
affection and piety. England is more em-
braceable: England is this “happy breed of
men,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II envis-
aged it, “this little world,” “this blessed
plot,” guarded by the silver sea “against the
envy of less happier lands” ….
Piety toward one’s kin and native land is
a commendable sentiment; but it has an un-
generous side—exclusiveness and intoler-
ance. Those who do not belong are beyond
the law; foreigners and strangers, with their
unassimilable ways, are viewed with sus-
picion and contempt ….
The form of geopiety called patriotism is
easily distorted by abstractions. From an
attachment to place based on intimate
knowledge and memories, it is a short step
to pride of empire or national state that is
no part of one’s direct experience. Pride of
mighty empire (Rome or the thousand-year
Reich) takes the place of compassion for
one’s native city, which is vulnerable to
enemies ….
P ractice often falls far short of the
ideal, and geopiety is no exception.
But defects in geo-pious practice are
human weaknesses and not inherent in the
sentiment. The self-regarding quid pro quo
attitude of the Romans toward their nature
divinities was at odds with their own high
ideal of pietas. Generosity that closes the
circle need not be a mere matter of do ut
des (I give so that you will give), a frequent
formula in Roman prayers.
Likewise, it is unnecessary for modern
conservationists to argue their case solely
on the ground of enlightened selfishness.
18
Virtue can be its own reward, and intense
loyalty to one’s homeland does not neces-
sarily lead to bigotry. The groups could
mourn the Trojan Hector with Homer and
participate with Aeschylus in the agony of
the Persians whom they had just defeated.
If the study of geopiety has any ethical
lessons for us, they may well be these: (1)
the fragility of goodness; (2) piety consid-
ered as reciprocity applies to relations be-
tween [humans] and nature as well as be-
tween [humans]; (3) piety toward a people
and place can lead to intolerance and nar-
row pride, unless we remember that piety
is also compassion.
Compassion for our native soil does not
preclude love for other lands. Compassion
is for the frail and the circumscribed. It is
incompatible with pride of empire, yet it
does not conflict with our love of the earth
itself, for the whole earth seen from a suf-
ficient height is our native soil and only
home—it is that “precious stone set in the
silver sea,” a fertile speck floating in the
ocean of space (pp. 33–36).
Apartness, Wholeness, and Completion
Yi-Fu Tuan
These excerpts were originally published in Religion: From Place to Placelessness—Text by Yi-Fu Tuan; Photographs and Essays by
Martha A. Strawn. Chicago: Center for American Places, 2009.

Apartness it” (Deuteronomy 20: 5). Several

biblical passages urge us not to
Religion is typically concerned with
put our hands to the plow and
the “sacred.” But what is sacred?
then turn back.
What does it mean? The word’s et-
These ideas apply to the city
ymology sheds some light. “Sacred”
and wilderness as types of sacred
is from the Latin sacer, which car-
space. A city that symbolized cos-
ries the general sense of restriction,
mic order also projected an image
but whose specific meaning is an
of wholeness and completeness.
area that stands apart and has lim-
The principal components of an
ited access, because it caters to the
ancient city—walls, streets, and
gods. The Hebrew root of k-d-sh,
important buildings—might take
which is usually translated as
only a year or so to construct. By
“holy,” is also based on the idea of
building rapidly with an army of
separation. A peculiar feeling of
workmen, a ruler could believe
dread marks off the holy from the
that his capital had “descended
ordinary.
from heaven” complete. In con-
Ronald Knox, in his version of the
trast, wild nature beyond the
Old Testament, chooses to empha-
walls looked unkempt, unfin-
size this idea of separation in the
ished.
meaning of k-d-sh. Thus, the stirring
Our age has reversed these per-
lines from God that “… ye shall be
ceptions. To us, it is the city that
holy; for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:
looks raw and protean. Buildings
44) turn into the rather pallid: “I am
are constantly being torn down
set apart and you must be set apart
and raised again, suburbs grow
from me.” As a thing becomes
and decay, so that it is hard for an-
“holy,” it is cut off from the sur-
yone to associate “wholeness and
rounding space. A temple is a sacred
completion” with the modern me-
template. The Latin templum is de-
tropolis.
rived from the Greek templos, and
On the other hand, people see
the root term means “to cut out” ….
stability and permanence in wil-
Among the oldest of the known
derness areas …. Since the 1950s,
forms of human-made sanctuary
more and more people in the af-
was a simple enclosure of stone. It
fluent West have come to regard
outlined an area of concentrated divine
nature (idealized as wilderness) not as
power and warned profane man of the dan- Wholeness and completion something raw but as an achieved work
ger to which he would be exposed if he In addition to “separateness,” The word complete, whole, and even holy (p. 20).
were to enter without undergoing purifica- “sacred” connotes the whole and the com-
tory rites. plete. Everything presented at the temple,
City walls were enclosures of a larger including people, must show physical per- Photograph: A “house of spirit” (San Pra
scale, and what they enclosed was a place fection. Sacrificial animals should be with- Pum) outside a home in Thailand (see an-
occupied by both humans and their deities. out blemish. A priest, according to Leviti- other image on p. 1). Inhabiting these
Walls protected against human enemies cus, cannot be a mutilated being; he must miniature houses, kindly spirits protect
but also demons and other forces of chaos. be a whole or holy man. dwellers and keep them safe from outside
During a siege or epidemic, the whole pop- In action or work, wholeness implies harmful forces. Photograph by photogra-
ulation—people and effigies of the gods— that any task, once begun, must not be left pher Martha A. Strawn and included as
might gather and parade around city walls unfinished: “… What man is there that hath one of several in Tuan’s Religion: From
for the purpose of strengthening their built a new house, and hath not dedicated Place to Placelessness; photograph, p.
magico-religious potency (pp. 16–17). it? Let him go and return to his house, lest 133.
he die in battle and another man dedicate

19
The Changing Qualities of Nature Encounters
Taking a Walk Around the Lake at Lunchtime—2
Stephen Wood
Wood is an independent researcher in phenomenology and the environment. He has a PhD in systematic zoology from the Univer-
sity of Cambridge and has held fellowships in the Theoretical Physics Research Unit at London’s Birkbeck College; and at the
Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. The first part of this essay was published in the 2022 winter/spring issue of EAP.
s.w.wood.88@cantab.net.© 2023 Stephen Wood.
I
n this essay, I continue my examina-
tion of plant and animal encounters in
place. In a previous essay, I showed
how my experiences of the lake at my
workplace shifted from year to year (Wood
2022). I explained how, now alert to the
natural rhythms of the place, I could per-
ceive with greater depth and notice novel,
surprising elements. Here, I explore the
theme of noticing in more detail.
Phenomenological geographer David
Seamon identified noticing as one mode of
place encounter. He located the modes of
obliviousness, watching, noticing, and
heightened contact on a spectrum running
from greater separateness to greater one-
ness between human experiencers and
their surroundings (Seamon 2015, Part 4,
figure below). My focus is the shift from
obliviousness to noticing and the oneness
with nature marked by moments of height-
ened contact.
Noticing
In the first year of my association with the
lake, I noticed general features of the
place’s animal inhabitants. In the second
year, my skill at noticing sharpened. I was
able to recognize birds’ qualities I had not
realized before. I recognized mallards in
flight by their compact body and short, rap-
idly flapping wings. Jackdaws on the wing
distinguished themselves from crows. I
saw how crow flight was straighter and
more measured, while jackdaw flight was
more agitated and wheeling.
Because of their small size and busy
flight, songbirds had eluded me. Then one
day I saw a flock of small birds alight on
the olive trees next to the canteen walk-
way. A black head, with a hint of red and
the fluttering flight, all said “goldfinch.” A
few days later, I saw chaffinches at the
same spot, hopping from tree to tree. In
these different ways, I became more able
to notice different birds’ characteristic
movements.
As time went on, I noticed the act of no-
ticing itself. I remember catching myself
about to complete a tour of the lake without
having paid any attention, oblivious to
what was happening before me. I had
turned my attention inward, preoccupied. I
stopped myself but could not settle down
20
to look with any concentration. Another
time I became aware of the chatter of my
thoughts, and they stilled as a moorhen
came into focus before me. My gaze had
not shifted, but my inner state had changed,
and the bird was there where it was not a
moment ago.
In his discussion of noticing, philoso-
pher J. G. Bennett explained that it “is not
something we do. It is something that hap-
pens to us. Something happens and our
state changes. What was not there is there.
Sounds that were not there for us are there.
A person that was not there is there” (Ben-
nett 1976, p. 19). He went on to say that
from “living in a small world ... in blinkers,
in a fragment of something,” we notice and
“we see the whole, not just a little part.”
Several times in my lake encounters, I
experienced coming out of a blinkered
state of obliviousness. Sometimes I needed
to stop, to allow myself to find an inner
quiet, and then I was able to notice the ac-
tivity on the lake. Other times, a movement
brought me out of myself, such as the nod-
ding head of a moorhen making steady pro-
gress across the water or a bird’s precipi-
tate flight into the lily pads. When I tried to
see the group of ducklings that my col-
league told me about, spotting one allowed
me to notice the others, to which all I had
hitherto been oblivious. Each of these ex-
periences involved a shift from oblivious-
ness to noticing. The quality of my encoun-
ter changed in a flash. I was suddenly more
available to my surroundings.
A shared experience
While going for walks, I was able to com-
pare experiences of noticing with my wife.
On one walk along the canal in Villeneuve-
lez-Avignon, I noticed kingfishers at three
different spots along the bank. I am fond of
this bird and alert for the iridescent flash
that announces its presence. My wife, how-
ever, saw nothing, each time unable to spot
the bird as it flew away. Only I was able to
see the very same events unfolding.
On our next walk, however, I was able to
help her. I pointed out one bird flying back
and forth across the canal. My wife caught
sight of it as it flew toward us. Another
kingfisher dropped from a branch and flew
off, its short whirring wings kept close to
the surface of the water. This time my wife
saw the bird, and we followed its trajectory
together as it flew down the canal.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote
about shared experiences in his journals.
Walking with a friend, he noticed the
“[g]reen-white tufts of long bleached
grass,” observing that “I saw the inscape
freshly, as if my mind were still growing,
though with a companion, the eye and the
ear are for the most part shut and instress
cannot come” (Hopkins, 1959, p. 228) [1].
For Hopkins, a companion’s presence
was too often an obstacle to noticing. My
experience of walking with my wife points
to another possibility: The one who sees
may be able to guide the other who does
not. An appreciation of the qualities of nat-
ural objects may be communicated to a
willing apprentice.
As I followed the second kingfisher
down the canal, it alighted at a branch far-
ther on. It settled in an upright pose before
taking off again. This was the first time I
had seen a kingfisher perched upright on a
branch. I had so often seen that pose cap-
tured in birdwatching guides, but now I
had witnessed it directly. It was always a
pleasure to see the flash of a kingfisher’s
flight over the water, but to capture its typ-
ical resting pose heightened the encounter.
I felt my appreciation of the bird rounding
out, taking on a deeper level of signifi-
cance.
Bennett described this intensification as
one of the fruits of noticing, to see things
in their wholeness and fullness: “You see
that things are what they are. You see that
a tree is a tree, that the earth is the earth—
[you see each thing as] having another di-
mension or substance to it. Ordinarily we
see things flat, but when we notice, we see
them in the round” (Bennett 1976, p. 30).
A change in the quality of conscious-
ness, even a simple act of noticing—spot-
ting a moorhen or a pair of mallards on the
lake—had a calming effect on me. I felt
more content and confident, less anxious
and frustrated. If I had been worrying
about how to code a difficult algorithm or
fix a computer bug, then my thoughts be-
came clearer. I saw the next steps to take,
even if the final solution was still out of
reach. I experienced a change in the quality
of my consciousness. Before, I was turned
inward to my stresses and preoccupations.
Now I was turned outward, more at ease
with the world and my place in it.
Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch
offered a beautiful example of this change
in the quality of consciousness: “I am look-
ing out of my window in an anxious and
resentful state of mind, oblivious to my
surroundings, brooding perhaps on some
damage done to my prestige. Then sud-
denly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a mo-
ment everything is altered. The brooding
self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.
There is nothing now but kestrel. And
when I return to thinking of the other mat-
ter it seems less important” (Murdoch
2014, p. 84).
Within Bennett’s philosophy, when we
are wrapped up in ourselves and oblivious
to what is happening around us, we are liv-
ing under the laws of conditioned exist-
ence. When we notice, we pass under the
influence of higher laws, the laws of es-
sence experience. Among the laws of con-
ditioned existence is the law of accident.
Bennett explained how the law of accident
is responsible for many of the frustrations
of the conditioned mode of existence:
“Things do not go as they should. We miss
opportunities. Things happen to us that
need not happen. Things go wrong.”
21
With the law of accident, things escape
our control, they “happen without coming
from some action of our own.” Bennett
went on to explain that “When we begin to
notice, we are protected from this as one of
the fruits of noticing” (Bennett, 1976, pp.
29-30). We feel more in control. Things
make sense for us and seem at their rightful
place. Noticing brings us consolation, put-
ting our worries in a proper perspective and
giving us greater power to act [2].
Heightened contact
When I spotted a heron squatting at the
lake edge one windy day, the encounter al-
ready had a heightened quality. The bird
was familiar to me, but I had never seen it
by the lake before. On other occasions
where the species was completely new, the
encounter had a particularly intense qual-
ity. Mysteriously a bird known only from
books or films came to life before my eyes.
The unknown became known. The image
of the living being became flesh. In the
fullest experience, I knew the bird instantly
and the “coming to flesh” was strong. At
other times, I encountered the new bird
with less clarity or recognized the species
with less certainty.
There were heightened encounters
mixed with uncertainty. One autumn I saw
a bird flying across the lake with a distinc-
tive yellow belly. It had a strange dipping
flight. The bird’s gestalt said “wagtail,” but
the bird was too large and its tail too long.
The yellow wagtail always gave me an
overall impression of yellow. This bird
stood out by its yellow belly but disap-
peared against the grey stones of the ex-
posed lakebed.
After that first impression, I continued to
wonder what bird I had seen. The thought
shot into my head that it was a golden ori-
ole. The bird I saw seemed about the size
of a blackbird and the oriole was, I thought,
a kind of yellow blackbird. As I researched
this possibility, there were things that did
not fit. The golden oriole is not found near
water but keeps up high in the forest can-
opy. Its black wings and bright yellow
head contrast with the softer colors of the
bird I had seen.
I turned to Richard Fitter’s Pocket Guide
to British Birds for help (Fitter 1966). He
presents birds by size (from very small to
huge) and habitat (land, waterside, or wa-
ter). This is not the traditional scientific ar-
rangement but one “which it is hoped will
prove more helpful to the beginner” (Fitter
1966, p. 10).
I searched among the waterside birds as
large as a blackbird, but no luck. I turned
to those of the next smaller size and found
a match! The grey wagtail has a yellow
belly, a grey back, and is larger than the
yellow wagtail, with a longer tail and a
more dipping flight (Fitter 1966, pp. 127-
128). The beginner-friendly layout of Fit-
ter’s book guided me from first impression
to plausible identification.
Walking back from work one day, I no-
ticed a small bird of prey by the side of the
motorway. The overall impression was
grey. It could not be a kestrel, as the bird
lacked the clear chestnut markings. Its
head was small and round, and its wings
very short and sharp. Following Fitter
(1966, pp. 89–90), I surmised that the bird
was likely a hobby. I was unsure of the
identification however, not being able to
bring my recollection into sharp focus.
Maybe I imagined those scythe-shaped
wings after reading elsewhere about the
hobby’s defining trait. A heightened en-
counter was on offer, but my knowledge of
birds of prey was inadequate for me to
fully engage.
The confidence of my identification of
the grey wagtail and the hobby followed
how strongly I captured the bird’s charac-
ter. Was that initial impression reliable?
Was I simply projecting what I hoped to
see? Certain commentators (MacDonald
2002; Ellis 2011) underline the risk of this
kind of wishful thinking. The birdwatcher
may be tempted into a hasty identification
and become distracted from the more pro-
ductive study of field marks.
In my case, I was wishfully thinking that
the yellow-bellied bird was a golden oriole.
I had seen the bird in books, had a liking
for the bird’s name, but only the vaguest
idea of what an oriole was. My first im-
pression of the bird in the field was truer,
coming before discursive thought. In the
impression “wagtail,” I glimpsed some-
thing of the “character rather than charac-
teristics, the tout ensemble of the subject”
(Coward 1922, p. 141).
Instant recognition
I was filled with amazement on those rare
occasions where I saw a new bird for the
first time and knew instantly what it was.
There was no doubt, no need to look the
bird up in an identification guide. In a
flash, the bird was there in all its life and
wholeness. I was present, feeling confident
and alert. I had the necessary background
knowledge and desire to see. My whole be-
ing was ready to meet the bird.
That oneness with nature, hinted at in
other heightened encounters, was there.
How was I sure in that instant? “Shape,
size, manner of flight, or maybe note, is the
reply. Yes, but there is something more;
something definite yet indefinable, some-
thing which instantly registers identity in
the brain, though how or what is seen re-
mains unspecified. It is its jizz” (Coward,
1922, p. 142). Jizz is the unique quality or
character of a living being that allows an
identification in a flash of insight.
On three occasions I caught the jizz of a
new bird and instantly recognized it. Once,
walking back home from the center of Avi-
gnon, I heard a strange cry from far over-
head. I looked up to see a flock high in the
sky and knew right away that the long-
necked, white-bodied birds with broad
black wings were migrating storks. The
Rhône valley is an established migration
route for storks, and their passage that day
was recorded by local radio. Until then, I
had only seen storks in a wildlife film fea-
turing the so-called “stork villages” in Ger-
many, where they nest in the chimneys of
people’s houses. In that moment of recog-
nition, storks suddenly became much more
real for me.
Another vivid recollection is my first
time seeing a kingfisher. I had returned
home to Bathampton in the west of Eng-
land and taken the habit of early morning
walks. I ambled down the hill from the vil-
lage to the canal, over a bridge, and along
to the River Avon. I stopped at a lovely
spot by an old toll bridge where the river
formed gentle cascades over the rocks.
I stood there feeling happy to be up so
early before most people were about. And
there it was: a flash of sapphire across the
water. Ah! I remembered those words from
Fitter’s Book of British Birds that I had de-
voured when I was a boy: “A flash of sap-
phire is all that is needed to identify the
kingfisher as it streaks downstream or bel-
lyflops to catch a minnow” (Fitter 1974, p.
178). Had his evocative words allowed me
to see? Now they took shape before my
eyes, and I knew instinctively that I had
seen my very first kingfisher. I felt a
greater sense of intimacy than with the
storks, an even more heightened contact, as
22
the bird was close to me, not in the distant
sky above. I felt a greater affinity for the
bird, inspired by Fitter’s poetic words that
had stayed with me over the years.
Chance may have brought me my first
kingfisher, but design brought me my first
hoopoe. I had wanted to see a hoopoe ever
since reading Fitter’s Pocket Guide to Brit-
ish Birds. The hoopoe is overall orange-
brown and black on its distinctive crest.
With black-and-white stripes on its
rounded wings and its curious manner of
flight, the hoopoe resembles “a huge,
rounded-winged black and white butterfly
or moth” (Fitter 1966, p. 87). These strik-
ing words stayed with me and inspired a
love for the bird, as well as a strong desire
to see the bird myself. Having moved to
Avignon in April, hoopoes were already
arriving from Africa and would stay to
raise their young until August (Collectif
LPO 2010, p. 50). I was determined to take
a hoopoe spotting trip before they flew
south again.
For her birthday in May, I surprised my
wife with a stay in a guest house near Apt,
in the beautiful Luberon countryside, about
40 miles from Avignon. The occasion pro-
duced feelings of contentment and open-
ness to the unexpected. Returning from an
outing, my wife and I made our way back
through the town. Many routes were
blocked as Apt was celebrating its annual
festival. We were diverted to a road that
climbed into the surrounding forest before
descending again.
As we approached the forest edge, I
caught the strange flight of an orange-
tinted bird, with curved bill and rounded
black-and-white barred wings. The road
turned, I lost sight of the bird, but I knew I
had encountered a hoopoe. When we lost
our way and found ourselves in the wooded
hills again, a hoopoe again flew across the
road in front of us! I had seen at last, not
once but twice, my “huge black-and-white
butterfly or moth.”
Notes
1. Inscape is the inner quality of a natural
object or living thing, and instress is the
expressive power that evokes the inscape
in the observer (Hopkins 1953, pp. xx–
xxi).
2. For more detail on the laws of the dif-
ferent worlds, see Bennett 1978, Chaps. 5-
8) and Seamon 2020.
References
Bennett, J. G. 1976. Noticing. Sherborne,
UK: Coombe Springs Press.
Bennett, J. G. 1978. Deeper Man. London:
Turnstone Books.
Collectif Ligue pour la Protection des
Oiseaux (LPO) 2010. Vaucluse Nature.
Brantes: Editions de Toulourenc.
Coward, T. A. 1922. Bird Haunts and Na-
ture Memories. London: Warne.
Ellis, R. 2011. Jizz and the joy of pattern
recognition. Social Studies of Science
41(6): 769–90.
Fitter, R. S. R. (ed.) 1974. Book of British
Birds. London: Drive Publications.
Fitter, R. S. R. 1966. Collins Pocket Guide
to British Birds. London: Collins.
Hopkins, G. M. 1953. Poetry and Prose.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hopkins, G. M. 1959. The Journals and
Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press.
Macdonald, H. 2002. “What makes you a
scientist is the way you look at things,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Sci-
ence Part C: Studies in History and Philos-
ophy of Biological and Biomedical Sci-
ences 33 (1): 53–77.
Murdoch, I. 2014. The Sovereignty of
Good. London: Routledge.
23
Seamon, D. 2015. A Geography of the Life-
world. London: Routledge.
Seamon, D. 2020. Understanding the Eso-
teric through Progressive Awareness: The
Case of Gurdjieff’s Law of Three as Elab-
orated by J.G. Bennett’s Six Triads. Aries
20 (1): 81–107
Wood, S. 2022. Intertwining with Nature:
Taking a Walk around the Lake at
Lunchtime—1, Environmental & Archi-
tectural Phenomenology, 33(1): 16–18.
Three Alaskans Walk into a Bear
Travel Vignettes from an Amateur Phenomenologist
Jenny Quillien
Quillien’s abiding interest in “place studies” led her to phenomenology, space syntax, and the work of Christopher Alexander. She
is currently on the board of the Sustasis Foundation and shares her time between Amsterdam and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author of
numerous articles, her books include Clever Digs: How Workspaces Enable Thought (2011); and Delight’s Muse: On Christopher
Alexander’s Nature of Order (2010. jennyquillien94@gmail.com. © 2023 Jenny Quillien. Image captions, p. 31.
E
ncounters with place, to be genu-
ine, require a willingness to
shake off our human tendencies
to sleepwalk through our days:
we must hold ourselves alert and porous to
unfolding unscripted moments of contact.
Vulnerability enters the mix. We risk not
only being thrown off course by what is
foreign. We risk self-discovery and even
transformation.
And should we have the audacity—as I
do here—to attempt communication of
such experiences, we’re confined to words,
those ill-fitting boxes half the size of what-
ever diaphanous transient sensations we
want to convey. But if try we must, the va-
garies of travel to distant lands are particu-
larly propitious. Herewith, seven lived ex-
periences from my forays into Alaska.
An ALCAN gas station
I must start with the Alcan Highway, the
famous WWII engineering feat that laid a
road across a huge expanse of rural Can-
ada, affording land travel between Alaska
and the Lower 48. I start with the Alcan not
out of logic—because it is the overland en-
trance to Alaska—but because it is where I
left my heart.
People live along this road with what
poet David Whyte calls “economy of pres-
ence.” To explain what he means, Whyte
speaks of an old sheep dog, too used up to
be frolicking for no reason and with just
one good eye. That dog, however, knows
her sheep and her hills and can, keeping her
good eye always to best advantage, move
those sheep competently home. Whyte also
uses the example of a Welsh villager
known for building dry rock walls, his eye
gazing calmly over stones—assessing
shape, size, and number of needed chisel
blows—to competently and patiently build
beauty with minimum effort and waste.
The people of this rugged and empty Ca-
nadian landscape embody that quality.
Houses and household objects are fre-
quently homemade. The cups won’t match
nor will the chairs around a table. But what
you need will be there and what you don’t
need won’t. All just matter of fact. The
minimalism won’t be arty but it gives a
spaciousness—no clutter to impede your
physical or mental movements. The spa-
ciousness gives a graciousness, even a sort
of truth. An au naturel prevails along the
road. Recall the eye of Degas. He didn’t
paint the ballerina posed on stage but pre-
ferred her unawares, just tying her slippers
or gazing out a window lost in thought. It’s
a bit like that. There’s not much posing
here—it’s all au naturel and, like the
Welsh stone mason, imbued with a certain
unaffected competence.
The military chose to run a long section
of the highway along a fault line where two
plates crush and grind. A long skinny, sil-
ver lake traces the divide; quakes and trem-
ors frequently shake the soil; and multiple
hot springs bring up water from the depths.
The road is cut into the rock, no shoulders,
few points where habitation would make
any sense.
I thought of Heidegger’s term “gather-
ing.” What would Heidegger have done
with the Double G, a trucker’s stop here at
this finger of a lake, with its loose chore-
ography of travelers, coffeepot, cook a.k.a.
owner, available supplies of local meat,
more distant markets for flour and salt. The
truckers know their meal will be hearty;
they look forward to it: they are the regu-
lars. Then there are the irregulars: the drop-
ins, the cook’s father, and oddball neigh-
bors from down the way. I wondered if
there was some magic in the spatial ar-
rangement of that tiny café—maybe the
placement of the different sized tables or
the mismatched chairs—which gave rise to
24
some sort of coded alchemy of invitation
and acceptance.
A “regula”’ customer orders two fried
eggs. The cook brings him three, “Here’s
them eggs. The third one was already
cracked.” The only available code for I
love you. The solo driver of a white RV
plastered with national park and museum
stickers bends everyone’s ears with stories
of all the places he has been and his son
back in New Jersey. Everybody hears
Hank Williams, I’m so lonely I could die.
The Double G gas station, which really
isn’t much to look at, had four rooms for
rent in a small building in the back. Had I
been traveling alone, I would have stayed
on. There were things to learn here. How
to stay attuned to the mountains and their
growling. How to combine movement and
stasis like overlapping moiré patterns.
How to take part in the gas station place
ballet. How to handle growth and repair.
I did learn a bit on this last question one
afternoon when I entered the café during an
afternoon lull and found the cook a.k.a.
owner counting the cash in the till while
considering a list of building supplies. He
paid me no mind and muttered his deep
philosophy, “Take care of your milk cow,
and your milk cow will take care of you.”
The Double G had all the enchantment
of a caravanserai—it only took switching
out camels for diesel trucks, sand for pot-
holes, and flowing desert robes for blue
jeans and plaid flannel shirts. The place
was all about the road. It gathered its very
existence from the dusty greasy needs of
the road. The road had birthed it.
As I traveled in Alaska proper, I never
saw this again: not the magic, not the econ-
omy of presence, not the truth. It became
my measuring stick of some sort of good-
ness.
Jesus and the Grizzly Bear
There are two decidedly different Alaskas.
One—let’s call it the road-based Alaska—
with 600,000 inhabitants (that’s eighty-
five percent of the total population), con-
sists of the greater Anchorage/Palmer area
and Fairbanks. I gave it instant disesteem.
Perception is a participatory event. Where
another pair of eyes might see conven-
ience, mine saw a cancerous cement kudzu
vine.
Fairbanks wins the Gertrude Stein award
for There is no there, there. Greater An-
chorage, as an urban fabric, sorely disap-
points: an ordinary road network connect-
ing malls of numbing banality, lining up
standard Americana big-box chain stores
of numbing banality, filled with standard
stuff of numbing banality. Housing is by
subdivisions of mostly of nondescript sin-
gle-family ranch-style houses.
I could only come up with two observa-
tions indicating a specificity of townscape.
One concerns the cleavage of inside and
outside. In Italy or France, lingering on a
balcony with a glass of wine seems self-
evident. In Ireland, the sharp delineation
between inside and outside, the absence of
terraces, patios, balconies, seems self-evi-
dent given the chilly, rainy climate. But
Alaska? All these homes, up or downscale,
have extensive porches and outdoor ar-
eas—in constant use regardless of
weather—which display family toys: bar-
becue pit, bikes, camping chairs, family
RV, extra car, boats, kayaks, ATV ma-
chines, snowmachines. The good life here
is a visceral one—the feel of gunning a
snowmachine on ice, the weight of a hali-
but on the line, the taste of cold beer down
the gullet. Alaska as land-as-playground.
The second observation concerns
churches. In space syntax and wayfinding,
churches are often noted for orientation
because, historically anyway, they have
been mindfully and prominently sited. Not
here. Anchorage churches consist of a
parking lot and a could-be-anything build-
ing just somewhere along a street. Some
sort of small signage indicates denomina-
tion.
I did, however, enter what felt like a
“cathedral,” four times the size of any or-
dinary church and sited as the anchor at
the heart of commerce. I’m talking about
Bass Pro. This is no wimpy sporting goods

25
store selling fleece jackets and promoting
goody-goody values of healthy exercise.
This is the grand depot of serious equip-
ment, the kind of gear that will save your
sorry butt when you are out in the woods.
Let me make my case in both word and
image. A worthy entrance with brass ant-
lers for doorknobs yields a view on the al-
tar: a two-story façade of waterfall and
rock cliff graced with bighorn sheep with
judging stare. The high vaulted ceiling dis-
plays celestial geese; the guns shine as
bright extensions of man’s natural prow-
ess. The narratives speak more clearly than
any stained-glass figures of biblical tales: a
man was born to be a man in an I/It world.
How far-fetched is it to consider Bass
Pro a wellspring of cosmology? Is there a
relationship between cosmology and land-
scape? Yes, I think so. It makes sense to
me that the woodlands of Scandinavia and
Britain would birth indigenous religions
based on spirited elves and trolls. It makes
sense to me that monotheism would come
howling out of the desert and that Jesus, as
a shepherd, would reach temperate agricul-
tural Europe and feel the need to switch
metaphors, don a suit, become a
bookkeeper, tally up sins and tithes.
Alaska? Ordinary Christianity doesn’t fit
here. There’s no way for Yahweh either. A
tidy Zen Buddhist black cushion for medi-
tation? Don’t think so. The land is too big.
Way too big. Way, way too big. The tat-
tered remains of First Nation religions?
No—too tattered. Here—I dare to conjec-
ture—that, while little children snuggle
with teddy bears to feel safe, it is the taxi-
dermist who performs the priestly duties
for the adult Alaskan’s need for reassur-
ance. In all Alaskan public places, airports,
administrative offices, hospitals, schools,
hotels, and, of course, Bass Pro, a defeated
but worthy opponent stands tall in arrested
attack. The stuffed bear makes the iconic
declaration: You are in Alaska now, damn
it. Our tribe. Our values.
Small Settlements
The other Alaska—the roadless remote
Alaska—hosts a meager population and,
for me, moments of beauty so intense and
so ineffable that I question my own percep-
tions and mind. Here, small human habitats
are places, deeply situated, utterly differ-
ent one from other in history, appearance,
vibes, mood, ways of making a living, and
ways of getting along. The buildings in
these communities won’t ever be much to
26
write home about, but the towns will be
sited well, following the natural curves of
a harbor or river valley. The absence of
heavy machinery means that people leave
the land alone and adapt their built forms
to it, a few vehicles will be a late after-
thought of limited utility so walking and a
comfortable density reign.
Each of these towns has unfolded itself
forward from its own bootstraps, a unique-
ness moving through time. A visit to any of
them prompts reflection on what dynamic
calculus between population size, eco-
nomic base, diversity, connectivity, and in-
tegration could account for a remote settle-
ment’s evolution, personality, and contin-
ued vitality or decline.
A tangible depth also marks these towns
as different from the shallowness of road-
based Alaskan sprawl. Take, for example,
the sedimentary layers left by repeated en-
deavors and failures in the little town of
Cordova (population 2000) on Prince Wil-
liam Sound. Underneath are Alaskan na-
tive place names and faces (sometimes just
lingering traces in the shadow of a smile),
then the boastful proclamations of Spanish
explorers, a Russian church, fur trappers,
depletion of sea mammals, American com-
mercial fishing and canneries, depletion of
fish, discovery of copper, a Rip-
ley’s Believe It or Not insane rail-
road line from mine to port, railroad
and mine quickly abandoned, me-
diocre fishing, a colossal bronze
statue of Old Testament mood
looms over the harbor to salute the
many men lost at sea, Valdez oil
spill, an Exxon financed make-
amends institute for ocean studies,
abandoned cannery remodeled as a
lodge for tourist fishing.
Or take Kodiak (population
5000), which felt to me so dark, so
forsaken, so silent. I had to dig around for
clues. The 1964 earthquake and tsunami
swallowed half the town, every boat, and
every man on every boat. All families am-
putated. I asked to fly on a scheduled run
to a native Aleut village and was refused
service by the pilot. “The weather is iffy,
not sure I could get you back out. You don’t
know anybody. You won’t be welcome.
Lots of drinking at night. I won’t take you.”
A lovely Aleut man getting on in years did
talk to me. “Our villages are small now.
Run by the old women. Their main job is to
prevent marriages between kids who are
too close.”
The panhandle island town of Sitka
(8000 inhabitants) sits on a small shelf of
land approachable from the high seas—
hence its long history going back to Rus-
sian fur trade and Tlingit tribes before that.
Like other remote settlements, you can’t
drive out or walk out. Ferry service and air
traffic keep Sitka alive, but it’s five hun-
dred bucks for a plane ticket to anywhere,
or nine hours on the ferry to the next port
of call. A palpable hemmed-in feeling pre-
vails, not quite flies caught in amber but,
say, a petri dish, where, like an introverted
neurotic nuclear family, folks stew in their
own juice.
In these smaller places, we can encoun-
ter a wider range of characters and walks
of life than in the city, where we tend to
find ourselves in the company of similar
kinds of people doing similar kinds of
things. I like to travel solo and to look for
conversation-friendly configurations.
What works well is a barstool in a gently
full pub. In just one evening in a Sitka bar,
I chatted with: An entrepreneur and his
wife out to buy up hotels and a yacht to
complement their California vineyards and
farmland in Illinois. The local drug dealer
who stopped by for a friendly exchange
with the entrepreneur. A commercial fish-
erman with a long ginger-colored beard
who lived on his boat in the harbor. For
sure, he had more testosterone than his
fish, but I’m less sure about his general in-
tellect. He was seeking solace through
drink after his last failed marriage. His
bride had stayed one night and then got up
and left.
A man from Nebraska up to hunt black
bear. He walked the forest, sighting any
number of bear but would only shoot the
one he thought would look really good on
his den wall. Not unlike a woman shopping
for a new dress. The operator of the local
radio station who played and commented
on classical music. A North Dakotan who,
after a long career as a schoolteacher in the
tiny bush villages of the far north, semi-re-
tired to the milder climate of Sitka and a
job at the public library. He said he
couldn’t face another winter at 45 below
and hadn’t been to the Lower 48 in years.
The Tlingit priest (but without his wife and
six children) imported from Kodiak Island
to run the Russian Orthodox Church to
which the Sitka natives have been loyal
since the 1840s.
I did not, however, run into Kevin Cost-
ner who, for the joys of fishing, owns an
island just offshore. He sometimes comes
into town wearing a hokey disguise. Town
folk just roll their eyes, play along, and
find him rather silly: it’s a family joke.
Alaska as Theme Park
Nobody comes to Alaska for the fine arts,
music, architecture, shopping, or cuisine.
Visitors come to taste the wilds. There’s
plenty of wild and a plethora of ways to
genuinely meet and greet it. Put on your
boots and hike out. Hire an outfitter. Fish.
27
I listened to the guys up for fish-
ing in Cordova—talking bait,
gear, and salmon runs. I suspect
(although they never said so) that
among the silvery fish in their
nets were silvery pieces of them-
selves that they had lost on the
subway commute into the office
and that’s what they were really
fishing for. Hunt. A moose hunt
safari will cost you fifty grand but
if you corner a hunter for a chat,
he might quietly admit that he
sometimes lets his trophy walk
on—just because it is so damn magnificent.
For many visitors, much of a first trip
gets frittered away just figuring out how
best to travel around. They may have read
Jack London or John McPhee, or, more
likely, watched Reality TV and took bets
on which contestant could stay out there
Alone the longest. They may have imag-
ined themselves camping in the woods to a
soundtrack of howling wolves, but, when
push comes to shove, most vote with
Monty Python, “I’ll have just a little bit of
peril, please.” Tourism now ranks as the
state’s third largest industry and deploys a
strangely effective magnet that pulls
greenhorns into its traps. This leads me to
contemplate authentic versus counterfeit
encounters.
I read Mathew Crawford’s Shop Craft
and Soul Craft and then his The World Be-
yond Your Head: How to Flourish in an
Age of Distraction. The main thrust of his
argument goes like this: only when we en-
gage with another (an other has a mind of
its own) we will experience our own selves
coming forth.
The other can be an old car engine that
sputters and spits, the irregularities of
French verbs, a person, or a forest. We find
ourselves coming into existence through
opposition, as it were, as we respond to
something which is not us. Crawford
points out that we don’t do this much any-
more. We don’t have to fix quirky old en-
gines or struggle with foreign ways, and, in
conversations, we hide behind our oft-re-
peated scripts. The world of marketing,
consumerism, and tourism pampers us in
non-effort.
Allow me to pursue the point. Crawford
tells us how he became dismayed with his
young daughter’s addiction to the Mickey
Mouse Show and decided to look into how
the program had evolved since his own
childhood. Compare (as a random pick) a
show from the 50s where Mickey, Donald,
and Goofy have ordered a build-your-own-
boat kit from a mail catalogue. Goofy tries
nailing down a wood plank, but the nails
pop out and the plank bonks him in the
head. Donald walks under the ladder where
Mickey is painting and finds himself with
a bright blue head. When Minnie christens
the vessel with a bottle of champagne, their
ship sinks. They all laugh from their fail-
ure. Failure.
In more recent shows, Mickey has be-
come the Master of Ceremonies of the
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. These episodes
are not about frustration but about solving
a problem. A problem is addressed by say-
ing “Oh Tootles!” which makes the Handy
Dandy machine appear which, in turn, pre-
sents a menu of four “Mouseke-tools.”
There is never an insoluble problem that
would pit one’s will against the world. The
structure of the show prevents any moment
of helplessness; the prompts from Mickey
protect the child from making a bad choice.
No bad choice? In what kind of world is
there no bad choice? What would happen
to us out in the wilds oblivious to the pos-
sibility of a bad choice?
Tourism, based on counterfeit encoun-
ters, combines passivity of the tourist, a
forged thrill, flattery, protection of the
goose who lays the golden egg (a dead
tourist is detrimental to business), and no
bad choice. Just two lived examples. A
Glacier Viewing Tour. I had poles and
crampons for my shoes so that I could walk
on the ice—but no need—on offer was a
viewing not a visiting tour. One-hundred-
twenty-five bucks by credit card or one-
hundred bucks cash. Two discarded Deuce
and-a-Half Army trucks carried us cross
country (no real risk but a tiny illusion of
thrill, as in reality TV shows) to a river
where two boats carried us (as in reality
TV shows) to the moraine where we could
walk about on a path and enjoy the pre-pre-
pared hot chocolate. Not a liability in sight.
The organizer knew nothing of geology or
glaciers—but no need—nobody asked.
The satisfied tourists took selfies with the
glacier as background.
More informative than glacier viewing
was the organizer who sat on the back of
the truck swinging his legs, quite willing to
tell his tale—a version of the old follow-
the-money story. You can, in Alaska, lease
40 acres of land for $150 a year. Pick your
parcel and set up your gig. His Glacier
Viewing Tour accommodates twelve tour-
ists in each tour group, four tours a day, a
two-month summer season. This entrepre-
neur from Michigan impressed me as a true
Alaskan and pertinent to my inquiries
about place—specifically, the question of
what endures over time and comes to de-
fine a place. The constancy of Alaska re-
sides partly in its capacity to lure the
schemer—such as our Michigander—who
is out to sidestep a life of dull drudgery by
being clever. Sometimes the schemer is
pulled forward by a rainbow, sometimes
he’s running from poverty, a past, or his
demons.
True Alaskans can also be bred. I
watched, in the small inside passage town
of Haines, a loving father pack off his only
child to a grueling stint as a helpmate on a
fishing vessel. The 13-year-old lad en-
dured conditions that would propel any
child labor lawyer into action.
The child did, however, limp home in
one piece, and in his pocket was his share
of the catch (three thousand dollars), a glint
in his eye, and plans to do it again. Rite of
passage? Instant manhood? The making of
an enculturated Alaskan unfit for life else-
where? I flashed back to the milk cow phi-
losophy of my Alcan gas station. None of
that slow-paced diligence here. The lad
was already hooked on immediate wealth
and the willingness to gamble for more.
My second example is less clear cut.
Katmai National Park is home to a popula-
tion of brown bears which, every summer,
come to the streams to feed on the salmon
runs. Webcams have been judiciously put
in place and you may, at no cost whatso-
ever, sit in your armchair at home any-
where in the world and observe the feeding
frenzy from your computer screen.
Hundreds of locations throughout
Alaska also lend themselves to such view-
ing live in situ, but if you don’t know any
better? For one thousand dollars you may
take a daytrip into Katmai Park: a small
prop plane from Anchorage flies you for
one and a half hours over an expanse of un-
inhabited scrub forest to a small airstrip
where you will be directed to a float plane
for a last leg into the park. Mandatory Bear
School (with silver pin upon graduation)
precedes your freedom to enjoy carefully
28
constructed boardwalks and viewing plat-
forms that separate you from the bears. The
place is crawling with highly trained park
rangers, some of whom are “bear techni-
cians.” The bears are numbered (409), in-
dividually identified, and some named.
The bears have become accustomed to the
(highly policed) human presence. If one
day of watching does not suffice, you may,
for an additional thousand dollars, stay for
a night in the rustic lodge.
What to make of this encounter? These
are wild animals in natural habitat doing
their natural wild-animal thing, and the
tourist pays for the privilege of supervised
watching. Akin to the modern Mickey
Mouse Show, the physical set up is con-
structed so that there is no bad choice. At
no point can the tourist be confronted by a
bear with a mind of its own. There is no
Martin Buber I/Thou encounter between
man and beast. What we have is a most in-
teresting day of I/It observations which can
be topped off with an ice cream cone and a
flight back to town.
Life Attained by Living
… The solution of the problems of life, is
life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning
and analysis, but first of all by living. For
until we have begun to live, our prudence
has no material to work on. And until we
have begun to fail, we have no way of
working out our success.
—Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
The Aleutian chain crosses the vast, frigid
waters of the North Pacific. Eons ago, the
Aleuts migrated from Siberia, down
through mainland Alaska, and then settled
the islands (sparsely) from East to West,
eking out a precarious existence. In the
1800s, Russian fur traders decimated the
populations, both animal and human. What
women they didn’t kill, they bedded so the
remaining population became creole.
Americans were not much of an im-
provement. In World War II, the popula-
tion, with no justification whatsoever, was
rounded up for internment camps so
wretched that many died. After the War
most islands were simply and permanently
left to the howling winds. A few Aleuts re-
turned to Dutch Harbor, the last outpost
used by fishing vessels and where an old
Russian Orthodox church still stands.
 Today, Dutch Harbor lists a population
of 4000, but how do they count? Most are
short-term seasonal workers: Filipino
women in one cannery, Mexican men in
the other, Samoan crews for fishing ves-
sels. American English is the lingua franca
but does not dominate. The list of ameni-
ties remains single digit: grocery, hard-
ware, liquor, bank, Western Union, barber,
immigration counseling. A finicky inter-
mittent hotspot service will sell you one gi-
gabit for twenty-five dollars. One hotel and
two bars (owned and operated by the big-
ger cannery) accommodate newly arrived
labor and seamen in transition. Dutch Har-
bor fails to be picturesque but does have
the vitality of an operation in full swing
and the sort of decency of a reliable car me-
chanic shop with well-maintained tools
and swept floor.
Men (mostly) come here, as they have
throughout Alaskan history and geogra-
phies, to seek their fortune. Thomas Mer-
ton, the Trappist Monk, came to Alaska in
1968, not to seek his fortune but to see if it
would be a place conducive to the contem-
plative life. I did not come across much in
my Alaskan travels in the way of contem-
plative living, self-reflection, or study.
Here in Dutch Harbor, however, I did
witness the playing out of Merton’s
Thoughts in Solitude: life’s problems being
addressed through living or, more pre-
cisely, through toil. Merton—no surprise
given his personal curriculum—chose the
example of Prudence as needing life’s ma-
terial to work on. Here I saw, not so much
Prudence, as Fortitude and Tolerance.
Still wet behind the ears and grinning
wide, the brand-new Samoan recruit enthu-
siastically declared to me, “Big Boy Pay
for Big Boy Jobs.” His more fortitude-sea-
soned colleague just faintly smiled at him
and then spoke of fatigue, a fatigue so deep
that when he went home on furlough with
his wad of unspent money, all he could do
was sit on the couch and stare into space.
“I can’t even turn on the TV,” he said. “I
just sit and stare.”
I found a peculiar stuck-in-fortitude, a
permanent postponement of gratification,
as if there were nothing to life but toil.
Take Bobby, 20 years in Dutch Harbor, his
wife 30 years: “We’ve already paid for an
apartment in Seattle and a house in Ha-
waii, but we’re still here. My wife at the
hotel. I’m down on the docks.” Bobby was
known on the docks as the one who set the
tone. He commented: “These American
Black guys come in with a chip on their
shoulder and a lot of racism talk. We just
say, ‘the only discrimination around here
is against slackers. See if you can pick up
that box and keep up the pace’.”
A shrug-your-shoulder tolerance of a
man’s occasional need for a primal scream
was deemed proper etiquette. At the Nor-
wegian Rat Saloon, a seaman stripped buck
naked on a dare to go skinny dipping. As
reported to me, nobody got upset. Nobody
minded. I minded since I missed it and had
obviously picked the wrong bar to do my
ethnography.
Did I find an awareness of the wild and
forlorn beauty of the empty cold Aleutian
mountains and even colder sea? Not much,
Dutch Harbor was a place to work and
make money. There were exceptions.
There was Michael, a heavy-set fellow
with tattoos on every body part that I could
see. A mongrel, Lord only knew (because
Michael didn’t) what cocktail of white,
black, and yellow blood filled his veins. He
was San Diego raised by bouncing from
one foster home to the next, a few years on
the street, a few years as a Hare Krishna,
and, finally, tossed up into Dutch Harbor.
“I’ve been here four years and I’m stay-
ing,” he said. “It’s beautiful. Summer is
beautiful. Winter is beautiful. The storms
are beautiful. I’m staying.” He’s got a Fil-
ipino girlfriend at the cannery. They can
work, save, and buy a little retirement
house near her folks. Working out his suc-
cess, he is.
The White Man’s Clock on Eskimo
Space-Time
Ethnographic fieldworkers chose between
two basic philosophies on preparation. One
has it that you should not prepare at all but
keep your mind blank lest you pollute
yourself with erroneous conclusions from
less witted travelers. The other philosophy
suggests you prepare to the hilt, read eve-
rything, lest you stupidly waste time rein-
venting an old wheel or miss out on some
critical must-see. I’ve tried both ways.
For Alaska’s extreme north, I prepared.
I read up on the old Eskimo legends and
early explorer reports. The most basic ex-
periences of life and space-time are de-
scribed as transience, transformation, and
insubstantiality. Consider this passage.
29
In a land where summer fogs blur the dis-
tinction between land and sea, where win-
ter wind and snow can produce the condi-
tion known as ‘white-out’—where land
and sky cannot be separated . . . the con-
cept of an ever-changing, amorphous
world is not surprising. The Eskimo world
was essentially smooth, without projec-
tions or sharp corners. Apparent transfor-
mations of various kinds were always oc-
curring, so the change of a man to a wolf
was no more unbelievable or inexplicable
than the merging of land and sea. If an
Eskimo were tricked by lighting condi-
tions into thinking a ground squirrel was
a grizzly bear and suddenly discovered he
was looking at the smaller animal, the
most obvious explanation was that the
bear transformed itself, probably through
magic, into a ground squirrel (Edwin
Hall, in Nick Jans’ Last Light Breaking).
My favorite read, Barry Lopez’s Arctic
Dreams, offers poetic descriptions of life
and space-time pierced with hard-nosed
explanations. Human vision, we learn, uses
the relative density of blue light scattered
in the air to judge distance, but the clear
Arctic atmosphere scatters little light, so it
is quite normal to not know whether some-
thing is 5 miles or 25 miles away. And
Lopez delighted me with Inuit vocabulary:
Quinuituq. The deep patience to wait
hours, days, weeks, for the caribou to
come through, for the wind to let up, for
ice to harden.
Kappia: the fear of unpredictable vio-
lence like a calving iceberg or polar bear
springing from nowhere.
Perlerorneq: winter insanity.
Nuannaarpoq: the extravagant pleasure in
being alive.
Art books’ glossy pages reveal an indig-
enous art in kinship with Paleolithic Las-
caux with, to our senses, strange perspec-
tives: objects float freely upside down and
sideways. It’s all about movement and be-
coming. The bear becomes the man, and
the man becomes the bear in an I/Thou
world. A small talisman of a walrus might
be carved, but the significance lies in the
act of carving. Once the stone has become
the walrus, the object itself retains no par-
ticular value.

After preparation, I’m in Kotzebue, the
administrative hub of the Inupiat Eskimo
region. Three thousand souls live here in
government housing. Subsistence hunting
and fishing remain significant in a house-
hold’s economy. A few Whites. A state
hospital, school, welfare administration,
social services, a small museum on arctic
fauna and flora, port, airport, and one hotel
for visiting civil servants and outfitters for
birding extravaganzas. The only way to
reach Kotzebue now is by air, but the spot
had been used for centuries as a trading
rendezvous, typically in early spring when
daylight and ice conditions allowed for
sled travel.
Place studies sometimes give attention
to space syntax: how axial spaces of move-
ment and transport function (or dysfunc-
tion) in holding together an urban fabric,
allowing goods and people to move along,
between, into, and out of areas of stasis.
The aerial photograph shows how
Kotzebue is laid out. White-Man-Civil-En-
gineer culture—obviously—laid down the
paths of movement (a couple of paved
roads), while the infill—the fine grain, the
flesh on the bones, so to speak—is Inupiat.
How do the two cultural approaches to
place organization compare? The white
man’s roads are used by a few utility vehi-
cles to get between airport and government
agencies. Drivers seemed tolerant of inter-
fering children, dogs, and ATV machines.
The Inupiat, for their part, have added no
pathways whatsoever. Everyone roams
freely cross country. There are no side-
walks or paths between houses. There are
no boundary markers. Graves have crosses
but no markers between burial area and liv-
ing area. No markers between one person’s
yard and the next—nothing like a fence or
a shrub. No indication of a way to a front
door: you just walk around a
building until you figure out
how to get in.
I found it curious that there
was not a single place in the
entire town to pause or rest.
Not a bench anywhere. Over-
all (so unlike the suburban
backyards of Anchorage),
the town is a big bone-
yard—broken ATVs, snow-
machine parts, oil drums,
antlers, and just whatever
might, someday, for some as-yet-unknown
purpose be cannibalized.
We’re not talking junk or trash (alt-
hough, at first glance, it looks that way).
We’re talking potential in space-time, a
material limbo. When I looked around at
how money was being spent, mobility
ranked highest—ATV and snow-
machines—the power to chase, flee, out-
maneuver, seize an opportunity.
How should I interpret my Kotzebue ex-
perience? Perhaps ideas of land, landscape,
place, change with technology. Agricul-
ture, arguably, would lead one to consider
the land as malleable, so if potatoes can be
grown in a field for food, then why not
flowers for pleasure? Since your houses
aren’t going anywhere, why not fix them
up and make pathways between them?
Maybe for the more roaming habits of
hunters and gatherers, interference with
landscape doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s
never considered. Shelters are temporary.
Human beings are but an insubstantial and
mobile figure crossing the land much like
the caribou humans pursue.
Although my own life has taken me deep
into the complexities of bilingual living,
Kotzebue invited me to further consider bi-
syntax living. In a mild form, all Alaskans,
both White and Native, learn a double syn-
tax. They all juggle the bigger fluid arcs of
seasonal light and animal migrations
alongside the mechanical units of space
and time imposed by temperate-zone no-
tions of scheduling and production. As any
traveler in Alaska, I quickly picked up on
both the bureaucratic necessity and bu-
reaucratic nonsense of imposing clocks on
this far northern terrain of midnight suns
and dark noons.
With a bit more exposure to the earth’s
heartbeat and the deep ways, say, of how
the salmon run brings on the bears, plus
30
this curious day in Kotzebue, I began to
perceive such bureaucratic nonsense as a
benign face of an egregious refusal to rec-
ognize where one is. As I stood on flat end-
less structureless tundra and then looked
across endless late spring ice floes on the
Bering Sea during a day that didn’t end, I
recalled my scuba diving precautions—
stay aware of air bubbles to remain ori-
ented to which way is up. I knew I was out
of my league—fundamentally clueless as
to the space-time syntax necessary for sur-
vival in this landscape.
Cluelessness works the other way too.
Space and time syntaxes come with all
sorts of paraphernalia: equipment, mainte-
nance, tools, education, rules, etiquette, ex-
pectations. I returned to the airfield for my
7:45 pm flight—a bureaucrat’s world,
right? The waiting room had chairs in a
row against the wall. Nobody sat that way.
Families left chairs empty and then piled
on top of each other on the floor. I stood in
line for the usual security clearance. In
front of me an Inuit Auntie (term of en-
dearment for elders) had a can of soda pop
and was told she couldn’t take it—either
throw it away or drink it. She wasn’t going
to waste it, so she held up the entire line to
enjoy “the pause that refreshes.” But then
she singlehandedly stopped cold the entire
clockwork of Standard Operating Proce-
dures when instructed to walk through the
body scanner. Tucked into her undies,
Auntie had a half bottle of hooch.
The Shaman, Isumataq, & Duende
And then Nome (population 3,500). A bru-
tal short blaze of 1900 gold-rush construc-
tion, now a remote ghost town boarded up
and falling down with remaining ghosts
boozed up and falling down. A Coast
Guard station was built nearby. The beau-
tiful able-bodied “Coastie” with a bloom to
his cheek cuts a figure of an alien-from-an-
other-epoch as he steps over the drunks. A
summer camp provides tents and shovels
for crazed amateurs who dig for gold. Even
a few boats with divers in thick wet suits
dredge the sea bottom. The sad sack bars
on Front Street (that’s all there is or ever
was on Front Street) stay open.
It's here, in Nome, that I came unglued.
In Nome, each person plays many parts
in local dramas, engaging multiplicities of
interactions with others hunkered down in
the same little spot. The warp and weft of
human relations takes on thickness, tex-
ture, and color, unlike the flatter homoge-
neity of suburbia.
I met here in Nome, far more than else-
where, people who did not go by script or
role but who spoke their more complex
truth and expected the same of me. I spent
time with a woman whom I recognized as
a kindred soul. She lived a double life, one
with children in the lower 48 and one in
Nome where she had a long-standing rela-
tionship with one of the town’s native sons
who ran the hardware store—a store as vi-
tal to this icy town as a liver to a body.
I met up with a now sober white guy,
aged 71, who had come to Nome at the age
of 17. No longer a drinking bartender, he
kept himself busy prototyping a one-room,
one-person dwelling to alleviate Nome’s
housing shortage. Our exchanges were
honest. I fell in with an Inupiat woman who
had returned home to collect the pieces of
herself, make amends to some, forgive oth-
ers, and then get on with the task of living.
We had heart-to-hearts.
The arctic Inuit from the Nome area have
their Isumataq—a person who can create
an atmosphere in which wisdom shows it-
self. All Alaskan Native cultures have their
shamans. From my New Mexican home
with its Hispanic traditions, I am more fa-
miliar with the duende, a shapeshifter if
there ever was one—a spirit or force that
can taunt you, haunt you, and sometimes
take you over, possess you.
For me, personally, I experience the du-
ende as a spirit (often female) who inhabits
situations and throws the dare, the chal-
lenge: Can you pull it off? Can you do this?
Would you walk away from life’s ultima-
tum? I felt the duende’s presence all over
Alaska. She can reward or not. Accept the
challenge, do the deed, and she may be
pleased. “I immigrated here in the late
eighties,” one man told me, “I signed a
contract for three years in Barrow. The
deal was that if you made the three years,
the company paid all your taxes. I made it
through, but most didn’t. I left with a quar-
ter of a million, bought a house free and
clear. Married. Settled down. A good life.”
The duende of Nome mostly kills. Hope-
less knots of destruction to self and kin
from drugs, alcohol, violence, and traffick-
ing (a jug of gin costs a bundle in town but
goes for ten times that in the villages and
fishing camps). Past wounds, which are
never past, continue to fester. And yet,
some, with choice, choose to stay and duke
it out, all the more alive for the struggle be-
cause, really, what are you worth if you
turn down the duende’s dare? I had, up un-
til then, remained my old self as I collected
the various strands of the Alaskan mind:
their knee-jerk libertarianism intertwined
with small community pulls together-ism;
the exhilarating thrill of domination spiced
with risk as they fly small planes over un-
inhabited expanses; their ruthless capital-
ism and extraction industries which rarely
give them pause.
I had become attuned to extra elbow
room, a live-and-let-live attitude, and skip-
the-bureaucracy-problem-solving. When
Auntie couldn’t get through the body scan-
ner, nobody got out the book of rules, no-
body yelled, nobody imposed a fine, no-
body poured the elixir down the drain.
Auntie got to take her booze back home
and was rescheduled on the next flight.
I had acquired an Alaskan ear: there is
not much art of conversation in this land of
hands-on living, nobody reads. Out of hun-
ger for book-speak, I had turned to
YouTube podcasts, but—as a now Alas-
kan—I found them effete, irrelevant, you
know, Gawd, so Lower 48.
I had also paid my deepest and genuine
respect to genius loci, all the spirits of
places from inside passage forests to whal-
ing shores. I had, however, not duly reck-
oned with the duende, and she got me. In
Nome. The whole point of this travel had
been to maintain myself open and porous,
to allow myself to be surprised not only by
place and others but by myself. Although
my travel gauntlet had included a willing-
ness to change, I found I came undone with
so much exposure to naked honesty. The
duende said to me,
Well, well, phenomenology, is it? You got
what you asked for and, everyone knows,
beware of what you ask for. Genuine en-
counters with others of independent mind.
In true grit Alaska. An invitation to dis-
cover yourself in opposition to what is not
you. What’s your response? Could you be
in this place? I dare you. Could you be
nourished by the peculiar magic of this
landscape? This lifeworld? Are you going
to just gawk and run? You were willing to
31
leave your heart in an Alcan gas station,
what body part are you going to leave
here?”
I took off a bit early for the airport, a bit
trembly in my hiking shoes. I still feel her,
the snarky sarcastic duende. Finger beck-
oning.
References
Jans, Nick, 2007. Last Light Breaking, Liv-
ing Among Alaska’s Inupiat, Alaska
Northwest Books.
Lopez, Barry, 1986. Arctic Dreams: Imag-
ination and Desire in a Northern Land-
scape. NY: Scribner.
Crawford, Matthew, 2009. Shop Craft,
Soul Craft. London: Penguin Press.
Crawford, Matthew, 2015. The World Be-
yond Your Head: How to Flourish in an
Age of Distraction. NY: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Jans, Nick, 2007. Last Light Breaking, Liv-
ing Among Alaska’s Inupiat. Anchorage,
Alaska Northwest Books.
Katmai webcam link: https://ex-
plore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brown-
bear-salmon-cam-brooks-falls.
Lopez, Barry, 1986. Arctic Dreams: Imag-
ination and Desire in a Northern Land-
scape, NY: Scribner.
Tarr, Kathleen Witkowska, 2017. We Are
All Poets Here: Thomas Merton’s 1968
Journey to Alaska, a Shared Story about
Spiritual Seeking, Anchorage: Todd Com-
munications, 2017.
Image captions [all photos by author
except p. 30]
p. 25: A culturally emphatic entrance to
Bass Pro, Anchorage.
p. 25: Altar to the experience of the hunt.
p. 25: High vaulted painted ceiling with ce-
lestial ducks.
p. 25: Riverside Community Church, Ea-
gle River, Alaska.
p. 26: The natural extension of man. Bass
Pro Gun rack.
p. 26: The state icon. Bear in arrested at-
tack.
pp. 27: Alaska’s relative size. Total popu-
lation 700,000. Small remote small settle-
ments account for perhaps 100,000
(source. Google images).
p. 30: Aerial view of Kotzebue (source:
Wikipedia).
The Call of the Desert
Harry Oldmeadow
Oldmeadow was formerly Coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University Bendigo in southeastern Aus-
tralia. His principal interests are the perennial philosophy, the East-West spiritual encounter, critiques of modernity, and tradi-
tional understandings of the natural world. His earlier essay on mountains appeared in the winter/spring 2022 issue of EAP. Old-
meadow’s books include Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (2004), Frithjof
Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy (2010), and Black Elk, Lakota Visionary (2018). This essay was originally included in a col-
lection of writings by Oldmeadow and scientist and philosopher Brian Coman. Entitled The Realm of Splendour and released in
2021, the book is published by Carbarita Press and available in open access at the following link: https://www.carbari-
tapress.com/the-realm-of-the-splendour/. Photographic captions are on p. 36. Text and photographs © 2022 Harry Oldmeadow.

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

—Jean Baudrillard

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
—Edward Abbey [1]

W
hat is it with
deserts?
Wherein the
fascination
and allure of these places
of extreme heat, aridity,
isolation, apparent empti-
ness, and unsociable rep-
tiles?
As a young man, I vis-
ited the fringes of the great
Saharan desert in Morocco
and have since fallen under
the spell of parched land-
scapes in the American
southwest and the vast
Australian interior. I also
became a zealous reader of
desert literature, ranging
from the writings of the
hermits and mystics to the classic accounts
of the explorers to the strange ruminations
of drug-crazed hippies fleeing civilization
in the Mojave Desert of southern Califor-
nia. Some fragmentary remarks about this
extensive literature come later. But first a
few general observations about these
places of denudation and abandonment
that take up roughly a third of the world’s
land surface.
Our word “desert” comes from ecclesi-
astical Latin, desertum, a place of aban-
donment. Geographers classify deserts in
four main categories: hot-arid, semi-arid,
coastal, and cold, the constant factor being
low precipitation. Scientists tell us that de-
serts can be categorized via the following
formula: P − PE ± S, where P is precipita-
tion, PE is potential evapotranspiration
rates, and S is the amount of water surface
storage. I suppose all this scientific expli-
cation has some sort of utilitarian applica-
tion, but I’m not much interested.
Geographers also tell us that the popular
notion of the desert as a place of sand
dunes rolling away to the
horizon only applies to about
twenty percent of the world’s
deserts. The earth’s largest
desert is Antarctica, covering
about one and a half times the
area of the vast Sahara. The
driest area on earth is proba-
bly the Atacama Desert in
Chile where, so scientists be-
lieve, there was no significant
rainfall between 1570 and
1971. That’s a long time be-
tween drinks!
But more intriguing than
such data is the question of
why some individuals volun-
tarily expose themselves to
the perils of these inhospita-
ble places. I suggest that we
can isolate three key themes implicated in
many human encounters with the desert:
danger; strangeness; and purity. Over the
centuries, a cluster of other ideas and val-
ues have accumulated around these three
primal associations.
Danger
Only a complete fool is unaware of the
dangers facing anyone venturing far into a
desert. Even today, people travelling in ro-
bust vehicles, armed with GPS devices and
emergency beacons, perish. The desert is a

32
bad place for things to go
wrong. Deserts, by definition,
are places where water and
food are scarce, where little
grows, where temperatures
are extreme—a place devoid
of the amenities of civilized
life, a barren realm presided
over by raptors, and peopled
until recent times, if at all, by
nomads not necessarily
friendly.
The great era of European
desert exploration covered
some two hundred years,
roughly 1750 to 1950, though
of course there were anteced-
ents—Marco Polo for one, the Chinese
monk Xuanzang (602–664) for another.
The latter crossed much desert country in
his seventeen-year journey through China
to India.
Exploring the vast uncharted deserts to
be found in every continent posed formida-
ble dangers and offered the chance of ad-
venture and heroic feats. These explorers
did not penetrate the deserts in spite of the
dangers but because of them. Expeditions
of one kind or another were dressed up in
the vestments of “scientific research,” with
plenty of grandiloquent talk about “push-
ing back the frontiers of human
knowledge” and “filling in the empty
spaces on the map.”
No doubt some of the great explorers
were gripped by the scientific impulse—
Douglas Mawson was a geologist and Dar-
win an explorer—but often this justifica-
tion was window dressing to attract fund-
ing. What could be more reputable and
praiseworthy than “scientific research”?
Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions were
a fine example of the phenomenon: If truth
be known, Shackleton was driven by the
thirst for adventure, full stop. Then too,
there were those motivated by dreams of
imperial expansion and the ambiguous ob-
ligations imposed by “the white man’s bur-
den.” I suspect, however, the most ele-
mental attraction (no doubt sometimes
subconscious or at least not fully acknowl-
edged) was danger. Men (and a few in-
trepid women) ventured into these places
because they were dangerous: the more
hazards, the greater the opportunity to test
oneself in extremis.
Many years ago, Paul Zweig observed
that the oldest, most widespread stories in
the world are adventure stories about hu-
man heroes who venture into the myth-
countries at the risk of their lives, and bring
back tales of the world beyond human be-
ing: “It could be argued … that the narra-
tive art itself arose from the need to tell an
adventure; that man risking his life in per-
ilous encounters constitutes the original
definition of what is worth talking about”
[2].
Strangeness
Deserts are strange places—in appearance,
in the life forms they support, in the human
cultures that have existed there, a rebuke to
what we think of as “normal,” a manifesta-
tion of “otherness,” in some ways a repu-
diation of culture (as Baudrillard notes in
the epigraph). One might recall the
prophet’s conjuration of “the wild beasts”
of the desert and the evil spirits that dwelt
there (Isaiah 34:11-15). The primordial de-
mon-spirit Lilith, sexually rapacious and
the stealer of babies, is associated with the
screech owl and serpents of the desert.
And think of the animals most readily
associated with the desert: ugly, menacing,
voracious raptors; cold-eyed reptiles that
look like miniature dinosaurs, indifferent
to the human world, appearing in many
mythologies as dragons; venomous snakes
and scorpions; and camels, odd in appear-
ance, cantankerous and odorous (though I
understand that camels have been given a
bad press; they are not without their attrac-
tions—but they are strange beasts nonethe-
less!) [3].
Or picture the weird plants, the various
forms of cacti, tumbleweed, the Joshua
tree, agave and aloe vera, boab trees. De-
33
serts are full of weird for-
mations, monoliths of strange
shape both beautiful and gro-
tesque, canyons, naked escarp-
ments, buttes and mesas, inter-
minable sand dunes, claypans,
salt lakes. The deserts of the
American Southwest are full
of these extraordinary sights,
of great interest no doubt to
geologists and a kind of
dreamscape for landscape
photographers. As someone
remarked, the desert is the
place where you see the earth
with its skin peeled back.
Some, myself included, find
these places full of mysterious beauty. I ap-
preciate Gertrude Bell’s remark that “To
awaken in that desert dawn was like wak-
ing in the heart of an opal” [4]. The desert
night sky, too, is something wondrous to
behold. Others share the view of the small
girl visiting Utah in Conan Doyle’s A Study
in Scarlet (the first published Sherlock
Holmes story): “I guess somebody else
made the country in these parts. It’s not
nearly so well done. They forgot the water
and the trees.”
The idea of strangeness can be linked to
that of mystery. The desert seems inscruta-
ble, reluctant to yield up its secrets. This is
a recurrent theme in desert literature. Thus
Edward Abbey: “The desert wears ... a veil
of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes
in us an elusive hint of something un-
known, unknowable, about to be revealed.
Since the desert does not act it seems to be
waiting—but waiting for what?” (Desert
Solitaire). Or Saint-Exupéry: “I have al-
ways loved the desert. One sits down on a
desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears noth-
ing. Yet through the silence something
throbs, and gleams” (Wind, Sand and
Stars).
As to European encounters with desert
peoples, I daresay few would contest the
suggestion that, in almost every case, in-
truders from other worlds almost invaria-
bly found the nomadic desert-dwelling
peoples foreign, alien, utterly “other.” The
explorer or adventurer in the desert was in-
deed a “stranger in a strange land.” The as-
sociation of deserts with faraway planets
does nothing to lessen their mystery. One
of the most celebrated of sci-fi stories, by
Frank Herbert, is entitled Dune.
Purity
The desert, sparsely populated by
hardy and generally modest forms of
flora and fauna, windswept, uncon-
taminated by the detritus of civiliza-
tion, often strikes the traveler or de-
sert-dweller as pure: clean, pristine,
isolated, untainted. This idea is easily
associated with austerity and with sol-
itude and silence. “The true call of the
desert,” wrote Freya Stark, “of the
mountains, or the sea, is their si-
lence—free of the networks of dead
speech” (Perseus in the Wind).
It is not much of a jump then to the
idea that individuals seeking to
cleanse their souls might best do so in
this kind of environment. Hence, the
timeless appeal of the desert to her-
mits and anchorites, ascetics, monks
and mystics, most notably in the time
of the Desert Fathers (3rd–4thC AD).
Many people of this stripe have re-
capitulated one of the central themes of the In slightly more sober but similar vein, Shackleton, Worsley, Apsley-Garrard,
Upanishads, the most elevated of the T.E. Lawrence: “Those who went into the Amundsen, Mawson, Lansing, Byrd—are
Hindu Scriptures: The path to freedom is desert long enough to forget its open well-known and need not delay us here.
renunciation. Where better to renounce the spaces and its emptiness were inevitably There is also a burgeoning secondary liter-
temptations and distractions of worldly life thrust upon God as the only refuge and ature on Arctic/Antarctic exploration,
than in the desert? Where better to quench rhythm of being” (Seven Pillars of Wis- spearheaded by the utterly gripping revi-
the deepest spiritual yearning? Ultimately, dom). And let’s not forget the desert as the sionist works of polar historian Roland
the desert is the place where one might find Devil’s playground, as the place of Christ’s Huntford who has, so to speak, rewritten
God but where one might risk a mystical great temptations. Here is Thomas Merton the polar maps.
delirium or complete madness in the quest. on this theme: Rudyard Kipling is credited with the line
Here is Nikos Kazantzakis in full flight on about only mad dogs and Englishmen go-
First, the desert is the country of madness. ing into the midday sun, later popularized
this recurrent theme:
Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown in a song by Noel Coward. Kipling didn’t
Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. out into the “wilderness of upper Egypt” to get it quite right: the key phrase should be
Surely only two kinds of people can bear to “wander in dry places.” Thirst drives man “dogs and mad Englishmen (and women as
live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. mad, and the devil himself is mad with a well).”
The mind topples here not from fright but kind of thirst for his own lost excellence— The mystique of the deserts of North Af-
from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses lost because he has immured himself in it rica and the Arabian Peninsula mesmer-
downward, losing human stability, some- and closed out everything else. So the man ized a long line of English traveler/ex-
times it springs upward, enters heaven, who wanders into the desert to be himself plorer writers, most of them quite eccen-
sees God face to face, touches the hem of must take care that he does not go mad and tric. Consider the list, by no means exhaus-
His blazing garment without being burned, become the servant of the one who dwells tive: Charles Doughty, Richard Burton,
hears what He says, and taking this, slings there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and Bertram Thomas, Harry St. John Philby,
it into men's consciousness. rage (Thoughts in Solitude). Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence, Freya Stark,
Only in the desert do we see the birth of Wilfrid Thesiger, Geoffrey Moorhouse.
these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up Some books about deserts Nearly all these characters—and “char-
in rebellion even against God himself and There are many fine works about deserts acters” is the word!—produced arresting
stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in by explorers, travelers, hermits, monks, works about the deserts they traversed.
resplendent consubstantiality with the soldiers, scientists, naturalists, and journal- Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is both the most
skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is ists. Three sub-genres long since having popular and the best (not often one can say
proud, because in them his breath has not compelling interest to me are those set in that!). To these illustrious desert explorers,
vented its force; in them, God has not Antarctica, the Australian interior, and the we can add the name of Antoine de Saint-
stooped to becoming a man (Report to vast expanses of sand and stone in North Exupéry, a pioneer of the desert skies; his
Greco). Africa and the Middle East. The classic Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) is an abiding
works of Antarctic exploration—by classic in the literature of the desert.

34
 Three more recent works of considerable
interest are Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The
Fearful Void (1974); American journalist
William Lagerwiesche’s Sahara Unveiled:
A Journey Across the Desert (1996); and
Michael Asher’s In Search of the Forty
Days Road (1984). Asher is a soldier, his-
torian, and ecologist much influenced by
Thesiger, sharing his view that the desert
nomads have much to teach us. Asher’s bi-
ography of his hero, Thesiger (1994) is
also well worth reading.
The literature on the deserts of the
United States has a much shorter pedigree,
but the locus classicus is Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire (1968). We may also men-
tion such writers as Mary Hunter Austin,
Charles Bowden, and Barry Lopez.
The vast arid regions of Australia at-
tracted an unruly crew of explorers, anthro-
pologists, would-be settlers, and despera-
does on the run or on the make. The names
of the great Australian desert explorers—
Eyre, Sturt, John McDouall Stuart, Leich-
hardt, Burke and Wills, Gregory, Giles and
Forest—were in days gone by known to
every primary school pupil. Are they still
so, I wonder?
Some of these explorers left detailed
journals or later accounts of their travels,
but none were writers of the first rank.
Their writings are often over-burdened
with scientific data and the tedious daily
accumulation of meteorological details and
the like. Besides, by the time the desert had
finished with them, several of these chaps
were, in one way or another, somewhat de-
ranged.
Madness-in-the-desert is a recurrent mo-
tif not only in the annals of desert explora-
tion but in our national art and literature,
famously in Patrick White’s Voss. (If you
like “madness-in-the-desert” movies, try
some of these: The Four Feathers, Fata
Morgana, El Topo,or Waiting for the Bar-
barians.)
Sidney Nolan, perhaps Australia’s most
acclaimed artist, was fascinated by the
Australian desert country, referred to both
as “the inland” and “the Outback.” He pro-
duced hundreds of artworks (paintings,
drawings, lithographs, photographs) in-
spired by the desert. Trying to explain this
obsessive attraction, he wrote:
I wanted to deal ironically with the cliché
of the “dead heart”; I wanted to know the
true nature of the “otherness” into which I
had been born. It was not a European
thing. I wanted to paint the great purity
and implacability of the landscape. I
wanted a visual form of the “otherness” of
the thing not seen [5].
Beside such “high-culture” tokens of in-
terest in the “dead heart,” and more gener-
ally in the “bush legend,” we might also re-
call the steady flow of “low-brow” books
by “outback” authors such as Ion Idriess,
Douglas Lockwood, Frank Clune, George
Farwell, and Bill Harney, all somewhat
forgotten now but widely read mid-cen-
tury.
Some of the later literature about the
feats of the Australian explorers, or in-
spired by them, are more interesting than
their own writings, A few of the more en-
gaging of these secondary works: Alan
Moorehead’s Cooper’s Creek and Sarah
Murgatroyd’s The Dig Tree, both about the
ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition; Geof-
frey Dutton’s Edward John Eyre: The
Hero as Murderer; John Bayley’s Into the
Unknown and Mr Stuart’s Tracks, about
Leichhardt and Stuart respectively.
Readers interested in indigenous con-
ceptions of the land should read T.G.H.
Strehlow’s remarkable Journey to Horse-
shoe Bend, published in 1969 but recount-
ing the author’s experiences of a perilous
journey in central Australia with a party of
Aborigines in 1922.
In my armchair travels in the dusty foot-
steps of the Australian explorers, I have
puzzled over the question as to why there
are so many books about Leichhardt, and
so few about Ernest Giles, the greatest ex-
plorer of the continent’s deserts. The an-
swer probably has something to do with the
fact that Leichhardt came to grief in un-
known circumstances, while Giles suc-
ceeded and lived to a comparatively old
age.
The Destruction of Nomads
The destruction of nomadic cultures and
peoples is one of the abominations of the
modern era [6]. The Australian story is but
one chapter in this dark history of the no-
mads, many of them desert-dwellers, all
over the globe. This is a subject too com-
plex and volatile to be canvassed in any de-
tail here. But the fate of the nomads is a
melancholy theme pervading much of the
writing to which I have referred; Thesi-
ger’s work on the Bedouin and the marsh
Arabs is a poignant example.
35
The full significance of the disappear-
ance of these peoples, however, is not al-
ways appreciated. Ruminating on the de-
struction of the traditional and largely no-
madic culture of Tibet, the perennialist au-
thor Marco Pallis wrote:
One can truly say that this remote land be-
hind the snowy rampart of the Himalaya
had become like the chosen sanctuary for
all those things whereof the historical dis-
carding had caused our present profane
civilization, the first of its kind, to come
into being … The violation of this sanctu-
ary and the dissipation of the sacred influ-
ences concentrated there became an event
of properly cosmic significance, of which
the ulterior consequences for a world
which tacitly condoned the outrage or, in
many cases, openly countenanced it on the
plea that it brought “progress” to a reluc-
tant people, have yet to ripen [7].
Similar considerations may be applied in
more or less analogous cases, whether we
think of the fate of Native-Americans, the
Australian Aborigines, the Inuit, the Bed-
ouin, the Amazonians, the Bushmen of the
Kalahari, or any other nomadic culture
which has been razed by the juggernaut of
modernization.
In The Reign of Quantity, the French
metaphysician René Guénon observes that
it is only in these latter days, marked by the
ever-accelerating “solidification” of the
world, that “Cain finally and really slays
Abel,” which is to say that the sedentary
civilizations destroy the nomadic cultures
[8]. Moreover,
It could be said in a general way that the
works of sedentary peoples are works of
time: these people are fixed in space within
a strictly limited domain and develop their
activities in a temporal continuity which
appears to them to be indefinite. On the
other hand, nomadic and pastoral peoples
build nothing durable, and do not work for
a future which escapes them; but they have
space in front of them, not facing them with
any limitation, but on the contrary always
offering them new possibilities [9].
No doubt it was with similar reflections
in mind that Frithjof Schuon remarked that
“traditions having a prehistoric origin are,
symbolically speaking, made for ‘space’
and not for ‘time’” [10]. George La Piana
also alludes to the symbolism of the Bibli-
cal story in writing that “Cain, who killed
his brother, Abel, the herdsman, and built
himself a city, prefigures modern civiliza-
tion, one that has been described from
within as a ‘murderous machine, with no
conscience and no ideals’” [11].
It follows from these observations that
the slaying of Abel and the violent extirpa-
tion of primordial cultures not only drasti-
cally contracts human possibilities but is
actually a cosmic desecration. Since the
genocidal vandalisms of the nineteenth
century, a great deal has been written about
the destruction of the indigenous cultures.
But many writers on this subject are quite
impervious to the deeper significance of
the events they seek to explain, a defi-
ciency that can in no way be compensated
by any amount of moral outrage, justified
as that is.
To return to our more immediate subject,
there have been many visitors to Aus-
tralia’s desert regions who have attempted
to enter the existential universe of the in-
digenous inhabitants—to enter into an en-
tirely different mode of perception, experi-
ence, and understanding. It comes as no
surprise that two of the most popular books
on this subject are remarkably shallow and
hopelessly Eurocentric: Robyn Davidson’s
Tracks (1980) and Bruce Chatwin’s Song-
lines (1987). I do not claim that these
books are worthless and without interest,
only that they are of very little help in un-
derstanding the mythology, cosmology,
and ritual life of these peoples. The widely-
heralded Songlines is actually a spectacu-
lar case of cultural myopia.
Much more illuminating is James
Cowan’s Two Men Dreaming (1995), an
account of his own time in the Western
Australian desert and his relationship with
a tribal elder still deeply versed in tradi-
tional ways. In my view, Cowan is the
most perceptive of all non-indigenous
writers on Aboriginal traditions. It would
be a good thing if books such as his Mys-
teries of the Dream-Time were far more
widely known.
Today, we can take some comfort in the
recent emergence of many new indigenous
writers, both fictional and otherwise, who
seek to bridge the gulf between traditional
Aboriginal and modern European
worldviews.
Notes
1. The epigraphs are from The Little
Prince, America, and Desert Solitaire.
2. The Adventurer: the Fate of Adventure
in the Modern World, 1981. Paul
Zweig (1935–1984) was an American
explorer, poet, critic and teacher.
3. A book full of fascinating material
about camels: H.M. Barker’s Camels
and the Outback (1964).
4. Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the
Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria,
2012, 64.
5. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibi-
tion/sidney-nolan/.
36
6. This section is an excerpt from my
book, Black Elk: Lakota Visionary,
2018
7. M. Pallis, Book review in Studies in
Comparative Religion, 5:3, 1971, 189–
190.
8. R. Guénon, The Reign of Quantity,
1995, 78.
9. R. Guénon, The Reign of Quantity,
180.
10. F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient
Worlds, 2006, 8.
11. La Piana in Light on the Ancient
Worlds, 70n. George La Piana (1879–
1971) was a Catholic priest, scholar
and author.
Photographic captions [photos by au-
thor]
p. 32: Lake Mungo (a lake without water!),
NSW, Australia.
p. 33: From Mt Bruce, Pilbara region,
Western Australia.
p. 34: Desert Water Hole, Chichester Na-
tional Park, Western Australia.
Questions relating to environmental and architectural phenomenology (from EAP, 2014 [vol. 25, no. 3, p. 4])
Questions relating to phenomenology
and related interpretive approaches
and methods:
▪ What is phenomenology and what does it of-
fer to whom?
▪ What is the state of phenomenological re-
search today? What are your hopes and con-
cerns regarding phenomenology?
▪ Does phenomenology continue to have rele-
vance in examining human experience in re-
lation to world?
▪ Are there various conceptual and methodo-
logical modes of phenomenology and, if so,
how can they be categorized and described?
▪ Has phenomenological research been super-
seded by other conceptual approaches—e.g.,
post-structuralism, social-constructionism,
critical theory, relationalist and non-repre-
sentational perspectives, the various concep-
tual “turns,” and so forth?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to making a
better world? If so, what are the most crucial
phenomena and topics to be explored phe-
nomenologically?
▪ Can phenomenological research offer practi-
cal results in terms of design, planning, pol-
icy, and advocacy?
▪ How might phenomenological insights be
broadcast in non-typical academic ways—
e.g., through artistic expression, theatrical
presentation, digital evocation, virtual reali-
ties, and so forth?
▪ What are the most important aims for future
phenomenological research?
▪ Do the various post-structural and social-
constructionist criticisms of phenomenol-
ogy—that it is essentialist, masculinist, au-
thoritative, voluntarist, ignorant of power
structures, and so forth—point toward its de-
mise?
Questions relating to the natural
world and environmental and ecologi-
cal concerns:
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of nature and
the natural world?
▪ What can phenomenology offer the intensi-
fying environmental and ecological crises we
face today?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to more sus-
tainable actions and worlds?
▪ Can one speak of a sustainable lifeworld?
▪ What is a phenomenology of a lived environ-
mental ethic and who are the key contribu-
tors?
▪ Do the “sacred” and the “holy” have a role in
caring for the natural world? For places? For
lifeworlds broadly?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to environ-
mental education? If so, in what ways?
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of the two
laws of thermodynamics, especially the sec-
ond law claiming that all activities, left to
their own devices, tend toward greater disor-
der and fewer possibilities? Are there ways
whereby phenomenological understanding of
lifeworld might help to reduce the accelerat-
ing disordering of natural and human
worlds?
Questions relating to place, place ex-
perience, and place meaning:
▪ Why has the theme of place become an im-
portant phenomenological topic?
▪ Can a phenomenological understanding of
place contribute to better place making?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to a genera-
tive understanding of place and place mak-
ing?
▪ What roles do bodily regularity and habitual
inertia play in the constitution of place and
place experience?
▪ What are the lived relationships between
place, sustainability, and a responsive envi-
ronmental ethic?
▪ How are phenomenological accounts to re-
spond to post-structural interpretations of
space and place as rhizomic and a “mesh-
work of paths” (Ingold)?
▪ Can phenomenological accounts incorporate
a “progressive sense of place” argued for by
critical theorists like Doreen Massey?
▪ Can phenomenological explications of space
and place account for human differences—
gender, sexuality, less-abledness, social
class, cultural background, and so forth?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to the poli-
tics and ideology of place?
▪ Can a phenomenological understanding of
lived embodiment and habitual inertia be
drawn upon to facilitate robust places and to
generate mutual support and awareness
among places, especially places that are con-
siderably different (e.g., different ethnic
neighborhoods or regions)?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to mobility,
the nature of “flows,” rhizomic spaces, the
places of mobility, non-spaces and their rela-
tionship to mobility and movement?
Questions relating to architecture and
environmental design and policy:
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of architec-
ture and architectural experience and mean-
ing?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to better ar-
chitectural design?
▪ How do qualities of the designable world—
spatiality, materiality, lived aesthetics, envi-
ronmental embodiment etc.—contribute to
lifeworlds?
37
▪ What are the most pertinent environmental
and architectural features contributing to a
lifeworld’s being one way rather than an-
other?
▪ What role will cyberspace and digital tech-
nologies have in 21st-century lifeworlds?
How will they play a role in shaping de-
signed environments, particularly architec-
ture?
▪ What impact will digital advances and vir-
tual realities have on physical embodiment,
architectural design, and real-world places?
Will virtual reality eventually be able to sim-
ulate “real reality” entirely? If so, how does
such a development transform the nature of
lifeworld, natural attitude, place, and archi-
tecture?
▪ Can virtual worlds become so “real” that
they are lived as “real” worlds?
Other potential questions:
▪ What is the lived relationship between
people and the worlds in which they find
themselves?
▪ Can lifeworlds be made to happen self-con-
sciously? If so, how? Through what individ-
ual efforts? Through what group efforts?
▪ Can a phenomenological education in life-
world, place, and environmental embodi-
ment assist citizens and professionals in bet-
ter understanding the workings and needs of
real-world places and thereby contribute to
their envisioning and making?
▪ Is it possible to speak of human-rights-in-
place or place justice? If so, would such a
possibility move attention and supportive ef-
forts toward improving the places in which
people and other living beings find them-
selves, rather than focusing only on the
rights and needs of individuals and groups
without consideration of their place context?
Questions relating to Covid-19:
▪ Will demands of Covid-19 have a lasting im-
pact on physical places and bodily sociality?
▪ Can social media and virtual realities effec-
tively replace face-to-face presence and
physical places?
▪ Will human beings return to physical place
and firsthand intercorporeality once the pan-
demic ends?
▪ Can human life really survive if people lose
their direct lived relationships with other hu-
man beings and an entrenched physical in-
volvement in real-world places?
▪ Does the crisis of Covid-19 demonstrate the
central phenomenological principle that hu-
man beings-are-inured-in place? If that in-
urement collapses, is human life at risk?
 Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology
Published digitally twice a year, EAP is a forum and clearing house
for research and design that incorporate a qualitative approach to
environmental and architectural experience, actions, and mean-
ings.
One key concern of EAP is design, education, policy, and advocacy
supporting and strengthening natural and built places that sustain
human and environmental wellbeing. Realizing that a clear con-
ceptual stance is integral to informed research and design, the edi-
tor emphasizes phenomenological approaches but also gives atten-
tion to related styles of qualitative research. EAP welcomes essays,
letters, reviews, conference information, and so forth. Forward sub-
missions to the editor.
Editor
Dr. David Seamon, Professor Emeritus
Architecture Department
Kansas State University
300 South Delaware Avenue, Manhattan, KS 66502 USA
tel: 785-317-2124; triad@ksu.edu
Exemplary Themes
▪ The nature of environmental and architectural experience;
▪ Sense of place, including place identity and place attachment;
▪ Architectural and landscape meaning;
▪ The environmental, architectural, spatial, and material dimen-
sions of lifeworlds;
▪
Changing conceptions of space, place, and nature;
▪ Home, dwelling, journey, and mobility;
▪ Environmental encounter and its relation to environmental re-
sponsibility and action;
▪ Environmental and architectural atmospheres and ambiences;
▪ Environmental design as place making;
▪ Sacred space, landscape, and architecture;
▪ The role of everyday things—furnishings, tools, clothing, in-
terior design, landscape features, and so forth—in supporting
people’s sense of environmental wellbeing;
▪ The progressive impact of virtual reality on human life and
how it might transform the lived nature of “real” places, build-
ings, and lifeworlds;
▪ The practice of a lived environmental ethic.
For additional themes and topics, see the preceding page, which
outlines a series of relevant questions originally published in the
25th-anniversary issue of EAP in 2014 (vol. 25, no. 3, p. 4).
38
Beginning in 2016, EAP is digitally open-source only. Current and
back digital issues of EAP are available at the following digital ad-
dresses:
https://ksu.academia.edu/DavidSeamon
http://newprairiepress.org/eap/
http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522 (archive cop-
ies)
Readers who wish to receive an email notice when a new issue is
electronically available, should send an email to the editor with
that request. Though EAP is now digital, we still have production
costs and welcome reader donations.
Because EAP is now only digital, we have discontinued library sub-
scriptions. Libraries that wish to remain subscribed should link
their digital catalogue to the archival digital address provided
above. A limited number of back issues of EAP, in hard copy,
1990–2015, are available for $10/volume (3 issues/volume). Con-
tact the editor for details.
Copyright Notice
All contents of EAP, including essays by contributors, are protected
by copyright and/or related rights. Individual contributors retain
copyright to their essays and accompanying materials. Interested
parties should contact contributors for permission to reproduce or
draw from their work.
Open Access Policy
EAP provides immediate access to its content on the principle that
making research freely available to the public supports a greater
global exchange of knowledge.
Archival Policy
EAP is archived for perpetual access through the participation of
Kansas State University’s New Prairie Press in CLOCKSS (“Con-
trolled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) and Portico, managed
through the Digital Commons Publishing platform. New Prairie
Press also participates in LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff
Safe). Once published, an issue’s contents are never changed. Ar-
chival copies of EAP are also available at Kansas State Univer-
sity’s digital archive, K-Rex (see links above).
Note: All entries for which no author is given are by the EAP Edi-
tor.
 Environmental &
Architectural
Phenomenology
Vol. 34 ▪ No. 2
T
his issue of EAP completes 34
years of publication and begins
with items of interest and cita-
tions received. Next is a book
note on architect Miguel Guitart’s Behind
Architectural Filters (2022), which fo-
cuses on the experiential relationships be-
tween buildings’ exteriors and interiors.
This issue includes four essays. First, zo-
ologist Stephen Wood continues his con-
sideration of encountering the natural
ISSN 1083–9194
world, a theme he explored in the win-
ter/spring 2022 and 2023 EAP issues.
Wood’s focus is the phenomenon of jizz—
the singular presence of a living being in-
stantly recognizable without the involve-
ment of conscious attention. Wood’s focus
is the jizz of birds and what such a mode of
identification offers ornithology.
In a second essay, geographer Edward
Relph considers aspects of a phenomenol-
ogy of climate change by examining how
Summer/Fall ▪ 2023
the phenomenon is understood and experi-
enced via both everyday and extreme envi-
ronmental situations and events. Relph
points out that phenomenological studies
of localities might be one important source
helping to facilitate adaptations to climate
change in particular places.
In the third essay this issue, philosopher
Robert Josef Kozljanič overviews the
study of genius loci (sense of place), giving
particular attention to recent research by,
among others, Gernot Böhme, Tonino
Griffero, Edward Relph, Hermann
Schmitz, David Seamon, and Tomáš
Valena. Kozljanič points out that all
these researchers “take pre-theoretical
lifeworld experiences seriously and use
a new phenomenological approach in
which the concept of lived space, felt
body, and spatially manifest atmos-
pheres is important or even crucial.”
The last essay this issue is artist and
place researcher Victoria King’s ac-
count of her lifelong search for veracity
via intellectual and artistic striving. She
recounts her Australian experiences
with indigenous women of the Outback
and their work in sand painting. She ex-
plains how, for traditional Aboriginal
communities, “art, country, spirituality,
and kinship relationships are all inter-
connected.” King gives particular atten-
tion to the paintings of Emily Kngwar-
reye (c. 1910–1996), an elderly woman
artist from Utopia, an area of 16 small
Aboriginal communities spread across
2,400 kilometers in Australia’s red, arid
interior.
Left: Floating World, Victoria King,
oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm. See King’s
essay, “A Place Called Utopia,” in
this EAP issue, p. 25.

Items of interest
The 19th annual International Associa-
tion for the Study of Traditional Envi-
ronments (IASTE) will be held in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, January 5–9, 2024. The con-
ference theme is “The Dynamism of Tradi-
tion” and relates to IASTE’s definition of
tradition as “a dynamic project for the re-
interpretation of the past in light of the pre-
sent and often in the service of the future.”
One conference aim is to facilitate “dia-
logue on the process of understanding how
traditions emerge in the current modern
world and how they may have changed
over a short period of time to deal with the
rapid pace of globalization and infor-
mation technology in the 21st century.” co-
ordinator@iaste.org.
The Architectural Humanities Research
Association (AHRA) sponsors research
examining experiential and cultural as-
pects of buildings and architectural mean-
ing. AHRA’s 20th-annual conference fo-
cuses on “Situated Ecologies of Care” and
will be held at the UK’s Portsmouth School
of Architecture, October 25–27, 2023. The
group’s current newsletter and conference
information are available at: https://ahra-
architecture.org/.
Published monthly since 2002, the News-
letter of Phenomenology is a partner of
the Open Commons of Phenomenology
and presents information relating to phe-
nomenological research. Its major themes
of coverage are: (1) upcoming events and
conferences; (2) new books; (3) recent
journal publications; and (4) general news.
Readers are welcome to submit relevant
entries. http://newsletter-phenomenol-
ogy.ophen.org/archives.
Lifeworld studies
The December 2022 Continental Philoso-
phy Review is a special issue devoted to
“Varieties of the Lifeworld: Phenomenol-
ogy and Aesthetic Experience.” Edited by
Iulian Apostolescu and Stefano Marino,
the eight articles include Günter Figal’s
“Lifeworld art: Husserl’s Crisis book and
beyond”; Shaun Gallagher’s “The unaf-
fordable and the sublime”; Elodie Bou-
blil’s “Healing the lifeworld: On personal
Chinese translation, Geography
and collective individuation”; Annika of the Lifeworld
Schlitte’s “Lines made by walking—the David Seamon’s A Geography of the
aesthetic experience of landscape”; and Lifeworld (1979, reprinted 2015) has been
David Seamon’s “Moments of realiza- published in Chinese translation. Chinese
tion: Extending homeworld in British-Af- geographer Dr. Shangyi Zhou initiated
rican novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated this project, and Chinese doctoral student
City.” This issue of CPT is open source Huihui Gao contributed to the translation.
and available at: The book is published by Beijing Normal
https://link.springer.com/jour- University Press. The ISBN is 978-7-303-
nal/11007/volumes-and-issues/55-4. 27114-6.
Three books by Tim Ingold
Routledge Publishing has reprinted two
books by Tim Ingold, the British social
anthropologist who has made important
contributions to phenomenological think-
ing about places and environmental expe-
rience.
Originally published in
2000, The Perception
of the Environment
considers how human
beings perceive and
encounter their sur-
roundings. The focus is
how people inhabit and
dwell in their environ-
ments as this dwelling
has both biological and
cultural determinants.
First published in
2011, Being Alive con-
siders aspects of every-
day human living, in-
cluding the lived na-
ture of making things Citations received
and the role of weather Julio Bermudez, 2023. Spirit-
in human life.
Published in 2022, uality in Architectural Educa-
Imagining for Real is tion. Washington, DC: Catho-
related to these two re- lic University of America
prints and considers Press.
how imagination plays
a role in our perception Chapters in this edited volume describe ar-
of the world. chitectural-design studios dealing with
Routledge has pub- various aspects of spirituality. Contribu-
lished these three tors include Craig W. Hartman, Juhani
books as a set, which is Pallasmaa, Alberto Campo Baeza, Clau-
described as an “extraordinary intellectual dio Silvestrin, Eliana Bórmida, Michael
project of one of the world's most re- J. Crosbie, Prem Chandavarkar, Rick
nowned anthropologists.” Joy, Susan Jones, and Daniel Libeskind.
2
Galen Cranz, 2020. The Poli-
tics of Park Design: A History
of Urban Parks in America.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press;
originally published 1982 and
now open-access.
Out of print for several years, this sociolo-
gist’s book is a seminal text in the fields of
park history and urban studies. Cranz iden-
tifies four shifting conceptions of Ameri-
can park design: Pleasure grounds (1850–
1900); reform parks (1900–1930); recrea-
tional facilities (1930–1965); and open-
space systems (1965–2010).
In a new preface to the open-source edi-
tion, she reviews recent research on parks
and identifies the latest conception of de-
sign and planning: Sustainable parks
(2010–). Cranz identifies three key fea-
tures of these parks: (1) resource self-suf-
ficiency; (2) integration with the larger ur-
ban system to solve problems beyond the
park’s borders; (3) new modes of aesthetic
expression also applicable to other public
spaces. The open-access digital edition is
available at https://di-
rect.mit.edu/books/oa-mono-
graph/5052/The-Politics-of-Park-
DesignA-History-of-Urban.
Rana Foroohar, 2022. Home-
coming: The Path to Prosper-
ity in a Post-Global World.
NY: Crown.
Place regeneration appears in many differ-
ent venues recently, and this Financial
Times business columnist highlights this
topic economically by arguing that wealth
must be shared more broadly via realizing
that “economic well-being isn’t just about
growth at the international or even national
level, but rather about real people, human
beings living in specific communities. Peo-
ple matter. Place matters. All places.”
In summarizing this shift to a regional
and place-based economics, Foroohar en-
visions “a far greater number and variety
of communities becoming economic hubs
as both policy and business models push
back against the existing trends of central-
ization and globalization…. The needs of
companies and consumers will be balanced
with those of workers and citizens…. De-
centralized technologies in the hands of
more people will allow for new kinds of
bottom-up, locally driven growth.” Below
is Foroohar’s description of “Anywheres”
and “Somewheres.”
“Anywheres” & “Somewheres”
[Anywheres] are the global techno-
crats, who include not only rich
elites… but also the international
class of technocratic policy makers,
executives, think tankers, literary
types, and all the other “meritocrats”
who have climbed up the slippery
pole of twenty-first-century success
and are now knowledge workers who
can live anywhere and be employed
most anywhere.
Somewheres are the people for
whom globalization has been hard.
They are typically (though not al-
ways) less educated, more traditional,
and far more place-bound, sometimes
by choice, but often by force.
They are rooted where they live for
myriad reasons, some having to do
with a lack of nationally or interna-
tionally marketable skills or of
enough money to move to where bet-
ter jobs are, but also because of the
presence of family communities and
clans that have helped support an oth-
erwise precarious life… or simply be-
cause they are more committed to
their own cultural and community
than your average upper-middle-class
American college graduate who is
ready to move wherever the next pro-
motion takes her (pp. 196–97).
Charlie Hailey, 2021. The
Porch: Meditations on the
Edge of Nature. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press.
This architect provides an “armchair ex-
ploration of past porches and those of the
future, moving from ancient Greece to con-
temporary Sweden, from the White House
roof to the Anthropocene home.” Includes
3
discussion of the porch in the lives of Ra-
chel Carson, Wendell Berry, Eudora
Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, John Dewey,
Louis Kahn, and Paul Strand. As explained
in the sidebar below, Hailey identifies four
key qualities of life-enhancing porches—
tilt, air, screen, and blue.
Essence and paradox
As an architect, I am fascinated with
how porches are built, how they func-
tion, and what their built form means.
Building a porch taps into the time-
less, elemental lessons of archetypes
like Marc-Antoine Laugier’s hut,
Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, and
Gottfried Semper’s origins of archi-
tecture in mound, hearth, enclosure,
and roof. A porch must also negotiate
equally fundamental edges of archi-
tecture, where experience tempers es-
sence and building yields to nature.
I think there are four core elements
to thinking about a porch, each carry-
ing porch’s essence and paradox: tilt,
air, screen, and blue. Tilt works from
the basic premise that slope yields
balance. Air mixes freshness with
conditioning and public with private.
Screen maintains openness with en-
closure. Blue makes the invisible visi-
ble and finds intersections of the ac-
tual and the imagined.
These four elements demonstrate
the fundamental nature of the porch to
our humanity, as they also build a
case for the porch as an indispensable
site to feel, understand, and address
climate and its changes. As a whole,
they tell a story of dwelling and
home, resilience and acclimation (p.
4).
John W. M. Krummel, 2019.
Place and Horizon. In Peter D.
Hershock and Roger T. Ames,
eds., Philosophies of Place:
An Intercultural Conversa-
tion, pp. 65-87. Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i Press.
Drawing on a range of thinkers including
Otto Bollnow and Martin Heidegger, this
philosopher aims to examine a “phenome-
nological understanding of place in rela-
tion to horizon and alterity.” He writes:
“While [a horizon] unfolds space for us,
we can never step beyond it to its other
side. Yet the horizon necessarily belongs to
the world. Without the horizon, nothing
will cohere. But it is not a thing in the
world. On the one hand, it opens the place
of spatial unfolding for us and, on the other
hand, it bounds it” (p. 65).
Drew Leder, 2023. The Heal-
ing Body: Creative Re-
sponses to Illness, Aging,
and Affliction. Evanston, Illi-
nois: Northwestern Univ.
Press.
This philosopher and medical doctor re-
views current research on the phenome-
nology of the body, of pain and suffering,
of disability, and of aging. He draws on
insights from continental philosophy as
well as from Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Taoism. The book is said to be a
“uniquely creative and refreshingly inno-
vative contribution to contemporary phi-
losophy, demonstrating the importance of
the philosophical method to the wider
culture.”
Setha Low, 2023. Why Public
Space Matters. New York: Ox-
ford Univ. Press.
This anthropologist considers why urban
public spaces are crucial to city life and
provides a comprehensive review of pub-
lic-space research, focusing on specific
real-world examples ranging from New
York City to Paris and Buenos Aires. A
staunch defense of the significance of pub-
lic space in sustaining urban places. In-
cludes a final chapter on “How to Study
Public Space,” illustrating a study of New
York City’s Tompkins Square Park.
Scott Peeples, 2020. The Man
of the Crowd: Edgar Allan
Poe and the City. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
American writer and poet Edgar Allan
Poe (1809–1849) regularly changed resi-
dences, seeking work in American maga-
zines and living in the cities that produced
them. This Professor of English describes
“Poe’s rootless life in the cities, neighbor-
hoods, and rooms where he lived and
worked, exploring how each new place left
its enduring mark on the writer and his
craft.” Peeples concludes that Poe was “a
man whose outlook and career were
shaped by the cities where he lived, long-
ing for a stable home.”
Jenny Roe and Lyla McCay,
2021. Restorative Cities: Ur-
ban Design for Mental Health
and Wellbeing. London:
Bloomsbury.
These psychologists develop what they
call a “restorative urbanism” that considers
how urban design and planning contribute
to mental health, wellness, and the quality
of everyday life. They illustrate how “cer-
tain places foster recovery from mental fa-
tigue, depression, stress, and anxiety.”
Chapters in the book explicate various
dimensions of restorative cities identified
by seven themes: inclusive, green (pres-
ence of nature), blue (i.e., incorporating
water settings), sensory, neighborly, active
(promoting agent-centered mobility), and
playable (offering opportunities for crea-
tive activities, including play). The authors
provide conceptual drawings at neighbor-
hood and city scales for each of these seven
themes as well as summary images.
M. Beth Schlemper, Karen D.
Adams, Maria Lewicka, and
others, 2023. Yi-Fu Tuan’s
4
Legacy: Impacts on The Geo-
graphical Review, Disci-
plines, Scholarship, and
Teaching. The Geographical
Review, spring on-line issue;
https://doi.org/10.1080/00167
428.2023.2191267.
This set of retrospective essays commem-
orates humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
(1930–2022) via a “diverse group of schol-
ars in geography, science education, and
environmental psychology, who address
Tuan’s influence on their professional and
personal lives, research, and teaching. Re-
occurring themes across all the individual
essays include place, home, and human ex-
perience. In addition, each author stresses
the broader implications of Tuan’s schol-
arship on peace, love, caring, and belong-
ing.”
David Seamon, 2023. Phe-
nomenological Perspectives
on Place, Lifeworlds, and
Lived Emplacement: The Se-
lected Writings of David Sea-
mon. London: Routledge.
This collection of 17 previously published
articles and chapters discusses such topics
as body-subject, the lived body, place bal-
lets, environmental serendipity, home-
worlds, and the pedagogy of place and
placemaking. The volume begins with an
introductory chapter, “Going Places,” that
overviews Seamon’s academic trajectory
and summarizes the book’s three-part out-
line of “the value of phenomenology for
studying place” (four chapters); “under-
standing place phenomenologically” (five
chapters); and “places, lived emplacement,
and place presence” (eight chapters).
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, ed.,
2023. Conversations on Ethi-
cal Leadership: Lessons
Learned from University Gov-
ernance. Toronto: Univ. of
Toronto Press.

Highlighting ethical leadership strate-
gies, contributors to this volume examine
features of effective decision-making at all
levels of an organization. Chapters address
challenges faced by universities and apply
those lessons to the broader community of
the public and private sectors. The volume
includes entries by architect Thomas Bar-
rie and philosophers Stefanovic, Robert
Mugerauer, and Tricia Glazebrook. The
sidebar, below, highlights an excerpt from
Stefanovic’s “Concluding Remarks:
Building a University’s Sense of Place.”
An institution’s sense of place
As a philosopher by training, I believe
that one of the great moments of mod-
ern thought occurs with the realization
that human beings are not, as Des-
cartes surmised, simply isolated sub-
jects or solipsistic, thinking things,
situated in a world of discrete material
objects. On the contrary, our interpre-
tation of the world is always fluid: in
as much as we exist, we exist some-
where, in relation to others, primordi-
ally situated within the context of
some place geographically, culturally,
temporally, politically, and indeed,
ontologically….
Simply put, it is impossible to exist
in the absence of place. That acknowl-
edgement is more than just a trivial
theoretical statement. Instead, it re-
flects the cardinal reality of our his-
torically lived, embodied experience
of the world and, I suggest, can signif-
icantly inform our understanding of
what universities should be today and
in the future.
University leaders would be wise to
acknowledge that an institution’s
sense of place is difficult to articulate
because it is often obscure and onei-
ric, nowhere but everywhere, compel-
ling yet unspoken. The concept of
place has been said to “resist theoreti-
cal reductionism,” acknowledging the
reality that, often, “the world cannot
be understood in solely causal terms”
(Janz 2005, 89).
Consequently, as noted by eminent
place theorist Jeff Malpas, “in many
of the most basic respects, our de-
pendence on place is something that
always remains implicit or else can
only be explicated with great diffi-
culty” (1999, 177).
Certainly, as we seek to better clar-
ify and facilitate a productive and
meaningful sense of place within our
universities, it becomes evident that
there is no silver bullet here: “place”
is as diverse a notion as the innumera-
ble local places that define it. That
said, the place literature is volumi-
nous, and part I [of this volume] sets
the stage by discussing what we mean
when we refer to a sense of place that
is both virtuous and meaningful. Part
II then extends that conversation to
show how important values need to be
preserved if university leaders are to
identify and productively shape a uni-
versity’s identity and a positive, hope-
ful, empathetic sense of place (from
the manuscript copy).
Maren Wehrle, 2923. Can the
“Real World" Please Stand
up? The Struggle for Normal-
ity as a Claim to Reality. Phi-
losophy and Social Criticism.
Vol. 49 (2), pp. 151-163.
This philosopher offers a phenomenology
of normality, asking the central question of
how “the experience of something as nor-
mal gives us a hint as to whether something
really is (and not only for our own experi-
ence but for everyone's)?” She explores
this question “by applying a phenomeno-
logical approach to lived normality,” draw-
ing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. See the
sidebar, right.
5
Reality necessarily transcends
Normality is not used here as a mere
descriptive category, nor does it refer
to an objectively measured average.
Rather, it refers to modes of experience
in which the world and others ... appear
as self-evident, familiar, and expected.
It thus seems that with the loss of nor-
mality and the uncertainty accompany-
ing this loss, the self-evidence of real-
ity itself is put under scrutiny. Old hab-
its and beliefs are no longer self-evi-
dent, but new ones have yet to be es-
tablished. In this in-between state not
only what should be, but also what ac-
tually is (or was) turns into a subject
for negotiation or struggle (p. 152).
... in the long run, the real world will
strike back, as it represents the horizon
but also the ultimate material and
physical limit to all experience and be-
liefs. Struggles against reality are not,
in the end, sustainable. The external
world or reality necessarily transcends
each individual or group's perspective
of it. The world or reality is thus not a
fixed thing that can be defined a priori,
but an open experiential horizon.
A plurality of perspectives is in this
sense necessary to guard the truth: to
prove the evidence of our appearances,
we need constant processes of confir-
mation. We can only “trust” our expe-
rience with the help of others. There-
fore, for the “real world” to stand up,
we need perspectives that confirm,
complement, and question our subjec-
tive take on the world (pp. 160–61).
Book note
Miguel Guitart, 2022. Behind Architectural Filters: Phenomena of Interference.
London: Routledge.
buildings, including Norwegian architec-
tural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Ar-
chetypes in Architecture (1987) and phi-
losopher Karsten Harries’ The Ethical
Function of Architecture.
Guitart illustrates his argument via a se-
ries of over 200 black-and-white photo-
graphs, most taken by the author. Chapter
3 is available as open source at the book’s
webpage at www.routledge.com. Follow-
ing, we excerpt a portion of Guitart's con-
cluding chapter.
An interpenetration
[A]rchitectural filters are spatial and
temporal mechanisms mediating the
relationship between the individual
and the environment .... Filters relate
to the essence of [human]kind through
their capacity to go beyond the archi-
tectural container and create essential
meaning. They have the capacity to
architectural milieu and the existing
natural surroundings is the departure
point in the design of architectural fil-
ters....
Contemporary architecture explores
the exchanges of energy that charac-
terize a filtering boundary. Phenome-
nological space emerges when the
physically constructed and the emo-
tionally perceived do not coincide.
The resulting architecture reaches be-
yond its own physical from and be-
comes a phenomenon. Architectural
filters overcome architecture's physi-
cal attributes and expand its capacity
to generate sensory perceptions. The
design of atmospheres in contempo-
rary architecture incorporates the op-
portunity to create spaces that rein-
force sensory experience. When shift-
ing the perceptual focus from the ma-
terial to the phenomenological, the re-

T
his architect uses the concept of
“architectural filter” to examine
the experiential linkages be-
tween buildings’ “withins” and
“withouts.” The focus is the degree of per-
meability that walls (and to a lesser degree,
roofs and ceilings) facilitate between inte-
rior and exterior.
Guitart writes that “Architectural filters
have always existed. They embody a time-
less strategy in the conception of space that
has consolidated its presence over time and
across different qualities. The utilitarian
and poetic qualities of these architectural
mechanism have evolved through the fil-
ters’ adaptability and capacity to combine
structure, function, and beauty” (p. 6).
Guitart’s book is a valuable complement
to other phenomenological studies of
incorporate time-proven traditional
sulting space embodies a series of
solutions, with opportunities for for-
sensations linked to ambient effects.
mal, organizational, and material in-
novation that have implications for
The conclusions extracted from the
both the present and the future...
present text aspire to resonate with
In the evolution of the manipulation
searches for universal and timeless
of the limit, architectural filters first
qualities. The goal of this reflection
emerged as solutions for purely func-
aims to establish a set of positions
tional needs. Only later did they be-
leading to complementary pathways.
come sophisticated mechanisms
The text targets the essence of archi-
whose relational attributes came to
tecture through phenomenological
address the interpenetration of light
discussion. Today, like yesterday, and
and vision between spaces. [The goal
very much like tomorrow, we con-
was] to mediate between two sides,
tinue to need to provide solutions to
typically an exterior medium that can
spatial questions and problematics
be categorized as natural, and an inte-
with very similar if not identical roots
rior medium that can be considered
(p. 265, 267, 269).
artificial, insofar as it is the conse-
quence of human artifice or interven-
tion. The connection between the new

6
Jizz: Science or Poetry?
Stephen Wood
Wood is an independent researcher in phenomenology and the environment. He has a PhD in systematic zoology from the Univer-
sity of Cambridge and has held fellowships in the Theoretical Physics Research Unit at London’s Birkbeck College; and at the
Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. The first and second parts of this essay were published in the 2022 and 2023 winter/spring
issues of EAP. s.w.wood.88@cantab.net.© 2023 Stephen Wood. Captions for photographs, p. 12.

I
n this essay, I continue my examina-
tion of plant and animal encounters in
place. In a previous essay, I described
a spectrum of encounters with birds
ranging from obliviousness to heightened
contact (Wood 2023). I explained how, in
the most intensely heightened encounters,
I captured the bird’s jizz, that unique qual-
ity of a living being that allows an identifi-
cation in a flash of insight.
Here, I explore the theme of jizz in more
detail. What does jizz offer the science of
ornithology? Is jizz identification reliable?
Is jizz with its poetic images and flashes of
insight unsuited to an analytical, rational
approach to ornithology?

Introducing jizz
In his Bird Haunts and Nature Memories,
ornithologist T. A. Coward introduced the
term jizz with the following romantic fable:
A West Coast Irishman was familiar with
the wild creatures which dwelt on or vis-
ited his rocks and shores; at a glance, he
could name them, usually correctly, but if
asked how he knew them, would reply, “By
their ‘jizz’” (Coward 1922, p. 141).
For Coward, jizz was “something which
instantly registers identity on the brain …
without pause for mental analysis” (Cow-
ard 1922, p. 142). Identification by jizz in-
volved an intuitive grasp of the wholeness
of the living creature and transcended log-
ical analysis. It was not confined to birds:
How do we recognise the bank vole, seen
for a second in the lane, the long lean rat
which appears and vanishes like a grey
streak, the pipistrelle flitting in the dusk
round the barn? How do we know the
daisy in the field, the sturdy oak? Is it by
colour, size, length of tail, or shape of
wing, by petal, form of leaf, or fruit? No;
the small mammal and the plant alike
have their jizz (Coward 1922, p. 143).
Among modern commentators, sociolo-
gist of science Rebecca Ellis finds Cow-
ard’s account of jizz “uncritically roman-
tic,” and holds that it disguises “the more
mundane, practical and prosaic dimen-
sions” of identification (Ellis 2011, p. 777).
Historian of science Helen MacDonald
also highlights Coward’s romanticism:
“Not only was [jizz] superior to the ana-
lytic ‘eyes of the systematist’ but it was a
folk-knowledge, springing from ‘the fertile
Celtic brain’ of the west coast Irishman, a
word perhaps ‘never before written ...
handed down from father to son for many
generations’ [Coward 1922, p. 141]”
(MacDonald 2002, p. 71).
The new ornithology that emerged in the
1920s and 1930s worked to be analytical
and rational. The aim was to support deci-
sion-making with quantitative data gath-
ered on bird populations at a national scale.
In 1928, Max Nicholson organized the first
nationwide census of a bird species in the
UK, asking amateur birdwatchers to record
the presence of heron nests across the
country (Nicholson 1928; see Guida 2019).
James Fisher led a similar survey of rook
nests during the Second World War to an-
alyze whether rooks raided food crops to
feed their young (Fisher 1947; see Sage
and Vernon 1975). There was a question of
shooting rooks to halt agricultural damage.
Fisher’s study showed that, although rooks
were responsible for some damage to
crops, the impact was small so there was
no need to curb the population.
The question I ask here is this: Is Cow-
ard’s jizz simply a vestige of Victorian ro-
manticism, ready to be swept aside by the
new ornithology? Or does it reveal a di-
mension of our experience of nature not
captured by the dots on maps of modern or-
nithological surveys?
Phalaropes as an example
Phalaropes are a kind of small wading bird.
Males and females differ in size and breed-
ing plumage, though unusually for birds,
the phalarope female is larger than the
male and has brighter colors with flashes
of red on the neck, wings, or underparts,
depending on the species. Usual sex roles
are also reversed, and the female courts the
male while the male broods the eggs and
rears the hatchlings.
Ornithologist H. J. Massingham was an
admirer of T. A. Coward and particularly
sensitive to the individual character of
birds. Here is his description of phalaropes

7

in his Birds of the Seashore (Massingham
1931):
Pre-eminently water-birds, they swim as
lightly as a dry, crinkled leaf, and always
as though driven by contrary and capri-
cious breezes, snapping sideways at
gnats, flies, water-boatmen and other
small surface fry, as their little caravels
tack from side to side (p. 89).
… once in the air, the birds are as incon-
stant as Wagtails, frisking round at right
angles or turning on their tracks just as
you expect them to go straight ahead on
their own momentum (p. 89).
Sometimes in order to stir an eddy for the
gnats and flies to swing into, they dart
round and round on the water as though
fixed at the end of a spike revolving from
a hub (p. 90).
This vivid account of phalaropes exem-
plifies Massingham’s aim “to give as per-
sonal a description of each bird as possible,
so that the curious may recognise it by its
individual manner of living as well as by
its form and plumage” (Massingham 1931,
p. 16). That phalaropes swim “as lightly as
a dry, crinkled leaf” is particularly evoca-
tive as is his description of how they swim
in tight circles to draw aquatic inverte-
brates to the surface. Massingham’s
phrase, “Individual manner of living” is an
accurate expression of Coward’s jizz.
Nature writer William Beach Thomas
reviewed Massingham’s book and praised
his knack of “... imparting precise infor-
mation with gusto and distinction”
(Thomas 1931, p. 434). He found that “The
pleasure of watching a particular individ-
ual bird or birds in definite places informs
almost every sentence, every section …”
Thomas appreciated Massingham’s cap-
turing and conveying the encounter with
the living bird in its natural habitat.
Thomas admired how the vividness of
Massingham’s account sprang from the in-
tensity and authenticity of that encounter.
Naturalist Paul Krafel recalls seeing
phalaropes while kayaking in Oregon’s
Warner Wetlands. He identifies the gesture
that impressed Massingham—“turning on
their tracks just as you ex-
pect them to go straight
ahead”:
As I keep moving up-
stream, the ponds and
channels grow wider ...
Many have small flocks of
phalaropes. The phala-
ropes fly in tight groups
that all bank at the same
time creating a collective
whoosh. Sometimes they
all drop into the water
with a startling, compact
suddenness while other
times they turn and disap-
pear behind some point of
8
land, revealing the channel to the next
pond (Krafel 2011, entry for June 28).
As a field naturalist, Krafel is drawn to
the overall gesture, or jizz, of the phala-
ropes, rather than any specifics of their
anatomy. His account reminds me of the
same tight, whooshing turn I saw executed
by a group of birds at California’s Syca-
more Cove. At the time, I could not iden-
tify them, but they left a strong impression.
Reading Krafel’s account, I realize now
that these birds were phalaropes. A vivid
image like Krafel’s evokes the jizz of a
species and make it identifiable to an oth-
erwise uninitiated observer. The phalarope
jizz was held in my memory, later acti-
vated and clarified by Krafel’s word-pic-
ture.
Massingham acknowledges that phala-
ropes are scientifically distinguished by
the coot-like lobing of the toe joints (their
scientific name, Phalaropus, means “coot-
foot”) but insists that “they are such highly
individual little birds in habit, appearance
and colouring that a Phalarope is a Phala-
rope and nothing but a Phalarope”
(Massingham 1931, p. 89).
Massingham underlines the phalarope’s
distinctive “manner of living,” but Helen
MacDonald disapproves. She writes that
“Such pronouncements are of little practi-
cal value for the novice birdwatcher.” She
dismisses Massingham’s species descrip-
tions as “grandly Romantic” (MacDonald
2002, p. 71).
Compare Massingham’s colorful evoca-
tion of the phalaropes with the following
“objective” descriptions from the website
of the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds (RSPB) (Red Necked Phalarope Bird
Facts - The RSPB):
Adult female, summer plumage
Feather colour: Black Brown Grey Or-
ange Red White Yellow
Leg colour: Black
Beak: Black Long Thin
Natural habitats: Marine and intertidal
Wetland
Both adult sexes, winter plumage
Feather colour: Black Brown Cream/buff
Grey White Yellow
Leg colour: Black
Beak: Black Long Thin
Natural habitats: Marine and intertidal
Wetland
Rather than indicating how the bird-
watcher is likely to encounter a phalarope
in the wild, the RSPB authors break the
bird into a dry list of separate indicators.
According to MacDonald, the novice
“should learn to identify [a bird] by the
painstaking methods of notes and text-
books before [naming] it on the wing”
(MacDonald (2002, p. 73, citing Robert-
son, 1950, p. 193). In her view, a textbook
list of characters is more useful to the nov-
ice birdwatcher than Massingham’s poetic
description.
According to the RSPB’s website, the
phalaropes’ lobed toes “enable them to
swim strongly when on pools or out at
sea.” We can see how this description
would logically follow from the scientific
definition of the phalaropes as “coot-toed.”
But “strong swimmer” conveys a different
impression from the bird’s bobbing about
on the surface of the sea “like a crinkled
leaf.” We expect the bird to vigorously
plough its way through the waves.
I suggest that the RSPB’s aim is to con-
vey intellectual knowledge, which is not
necessarily useful for the novice who, ven-
turing into the field, may find descriptions
of jizz more helpful in that they better cap-
ture the novice’s encounter with the bird.
The trouble with jizz
In her study of plant naturalist communi-
ties in the UK, Rebecca Ellis considered
the nature of jizz (Ellis 2011). She accom-
panied Angela, a specialist of mosses, on
one of her field outings. Magnifying lens
in hand, Angela bent forward to look
closely at mosses on tree branches, care-
fully separating the small fronds with a dis-
secting needle. The two women walked on,
and suddenly Angela stopped, six feet from
a branch. She immediately identified the
moss species by its jizz: “She knew what
the organism was in a flash and from a dis-
tance” (Ellis 2011, p. 775). Angela did not
elaborate on which subtle clues of lighting,
shape, color, or context informed her intu-
ition: “She presented it as an inexpressible
sense of the organism’s essence, embedded
in and expressed through [a web] of eco-
logical relationships” (Ellis 2011, p. 775).
In contrast to Angela’s way of study, an-
other botanist interviewed by Ellis, Chris
Preston, urged caution regarding jizz iden-
tification (Ellis 2011, pp. 776–77):
The trouble with jizz is that there is no ne-
gotiation, and I’m therefore suspicious. It
is not helpful to say it just looks like it—it
is just an assertion—that I recognize this,
and this is it.
My favourite group, Potamogetons [pond-
weeds], is one where jizz as opposed to
technical characters is of limited value.
I do allow myself to use jizz, but through
correlation with hard characters. I then
eventually realize that I don’t need hard
characters, but if challenged, I will, for ex-
ample, return to the small curly hairs on
the underside of a leaf.
Preston’s choice of words in his first
comment is interesting: “No negotiation …
not helpful … just an assertion…” He as-
sociates jizz identification with the private
judgement of the observer—a personal
claim without communicable justification.
Later, Ellis mentions that Preston describes
an expert whose reliance on jizz to identify
a species of saxifrage during a training
course was successfully challenged by a
novice participant: “a return to the field
and an organism’s individual features sub-
sequently overturned the expert’s identifi-
cation” (Ellis 2011, p. 777).
Preston is uncomfortable with jizz iden-
tification because it purports to provide
“knowledge without recourse to inference”
(Ornstein 1983, p. 24). He prefers empiri-
cal features—his “hard characters”—that,
through a clear sequence of inferential
steps, bring him to an identification. With
jizz, there is an intuition of the whole that
comes simultaneously (cf. Ornstein 1983,
9
p. 26). The observer perceives the living
creature all at once in its context of ecolog-
ical relationships.
I draw on a situation from my own expe-
rience to emphasize that the sequential and
simultaneous modes can complement ra-
ther than contradict each other. While
walking, I saw a tiny bird in a bush. I im-
mediately thought “wren” but spotted a
gold streak over its eye. Looking among
the very small birds in Richard Fitter’s
guide, I recognized a bird with a wren-like
silhouette (Fitter 1966, p. 32, pl. 1). The
gold streak was a portion of a gold crown,
an identifying feature of firecrests or king-
lets. This gold streak was a decisive identi-
fying feature. If challenged, I would high-
light this feature to justify my identifica-
tion.
I emphasize, however, that my first im-
pression of “wren” provided vital clues as
to size and shape, important features di-
recting me to the correct section of Fitter’s
guide. The two modes of observation—the
sequential, based on “hard characters,” and
the simultaneous, based on jizz—here re-
inforced each other.
Identification keys
One tool to establish “hard characters” is
the identification key that Preston provides
in his handbook to pondweeds (Preston
1995). Fellow botanist John Poland has
prepared a freely-available pondweed
identification key for the UK Freshwater
Habitats Trust (Poland 2019). Table 1
(next page) summarizes the section for
pondweeds with leaves greater in width
than 6 millimeters.
In this table, indentation follows a se-
quence of steps in the identification pro-
cess, whereby the observer selects the
characterization that best fits the pond-
weed plant in question. Each characteriza-
tion requires an analysis of the plant into
parts. Each leaf is dissected into base,
stalk, margin, midrib and so on. Following
this sequence, the observer ends with an
identification of the plant species.
On one hand, this observation method
may seem different from jizz identifica-
tion, where the organism is grasped in its
totality in a moment. On the other hand, the
two approaches may be closer than they
first appear. To apply the key to the partic-
ular pondweed, one must have a “feel” for
what the different terms mean—“crispy
when dry,” “minutely toothed,” “shortly

stalked,” and so forth. At the same time,
being able to successfully apply the se-
quence gives the observer a “feel” for the
different species, which begin to stand out,
one from another. Gradually, the observer
gains a sense of the jizz of the different
species. In this sense, the analytic and ho-
listic modes of observation are comple-
mentary, working together to provide a
more multivalent knowledge of the natural
world.
Drawing on the work of psychologist
Robert Ornstein (1977, 1983), philosopher
Henri Bortoft argues that the analytical and
holistic approaches represent different
modes of human consciousness and two
contrasting ways of being in the world
(Bortoft 1996, p. 61). Bortoft explains how
the analytic mode springs from our experi-
ence of seeing and handling solid bodies.
To build a wall, for example, we assemble
bricks one by one in piecemeal fashion. In
contrast, the holistic mode arises from our
appreciation of living beings, where the
whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
In the analytic mode, language and logic
are preeminent tools of human conscious-
ness. In terms of practical value, the se-
quential, linear structure of this mode of
being would seem to give it greater legiti-
macy. Because Western education empha-
sizes this logical, sequential mode, the in-
tuitive, integrative mode is often not even
recognized as a valid way of knowing:
Most of us have been educated and have
developed sequential abilities … at the ex-
pense of the fluid and simultaneous … We
do not educate intuition since it seems to
lack a basis, and it is often confused with
the negative connotation of the “irra-
tional”—or with sloppy thinking …
(Ornstein 1983, pp. 30–31).
In short, the analytic mode is the sequen-
tial expression of the verbal-intellectual
mind, whereas the holistic mode is the ex-
pression of the intuitive mind, grounded in
“a simultaneous perception of the whole”
(Bortoft 1996, p. 63).
Science or poetry?
As illustrated by the above examples, a list
of an organism’s properties can be framed
simply in terms of the size, shape, and
color of various body parts. In contrast, jizz
pays heed to the activity of the organism,
its characteristic associations, and its man-
ner of comportment. This way of seeing re-
quires evocative language that highlights
the feel of the activity for the observer,
who is not placed before a static museum
exhibit but before a living being going
about its everyday business. A description
that evokes this living being is best poetic
in the sense that words encourage an intui-
tion of the whole.
As we have seen, some commentators
view such descriptions with suspicion,
claiming to detect inappropriate aesthetic
considerations or romantic sentiment. For
10
example, historical geogra-
pher Mark Toogood frames
the emergence of modern, sci-
entific ornithology as a shift
away from so-called “aes-
thetic birdwatching” (Too-
good 2011, p. 350):
In the 1920s and 1930s, ama-
teur naturalism moved away
from the “aesthetic” ap-
proach found in museum dis-
play and private collection …
towards work on living ani-
mals, their behaviour and
ecology …. The few profes-
sional naturalists that there
were at the start of the 1920s
became increasingly con-
cerned with survey and with
uniform and standardised
procedures of observation … This was not
straightforwardly a breaking away from
previous practice but rather a building
upon a “critical spirit” to approach the
study of nature in an apparently serious
way, unburdened by what self-styled
“modern” naturalists saw as the igno-
rance and selfish concerns of latter-day
Edwardian naturalists for specimens, lists
and numbers of records for personal use.
Toogood’s word choice is revealing. The
aesthetic approach is based on “ignorance
and selfish concerns” and is limited to dead
specimens kept for the private use of the
collector. In contrast, the scientific ap-
proach is “serious,” founded on a “critical
spirit” that assumes “uniform and stand-
ardized procedures of observation” and
provides data on living animals for public
use. In Toogood’s account, the scientific
approach is clearly destined to triumph
over the aesthetic and to usher in a modern
era of evidence-based observation.
For Helen MacDonald, the interwar pe-
riod saw a “battlefield of identification”
fought between aesthetic and scientific
birdwatchers. She frames the aesthetic ap-
proach as “merely seeing,” an “uncon-
scious, organic vision” expressing “an or-
ganic connection with nature”’ (MacDon-
ald 2002, p. 63, 73). The scientific ap-
proach, in contrast, establishes the modern
observer, who possesses “a discriminating
… gaze … built upon scientific discourse,
with the end result a learned, intellectual
familiarity, a legitimate knowledge” (Mac-
Donald 2002, p. 73).
 Interestingly, when we examine the or-
nithological writings of Max Nicholson
and James Fisher, we find a more balanced
view than we would be led to expect by
modern commentators like Toogood and
MacDonald. For these early architects of
the new ornithology, “aesthetic bird-
watchers such as W. H. Hudson … collect
memories” that owe their value to a “trans-
cendent impression of beauty” (Nicholson
1931, p. 59). They like the shape of birds,
“their colours, their songs, the places
where they live … Many of them paint
birds or write prose or poetry about them”
(Fisher 1940, pp. 13–14).
To these positive depictions of the aes-
thetic approach, Nicholson and Fisher
added warnings of the limitations of a dry
scientific approach. Fisher described re-
searchers who, “like several of the school-
masters, are grimly scientific” about birds,
and “talk for hours on the territory theory,
the classification of the swallows, or
changes in the bird population of British
woodland during historical times” (Fisher
1940, p. 14).
Nicholson urged birdwatchers to boldly
adopt the new tools of scientific birdwatch-
ing but to respect the “vital tradition of the
older school” and to keep birdwatching
“free from the jargon and pretence too lia-
ble to accompany a more developed tech-
nique” (Nicholson, 1931, pp. 17-18).
For Nicholson and Fisher, there was no
battlefield of identification. Rather, accu-
rate identification was vital to the outdoor
naturalist’s enjoyment, whether he or she
was of a scientific or aesthetic persuasion
(Fisher 1940 p. 47, 49; Nicholson 1931, p.
59).
Toogood and MacDonald see the aes-
thetic approach to birdwatching in nega-
tive terms not found in Nicholson and
Fisher: “not serious”; “unconscious”;
“mere seeing”; based on “ignorance” and
“selfish concerns.” Much has been made of
Nicholson’s statement that “It is a frequent
delusion that the bird-watcher is a man
who rambles about the country-side until
chance puts something in his way, like the
common idea of a poet looking for inspira-
tion” (Nicholson 1931, p. 47).
Citing social historian David Allen’s
“wayward sampler of nature” of the 1920s
(Allen 1994, p. 223), MacDonald envi-
sions Nicholson’s aesthetic birdwatcher
rambling “about the country-side … like a
poet looking for inspiration” (MacDonald,
2002, p. 54). This caricature of Nicholson
has become the truth for MacDonald: the
poet wandering aimlessly through nature,
looking with a glazed eye of rapture in the
hope of revelation. This person would in-
deed be a selfish and ignorant artist, whose
art would reflect only themselves.
Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch
points out that an “ability to forget self, to
be realistic, to perceive justly” is the crux
of good art (Murdoch 2014, p. 90). A poet
or painter attracted by the beauty of the
birds at a particular spot is challenged to
respond with “unsentimental, detached,
unselfish, objective attention” (Murdoch
2014, p. 66, also pp. 90–91). The calling of
the artist is to be a selfless witness to the
truth, to show “how real things can be
looked at and loved without being seized
and used, without being appropriated into
the greedy organism of the self” (Murdoch
2014, p. 66).
In ancient Greek, the meaning of aes-
thetic was “of the senses.” In the mode of
detached, objective perception that Mur-
doch emphasizes, the observer pays atten-
tion to the evidence of the senses, no longer
perceiving what he or she expects to per-
ceive. In this manner of heightened aware-
ness, the observer becomes open to a sim-
ultaneous perception of the whole, and of
the form, order, and beauty that the whole
imparts. This sensuous-intuitive mind aims
to perceive beings in their living wholeness
and challenges the schematic, piecemeal
observation of the verbal-intellectual mind
(Bortoft 2012, p. 53).
Toogood and MacDonald’s criticisms
show a lack of interest for the value of the
sensuous-intuitive mode of understanding,
recognizing only the fruits of the verbal-in-
tellectual approach. As Ornstein explained,
“‘Hemianopia’ is a blindness to half the
visual world, due to lesions in one half of
the brain … Our contemporary education
yields a similar disorder: we may have de-
veloped one half of our ability to organize
external reality to an unparalleled extent
yet remain ‘blind’ … to the other”
(Ornstein 1983, p. 31).
Birds by character
As chairman of the RSPB’s Rarities Com-
mittee, Rob Hume was responsible for as-
sessing claimed sightings of birds rarely
seen in Britain. One would be justified in
assuming that he is an authority on bird
identification and expect his approach to
11
be the atomism of the RSPB’s official web-
site. But his own contribution to bird iden-
tification, Birds by Character: The
Fieldguide to Jizz Identification (1990),
has surprisingly holistic entries for phala-
ropes. For example (p. 84):
Red-necked Phalarope
Neat, light-weight, with very fine bill, tiny
head. Slighter than Grey. Swims buoy-
antly, erratically over water. Flight light,
airy, erratic. Usually alone.
Grey Phalarope
Dumpy, with short, thickish bill, square
head, stout body and short legs. Swims
buoyantly, foreparts high and tail low, of-
ten turning sharply, even spinning while
pecking at the surface. Flight low, confi-
dent; wings rather long and broad. Singly
or in small, compact parties
Portions of Massingham’s account,
highlighted earlier (such as the way phala-
ropes swim like a dry, crinkled leaf) corre-
spond to Hume’s description of the Red-
necked Phalarope, which he says “swims
buoyantly, erratically.” Other descriptive
portions correspond to Hume’s Grey Phal-
arope—for example, the spinning move-
ment on the water and the flying in small
compact parties.
Even if we fault one or the other of these
accounts for its accuracy, both descriptions
evoke a vivid, alive quality. Both prepare
the reader to encounter phalaropes in the
field, to value and to savor their singular
character. Both descriptions incite the
reader’s curiosity and desire to see.
In their different manners of knowing,
jizz and “hard characters” illustrate the
contrasting sensuous-intuitive and verbal-
intellectual approaches to nature. Whether
realized as an immediate whole or part by
part, the bird comes to presence for the
birdwatcher as the particular bird it is. Jizz
identification acknowledges that the bird’s
wholeness is primary, whereas a hard-
character analysis sees the bird, via piece-
meal features, as a re-presentation of the
bird’s wholeness—a verbal-intellectual re-
construction (Bortoft 2012, p. 60, after
McGilchrist 2009, p. 179). Such represen-
tations are reductive and anti-climactic as
compared to “the bird as a whole, as a liv-
ing, exciting, absorbing creature” (Hume
1990, p. 9).
The senses and intuition are the bird-
watcher’s tools. Rather than to be rejected
by the novice, they should be encouraged
and developed. In his introduction, Hume
(1990, p. 9) recommends jizz identification
to “young birdwatchers, indeed to anyone
nervous of cluttering the mind.” He specif-
ically rejects MacDonald’s prescription to
avoid evocations of bird qualities. “Relax
your mind’s eye until it receives general
character freely and easily,” Hume (1990,
p. 9) recommends. Do not separate the bird
into specific indicators too early, an action
that too readily provokes “tension and anx-
iety” (Hume 1990, p. 9). Allow the bird its
full presence first, as clearly and distinctly
as possible, before noting visible field
marks. Yes, Hume urges the birdwatcher to
take notes in the field and to review them
later (Hume 1990, p. 11). For Hume, the
sensuous-intuitive and the verbal-intellec-
tual modes of birdwatching are fully com-
patible and complementary.
If one hopes to encounter birds from a
typical identification guide (where birds
are presented in systematic order begin-
ning with loons and grebes and ending with
songbirds), he or she will mostly be disap-
pointed. Though these guides list descrip-
tive features of a particular bird, they give
little indication of how to encounter that
bird. If one starts with its re-presentation
via a list of separate indicators, one has al-
ready missed an encounter with the bird.
Precise identification comes with a more
precise encounter—a moment of aware-
ness in which holistic and analytic under-
standing work together.
Main takeaways
I conclude by offering the following gen-
eralizations about jizz:
▪ Jizz points to the primacy of wholeness
and is appropriate to the holistic mode of
consciousness (but may seem arbitrary
and irrelevant to the analytic mode).
▪ Jizz is an intuition that involves a simul-
taneous perception of the whole.
▪ Jizz is difficult to describe in simple lan-
guage and is best served by poetic im-
ages.
▪ Jizz forms a trustworthy basis for identi-
fication to the extent that it can be suc-
cessfully evoked by these poetic images.
▪ Jizz works best in tandem with conven-
tional methods of identification, sup-
porting and supported by those methods.
▪ Jizz points to the complementarity of the
sensuous-intuitive and the verbal-intel-
lectual approaches to science and
knowledge.
References
Allen, D. E. 1994. The Naturalist in Brit-
ain. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press.
Bortoft, H. 1996. The Wholeness of Na-
ture. Edinburgh: Floris.
Bortoft, H. 2012. Taking Appearance Seri-
ously. Edinburgh: Floris.
Coward, T. A. 1922. Bird Haunts and Na-
ture Memories. London: Warne.
Ellis, R. 2011. Jizz and the joy of pattern
recognition. Social Studies of Science
41 (6): 769–90.
Fisher, J. 1940. Watching Birds. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin.
Fisher, J. 1947 (unpublished ms.). A Sum-
mary of the Results of the Rook Investi-
gation. Edward Grey Institute of Field
Ornithology Report R4.
Fitter, R. S. R. 1966. Collins Pocket Guide
to British Birds. London: Collins.
Guida, M. 2019. 1928—Popular bird-
watching becomes scientific: The first
national bird census in Britain. Public
Understanding of Science 28 (5): 622–
27.
Hume, R. 1990. Birds by Character. Lon-
don: Papermac.
Krafel, P. 2011. A phenomenal place.
Cairns of H.O.P.E. No. 66. http://kra-
fel.info/a-phenomenal-place-cairns-
66/.
Macdonald, H. 2002. What makes you a
scientist is the way you look at things.
Studies in History and Philosophy of p. 8: Grey Phalarope (UK name) or Red
Science Part C: Studies in History and
Philosophy of Biological and Biomedi-
cal Sciences 33 (1): 53–77.
Massingham, H. J. 1931. Birds of the Sea-
shore. London: Laurie.
McGilchrist, I. 2009. The Master and His
Emissary. New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press.
Murdoch, I. 2014. The Sovereignty of
Good. London: Routledge.
12
Nicholson, E.M. 1928. Report on the
“British Birds” Census of Heronries,
1928. London: Witherby.
Nicholson, E. M. 1931. The Art of Bird-
Watching. London: Witherby.
Ornstein, R. E. 1977. The Psychology of
Consciousness. NY: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Ornstein, R. E. 1983. The Mind Field. Lon-
don: Octagon Press.
Poland, J. 2019. A Vegetative Key to the
Wetland Plants. Draft for UK Freshwa-
ter Habitats Trust. https://freshwater-
habitats.org.uk/wp-content/up-
loads/2019/09/Vegetative-Key-to-
Wetland-Plants-_-DRAFTSept19.pdf.
Preston, C. D. 1995. Pondweeds of Great
Britain and Ireland (BSBS Handbook
No. 8). London: Botanical Society of
the British Isles.
Robertson, A. W. P. 1950. Birds, Wild and
Free. London: Bodley Head.
Sage, B. L. and J. D. R. Vernon. 1978. The
1975 National Survey of Rookeries.
Bird Study 25 (2): 64–86.
Thomas. W. B. 1931. A real bird book. Sat-
urday Review of Politics, Literature,
Science and Art 152 (3962): 434.
Toogood, M. 2011. Modern observations:
new ornithology and the science of our-
selves, 1920–1940. Journal of Histori-
cal Geography 37 (3): 348–57.
Wood, S. 2023. The changing qualities of
nature encounters: Taking a walk
around the lake at lunchtime—2. Envi-
ronmental & Architectural Phenome-
nology, 34 (1): 20–23.
Image captions
p. 7: Red-necked Phalarope, summer plum-
age, male behind, female in front.
Source: PanuRuangjan.
Phalarope (US name), winter plumage.
Source: MikeLane45.
p. 8: Grey Phalarope (UK name) or Red
Phalarope (US name), female, summer
plumage. Source: Alexander Hellquist.
Toward a Phenomenology of Climate Change
Edward Relph
Relph is Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto and a key founder of research that has come to be identified as “phenom-
enologies of place.” His books include Place and Placelessness (1976; reprinted 2008); Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Ge-
ography (1981; reprinted 2016); and Toronto: Transformations in a City and its Region (2013). Ted.relph@gmail.com. © 2023
Edward Relph.
I
n 2021, I directly experienced two ex-
treme weather events attributed, at
least in part, to climate change. One
was the “heat dome” of late June,
when temperatures in my part of the Pa-
cific Northwest rose above 40°C, and the
temperature in the small town of Lytton in
British Columbia reached 49.6°C, which
exceeded the previous record for anywhere
in Canada by almost 5°C. The other event
involved two “atmospheric rivers”—long
bands of very intense warm rainfall—that
tracked in from the Pacific Ocean over six
days in November, broke the regional rain-
fall record for the month by 13 centimeters,
and caused devastating floods in British
Columbia’s Fraser Valley.
As I tried to make sense of what had hap-
pened, I began to wonder how phenome-
nology could clarify experiences of cli-
mate change.
Below: The outdoor-indoor thermometer
at my house, June 2021. 43°C is 110°F;
36°C is 98°F.
Experiencing climate change
It is not immediately clear that climate
change is a phenomenon that lends itself to
a phenomenological approach. The very
idea of climate is an abstraction. According
to NOAA: “Weather is what you experi-
ence when you step outside on any given
day .... Climate is the average of the
weather patterns in a location over a longer
period of time, usually 30 years or more.”
Strictly speaking, climate change is a
quantitatively-based scientific theory
about environmental processes caused by
human activity. It is often summarized in
averages, most notably that the average
global temperature has increased by 1.2°C
since pre-industrial times, which is actu-
ally an average of averages from data rec-
orded over many decades at thousands of
weather stations around the world. This is
just the sort of abstract knowledge that Ed-
mund Husserl aimed to redress when he
proposed phenomenology as “a return to
the things themselves.”
Yet I and others who experienced some
combination of the debilitating heat,
drenching rain, wildfires and floods in
2021 knew immediately that this situation
was so far beyond both past experiences
and reasonable future expectations that it
had to be a consequence of climate change.
Climatologists, who are cautious about
identifying causes (because there have al-
ways been instances of exceptional
weather), produced an official attribution
study a few days later that merely con-
firmed what we already knew.
And when the Secretary General of the
United Nations saw the devastating floods
that affected a third of Pakistan in 2022, he
needed no attribution study to immediately
declare it a “climate catastrophe”. Climate
change may be an abstract theory about a
gradual and almost imperceptible increase
in average temperatures but, in its manifes-
tations, it is a real and immediate lifeworld
phenomenon in which places are de-
stroyed, trees catch fire, people suffer and
die, and the neat distinction between
weather and climate doesn't work.
David Seamon (2000, pp. 158–59)
writes that a legitimate phenomenological
topic is “Any object, event, situation or ex-
perience that a person can see, hear, touch,
smell, taste, feel, intuit, know, understand,
13
or live through ...” Climate change is not
an object nor exactly an event, though it is
most obviously manifest through extreme
weather events. But it is certainly a situa-
tion that in diverse ways has become an as-
pect of everyday life everywhere. For ex-
ample:
▪ A continual stream of news depicts
record-breaking floods, wildfires, and
droughts;
▪ Seasonal temperatures edge upward,
and weather patterns shift in unfamil-
iar ways;
▪ Governments and businesses imple-
ment policies and practices to miti-
gate carbon emissions and move to-
ward net zero;
▪ Citizens organize protests that high-
light the inadequacy of climate poli-
cies;
▪ Wind farms and solar panels mark
visible testaments of a shift away
from fossil fuels;
▪ Crops fail because of drought, com-
munities are destroyed by floods, and
people are forced to migrate;
▪ Climate considerations enter daily
life, affecting where people choose to
live, whether to drive or walk, how to
cool homes, what products to use,
what foods to eat, and so forth.
In short, what was initially a theory
has evolved into a widespread sense of cli-
mate change. This awareness, rather like a
sense of place, has become a companion of
everyday life, mostly in the background
but coming forward whenever some envi-
ronmental disaster or international confer-
ence makes headlines, and especially, as in
my case, when we experience local
weather that has no precedent. How can
phenomenology clarify this sense of cli-
mate change?
A phenomenological perspective
I understand phenomenological method as
a flexible way to describe some aspect of
the lifeworld as it is experienced, while set-
ting aside assumptions about why it is as it
is. My aim here, to borrow some of Sea-
mon's terms, is to explore aspects of how
the phenomenon of climate change is
known, understood, and lived through.
Philosopher Don Ihde (2019) noted that,
in some phenomenological studies, there is
an element of what he has referred to as a
“first-person reduction,” which reveals in-
dividual experiences but mostly avoids
material and social contexts. He proposed
a modified approach that he calls “post-
phenomenology,” to redress those omis-
sions.
I see no need for this neologism, but
Ihde’s suggestion is helpful here because it
accommodates the material reality that
most of our knowledge about climate
change is dependent on scientific reports,
online sources, television news, and social
media.
Except for the relatively small minority
who have encountered extreme weather
events firsthand (and to a large extent even
for them), an understanding of climate
change is based on mostly received, inter-
subjectively shared knowledge about how
the climates and weather of the world are
shifting and what that shift bodes for the
future.
Below: A display in Les Galleries Lafa-
yette in Paris for a Zone of Low Carbon
Shopping, June 2022.
Climate change and lifeworld
Climate change as a consequence of hu-
man activities was first recognized in 1981
when some atmospheric physicists at
NASA (most notably James Hansen, who
subsequently made a presentation about it
to a U.S. Senate committee) published a
paper in the journal Science on the “Cli-
mate Impact of Increasing Carbon Diox-
ide” (Hansen et al. 1981). This research
demonstrated that the global average tem-
perature had been rising since the begin-
ning of the 20th century, which was con-
sistent with measurements that indicated
an equivalent increase in atmospheric car-
bon dioxide caused by the use of fossil
fuels.
Depending on the rate of economic
growth, it was projected that global aver-
age temperatures would rise between
2.5°C and 4.5°C by 2100, something “of
almost unprecedented magnitude” in both
geological and human history, not seen
since the age of dinosaurs. The conse-
quence would be intense droughts, shifts in
productive agricultural regions, and rising
sea levels.
In 1988, climate scientists persuaded the
World Meteorological Association, an af-
filiate with the United Nations, to create
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) to summarize all relevant
research on global warming, and the sub-
sequent report confirmed that human activ-
ities were indeed inadvertently the cause.
The UN reacted by organizing a Confer-
ence of the Parties (COPs) in 1995 to bring
together representatives of the roughly190
states under its aegis to discuss causes,
consequences, and possible mitigation. At
a subsequent meeting in Kyoto in 1997,
participating nations committed to reduc-
tions in greenhouse gas emis-
sions.
In less than 20 years, climate
change had morphed from an
obscure research topic into
something requiring immediate
international actions. There
was some media coverage, but
climate change was still a con-
cern remote from everyday life,
a matter for experts to consider.
While the evidence that the
global average temperature has
increased by 1.2°C since the
beginning of the industrial rev-
olution may be hugely important from a
scientific perspective, from the perspective
of personal experience of local temperature
changes, this shift is inconsequential.
14
Nevertheless, after Kyoto, some govern-
ments and businesses gradually began to
implement practices to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. Some responses, such as
LED lighting, more efficient appliances,
solar panels and hybrid vehicles had some
presence in everyday life, but most, such as
revised building codes and carbon capture
in industry, were largely invisible.
This top-down process of scientific re-
ports, international conferences, and incre-
mental measures to reduce carbon emis-
sions, all somewhat detached from every-
day life, continued for the first decade of
the new century. But for two reasons,
things began to change, at first in the back-
ground and then increasingly in the fore-
ground.
First, and most important, the theory of
climate change began to become a mani-
fest reality. Every year since 1998 has been
one of the warmest on record, and weather
records around the world have been repeat-
edly broken. And as extreme weather
events intensified and destroyed places,
scientific models have, since about 2012,
been able to confirm that their probable
cause is climate warming.
Second, the translation of the science,
warnings, and news about climate change
into popular awareness has been facilitated
by the coincidental global expansion of
personal electronic communications. The
worldwide web was invented in 1989, just
as the First Assessment Report of the IPCC
was written. Search engines came a few
years later, and there are now over six bil-
lion users of smart phones worldwide.
Electronic media do not easily convey
the rational logic and complex arguments
of the written Accessibility Reports of the
IPCC or the consequences of the inexora-
ble, almost imperceptible rise in global av-
erage temperature. These media favor sim-
ple explanations, emotional responses, and
strong opinions. These reactions are pre-
cisely what images of extreme weather dis-
asters provide.
In short, electronic media turn the care-
ful, qualified arguments of climatologists
into stories of personal suffering and sur-
vival. Even though they also give voice to
climate-change skeptics, their instantane-
ous world-wide reach has ensured that both
the global scale and the human, local con-
sequences of global warming have become
intersubjectively shared and a part of eve-
ryday life almost everywhere.
Phenomenological possibilities
Phenomenological approaches have the
potential to clarify the diverse ways that
climate change is experienced, whether as
a looming concern about the future, or di-
rectly through extreme weather and shifts
in the character of seasons as temperatures
slowly rise.
For example, phenomenological studies
can provide insights about the range of
ways climate change is viewed, from grief
provoked by possible consequences, to ag-
nosticism and denial that it is even happen-
ing. Many tourists on cruise ships to
Alaska enjoy the dramatic calving of glac-
iers simply as a natural spectacle, but some
look at it with a sense of doom as they wit-
ness something before it disappears for-
ever (Kizzia 2022).
Phenomenology can provide a way to
understand the experiences of those who
survive extreme weather, those who des-
pair and move away to somewhere safer, or
those who choose to resist and to rebuild in
locations clearly threatened by increasing
floods, hurricanes, or wildfires. For exam-
ple, one can ask if root shock that results
from apparently natural causes, albeit ex-
acerbated by human activities, differs from
root shock provoked by political or eco-
nomic causes?
In almost every aspect of climate-change
experiences, place, and sense of place are
important because weather is locally varia-
ble. Floods, droughts, storm surges, de-
creasing snowpacks, and the slow decline
of tree species are all consequences of cli-
mate warming, but these events have very
different manifestations and are further
differentiated by the character of the spe-
cific places where these events are likely to
occur.
Adaptations must respond to the situa-
tions of a specific place and local
knowledge, including the knowledge of in-
digenous communities. This place
knowledge plays a critical role in how
adaptions might happen. The sensitivity to
place and locality that phenomenology
provides should be able to facilitate adap-
tations to climate change.
A particularly promising area for phe-
nomenological enquiry relates to the “plu-
ral temporalities” of past, present, and fu-
ture implicit in most considerations of cli-
mate change and that underly variations in
understanding how serious, urgent, and
worrying climate change is (Murphy and
Williams 2021).
Climatologists have the longest view. A
diagram in the Sixth Assessment Report
(2021, Cross Chapter Box PALEO 2 pp. 1–
43) shows global temperatures from
70,000 before present to 2100, with the
caption: “Humankind is embarking on a
trajectory beyond the global temperatures
experienced since at least the advent of ag-
riculture.”
This temporal span of millennia suggests
a future of unconceivable environmental
catastrophes and a world unfit for humans.
Climatologists usually bracket this climate
threat in their research, but it can affect
their personal lives. A survey of climate
scientists, published in Nature, found that
global warming has caused many research-
ers to reconsider major life decisions, such
as where to live and whether to have chil-
dren. This survey found that more than 60
percent of respondents experienced anxi-
ety, grief, or other distress because of per-
sonal and professional concerns (Tollefson
2021).
Most discussions of climate change con-
sider a time span from the pre-industrial
era (about 1750) to 2100, the period when
emissions from fossil fuels have acceler-
ated and will have to be slowed. This time
frame makes climate change appear some-
how more comprehensible and managea-
ble. The year 2100 lies within the possible
lifetimes of those born since the turn of the
century who have lived entirely in a rapidly
warming world. Student protests initiated
by Swedish environmental activist Greta
Thunberg indicate that many young people
share the anxiety of climate scientists
about a disastrous climate future, unless
immediate transformative actions are taken
to reduce emissions.
Joëlle Gergis (2022), a climate scientist
who contributed to the last IPCC report,
writes that the reality of climate change
forces people to grapple with a range of
complex emotions. Psychoanalyst Susan
Kassouf (2022) writes about the need to
address the “traumatized sensibility” of
what life might be like on a hotter planet in
which catastrophes become commonplace
and even annihilation becomes thinkable.
Climate change involves embodied experi-
ences even when its effects are not directly
felt through unprecedented extreme
weather.
15
A similar concern seems not to be the
case for many business leaders and politi-
cians who probably grew up before climate
change was discovered in the 1980s and
must find practical ways to respond to the
long-term concerns of climate scientists.
For these individuals, the costs of acting
now to deal with a problem whose really
serious consequences are mostly in the fu-
ture must be balanced against immediate
competing claims such as pandemics, af-
fordable housing, and health care.
A target date of 2050 for net-zero, green-
house-gas emissions seems reason-able to
allow for transition. But for small busi-
nesses and households with limited means,
the temporal span is much shorter. Even
though climate change may be a reason for
personal anxiety, expenditures on
measures to deal with it cannot compete
with more immediate priorities. Looking
ahead even five years is challenging (Mur-
phy and Williams 2021).
A new Copernican revolution?
French philosopher Bruno Latour (2021)
suggests that the climate emergency is a
powerful demonstration of the limits of hu-
man agency and constitutes a sort of re-
verse Copernican revolution in which the
Earth has effectively become the center of
the human universe.
For the 19th and most of the 20th centu-
ries, nature was to be dominated and ex-
ploited for its abundant resources with lit-
tle concern for long-term consequences.
Some of those habits of thought and prac-
tice remain with us, but Latour suggests
that, to survive the climate crisis, we will
need to align ourselves with nature, under-
stand its limits, and side with insects and
creatures threatened with extinction, with
trees and forests, with ecosystems.
It is clear that we cannot avoid direct or
indirect experiences of climate change.
Each of us has as much responsibility for
the state of the Earth and its atmosphere as
for our own health and wellbeing. This is a
responsibility, Latour wrote, “that weighs
on you, body and soul.” It is an intensify-
ing responsibility and warrants phenome-
nological investigation.
References
Gergis, J. (2022) Humanity's moment:
How can we find meaning in a world that
is both heaven and hell, The Guardian, 9
Sept 2022.
Hansen, J., et al. (1981) Climate impact of
increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Science, 213, 957–66;
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x
.html.
Ihde, D. (2019) Postphenomenology and
places, in Erik Champion (ed), The Phe-
nomenology of Real and Virtual Places.
London: Routledge, pp 51–59.
IPCC (2022) Sixth Assessment Report,
Working Group II, Climate Change
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.
Toward a Phenomenology of Nature-made and Human-
made Genius Loci
Robert Josef Kozljanič
Kozljanič is a philosopher who did his doctorate under the direction of Gernot Böhme at the Technical University of Darmstadt in
Germany. His dissertation was entitled, “The Spirit of a Place—Cultural History and Phenomenology of the Genius Loci,” and was
published in German in 2004. r.kozljanic@freenet.de. Text and images © 2023 Robert Josef Kozljanič. Image captions, p. 24.
T
he Latin term “genius
loci” (pl. “genii lo-
corum”) literally
means “spirit of place.”
According to the ancient Ro-
mans, all individual human be-
ings had their own unique genius.
Similarly, certain places had
their own genius: in other words,
a local spirit. It was believed that
this genius constituted the char-
acter of a person or a place [1].
This spirit was equally regarded
as protective or tutelary and,
thus, sometimes called and hon-
ored as the “tutela” or “tutela
loci” [2].
A Roman wall-painting from
Herculaneum illustrates in a
strikingly graphic way how the spirit of
place was conceived and what it signified.
In the image [above right], we see a small
circular altar, around which a serpent
winds its way upward. Its tail touches the
earth, and its head stretches over the altar’s
top. The serpent—unambiguously identi-
fied by the inscription to its right,
“GENIVS HVIVS LOCI MONTIS,” as a
manifestation of “the genius of this part of
the mountain”—is eating the offering of
food placed on the altar [3].
To the left of the painting, a boy ap-
proaches the altar. In his right hand, he
holds a branch. On his head, he wears a
garland. He could be a shepherd boy who,
ritually dressed, comes to this part of the
mountain to make a sacrifice or offering to
the genius for his flock’s welfare. This
conjecture is supported by verses from
Calpurnius: In spring the shepherd should
first sacrifice—“Invoke with salted meal
the gods, / The guardian genius of the spot
/ The Lars and Faunus“—then let the flock
go to pasture [4].
Genius loci arising from
nature
Characteristic nature-dominated
places tend to maintain their
spirit through themselves or
through the expressive-atmos-
pheric qualities and properties in
situ. Examples of such nature-
dominated places include
springs, hills, creeks, rocks,
coves, groves, caves, and river
places. Nymphs are also im-
portant spirits of places, in antiq-
uity and throughout art history:
for example, the often-lovely
spirits of trees, springs, moun-
tains, and bays [image below].
The art-historical topos of the
locus amoenus traces back to such
“Genius loci” thus means a place that
nymphic places. Famous is the locus amoe-
has a special, characteristic spirit. A place
nus described by Longus (2nd century AD)
has such a spirit either through itself, as a
in his novel, “Daphnis and Chloe,” with its
kind of innate spirit (“ingenium loci”), or
classical triad of spring, tree, and rock.
through what people have inscribed in it,
Even the muses have originally been
whether materially or immaterially [5]. But
nymphs themselves—singing and dancing
whether innate or inscribed, decisive is that
mountain nymphs (Greek: oreades). Hip-
this spirit has developed naturally and/or
pocrene, their sacred spring at Mount Hel-
historically. Equally important, the genius
icon, where they appeared to Hesiod (cf.
loci is not only a spirit that has developed,
Hes. theog. 1-10), is still the symbol of po-
but continues to develop. For every ge-
etic initiation and inspiration [8]. The place
nius—including that of a place—is a
and the atmosphere of Hippocrene can still
“spirit of becoming” [6]. This processual
aspect is also suggested
by the etymology of the
word: “The origin of the
name from the root gen
in gignere is obvious and
was not misunderstood
by the ancients” [7].
Gignere means to beget,
to bring forth, to give
birth to.
17

be seen and sensed today and have the
same classic triad: spring, tree, rock [image
above]. This triad has mythological, icon-
ographic ideal-typical, and even archetypi-
cal significance [9].
Locus amoenus and genius loci
Locus amoenus and genius loci appear re-
peatedly in art history as commonplaces—
often with a tendency toward the afore-
mentioned triad of spring, tree, and rock.
Here are five examples [10]:
▪ The inscription, “HVIVS NYMPHA
LOCI ...” on the painting,
“Sleeping Nymph,” by Albrecht
Dürer (1471–1528) [11].
▪ The painting, “The Nymph of the
Spring” (after 1537), by Lucas
Cranach the elder (1472–1553)
with inscription “FONTIS
NYMPHA SACRI SOM: / NVM NE
RVMPE QVIESCO” (“I am the
nymph of the sacred spring. / Do
not disturb my sleep. I am resting”)
[[image below].
▪ The famous demand in Alexander
Pope’s (1688–1744) “Epistle to [...]
Burlington”, significant for the
history of the English landscape
garden: “Consult the Genius of the
Place in all” [12].
▪ The “Serpent Stone,” erected in
honor of Goethe in 1787 in the
English landscape garden on the
Ilm (Weimar) with the inscription
“Genio huius loci”—“To the spirit
of this place”.
▪ The painting, “A Naiad or Hylas
with a Nymph” (1893), by John
William Waterhouse (1849–1917).
A description by Seneca (1st century
AD) demonstrates that the atmosphere of a
genius loci site can be not only graceful,
beautiful, and lovely but also sublime, ee-
rie, oppressive, over-
whelming, and above
all numinous [image
above right]. This de-
scription is found in
the 41st Letter to Lu-
cilius:
If ever you have come
upon a grove that is
full of ancient trees
which have grown to
an unusual height,
18
shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of
pleached and intertwining branches, then
the loftiness of the forest, the mysterious-
ness of the place [secretum loci], and your
marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the
midst of the open landscape, will prove to
you the presence of the numinous [numi-
nis]. Or if a cave, made by the deep crum-
bling of the rocks, holds up a mountain on
its arch, a place not built with hands but
hollowed out into such spaciousness by
forces of nature, your soul will be deeply
moved by a certain intimation of the exist-
ence of the divine [religionis suspicione
percutiet]. We worship the sources of
mighty rivers; we erect altars at places
where great streams burst suddenly from
hidden sources; we adore springs of hot
water as divine, and consecrate certain
pools because of their dark waters or their
immeasurable depth” [13].
Human-made genius loci
Unlike natural sites, characteristic cultural
sites obtain their spirit primarily through
social references, human imprints, and im-
material inscribings—for example,
through cultural codifications and interpre-
tations; historical traditions and stereotyp-
ings; collective memories and narratives;
social functions and psychic projections;
and, last but not least, through architectural
design and fabrication. While natural ge-
nius loci sites largely speak for themselves,
at least atmospherically and physiognomi-
cally, cultural sites require fuller explana-
tion and instruction.
Numerous imperial testimonials provide
direct evidence of the domestic signifi-
cance of the genius loci, or to the genius of
the home [14]. Many inscriptions bear wit-
ness to a village or civic cult: to the genius
of a village, a district, the place for the as-
sembly, the food stores or the granary, the
customs office, the watch station, the thea-
ter, the threshing floor, the meat market,
the school, or the baths [15]. A genius of
the port is known from Ostia among others;
or a genius of the city from Lugdunum
(Lyon) [image below]. Even in a military
context, the genius is not without its signif-
icance—as the genius exercitus [16].
The ancient Romans attributed a genius
loci above all to these characteristic natural
and cultural sites. As can be seen, these are
clearly definable and delimitable small-
scale places and not entire landscapes that
extend to the horizon—and certainly not
larger geographical units or even climate
zones [17].
Genius loci and polydaimonism
This genius loci was considered, according
to the polytheistic worldview, a numen or
daimon—a daimonic deity. Usually, these
local daimons were worshipped cultically.
People prayed and spoke to them, sang and
danced, consecrated something and sacri-
ficed to them so that local life might be
protected and promoted. Examples of such
genius-loci-like beings include mountain
and river deities, spring and tree nymphs,
hearth and store gods (lares and penates),
forest gods and wilderness goddesses, lo-
cal heroes and deified people, ancestor
gods and spirits of the dead (manes), genii
of the army and theater, deities of the har-
bor or city. The classical anthropomorphic
representation of the genii was standing
with toga and cornucopia. In the case of
spring nymphs and river gods, they tended
to be reclining with an overturned urn or
vase flowing with water. Theriomorphi-
cally, the local genii were often depicted as
snakes and river gods or sometimes as
bulls. Tree nymphs were sometimes de-
picted in tree form, and mountain gods in
mountain form [image below].
All these local deities belong to the so-
called lower mythology. This designation
indicates not only the proximity of these
religious ideas to popular belief, but also
their great age. Belief in local protective
deities is one of the oldest religious tradi-
tions in human culture. It is found world-
wide in archaic (e.g., shamanic) cultures
and can be traced back to prehistoric times
[18]. It can also be found in neolithic-ma-
tricentric contexts [19].
Anthropologists and ethnographers to-
day also frequently come across these local
spirits among indigenous peoples [20].
These local deities are based on numinous-
atmospheric and visionary experiences of
the place. As native peoples credibly af-
firm, these deities can be bodily felt, men-
tally imagined, and visionarily experi-
enced as numinous or daimonic powers.
One of the most profound interpreters of
the primordial mythical worldview, the
psychologist and philosopher Ludwig
Klages (1872–1956), therefore speaks of
visionary appearing “archetypes of reality”
(“Bilder der Wirklichkeit”—“primal im-
ages of reality”) and a closely related “pol-
ydaimonism”: “The true daimon is the dai-
mon of a place, of an area, of an element,
changing with their appearances, accepting
the sacrifices of its devotees” [21].
Schmitz’s New Phenomenology
In the last 20 years, the phenomenon of ge-
nius loci has been more accurately de-
scribed. Gernot Böhme, Tonino Griffero,
Robert Josef Kozljanič, Juhani Pallasmaa,
19
Edward Relph, David Seamon and Tomáš
Valena should be mentioned here. These
authors have one thing in common: they
take pre-theoretical lifeworld experiences
seriously and use a new phenomenological
approach in which the concept of lived
space, felt body, and spatially manifest at-
mospheres is important or even crucial.
In doing so, they re-actualize and revise
older phenomenological and life-philo-
sophical theories by Ludwig Klages,
Karlfried von Dürckheim, Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Otto
Friedrich Bollnow, Yi-Fu Tuan, Christian
Norberg-Schulz—but above all Hermann
Schmitz (1928–2021). Founder of what he
calls “New Phenomenology,” Schmitz
criticizes leading philosophers and scien-
tists for cutting off human thinking from
the most important parts of spontaneous
life experience through exaggerated-ab-
stract constructions out of touch with eve-
ryday life. In contrast, Schmitz shows that
genuine life experiences not necessarily re-
quire or presuppose abstract super-con-
cepts nor singled-out hard facts (Schmitz:
“objective facts”) but, first of all, holistic,
meaningful situations.
According to Schmitz, these situations
are the original objects of perception—the
original phenomena [22]. They appear as
bodily-felt, interwoven ambiance-ensem-
bles with internally diffuse but rich struc-
ture [23]. Although they occur only in a
subjective state of affective involvement,
they are more than subjective: they are in-
tersubjective gentle facts (Schmitz: “sub-
jective facts”) concerning reality. It is the
task of the phenomenologist to examine,
distinguish, and explicate these initially
diffuse ensembles. According to Schmitz,
poetry is a “gentle explication of situa-
tions” [24]. The phenomenologist should
also gently verbalize and explicate situa-
tions—but, as far as possible, systemati-
cally and unmetaphorically [25].
Schmitz was able to prove in a concep-
tually differentiated way that genius loci
sites are internally meaningful, diffuse,
and manifold situations. He identifies two
main situation types:
1. Impressive-present situations;
suddenly and significantly
appearing in an overall impression
of felt presence.
2. Segmented-complex situations;
appearing fragmented and
 uncomplete in one or few segments
and therefore requiring further
knowledgeable additions and
contextualisation.
Situations are impressive-present “when
they suddenly come to the fore in their in-
tegrated meaning (like dangerous situa-
tions that have to be grasped holistically
and answered aptly at a stroke in order not
to fall victim to the danger) ….” [26]. Ear-
lier, I explained that places of natural ge-
nius loci largely speak for themselves,
whereas cultural sites require fuller expli-
cation and understanding. Drawing on
Schmitz’s contrasting modes of situation,
we can now clarify why this fuller exami-
nation is required: because natural sites
correspond more to impressive situations,
and cultural sites more to segmented ones.
A specific feature of these subjectively
experienceable and intersubjectively com-
municable situations is that they are atmos-
pherically charged and only become tangi-
ble and articulate in their spatially ex-
tended “flowing” atmospheres. Schmitz
said of the Rhine River’s Loreley and other
siren-like spirits of place that they draw
their “power of suggestion from the nim-
bus of a powerful atmosphere,” from a
“highly emotive” mood [27] [image be-
low].
These atmospheres are thus situation-
ally-intersubjectively accessible and sub-
jectively-bodily perceptible, especially in a
state of affective involvement. Only then
do they show themselves as spatially
given, i.e., actually lying in the landscape
and not (as is often assumed) psychically
projected or even socio-culturally con-
structed. Schmitz usually emphasizes that
these atmospheres are quasi-climatic, fra-
grance-like, and spatially flowing phenom-
ena. This also applies to what Schmitz calls
“local divine atmospheres” and, thus, espe-
cially to all numinous genius loci sites
[28].
Place and common presence
The ambiguous term “sense of place”—
used by phenomenologists such as Edward
Relph and David Seamon—comes quite
close to Schmitz’s concept of situationally
accessible and bodily perceptible atmos-
pheres [29]. Seamon speaks of “atmos-
pheric qualities like sense of place” and
says that one task of phenomenological re-
search is to “clarify the lived subtlety of
sense of place” [30]. “Sense of place”
could be paraphrased as “felt meaning of a
place” and also relates to “the sensuous
ability to feel this meaning.”
With reference to Relph, Seamon distin-
guishes between “genius loci” and “sense
of place” (in a narrower meaning) [31].
The former is described as “the singular
qualities of a particular landscape or envi-
ronment that infuse it with a unique ambi-
ence and character,” while the latter is “the
synaesthetic and largely unself-conscious
facility of human beings to recognize, feel,
and sense the uniqueness of a particular”
place [32].
In this phrasing, “genius loci” represents
the intersubjectively perceived-object side,
while “sense of place” relates to the bodily
felt-subject side. If the layperson or phe-
nomenologist hasn’t developed and culti-
vated a sense of place, he or she won’t be
able to detect and analyse any genius loci;
or, using Seamon’s terminology, there will
be no awareness of “common presence.”
Seamon’s concept of “common presence”
is similar to Schmitz’s concept of common
impressive situations but is less formal and
closer to lived experience. Seamon argues
that the relative togetherness of entities in
space—material and human qualities as
well—sustains an
environmental
“common pres-
ence” that emerges
as a sensible quality
shared by these lo-
cal entities: The
common presence
of a place refers to
“its degree of ‘life’
and its environmen-
tal character” [33].
20
It is obvious that this “common pres-
ence” cannot be understood only theoreti-
cally but must be looked for through phe-
nomenological “field research”—in other
words, through “thick participation” and
“thick description” [34]. This point has
been seen repeatedly, but seldom clearly
enough [35]. In particular, Jürgen Hasse
has set new standards with his “microlo-
gies of spatial experience.” He recorded his
impressions in meticulous on-site proto-
cols and reflected on them neo-phenome-
nologically. “The great degree of differen-
tiation” illustrated by his micrologies
“owes itself exclusively to the careful ex-
plication of atmospheric experience in the
actual situation of being-with” [36]. In his
micrologies, Hasse referred primarily to
ordinary, everyday places—not genius loci
sites. For studying sense of place, his
method of distanced participation would
need to be deepened via thick participation.
Anchored atmospheres & auratic
places
Robert Josef Kozljanič was the first thinker
to clearly distinguish between place, land-
scape, and climate zone. He demonstrated
that Christian Norberg-Schulz’s genius
loci types are landscape or climate types
and not place types. Even so, Norberg-
Schulz’s phenomenology and typology re-
mains a first and important (but incom-
plete) attempt at a phenomenology of
place.
In his work, Kozljanič argues that places
are delimitable, small-scale locations (usu-
ally smaller than a football field) whereas
landscapes are panoramatically overview-
able, larger-scale regions (that can extend
to the horizon). In turn, climate zones are
huge geographical units that reach much
farther than the eye can see (unless one
looks on from outer space) [37].
Kozljanič demonstrates that atmos-
pheres are not only quasi-climatic, fra-
grance-like, and spatially flowing “diffu-
sivities.” In concretizing Schmitz, Ko-
zljanič emphasizes that atmospheres are
also condensed in a place and anchored in
specific things and shapes. They can be ex-
perienced empathically, perceived physi-
ognomically, and communicated intersub-
jectively as “thingly” phenomena within
affective-expressive encounter-situations
[38].
These “thingly” phenomena and their
shape are of crucial importance. If they are

removed or technically dominated or su-
perstructured, the atmosphere and charac-
ter of the place will seriously be damaged.
This happened to the Rhine’s scenic Lore-
ley Valley, which has almost completely
lost its threatening and mysterious atmos-
phere due to construction works: a railway
line and tunnel in 1862, then quay and
road, blasting of the river stones in the
1930s, and construction of an open-air
Nazi theatre in 1935–39.
A modern equivalent of the Roman term
“numen” is “aura,” coined by Walter Ben-
jamin in his essay, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935):
Every original and ingenious work of art
has or can have a special “aura” that can be
lost through reproduction and instrumen-
talization. Kozljanič argues that the same
can be said of original and ingenious
places. He differentiates five essential
components:
1. The uniqueness of the object.
2. The sensuous presence of the
original.
3. The aesthetic and contemplative
distance of the viewer.
4. The enchantment of the
contemplator by a mesmerizing or
“ecstatic” thing [39].
5. The multi-layered testimony-
character of a memorial-like object.
Kozljanič was able to confirm and specify
these five components through an investi-
gation of lifeworld experiences surround-
ing the conflict over the preservation of the
ruins of the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto [40]
[image above].
Atmospheric affordances
Italian philosopher Tonino Griffero pro-
vides one of the most recent and forward-
looking contributions to a phenomenology
of genius loci. He too revises and concre-
tises Schmitz’s concept of atmospheres.
Central to Griffero’s argument is the term
“affordances,” which he adopts from
American psychologist James J. Gibson:
“The affordances of the environment are
what it offers the animal, what it provides
or furnishes, either for good or ill.… I
mean by it something that refers to both the
environment and the animal in a way that
no existing term does. It implies the com-
plementarity of the animal and the environ-
ment” [41].
21
In his use of affordances, Griffero places
aesthetic-pathic suggestions alongside the
pragmatic-active options for action. This
extension rounds off the ethological as-
pects of “affordance,” deepens it, and gives
it enormous phenomenological relevance.
“Affordance” now means stimulating op-
tions and “mesmerizing” significances ra-
diating from people-place-interactions,
people-place-correlations, and people-
place empathies—for example, kinetic
suggestions or psychic image-initiations,
correspondence relationships or resonance
possibilities, bodily-activating triggers or
bodily-pathic resonances.
These modes of affordances arise from
situations and their effects and whether
they are embedded features, functional dis-
positions, or expressive atmospheres.
Whatever the particular experiential ex-
pression, Griffero’s focus is on “pathic aes-
thetics.” His primary concern is “pathic af-
fordances, responsible for our spontane-
ous-intuitive evaluations.” His innovative
idea is that:
atmospheres function as (amodal) af-
fordances, i. e. as ecological invitations or
meanings that are ontologically rooted in
things and quasi-things, namely as de-
mands that are not only pragmatic-behav-
ioural and visual. While the environment
can invite a certain action or even urge a
person to do something, to an atmospheric
affordance indeed one does not necessarily
react with a given behaviour.… [O]ne may
also react to atmospheric qualia with an
(also aesthetic) distance, in the sense that
we can feel the atmosphere of a chair, for
example, both by sitting on it and by per-
ceiving it from a distance [42].
Genius loci sites are thus marked by au-
ratic and particularly “bubbly” expressive-
atmospheric affordances [43]: “My hy-
pothesis is therefore that a place has its
own genius only if (when and where) it ra-
diates an intense and authoritative specific
atmosphere” [44].
Interpretive layers and levels
It is obvious that a mono-perspectival ap-
proach cannot do justice to the phenome-
non of genius loci, neither lifeworld-wise
nor methodologically. For example, Ko-
zljanič already in 2004 consciously
worked with a layer-historical
method; he creatively followed Ni-
colai Hartmann’s ontology of layers
(or levels), revised in terms of cul-
tural history. These different histor-
ical layers correspond to specific
modes of access (archaic-mythical,
Christian-allegorical, modern-secu-
lar, rationalist-technical) and to spe-
cific human-place relationships (in-
tegrative-adaptive, preserving-
trans-formative, superstructure-
transformative, superstructure-lev-
elling). Griffero draws on a similar ap-
proach:
When interacting with a place, even the
same one, we can in fact (a) abandon our-
selves in an ecstatic-cultic way to it [with
Kozljanič: archaic-mythical access]; or
(b) intervene through material or ideal su-
perstructures, as with the Christian rein-
terpretation and architectural re-function-
alization of previously pagan sacred
places [with Kozljanič: christian-allegori-
cal or modern-secular access]; finally (c)
we can flatten [the place], making it per-
fectly suited to host new architectural pro-
jects (almost) totally unrelated to the char-
acter of the place [with Kozljanič: radical-
ized modern access or rationalist-tech-
nical access]. Only in the first case do we
have a full experience of the genius loci”
[45].
I would add, however, that today the ar-
chaic-mythical approach is very often ide-
ologically super-structured and civilisa-
tion-process-related overlayered. Usually,
we can’t just jump in. Rather, we must re-
move the upper layers first, move through
them, and deepen our experience. What we
need is a kind of felt and mental archaeol-
ogy of our being-in-the-world and our be-
ing-in-place.
A multi-perspectival approach
The person who has so far worked most
stringently with a multi-perspectival pro-
cedure, both theoretically and practically,
is David Seamon. He has argued that ge-
nius loci can best be explicated via a triadic
procedure grounded in pre-scientific life-
world experiences. He draws on a creative,
phenomenological continuation of British
philosopher J. G. Bennett’s method of
“systematics.”
Seamon pointed out that at least three as-
pects of any place are necessary: one topo-
graphical, one sociographical and one at-
mospheric [46]. He identified these three
intertwined place aspects as environmental
ensemble, people-in-place, and common
presence: “The key word is togetherness,
whereby the environmental and human el-
ements of place are together (or not) in a
mode of belonging (or not) that supports
(or undermines) the life and wholeness of
the place” [47] [image above].
Tomáš Valena brought forward a second
important key word: relatedness: “Man has
a primal need to relate the objects and phe-
nomena of his world to each other.”
Through a reciprocal, multi-layered
trilogue between people, building and
place, “site-bound” relationships are cre-
ated [48].
Living, experiencing, remembering
In 2011, Hasse and Kozljanič pointed to
three important modes of place inquiry:
Living, experiencing, remembering. In re-
lation to lived space and living, bodily ex-
perience is primarily expressive-atmos-
pheric and often rooted in impressive-pre-
sent situations. In turn, place experiencing,
particularly as it involves landscapes, is of-
ten shaped by the sensuous-aesthetic—in
other words, by temporal categories of life
experience and by aesthetic forms of per-
ception that have become historical.
Yet again, remembering relates to men-
tal-cultural, associative meanings and nar-
rated stories sedimented in socio-cultural
memory. It is through remembering that
significant places of memory become ac-
cessible. These mnemotopes are less an-
chored in impressive situations and only
partially in segmented situations [49]. One
can speak of sedimented-complex situa-
tions that can only be located via a cultural-
historical-semantic layer interpretation
22
that goes beyond a purely phenom-
enological approach. Just as the ar-
chaeologist digs deeper in the earth
to uncover layer after layer, the
cultural researcher can dig deeper
into social and cultural memory,
layer by layer [50].
Finally, one must remember that
history is based on stories. Because
of a still powerful and power-ob-
sessed patriarchal tradition, the
emphasis has mostly been his-sto-
ries. Stories of Western victors and
bellicists. Stories of a predatory capitalism.
Stories of hegemonic masculinity. These
stories need deconstruction and supple-
mentation with her-stories. And we must
remember that all stories are multi-layered.
Parallel to studies of layers and struc-
tures are studies of relational structures
that emanate from or lead to the place.
Both modes of study are equally important.
One goes into depth, the other into breadth.
How these contrasting perspectives and
approaches can be integrated into an over-
arching theory without loss of differentia-
tion is still unclear today. Seamon’s multi-
perspective methodology may be one di-
rection. His conceptual presentation of
place does not end with the triadic structure
of environmental ensemble, people-in-
place, and common presence. Rather, the
approach is open and expandable, pointing
to tetradic, pentadic, and hexadic dimen-
sion of place and place experience.
Notes
1. See R. J. Kozljanič: Der Geist eines
Ortes, Kulturgeschichte und Phänome-
nologie des Genius Loci, vol. 1, Munich,
Albunea, 2004, pp. 28–78.
2. See, for example, Petronius, Satyricon,
§57, 1.2, in Petronius; Seneca, “Apocol-
ocyntosis,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, p. 119; or the inscription in
the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,
bibliographical details for which are
available at: https://cil.bbaw.de/haupt-
navigation/das-cil/baende (accessed Jan.
5, 2023); this document is henceforth ab-
breviated as CIL here;, CIL, vol. 6.1, no.
216 p. 40; vol. 13.1, no. 440, p. 58.
3. See T. Birt, “Genius,” in W. H. Roscher
et al. (eds.), Ausführliches Lexikon der
griechischen und römischen Mytholo-
gie, 6 vols, Leipzig: Teubner, 1886–
1937, vol. 1.2, cols. 1613–25; col. 1624,
 includes a reproduction of the picture
from Herculaneum.
4. Calpurnius Siculus, 5, 26; see Cal-
purnius Siculus, The Eclogues, London:
George Bell and Sons, 1890, p. 95.
5. Cf. Ovid, met. 3, 157–162, also: trist. 5,
10, 18; Pont. 2, 1, 52; 4, 7, 22.
6. See Birt, “Genius,” col. 1614; and: R. J.
Kozljanič: Der Geist eines Ortes, l. c.,
vol. 1, p. 50, 67.
7. W. F. Otto, „Genius,“ in G. Wissowa et
al. (eds), Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 1st
edn, 20 vols, Stuttgart: Metzler and Al-
fred Druckenmüller, 1894–1963, vol.
7.1, cols 1155–70 (here: col. 1156). Ac-
cording to the OED, the Latin genius de-
rives from the base of gignere, “to be-
get,” and in turn the Greek gignesthai,
“to be born” or “to come into being.”
8. Cf. E. R. Curtius, European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages (1948),
Princeton, Princeton University Press
2013, pp. 183–202 (“The Ideal Land-
scape”), pp. 228–46 (“The Muses”),
474f (“The Poet’s Divine Frenzy”).
9. To the best of my knowledge, the first
person to point out this decisive triad
was the poet Heinrich Heine in his writ-
ing “Elementary Spirits” (“Elementar-
geister,” 1837). Cf. R. J. Kozljanič: Der
Geist eines Ortes, Kulturgeschichte und
Phänomenologie des Genius Loci, vol.
2, Munich, Albunea, 2004, p. 38f.
10. Further examples can be found in J. D.
Hunt, Genius Loci. An Essay on the
Meanings of Place, London, Reaktion
Book, 2022.
11. See Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci:
A Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a
Drawing by Dürer,” in Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol.
16, No. 3/4 (1953), pp. 171–77.
12. A. Pope, “Of Taste. An Epistle to Right
Honourable Richard Earl of Burling-
ton,” London, Gilliver, 1731, S. 7. Cf. R.
J. Kozljanič: Der Geist eines Ortes, vol.
2, l. c., pp. 207–38.
13.Sen. epist. 4, 41, 3; my translation,
based on: Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae
Morales, NY, 1925 pp. 273–75.
14. For example, genio domi suae ... aram
(CIL, vol. 8.1, no. 2597, p. 307); [Io]vi
o. m. et [He]rculi et [Sil]vano et [Ge]nio
[do]mus (CIL, vol. 13.2, no. 8016, p.
539); cited in Otto, “Genius,” col. 1167.
15. See, for example, the references to
genius vici (CIL, vol. 8.1, nos 2604 and
6352, pp. 308 and 591) or pagi (CIL, vol.
5.1, no. 4909, p. 515); genius curiae
(CIL, vol. 8.1, no. 1548, p. 189); genius
conservator horreorum (CIL, vol. 6, no.
236, p. 46) or tutelae horreorum (CIL,
vol. 2, no. 2991, p. 406); genius portorii
(CIL, vol. 3.1, nos 751–52, p. 142);
genius area frumentariae augustus
(CIL, vol. 8.1, no. 6339, p. 590); genius
macelli (CIL, vol. 2, no. 2413, p. 339);
scholae (CIL, vol. 8.1, no. 2601, p. 308);
thermarum (CIL, vol. 8.1, no. 8926, p.
761); cited in Birt, “Genius,” cols 1621–
22.
16. I. Romeo, “Genius,” in Lexicon Icono-
graphicum Mythologiae Classicae
(LIMC), vol. VIII (suppl.), Zürich, Arte-
mis & Winkler,1997, pp. 599–607 (here:
p. 603 no. 35, p. 604 no. 42, p. 603 no.
28).
17. A genius britanniae or a genius populi
romani are exceptions that prove the
rule.
18. Prominent here is the guardian god-
desses of animals and caves; see H. P.
Duerr, Dreamtime—Concerning the
Boundary Between Wilderness and Civ-
ilization, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, § 2 u.
3. On Siberian shamanism, see H.
Findeisen, H. Gehrts, Die Schamanen,
Munich, Diederichs,1983, pp. 28–30.
19. M. Gimbutas, The Civilization of the
Goddess, NY, HarperCollins,1991, p.
251 (“Guardians of Wild Nature,” Figs.
7–45).
20. Cf. David Bruno and Meredith Wilson
(eds.): Inscribed Landscapes: Marking
and Making Place. Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press, 2002, Chap. 4; Tim In-
gold, “Hunting and Gathering as Ways
of Perceiving the Environment,” in Re-
defining Nature, Ellen Roy and Ka-
tsuyoshi Fukui, London: Routledge,
2020, pp. 117–56; E. Mader, Die Macht
des Jaguars: Natur und Weltbild der
Shuar und Achuar in Amazonien, in A.
Gingrich et al. (eds.), Metamorphosen
der Natur: Sozialanthropologische Un-
tersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Welt-
bild und natürlicher Umwelt, Wien-
Köln-Weimar, Böhlau, 2002, pp.183–
222.
21. P. Bishop, Ludwig Klages and the Phi-
losophy of Life, London: Routledge,
2018, p. 101f. L. Klages, Der Geist als
Widersacher der Seele, Bonn, Bouvier,
1981, p. 1264. (First publication Leip-
zig, 1929–1932).
23
22. Cf. M. Großheim, “Zu den Situationen
selbst! Ein Vorschlag zur Reform der
Phänomenologie” [“To the Situations
Themselves! Proposal for the Refor-
mation of Phenomenology”], in Synthe-
sis Philosophica 2/2018, 303–25.
23. With regard to the term “ambiance”,
see J.-P. Thibaud, Ambiance, Interna-
tional Lexicon of Aesthetics; https://lexi-
con.mimesisjournals.com/ar-
chive/2022/spring/Ambiance.pdf (ac-
cessed January 5, 2023).
24. H. Schmitz, Der unerschöpfliche Ge-
genstand, 2nd edn., Bonn, Bouvier,
1995, p. 461f; see Alexander Pope’s fa-
mous translation of a Latin verse:
“Nymph of the grot, these springs I keep,
/ And to the murmurs of these waters
sleep; / Ah, spare my slumbers, gently
tread the cave! / And drink in silence, or
in silence lave!” (1725). A beautiful
metaphor indicating that one should
tread (and treat) a genius loci site gently!
25. See H. Schmitz, New Phenomenology:
A Brief Introduction, Milan, Mimesis,
2019; and: H. Schmitz, The “New Phe-
nomenology,” in Phenomenology
World-Wide, Anna-Teresa Tymie-
niecka, ed., Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2002,
pp. 491–94.
26. H. Schmitz, Was ist Neue Phänomenol-
ogie? Rostock, Ingo Koch, 2003, p. 91.
27. H. Schmitz, System der Philosophie,
Vols. 3, 4, Das Göttliche und der Raum,
Bonn, Bouvier, 1977, p. 150.
28. H. Schmitz, System der Philosophie,
Vols. 3, 4, pp. 128-34. With good rea-
son, Schmitz uses (p. 130) the same Sen-
eca quotation in this context that I used
above (namely Sen. epist. 4, 41, 3).
29. See D. Seamon, “Sense of Place,” in D.
Richardson, et al., eds., The Interna-
tional Encyclopedia of Geography, John
Wiley & Sons, 2022. Accessed January
16, 2023, file:///C:/Users/User/Down-
loads/2022-seamon-sense-of-place-ge-
ography-encyclopedia-aag-wiley-1-
1.pdf.
30. D. Seamon, “Sense of Place,” p. l.
31. E. Relph, “A Pragmatic Sense of
Place,” Environmental and Architec-
tural Phenomenology, 20/3 (2009), pp.
24–31.
32. D. Seamon, “Sense of Place,” p. l.
33. D. Seamon, Life Takes Place. Phenom-
enology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making,
London, Routledge, 2018, pp. 87–90.
34. See: G. Spitteler, Dichte Teilnahme
und darüber hinaus [Thick Participation
and Beyond], Sociologus 64/2014, pp.
207-30; C. Geertz, “Thick Description:
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Cul-
ture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays, NY, Basic Books,
1973, pp. 3–30.
35. Cf. C. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone:
Explorations in Landscape Phenome-
nology, Oxford, Berg, 2004, pp. 27f.
36. J. Hasse, Die Aura des Einfachen. Mik-
rologien des räumlichen Erlebens, vol.
1, Munich, Alber, 2017, p. 170.
37. See C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci:
Towards a Phenomenology of Architec-
ture, New York, Rizzoli, 1980; R. J. Ko-
zljanič, Der Geist eines Ortes, vol. 2, pp.
258 and 309–20; T. Griffero, Places, Af-
fordances, Atmospheres. A Pathic Aes-
thetics, London, Routledge, 2020, p.
140f.
38. See R. J. Kozljanič, “Genius Loci and
the Numen of a Place: A Mytho-Phe-
nomenological Approach to the Ar-
chaic,” in The Archaic: The Past in the
Present, P. Bishop, ed., London,
Routledge 2012, pp. 69–92, here pp. 82–
87; also: R. J. Kozljanič, Der Geist eines
Ortes, vol. 2, pp. 330–35.
39. See the phrase “ecstasy of things” in re-
lation to the term “aura” in G. Böhme,
Atmosphäre, Essays zur neuen Ästhetik,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,1995, pp. 25–34
and 166–172; see also G. Böhme, Archi-
tektur und Atmosphäre, 2nd edn., Mu-
nich, Fink 2013, pp. 149–150.
40. R. J. Kozljanič, Walter Benjamins Be-
griff der Aura und die Aura eines
.
Ortes—am Beispiel der Judengasse
Frankfurt, in Symbolon, Jahrbuch für
Symbolforschung, Neue Folge, Bd. 19,
H. Jung, ed., Frankfurt, Peter Lang,
2014, pp. 193–217.
41. J. J. Gibson, The Theory of Af-
fordances: The Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception. Boston, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 1979. p. 127; see T.
Griffero, Places, Affordances, Atmos-
pheres. A Pathic Aesthetics, London,
Routledge, 2020, p. 81.
42. T. Griffero: Places, Affordances, At-
mospheres, p. 101.
43. Cf. P. Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres
Volume I: Microspherology, Los Ange-
les, Semiotext(e), 2011 (orig. ed. 1998).
44. T. Griffero: Places, Affordances, At-
mospheres, p. 145. Cf. T. Griffero,
Quasi-Things. The Paradigma of Atmos-
pheres, Albany, NY, State Univ. of New
York Press, 2017, pp. 29-38; and: M.
Tedeschini, La differenza del genio.
Problema teorico, soluzione estetica,
Sensibilia, 9) [special issue on genius
loci], Milano, Mimesis, 2017, pp. 351–
65.
45. T. Griffero: Places, Affordances, At-
mospheres, p. 144.
46. J. G. Bennett, Elementary Systematics,
Santa Fe, NM, Bennett Books, 1993.
47. D. Seamon, Life Takes Place, p. 90.
48. T. Valena, Zu einer Phänomenologie
des Genius Loci, in Genius Loci, L. Mal-
lien et al., eds., Drachen, Klein Jasedow,
2009, pp. 148–206, p. 148.
49. J. Hasse and R. J. Kozljanič, Einlei-
tung, in Jahrbuch für Lebensphiloso-
phie, 5, 2010-2011, J. Hasse and R. J.
24
Kozljanič, eds., Munich, Albunea, 2011,
p. 9–21.
50. Cf. R. J. Kozljanič, Landschaft als
physiognomisch-atmosphärisches und
geistig-kulturelles Phänomen, in Jahr-
buch für Lebensphilosophie, 5, 2010–
2011, pp. 157–76; cf. R. J. Kozljanič,
Geschichten der Bethen—Vom heutigen
Bethen-Kult über den christlichen Drei-
Jungfrauen-Kult zum mythischen Ma-
tronen-Kult und zurück, in Hagia Chora,
36, 2011, pp. 46–51.
Images
p. 17: Roman wall-painting from Hercula-
neum.
p. 17: Reclining nymph with an overturned
urn. Fountain fragment from Rome, 2nd
century. Vienna Museum of Art History.
p. 18: Hippocrene at Mount Helicon.
p. 18: Reclining spring nymph by Lucas
Cranach, 1530–1535.
p. 18: Detail from the numinous Corycian
Cave near Delphi.
p. 19: Genius from Lugdunum (Lyon). In
front of the genius on the left a sacrific-
ing Roman colony founder. Terracotta
medallion, 1st century.
p. 19: Nymphae Querquetulanae. Tree
nymphs from a sacred oak grove near
Rome. Silver denarius, 43 BCE.
p. 20: Lurlei or Loreley. Postcard, ca 1900.
p. 21: Jewish Ghetto Frankfurt. Engraving
by M. Merian. Detail, ca 1628. The
ghetto is the curved, narrow street out-
side the city walls.
p. 22: three impulses generating place;
from Seamon 2018, p. 85; used with per-
mission.
A Place Called Utopia
Victoria King
King is an artist, writer, and poet whose work is concerned with issues of place and displacement. She lived for many years in
America and Australia, and now once again lives in England. Her artwork can be seen at: www.victoria-king.com. Text and images
© 2023 Victoria King. vkblackstone@gmail.com. Image captions, p. 31.
A map of the world that does not include
Utopia is not worth glancing at, for it
leaves out the one country at which Hu-
manity is always landing [1].
—Oscar Wilde
A
boriginal Australians have the
oldest, continuous land-based
culture in the world, estimated
at 65,000 years. Their identities
are based on connections to kinfolk and
“country,” specific places for which they
are custodians. In 1788, British coloniza-
tion systematically and catastrophically
disrupted their lives through brute force,
massacres, and disease. The government
placed the majority of those who survived
on harsh stations and reserves. Christian
missions forbade them to speak their native
languages. The traumas they experienced
left physical and emotional scars and pro-
foundly affected their descendants.
Traditional Aboriginal people perceive
time and place in a non-linear way that in-
cludes past, present, and future. Dream-
time creation stories tell of mythological
beings who created every land formation,
plant, and animal. The ancient stories map
that vast island and are still sung and
danced in secret/sacred ceremonies. Chil-
dren receive Dreamings from both parents:
the father’s Dreaming is handed down
from his paternal lineage, while the mother
gives a Dreaming based on the place of the
child’s conception.
B ut I am not an indigenous woman;
their stories are not mine. My white
skin and American accent reflect
the cultural wilderness in which I grew up.
My question is more fundamental. Who am
I? As a child, I was painfully shy, a silent,
acutely observant witness to natural beauty
and unnatural cruelty. A child deprived of
love and touch becomes emotionally mal-
nourished, literally starved of affection. As
an adult, she will attract relationships that
mirror the original abuse as she desperately
tries to prove she is worthy of love.
Scientists now recognize that our cellu-
lar life as an egg inside our mother’s womb
began in the womb of our grandmother [2].
Behavioral epigeneticists have shown that
our ancestors’ traumas leave molecular
scars on our DNA which pass down to fu-
ture generations [3]. Our forebears’ expe-
riences may not be known to us, but we in-
herit not only physical characteristics but
psychological and behavioral tendencies
and traumas.
Silence, suppressed rage, and unrelent-
ing despair permeated the houses in which
I grew up, as well as those of my maternal
and paternal grandparents. The past was a
25
leaden drape dangerous to draw back. The
few ancestral stories told were always dra-
matic and involved death—moral tales
about what would happen if I weren’t sen-
sible. Like most children, I tuned out the
same way my own son would decades
later.
After my parents died, I began research-
ing my family history with the incentive of
my granddaughter’s birth. I discovered that
I am an imbroglio of the genetic imprint of
countless generations of English, Irish,
Scottish, German, and Scandinavian an-
cestors who were farmers, blacksmiths,
schoolteachers, railway conductors, dukes,
duchesses, and Harald the Black, a man for
whom a large nineth century stone menhir
still stands on the Scottish island of Islay.
These victims and victimizers partici-
pated in religious wars and slavery, crossed
mountains, rivers, and oceans in search of
utopias and better lives. Their hopes,
dreams, anxieties, illnesses, and premature
deaths are within my DNA. I became a
seeker of truth, an inordinately shy but out-
spoken advocate of justice, an intrepid, ag-
oraphobic traveller, a suicidal lover of life.
F rom an early age, I was obsessed
with a search for meaning that took
me far from my Kentucky home to
Europe and India to study esoteric teach-
ings with Christian and Hindu mystics, Su-
fis, and Buddhist lamas. Whether it was
through insufficient devotion or lack of re-
ligious fervor, within a relatively short
time, I inevitably had reservations and
doubts.
What was incontrovertible was that no
matter how much I prayed or meditated,
my emotional pain remained. Only my pas-
sions for nature and art were unwavering.
The beauty of the natural world dramati-
cally, albeit temporarily, alleviated my suf-
fering and gave me joy.
As an artist, I pursued the elusive quarry
of the sublime in a life leaden with situa-
tional depression. Moments of respite
came when I relinquished control and cel-
ebrated unexpected juxtapositions of col-
ors. Painting was my voice, and I gave
every appearance of being a confident, suc-
cessful artist. Yet losing myself in color
had never been infallible despite spending
long hours each day in my studio and trav-
elling far to see inspirational works of art.
Hope remained an extremely limited com-
modity, but I had mastered the art of endur-
ance in childhood.
The phrase “sense of place” is now ubiq-
uitous in western culture, as is the pre-
sumption that having a deep connection to
where we live comes easily. Too often,
however, we underestimate the power of
place in our lives. Indigenous cultures do
not make that mistake. At 17, I was cava-
lier about moving farther and farther from
home and didn’t look closely at my failure
to thrive in far-away places. I yearned to
feel at home in the three countries I’ve
lived, yet the reality has been otherwise.
Freud and Heidegger recognized that
displacement was endemic to the human
condition and elicited feelings of unbeara-
ble emptiness as well as a sense of the un-
heimlich. Philosophers and writers recog-
nize the importance of returning to places
of significance in our lives through jour-
neys, memory, and imagination. Storytell-
ing, be it autobiographical or biographical,
can hold integrity as a form of personal and
collective revelation as well as being a po-
litical irritant. In the 1980s, feminists
sought an écriture feminine as they ex-
plored and reconstructed lost and sup-
pressed records of female experience, plac-
ing emphasis upon the inclusion of non-lit-
erary and historical data such as diaries,
memoirs, and social and medical histories
to facilitate greater understanding.
M y story begins where I was born
in a small Kentucky town near
the Ohio River, a geographical
border between states that during the Civil
War divided north from south, a wide tur-
bulent river that slaves once crossed to find
freedom. During the 1960s, I crossed that
river to Cincinnati to participate in civil
rights marches and Viet Nam War protests.
I read existentialist and Buddhist texts, and
studied privately with Paul Chidlaw, an el-
derly Abstract Expressionist artist who
once lived in Paris and Morocco.
In 1972, I came to England and studied
integrative spiritual philosophies with J. G.
Bennett in a dilapidated stately home in a
tiny Cotswold village until his death three
years later. I moved to the north of England
when my son was born and went to art col-
lege in Manchester. A profusely flowering
“secret” garden that I created became the
sole inspiration for my paintings. I planted
colors that resonated in my solar plexus.
I eclectically decorated our house in the
shabby chic style of Bloomsbury artists,
collected tribal art, and made annual pil-
grimages to see early Renaissance frescoes
in Tuscany and Umbria. I became a senior
university lecturer and regularly exhibited
my paintings. My son’s father and I lived
frugally by necessity, but our life was rich
and full.
Yet stories are partial histories and ap-
pearances are often deceiving. In my art
studio, I obsessively painted my garden’s
flowering colors without a larger perspec-
tive. My hunger for beauty offset feeling
displaced, trapped in circumstances I felt
unable to change. Northern light was
gloomy and grey. Bone-chilling rain
seemed to drizzle incessantly on the grim,
soot-covered archi-
tecture of the Indus-
trial Revolution.
Sky was barely visi-
ble above endless
rows of austere,
dull, red brick
houses, and street-
lights muted the vis-
ibility of stars.
There were no long
vistas, and the grow-
ing season was
short. Beyond my
26
garden were reminders of where I was and
did not want to be—in a northern English
suburb where I stayed for the sake of my
son.
In 1993, while my son spent the summer
with his grandfather in Kentucky, I went to
the south of France to attend a three-month
Buddhist retreat given by a Tibetan lama.
It was an impulsive decision that I made
after reading his inspirational book on liv-
ing and dying [4]. Yet in the mountains of
Languedoc amidst idyllic, ancient beech
forests, I lost rather than found perspective.
At the age of 42, like an infatuated teen-
ager, I fell in love with a retreat facilitator.
At the end of December, I went to Aus-
tralia to join him for a holiday and on the
jet-setting lama’s two-week retreat.
Three days after I arrived, he asked me
to marry him, but the 25-year relationship
that followed was like a slow train wreck.
During the retreat, I vowed never again to
join a spiritual group after discovering that
our charismatic teacher was a sexual pred-
ator, something my new partner had long
known [5]. He called me his “life partner”
but, despite my desperate unhappiness be-
ing so far from my son, he refused to move
to England.
Thinking that he would change his mind,
I focused on my art practice and new three-
acre garden in the Blue Mountains, annual
trips to see my son, and my growing inter-
est in Aboriginal art. The paintings of
Emily Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996), an el-
derly Anmatyerre woman artist from Uto-
pia, particularly fascinated me. Utopia is
comprised of 16 small Aboriginal commu-
nities spread across 2,400 kilometers in the
arid, red center of Australia. In the 1920s,
two European brothers forcibly took the
land from its indigenous owners and called
it Utopia because of the abundance of rab-
bits, a welcome, familiar food source, but
an environmentally disastrous introduced
animal. It took the Anmatyerre and Al-
yawarre people over 50 years to get their
land back.
I n their writing on “close vision-haptic
space,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari describe how indigenous people
are in a deep relationship with the ground:
“on” it, not “in front of” it [6]. Heidegger
realized that our elemental relationship
with place goes beyond philosophy and is
concerned with our very being. Merleau-
Ponty embraced concepts of mutuality and
participation. He contended that our per-
ception and exchanges in the world occur
through the simple yet profound fact that
our bodies are in contact with the ground.
He recognized the importance of the intri-
cate relationship between our body and
perception of the world, calling it “the
knowing touch” [7].
Touch is our most intimate and essential
sense, engaging our whole body through
properties of our skin. As well as being an
active sense, touch is also passive: to touch
is to be touched. Merleau-Ponty wrote:
“The presence of the world is precisely the
presence of its flesh to my flesh” [8]. David
Abram expanded further: “We are organs
of this world, flesh of its flesh, and the
world is perceiving itself through us” [9].
He suggests that this simple yet profound
recognition could be the foundation for an
environmental ethic through attentive-
ness—a “carnal, sensorial empathy” [10].
Since the 1970s, a growing number of
ecologists, geographers, philosophers, ar-
chitects, artists, sociologists, feminists, an-
thropologists, theologians, and ethicists
have taken the theme of place seriously and
exposed the dangers of post-modern, post-
capitalist societies that construct the world
as a series of manipulable sites within
empty space.
A worldview that privileges ceaseless
property development and the exploitation
of natural resources is at extreme odds with
that of indigenous people whose connec-
tions to the land are central to their very
being. The political and ethical dimensions
of this difference have haunted Australia
since the first British fleet arrived in 1788;
it was in their interests to wrongly declare
the continent Terra Nullius.
Seeing the land as infinite, without par-
ticularity, or only having real estate poten-
tial with no intrinsic significance as op-
posed to indigenous ways of seeing and ex-
periencing the land as sacred reveals a fun-
damental difference of perception that con-
tinues to undermine mutual understanding.
M y father bought cheap rental
properties for extra income all
his adult life, but I have never
bought a house as an investment. When my
son was born, I created a life-enhancing
home for him as well as for myself to make
up for the lack of one during my childhood.
In English art colleges, I taught students to
“see” what was in front of them, not real-
izing just how important and fragile were
my connections to family and home. In
Joni Mitchell’s words: “You don’t know
what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” [11].
When I was barely 18, the loss of my al-
beit dysfunctional home when my father
disowned me, my move to England at the
age of 21 to find meaning in my life, and
to Australia at the age of 42 all had truly
detrimental effects upon me and others.
The erasures that increasingly occurred on
my paintings were symptomatic of my un-
happiness and homesickness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “The
expression of a change of aspect is the ex-
pression of a new perception and at the
same time of the perception being un-
changed” [12]. He explored the implica- Modernism has only recently become
tions of a new vision that appeared in the the focus for accusations of essentialism in
field of vision, one that was half visual and its attention to how we see rather than what
half thought, an “echo of a thought in we see, that is, difference and specificity.
sight” [13]. Such a celebration of vision does not allow
In the 1960s, modernist art critic Clem- for cultural difference or artists’ intentions.
ent Greenberg maintained that abstract art Deleuze and Guattari recognized that art
demands and creates certain spatial rela- galleries are by their nature “striated”
tionships between a viewer and an art ob- spaces, places of commodification that
ject. He believed that paintings had be- provide a particular kind of space where
come objects of the same spatial order as viewers come into close contact with art-
our bodies: “It [a painting] has lost its ‘in- works while at the same time being dis-
side’ and become almost all ‘outside’, all tanced from them.
plane surface” [14]. Striated spaces relate to distant vision
This interpretation of a surface “skin” and the optical spaces where people view
resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s writings artworks, whereas artists create within the
on the phenomenology of perception: “In “smooth,” haptic space of close vision
whatever civilization it is born, from what- [16]. Since the Renaissance, there has been
ever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no mat- an autonomy and secularization of art that
ter what ceremonies surround it—and even has made it conducive to external valua-
when it appears devoted to something tion.
else—from Lascaux to our time, pure or
impure, figurative or not, painting cele-
brates no other enigma but that of visibil-
ity” [15].
27
Y et in Australia, I discovered that
what seemed straightforward in
American and European galleries
was far more complex when applied to Ab-
original art. When Aboriginal paintings are
displayed out of context on the walls of a
gallery, home, boardroom, or government
department far from the place of their cre-
ation, the artists’ long struggles for Land
Rights and their past and present suffering
become invisible.
For traditional Aboriginal people, art,
country, spirituality, and kinship relation-
ships are all interconnected, and they pass
their ancient oral culture and embodied,
experiential knowledge to new genera-
tions. At Utopia, women collect and grind
natural ochres for awelye ceremonies, then
paint the dots and lines specific to each girl
and woman’s Dreaming on their bodies as
the stories are sung. Bare feet then dance
upon the sensuous, sandy ground for which
they are custodians. Ground and body are
one.
Sand is a perfect medium for expression
and contiguous with bodily experience:
Aboriginal people walk long distances on
it to hunt and gather bush tucker, sit, sleep,
cook, and eat meals upon it, draw maps in
it, and now paint canvases upon it. Emily
Kame Kngwarreye sat cross-legged in the
middle of large, unstretched canvases laid
flat on the soft sand at Utopia to paint her
linear body painting designs and dotted
celebrations of her Yam Dreaming. Her
name, Kame, means “yam.” She was a cus-
todian and “boss lady” for her country of
Alhalkere, land stolen from her people
which is still a non-indigenous cattle sta-
tion adjacent to Utopia.
She began painting with acrylics on can-
vas during the last eight years of her life
and rose to meteoric fame for her bold,
brightly colored paintings, yet she contin-
ued to live in a “humpy” made of three
sheets of corrugated iron. While post-mod-
ern theorists see cultural difference as po-
tentially challenging universalistic, Euro-
centric, and ethnocentric aesthetics, old vi-
sions remain intact in Aboriginal art galler-
ies. Like art critics at the time, I once com-
pared Kngwarreye’s paintings to those of
Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist
artists whose work had influenced my own.
But it was her Dreamings and embodied
connection to Alhalkere that solely deter-
mined her dynamic brushstrokes.
Aboriginal paintings are, in effect, docu-
ments of Land Rights, something rarely ef-
fectively disclosed by art galleries. As the
late Western Desert artist Charlie Tjungur-
rayi said, “If I don’t paint this story some
white fella might come and steal my coun-
try” [17].
Creating artworks has provided much-
needed financial agency for many Aborig-
inal people since 1971, when a school-
teacher gave acrylic paints and small
boards to a small group of despondent Ab-
original men at the bleak government set-
tlement of Papunya [18]. It was a place of
profound unhappiness where the effects of
displacement, trans-generational trauma,
and loss were everywhere evident. The
men first painted the designs of their se-
cret/sacred ceremonies, but quickly cov-
ered them with dots when they realized that
women and uninitiated boys would see
them.
T he fact that the appreciation of in-
digenous artworks does not extend
into meaningful action has not gone
unnoticed by the artists. Distanced from
the reality of indigenous people’s lives, the
paintings’ shimmering surfaces mesmerize
us, and the dots and lines remain our blind
spots. Cultural difference and suffering
disappear in a celebration of surface
beauty. Artworks are re-contextualized
into interior spaces where they become
symbols rather than indexes: generalized
28
notions of the spiritual and icons of Aus-
tralia that do not reflect that country’s
shameful past and present history.
In addition to the injustice of land being
stolen from its indigenous owners, and the
massacres and rape of Aboriginal women
that followed, the government carried out a
White Australia policy from 1850 to 1973
and forcibly removed half-caste children
from Aboriginal families. Records were
often not kept, and many of the Stolen
Generation were never able to find their
families again. Utopia artist Barbara Weir
was nine years old and collecting water for
her Auntie Emily Kngwarreye when offi-
cials took her and placed her in a brutal
children’s home 1,500 kilometers away in
Darwin. Her mother believed she was
dead, and the community did Sorry Busi-
ness death rituals.
Barbara finally found her family 12
years later, and her capacity to speak Eng-
lish combined with her fierce determina-
tion for justice made her instrumental in
Utopia having the first successful Land
Rights claim in 1978.
When I met her in 1998 at an Aboriginal
art gallery in Adelaide, I recognized how
traumatized she still was and offered to
help her in any way that I could. Some
weeks later, she phoned and asked me to
record the story of her life. I immediately
agreed but told her that I’d just been diag-
nosed with ovarian cancer. Shortly after
my six months of chemotherapy ended, we
began a five-year collaboration at Utopia
in which I transcribed her stories and those
of 12 other Anmatyerre and Alyawarre
women artists in her extended family.
My hair had not yet regrown when I ar-
rived at Utopia, but I did not feel out of
place, for many of the women had recently
shaved their heads for Sorry Business. I
found myself on a very steep learning
curve about cultural difference and quickly
realized that my culturally ocular-centric,
aesthetic gaze had limited my perception
and directly affected how I viewed the
world. While walking with the women, I
felt ignorant and often blind; the land dis-
closed so much more to them than it ever
would to me. Being at Utopia disrupted my
perceptions of time, the land, art, and of
myself.
T he women’s stories were heart-
breaking, as were the third-world
conditions in which they lived and

the racism and exploitation they endured.
Being with them profoundly affected me
[19]. Through their kindness and patience,
I slowly came to better understand their
culture and paintings.
In that place where time and space
seemed infinite, I also saw more clearly the
negative effects of my own displacements,
and that my ineffectual attempts to im-
merse myself in art, nature, spirituality,
and love were simply desperate attempts to
survive. Trauma anaesthetizes, permeates,
and restricts lives; activities become disso-
ciative, obsessive, monotonous, and repe-
titious. I began to wonder if the obsessive
dotting that Aboriginal people made on
their canvases could reflect not only their
Dreamings, but the trans-generational
trauma they suffered.
Paul Carter recognized that “In transfer-
ring the iconic signs from the performative
context of the ceremony—where singing,
ground-marking and body painting com-
bine to evoke complex abstract concepts—
to the permanence of the painting board [or
canvas], the marks risk growing disembod-
ied” [20]. I became ashamed of my white
skin and so unhappy being so far from my
son in England that in my studio I could
barely make a mark upon my canvases
without erasing it. Western artists fre-
quently “borrow” the styles of past and
present artists of all cultures, but it is
against Aboriginal Law to paint another
person’s Dreaming. My respect for the
people of Utopia made it essential for me
to find an appropriate gesture in an appro-
priated, contested land and not let the ap-
pearance of their paintings influence my
own.
All around the world, past and present
injustices and genocidal policies toward
indigenous people meet with inaction and
denial. The legacy of those actions is visi-
ble in shocking health statistics, high mor-
tality rates, lower-than-average life spans,
and high levels of unemployment. Abo-
riginal art has the power to speak to con-
tentious issues, but its capacity to bear
29
cultural witness is too frequently under-
mined.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan
Sontag reflected on the consequences of
inuring ourselves to the reality of suffer-
ing: “Our failure is one of imagination, of
empathy” [21]. A deeper understanding of
indigenous cultures’ past and present op-
pression allows us an important oppor-
tunity to counter a cult of forgetting. Aus-
tralian Aboriginal paintings contain an un-
canny echo that shudders within a gap of
disturbance. They carry a plea to the be-
holder to see and act with more than visual
perception. Knowledge, empathy, ethical
perception, and action are all required, oth-
erwise they will continue to be objects of
desire in a field of optical pleasure. These
hybrid paintings have a crucial message for
all people of the importance of environ-
mental custodianship and the fundamental
relationship between kinfolk and “coun-
try.”
I n 2005, after a major 25-year retro-
spective of my artwork, I was canoeing
along the coast of Bruny Island, Tas-
mania, and came across a for-sale sign
nailed to a tree in front of an isolated, hum-
ble wooden house that had sublime water
and mountain views. My son had married
and bought his first house, and I had just
sold the large English home where he had
grown up. I had money in my pocket, so to
speak, and impulsively shook hands on the

purchase of “Blackstone,” much to the
shock of my partner.
I intended it to be a holiday house, but
within a year, we moved there full-time. I
collected water-polished black stones,
shells, feathers, and driftwood along the
shoreline, and put water bowls for wildlife
outside my studio shed where on still days
I could hear dolphins passing. I wrote and
illustrated books of my poetry and cele-
brated the birdlife in paintings and sculp-
tures.
Yet there were many challenges. There
was toxic small-mindedness and environ-
mental corruption on the island, and Black-
stone’s isolation frequently made it feel
like a pressure cooker. We relied on wind
and solar power, composting toilets, and
rainwater, bought food fortnightly on the
mainland, and I grew vegetables that wild-
life adored.
Blackstone’s 55 acres had long ago been
clear-felled for sheep grazing. With volun-
teer help, we planted 4,000 endemic trees
and understory plants to restore the land
and fulfil my dream of creating a wildlife
sanctuary. Yet when I found out the tragic
history of that awe-inspiring place, my per-
ception changed. We discovered the re-
mains of the Sod Hut, the place where
George Augustus Robinson met the
Nuenone tribe in 1829 and began his so-
called “Friendly Mission” that led to the
genocide of nearly all Tasmanian Aborigi-
nal people.
My sculptures became more shamanic,
and my bird paintings morphed into trau-
matized “Angels of History” [22]. I painted
with pigments I made from native plants
and wood ash, the latter being in plentiful
supply after the neighboring grazier tried
to burn us out when I complained about his
shooting wallabies on our land.
After the birth of my only grandchild in
2009, my desire to spend more time in
England became overwhelming. My
mother died that same year, and with her
inheritance I bought a house in a 400-acre
country park near my son so that we could
spend six months in each place. I thought
that it was a perfect and “fair” solution. Be-
ing less than a minute walk from three
lakes filled with waterbirds and frequent
trips to Europe made the transition easy for
both my partner and me.
I created another profusely flowering se-
cret garden, had a roof raised to make a
large art studio, and color returned to my
painting [image, front page]. I felt content.
But in 2018, at Blackstone, the train finally
crashed. I returned alone to live in Eng-
land, grieving for the loss of a place and
wildlife that I loved, and furious because
my partner unexpectedly ended our 25-
year marriage.
Slowly, with the help of my family, gar-
den, art practice, and journal, I began put-
ting myself back together, hopefully now
with more discernment. The north of Eng-
land will never be a utopia, but in the cen-
ter of Australia, I discovered the relation-
ship of kinfolk and country.
Notes
1. O. Wilde, 1891. The Soul of Man Under
30
Capitalism, The Complete Works of Os-
car Wilde. 2007. Vol. 4, Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press.
2. D. Hurley, May 2013. Trait vs. Fate,
Discovery magazine, pp. 48–55; R. Ya-
huda and A. Lehrner, October 2018. In-
tergenerational Transmission of
Trauma, World Psychiatry,
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pmc/arti-
cles/PMC6127768/.
3. M. Wolynn, 2017. It Didn’t Start with
You. NY: Penguin.
4. S. Rinpoche, 1992. The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying. London: Rider.
5. When I arrived in Australia, I discovered
that Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) had
a long history of sexual predation, set-
tled rape cases out of court, was violent,
misused charitable funds, and watched
pornography with senior students who
condoned his hypocritical actions as
“cultural difference” see http://howdidi-
thappen.org /history-abuse-allegations-
rigpa/.
6. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 1987, pp.
492–500. A Thousand Plateaus. Minne-
apolis: Univ. of Minnesota.
7. M. Merleau-Ponty,1962, p. 315. Phe-
nomenology of Perception. London:
Routledge.
8. Ibid., p. 127.
9. D. Abram, 1996, p. 68. The Spell of the
Sensuous. NY: Pantheon.
10. Ibid., p. 69.
11. J. Mitchell, 1970. Big Yellow Taxi,
from her album, Ladies of the Canyon.
12. L. Wittgenstein, 1921. Philosophical
Investigations; quoted in J. Elderfield,
2001 pp. 11–12. A Change of Aspect, in
Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance. NY: Dia
Center for the Arts.
13. Ibid., p. 53.
14. C. Greenberg, 1986, p. 19. Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, Vol. 3, Affirmations and Re-
fusals: 1950–1956, J. O’Brian, ed., Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
15. M. Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp. 165–66.
Eye and Mind, in The Primacy of Per-
ception and Other Essays on Phenome-
nological Psychology, the Philosophy of
Arts, History, and Politics. Evanston:
Northwestern Univ. Press.
16. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 493 [see note
6].
17. www.nma.gov.au/audio/uncatego-
rised/mutukayi-motor-cars-and-pa-
punya-painting/transcripts/mutukayi-
 motor-cars-and-papunya-painting.
18. Acrylic painting was first introduced at
Papunya in 1971 by Geoffrey Bardon, a
schoolteacher who recognized the peo-
ple’s disempowerment and grief at being
displaced from their ancestral lands.
Acrylics were introduced to the people
of Utopia in 1988 by a Sydney art dealer.
19. Psychologist and Holocaust survivor
Dori Laub recognized that “The listener
to trauma comes to be a participant and
co-owner of the traumatic event: through
his very listening, he comes to partially
experience trauma in himself.” See D.
Laub, 1991 p. 7, No One Bears Witness
to the Witness, in Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanaly-
sis, and History. S. Felman, and D.
Laub, eds., NY: Routledge.
20. P. Carte, 2000, p. 255. The Enigma of
a Homeland Place: Mobilising the Pa-
punya Tula Painting Movement, in Pa-
punya Tula: Genesis and Genius, H. Per-
kins and H. Fink, eds., Sydney:
AGNSW. Italics are mine.
21. S. Sontag, 2003, p. 7. Regarding the
Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamil-
ton.
22. www.victoria-king.com/angel-of-his-
tory.
Image Captions [all photographs by
Victoria King]
p. 1: Floating World, Victoria King, oil on
canvas, 40 x 40 cm.
p. 25: My Mother’s Country, Barbara Weir,
acrylic on canvas, 120 x 38 cm.
31
p. 26: Barbara Weir and her mother Minnie
Pwerle collecting bush tucker.
p. 27: Yam Flowers by Emily Kngwarreye,
acrylic on canvas, 133 x 63 cm.
p. 28: Anna Petyarre Price drawing the
lines of her Yam Dreaming awelye in the
sand.
p. 29: Gloria Petyarre painting her Grass
Dreaming.
p. 29: Gloria Petyarre, Violet Petyarre, and
Glory Ngale hunting perentie lizards at
Utopia.
p. 29: Minnie Pwerle, mother of Barbara
Weir, painting her Bush Melon Dream-
ing awelye.
p. 30: Driftwood shorebird, Victoria King.
p. 30: Angel of History II, Victoria King,
natural pigments on board, 99 x 66 cm.
Questions relating to environmental and architectural phenomenology (from EAP, 2014 [vol. 25, no. 3, p. 4])
Questions relating to phenomenology
and related interpretive approaches
and methods:
▪ What is phenomenology and what does it of-
fer to whom?
▪ What is the state of phenomenological re-
search today? What are your hopes and con-
cerns regarding phenomenology?
▪ Does phenomenology continue to have rele-
vance in examining human experience in re-
lation to world?
▪ Are there various conceptual and methodo-
logical modes of phenomenology and, if so,
how can they be categorized and described?
▪ Has phenomenological research been super-
seded by other conceptual approaches—e.g.,
post-structuralism, social-constructionism,
critical theory, relationalist and non-repre-
sentational perspectives, the various concep-
tual “turns,” and so forth?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to making a
better world? If so, what are the most crucial
phenomena and topics to be explored phe-
nomenologically?
▪ Can phenomenological research offer practi-
cal results in terms of design, planning, pol-
icy, and advocacy?
▪ How might phenomenological insights be
broadcast in non-typical academic ways—
e.g., through artistic expression, theatrical
presentation, digital evocation, virtual reali-
ties, and so forth?
▪ What are the most important aims for future
phenomenological research?
▪ Do the various post-structural and social-
constructionist criticisms of phenomenol-
ogy—that it is essentialist, masculinist, au-
thoritative, voluntarist, ignorant of power
structures, and so forth—point toward its de-
mise?
Questions relating to the natural
world and environmental and ecologi-
cal concerns:
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of nature and
the natural world?
▪ What can phenomenology offer the intensi-
fying environmental and ecological crises we
face today?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to more sus-
tainable actions and worlds?
▪ Can one speak of a sustainable lifeworld?
▪ What is a phenomenology of a lived environ-
mental ethic and who are the key contribu-
tors?
▪ Do the “sacred” and the “holy” have a role in
caring for the natural world? For places? For
lifeworlds broadly?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to environ-
mental education? If so, in what ways?
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of the two
laws of thermodynamics, especially the sec-
ond law claiming that all activities, left to
their own devices, tend toward greater disor-
der and fewer possibilities? Are there ways
whereby phenomenological understanding of
lifeworld might help to reduce the accelerat-
ing disordering of natural and human
worlds?
Questions relating to place, place ex-
perience, and place meaning:
▪ Why has the theme of place become an im-
portant phenomenological topic?
▪ Can a phenomenological understanding of
place contribute to better place making?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to a genera-
tive understanding of place and place mak-
ing?
▪ What roles do bodily regularity and habitual
inertia play in the constitution of place and
place experience?
▪ What are the lived relationships between
place, sustainability, and a responsive envi-
ronmental ethic?
▪ How are phenomenological accounts to re-
spond to post-structural interpretations of
space and place as rhizomic and a “mesh-
work of paths” (Ingold)?
▪ Can phenomenological accounts incorporate
a “progressive sense of place” argued for by
critical theorists like Doreen Massey?
▪ Can phenomenological explications of space
and place account for human differences—
gender, sexuality, less-abledness, social
class, cultural background, and so forth?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to the poli-
tics and ideology of place?
▪ Can a phenomenological understanding of
lived embodiment and habitual inertia be
drawn upon to facilitate robust places and to
generate mutual support and awareness
among places, especially places that are con-
siderably different (e.g., different ethnic
neighborhoods or regions)?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to mobility,
the nature of “flows,” rhizomic spaces, the
places of mobility, non-spaces and their rela-
tionship to mobility and movement?
Questions relating to architecture and
environmental design and policy:
▪ Can there be a phenomenology of architec-
ture and architectural experience and mean-
ing?
▪ Can phenomenology contribute to better ar-
chitectural design?
▪ How do qualities of the designable world—
spatiality, materiality, lived aesthetics, envi-
ronmental embodiment etc.—contribute to
lifeworlds?
32
▪ What are the most pertinent environmental
and architectural features contributing to a
lifeworld’s being one way rather than an-
other?
▪ What role will cyberspace and digital tech-
nologies have in 21st-century lifeworlds?
How will they play a role in shaping de-
signed environments, particularly architec-
ture?
▪ What impact will digital advances and vir-
tual realities have on physical embodiment,
architectural design, and real-world places?
Will virtual reality eventually be able to sim-
ulate “real reality” entirely? If so, how does
such a development transform the nature of
lifeworld, natural attitude, place, and archi-
tecture?
▪ Can virtual worlds become so “real” that
they are lived as “real” worlds?
Other potential questions:
▪ What is the lived relationship between
people and the worlds in which they find
themselves?
▪ Can lifeworlds be made to happen self-con-
sciously? If so, how? Through what individ-
ual efforts? Through what group efforts?
▪ Can a phenomenological education in life-
world, place, and environmental embodi-
ment assist citizens and professionals in bet-
ter understanding the workings and needs of
real-world places and thereby contribute to
their envisioning and making?
▪ Is it possible to speak of human-rights-in-
place or place justice? If so, would such a
possibility move attention and supportive ef-
forts toward improving the places in which
people and other living beings find them-
selves, rather than focusing only on the
rights and needs of individuals and groups
without consideration of their place context?
Questions relating to Covid-19:
▪ Will demands of Covid-19 have a lasting im-
pact on physical places and bodily sociality?
▪ Can social media and virtual realities effec-
tively replace face-to-face presence and
physical places?
▪ Will human beings return to physical place
and firsthand intercorporeality once the pan-
demic ends?
▪ Can human life really survive if people lose
their direct lived relationships with other hu-
man beings and an entrenched physical in-
volvement in real-world places?
▪ Does the crisis of Covid-19 demonstrate the
central phenomenological principle that hu-
man beings-are-inured-in place? If that in-
urement collapses, is human life at risk?
 Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology
Published digitally twice a year, EAP is a forum and clearing house
for research and design that incorporate a qualitative approach to
environmental and architectural experience, actions, and mean-
ings.
One key concern of EAP is design, education, policy, and advocacy
supporting and strengthening natural and built places that sustain
human and environmental wellbeing. Realizing that a clear con-
ceptual stance is integral to informed research and design, the edi-
tor emphasizes phenomenological approaches but also gives atten-
tion to related styles of qualitative research. EAP welcomes essays,
letters, reviews, conference information, and so forth. Forward sub-
missions to the editor.
Editor
Dr. David Seamon, Professor Emeritus
Architecture Department
Kansas State University
300 South Delaware Avenue, Manhattan, KS 66502 USA
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Exemplary Themes
▪ The nature of environmental and architectural experience;
▪ Sense of place, including place identity and place attachment;
▪ Architectural and landscape meaning;
▪ The environmental, architectural, spatial, and material dimen-
sions of lifeworlds;
▪
Changing conceptions of space, place, and nature;
▪ Home, dwelling, journey, and mobility;
▪ Environmental encounter and its relation to environmental re-
sponsibility and action;
▪ Environmental and architectural atmospheres and ambiences;
▪ Environmental design as place making;
▪ Sacred space, landscape, and architecture;
▪ The role of everyday things—furnishings, tools, clothing, in-
terior design, landscape features, and so forth—in supporting
people’s sense of environmental wellbeing;
▪ The progressive impact of virtual reality on human life and
how it might transform the lived nature of “real” places, build-
ings, and lifeworlds;
▪ The practice of a lived environmental ethic.
For additional themes and topics, see the preceding page, which
outlines a series of relevant questions originally published in the
25th-anniversary issue of EAP in 2014 (vol. 25, no. 3, p. 4).
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